Down the Memory Hole

When Documentaries Un-document

UPDATE: ALL THREE VIDEO CLIPS BELOW ARE NOW CLICKABLE

While this is not the third and final part of the series on the WWII-era American folk left and the nature of political protest song—I’ll keep that series public, this one’s for paying subscribers—it’s related. Before I circle back to more familiar BAD HISTORY topics (like the bad history of democracy in America), I want to hook my WWII folk-left series of posts to my notes on the Beatles documentary “Get Back,”posted in February, notes really about the fictional nature of nonfiction technique.

About the deception, that is, on a spectrum ranging from OK to unacceptable, necessary to creating material presented as nonfiction, especially narrative nonfiction. This is important to me as a writer of narrative nonfiction books.

Nowhere are narrative deceptions easier to spot than in documentary filmmaking, and there’s a 2007 PBS “American Masters” documentary on Pete Seeger that, in handling the changing positions of the folk left, which I’ve discussed here and here, regarding U.S. entry in WWII, as embodied in the music of the Almanac Singers, flagrantly crosses what I call a pretty bright line between effective dramatization and outright falsehood.