Justification.

  
“When people think they’ve seen enough of something, but there’s more, no change of shot, then they act in a curiously livid way.  They think there must be some justification for it, but it never occurs to them that the fact that you happen to like whatever is in the shot is sufficient justification.  They imagine that there has to be some other reason…”

                                                                                   -Wim Wenders (1971)

     Thank you, Wim Wenders, for stating my very own opinion, albeit 35 years before it would ever occur to me.  The main difference is of course glaring; Wenders holds significant prestige in the film-making world whereas I hold none.

    It would be naïve to suggest, yet innocent enough, that the documentary film is easier to justify as a social/cultural artifact.  An apparent truth automatically raises its supposed relevance and importance as a creative document.  I often wonder just how Michael Bay sleeps at night knowing his millions of dollars result in a hyperactive mess of explosions.  Does the shear existence of a Michael Bay film exhibit enough cultural relevance that it self-justifies as a document of the current cultural state of things?

    I’ll call it art for art’s sake, yet refrain from any attempt at proving why.  If it itself is visually pleasing is that not enough of a justification for its persistence, as Wenders argues?  Is not, then, Bays love of explosions and their powerfully uncontrollable nature not enough of an excuse to keep blowing things up?

    How will history look back on our still very young art form?  We may hope that each and every piece, even confessional YouTube bullshit, represents a distinct and telling insight into the way our society works and grows.  This likely will not be the case, as how many numbers of endless reincarnations do we need to understand the significance of, say, the Bill of Rights?  And only with certain cases does the individual matter.  History cares not about each and every person but about the collective actions of the species.  It is a very mathematical way to look at something that, at times, appears out of control.

    It is only because of this need to categorize and organize that we separate the documentary from the fiction film.  As a medium ages and evolves so does our way of classifying it.  Now more than a century of films to pull from and recent acceptance of film nerds as skilled filmmakers has meant an increase in cross-pollination betwixt genres, styles, techniques, and expectations.  The spectrums on which we classify films have melted into one another and become wholly indistinguishable.  And for good reason.

    No answers have been given here, only questions.