TRUTH, THE FRANCHISE

Reality, or its shadow, is everywhere these days. Where the documentary film was just a few decades ago a form practiced only by a few maverick, even avant-garde specialists, it is now -- if you count television, in all its myriad channels -- what accounts overwhelmingly for the bulk of filmmaking. “March of the Penguins,” “Super Size Me,” “Grizzly Man,” “An Inconvenient Truth” have drawn crowds to theaters, while an uncountable army of citizen-directors, armed with affordable DV cameras and Final Cut or iMovie, are turning cameras on their dogs, their grandmothers, their hometowns, for their own understanding and pleasure.

Far and away the biggest names in nonfiction film are Michael Moore and Ken Burns. They win the big awards, they make money. In terms of their craft, they are possibly not the most influential filmmakers. Moore is an inimitable personality; few can afford to work on Burns’ scale. The highly stylized works of Errol Morris (“The Thin Blue Line,” “The Fog of War”) have arguably had a greater influence on the look and feel of contemporary documentary. But Burns and Moore are the popular favorites.

On the face of it, their work has little in common, beyond its claims to being true. Moore: The noisy gadfly whose “Bowling for Columbine,” a film about American violence and fear, and “Fahrenheit 9/11,” a film about American fear and violence, broke box-office records for documentary film, now has “Sicko,” about healthcare as class war, currently in theaters, and it’s doing very well, thanks. Burns: The father of the public television historical blockbuster, his 14-hour “The War” (as in Second World), co-directed with Lynn Novick, arrives on PBS Sept. 23.

Moore is the on-screen star of his films, while Burns is a name on a title card (an above-the-title title card, and one that leaves out the name of his elsewhere-credited co-director). Burns lives to organize the past, Moore wants to change the future. Burns makes his work to further understanding; Moore wants to rouse the world to action.

Yet they share much. Both are populists -- they are romantic about the American people (yes!), and about America, and hopeful about its better self while not downplaying its worst. They like to give a voice to the sort of folks movies and TV tend to ignore -- the honest poor, the struggling middle class, the ordinary Joes and Janes who found themselves under extraordinary stress. Like all journalists, they are proxies for the public; they have the time, the access and the money to go places, ask questions, gather pictures, sift information on behalf of those who have not. (While the documentary boom owes much to their being relatively cheap to produce, that isn’t true of the work of Moore or Burns.)

There is a sense of purpose in what they do.

But what links them most perhaps is their success, and its burdens: big names, big targets. The controversy they attract is proportionate to their fame, which gilds whatever they produce with an aura of event that a detractor might read as arrogance: This is it, I have spoken. In Moore’s case, it’s enhanced by his large on-screen presence and, in a circular way, by the very expectation of attack and counterattack. (Even to a sympathizer, Moore can be off-putting, the messenger you sometimes want to kill, regardless of the message.) Indeed there’s a whole genre of films dedicated to proving him wrong: “Michael Moore Hates America,” “Celsius 41.11,” “Michael & Me,” “Manufacturing Dissent,” “Shooting Michael Moore,” “Fahrenhype 9/11.”

Building their brands

For his part, and because of his perceived importance, Burns was constrained to defend “The War” against claims that it slighted Latino veterans, whose contribution to the war effort is not specifically explored. While pointing out that the film was never designed to be authoritative -- and for all its length, it is just a slice of the Second World War, as lived by some of the residents of four American towns -- Burns nevertheless overturned his initial refusal and added 28 minutes of new interviews.

And yet the pique is understandable. Even if not intended, in light of Burns’ high-profile, PBS insider status, the Shoah-length enormity of his projects and the definitive titles he gives them -- “The Civil War,” “Baseball,” “Jazz,” “The War” -- there is a kind of inevitable case-closed aspect to his work. Exclusion would be like being kept out of the encyclopedia or having your species denied a place on the ark.

Named by Time magazine in 2005 as one of world’s 100 most influential people, Moore is certainly the most successful documentary filmmaker ever. Nearly all his work proceeds from the same idea, that the country is being run for the rich at the expense of the poor.

He is more than a documentarian -- though some might say less than one, and for the same reasons. Moore is a one-man cottage industry: He writes books, entertains crowds, has directed music videos. He’s a comedian, a Web presence, a pundit, a man on the street corner with a bullhorn (literally at times). As opposed to Burns’ quiet respectability and respectfulness, Moore is loud and vaudevillian. His films are oleos, a series of linked acts usually culminating in a scene when the filmmaker (often with sympathetic citizens in tow) attacks the citadel.

It doesn’t matter if he fails to get through, since his failure to do so is part of his point; Sen. John McCain has called him “disingenuous,” but what he is is an ironist, right down to the gentle story-time voice he uses to narrate his angry films. Of course, success -- as in “Bowling for Columbine,” in which Moore and two young survivors of the Columbine massacre manage to get K-Mart to restrict its sale of bullets -- is acceptable too.

While not as visible or vocal as Moore, Burns has long since become a brand himself; indeed the “Ken Burns Effect,” in which still photos are brought to life by panning and zooming, is a built-in feature of Apple’s iMovie. He has his own designated tract of cyberspace at iTunes, where some of his documentaries are available for downloading, along with associated music and audiobooks. All this from creating what is essentially an exquisitely beautiful version of the sort of educational films they used to show you in high school.

Burns’ films are like the coffee table books they invariably spawn; they have heft, they feel expensive and serious, and tend toward an identical elegiac tone that isn’t always well-suited to the subject: It worked well for “Baseball,” with its long look back over the golden days of many summers, but “Jazz” was as unswinging a musical history as could be imagined. The approach is more appropriate to “The War” -- which, like his signature work, “The Civil War,” is full of death and blasted landscapes -- but not to all of the project..

His work is both earnest and romantic. He loves statistics but also storytelling and is obsessed with detail -- visual detail above all -- but also with the beautiful frame that sets it off. And for all the restrained formalism of his approach, Burns can be awfully sentimental. When he gives way to his inner Norman Rockwell, his latent Steven Spielberg, as the small-town orientation of the generally hard-nosed “The War” often calls him to do, things can turn bad. Tom Hanks reading the words of Luverne, Minn., newspaper columnist Al McIntosh over images of farmland and quiet streets, is pure Hallmark.

But the truth about documentary film is that any documentary tells only a partial truth. Every film is the product of a series of subjective decisions, based on the material acquired and the story it seems to want to tell. It’s only a reflection of the way we all have to focus on bits of the world to understand it -- a kind of fiction.

“My view is that these films are biased, prejudiced, condensed, compressed but fair,” Frederick Wiseman, perhaps the greatest American documentary filmmaker, has said of his work (“High School,” “Racetrack” and “Belfast, Maine”), which tends to look quietly at people in civic or professional groups. They are in no sense statistical -- they’re experiential, rather, like art. Burns and Moore are after different fish, but at their best, their movies also transcend the facts they seem meant to convey and speak not just to their subject but to the ages.

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robert.lloyd@latimes.com

Robert Lloyd is a Times TV critic