SILHA
INCONVENIENT TRUTHS AND TIGER KINGS: THE VITAL ROLE OF DOCUMENTARIES TODAY The 35th annual Silha Lecture addressed the importance of documentaries and the need for U.S. law to recognize such importance. BY SCOTT MEMMEL ON OCT. 19, 2020, DALE COHEN, THE DIRECTOR AND FOUNDER of the UCLA
Documentary Film Legal Clinic and Special Counsel to FRONTLINE, the award-winning PBS documentary series, contended during the 35th Annual Silha Lecture that “documentaries provide a brilliant platform for filmmakers to tell us important stories and give voice to perspectives that are often overlooked. Some of them are straight up news. Some are advocacy. Some are designed primarily to make us laugh or to intrigue or entertain. Whatever form they take, films provide us with a vivid and entertaining medium for understanding our world. It’s time for the law and our institutions to treat documentaries as an essential and equal part of our journalism universe.” Cohen’s lecture, titled “Inconvenient Truths and Tiger Kings: The Vital Role of Documentaries Today,” attracted approximately 200 attendees from a variety of locations in the United States and abroad, marking the first Silha Lecture held in a virtual format due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Cohen began his lecture by discussing the importance of documentaries in our culture today. He explained that thousands of documentaries are available for streaming and viewing and that in the first half of 2020, Netflix had announced that 150 million viewers worldwide had watched at least one of its documentaries in the last year. Cohen also cited several “powerful documentaries,” in which “documentary filmmakers get to add their skills, their tools, and their talents to enhance and contextualize that footage.” He continued, “They use music, sound, lighting, graphics, effects, and cinematography, and use these tools to grab our attention, to make us think, to tug at your heartstrings just as much as any Hollywood blockbuster does.” Cohen cited several examples, including An Inconvenient Truth—a 2006 documentary film about former U.S. Vice President Al Gore’s efforts to inform the 14
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American public about global warming—and Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness—a 2020 documentary miniseries about the life of zookeeper Joseph Maldonado-Passage, better known as Joe Exotic. Cohen then considered the legal landscape around documentaries in the United States, asserting “the surprising fact that our legal system does not treat doc filmmakers with the same constitutional deference as we provide the journalists operating in other media.” He explained that the U.S. Supreme Court first considered motion pictures in Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio. In this case, the Court held in a 9-0 vote that the free speech protection under the Ohio Constitution did not extend to motion pictures. According to Cohen, the Court provided three main reasons why it did not extend First Amendment protections to motion pictures, including that motion pictures “were capable of causing harm, given their ‘attractiveness and manner of exhibition.’” The second reason was that films, according to the court, were for entertainment, not the conveyance of opinion. The final reason was that films were created
