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I’m going to go ahead and answer the question I posed in the headline: No. Now, let’s back up a bit…

At Movie City News, Kim Voynar has written a column in which she admits that she has “just not been blown out of the water much by the docs this year”:

Maybe it’s the tightening of the economy overall making it harder for filmmakers to get compelling documentaries made. Maybe we’re just in a cycle of docs not being the preferred flavor of the month again…Many of the docs I saw this year, while they had interesting subject matter, were not what I would consider “theatrical” films. They were films that would have played just as well, or even better, on a television screen.

As you might have guessed, I disagree that this has been a weak year for documentaries. As I wrote last week, many of the most successful nonfiction films of the year have been challenging in form and idiosyncratic in content, and though I’m not cukoo-bananas for all of them, I think the fact that art seems to be trumping artless activism is encouraging. But that is not the aspect of Voynar’s piece that I take issue with. This is the aspect of Voynar’s piece that I take issue with:

She goes on to make a four-point checklist of what she considers to be requirements “for a great theatrical documentary,” and then concludes that only four films on the 2008 Oscar shotlist fit those requirements: The Betrayal, Trouble The Water, Man on Wire, and Encounters at the End of the World. She concludes by offering the four films the following compliment: “All of these films are not only good documentaries, but great filmmaking.” Which implies that a film could be a “good documentary” while not exhibiting “great filmmaking,” which raises a question or three.

Shouldn’t the quality of the filmmaking be of primary concern, regardless of whether or not the film itself  qualifies as a documentary? What good could come from a critic systematically holding one genre of film to a different standard than all others? If we’re going to make guidelines for the evaluation of documentaries, should we also do it for animation, or for foreign films, or for all those Zooey Deschanel films that premiere at Sundance and then disappear off the face of the planet? Where does it all end?

The sheer fact that such a system of evaluation special to docs exists is, I think, possibly endemic of a larger problem. That documentaries are ghettoized by film festivals is one thing, but that attitude more often than not extends to the way nonfiction films are approached by the media. Last month, Toronto documentary programmer Thom Powers issued a call for a new breed of documentary critics who would, in part, “ignore the way most periodicals divide their reviews by formats of theatrical, television and DVD [because] these boundaries prevent meaningful connections.” Citing the influence of Andrew Sarris, Clement Greenberg and Lester Bangs on their individual frames of reference, Powers urgently wondered, “Where is the equivalent voice for today’s documentary scene?” The answer might be that many of those potential voices are hung up making the distinctions which Powers warns against.