Hill on Michael Moore's Film Techniques

Inciting Action:
The Film Techniques of Michael Moore as Compared with Sergei Eisenstein
By Karina Hill

Introduction

Michael Moore is arguably the most controversial filmmaker of our time.  Fahrenheit 9/11 and his Oscar acceptance speech inspired much hatred toward him.  This hate was perpetuated by his film, Fahrenheit 9/11.  Conservative pundits draw frequent comparison between Moore and Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, citing similar propagandistic tendencies, but these pundits seem to oversimplify these filmmakers’ works.  I do think Moore and Eisenstein share a similar goal in their movies, in terms of inciting people to action, but the techniques they use activate the audience are somewhat different.   This paper will argue that, while both filmmakers use montage, Moore makes greater use of emotion to incite his viewers into action.

The Goals of Eisenstein and Moore

The goals of Eisenstein and Moore are essentially the same.  They both aim to create a compelling story which will motivate their audiences to take action.  Eisenstein theorizes that the basic unit of film is the shot.  Montage is created by multiple shots to create the filmmakers desired meaning. Eisenstein explains process of achieving meaning through dialectics.  The first shot in a sequence represents the thesis of an idea.  The next shot either opposes or is seemingly unrelated to the first shot, creating an antithesis. The juxtaposition of these two shots acts as a collision of ideas, resulting in a synthesis. This synthesis is the final desired meaning for the montage sequence.  Eisenstein uses several different techniques of montage to create a desired effect in the audience.  Eisenstein’s early use of montage focused on causing a physiological response through shocking viewers’ senses and sensibilities; this is called the montage of attractions.  His associational montages use dialectic elements to activate audience emotions.  Generally, his associational montages are used to sadden or disgust the audience.  Intellectual montage is the colliding of two unrelated shots in order to arrive at an understanding of an abstract concept or message. The Soviet system within which he worked emphasized the social utility of film and he believed that film could be used to reeducate the public. Therefore, Eisenstein used montages to incite physiological, emotional, and intellectual responses in spectators, with the ultimate goal of motivating them to take action.

It seems clear that Moore also shares this goal of motivating and educating spectators.  Moore creates documentaries about highly controversial issues like corporate responsibility, poverty, gun control, and motives for going to war.   He attempts to transport his audiences into a new situation or experience.  In Roger and Me, for example, he explores the extremely impoverished town of Flint, Michigan.  Moore educates his audience about the problems General Motors causes within the city.  In Fahrenheit 9/11 he develops an argument about the Bush administration’s motives for going to war with Iraq.  It is clear he aims to incite audiences to action.  After Bush bumbles a famous quote, “Fool me once shame on…me. Fool me twice…uh..you ain’t gonna fool me again,” Moore concludes the film with the following statement: “Finally, something we agree on,” meaning that the American public was fooled once, but now that Americans know what we know from watching this movie, we will not be fooled into voting Bush  into office again.  In all of his films, Moore makes compelling arguments and poses many questions that cause his audience to question the validity of social structures and governmental action.

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Roger and Me

In Moore’s first major film, Roger and Me, Moore’s techniques are closer to those of a traditional documentary with a few aspects of Eisensteinian montage.  Roger and Me focuses on the effects of General Motor’s factory closings in the town of Flint, Michigan.  It seems his ultimate goal is to make his audience think about the responsibilities of corporations to their employees. Roger and Me is a mixture of traditional documentary techniques like explanatory segments with interviewees and colliding segments that are not unfamiliar to Eisenstein. The “collisions” in the film are organized around the opposition between GM corporate representatives (or wealthy citizens) and the middle or working class families in Flint.  The style and technique in Roger and Me is markedly different from his later films, Bowling for Columbine, and Fahrenheit 9/11. The latter two films are more focused on humor and sadness, while Roger and Me is more focused on emphasizing a dichotomy within the community.

Montages

There are several examples within the film which seem to emulate Eisenstein's technique of dialectical montage. For example, the first montage in Roger and Me is a display of all the run down homes and businesses in Flint.  These images are the thesis of the montage.  The song, “Wouldn’t it Be Nice” is used contrapuntally and creates an antithesis to the images of the poverty-stricken Flint.  The synthesis of these two elements evokes a feeling of helplessness and hopelessness.   A few scenes later there is a montage of all the beautiful houses of Grosse Point, a nearby town, where the wealthy, corporate Michiganians live. It evokes a regal and powerful feeling.  This montage acts as an antithesis to the poverty montage, resulting in a synthesis that portrays the abstract concept of injustice.  The juxtaposition of these montages seems to beg the question “Why should some have so much, while others should have so few?” 

There are a few other examples of more Eisensteinian techniques of montage in Roger and Me.  One particularly effective montage is the quick inter-cutting between the opinions of a worker and the opinions of a union boss.  The worker expresses his concerns about the true intentions of the union boss.  Inter-cut into the worker’s concerns are statements from a union boss which validate these concerns.  This is an intellectual montage of sorts; however it mostly uses more traditional interview techniques associated with documentary rather than Eisensteinian juxtaposition to create a collision of ideas to point out the fallacies of the union boss.

Moore, like Eisenstein, uses montage in order to evoke both an emotional and a physiological response. Moore uses a running montage throughout the film of the Flint Sheriff evicting Flint residents from the tattered homes to stimulate physical and emotional responses.  The eviction montage acts as a shocking exclamation to preceding scenes.  For example, the eviction scene abruptly follows the scene with the wealthy Great Gatsby party-goers.  Switching from the story of a superfluous lifestyle to a paltry lifestyle causes a drastic change in the viewers’ sensibilities.  This pattern continues after the viewers become used to the quiet and soft-spoken views of the wealthy, elderly, golfing women. The Sheriff interrupts the golf segment with loud rapping on the front door of a dilapidated house, causing a physiological response in viewers by enhancing sound difference.  This is in keeping with Eisenstein’s initial theory of mind where he postulates that in order to reach the mind you must stimulate the body. The eviction theme also manifests itself in the climax of the film.  While Roger Smith is sending out a Christmas message of love and warmth, the Sheriff is forced to put people out in the cold because they can’t pay their rent, most likely because they were laid off by GM. This is another example of associational montage.  It points to the coldhearted policies of GM CEO Smith and is likely to evoke a sense of injustice in viewers.  The continual eviction theme manifests itself in Moore’s film in the form of two of the three Eisenstein’s montages; associational and physiological. Moore uses these aspects of montage to let the viewers develop a better understanding of the situation of the people in Flint, speaking to their emotions in the hope that they will not put up with corporate insensitivities.

Segments

In general, Moore uses a more traditional segmented structure in his films. As with traditional documentaries, he begins with an introduction where he sets up his relationship to the city of Flint.  He then describes General Motor’s role in the City of Flint.  The next segment focuses on all the current problems in Flint.  This is followed by a story about Reagan coming to visit Flint, which is followed by a segment on the Great Gatsby party.  All of these segments seem to have little relationship to each other: however, as the documentary progresses the audience begins to see a pattern. The address changes, the problem of keeping the UHAUL trucks in Flint, rising crime rate, and the pets or meat segment give the viewer a broad, systemic understanding of the true problems in Flint.  Michael Moore is essentially presenting all the segments as the effects of General Motors closing factories in Flint. Moore uses a running montage throughout the film of the Flint Sheriff evicting Flint residents from the tattered homes to stimulate physical and emotional responses.  The eviction montage acts as a shocking exclamation to preceding scenes.  For example, the eviction scene abruptly follows the scene with the wealthy Great Gatsby party-goers.  By connecting these initially unrelated ideas via various forms of montage, Moore is creating the notion of a large systemic response to the GM factory closures. The viewers are invited to blame on GM and to fight corporate negligence and insensitivity.

Moore's Shift in Technique

In Moore’s later films, a shift in style is evident.  By dividing the films into segments and then synthesizing them via montage, Moore is able to make the audience laugh or make them sad.  These moods are very closely related with Eisenstein’s notion of intellectual montage and associational montage.

Eisenstein used associational montage to elicit an emotional response in his viewers. I argue that sadness or sympathy draws the viewer into the lives of the subjects in the documentary.  The viewers become emotionally invested in the livelihoods of the people on screen.  Moore encourages empathy for his subjects and thus encourages viewers to take action to end the suffering of the subjects of his films.

While creating sadness or upsetting the viewer can effectively be traced back to Eisenstein's associational montage, the relationship between humor and intellectual montage is less direct.  Humor acknowledges a certain minimum understanding. Essentially, I believe that if someone is able to laugh at something, they clearly understand the basics of an issue.  Laughter, by its very nature, publicly proclaims for fellow company, that a concept is understood. If you can laugh at something, you are ultimately saying “I’m smart, I get it.”  In the real world, however, understanding complex issues is not that simple.  Because Michael Moore often creates laughter in pointing out hypocrisies or ironies in sarcastic ways, it seems he is able to see the big picture.  He sees the nuances that politicians and activists have yet to point out. Our laughter in response to his films denotes our objective distance.  Our laughter signifies that we are distanced enough to see the big picture.

These two moods create a very effective balance in that together they make the viewer understand (or at least believe they understand) the details and complexities of the reality depicted, while still keeping them emotionally invested and empathetic toward the lives of the people in the film. Bowling for Columbine clearly demonstrates Moore’s intentions to make the audience both laugh and cry.  These two emotions are mediated through Moore’s use of montages, as well as his use of segments.

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Bowling for Columbine

Sad Montage

Bowling for Columbine, like Roger and Me, uses montage to communicate ideas.  However, these montages more explicitly elicit a humorous or sad response in viewers.  For example, the first montage Moore constructs in Bowling for Columbine is one that creates a sick and ultimately very sad feeling.  It is a series of shots with people shooting other people or themselves, and it is edited to the song “Happiness is a Warm Gun” by the Beatles.  The juxtaposition of the song and the images, and the irony this generates, results in a synthesis understanding that shows that people’s obsessions with guns is sick. The audience actually witnesses several individuals’ deaths by guns, evoking a sad and disgusted feeling.  This juxtaposition of sound and image draws the viewers into the argument by showing how the gun control issue is truly a matter of life and death.
The next montage in the film is made of actual audio and video from the murders at Columbine.  People’s desperate pleas for help as they call 911 provide the audio, while the visuals show the security cam footage of panicked students and the two murders aiming guns at people and setting off explosives.  It is an extremely disturbing and upsetting montage.  The graphic nature of the montage, I believe, gets at the question “What makes humans act like monsters?”  This question heightens the interest of the viewer, pulling them into the film while Moore attempts to answer that very question.

Collision Segments

Similar to Roger and Me, there are collisions of segments designated to create a physiological response in people.  For example after the sad “Happiness is a Warm Gun” montage, the viewer is shocked by the sudden cut to a suburban, Littleton mother saying that “Littleton is a great place to live.”  I think that cuts like this echo Eisenstein’s goal of stimulating a physiological response.  In this case, the “Happiness is Warm Gun” montage is sad and incites stress. This stress is released after the Littleton mother says that “Littleton is a great place to live.”  Another example might be the expected sick or queasiness that I feel when the gut-wrenching Columbine montage ends suddenly by cutting to Charlton Heston yelling “From my cold, dead hands.”  These physiological responses heighten the senses and open up the viewers to ideas and arguments throughout the documentary.

Humor Segments

Humorous montages are not pervasive in Bowling for Columbine, but the idea of using funny segments as tools for creating a critical distance in audiences is practiced effectively a few times in film.  The best example of this is the animated portion entitled “The History of America.”  The segment explains how the pilgrims left England to escape persecution but when they arrived in America they imposed a strict persecution of mass genocide on the Native Americans.  White people also kidnapped Africans and made them slaves.  After a few slave uprisings, the cartoon claims that white people got scared, but it was too late to do anything else because President Lincoln had freed the slaves.  The cartoon explains that white people stayed scared and created the KKK and the NRA.  A long time passed and then black people started to demand their rights, so white people moved to the suburbs, all locked up safely with their guns.  The whole segment first hints at the hypocrisy of the people coming to America to escape persecution and yet they caused more persecution; they murdered and enslaved people.  And then when black people started to gain equal rights, white people freaked out and essentially persecuted them again by isolating themselves in suburban communities and holding irrational fears about the black community.  The segment is very ironic and it allows the audiences to laugh at the hypocritical nature of white people. This cartoon segment performs two functions; first, it causes white people in the audience to question whether or not they have ever held those irrational fears. Second, it also allows viewers to distance themselves from the fears because they are so irrational that we would never want to associate ourselves with them.  We laugh at all those irrational white people and therefore rise above the problem.  Because we believe that we understand the whole picture, I would argue that we feel more inclined to support the rest of Moore’s arguments because we identify ourselves as understanding the situation in the same way as Moore understands it.

Sad Segments

I believe that Moore prefers emotional appeals more than laughter in Bowling for Columbine.  The end of the film is largely composed of scenes generating sadness.  After he makes the audience laugh and distances us from the problem, he pulls us back into the issue to help us see the big picture from the inside out, rather than the outside in, which I would argue is more effective at moving an audience to action than a purely intellectual stimulus.  There is a long string of sad segments toward the end of the film, beginning with a segment about a school shooting in Flint, MI.  It is the youngest school shooting in history.  It is shockingly sad to know that a first grader is capable of shooting another classmate.  The segment emphasizes that gun violence permeates its way all the way through society, even to its youngest members.  The following segment emphasizes the impoverished city of Flint, which suggests that violence is a systemic reaction to poverty.  The next section explores this notion in depth by explaining that the mother of the first grade boy who shot his classmate was not with him when he found and took the gun to school. She was busy working two jobs 50 miles away and still not making ends meet.  These three segments create a very bleak and depressing look at the effects of government policies.  It makes viewers feel for the people who are trying to work hard to overcome poverty and violence and the futility of it all.

Michael Moore ends the movie with a visit to NRA president, Charlton Heston’s home. He leaves a picture of the first grade girl who was shot in Flint as a final appeal to Heston to stop promoting guns.  In actuality, it serves as a plea to the audience to support strict gun control for the sake of our children.

Explanatory Segments

Rather than using seemingly unrelated scenes to complete the full picture in Bowling for Columbine, Moore uses traditional segments that have a more direct explanatory tone. Unlike Eisenstein’s films, between montages and segments, opinions, beliefs, and ideas are delivered more explicitly.  This helps to fill in all the gaps that viewers need to connect their laughter and their tears. For example, the two interviews with Matt Stone and Marilyn Manson don’t necessarily depict a mood; they are rather explaining potential reasons for the violence at Columbine.

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Fahrenheit 9/11

The montages, the segments, the laughter, the sadness, and the physiological responses that all occur in Moore’s first two documentaries become accentuated in Fahrenheit 9/11.  This film is also Moore’s most controversial and most effective in causing political action, mostly because it has a concrete goal; to reelect anybody but Bush. 

Funny Montage

The incidence of humorous montage increases in Fahrenheit 9/11.  There are some very memorable funny montages.  One memorable example is when Bush is explaining how the U.S. military is going to “smoke out” Osama and his Al-Qaeda pals.  The montage is of Bush repeating “smokem' out” at various speeches as it suddenly cuts to cowboys in old westerns.  It’s a funny comparison because many people are aware of Bush’s Texas cowboy style, but this montage seems to make the comparison come to life.  Once again, this humor places the viewers above the entire situation and allows us to see the big picture.  This in turn makes us feel smart and therefore prepared to take action.

Another funny montage focuses on the countries that are part of the “coalition of the willing.”  By using a funny voice that sounds overly enthusiastic about the importance of each of the armies in the coalition, and by showing almost offensively stereotypical footage of each culture, Moore has created a montage that teaches the viewers that this grand “coalition of the willing” about which Bush often speaks is actually not so grand.  It suggests that the coalition is made up of small island countries that can’t actually provide any troops.  Once again, humor is an excellent vehicle for providing information that helps people come to conclusions about the big picture and makes them more likely to take action.

Sad Montage

I have identified about four Eisensteinian montages that have a sad tone to them in Fahrenheit 9/11, which is twice as many as there are in Bowling for Columbine (See attached charts).  One particularly effective montage is when Moore shows numerous shots of happy, care-free Iraqis, which serves as the thesis.  He then begins to inter-cut explosions with shots of Iraqi suffering. The suffering Iraqi images serve as the antithesis. The juxtaposition of these images creates a synthesis that depicts the horror of war.  This is meant to disturb viewers enough to incite weariness regarding the war in Iraq.

There is another similar and effective montage where the audio from a Bush speech in which he is discussing winning the hearts and minds of people plays over the images and sounds of the brutality and insensitivities of some soldiers to the Iraqi people.  While these are not only sad and disturbing images, contradiction between what Bush says and what his policies do is overwhelming.  This juxtaposition of conflicting sounds and images is another example of Eisenstein’s use of thesis and antithesis. Moore creates conflict between images and voice over, which results in an understanding of the hypocritical actions taken by the Bush administration. I would argue that this decreases the trust people have for anything that the Bush administration says.  Thus it brings the viewers closer to the ideas of Moore and will ultimately help Moore achieve his final goal, which is to encourage people to vote for anyone but Bush.

Collision of Segments

In Fahrenheit 9/11, there are also many collisions of images, thoughts or ideas that cause physiological responses in people.  The best example of such a collision occurs right after the audience, for a prolonged period of time, watches a grieving Iraqi woman yell about God taking revenge on America. This is unsettling, to say the least.  Then, out of nowhere, Moore cuts to a short clip of him interviewing Britney Spears.  Spears makes a simple statement that much of the country would also subscribe to; that we should trust our president. It is startling to jump from the clip depicting the sorrow of those affected by the war to the pop-sensation, Britney, whose life is relatively unaffected by the war.

The collision between the segment regarding the objections to the 2000 election and the montage about vacations also causes a physiological jolt.  During the scene where Congressmen and women are objecting to the 2000 election, there is an overall sense of desperation in the scene.  Michael Moore uses a brief transition which continues the desperate mood, and then all of a sudden the Go-Go’s hit song “Vacation” starts and there is a montage of the President on vacation.  This startling switch provides at least initial sense of relief from the desperation of the election segment. 

Funny Segments

The funny segment that stands out the most for me is when Michael Moore is in D.C. circling the Capital building reading the Patriot act to Congressman from an ice-cream truck.  It shows the pure ridiculousness of a system where legislators don’t read the bills that they sign, or at least understand them enough to pick up on the bill’s main themes.  This puts the citizen in the role as an intellectual superior which might cause viewers to act because they know they can’t trust an incompetent government to do things for them.

Explanatory Segments

There are many interviews in Fahrenheit 9/11 that are aimed at delivering sound bites of information to aid Moore’s arguments.  An example of this would be where he interviews an ex-CIA agent who fills in the gap regarding Moore’s argument about flying the Bin Laden family out of the U.S.  It adds credibility to Moore’s claim that it was a bad idea and a suspicious action to fly the family out of the U.S.

Another example of an explanatory segment in Fahrenheit 9/11 that aids in Moore’s argument is his interview with two senior citizens.  Placed late in the movie, after most of the argument has already been presented to us, they essentially verbally present to the audience the suspicions that should be held about the administration after watching the movie.  They question the business motives of Bush and they also question the purposes for going to war.  These statements help to explain and validate Moore’s argument up to this point in the movie.

Conclusions

Michael Moore uses humor and sadness in his Eisensteinian styled montages and in his more traditional segmented style of documentary.  He also uses collision segments to produce a physiological response, following Eisenstein’s early theory regarding the montage of attractions.  Moore achieves this sense of shock by building up a certain mood and then releasing it suddenly. He also does it by using starkly different sounds.  These leave the audiences in shock. I believe that his sense of shock heightens people’s senses and sensibilities which make them more open to the arguments in the documentaries. 

By using humor, he is able to allow the viewers to distance themselves from the issue and laugh at it, because in order to laugh, one must understand the premises that Michael Moore puts forth in his film. Moore is creating an intellectual stimulus not unlike Eisenstein but by using humor to create cognition rather than an abstract depiction of an idea.

Moore also uses sad emotional stimuli to motivate the viewer which is not unlike Eisenstein’s use of associational montage to activate the viewer.  However, I hypothesize that Moore uses emotional montage to bring the viewers back down from the big picture they see during the humor segments, to the personal stories of the subjects of the films.  This allows them to have a big picture approach from the inside of a story, which is a hard viewpoint to reach in most issues. 

All of these techniques make the viewer more prone act in response to issues in the film. However, these techniques can’t guarantee that viewers will actually take action.  It is clear that both Michael Moore and Eisenstein have similar purposes.  They both concentrate on societal and governmental issues and make powerful cases for taking action when the government or corporations will not step in and do their job.  Fahrenheit 9/11 played an unprecedented role in the 2004 Presidential election.  It was highly discussed and it broke box office records for a documentary film.  While it is likely that Fahrenheit 9/11 convinced a lot of people to vote for Kerry, it didn’t succeed in activating enough people to elect anybody but Bush.  Nevertheless, the huge success of Fahrenheit 9/11 suggests that Moore’s techniques were successful in activating many viewers.

Click on the following thumbnail charts to see the full-size versions:

Works Cited

Donelan, Carol. “Formalist Film Theory: Eisenstein.” Class lectures. 1/6/05 and 1/11/05.
Moore, Michael. Bowling for Columbine. Dog Eat Dog Films. MGM. 2002.
Moore, Michael. Fahrenheit 9/11. Dog Eat Dog Films. Columbia TriStar. 2004.
Moore, Michael. Roger and Me.  Dog Eat Dog Films.  Warner Brothers. 1989.

Comments

[Mia Ruth]

In her essay, "Inciting Action: The Film Techniques of Michael Moore as Compared with Sergei Eisenstein," Karina Hill proposes that Michael Moore, like Sergei Eisenstein, invokes the techniques of montage and segment in order to provoke certain responses, those being emotional, intellectual, or physiological, of the spectator. Hill accurately identifies key similarities between the films of Moore and Eisenstein, as evidenced in their common tactics of juxtaposing a thesis and antithesis into a meaningful synthesis.

Karina correctly points out the fact that, unlike Eisenstein, Moore interjects his montages and segments with more clearly explicated opinions and ideas. While she recognizes that this technique serves to erase any possible ambiguity with regard to Moore’s message, I argue, through the examination of one of Hill’s examples, that it is not only through these additions, but through the closer-related images used within each montage as well, that Moore differs from Eisenstein in terms of technique.

Hill’s explanations of the montages in Roger and Me lead to her comparison between Eisenstein and Moore. The song “Wouldn’t it be Nice,” which accompanies images of run-down homes in Michigan, Hill says, serves as the antithesis to the images/thesis. The synthesis created through the conjunction of these images and this song results in empathy for those who are forced to live in such conditions, whose situations seem hopeless. Moments later, a montage of nicer homes in a nearby town, where the corporate bosses live, provokes the question of why some have so much and some have so little. While there is no doubt that the juxtaposition of the images within and between each montage incites the desired responses within the audience, I argue that Moore’s techniques of montage differ significantly from those of Eisenstein. While Eisenstein would juxtapose seemingly unrelated images (such as an animal being slaughtered and people running), Moore pairs images of run-down homes with those of nicer homes. The meaning is much more explicit and, ultimately, much more accessible to the average viewer.

While I do not disagree with Hill’s suggestion that both Eisenstein and Moore have similar goals in terms of the responses and actions they desire from their audiences, I believe that Moore uses much more obvious and comprehensible techniques than does Eisenstein in the carrying out of these goals. Nonetheless, though, both artists have created thought- and action-provoking films that will no doubt continue to incite response, discussion, and comparison.