I actually took a class on documentary and mock documentary last semester, and out of all the films we screened, I found Rémy Belvaux’s Man Bites Dog among the most fascinating. Though fictional, the film adopts the agenda of the reflexive documentary by interrogating the very act of filming real-life subjects, specifically focusing on the often ethically problematic relationship between the subject and the filmmaker. The movie follows a diegetic documentary film crew as they go about filming the exploits of Ben, a fictional serial killer and the subject of their film. Watching this process take place, our moral instincts immediately kick in. How can these filmmakers go about making their movie when Ben is walking the streets, murdering people left and right for sport?
But it is precisely the extreme nature of the movie’s subject that foregrounds the ethical issues inherent in documentary filmmaking. To what degree are filmmakers justified in continuing to film a subject before they are ethically obligated to intervene? The film’s aim is satirical rather than realist, using the film crew’s chilling moral apathy (and later outright moral decadence) as a commentary on the way in which documentary filmmakers sometimes sacrifice moral integrity for the pursuit of knowledge. One thinks of the infamous incident in which a photojournalist takes a picture of a hungry child only to receive vicious backlash for not helping the child out.
It only goes to show how complex a genre documentary is. Because a documentary’s goal is to represent reality, there are added ethical implications to the making of the film.
Below is Man Bites Dog in its entirety, available on YouTube. Go to the 1:00 mark and you’ll see Ben describing the process of disposing a body. The way he’s framed and talking at the camera mimics the “talking heads” interview style commonly seen in the expository mode of documentary film.
If you’re going to watch the whole movie, be warned: it’s very violent and disturbing.
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