I loved this article... I thought it was particularly telling when Scott says: "The power of documentary depends on the fiction that the world will reveal itself to the camera in all its rough, obdurate actuality, and the practice of documentary often consists of trying to control or curtail this power, to maintain a safe distance." In all of the films we've seen so far this semester there hasn't been one filmmaker whose first goal was to protect the audience. If anything, there has been a kind of literal unsettling taking place. We're more or less forced to confront topics (e.g. torture, the everyday horrors of war in Iraq, etc) that we try to maintain a safe distance from. Say what you will about CNN, but the news is supposed to be 24-hour news--24-hour reality. Films don't have to and are not expected to be. However, Scott points out that a lot of filmmakers seem to be trying to tell us: hey--wake up!--what you're getting on the news isn't the only truth... whether it's tapping into the "YouTube effect" or doing the head-smacklingly obvious, documentary films seem to be raising the standard for reportage and/or providing some social good.

As Christina mentioned, at the end of the article Scott discusses how often the challenge of a documentary is to provide some distance from very powerful images. It seems that this is a challenge in framing footage: how to give the viewer a chance to follow an argument or a line of thinking in such a way that when raw footage is presented, it is done for something more insightful than simple shock value.