In an opinion piece at the IFC website, documentary filmmaker Steve James -- the man behind such movies as Hoop Dreams and Stevie -- makes an argument that while we might be seeing more and better non-fiction films than ever before, we're sorely lacking in what he calls "longitudinal documentaries".
What in the name of Sam Hill are longitudinal documentaries, you may well ask? Well, according to James, they're documentaries that follow the lives of a person or a number of people over a period of years in their lives. You know -- the kind of documentaries that Steve James and his partner Peter Gilbert specialize in!
To be fair to Gilbert and James (whose new film, At the Death House Door, is an outstanding example of the longitudinal documentary), there may be something to the idea that there aren't a lot of documentaries of the sort they make being released today. James even lists some of those reasons (while ignoring another -- since these movies, by definition, take years to make, maybe a lot of them just aren't finished yet) while making a fairly convincing case that the form is badly needed today. But he certainly doesn't do much for his case by mentioning no other documentaries other than his own (where's Michael Apted, whose commitment to the form makes James' look tepid?), poutily calling attention to his difficulties in getting funding, and self-flatteringly comparing his work to Charles Dickens and William Faulkner. What ought to be an informative and convincing piece about a vital need in the documentary genre just comes off reading as a self-promotional piece for Steve James, Inc.