Do film critics approach documentaries differently than fiction? Should they? When evaluating nonfiction, do critics mistakenly elevate “importance” over form, story over storytelling? Is it fair to always expect documentaries to be art?

These are just a few of the questions taken up by moderator Robert Greene and critics Eric Hynes, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, Miriam Bale and Vadim Rizov in our panel “The Revolution Will Be Criticized: Do Critics Miss the Boat on Nonfiction Filmmaking?” which took place at the Odd Fellows Lodge during T/F 2013.

This panel was occasioned Robert Greene’s Cinematic Nonfiction 2012 piece for Hammer to Nail. In this article, Greene expressed frustration over Manohla Dargis’s New York Times review of Only the Young (T/F 2012), a review he considered symptomatic of critical culture’s failure to understand documentary not as a rigid genre but as a “way of seeing”.

The entire panel is available in the video embedded below thanks to the work of our friends at Columbia Access Television. You can also take this entire conversation with you as an audio podcast by downloading an mp3 here.