I was scrolling my YouTube and found that Werner Herzog and Errol Morris actually did an interview for Vice. It was about the Movie The Act of Killing, by Joshua Oppenheimer. Although that film is incredible and does a lot of things that I don’t think many other documentaries do (from what I’ve heard and seen snip bits of). Herzog brings up his idea that facts don’t exactly mean truth again. He went on to explain that if we wanted something one hundred percent factual then we’d just read a phonebook. That the sense that documentaries have to be this perfectly factual medium is false and doesn’t really do justice to what it truly is. Although this is my own interpretation of his words, from what I gather out of his interview is that documentaries are a tool. Their purpose is solely to help spread the director’s ideas or opinions, sometimes they can inform or help interpret situations or subjects that its viewers would otherwise not know about. By no means though is documentary meant to be a form of education or better put as Herzog puts, “documentaries are not adult education”. It seems silly but it does seem like that’s what people see documentaries as, a form of adult education, its art, its film, Pixar doesn’t put out movies to teach kids, it entertains them sometimes they may happen to teach a lesson. So, do documentaries some may set out to teach, but they don’t necessarily have to. I personally have learnt a whole lot about wars through documentaries, but they only served as a point of launch, I’d delve deeper read some books etc. Documentaries are just one of many artistic mediums, they are an extension of the director and as such can be biased, opinionated, and even fictitious. It’s up to the viewer to educate themselves and decide whether they agree or not with whatever is presented to them, we are all free of will and thought if anything documentaries simply provide a window into a subject and it gives us a chance to decide if we want to dive into that subject or not.