It’s one of the best documentaries ever made: 21 years after its release, this Oscar-winning film remains extremely relevant today.

Although it is naturally different in form from works of fiction, the emotional field opened up by documentary film can be absolutely devastatingly powerful. Because it deals with things that are sometimes intimate, with questions that deeply surprise and ask us, about our relationship with the world, others and living beings.

It also sometimes provides a helpful mirror, like an X-ray on the future of a society engaged in a life-or-death struggle with itself. This is about bowling for Columbine.

“I’ll only take your guns away when I’m dead!”

Michael Moore has been criticized for liberally taking some short-cuts in some of his past work, and sometimes even being intellectually dishonest. However, it is clear that his Bowling for ColumbineHe opened the piece with a bang that was as relentless and chilling as it was liberating, even controversial.

Released in 2002, it took as its starting point the school shooting in Columbine, Colorado, in 1999 that killed 15 people. The massacre caused an uproar in the United States and led to debates about terrorism, gun control laws, the availability of these weapons, safety in schools, and the influence of video games, music, and movies.

Borrowing its title from an activity in which the two authors, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, engaged in the days leading up to the assassination, routinely mixing archival images such as those from the Vietnam War with cinematic processes that appeal to emotion (“manipulations,” Moore’s detractors would say), the filmmaker tackled a deceptively simple question: why There were, he said, a hundred times more murders by fire With more guns in the United States than anywhere else?

and to point out the American obsession with guns by explaining that the United States has always been historically steeped, since its birth, in a violent history and culture; From the War of Independence against Native Americans, including two World Wars and of course the Vietnam War.

The last devastating ghost

Crowned notably with an Oscar for Best Documentary and a César for Best Foreign Language Film, Bowling For Columbine ends with a devastating scene for the Hollywood legend who was Charlton Heston six years before his death, and who had been president of the NRA since 1998. 2003

In the final exchange, after playing cat and mouse with him pretending to be a member of the NRA in order to get closer to him, Heston shoots Michael Moore. “I have only five words for you: from my cold dead hands!” – I’m only going to take your gun away when I’m dead!- These images are in any case devastating for Heston, who also made his last screen appearance here, which didn’t really speak in his favor…