Documentaries List Discussion & Suggestions (Genre Project)

[matrixschmatrix]

Are most of these the kind of things that show up on the second disc of Warner releases? They're usually the worst about useless, fawning puff pieces, except maybe Disney.

[domino harvey]

No, I actually sought these out. My storied reputation of making bad decisions during list projects remains alive and well

[swo17]

Since it doesn't appear to have been mentioned in this thread yet, allow me to put in a word for Frederick Wiseman's Near Death. The most epic of his films that I've seen, it's a long and hard watch (about terminally ill patients in a Boston ICU) but riveting throughout, even as the doctors run through the same routine or the same speech with different patients/family members on different days. There's a rather apt speech by one of the doctors toward the end of the film about how they are merely minor actors in a game too big for even them to understand, despite all of their medical expertise. The doctors have to hold out at least an iota of hope for all of their patients in order to do what they do, but when you're the one that has to deal with all the "one chance in a thousand" cases, that's a lot of gloom and doom that you have to wade through before having your best efforts occasionally pay off. The film also explores some pretty vital social questions about how much of this critical care is justified given the tremendous cost of it weighed against the pricelessness of human life.

[knives]

I think the highest Wiseman for me is going to be Belfast, Maine which just seems to touch upon everything ever featured in one of his films ever to the point where it functions almost as a perfect summary to a great career. I think the death film for me is going to be King's Dying at Grace.

[martin]

Kilka opowiesci o czlowieku (Bogdan Dziworski, 1983)
This is Nabob of Nowhere's spotlight title. I clicked the youtube link and was very happy when I realised the file was recorded from a Swedish TV-channel (as I read Swedish). But the film didn't have any narration or dialogue! A nice surprise. I liked it, vital, sweet and tender.

Katka (Helena Treštíková, 2010)
Michael B's spotlight left its mark on me. A relentless (to reuse Michaels word) and grim film about a drug addict. Very sad. This is going to stay with me for a long time.

Módszerek (Judit Vas, 1968)
A psycological experiment where democratic, autocratic, and lissez-faire teaching styles are tested upon kids. I saw this in a class c. 1990, and had actually forgotten most of the details of the film. But it affected me a lot at the time, like Loach's Family Life which we saw during the same course. And somehow it has stuck in my mind on a subcunscious level. I guess the use of children made it particularly brutal. Thanks to user Cold Bishop for finding the youtube link in the Identify This Movie thread.

Congo river, au-delà des ténèbres (Thierry Michel, 2005)
Belgian documentarist Thierry Michel travels 4000 km upstream to the source of the Congo River - first on a barge, then in a canoe. There doesn't seem to be a clear narrative point from the outset; the 2 hour film unfolds slowly exploring themes like religion, fate, mortality, colonialism, decay, disease, and war. The journey gets darker as we move deeper into the heart of darkness (Conrad's novel is briefly hinted at). It gets particularly grim when we hear about women and even 6 year old girls being gangraped by soldiers. A slowly meandering and at times almost meditative journey.

[Satori]

I've been doing some documentary watching recently, and thought I'd post up some recommendations for the list. I don't think many of these have been mentioned so far, but they're worth a look.

Grin Without a Cat (Marker 1977)- For me, this is Marker's best film, which is a truly competitive category. A radical, yet anti-nostalgic periodization of the great era of global revolutions from 1968 through the mid-70s that remains fresh and vibrant. Marker strikes the perfect balance of scope and and depth (at least in the three hour version- I confess I have never seen the earlier 4-hour one). The film is dialectical in that it always demands we make connections between the images and events shown, but will never do our work for us. The tragedy of the film, alas, is that its revolutions were never meant to be, but while Marker forces us to confront the crash and burn of the era's great utopian projects, he never lets us gives up hope on the utopian imagination itself.

Ballot Measure 9 (Heather Lyn Macdonald, 1995)- Fascinating film about a 1992 anti-gay ballot initiative in Oregon that would have essentially legalized discrimination against gays and lesbians (a shockingly current subject given what is currently happening in Arizona and Kansas). I am a sucker for documentaries about political organizing and this holds up for me as a brilliant study of a micro-scale political battle. It juxtaposes footage of the far-right religious leaders who are campaigning for the initiative with the activists that are fighting it, allowing the film to dissect the right's rhetorical strategies (that they are still using) and how we can combat them. The most inspiring part of the film is its depiction of coalition strategies between different progressive groups and how grassroots organizing can be used for the left. I'll be honest and say that it isn't terribly interesting formally (it has a TV-documentary feel at times, lots of talking heads, ect.), but its analysis of how to form coalitions is insightful and it works as a great anatomy of political organizing.

Gendernauts (Monika Treut, 1999)- I've recently been going back through Treut's work and was really taken with this documentary. It's similar to Paris is Burning in that it examines a sexual subculture as it appears in a specific geographical space (here San Francisco, which functions a kind of queer utopia in the narrative). We even get a drag king performance to compliment the balls in PIB! The people Treut interviews are wonderful and inspiring and Treut just lets them tell their stories. Again, not particularly innovative in form (unlike Treut's fiction films), but the individuals she speaks to are fascinating, intelligent, and funny enough to carry the film.

From the Other Side (Akerman, 2002)- Akerman's look at immigration on the U.S./Mexico border. Juxtaposes static shots of interviewees (on both sides of the border, including potential immigrants, family members of those who died trying to cross the border, a sheriff, and a paranoid rightwing couple) with stunning shots of locations along the border, including hypnotic extended tracking shots from vehicles. The film really lets you feel space and time, giving a concreteness to the stories of the interviewees.

Mutantes: Punk, Porn, Feminism (Virginie Despentes, 2009)- Rather scattershot doc by the director of Baise-moi. It's basically a study of sex-positive feminism that begins with a discussion of sex workers and moves into “post-porn,” which seems to be a mostly European movement that is roughly the same as 'queer porn' here in the U.S. It has some interviews with filmmakers like Catherine Breillat and Maria Beatty as well as scholars like Linda Williams, and provides plenty of clips from the films. I thought it worked well as a survey of contemporary feminist porn, but I wish it had retained a bit more focus in the beginning. The stuff about sex workers rights and organizing was great, but I think that would have worked better as a separate documentary (the documentary Live Nude Girls Unite is indispensable for covering this ground as well).

[matrixschmatrix]

A Grin Without a Cat is a lock for my list as well. It's sort of Marker's epic- as much as I love and will also likely vote for Sans Soleil, Grin maintains the personality of it and makes it about a whole era, one other movies (fiction and non) have tried and failed to encapsulate.

[martin]

I saw A Grin Without a Cat at Cinemateket, Copenhagen, in 2008. It was probably the most unique experience I've ever had at a movie theatre (worthy for that thread too). Social workers and nurses in Denmark were on a two-month strike at the time, fighting for higher wages. At the day when I saw Marker's film, 1st of May 2008 (a 40th anniversary retrospect of the 1968 Paris riots), there was a huge demonstration passing by just outside Cinemateket. There was an intermission in Marker's film, and I went to the lobby for a cup of coffee. So here I was on the International Workers' Day watching art-cinema about revolution while "real people" living "real lives" were fignting for their cases just outside the windows of the theatre! The whole experience had a huge impact on me, partly beacuse of the circumstances, of course, but also because of Marker's film. A great and unique experience.

[swo17]

Blockade (Sergei Loznitsa, 2006)
This found-footage documentary depicting scenes from the Leningrad Blockade during WWII can be found on a Loznitsa set recently put out by New Wave Films in the UK (currently dirt cheap). I gather that "all" that was done to put this film together was the non-intrusive editing and subtle addition of Foley effects to bring the images more to life. Perhaps most notable is what the film doesn't do--principally, adding narration to guide you through each scene, or perhaps to provide some historical context. You might think this would leave the viewer a little lost, though this isn't exactly rocket science--a city has been occupied against its will, and the living conditions are dire. If you feel kind of thrown into this situation without having had any time to prepare, you're in much the same boat as the film's subjects. Instead of instructing, Blockade immerses you in the lives of these people, taking its time to reveal different layers of horror, at times suddenly and without warning, or even more chillingly, in a commonplace, defeatist manner.

[martin]

It’s Not Repetition, It’s Discipline (Lars Kjelfred, Troels Holmstrøm, Jesper Hedeager Madsen, 2014)
A brand new film about the Manchester band The Fall - made by three Danish The Fall fans. I don't even think there are IMDb entries for any of the directors or the film yet.

I saw this with an indroduction by the directors at Cinemateket in Copenhagen. They call themselves amateurs, and they said the film was recorded using probably every existing digital video format. Even pocket cameras! And it often looks absolutely horrible with ugly aliasing artefacts. But the look somehow fits this sort of underground post-punk music.
The footage is shot over a period of 12 years, and the result is interesting, although not a top 50 entry for me. It's not a chonological survey of the band but rather some kind of collage consisting of live footage, interviews with frontman Mark Smith and other former band members, and interviews with John Peel, Thurston Moore, Dee Dee Ramones, Henry Rollins, and with musicians from bands like Joy Division/New Order or Captain Beefheart. It all ends with a terrific 6 or 7 minutes uninterrupted live-performance of the track "I am Damo Suzuki" (Damo Suzuki of Can being another famous participating musician in the film). Great!

[zedz]

I'm just rustling through my probable list and stumbled across The Quince Tree Sun, which I'm in two minds about. If it's a documentary, then I'm placing it near the top of my list, and at the moment that's the call I'm making. Does anybody else have any strong thoughts on whether this should be 'in' or 'out'?

I've also got a lot of films on my list that might more usually be classed as experimental, but I don't see 'experimental' and 'documentary' as being mutually exclusive terms:
Walking from Munich to Berlin - the reductio ad absurdum (and simultaneous elevation to the sublime) of the travelogue.
Rhythm - the world's greatest - and fastest - industrial documentary.
The Ossuary
Wanda Gosciminska - Weaver
Fire in Castille
Sink or Swim and Rules of the Road - though I'm taking it on faith that the relationship in the latter actually happened, and that a station wagon was involved.
New York Portrait 2
Screen Test: Ann Buchanan

Some other odd ones: The Sinking of the Lusitania (if it takes a couple of years to painstakingly animate a newsreel, does that mean it's no longer a newsreel?); two Herzog science-fiction films (Fata Morgana and Lessons of Darkness).

Some great docs I haven't seen mentioned yet:
La Corne d'Or - the most exquisite of Pialat's Turkish films
Mingus - Hair-raising portrait of genius unhinged, in which you're barricaded inside with Charlie and a shotgun.
Ulysse - And I might make room for Varda's delightful Ydessa, the Bears & etc. too.
Act of God - Greenaway makes a quintessentially Greenaway film (that looks a hell of a lot like an Errol Morris film!) about people who have been struck by lightning.
Rats in the Ranks - Hilarious and revealing expose of local body politics in Sydney. One of the most completely entertaining films on my list and no, I have no idea how you can see it!

I'm also dithering about whether to classify Jammin' the Blues as a doc or not.

[swo17]

Just to make sure I'm not crazy on some of my picks, I've been doing word searches for the words "documentary" and "fiction" in IMDb reviews to see if use of one term overwhelms the other. I think I'm okay with a film being classified as "part-documentary," as long as the documentary part is not incidental to the film. (And I'm still mulling over something like And Life Goes On..., where the question of authenticity is a big part of the film's appeal.) Based on these criteria, the verdict on Quince Tree Sun is...maybe!

[matrixschmatrix]

I've always considered Fata Morgana and Lessons of Darkness to be documentaries- if I recall correctly it's all documentary footage, regardless of the narrative created via voiceover and editing, and F for Fake is a similar hybrid (and likely to be among my top picks.)

[colinr0380]

I'll back you up on The Quince Tree Sun/The Dream of Light zedz! Though this also makes me curious about where certain Kiarostami films, particularly Ten, would fall on the drama-documentary divide? In the end is it all captured reality, perhaps less manipulated than professionally edited documentary works? Or is that just the illusion that is presented?

[matrixschmatrix]

I think we decided earlier that faking a documentary is still a documentary- certainly it has a long and noble pedigree.

[zedz]

I'm not including any Kiarostami films, because in something like Life and Nothing More the documentary aspects seem to me to be clearly deployed within fictional frameworks - and that's exactly the peculiar frisson the films are engineered to deliver - whereas the ambiguities in the Erice are less charged / pointed, and when it all boils down, Lopez really is an artist, and he really is painting a tree. There are various Kiarostamis that are pretty unproblematically documentary (e.g. ABC Africa, Roads of), but they're not films I'm going to be voting for.

[zedz]

I think we decided earlier that faking a documentary is still a documentary- certainly it has a long and noble pedigree.

And from a purely practical standpoint, there are thousands of documentaries that none of us are equipped to evaluate the truth value of.* However, I'd personally draw the line at a purely fiction film that simply employs a 'documentary' form, like This Is Spinal Tap. Nobody's that ingenuous, and you can always vote for the Anvil film if you're so inclined!

* And there are probably plenty of domino's beloved period PSAs that we could all agree are 100% bullshit, but that doesn't mean they're not documentaries!

[swo17]

You'll be relieved to learn that I've decided against including any mockumentaries in my list, because this has become such a common form of comedy in recent years that even an early and interesting example like Spinal Tap (where a sort-of-real band/fanbase emerged from all the fakery) seems like a bit of a stretch. But mostly just because I'm out of room.

I will however be prominently featuring at least one documentary that is clearly fake, because it couldn't possibly exist in any other form.

[domino harvey]

I'm still voting for stuff like You're the Judge though

[martin]

Are filmed opera performances eligible? I'm thinking of actual stage performances and not opera films like the ones by Zeffirelli or the Huillet/Straub Schönberg operas. An opera performance meets the "performance of music" criteria but we could also consider an opera a performance of a dramatic stage play of some sort, in which case it probably wouldn't be eligible. It's no big deal though, and it would probably be an orphan even if I voted for Patrice Chereau's 1976 Bayreuth Ring. I'm just curious.

Méditerranée (Jean-Daniel Pollet & Volker Schlöndorff, 1963)
This would probably have been my spotlight title if I had joined the discussion soon enough to give people a chance to watch it. Beautiful images, tracking shots and pans are repeted over and over while a narrator reads an avantgarde text. Hypnotic, and endlessly fascinating.

[swo17]

I'm still voting for stuff like You're the Judge though

That was quite charming, though I don't see how it's in any way a documentary. Because it's educational (sort of)?

[matrixschmatrix]

Matin: filmed performances are explicitly eligible, and my spotlight is one!

[martin]

Thanks.

Dancing Dreams (Rainer Hoffmann & Anne Linsel, 2010)
A group of German teen amateurs are rehearsing Pina Bausch's dance piece "Kontakthof". Many of these teens have never been in love, and have never touched one of the opposite sex. They're now facing a tremendous challenge trying to be tender, tactile, caressing. This moving documentary shows the big challenge these teens are facing during the rehearsals.

I'm remindended of the complicated filming of nude scenes with actresses like Marceau for Antonioni or Pialat, or with the fake penis footage made for Breillat's Fat Girl. It may seem pretty straightforward and uncomplicated for us, the viewers, but it's an earth-shattering experience for the ones involved. The scenes seems equally complicated here - for these fully clothed teens! A great film. Maybe even better than Wenders' Pina?

[FerdinandGriffon]

Méditerranée (Jean-Daniel Pollet & Volker Schlöndorff, 1963)
This would probably have been my spotlight title if I had joined the discussion soon enough to give people a chance to watch it. Beautiful images, tracking shots and pans are repeted over and over while a narrator reads an avantgarde text. Hypnotic, and endlessly fascinating.

You must watch Pollet's L'Ordre, from '73, about a leper colony. A devastating and haunting record of communal memory, set to unpopulated images that nevertheless hum with presence.

[swo17]

A few last minute Hail Mary passes:

Zorns Lemma
What is this doing here, you ask? Aside from the fact that this film indisputably encompasses all genres, I count two separate, slanted ways in which it approaches the documentary genre. First, it's a city symphony in an abstract, minimalist vein, reducing city scenes to fragments that tie into its rigid alphabetical framework. Second, it's educational in the most immersive way possible--instead of instructing you about a subject, it teaches without speaking, illustrating the language acquisition process by letting you feel your way through symbols that eventually take on specific meanings.

N.Y., N.Y.: A Day in New York
See it here. When I first recommended this film in this thread (as a "city symphony through a funhouse mirror"), I thought it might be a bit of a stretch. But now I see that it's actually listed as an example of a documentary on the Wikipedia page for documentaries! And I didn't even put it there! (Though you have no way of knowing that for sure! But I really didn't!)

Plate-forme mobile et Train électrique
See it here. Of all the early actuality films, this one feels the most to me like the perfect combination of being both visually interesting and capturing moments from a pivotal event (the 1900 World's Fair).

79 primaveras
See it here. War ravages every corner of the earth, right down to the film stock.

Granton Trawler
Rewatching my spotlight title recently, I was struck by how much it shares in common with Leviathan, both in subject and in execution. Both films follow a fishing boat and get a lot of mileage out of the visual beauty of the birds that follow the ship. But they also both have a secret weapon in their subtly experimental sound design. Also, they're both making my top 10.