Documentary Starts Here

Cindy Meehl

2012-01-17T07:38:00.014-05:00

Cindy Meehl's Buck (2011) portrays a professional "horse whisperer" named Buck Brannaman as the real-life counterpoint to the movie version played by Robert Redford (top still: Brannaman at right). Access and editing are the key to the film's effectiveness, and the story is deepened when Meehl implies the parallels between child abuse and the mistreatment of horses. Third still: one of Buck's assistants in the ring is about to be bitten in an alarming scene in the documentary.

Richard Press

2011-12-19T06:05:00.021-05:00

Richard Press's Bill Cunningham New York (2010) documents the unnervingly capable photographer, an obsessive workaholic who insists on using film not digital (top still). Cunningham captures images of fashionable people high and low, either on New York City streets or at nighttime parties. Press follows Cunningham riding a bike around town in his blue utility jacket, making a sighting, snapping pictures, and finally readying images for publication in The New York Times. The film shows Cunningham at home and with friends (second still), and interview time goes to his most-photographed subjects, such as Iris Apfel and Anna Wintour. Footage from an earlier documentary adds another dimension to a now well-recognized figure, whereas an inquiry about Cunningham's personal life is hardly necessary.

Johan van der Keuken

2011-11-19T04:44:00.011-05:00

Johan van der Keuken's Big Ben: Ben Webster in Europe (1967) portrays the jazz saxophonist at age 58, living in Amsterdam. He plays in clubs, practices at home with a record player, and gets fussed over by his landlady (second still). A process sequence showing a saxophone factory shows van der Keuken's skill as a photographer.

Emile de Antonio

2011-10-11T08:44:00.014-04:00

Emile de Antonio's Mr. Hoover and I is a personal and angry bash note to the longtime FBI director. The filmmaker addresses the camera straight on (top still), describing his well-documented grievances against the FBI's seemingly obsessive harassment. The film shows de Antonio getting a haircut (second still), giving a speech, and visiting John Cage in Cage's kitchen (third still). Otherwise, few photos or clips illustrate de Antonio's harangue, and he's at his best with crazy anecdotes about Hoover's reaction to his films Weather Underground, In the Year of the Pig, and Millhouse.

Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth

2011-09-07T08:24:00.013-04:00

Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth made The Five Obstructions (2003) together as a visual record of the therapeutic value of movie-making. Lars von Trier challenges Leth (middle and bottom stills) to create new versions of Leth's arty 1967 film The Perfect Human (Det perfekte menneske, top still). Von Trier hurls insults and provocation at Leth in an attempt to rouse him out of depression; the audience is a reluctant witness to the two men interacting in a sometimes-creepy set of one-on-one conversations. Leth's gorgeous new versions of The Perfect Human don't deserve the put-downs that von Trier tosses off, but the fun of the movie is waiting for what von Trier will say next.

Les Blank

2011-08-31T07:52:00.026-04:00

In Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1979), Les Blank documents with relish the fulfillment of a pledge: Werner Herzog promised he would eat his shoe if Errol Morris finished Gates of Heaven (Morris's first film). Les Blank shoots every step of Herzog's process, starting with his arrival in northern California. Herzog cooks the shoe at Chez Panisse, where Alice Waters (top still) helps with the recipe (second still). Later, Herzog eats his boiled shoe in front of a Berkeley audience. Charlie Chaplin's shoe dinner from The Gold Rush (third still) makes an apt counterpoint to Herzog's good-natured chew. The next day, Herzog reflects in a grandly Herzogolicious monologue (last still).

Robert Drew

2011-08-24T19:46:00.006-04:00

On the Road with Duke Ellington (1967) by Robert Drew showcases Drew's bravura observational filmmaking style. Unlike more recent music documentaries, this film steers clear of archival footage and photographs in favor of long verite sequences with dated voice-over narration. The day that Duke Ellington received an honorary degree at Yale (third still) is shown at length, for example, while we hear nothing of Ellington's innovative early years and classic recordings. The film leaves an overall impression of a sad and perhaps lonely man, endlessly smoking and feeling underappreciated. Above, Duke Ellington with arranger Billy Strayhorn and Louis Armstrong.

Joris Ivens

2011-08-17T11:39:00.002-04:00

Joris Ivens's 1931 Phillips Radio (Symphonie industrielle) documents a Dutch glass-tube radio factory. The film's powerful footage of a now obsolete technology still looks shiny and futuristic. Exotic radio and speaker components work though assembly lines, dancing to the soundtrack's mix of machine sound and music. Ivens creates a modernist statement about industrial dehumanization despite the elegant and old-timey feel of the plant. We see men strenuously blowing glass by hand, for example, and factory processes are timed with an hourglass. Ivens includes a humorous human moment when some precariously balanced boxes fall off a cart as its driver speeds around a corner at the factory.

Susan Fanshel and Jill Godmilow

2011-08-10T07:30:00.015-04:00

Susan Fanshel and Jill Godmilow's Nevelson in Process (1977) is a portrait of the artist as an opinionated rebel: bossy, hyper-creative, and enveloped in tobacco smoke. The film captures Nevelson's rapport with her technical team: young men who do the heavy lifting, hammering, and welding on her sculptures. Nevelson is candid about her artistic process but puts her private life strictly off-limits.

Jayne Loader, Kevin Rafferty, Pierce Rafferty

2011-08-03T08:01:00.065-04:00

The Atomic Cafe (1982), co-directed by Jayne Loader, Kevin Rafferty, and Pierce Rafferty, is a witty and biting assemblage of post-1945 newsreels, speeches, popular song, army training films, and government propaganda on the subject of nuclear war. The film captures an era of fear and misinformation that perhaps isn't so different from the present. The film has no added narration or contemporary interviews, so its themes, ironies, and relevance derive from expert editing. The film's structure builds to a sobering sequence, constructed from archival materials, which portrays a sustained thermonuclear attack. A simplistic graph (top still) directed at an ignorant and trusting population bring to mind the US government's "Homeland Security Advisory System" color chart. Footage of kids running for cover from old seesaws resembles images from James Cameron's The Terminator 2 (1991) that show a playground after the bombs have dropped. (second and third stills).

Vincent Monnikendam

2011-07-27T09:36:00.037-04:00

Vincent Monnikendam's 1995 documentary Moeder Dao, de schildpadgelijkende (Mother Dao, The Turtlelike) is an unexpectedly lyrical and panoramic compilation of early 20th-century footage of Indonesia (at that time, it was a Dutch colony). Although the material is from Dutch films that trumpet industrialization and development, the viewer perceives only exploitation of resources and slavery-like working conditions. The film's structure and themes make the point that there were no positive aspects of colonialism for the people in Indonesia. A missionary, for example, participates in the system of colonial rule (top still). Monnikendam's soundtrack uses textures of found audio and Indonesian ballads to comment on the images; the film has no interviews.

Michael Sear and Joseph Sharman

2011-07-20T08:16:00.013-04:00

The Harlem Globetrotters: The Team That Changed the World (2005) is a blue-sky promotional documentary about the glory days (shown in fleeting archival clips) of the Globetrotters basketball team. Indeed, the group's current owner, Mannie Jackson, repeatedly weighs in on their cultural and historical significance. The film's talking-heads interviews range from former team members to "Honorary Globetrotter" Henry Kissinger. Barack Obama, at the time a Senator, adds to the mix of celebrities who recall the Globetrotter magic.

Jean-Luc Godard

2011-07-13T08:36:00.019-04:00

In Ici et Ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere, 1976), Jean-Luc Godard uses documentary-style footage shot in Israel in 1970, deconstructed and edited into a rambling critical analysis of then-current events. The film is rhetorical without story, consisting of voice-over narration and texts matched to repeated sets of images. The film sets up a visual contrast between Palestinian fighters (third still; we're told that the people shown in the footage are now dead) and a French family shown passively glued to the TV (fourth still). Godard includes cinematic flourishes, such as filming people holding photographs and TV screens (bottom two stills). Although Godard is sympathetic to the Palestinians, the film seems to treat them as symbols rather than people.

Marcel Ophüls

2011-07-06T09:18:00.003-04:00

Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie (1988), by Marcel Ophüls, is four-and-a-half hours long, delving deep into Barbie's Nazi activities during and after the Second World War, namely, torture, murder, and avoiding justice. Ophüls (top still) is mordant, skeptical, and occasionally aggressive in his interviews with dozens of people, many of whom come across as liars and apologists (second still: a former SS officer). Barbie's various enablers disclose, with the filmmaker's prodding, how Barbie was useful to US Intelligence and South American dictators after 1945; his supposed anti-Communism was a handy excuse for decades until Bolivia extradited Barbie to France. Barbie's 1987 trial in Lyon gives the film a focal point and adds heft to Ophüls's accumulation of evidence and commentary. The camerawork and occasional choral music add a touch of wit throughout the film. Many of the interviews, for example, are framed with cheery (or creepy) Christmas decorations (second and third stills). Ophüls also uses some unconventional set-ups for visual variety, such as placing an interviewee in profile between the camera and the interviewer (fourth still).

D.A. Pennebaker

2011-06-29T09:33:00.014-04:00

D.A. Pennebaker's short film, Daybreak Express (shot in 1953 and released in 1958), is a tribute to the about-to-be-demolished Third Avenue Elevated line in New York City, set to Duke Ellington's composition of the same title. The film is an abstract city symphony: a fast-paced complement to silent films such as Paul Strand's Manhatta and Joris Ivens's Rain. Pennebaker's intuitive and rhythmic editing allows architectural elements, visual action, and the view out of the front of the train to match perfectly with the music.

Laurent Chevallier

2011-06-22T08:01:00.004-04:00

Djembefola (1991) by Laurent Chevallier celebrates the homecoming of djembe virtuoso Mamady Keita from his home in Brussels to his family's village in Guinea. The film documents Keita's hammy mode of performing and contagious love for drumming. At all times, Chevallier keeps his charismatic lead character front and center. Keita makes his way from teaching djembe in a staid classroom in Brussels to the post colonial city of Conakry to the village he left 26 years before, with reunions and opportunities to play the drums along the way. The film's structure builds to a series of encounters at the village and Keita's search for the answer to how he came to be a drummer.

Alessandro Cavadini and Carolyn Strachan

2011-06-15T07:53:00.018-04:00

Two Laws (1982), by Alessandro Cavadini and Carolyn Strachan, was an unusual collaborative project in which two outsider filmmakers worked with the Booroloola Aboriginal Community in the Northern Territory of Australia. (The two laws of the title refer to "whitefella law" and Aboriginal law.) The film's four sections provide a consensus version of decades of Booroloola struggle against Australian police violence, cruel social policy, and unfair land usurpation. Cavadini and Strachan structure the piece as a mix of observation and re-enactment. The film's leisurely pace warmly invites the viewer to feel completely at home with the Booroloola community. The camerawork (by Cavadini; sound is by Strachan, third still) is all done with a wide-angle lens, emphasizing the high degree of participation and consent: everyone gets to be seen and heard.

Chris Marker and François Reichenbach

2011-06-08T10:05:00.002-04:00

Chris Marker and François Reichenbach's 1968 short film, The Sixth Side of the Pentagon (La sixième face du pentagone), documents the front lines of a demonstration against the Vietnam War. The cameraman and sound recorders are right in the middle of a 100,000 person event outside the Pentagon on October 21, 1967: we see young people yelling (top still), marching with banners, burning draft cards, and facing the Military Police (second still). Eventually, men with guns beat back the crowd (third and fourth stills). The overall mood of the footage recalls this year's mass protests in the Middle East. As the stills show, protesters holding 35mm film cameras documented the action in 1968; cell phones have replaced them (bottom still: Tahrir Square, Cairo, January 2011).

Barak Goodman

2011-06-01T09:42:00.011-04:00

Barak Goodman's My Lai is a moving and well-told history of the killing of civilians in the village of My Lai on March 16, 1968. The standardized framing of survivors (such as Pham Thi Thuan and Tran Nam) and soldiers (including Greg Olsen and Fred Widmer) imply that that all of the witnesses contribute important voices to the story. Images by the army photographer that day, Ronald Haeberle, add to the horror of first-hand accounts. The film also chronicles the activities of Charlie Company leading up to My Lai, the subsequent cover-up, and the official investigations that followed. Jerome Walsh, recalling the results of the US Army's review of the matter, says in the film, "Calley got away with it - and all the other people who were involved got away with it also." One hero emerges, Hugh Thompson, a helicopter pilot who saw the massacre for what it was and saved Vietnamese villagers.

Johan van der Keuken and James Blue

2011-05-25T08:10:00.011-04:00

Johan van der Keuken's 1960 short "city symphony" film, Paris at Dawn (Paris à l'aube), was co-directed by James Blue. A lovely series of composed shots, set to a jazz score, presents an idealized Paris. Birds, smoke, water, cars, and buildings, seen through the eyes of a professional photographer (as van den Keuken was) hold a certain mood, reminiscent of Eugene Atget's photographs of Paris streets. Paris at Dawn's only "story" concerns the figure of a fedora-and-trenchcoated walker who occasionally strides across the frame from left to right. He turns to face the camera at the end of the film (above).

Stefan Nadelman

2011-05-18T08:12:00.004-04:00

The short film Terminal Bar (2003) is a love song to black and white photography. Director Stefan Nadelman's father, Sheldon Nadelman, took beautiful pictures of customers, crooks and winos when he was a bartender at the Terminal from 1972 to 1982. (The bar was at Eighth Avenue and 41st Street, near the Port Authority Bus Terminal; the New York Times building is there now.) Sheldon Nadelman's photographs match the visual mood of Frederick Wiseman's Welfare (1975) which was also shot during the pre-yuppie, New-York-in-decay era.

Amir Bar-Lev

2011-05-11T08:02:00.021-04:00

The Tillman Story (2010), by Amir Bar-Lev, tells the story of Army Ranger Pat Tillman, who died in Afghanistan on April 22, 2004. The film portrays Tillman, a professional football player who volunteered for military service, as a strong, complicated, and deep-thinking individual, and the facts about his death hit hard. Two witnesses to the events of that April 22, Russell Baer and Bryan O'Neal, (above) are particularly important to the documentary. Their words provide a balance to the official account given to the Tillman family and infuriatingly retold at the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearings (third still). Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and retired generals Richard Myers, John Abizaid, and Bryan Douglas Brown present a thoroughly unconvincing set of lies to Representative Henry Waxman and other members of the committee (third still). Tillman's family (and the film's audience, by now completely on their side) mutely observe the sad and disquieting congressional inquiry.

Johan van der Keuken

2011-05-04T07:48:00.020-04:00

Johan van der Keuken's beautiful 1964 short about a school for the blind in Amsterdam, Blind Kind (Blind Child), has an unusual structure: the first seven minutes of the 25 minute film avoids picturing the blind students. Instead, we hear voice-over observations by several boys who talk about the experience of being blind; a sparse set of images complements their common sense and humor. Later, the hands of the students are shown as they read Braille and examine classroom objects. After this extended introduction, the camera is devoted to following individual blind students walking, running (second still), and maneuvering around tricky terrain (third still) and a busy sidewalk (fourth still). The sounds of traffic and urban life grow more pronounced and insistent as the film concludes.

Eugene Jarecki

2011-04-27T07:42:00.000-04:00

Eugene Jarecki (director) and Alex Gibney (writer) made The Trials of Henry Kissinger (2002) as an inflammatory, damning, blood-pressure-rising indictment of Kissinger's war crimes. The film makes its case with documents, interviews, and archival footage. Christopher Hitchens (second still) and a flood of evidence explain the rottenness of Kissinger's actions in Chile, East Timor, Cambodia, and elsewhere. (Hitchens published a book on the same subject.) The film is as relevant and pointed today as it was in 2002: what characteristics from the Kissinger era continue to have a hold on US foreign policy?

Visual Storytelling-The Digital Video Documentary

2011-04-20T13:48:00.012-04:00

You are invited to take a look at the brand new e-book from Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies: Visual Storytelling: The Digital Video Documentary. The e-book is free and on a Creative Commons "share-alike" license. It's a fun do-it-yourself guide to making watchable short documentaries using a consumer camcorder, digital SLR camera, or cell phone. Visual Storytelling is based on my 12 years of teaching people who want to make a documentary -- have the access to their subject and the drive to document -- but need to learn how to get started.

Robin Anderson and Bob Connolly

2011-04-13T07:56:00.017-04:00

A classic study of neo-colonialism gone amok, Black Harvest (1992), is the final piece in a trilogy of films about the highlands of Papua New Guinea. Black Harvest was made by a husband-and-wife team, Robin Anderson (sound) and Bob Connolly (camera) using 16mm observational techniques. The filmmakers tell the story of Joe Leahy (top still) and his attempt to run a coffee plantation in partnership with the Ganiga tribe. (Leahy is the son of a Ganiga woman and an Australian gold miner; Leahy's dad was one of the first outsiders in the highlands in the 1930s.) Hard times strike Leahy and the Ganiga when coffee prices crash. The workers complain that they're being paid slave wages -- and Ganiga men stop working on the coffee harvest entirely to wage a bloody war against other tribes. Anderson and Connolly (with editor Ray Thomas) give shape to a complicated and absorbing story, which maintains intimate access to a variety of characters amid the larger issues in globalization and development.

Howard Alk

2011-04-06T08:12:00.004-04:00

The Murder of Fred Hampton (1971) by Howard Alk gives the history of and circumstances behind the December 4, 1969 assassination of the 21-year-old Hampton (top still), who was then leading Chicago's Black Panther Party. Hampton's girlfriend Deborah Johnson was pregnant with Fred Jr. at the time; her interview for the documentary (above) offers a chilling condemnation of "the pigs" who invaded her bedroom and fired on Hampton. The film shows that the official story, elaborately told and reenacted by the police and Illinois State's Attorney Edward Hanrahan, was a series of untruths. Fred Hampton himself almost seemed to have forseen his own death when he talked about a "revolutionary happy hunting ground" a few months before he died. Black-and-white footage and formidable observational technique (the film has no narration) add to the timeless power of the film.

Ondi Timoner

2011-03-29T07:08:00.015-04:00

Ondi Timoner's We Live in Public (2009) documents Josh Harris (above) who loses a tech-bubble fortune in the same way a careless lottery winner would: by blowing it all. Along the way, Harris intentionally rejects his family, friends, and investors by over-documenting himself. His volunteered lack of privacy in the name of a webcam "project" destroys a romantic relationship, for example. He also sends a coldly impersonal video message to his ill mother (second still). And, he undermines the value of the ventures he starts up with irrational behavior. Timoner's approach to making a documentary about such a hard-to-take main character is to focus on sweeping social movements and the origins of today's internet oversharing. Timoner edited copious amounts of home video footage to portray the crazy mid-90s time in New York City when a group of people willingly participated in Harris's experiments.

Alex Gibney

2011-03-22T07:04:00.023-04:00

Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer (2010), by Alex Gibney, analyzes the political and personal aspects of the comedown of New York's former governor. The film captures the shameless cat-who-ate-the-canary satisfaction of Spitzer's powerful opponents, such as Maurice Greenberg and Ken Langone. Gibney hammers away at the Spitzer-haters but also provides balance by including women who knew Spitzer as an escort service customer. Top still, in the film's funniest moment, Cecil Suwal, the former CEO of Emperor's Club VIP, breaks out into infectious hilarity when asked by the filmmaker, "You said that he wasn't that interested in the companionship...?" Botton still: Alex Gibney at far left with his cinematographer, Maryse Alberti, getting ready for a re-created interview using the words of one of the escorts as a script.

Banksy

2011-03-15T06:59:00.030-04:00

Artist/satirist Banksy's Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010) is a withering portrait of a quack, Thierry Guetta, who relentlessly videotaped street art in the US and Europe before becoming an artist himself. Appreciating the film's use of street art footage (one example is the sequence of a bit of plastic trash inflating to become a dog, above) videotaped by Guetta is well worth the chore of spending time with an unlikeable character. In fact, Exit is structured like a revenge movie: Banksy's payback against a nervy copycat. Perhaps Banksy is also poking fun at today's undiscerning art crowd.

Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman

2011-03-08T09:18:00.000-05:00

In Catfish (2010), three young men (Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, the filmmakers, and Nev Schulman, Ariel's brother) set out on a road trip to meet a woman that they know only from her phone calls, text messages, and Facebook profile. During the film, the men joke about how it feels to get one's SAT scores back and that one of them wears an orthodontic retainer: they never seemed to have matured beyond the high school level. Is video documentation inherently exploitative or genuinely truth-telling? Two central characters, Angela and Nev, reveal their secrets as the film progresses. Angela's gentle visual portrayal, in natural light and close up, makes her deceit more ambiguous (first still). Nev's credibility is perhaps undermined by the constant gaze of the camera (second still).

Karpo Godina

2011-03-01T09:34:00.002-05:00

The Yugoslavian filmmaker Karpo Acimovic-Godina's short film, About the Art of Love or a Film with 14441 Frames (14441 kvadrat, 1972) was distributed on DVD by Believer magazine last year. Godina documents male soldiers in training (such as these three, above), noting that they are kept separate from female workers at a nearby factory. The film imparts a timeless and witty anti-war/pro-love message.

Frank van den Engel

2011-02-22T09:05:00.006-05:00

Frank van den Engel's Photo & Copyright by G.P. Fieret (2009) is an appreciative portrait of the Dutch photographer Gerard Petrus Fieret. 1960s-era archival footage shows an exuberant Fieret at work in The Hague, chasing around (and taking pictures of) young women. In interviews, museum specialists, collectors, former models, and even Fieret's landlady reflect on his life and legacy. Ironically, the art market valued Fieret's oeuvre more than anyone seemed to value his well-being. In the film, Fieret's physical decline is paralleled by the squalorous condition of his negatives and prints.

George Hickenlooper

2011-02-15T07:00:00.017-05:00

George Hickenlooper's Picture This: The Times of Peter Bogdanovich in Archer City, Texas (1991) was made at the time that Bogdanovich was shooting Texasville, his 1990 sequel to The Last Picture Show (1971). Archer City residents and Picture Show actors reflect on changes over the years, particularly the ups and downs in Bogdanovich's career. Hickenlooper's sensitive interviewing elicits an account of Bogdanovich's years-ago romance with Cybill Shepard and messy breakup with his then wife Polly Platt (bottom still); all three discuss it frankly and dispassionately.

Eric Bricker

2011-02-08T07:42:00.006-05:00

Eric Bricker's Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman (2008) celebrates the career of the Los Angeles photographer, who died in 2009 at age 98. The film is a love song to Southern California architectural modernism exemplified by Rudolph Schindler, Richard Neutra, and John Lautner. Bricker lavishes deserved attention on Shulman's photographs of Pierre Koenig's Case Study House No. 22 (1960) and Richard Neutra's 1946 Kaufmann Desert House (top two stills). Third and fourth stills: Shulman documents Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall (2003) with a view camera and assistant. Shulman memorably says that the camera is the least important piece of equipment for a photographer, which rings true when you see all the prosaic photographs of the same buildings.

whitelightbringer's YouTube channel

2011-02-01T07:25:00.006-05:00

A YouTube user, "whitelightbringer," posted a six minute video of the Toowoomba Flood on January 10, 2011. Camcorder or cellphone videographers learning to put together a short documentary can take note of a basic storytelling structure that gives heft to this handheld eyewitness account of a natural disaster: the flood video has a beginning, middle, and end. Top still: a rapidly rising creek is still within its banks. Second still: a succession of cars is swept away as the creek becomes a torrent. The third still provides suspense: can the man with the flimsy umbrella move his car in time? The end of the video shows the jumble of cars after the water has receded (bottom still). If you hadn't seen the first images of the water contained in the creek, the flooded creek wouldn't have been as meaningful. Visuals tell the story without talking heads or extra information.

Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg

2011-01-25T07:55:00.019-05:00

For Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work (2010), filmmakers Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg spent months with the comedian, filming at close range. The most eloquent sequence in the film goes beyond depicting an always-onstage, always-driven celebrity: while handing out Thanksgiving meals for God's Love We Deliver, Rivers meets Flo Fox, a photographer confined to a wheelchair (top still). After their encounter, Rivers seeks out Flo Fox's life story on the web. While watching a 1980 television clip of Fox in her better days with Tom Snyder on the Tomorrow Show (second still), Rivers says, "There's this sexy, young, artistic, edgy, New York, tough, bohemian girl. Life is so mean.'' It's a lovely and poignant moment.

Megumi Sasaki

2011-01-18T07:17:00.012-05:00

Herb and Dorothy (2008) by Megumi Sasaki documents two collaborative hoarders who would fit right in with the Buried Alive reality series. In this case, however, the hoarders are respected art collectors with a low income and tiny New York City apartment (bottom still). Herb and Dorothy Vogel (top) spent their time and energy over the last forty years insatiably collecting minimalist and conceptual art, often directly from the artists, such as Chuck Close (second still). One work, by Lawrence Weiner, describes the Vogel's apartment (third still). Interviews, archival footage, and present-day observation tease out the uniqueness of the Vogel's collection and accomplishment.

Davis Guggenheim

2011-01-11T07:48:00.008-05:00

Davis Guggenheim's It Might Get Loud (2008) is notable for its intimate access to its subjects, rock guitarists Jimmy Page, The Edge, and Jack White (top still, during their elegantly lit and shot "summit" session). All three musicians come across as well-rounded, deeply thoughtful, and hugely likeable. Page, especially, steps out of his dour and uncommunicative public persona to reveal an appreciative listener who is still totally engaged in musical exploration. Above, what has to be the most charming air guitar footage ever presented: Jimmy Page channeling Link Wray's Rumble and Muddy Waters's I Can't Be Satisfied.

Tamra Davis

2011-01-04T08:49:00.009-05:00

Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child (2010) by Tamra Davis is an example of the power of careful editing to create an absorbing narrative out of period footage and talking heads interviews. Repetition and distracting subplots are stripped away in the service of the biography of artist Jean-Michel Basquiat's rapid ascension (and sad end) in the 1980s. Indeed, Tamra Davis renders New York City in the eighties as one of the primary characters in the story.

Bert Stern

2010-12-28T07:00:00.015-05:00

Photographer Bert Stern's Jazz on a Summer's Day (1960) is an durable record of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival. Chuck Berry's performance of "Sweet Little Sixteen" is notable because some observers characterize Berry (top still) as a rock and roll interloper at an otherwise "pure" jazz event. Drummer Jo Jones (second still), among other players, accompanied Berry for "Sweet Little Sixteen." Were the older jazz musicians deliberately undermining Chuck Berry, as Keith Richards suggests in his autobiography?

Joshua Weinstein

2010-12-22T09:39:00.000-05:00

Joshua Weinstein's portrait of Dr. Sharadkumar Dicksheet in Flying One One Engine (2008) gives equal weight to two sides of his persona: the disabled nobody, scrimping by in a messy apartment in New York City (top still), and the heroic, even god-like surgeon who has corrected the facial deformities of thousands of children in India. The film's editing brings out secondary characters, surprising humor, and gritty irony.

Frederick Wiseman

2010-12-13T08:50:00.005-05:00

Basic Training (1971) is Frederick Wiseman's observation of the United States Army nine-week basic training course at Fort Knox, Kentucky in the summer of 1970. The film is bookended with the pomp and speechmaking of orientation and graduation. The middle of film is structured to build from the learning of discrete skills (top two stills) to elaborate exercises that seem to resemble actual combat, at night and in the field (third still). Wiseman adds humor and commentary by periodically showing groups of soldiers on the march, chanting call-and-response military cadences (bottom).

Christian Delage

2010-12-06T06:54:00.027-05:00

Christian Delage assembled Nuremberg: The Nazis Facing Their Crimes (2006) from footage of the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal in 1945 and 1946; Christopher Plummer narrates. The documentation in the courtroom was overseen by director John Ford, who was working for the Department of War (Office of Strategic Services Field Photographic Branch/War Crimes Unit) during World War II. Ford, Stuart and Budd Schulberg, Pare Lorentz, and others prepared documentary films to show as evidence at the Nuremberg trials and filmed the ten months of the proceedings. Delage's film tackles the complexity of the trials by clarifying the overall timeline and sorting through a bewildering number of participants. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson (top still) was the primary American prosecutor, for example; future news anchor Walter Cronkite (second still, at left) covered the trial. The Nazis in the dock (third still) are stiffly defiant throughout. Marie Claude Valliant-Couturier (bottom still), personifying all heroes of the resistance, gives her eyewitness testimony.

Werner Herzog

2010-12-02T09:28:00.001-05:00

In Grizzly Man (2005),Werner Herzog presents a self-appointed grizzly bear expert, Timothy Treadwell, as a symbol of all interventionist and wrong-headed do-gooders. Treadwell spent years living in Alaska among the bears, often alone for months at a time, before his luck ran out in a bear attack. He shot 100 hours of video footage, including both animal behavior and also his own first-person confessionals. Treadwell romanticizes the wild animals around him, ascribing human characteristics and names to bears and foxes. He wrongly assumes that he's living in harmony with a community of like-minded creatures. He's as misguided as First World volunteers on a Third World charity trip. Herzog's voice-over narration finds meaning in Treadwell's aspirations and beauty in his videotapes. An array of friends and observers provide a bracing contrast to Treadwell's on-camera emotional narcissism. Herzog's structuring, contextualizing, and moralizing creates value from home videos that probably would never have been seen if Treadwell hadn't been killed and eaten.

Frederick Wiseman

2010-11-29T07:33:00.020-05:00

Watching Frederick Wiseman's 1975 film Welfare is like taking a time machine back to the grungy and non-gentrified New York City at the time of the city's financial crisis and close call with bankruptcy. Everyone at the Waverly welfare office is smoking and the computers are from the Mesozaic era (bottom still), but the overworked staff comes across as resolutely willing to listen. Indeed, a 1975 portrait of bureaucratic dehumanization now seems far less menacing. Wiseman's close-in, eavesdropping documentation of client-staff interactions gives us a wide range of stories and personalities. We hear from the woeful, the mentally ill, and the unlucky, with a few con artists thrown in the mix.

Frederick Wiseman

2010-11-22T08:36:00.004-05:00

Frederick Wiseman's Seraphita's Diary (1982) is a conceptual one-woman performance piece featuring actress-model Apollonia van Ravenstein playing dozens of characters: old and young, men and women, in minstrel blackface and haute couture. (Such wildly disparate personas bring to mind Cindy Sherman's range of self-portraits.) In Seraphita's Diary, Wiseman imagines a model named Seraphita who has disappeared, leaving her diary behind. The film presents a succession of conversations. One scene, for example, shows van Ravenstein as photographer, makeup artist, model, and other supporting figures at a pretend fashion shoot. Perhaps Wiseman's fictional "Seraphita" is a reference to the androgynous title character in Honoré de Balzac's 1835 book.

Robert Drew

2010-11-18T07:13:00.012-05:00

Robert Drew's Yanki No! had a remarkable team of filmmakers including Richard Leacock, Albert Maysles, and D.A. Pennebaker. The film aired on ABC in December of 1960 as part of the Bell & Howell Close Up series. Observational footage of a wide range of people and places in Latin America demonstrated the power of documentary images to convey the region's anti-American popular opinion. Latin American activists were aware of the impact of American television: one Venezuelan official pointedly tells the cameramen go out to the slums and film there (and they do). Yanki No! cuts from erudite conversations to crowded rallies, with many "face in the crowd" close-ups. In Havana, for example, a young woman (top still) and a Russian sailor (middle) speak to the filmmakers. The climactic scene in the film shows Fidel Castro in his heyday (bottom still).

Anne Milne

2010-11-15T07:07:00.013-05:00

Maria's Way (2009) was made by Anne Milne as a student in the MFA Film Directing program at the Edinburgh College of Art. The film's quiet observation of one stop along a well-known pilgrimage route (the Way of St. James, in northwestern Spain) documents a day in the life of Maria Teodora Mediavilla as she greets passers-by heading to the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. The film unexpectedly uncovers a very human and sardonic side to Maria's deeply-felt religious call to reach out to the pilgrims.

Ondi Timoner

2010-11-08T07:49:00.012-05:00

Ondi Timoner's Dig! (2004) is a Handycam special: a homemade, years-of-shooting documentary yarn about two rock bands and the uncomfortable rivalry between their two leaders, Anton Newcombe (top two stills) of the Brian Jonestown Massacre and Courtney Taylor (bottom still, gussied up for a music video) of the Dandy Warhols. Although Newcombe consistently undermines his own career with on-stage fights (third still), narcissism, and substance abuse, the camera loves him and the film portrays him as some sort of genius. Taylor's narration and Timoner's thoughtful editing bring together a sprawling story.

Leon Gast

2010-11-04T07:12:00.018-04:00

Leon Gast's Smash His Camera (2010) showcases the allure and quantity of Ron Galella's celebrity photography while also offering a payback on behalf of the famous people he chased, among them Jackie Kennedy Onassis and Marlon Brando. The documentary questions Galella's motives, laughs at his singular lack of self-insight, and gives airtime to critics who malign his reputation (Thomas Hoving is particularly biting in his assessment of Galella as trivial sideshow). Galella is proudly game throughout, oblivious to his own exploitation-by-documentary. Editing by Doug Abel brings out Galella's future irrelevance. One sequence, for example, juxtaposes a celebrity event (middle still: Galella and Taylor Swift) with a hyper-clueless woman at a gallery. This young woman stands in for everyone under the age of 35 who would be equally unable to recognize John Belushi, Brigitte Bardot, Henry Kissinger, or Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton (bottom still).

Robert Drew

2010-11-01T07:54:00.012-04:00

Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment (1963) is a documentary made up of pairs: two students trying to integrate the University of Alabama, James Hood and Vivian Malone (top), two political opponents at home in the morning before work (Robert Kennedy and George Wallace, second and third stills), and two sides of a confrontation between George Wallace and Nicholas Katzenbach (bottom two stills). Much of the action depicts simultaneous phone conversations, shot in Washington and Alabama, featuring anxious middle-aged white men. The filmmakers on this early example of observational cinema muscle included Richard Leacock and D.A. Pennebaker.

Michael Apted

2010-10-27T07:33:00.013-04:00

Michael Apted's 49 Up (2005) continues the fascination of the previous films in this longitudinal documentary series. We've gotten to know same group of English men and women who've had their lives peered into, sniffed, and stirred since the age of seven. Skillful editing teases out many small suspenses and unexpected reveals, such whether a character will get (or stay) married, have children, or ever be happy. The interviews, while informal, are beautifully shot and lit. One wonders what is in store for the next film, because by now, at age 49, several of the participants have pushed back against the entire enterprise. Some of them argue with the filmmaker about how they've been represented (Jackie, top) or simply state they will "bow out" next time (Suzy, second still). Two of the participants who did bow out of the series were Peter, after 28 Up, and Charles, after 21 Up (third and fourth stills).

Michael Apted

2010-10-25T07:41:00.032-04:00

In the series 7 Plus Seven, 21 Up, 28 Up, 35 Up, and 42 Up (1998), Michael Apted introduces his characters with narrated capsule biographies using memorable scenes from the past films. Within these brief bios, Apted often uses images to telegraph personal traits. For example, one short sequence from 35 Up (repeated in 42 Up) demonstrates Bruce's humility and genuine love of learning: the camera pans across a classroom of kids in Bangladesh, revealing Bruce as just another student in the class (top still). Apted's recaps of Suzy's privileged life include footage of a dog chasing after and chewing over a rabbit in a handsome garden (second still: from 7 Plus Seven). Using this same dog-and-bunny scene in every subsequent film allows the viewer to feel the irony of the filmmaker's compulsion to chase after and chew over all the individuals, Suzy among them, who participated in the original Seven Up documentary. Indeed, Apted persistently puts Tony and Symon (above, third and fourth stills) on the spot when he keeps carping on their feelings about money, goals, success and failure.

Michael Apted

2010-10-21T07:38:00.025-04:00

35 Up's portrayal of Neil (above, at 7, 14, 21, 28, and 35; he's one of the subjects in Michael Apted's series of films about a group of British kids) is dramatic, sad, and weirdly hopeful. Neil's decline into a tramp-like instability is accompanied by the tremendous cinematic contrast between his coherence in interviews and his nervous body language of shuffling and ceaseless rocking. Apted seems to suggest that we all know someone like Neil -- an eccentric, marginal, or homeless person -- but without the access to the seven-year-old that we get in The Up Series.

Michael Apted

2010-10-18T06:25:00.014-04:00

28 Up (1985), directed by Michael Apted, continues his long-running documentation of a group of British children at age 7, 14, 21, and now 28. Most of the characters have found stability in their work and their love lives, and Apted conveys the pride and delight that the 28-year-olds have in their young children (above: Lynn, Symon, Tony). Apted seems most interested in his participants who have not gotten married, such as Bruce and Neil -- their situations are inherently more dramatic within an overall smoothly reassuring film.

Michael Apted

2010-10-14T07:14:00.021-04:00

In 21 Up (1977), Michael Apted continued documenting a set of British children (from Seven Up and 7 Plus Seven). The most striking character is the one who has changed the most: the kid from the country, Nick. The top three stills hint at how the films portray him as a would-be farmer at 7, an inarticulate mess at 14, and a suave success with a sense of humor at 21. Other characters who come out of their shells in surprising ways are Bruce and Suzy (bottom two stills).

Michael Apted

2010-10-11T07:37:00.024-04:00

Michael Apted directed 7 Plus Seven (1970) using color film; the earlier Seven Up was in black and white. An out-of-doors scene with Tony (top still) has beautiful muted colors, for example. Apted positions his sets of subjects (such as John, Andrew, and Charles together, second still, or Symon alone, bottom still) in the same order as in Seven Up, emphasizing how much (and how little) they've changed. It might not be fair to make the kids exemplars of social class, but film's editing convincingly suggests that children's class, income, and education lead to unequal ambitions and unequal futures.

Paul Almond

2010-10-07T07:39:00.017-04:00

Paul Almond directed the first of the Up Series with Seven Up (1964), which documents an assortment of British children, rich and poor, urban and rural. The film is completely centered around the seven-year-olds. It has delightfully few images or voices of adults (and absolutely no parents) -- one reason why it is still a great watch. Michael Apted participated in making Seven Up and has since directed the every-seven-years follow-up documentaries, at ages 14, 21, 28, 35, 42, and 49. Are the 14 children in the films in the vanguard of "social media" sharing: were they the first of us to lose a certain basic privacy, with childhood images and growing pains permanently part of the public record? These days, anyone can expose their upbringing and lives with photo albums and constant self-documentation.

Robb Moss

2010-10-04T07:21:00.019-04:00

Robb Moss's The Tourist (1991) is an autobiographical reflection on the difficulties of one couple trying to have a child, interwoven with footage from Moss's career as a documentary cameraman. The film's wealth of imagery, such as kids with scrap-made pretend movie cameras and microphones who "film" the film crew, makes a case that documentaries about the third world are often more touristy than revelatory. Moss's candid, witty, and moving narration ranges from observations on filmmaking ("the worse things get for the people you are filming, the better that is for the film.") to insights on infertility. Moss has never released a DVD of the film, and it can only be seen at rare public screenings or at an archive, viewable on this Steenbeck editing table (above).

Framing

2010-09-30T07:11:00.013-04:00

Professors in their offices are standard fare for student documentary makers. In the case of a film about Stanley Hoffmann (above), student questioners elicited a range of responses from their subject, ranging from the unexpectedly humorous to the bookishly academic. Across the desk from an eminent thinker, try raising the tripod to get an eye-level framing, rather than shooting from below.

John Walker

2010-09-27T07:07:00.016-04:00

John Walker directed Strand: Under the Dark Cloth (1990) as a tribute and guide to the career of photographer Paul Strand. The footage includes Strand himself (top still) and friends such as Georgia O'Keefe (second still). The film makes the case that Strand's early work -- sharp edged and unsentimental -- was consistently a modernist challenge to the romanticized photography of the day, exemplified by the work of Alfred Stieglitz (who was married to O'Keefe). Above, three examples: a 1915 photograph of Wall Street, a fence (1916), and a blind woman in New York (1916). The film doesn't hide the fact that Strand used a sneaky right-angle lens; his street-photography subjects did not know he was taking a picture.

Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert

2010-09-23T08:30:00.017-04:00

Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, in The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant (2009) visualize the winter landscape as matching the unhappy mood of the auto workers who are about to lose their jobs near Dayton, Ohio. We get to know several long-time GM employees and understand how they had developed a sense of community. The film's most touching sequence is watching dozens of workers autograph the final truck as it goes down the assembly line (bottom still). Using documentary tools of observation, character study, and editing, the filmmakers suggest the wider implications of the plant's shutdown.

Edgar G. Ulmer

2010-09-20T08:14:00.016-04:00

Edgar G. Ulmer's hybrid film, Carnegie Hall (1947) combines performance footage with a rambling fiction plotline. The heart of the film is its documentation of several music legends of the last century. Artur Rubinstein at the piano and Jascha Heifetz playing violin, among others, are shot in a glamorously-lit Hollywood style. Musical selections are generally allowed to run from beginning to end while a decidedly un-diverse tuxedo-and-décolletage Carnegie Hall audience listens motionlessly.

Emile de Antonio

2010-09-16T06:19:00.019-04:00

Emile de Antonio's film on Richard Nixon, Millhouse (1971) is a very watchable all-in-one document about a powerful politician. The Vietnam war was the pressing contemporary issue underlying the film; Watergate was not even on the horizon. The film covers Nixon's youth, his role in the Alger Hiss case, his many political campaigns, and his televised appearances that range from folksy to angry to contrite. Watching the film today provokes an uneasy reaction, because Nixon seems at once laughable and an overwhelming creep who is the likely forerunner to contemporary "dirty tricks" political campaigners. The film favors Nixon at the microphone, with some of his famous speeches shown in their entirety (editing by Mary Lampson employs many ironic audio and visual juxtapositions), along with interviews (with Joe McGinniss, for example, middle still) and well-chosen archival footage (bottom still: Dick Gregory).

Zeynep Devrim Gürsel

2010-09-13T08:10:00.009-04:00

Coffee Futures (Neyse Halim Ciksin Falim), a documentary by Zeynep Devrim Gürsel (2009), starts out as a light-hearted look at amateur fortune-telling among friends in Turkey. Gürsel shows a range of people examining the patterns in coffee cups (left by the dregs of finely ground coffee). The documentary elegantly expands its purview from culture and tradition to global politics when the fortune-telling seamlessly moves from ordinary romance to the question of Turkey's admission to the European Union.

Emile de Antonio

2010-09-09T07:59:00.017-04:00

Emile de Antonio's Underground (1976) is an extended whine session for five members of the Weather Underground, intercut with well-chosen archival material (Mary Lampson was the editor). Interviews with Bill Ayers, Kathy Boudin, Bernadine Dohrn, Jeff Jones, and Cathy Wilkerson, then in hiding, were shot by cinematographer Haskell Wexler, who never shows their faces by shooting through gauze or else into a mirror (as in the top still, Wexler at left, de Antonio at right). The self-justification of the five white middle-class activists contrasts with powerful footage of their much more charismatic role models, Malcolm X, Fidel Castro, and Ho Chi Minh (above).

Alexander Hammid

2010-09-06T07:47:00.010-04:00

The 1961 film of Martha Graham's ballet, Night Journey, was directed by Alexander Hammid and edited by Miriam Arsham. In Graham's telling of the Oedipus myth, a burly Paul Taylor (top still) dances the part of the blind seer Tiresias. Graham herself is Jocasta (bottom still), the wife and mother of Oedipus (danced by Bertram Ross). Watching the film is a different experience from seeing the ballet performed live, because the camera shows the dancers close-in, from many angles, and interacting with Isamu Noguchi's sculptural forms that comprise the set.

Richard Schickel

2010-09-02T07:26:00.005-04:00

Richard Schickel wrote and directed Howard Hawks-The Men Who Made the Movies; it's one episode of a 1973 TV documentary series that also included films on Hitchcock, Capra, Cukor, and several others. The Hawks documentary is deceptively straightforward: movie clips intercut with their director's commentary (top still). Schickel grounds each of Hawks's anecdotes with a killer example from the film under discussion, which makes the film a delight to watch. Above: Scarface, His Girl Friday, The Big Sleep, and Red River.

Michael Palm

2010-08-30T07:55:00.016-04:00

Michael Palm's 2004 Edgar G. Ulmer: The Man Off-Screen covers the life and career of the director of The Black Cat (1934), Detour (1945), and many other films. Ulmer had a gift for making the most of low budgets and short shooting schedules. Palm's documentary, though, paints an unflattering picture of this under-appreciated director. Although filmmakers such as Roger Corman (top still) and Peter Bogdanovich (middle) describe Ulmer's influence on independent and B-movies, the film calls into question, without resolving, some of Ulmer's claims about his early work with European filmmakers such as F.W. Murnau, G.W. Pabst, and Fritz Lang.

John Huston

2010-08-26T08:53:00.024-04:00

John Huston's Let There Be Light (1946), narrated by his father, actor Walter Huston, is a very polished film (no camera shake, no natural lighting) compared to most documentaries. The film follows the arrival, treatment, and release of a group of shell-shocked veterans at an army mental hospital. Let There Be Light was withdrawn by the US military for about 35 years -- it started to be shown in the early 1980s. It strangely resembles another black and white documentary (also unseen for years) about a mental institution: Titicut Follies, by Frederick Wiseman. In both films, groups of unhappy men sit and stare, everyone is chain-smoking, and in psychiatrist-patient encounters, the doctors show the same arrogance.

Orson Welles

2010-08-23T08:20:00.011-04:00

F for Fake (Vérités et Mensonges), a 1973 documentary by Orson Welles (top still), is a fractured and non-conventional personal reflection on truth and lies. Welles uses footage from other films in a deliberately piecemeal telling of the story of two professional phonies: Howard Hughes hoax-biographer Clifford Irving (middle) and art-forgery maestro Elmyr de Hory (bottom). Welles seems to assume that the viewer already knows all about his rather pompous subjects. Orson Welles himself has tremendous charisma when he's on the screen: the viewer endures Irving and de Hory in order to enjoy Welles's sarcasm, anecdotes, and sonorous rotundity when he puts himself front and center.

Jan Němec

2010-08-19T06:56:00.010-04:00

Oratorio for Prague (Oratorium pro Prahu), shot in 1968 by Czech director Jan Němec, was suppressed by Soviet authorities; it's still hard to find. Němec and his crew shot astonishing footage of Soviet tanks and troops invading Prague. The citizens gather and a few are killed by the soldiers, and some of the tanks are put on fire. Němec also shows idyllic scenes of the Prague spring, including some sort of hippie festival.

Humphrey Jennings

2010-08-16T06:43:00.021-04:00

Humphrey Jennings made Fires Were Started (1943) as a staged reconstruction of the London Blitz of the fall of 1940, when German planes dropped bombs every night on London. The film may have originated as a propaganda piece, but it works well as a procedural document of how a trained team of men attack a devastating fire. Jennings worked with actual firemen, whose good humor and tenacity strengthen the film. Along the way, the men recreate a daring rescue from a collapsing building. Action scenes are cross-cut with women clerks and telephone operators playing out their supporting roles (bottom still). Jennings's close-in shots show the growing exhaustion of the firefighters, who, during the Blitz, often worked 24 hours straight to prevent the spread of fires from building to building (top two stills).