How to get a han-dle on doc-u-men-tary film? Giv-en not just the quan-ti-ty but the wide vari-ety of works in the field, with all their vast dif-fer-ences in style, dura-tion, approach, and epis-te-mol-o-gy, get-ting up to speed with the state of the art (or per-haps you con-sid-er it a form of essay, or of jour-nal-ism) can seem a daunt-ing task indeed. But as luck would have it, ten experts on doc-u-men-tary film — doc-u-men-tar-i-ans them-selves, in fact — have just done some of the work for you, select-ing a total of “Fifty Doc-u-men-taries You Need to See” for The Guardian.
Few pic-tures in the his-to-ry of cin-e-ma have played as impor-tant a role in the for-ma-tion of a genre as has Dzi-ga Ver-tov’s 1929 Man with a Movie Cam-era, which Man on Wire direc-tor James Marsh named as an essen-tial. “This was the first tru-ly sub-ver-sive, play-ful doc-u-men-tary,” he says. “It’s notion-al-ly a day in the life of a city in the Sovi-et Union and so it has, on a pure-ly sociological/historical lev-el, great val-ue. But what it does beyond that is to show you the means of pro-duc-tion: the film-ing, the cut-ting room, the edit-ing – all the things that are going into the mak-ing of this film.”
You can, of course, watch Man with a Movie Cam-era free at the top of this post. For the oth-er 49 Doc-u-men-taries You Need to See, you may have to do some more search-ing, but they’ll repay the effort many times over with their intel-lec-tu-al stim-u-la-tion, their unex-pect-ed dra-ma, and their explo-ration of the bor-der-lands between cin-e-mat-ic fic-tion and cin-e-mat-ic fact. Few films of any kind per-form that last mis-sion as astute-ly as Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-up (avail-able on Hulu if you start a free tri-al), about a man’s imper-son-ation of famous Iran-ian film-mak-er Mohsen Makhmal-baf, re-enact-ed with the very same peo-ple orig-i-nal-ly involved: the impos-tor, the fam-i-ly he tried to trick, the judge who presided over the ensu-ing tri-al, and even Makhmal-baf him-self.
Close-up (as well as one of Makhmal-baf’s own movies, Salaam Cin-e-ma) appears among the picks from Joshua Oppen-heimer, a doc-u-men-tar-i-an spe-cial-iz-ing in exam-i-na-tions of mas-sacres in Indone-sia. When you’ve watched all the rec-om-men-da-tions, you might con-sid-er cir-cling back and check-ing out Oppen-heimer’s The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence. By the same token, after you’ve seen Agnès Var-da’s The Glean-ers and I, have a look at Lucy Walk-er’s Waste Land; after Wern-er Her-zog’s Griz-zly Man, Kha-lo Mata-bane’s Sto-ry of a Beau-ti-ful Coun-try. But fair warn-ing before you launch into this view-ing project: once you come out of it, you won’t see the pos-si-bil-i-ties of cin-e-ma in quite the same way ever again — at the very least, you’ll see infi-nite-ly more of them.
For anoth-er list, see The 10 Great-est Doc-u-men-taries of All Time Accord-ing to 340 Film-mak-ers and Crit-ics.
Relat-ed Con-tent:
265 Free Doc-u-men-taries Online
Free: Dzi-ga Vertov’s A Man with a Movie Cam-era, the 8th Best Film Ever Made
Wern-er Her-zog Nar-rates the Touch-ing, Exis-ten-tial Jour-ney of a Plas-tic Bag
Based in Seoul, Col-in Mar-shall writes and broad-casts on cities, lan-guage, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange-les, A Los Ange-les Primer, the video series The City in Cin-e-ma, the crowd-fund-ed jour-nal-ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange-les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol-low him on Twit-ter at @colinmarshall or on Face-book.
In the time it’s tak-en me to grow out of my way-ward 90s youth and into most-ly sol-id cit-i-zen adult-hood, cul-tur-al mem-o-ries of that decade have crys-tal-ized around a few gen-res that have seen some renew-al of late. I’m more than pleased to find cur-rent musi-cians reviv-ing shoegaze, 90s elec-tron-i-ca, and neo-soul. And with so many artists who peaked twen-ty or so years ago still releas-ing records or get-ting back togeth-er for impres-sive reunions, it often seems like the music I grew up with nev-er left, even if a whole raft of stars I couldn’t pick out of a line-up have emerged in the mean-time.
