Some Essential Documentaries
Submitted by kenji on Sun, 02/13/2005 - 04:29
Tags:
- Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov)
- The World at War (BBC TV)
- The Sorrow and the Pity (Ophuls)
- The Civil War (Burns)
- People on Sunday (Siodmak, Ulmer)- part drama
- Sans Soleil (Marker)
- Story of the Weeping Camel (Daava, Falorni)
- The House is Black (Farrokhzad)
- When we Were Kings (Gast)
- The Thin Blue Line (Morris)
- Triumph of the Will (Riefenstahl)
- Touching the Void (Macdonald)
- Streetwise (Bell)
- F for Fake (Welles)
- Night and Fog (Resnais)
- The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner (Herzog)
- Hearts and Minds (Davis)
- Winged Migration (Perrin)
- Cane Toads- An Unnatural History (Lewis)
- Nanook of the North (Flaherty)
- Song of Ceylon (Wright)
- Hotel Terminus (Ophuls)
- Basque Ball (Medem)
- Berlin, Symphony of a Great City (Ruttmann)
- Burden of Dreams (Blank)
- Hearts of Darkness; A Filmmaker's Apocalypse (Bahr)
- The Fog of War (Morris)
- Bowling for Columbine (Moore)
- Man of Aran (Flaherty)
- Olympia (Riefenstahl)
- A Diary for Timothy (Jennings)
- Tokyo Olympiad (Ichikawa)
- Elgar (Russell)
- Comandante (Stone)
- Fahrenheit 9/11 (Moore)
- Koyaanisqatsi (Reggio)
- The Quince Tree Sun (Erice)
- The Gleaners and I (Varda)
- Woodstock (Wadleigh)
- Homework (Kiarostami)
- Welfare (Wiseman)
- Buena Vista Social Club (Wenders)
- Listen to Britain (Jennings)
- Land of Silence and Darkness (Herzog)
- Hoop Dreams (James)
- Night Mail (Wright, Watt)
- Etre et Avoir (Philibert)
- Shoah (Lanzmann)
Author Comments:
The list above is roughly in order of preference.
I've not seen:
The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On (Hara)
The Battle of Chile (Guzman)
Spanish Earth (Ivens)
Tale of the Wind (Ivens)
Land without Bread (Bunuel)
Medium Cool (Wexler)
Oporto of my Childhood (Oliveira)
Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (Haynes)
Harlan County, USA (Kopple)
To me, Fahrenheit 9/11 seems like the ultimate nonessential documentary now that the election is over. It's not helped by its relatively low (70%? 60%?) truth/deception ratio.
Well i certainly don't agree with every point he made or how he went about it (and his smart-alec style is probably counter-productive) but some of the issues are still very relevant, even after the election. I'm only surprised he didn't make more of the 9/11 conspiracy, rather than swinging round in various directions. An interesting film but not a great one.
Land without Bread is a film I really want to see, too.
I watched Sans Soleil recently and thought it was excellent, so i went on to imdb to read about it and couldn't believe it had so few votes. I'm gonna put some of these on the Hidden Gems list.
I couldn't recommend Harlan County, USA enough; it may be my favorite documentary. The spirit of the strikers and the callous statements of the mining company leave me alternately hopeful and enraged...
Johnny Waco