There’s been a lot of documentary work going on lately. A lot of very good topical stuff, and we might consider Michael Moore its modern father. His Roger & Me was something I’d never imagined, and loved. I haven't loved any of his subsequent work quite as well. There’s a lot of things we could call a documentary, including all that low budget tabloid stuff that inspires me to change the channel from MSNBC.
I once had an argument with a boyfriend who argued that The Last Emperor (a docudrama/biopic epic kinda thing from Bertolucci) was a documentary. No, it’s not, I insisted. A documentary doesn’t use actors, only pictures of the real person. And what they actually said, not some scripted conversation some writer crafted. This from Leni Reifenstal's Olympia:
The ways you make a documentary are subject to enough unwritten rules, that we have mockumentaries, which tend to be satirical. (Stuff like Best in Show and This is Spinal Tap come to mind.) But I recently rented Radiant City, which is not exactly a documentary, though it’s made to look exactly like one. The last few minutes are the performers - not professional actors - explaining their participation in the project. It was a brilliant exploration of modern suburbs - exactly what a documentary on the subject should be. Haven’t a clue what to call it - it’s kind of a genre buster.
Of course, there can be deep truths in fiction, and complete lies in "documentaries". Leni Reifenstal was the starlet turned filmmaker for Hitler. Her Triumph of the Will is a landmark propaganda piece. (Interesting to contrast with comparable stuff from the left like Dziga Vertov’s One Sixth of the World.) Her Olympiad is an almost abstract 4-hour opus on the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. The diving sequence is the most famous, and her visual infatuation with Jesse Owens, who never got the memo on Aryan superiority, is frequently commented upon. But I’m actually rather fond of the equestrian part - where a whole bunch of riders get thrown from their horses into a pond. Kind of the low comedy storyline, like Shakespeare always includes, too.
There’s good nature stuff out there. I almost think that The Making of the March of the Penguins might be as interesting as mega-hit March of the Penguins. A lot of Winged Migration, another big hit, seemed CGIed to me, and so on the edge of conventional documentary.
There’s some pretty well known documentaries, I’ve not seen so would love to hear what others have to say about Sicko, Capturing the Friedmans, Reefer Madness or that one about the guy who ended up killed by the grizzly bears his movie was about.
Here’s a few more:
Many of us may have seen Nanook of the North in shool. It’s an historical landmark of sorts. Also funded by Lazard Freres, in the fur business, who had something to gain by making trapping for big city fashion seem noble and ancient.
*Blue Vinyl* is a kind of (un)natural history of vinyl siding. It was made by a young woman whose mother had taken that drug - MES? - that turned out to cause uterine cancer in daughters of the women who took it during pregnancy. She had a hysterectomy at a young age, and paid for producing this movie - which has a lovely, quirky sensibility - with her "uterus money".
*Atomic Café* is a favorite of mine. It is of interest technically because it has no analysis or commentary added. It’s woven together entirely from archival materials (including popular songs). It’s about the development of nuclear weapons. Living near Los Alamos (including when it burned being downwind), it’s a topic that’s hard to forget entirely.
A filmmaker (indy producer type, influential) and his family went off to Fiji for a year where they opened a movie theater where there had never been one before. The documentary result of this adventure is called Reel Paradise, and in it we learn, amongst other things, that Fijian cinematic tastes don’t match those in the U.S.
Concerts: There’s plenty of concert and band films been made. Scorsese’s probably the best at that. He started his career editing Woodstock, and later followed up with the excellent Last Waltz. Clint Eastwood’s Bird is another good performance piece.
Some documentaries cover a long period of time. With little money available to make them, it requires extraordinary dedication by the filmmakers. The greatgranddaddy of long-time documentary timelines is the series from Michael Apted that starts with 7 Up, which documents the lives of a bunch of British 7-year old kids. He’s provided update installments every seven years, with the latest I’ve seen being 42-Up . Extraordinary stuff. Another long term project is Hoop Dreams about some promising high school basketball players, and how they make the transition to college - dealing with scouts and agents, and a bunch of stuff the families are not at all equipped to deal with. Very thought provoking.
I’ll pick two outstanding sports (kinda sports) documentaries. Different than Hoop Dreams because they’re mostly just about the physicality of the activity: Classic entry The Endless Summer, about surfing; and Dog Town and Z Boys, about the first competitive skateboarding. FWIW, Heath Ledger was really good in the feature version of the story, Lords of Dogtown (directed by the same woman who did Thirteen. Then, too, there’s the lesser known Japanese entry, The Man Who Skied Down Everest.
Robert McNamara was the subject of a kind of deathbed confession piece on how wrong they were about Vietnam, The Fog of War. It’s well worth seeing. Another retrospective Vietnam-era story, from a different angle, is The U.S. vs. John Lennon. Though honestly, I think the trailer for this last one is better than the movie. A classic, from the time, is Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool, about the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.
I once saw a quirky little film at an Anthropological Film Festival called Trobriand Cricket, about how the Trobriand Islanders adapted the colonially-introduced game in ways that show things about their culture. I enjoyed it.
I have a personal favorite documentary, which was shown as a safety film when I worked at the post office. I was a clerk, and this was a total waste of time because it was for carriers. But damn it was funny! Blue Danube waltz, and all these letter carriers falling down icy steps in slow motion. Showing us the consequences of traipsing around with your sack of mail without observing proper safety precautions. Stuff like training films, every so often, is brilliant!
Well, I’ve left many out. But the list is pretty long already, and it’s time to post. So just fill in the rest. And don’t forget the mojo!
