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 Docs that Rock
That
flick about the penguins was all well and good (yeah, we cried), but
the world of documentaries goes much deeper than those birds can swim. By Jenna Schnuer
Summer’s
almost over, and with it, the blockbuster movie season. But that
doesn’t mean an end to great film viewing. While an empty calorie or
two in film form isn’t a bad thing, man cannot exist on Raisinets
alone. And, over the last few years, box-office draws of a meatier
variety, documentaries, have made it clear that many a moviegoer wants
a little something more out of their popcorn time. ¶ “With a
documentary, there’s a kind of depth of engagement, a passion, an
authenticity that is so often missing from [feature] films that are
hoping to capitalize on a trend or an actor or just an intelligent
script,” says Michael Renov, professor of critical studies and
associate dean of academic affairs for the School of Cinema-Television
at the University of Southern California. ¶ In the past, “the common
perception of documentaries was … they’re informative, they’re good for
you, but they’re a little like spinach or castor oil going down,” says
Mark Harris, Academy Award–winning writer/director of Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport
and professor in the Division of Film and Video Production, School of
Cinema-Television at USC. “But now I think that perception has changed.
Documentaries are seen as every bit as entertaining or engaging as
feature films.” ¶ This month, doc enthusiasts will gather at the
Toronto International Film Festival (September 7 to 16) to watch the
latest batch of films to hit the circuit. If you aren’t headed to the
festival, you can create your own screening room at home. We asked
experts to offer recommendations of titles you should pop into your DVD
player. “Part of the fun of it,” says Renov, “is discovering all these
different voices and these different approaches to telling stories that
are based on people and events in the real world.”
Night and Fog (1955)
Director
Alain Resnais’s film was “one of the first … to deal in a forthright
way with a now-conventional theme in documentary, the Nazi
concentration camps,” says Jonathan Kahana, assistant professor of
cinema studies for Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. “It
is still shocking in its use of experimental techniques, including the
combination of present-day color and past-tense black-and-white
footage, [and] its expressive musical score.” Adds Renov: Though the
film is more than 50 years old, “it still has a stinger in its tail
that doesn’t go away.”
The Thin Blue Line (1988)
Director
Errol Morris’s “gripping investigation of murder and injustice, set to
a Philip Glass score, has as much story and style as 10 films noir,”
says Kahana. “Its often-imitated, never-duplicated use of color,
close-ups, interviews, and reenactments changed the look and form of
documentary forever.” Adds Harris: “He recognizes the fact that
audiences no longer will accept statements as a given or as instantly
believable just because they’re shown in a documentary film — that we
all have some level of skepticism and that we ought to have some level
of skepticism.”
Harlan County, U.S.A. (1976) and
American Dream (1991)
Barbara
Kopple gathered a pair of Oscars for her documentaries about miners and
meatpackers. The films “make an epic double bill on the rise and fall
of the labor movement in America,” says Kahana. “Kopple is the epitome
of the committed filmmaker, rolling up her sleeves and joining the
fray, helping out on the picket lines, and getting shot at by
vigilantes.”
Nobody’s Business (1996)
Documentary
filmmakers are increasingly focusing on their own lives and on their
families. “I call it domestic ethnography,” says Renov. “It’s [about]
really digging into your own background to look at where you came from
and who you are via your own family members.” But, according to Renov,
Alan Berliner’s film about his father — a reluctant subject if ever
there was one — “is the best of them.” The downside? It’s not widely
distributed. To order your own copy, contact Milestone Films at (800)
603-1104 or at www.milestonefilms.com. While you’re waiting for Nobody’s Business to arrive, Ted Sarandos, chief content officer of the DVD rentals-by-mail service Netflix, recommends you check out Tarnation, an incredibly intimate 2003 documentary about filmmaker Jonathan Caouette’s family.
The Gleaners and I (2000)
In
her first-person documentary, which Kahana says is “one of the very
best” there is, French filmmaker Agnès Varda manages to bring garbage,
French civil law, and home video together — successfully. “A charmingly
digressive film,” he adds, Gleaners is “knit together by Varda’s funny, incisive, and deeply personal narration.”
Spellbound (2002)
Spellbound,
which lives up to its name literally and figuratively, seems at first
like it’s going to be a light little flick about the Scripps Howard
National Spelling Bee. Well, not so much. “It’s a wonderfully well-made
film,” says Renov. “It’s humorous and does one of the things I love for
films to do — it starts out feeling like it’s one kind of film and
turns into another.” Instead of just a look at the bee, viewers get to
take a good look “at American culture … our competitiveness, how driven
we’ve become.” And director Jeffrey Blitz does it all without letting
up on the entertainment value for even a second.
Capturing the Friedmans (2003)
If
there’s one thread that runs through many contemporary documentaries,
it’s that of questioning what is true — and what isn’t. In Capturing the Friedmans,
the story of a middle-class father charged with child molestation,
filmmaker Andrew Jarecki “just kind of peels the onion and shows the
unspoken contradictions and the difficulties” of finding out whether
the man accused of the crime was really guilty, says Renov.
The Corporation (2003)
Don’t
care much about macroeconomics? Well, just remember, change (of mind)
is good. In their “riveting, creative analysis of this fundamental
modern institution,” filmmakers Jennifer Abbott and Mark Achbar manage
to make the topic “seem sexy,” says Kahana.
Grizzly Man (2005)
Though
the story of Timothy Treadwell — who lived in close proximity to the
bears of Alaska’s national parks for years, before one of his angrier
bear neighbors devoured him — takes place in the U.S., the film, by
director Werner Herzog, has an ever-so-European sensibility. Herzog,
who directs both documentaries and feature films, makes docs that “are
often as much about Herzog as they are about the subject he makes them
about,” says Harris.
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