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.
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.