Documentaries to Discover by Craig Hammill (SMC Founder.Programmer)
The doc is such a plastic and malleable art form and genre. Though the ones that stick with us seem to really reveal something about reality, true life that fiction can't, documentaries are every inch as manipulated, crafted, structured as fiction movies. I've always felt that documentaries and fiction movies really feed each other. To be a great fiction movie maker, you should make docs. Maybe to be a great documentarian, you should study fiction.
Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life (1925, dir by Ernest Schoedsack & Merian Cooper, USA)
The amazing silent 1925 documentary made by the team that would go on to make the original King Kong. It's a thrilling adventure of how these documentarians follow the Persian Bakhtiari tribe on their annual migration across raging rivers, up snow blanketed huge mountain ranges, ALL ON FOOT. The images of tens of thousands of tribe members inflating goat bladders to carry their babies, families, prized possessions across wild rivers and then of mothers carrying babies and food five miles up a mountain just puts everything in perspective. This movie was clearly very hard to make and you feel how dangerous it was to get the footage you're seeing. The thrilling sense of real adventure and risk must have educated Schoedsack and Cooper on how to make a thrilling Hollywood movie when they made King Kong. Both Grass and Kong pulse with a sense and understanding of true danger.
Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan/Land Without Bread (1933, dir Luis Buñuel, Spain)
Buñuel's documentary, about the deeply impoverished villagers of Spain's Las Hurdes region, crackles with a very unsettling darkly comic irony that makes all the deprivation you see that much more painful. Buñuel made the brilliant choice of contrasting the clear daily struggle of these people (who are so poor they don't know what bread is) with a very dry, flat, ironic narration. The effect is impossible to explain. You laugh but you cry. Though Buñuel often came at his subjects with a surrealist's eye and humor, he was a deeply committed person who put his reputation on the line repeatedly for political and social causes. There's a famous story of Buñuel and Dali's falling out: Buñuel insisted they go out and fight with the resistance fighters to save Spain from dictatorship. Dali preferred to stay in the studio. Unlike many folks though, Buñuel always seemed to understand you get people to action by agitating them through understatement. Here and again in his brilliant Mexican film Los Olvidados, Buñuel would employ surrealism to paradoxically get us to finally open our eyes to the real suffering of real life.
Louisiana Story (1948, dir by Robert Flaherty, USA)
Really 3-4 different segments linked by Louisiana and the story of a little bayou boy, Louisiana Story is one of the most lyrical, meditative beautiful documentaries about America I've ever seen. Documentarian Robert Flaherty is famous as one of the very FIRST doc moviemakers. But he shows here how any subject can be made fascinating, if you're fascinated by it. One segment is just beautiful shots down a river. Another segment focuses on an oil derrick. And somehow Flaherty makes the work of the derrick beautiful, tranquil, rhythmic. Another sequence finds the little boy lassoing a crocodile. Although you can see how they filmed it (the boy and croc are rarely in the same shot), it's still a thrilling example of how filmic techniques can be used to cement and sell a narrative thrill. Just a beautiful poetic gem on all levels. By the time it's done, you feel Flaherty has somehow lifted the veil of cinematic distance and created a visceral way for us to re-discover just how beautiful the world is around us.
Titicut Follies (1967, dir by Frederick Wiseman, USA)
Wiseman's style is famous: no narration, no talking heads. Wiseman picks a subject, films it, then really creates his artistry (almost a magic trick) in the editing room by finding a way of editing and sequencing the footage in a way that makes all its points on its own. It's very hard to explain here how strong an authorial voice Wiseman has without ever needing to use that voice in any overt way. Titicut Follies shows the mistreatment of prisoners in a Massachusetts prison for the criminally insane in the late 1960's. This programmer will never forget the experience of discovering this movie on PBS one day and watching it straight through without having any idea what it was. One of the most devastating and striking bits of editing I've ever seen was Wiseman's decision to cut from scenes of prisoner abuse to the guards putting on their annual talent show (The Titicut Follies) singing and dancing on stage. The contrast is so biting and devastating, the point is made without having to make the point. Wiseman has built a career making movies about systems. His brilliant 1970 HOSPITAL shows every aspect of a big city hospital from the doctors to the social workers to the chaplains to the nurses to the patients. Somehow you get the sense of the discouraging nature of trying to get anything done in such a huge bureaucracy and yet you also get the sense that these folks are doing their best. Wiseman has that essential attribute of a great artist: he lets the material be what it is without trying to force a predetermined conclusion. His work is vast and deep and hilarious and humanist and deeply disturbing. Just like existence.
The Civil War (1990, dir Ken Burns, USA)
As cliched as it might seem to put this doc on this list, this programmer does because it is just that good. This documentary (9 episodes running 11.5 hours total) by Ken Burns richly tells the story of the American Civil War through actor-read documents, historian interviews, amazing music, and photos from the time. The style has become so iconic as to be parodied everywhere (including an episode of the sitcom Community): melancholic music starts, photo montages, the stentorian voice of an actor reads a heartfelt letter, etc. What Burns achieves in this doc though is the kind of richness, depth, breadth, and complexity only usually achieved in grand novels by Tolstoy or Dickens. You get a kaleidoscopic view of a seismic conflict that may be THE defining event to this day for our nation. By the end of the documentary, you feel in some way you've gone on the journey of those 5 years from 1860-1865. There's even a nifty little trick Burns does with the famed "Rebel Yell" that is a huge payoff for those who make it to the end. Well worth your time. Historical docs have rarely been both this gripping and informative.
The Act of Killing (2012, Joshua Oppenheimer, USA)
If ever a documentary made you feel like you'd wandered through the looking glass to a world of reversed logic this is it. The doc tells the very strange story of how mass murderers of suspected communists in Indonesia are still celebrated to this day as national heroes. Even though they were gangsters, hitmen, thugs, rapists who terrorized villages and destroyed families. What Oppenheimer does that is so unsettling is use the judo move of ego to get these celebrated killers to reenact the murders as musical and genre set pieces. The Men initially love this because they feel it glorifies them even more. But as the documentary goes on, you can see the smartest of these Men are not completely without regret and the nagging mosquito of conscience telling them their acts were not actually very heroic. A very painful, strange experience unlike any this programmer has had. When the final scene happens (and it is a doozy), you feel that strange indescribable chill of past actions' infinite tendrils wrapping themselves around the necks of both the aggressors and victims in the present.
The Imposter (2012, dir by Bart Layton, UK/USA)
The incredibly chilling story of con man Frederic Bourdin who pretended to be the long lost missing son of a Texas family even though he looked nothing like the boy and had a thick European accent. Terrifyingly, you realize the family has accepted him because maybe they are hiding an even darker secret about the missing boy's disappearance. This movie is for folks who like (is like the right word?) to feel that chill of cosmic irony that ripples throughout the strange and wicked doings that pulse throughout parts of humanity and the world. Director Layton scores huge by getting con man Bourdin to tell the story to us. At first, we think the game of the doc is not to be taken in by this charming con man but to see through his narrative lies about the story. But then, at a certain point, it ain't about the con man at all. It's about that family. . . .Like a movie where a killer suddenly wanders into a house of even worse killers, The Imposter gets at something shadowy about human behavior that must be wrestled with if you want to honestly artistically engage in humanity.
American Movie (1999, dir by Chris Smith, USA)
Sometimes documentaries can give us the real-life feel good stories we crave but told in a way that feels earned rather than mercenary. Chris Smith's hilarious, cringe-worthily painful, yet ultimately bizarrely uplifting American Movie tells the story of determined Wisconsin moviemaker Mark Borchardt who will do anything to raise the money for his horror opus Coven. The only ones who consistently believe in Mark are his slightly acid fried lifelong best friend Mike and Mark's aging misanthropic Uncle. What director Smith and his subjects capture here is the timeless story of how determination, above all else, must never yield to the harsh toll gate guard of ambition: reality. You watch horrible mistake after horrible mistake and feel like grabbing these guys and saying "Just... let it go." But they don't. And in not giving up, teach all of us persistence, even more than talent, is what gets you through.
Written by Craig Hammill. Founder and Programmer of Secret Movie Club.