Here at Cinefix, we spend most of our time looking at narrative films.
But just like pretty much everyone else in the world,
we've been getting pretty into docks lately.
So we figured it was time to take a deep dive.
These are our fix for the 10 best documentaries of all time.
(Music)
Start things off we want to first look at that which feels like a documentary at
it's most traditional.
The history dark, with moving original and
fascinating looks in American history in four little girls and 13th.
Non American history in nostalgia for the white and west of the trucks.
At the Vietnam War, In the Fog of War, In Hearts and Minds and the World Wars and
the Sorrow and the Pity and They Shall Not Grow Old.
We love Twenty Years Later, the Act of Killing, the Look of Silence and
the Cave of Dreams.
But at the very front of the pack, we think there is perhaps no
more moving document of the past ever created than our first pick, Shoah.
(Foreign) >> Standing at nearly nine and
a half hours long, clawed landsman Shoah is a towering act of witnessing.
A shocking combination of the stories told by victims, bystanders and perpetrators.
Some of these against their wishes and without their knowledge,
Shoah is on it's face a simple film, hardly more than oral history.
But in its execution it's prosaic tapestry woven of many personal narratives,
its quiet images of places that are truly haunted.
What eventually emerges is more than just a historical tragedy,
the stuff of books and facts and statistics.
But the unmistakable echo,
preserved as if in amber of many real moments in many real human lives.
It is immensely difficult, but never dull.
Beautiful despite so much heartbreak and important.
So very important, maybe more so than any other historical document ever made.
(Music)
After history, our minds next wander to the realm of the social documentary.
Beginning with the earliest innovators Nannok of the North and
Land Without Bread.
To the later standouts in High School, D'Est, Paris is Burning and
the real life boyhood of the Up series.
Salesman and Chronicle of a Summer are probably the gold standards of the social
documentary form.
But in terms of endless watchability our second pic goes to Harlan County USA.
>> I had to go, to mine to save more time.
He said he can be sure no get that new, no place for the rock of falling on it.
I said, well, what about me?
I was driving a mule in there.
What about me, the rocks are pulling on me.
He said, we can always hire another man, but he said you've gotta buy that mule.
>> Harland County USA is first and
foremost the story of a year long coal miner's strike in Kentucky.
There's picketing and injustice and real violence of the labor struggle sort that
is all but forgot in the America of today.
It is also a story of a people, many people, in a place, in a career,
in a class, all given their due as irrepressibly unique individuals and
yet connected in their commonalities all the same.
It also happens to be a story of music, of the songs to which these people, and these
places, and these struggles give birth and how inextricably linked they really are.
(Music)
Narrowing in from our cultural landscape,
some of our favorite documentaries of all time focus in on one or two subjects and
use the medium of film to paint them in all their detail.
This is the documentary as portrait where you can find such incredible classics
as Grizzly Man, Pina, a portrait of a brilliant choreographer through her work.
The aptly titled Portrait of Jason,
Crumb the deeply open profile of an underground comic artist.
Especially The Quince Tree Sun,
a meditative portrait of one man's Sisyphean task of capturing honest beauty.
However for this lot we think that there is something irresistibly
fascinating about the big and little edie in Grey Garden.
>> Cat's going to the bathroom right in the back of my portrait.
>> Isn't that awful?
>> No, I'm glad he is.
I'm glad somebody's doing something they wanted to do.
>> It is impossible to overstate the importance of selecting the right subject
for a portrait.
And in Gray Gardens, the Maysles brothers have struck pay dirt.
Decades past each of their moments, Gray Gardens follows and
eccentric mother and daughter once upon a socialite pair.
As they share their evening years amidst the overgrown decay of their estate and
their pasts, and the raccoons and cats with which they dwell.
Grateful for an audience to perform for beyond each other, they sing and dancing,
banter for the camera, relive their glory years.
Their what could have beens and the resentments they have honed about them.
Lonely in their irrelevance and image of a codependent relationship built and
warped to sustain them emerges.
But pity is not this documentary's primary mode.
An irrepressible delightfulness emerges nonetheless.
Of course we can not forget the ever popular investigative documentary.
Great true crime investigations include O.J.
Made in America, The Imposter, and especially The Thin Blue Line.
While great expose investigations include the like of Titicut Follies,
Whores’ Glory, Lake of Fire, and all of Michael Moore’s greatest hits.
But our favorite expose, my God if there isn’t anything in the world quite as mad
as The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On.
(Foreign)
>> Emperor's Naked Army doesn't take very
long before revealing itself to be, all in all, (Bleep) insane.
Ginzu Okuzaki is a veteran of World War II.
Who decides at the ripe old age of 65 to take up the investigation of
the mysterious deaths of three of his army mates that were stationed
with him in New Guinea as the war was lost by Japan.
His methods are less archival, research and official inquiry and more ambush other
70-year-old veterans and force them to talk by threat of and actual violence.
And it only gets way, way crazier from there.
The act of documenting the ordeal without intervention raises some serious ethical
questions.
But the war time truth that is uncovered over the course of his investigation is so
far beyond horrifying that one begins to understand Okuzaki as the willing owl of
all consuming rage that the war has left in its wake.
(Music)
Taking a step back from that, let's turn and take a look at sports darks.
From sweeping epics on a country's past time like Ken Burns baseball.
To delightful looks at little niches,
like Murderball, from portraits of an entire career as in Senna,
to slices of a moment in sports history as in When We Were Kings.
There's Freedom's Fury, Touching the Void, and the only kind of racist Olympia.
But it really doesn't get any better than the genre defying, trophy holding,
all time all star of Hoop Dreams.
>> When I get in the NBA, first thing I'm going to do I'm going to go see my mama.
I'm going to buy a house.
I'm go down make sure my sister, my brother's okay.
(Laugh) >> Try to get my dad Cadillac,
Oldsmobile, so he can cruise in the game.
>> For real. >> To Inner city eighth graders
are recruited straight off the playground by talent scouts for suburban prep school.
For the next six years, we watch them grow,
struggle, commute 90 minutes each way, succeed, fail, and ultimately strive to
travel the long road from where they are to the realization of their dreams.
And we have unprecedented access to their journey.
These are young children dreaming as children do,
invited into a demanding world of expectations and results and
disappointments all on the precipice of adult hood.
They become two very human faces on a very real american dream.
(Music)
After sports we got to look at music there's the band biography most notably
montage of heck.
And there's the back stage documentary including Dig, Don't Look Back and
the incredible Some Kind of Monster.
And there's the concert documentary whose standouts include Monterey Pop,
Gimme Shelter and The Last Waltz.
And we know it's crazy to give best music documentary to what
on its surface just looks like a concert film.
But by god there's something magical happen in the talking
Heads Stop Making Sense.
(Music)
Stop Making Sense is a blast.
The music is awesome and endlessly jammable.
The cinematography is better than most.
The concert itself is wonderfully structured and well done in its visuals.
But more than anything else there is something so honest and present and
un-ironic about the joy and togetherness we see in this musical family.
Especially in its bizarre genius frontman David Byrne, and
how he connects with those around him.
Watching him join and play, and
perform with his band mates is a surprisingly transcendental treat.
One that hits just the right kind of alchemy to rise beyond the average film,
up to the level of art.
(Applause) >> Of course,
if we're going to look at music docs, we can't pass up the film making ones.
Many of the best of them are behind the scenes chronicles of some
of the more insane entries in film making history.
Hearts of Darkness, Lost in La Mancha, Burden of Dreams, and Jodorowsky’s Dune.
But there’s also the individual profile as in film worker and Kate Plays Christine
and the look into true indie films as in American Movie and Raiders!
And Raiders the story of the greatest fan film ever made.
But our favorite is something else entirely.
Abbab Kiarostami's Close-up.
>> Start.
(Foreign)
>> We want to say very little about
closer, we recommended unreservedly, of course, and feel no hesitation
calling a genius, we can tell you that it's a film about misrepresentation.
About a man who pretends to be his favorite director in order
to impress a family.
And that it explores the boundary between truth and misrepresentation in life,
fiction and film, twisting back on itself in its analysis.
But beyond that, we don't really think any of our words could possibly improve your
experience with it.
So go watch it, you'll see.
(Music)
Next up, we're looking at the poetic mode of documentary film making.
The exposition-less, audio-visual collage that really does just observe and
document and make no judgement beyond inclusion and assemblage.
There are the early examples, Man with a Movie Camera and Berlin,
Symphony of a Metropolis.
Later, we find meditations on mirages, in Fata Morgana, insects,
in Microcosmos, and fishermen, in Leviathan.
We find the work of Godfrey Reggio, the Qatsi Trilogy and Visitors.
And then, there is the work of his one-time cinematographer Run Freak who
Samsara we call the most beautiful film of all time.
We still think it is and if we hadn't gushed about it so
much already it might easily snap up this slot.
But fortunately, for
us it has a just as good if not better older brother in the form of Baraka.
(Music)
For 90 gorgeous minutes, Baraka issues all language in its ambitious
attempt to reach its arms impossibly wide around the entirety of our Earth and
wrap it up all at once.
Immersing us in the vastness of its sights and sounds and rhythms and combinations,
striving for the universal through the narrowest of specifics.
Earth, humanity, individuals, culture, commodity, worship, often haunting,
sometimes tragic, sometimes glorious, but always beautiful.
Baraka is the crowning achievement in poetic documentary cinema.
Building upon Qatsi rhythms and eye,
and outlining the basic themes that some sorrow would eventually go one to develop.
It truly is a spectacular testament to the immense majesty of this thing called life.
(Music)
If you take your tone-poem and add the words back in,
you end up at our second to last slot, with the essay film.
Graced with such greats as, F is for Fake, Letter to Jane, and Histoire du Cinema.
But atop them all, we will attempt to describe the nearly indescribable with our
penultimate pick Sans Soleil.
>> The first image he told me about was of three children on the road in
Iceland in 1965.
He said that for him it was the image of happiness, and also that he had tried
several times to link it to other images, but it never worked.
He wrote me, one day I'll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film,
with a long piece of black leader.
If they don't see happiness in the picture, at least they'll see the black.
>> From these almost too sublime opening images and words you can sense that there
is going to be something very special about Chris Marker's Sans Soleil.
Made up of a fictional woman reading semi-fictional letters from a sort of
fictional camera man over the very real images of Marger's travels,
mostly to Tokyo and Guinea Basao.
We will not be the first to observe how Sans Soleil feels so
much like the beautifully poetic travel log of an alien anthropologist observing
humanity empathetically.
But from an almost extra-terrestrial distance.
The fictional relationships between the narrator and Chris Marker's
words asks his delightfully personal way of seeing into a humble intimate light.
This is documentary, keenly watching the world, but
fully aware that it's only doing it through one man's eyes.
(Music)
Finishing things off at number 1,
we cannot ignore the complete about face of the camera's lens pointed squarely back
at its documentarian in the autobiographical doc.
And amidst the ranks of the greats here we find the best of Ross Mackelwei.
Time Indefinite and Sherman's March, deeply personal films about love and
loss and death and life.
We find Tongues Untied,
a story of black gay identity that blends the historical with the personal.
We find Agnes Barnell looking at herself in The Gleaners and I.
And we find Waltz with Bashir's are a full men investigating his own repressed
memories.
And finally, we find our top pick, the unbelievably intimate,
as I was moving ahead occasionally I saw brief glimpses of beauty.
>> I saw that, nothing much,
nothing extraordinary as so
far happened in this movie.
It's all, Very,
Simple daily activities life.
>> We end as we began.
Again, with a long, long cinematic journey.
But this time of a very different sort.
As I Was Moving Ahead is an epic of the personal.
It is a long and messy act of a man remembering his
entire life through his home movies and recollections and poetry.
Difficult to imagine anyone watching all these moments of Jonas Micah’s life and
not being reminded of their own.
Little snippets of distant memories presumed lost rising back into view.
Micah calls it a masterpiece of nothingness.
Maybe so, but the genius is in how much he captures in that nothing.
He captures an entire life, which is why it's our pick for
one of the best documentaries of all time.
So what do you think?
Disagree with any of our picks?
Did we leave out any of your favorite documentaries?
We almost certainly did,
there's bound to be at least 11 worthy documentaries out there, maybe even 12.
Let us know what you think in the comments below and be sure to subscribe for
more Cinefix movie lists.