Living on the River Agano.
Hoop Dreams.
I agree with TOM WILSON above — Those Disney “True Life Adventures,” as they were known, are still magnificent pieces of filmmaking.
And I am in shock that only one person mentioned HEARTS AND MINDS. That one film helped end the entire Vietnam conflict!
For those into simple, well-made docs, get GEORGE STEVENS; A FILMMAKERS JOURNEY, done by his son, George Stevens, Jr. Good stuff.
Style Wars
Stone Reader
Some Kind of Monster
Crumb
Born Into This: Bukowski
I’ve loved documentaries ever since I first saw Erroll Morris’ The Thin Blue Line. It was so gripping, seeing real people on the screen. Truth is stranger (and more chilling) than fiction. A recent documentary that I love and watch from time to time is Michel Negroponte’s Jupiter’s Wife. This is a portrait of a very vivacious, sharp, funny, middle-aged homeless woman named Maggie who lives in Central Park with a big group of dogs. She’s like a natural actress, a natural movie star. The filmmaker has an intuition that her life history will reveal interesting secrets, and it does.
Does anyone know where I can find Hearts of Darkness?
Hoop Dreams
Winged Migration
Night and Fog
THE STAIRCASE (2005) and MURDER ON A SUNDAY MORNING [Un coupable idéal] (2001), two fine courtroom docs that are like dramas and telling exposes on the American justice system by the Frenchman, Jean-Xavier de Lestrade.
I enjoyed Herzog’s THE WHITE DIAMOND (2005), though there is something about his flare for drama that make his documentaries always a bit suspect. And so it is here, with Dorrington presented as a little madder than he probably is, and Mark Anthony Yhap (what a name!) a bit more saintly than any man could possibly be. And yet he is always interesting, for he tells us stories that are complicated and obscure, and takes us to places that it would occur to no one else to go. And the story of Dorrington’s strange and fragile airship is certainly one of these. Favorite moment: that dancing fool on the cliff’s edge above the waterfall … fantastic.
Drew-Hearts of Darkness is readily available at Amazon. Netflix also has it. It’s in print.
“Night and Fog” should be required viewing.
Wiseman has been mentioned more than once; if you can, find “The Titicut Follies”, his documentary about a US mental institution, which was banned for years. “Law and Order” is another classic from him.
Herzog: “Encounters at the End of the World” and “Lessons of Darkness” among others.
And one that was made for HBO that I have never forgotten: Michael Mierendorf’s “Losing it All.” The devastation of Alzheimer’s in five people’s lives, including Rita Hayworth’s (her daughter, princess Yasmin Aga Khan, is the narrator.) Very sad but also very important.
And a fun one: “Desperate Man Blues” about Joe Bussard, a one-of-a-kind collector of 78 blues, jazz and country records who lives in Maryland. The film is both a portrait of the man, and of the period he hangs on to, because through the music, as he sees it, things simply were ‘better’ then in many ways.
Best of the best in documentaries:
1) Ken Burns The Civil War
2) When the Levees Broke
3) For All Mankind
4) When We Were Kings
5) Harlan County USA
6) Hearts and Minds
7) Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmakers Apocalypse
8) The Bridge
9) Night and Fog
10) Idi Amin Dada
11) Four Little Girls
12) Bowling for Columbine (regardless of your opinions about Michael Moore, this was the first film that EVER pointed out, in an informed manner, why America is so violent and paranoid: THE MEDIA
13) Dogtown and Z Boys
- Hoop Dreams is staggering; as is Stevie, by the same director Steve James (the two comprise an anti-“American Dream” diptych).
- Marcel Ophuls Hotel Terminus (not available, I believe on DVD – should be a Criterion!), and of course The Sorrow and the Pity (the obsession of Alvie Singer).
- Speaking of which, Barbara Kopple’s Wild Man Blues.
- Chris Landreth’s Ryan, about the ruined Canadian animator Ryan Larkin: a kind of fabulously conceived, animated doc which is nonetheless extremely poignant and personal, and has no peer.
- Jarecki’s Capturing the Friedmans – this is one of those docs served well on DVD release, with the extras (like Fog of War, or an Inconvenient Truth, etc.)
- And did anyone mentioned Michael Apted’s “Up” series?
Night and Fog by Alain Resnais
oops, Joe already mentioned that
Tokyo-ga by Wim Wenders is a good one. I don’t know if Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil counts, but I could watch that all day long. And Herzog has said that Fitzcarraldo is his best documentary. I can see what he means.
Musically:
Dont Look Back (please, don’t include the apostrophe in “Don’t”!)
No Direction Home
Gimme Shelter
DiG!
I Am Trying To Break Your Heart
Herzog’s Little Dieter Needs to Fly and My Best Fiend
Salesman
Orphan, that’s true about Fitzcarraldo, we’re really watching them drag that boat over that mountain. What a crazy, legendary shoot — and the subject of two documentaries in its own right. No other film can boast that.
The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
Kind of silly but it’s my favorite! With a tagline like “don’t get chumpatized!” you know it must be grand.
“Dig!” is probably my favorite. And yes, I’m a musician so I’m a bit biased with it.
Luis, the very same thing happened to me. It was very late one winter night, and even down here in the south that it was so cold that we let our outside dog in, and I found Hoop Dreams channel surfing, and I watched it. I must have caught it at the very beginning, because it seemed like it was a 4 hour movie, and I was completely engrossed. I don’t know how many times PBS has ever aired Hoop Dreams, but this was a very long time ago, I’m tempted to suggest that we watched the very same program at the very same time…weird.
Triumph of the Will and Olympia by Leni Riefenstahl
seems American documentaries feature strongly on this thread but here are my choices:
Man with a Movie Camera
Sans Soleil
The World at War
Hearts and Minds
The Sorrow and the Pity
Hour of the Furnaces
The House is Black
The Battle of San Pietro
Song of Ceylon
Bus 174
The Civil War
Les Statues Meurent Aussi
The Power of Nightmares
People on Sunday (semi doc)
The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner
The War on Democracy
When we were Kings
Story of the Weeping Camel
Touching the Void
Winged Migration
The Thin Blue Line
Oh i forgot Kalatozov’s brilliant Salt for Svanetia, an eye-opener on an extraordinary region of the Caucasus. And Das Stahltier, a 1935 German documentary on trains that should have appeal way beyond fans of locomotives
God’s Country
Harlan County U.S.A.
The World at War (epic!)
Rodney Welch
Sherman’s March! How could I forget? And Time Indefinite, almost as good