The War Room is the one about the Clinton campaign, right? If so, I really enjoyed that one. Gimme Shelter is great to watch with Woodstock.
I didn’t care for Salesman or I just thought it was OK (pretty depressing).
Jazz, what didn’t you like about Salesman?
Fredo
Without question, two of the greatest documentarians in the history of cinema are D.A. Pennebaker and Albert Maysles (and his brother David). These filmmakers represent to me the pinnacle of non-fiction filmmaking and helped redefine what a documentary film could be.
What are people’s thoughts on these guys? On the one hand you have Don’t Look Back, Monterey Pop and The War Room with Pennebaker and on the other hand you have Salesman, Gimme Shelter, and Grey Gardens with the Maysles Bros. (and a laundry list of other films). Having just watched Jimi Plays Monterey, I was surprised to see that Albert Maysles worked on that film, indicating that indeed these guys were all collaborators.
Do people have a preference to one over the other? Can you identify distinguishing characteristics between them? While David Maysles has since passed away (as well as Charlotte Zwerin, who worked on a couple of the Maysles’ films), Albert is still chugging along making films (if you look closely you can see him running around operating on Scorsese’s Shine a Light) and Pennebaker is also still alive. It just amazes me to watch some of these films today and be struck by their power. With documentaries, it seems like they’re so often disposable and forgotten after a couple years because they’re topics become moot. But with these guys, so many of their films are timeless. To this day, The War Room is still absolutely riveting to watch and maybe even more so with some historical perspective. I feel I could say the same thing about Gimme Shelter, which is such a devastating, raw film that inadvertantly became a Zapruder-like historical document.