Film as a Debate Moderator: Significant Historical Documentaries

A camera has the wonderful ability to possess some kind of ontological capabilities that enable well-made (popular) historical documentaries not only, in the words of film theorist Bill Nichols, to “describe and interpret the world of collective experience” but to participate in “the actual construction of social reality” and thus, the construction of collective memory. The following titles – listed in order of release – were all fabricated with the intention of keeping that collective memory up to the mark and giving image and sound to the multiperspectivity of the events. Makers of such films achieve this by...