An Impossible Job: ILX's 40 Favorite Documentaries

i like birds, but i dont like watching nothing but birds flying from point A to point B for 100 minutes

Oops - I voted for World At War even though I haven't seen it, I just read about it and thought it looked amazing. Didn't think I'd be influencing things.

already hate ILX for not repping for seventeen & actively punishing agnes varda. etre et avoir a good one. i think i found spellbound a lil frothy?, but i forget.

It makes want to read a good book about what exactly happened. I still don't understand how derivatives are supposed to work.

apparently the john lanchester one's good; i read the start and was only distracted by other books, not by it being boring or impenetrable etc.

hahaaaaa

xp

Couldn't find a clip for World at War. Spellbound was my #1--I wanted to find a useable still for someone other than Harry (ideally, the Chateaubriand girl), but no luck.

sb'd you ismael

don't wanna interrupt your countdown, but do enthuse about spellbound when you've a sec, clemenza -- would be curious to hear someone zealous about how good it is, i remember it fairly plainly

yeah, sb'ed myself too

#33: Los Angeles Plays Itself (Thom Andersen, 2003)

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_rLhnrqgHqhw/SlKnb26rjzI/AAAAAAAAAEw/UkxZZm65-Xg/s400/Los+Angeles+Plays+Itself+%282003%29+4.JPG

25 points/3 votes

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hYg01uqz9U

writing a draft list of shitty novels to submit to any future books polls you run
xp

I've written about Spellbound a few times--I'll post some thoughts when I get a second. (I'm finding commenting difficult as I search for stills and clips.)

already havent heard of a few of these!

you have to disable safe search to find stills for 'HATED: the gg allin story', fyi
xp

#32: Sherman's March (Ross McElwee, 1986)

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_nOqp-9qvh9g/S7K_zRqjkpI/AAAAAAAAABc/cDPtExaU6Y8/s1600/ross+pat.jpg

25 points/4 votes

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZC2_FAcYlU

Yay, thanks for doing this, clemenza.

Did I miss discussion of The Gleaners & I somewhere? Looks really interesting to me.

You'll be glad to know that Hated finished 214th among 214--dead last (but ahead of many, many documentaries that got no votes).

#31: Anvil! The Story of Anvil (Sacha Gervasi, 2008)

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-C9klPY5snd0/TWWtv-e_TII/AAAAAAAAA0s/5BgsRY5BMCY/s1600/anvil2.jpg

26 points/2 votes

www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYxZBTgi-gI&feature=fvst

I haven't seen this, but obviously the greatest title ever.

#30: The Last Waltz (Martin Scorsese, 1978)

http://bobmccurdy.com/JoniMitchell.jpg

26 points/4 votes

www.youtube.com/watch?v=BREYCGWOouw

If there's zero Fred Wiseman on this, including Anvil! makes perfect sense

i don't know that there was any real dedicated gleaners discussion, emil.y; furthermore she's threadless, here, but i think there's quite a lot of discussion of it in a chris marker thread, iirc. it's v charmingly made and very interesting, if you've not seen it.

i actually wouldn't go near hated but i can see why someone'd vote it.

#29: WR: Mysteries of the Organism (Dusan Makavejev, 1971)

http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/images/reviews/177/1182304636_1.jpg

27 points/2 votes

www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FNha0znnnA

i can see how anvil! is not for everyone. for instance, if you hate life.

Sherman's March.. jakldsfjklsdf

what does that mean, Jeff

#28: The Fog of War (Errol Morris, 2003)

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_m47RlRiYoAg/S9qSW4OYzAI/AAAAAAAAHnc/hEemo1InSAA/s1600/The.Fog.of.War.20031.jpg

27 points/3 votes

www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfPwR00HXM0

I voted for Anvil - it's another of those modern docs that have a real way with a good narrative yarn and emotional connection without seeming obscenely fake.

Finally remembered the name of a doc that gareth told me about that I was trying to find before voting: The Moon and the Sledgehammer. This looks awesome.

And my friend just got this for his birthday yesterday: Here's a Health to the Barley Mow: A Century of Folk Customs and Ancient Rural Games

And, you know what, I just realised that B.S. Johnson's short on the making of The Unfortunates may well have counted. This is what happens when you rush voting.

(I'm guessing the Barley Mow vid wouldn't count as 'a documentary', I think it's more of a collection, but still looks relevant to the interests of the thread)

#27: My Best Fiend (Werner Herzog, 1999)

http://thecinemaguy.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/500my_best_fiend.jpg

29 points/3 votes

www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4sg459P8m4

the weirdest thing about Hated to me is that it was directed by todd phillips.

fog of war was the top erroll morris contender for me, though i ended up not voting for it. spectacular movie

now that I see how low the point threshold was for a movie to rank, I wish I'd spread my points around to some more unconventional pictures. I was coming right off the U2 poll, where my top songs didn't rank at all, so i guess i thought i'd be wasting points.

#26: Brother's Keeper (Joe Berlinger/Bruce Sinofsky, 1992)

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_FY2687dO59c/S734xQnJpgI/AAAAAAAABLU/cktxCalNJ4U/s1600/brothers-keeper_592x299.jpg

30 points/1 vote

www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlDSGMAyUrE

urgh, i never sent in a ballot

of what's been posted so far, 'spellbound' (for admittedly personal reasons) and 'los angeles plays itself' would def have been on it

huh, brother's keeper looks great. i'll have to watch for it.

I'll stop there for today. Brother's Keeper was the only film to get in on the maximum support from one voter--which is fine. One of things I love about documentaries is that a film like Anvil! The Story of Anvil can end up being every bit as compelling as The Fog of War--I had a film about bowling on my list, but not The Sorrow and the Pity. That's just the way it goes. Schlump asked earlier for some thoughts on Spellbound--just so I don't repeat myself, I'll be really lazy and link to some stuff I wrote when I listed it as my favourite film of the '00s (where I see I link to something I'd written on the film even earlier).

yea i didnt vote for it, but i ttly love brother's keeper

Fog of War is my least fave Morris. McNamara's confessional spin doesn't interest me.

brother's keeper is great

I had mixed feelings on The Fog of War too, but I found it better the second time. I think the whole point of the film is watching McNamara spin--except I wouldn't reduce it to spinning, he does seem to agonize his way through whatever it is he's trying to say.

I still don't understand how derivatives are supposed to work.

I think I've seen about six documentaries that try to explain this, and I'm still lost.

Since they came out around the same time, I always compare FoW to Capturing the Freidmans, even though they are so different. Love CtF so so so much more.

i always liked amateurist's posts on fog of war:

the film is perhaps most interesting for excavating, in part and not wholly convincingly--more on that later--the milieu out of which this guy and others who shaped cold war foreign policy came. he was a kind of technocrat, perfectly embodying the spillover between industry academia and the military.

what bugs me most--and i don't mean this as a criticism of the fil necessarily--is how much he claims innocence of the historical and political phenomena he was encountering in vietnam. when he said that he didn't understand the vietnamese hostility toward the chinese; or the fact that th e north vietnamese saw it as a liberation struggle...why not? books had been written, editorials published, etc. well before america's involvement in the region. were his circumstances and intellectual horizons really so circumscribed that mcnamara missed this completely? or is his claiming innocence--and by extrapolation the innocence rumsfeld et al may claim 30 years hence--just a way of bucking responsibility?

the film lacked a thorough enough feel for the period to throw these questions out--it remains mcnamara's story. which i believe was morris's intention and it might be a worthwhile one. why bother to make another film castigating our vietnam policy when so many exist already (or do they?)?

etc

― amateur!st (amateurist), Monday, January 19, 2004 7:14 AM (7 years ago) Bookmark

I left Spellbound off my list and I feel terrible about it now. Sorry, clemenza.

WR: Mysteries of the Organism

is this a documentary? imo this is like 'any film that isn't a straightahead fictional narrative or an abstract/art/___ film'

well, The Last Waltz isn't a doc either; it's a staged event.

Just went and read up on it (so thanks for mentioning it as I now desperately want to see it) and it sounds like it counts: all the reviews suggest there is a documentary element mixed up with collage/artyshit, which seems to me to be a perfectly reasonable way of shaping one's work without discounting it. I don't see why a documentary can't be arty.

Surely you should have psychically divined that I wanted Spellbound to win, Emily...It's such a great film. I assume Morbius's nerd comment upthread was directed at Spellbound (maybe Winged Migration, I'm not sure). If so, I think that's so far off the mark.

As I said numerous times in the previous thread, I didn't set guidelines as to what counted as documentary (not that I have any idea where I'd set them if I were to try). People who voted decided that WR and The Last Waltz are documentaries, and that's fine with me.

Uh. I also voted for brothers keeper. Did my ballot go missing?

WR is mostly documentary - apart from a couple of short fictional scenes set in (then) Yugoslavia.
Also I mentioned this on the other thread, but I first saw WR when I was 16, and it blew my mind. Well worth checking out.

i actually wouldn't go near hated but i can see why someone'd vote it.

I voted for Hated - the main thing for me is the massive gulf between what GG thought he was doing and what other people, even his fans, were getting out of it.

Jjjusten--I'm so glad you caught that, and many apologies. I'm going to make the adjustments right now. It's an easy fix; I'm just got to move Brother's Keeper up, and retabulate points for a film that hasn't come up yet. Let me do that, and I'll be back in a few minutes to post the proper #26 (and will re-post Brother's Keeper again on Monday).

A problem:

http://www.avclub.com/articles/if-documentaries-want-to-be-treated-like-movies-th,93354/

I'm guilty of falling prey to this, I know; I'll accept conventional filmmaking if the subject and people interest me enough (e.g., Knuckleball). But it's something I'm often aware of, most recently watching The House I Live In. It was good, and it was a passionate piece of advocacy. But I kept thinking that it could have been better.

interesting Apted interview about UP here with Roger Ebert

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGu470P7yfc

I'm guilty of falling prey to this, I know; I'll accept conventional filmmaking if the subject and people interest me enough (e.g., Knuckleball). But it's something I'm often aware of, most recently watching The House I Live In. It was good, and it was a passionate piece of advocacy. But I kept thinking that it could have been better.

This is an interesting argument, but I think the opposite can also be a problem. Searching for Sugar Man is a good recent example which suffers from the fact that the director wanted to make it too much like a conventional movie narrative. Large parts of the real story are excluded so that the movie could climax with the cathartic moment of Rodriguez, its subject, playing a comeback gig for a large South African audience in 1998, after (if the movie is to be believed) having been inactive and unsuccessful as a musician ever since 1971. In order to retain this "rise->fall->rise again" narrative formula the director conviently ignore the fact that Rodriguez had already had a similar (though somewhat smaller) revival success in Australia in the late 70s and early 80s. Also, the movie very much focuses on South African journalists' search for the mysterious musician, which makes for a nice detective story, but also means there's not that much material about Rodriguez himself and his life between 1971 and 1998.

So yeah, the movie is certainly more cinematic than your regular talking heads doc, but Rodriguez is such an interesting guy I would've preferred to watch a more traditional document with him and people close to him talking about his life. The liner notes to the reissues of the two Rodriguez albums actually give a more detailed and more interesting picture of his life than a feature-length documentary.

That would be a better argument if it was called "Rodriguez: His story", in fairness - it's a story about fans searching for him.

I guess... But since the director was able to interview Rodriguez himself, and a whole lot of friends, relatives, and music business people who know him, he could've easily made the movie about his story, and not the about the search for him. To me, it seems he picked the "search" narrative because it made for more thrilling cinema, and it sorta does – Searching for Sugar Man certainly is more entertaining to watch than many other docs – but in the end the approach means the movie has less content than it could've had, makes the story look more one-sided than it could've been. The movie leaves you with with several unanswered questions, and they aren't all the sort of questions that are meant to be left hanging, they could've answered them if they wanted to. And that is my opinion on the subject: sure, make your doc more cinematic, but don't do it at the expense of content, because content is the main thing people want from (most) documentaries.

Would you have added more running time, or cut out the South African material? Because it does sound like you're wishing they made the movie you would like rather than the one they made, and I'd counter that I found the South African stuff far more interesting than "This dude was like Bob Dylan except not as good, then he dropped under the radar, here he is again"

Also wtf is "content"?

I didn't mean the South African stuff as a whole was uninteresting; the Afrikaaner equality movement and his influence on that was interesting stuff, you could've made a whole movie about that alone. But the search part, the detective story, it felt pretty superficial, because it didn't give you any new information on either of the main subjects of the doc (Rodriguez's influence on South African musicians and political activists, and his life in Detroit). That's what I mean by "content" in documentaries: new information on stuff that I didn't know about before.

So you'd be as happy with a wiki URL, the lights up, and an instruction that it's fine if you want to turn your phone on? :)

maybe film snobs already know this but i didn't -- DEMON LOVER DIARY is now online! look!! http://vimeo.com/62618360
i watched the first few minutes and it reminded me how great this movie is.

http://www.amazon.com/Cat-Dancers-Joy-Holiday/dp/B007BG5RUE

^this was really great fyi

Richard Brody's favourite documentaries, in advance of a Sight & Sound documentary poll:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2014/04/the-greatest-documentaries-of-all-time.html

Cool thread.

http://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-sound-magazine/greatest-docs

Some show up shockingly low (e.g. Close-Up) until you consider many people probably don't categorize them as "documentaries."

No King of Kong, I don't get it.

I count 19 instances of overlap between their 50 and ILX's 40. Doesn't seem all that scandalous to me.

Yea but that other 21 tho.

The BFI site now has the complete results/ballots for the documentary poll + a sprawling graphic linking each film to each voter. http://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-sound-magazine/greatest-docs-full-poll

Did any ilxors get a vote?

Now I'm going to watch Grey Gardens.

Glad to see King of Kong got two votes, enough to finish ahead of one-vote-only Citizen Kane (also ahead of no-votes Vertigo). Personally I like Kane better, but it's close. (I'm in something that got one vote, Vinyl).

i saw this a couple weeks ago, highly recommended:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0263238/

I saw that four or five years ago, with Drew in attendance--yes, very good. I think it might be the beginning of cinéma vérité? The primary season as it existed then is unrecognizable next to today's circus.

Goofed--it's the earlier Primary I saw. Would love to see the Wallace film.

On Lanzmann and Shoah. Was watching it last night on TV, 2nd part next week.

The 30 min sequence in the Polish village is probably the best evidence of his skills, the way he could charm anyone into talking about themselves and ultimately their prejudices. There was certainly evidence of his -- not bullying -- but you could tell he was a prick. When he tells off the translator "I heard the word 'Capital' why haven't you translated?" when its a pretty tough interview of up to four women talking. Didn't think much of it at the time -- you could argue that these things happen on tough shoots -- but then you read his vile quote on female translators. There was certanly nothing they could do, even if they were half-cheering the 'extraction' of jews but its weird that Lanzmann doesn't think this could've happened in France when anti-semitism and racism are to be found in France (Sorrow and the Pity hello?)

Ultimately not too sure about the impact of re-enactments, and the camera focusing on any tear is pretty much pornography (nearly switched off after an hour) but there is so much powerful testimony, even if the methods by which he obtained some of it are questionable.

I just saw Nicolas Philibert's "Louvre City" and LOVED IT SO MUCH! It was so observational and cinema verite in its very direct presentation of its subject matter and lack of overall narrative and yet it had so much cinematographic flourish, like really well conceived tracking shots and close-ups and thoughtful editing and it was so pretty and art-filmy and contemplative and just fun to watch and lull about in. This guy is so fucking great. I remember really liking Etre et Avoir but not like this.

Just finished The Battle of Chile for the first time. Not in one sitting. I found the structure somewhat odd--it's in three parts, and the third part doubles back and covers some of the same ground as the first part, though from a different angle; 10 minutes in, I was worried I'd accidentally watched the discs out of order--but an often hypnotic cascade of words, almost always from one person speechifying as others look on and listen. Hope to see it again in a theatre one day; really impressive.

I found the lead girl in Seventeen exceedingly annoying, so that interfered with all that was good about it. Great freeze-frame ending.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwX1Y-BGR58

the NYC Quad is having a Claude Lanzmann retro... anyone ever seen his first feature, Israel, Why (1973)? The only iMdB-linked reviews are in German.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069115/fullcredits/

https://quadcinema.com/film/israel-why/