An Impossible Job: ILX's 40 Favorite Documentaries

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).

I almost voted for hated as well

Oh and no apologies needed obv

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

o_0

oh boy

just ignore him

it's hard!

#26: Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985)

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/Shoah-two_opt.jpg

(30 points/2 votes)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=5W0WcZu9O74

Bravo

although on second thoughts a lot of that is so clearly staged, it has no place here. I find it hard to believe those guys are still walking around the camps so many years later and the camera crew just found them there

^^^ set up for a really edgy joke

That's the real #26--Brother's Keeper has moved up. As I'm sure everybody says when they mess up a countdown, I'm not sure how that happened--I'd acknowldged jjjusten' ballot when it came in. Anyway, most of jjjusten's votes were solitary, so it was as easy a fix as I could've hoped for in such a situation.

You can't find a Shoah clip on YouTube. Just the trailer, or the whole film in 59 parts.

I definitely enjoyed most of these, I think, aside from Spellbound and Brother's Keeper. Winged Migration is the one so far I haven't seen. Looks hard to get excited about, tbh.

Sad realization about what that means about the rest of my ballot slowly sinking in

d00d you're intense

Sorry to people who voted for them but IMO anvil was sorta bland who cares rock doc and inside job was just awful in every way

the Anvil doc barely made an impact on me, and I *like* '80s metal.

it's no 'night mail'

Man now I am also wishing I had 30 pointed my top 2 and gotten them in here - something tells me impaler isn't going to make it

voters should have seen at least 20 documentaries total.

I was kind of touched by Anvil. Not a big metal guy.

did you even vote Morbius?

I did, Tammy Tam Tam, and since Shoah is my #1, ah'm dreading the rest.

There are going to be about 10 decent eps of "Behind the Music" in this

I didn't vote, btw.

i considered a few metal docs, but i settled on... i guess we'll see if it places. i'm betting not

another opinion 4 u: talking about what is/isn't a documentary is pretty much the most boring insufferable thing ever. n.b. i got a year of that bullshit in school. IT DOES NOT MATTER, AT ALL.

dr morbius seriously? go fuck yourself

easy now

another opinion 4 u: talking about what is/isn't a documentary is pretty much the most boring insufferable thing ever. n.b. i got a year of that bullshit in school. IT DOES NOT MATTER, AT ALL.

ehhhh it kind of matters

I don't know why you make these crazy assumptions, Morbius.

Here's the list so far:

#40: Salesman (Albert Maysles/David Maysles/Charlotte Zwerin, 1968) -- 20 points/3 votes
#40: The Filth and the Fury (Julien Temple, 2000) -- 20 points/3 votes
#40: The Gleaners & I (Agnes Varda, 2000) -- 20 points/3 votes
#40: The Times of Harvey Milk (Rob Epstein, 1984) -- 20 points/3 votes
#39: Être et Avoir (Nicolas Philibert, 2002) -- 21 points/2 votes
#38: Inside Job (Charles Ferguson, 2010) -- 22 points/3 votes
#36: Gimme Shelter (Albert Maysles/David Maysles/Charlotte Zwerin, 1970) -- 24 points/3 votes
#36: Winged Migration (Jacques Perrin/Jacques Cluzaud, 2001) -- 24 points/3 votes
#34: Spellbound (Jeffrey Blitz, 2002) -- 25 points/2 votes
#34: The World at War (Hugh Raggett/John Pett/David Elstein/Ted Childs/Michael Darlow/Martin Smith, 1973/74) -- 25 points/2 votes
#33: Los Angeles Plays Itself (Thom Andersen, 2003) -- 26 points/2 votes
#32: Sherman's March (Ross McElwee, 1986) -- 25 points/4 votes
#31: Anvil! The Story of Anvil (Sacha Gervasi, 2008) -- 26 points/2 votes
#30: The Last Waltz (Martin Scorsese, 1978) -- 26 points/4 votes
#29: WR: Mysteries of the Organism (Dusan Makavejev, 1971) -- 27 points/2 votes
#28: The Fog of War (Errol Morris, 2003) -- 27 points/3 votes
#27: My Best Fiend (Werner Herzog, 1999) -- 29 points/3 votes
#26: Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985) -- 30 points/2 votes

Sorry (again!) for delivering preemptive bad news about your favourites, jjjusten.

I don't think that it does matter, but not in the way this fellow means it.

xp

jeez, I'm kinda semi-joking. If I'd included 'concert films' my list woulda changed. (Gimme Shelter is different)

xxxxp

it kind of matters bc there's a question of comparing like with like. i like 'the world at war', but it's a compilation of clips from various sources. that's absolutely unlike 'shoah', which in turn is absolutely unlike 'primary', which in turn is absolutely unlike 'north sea'...

Love Makavejev's The Switchboard Operator

a lot of movies are unlike other movies; i dont really understand the complaint

Morbs speaks the truth. Too loudly, but still ...

Yes ok but that's why I don't really get polls like this, much as I respect the efforts of everyone involved in voting and compiling it, it's nice to have stuff to talk about.

xxxp

Out of 40, already 9 are from the last 10 years, et al.

a lot of movies are unlike other movies; i dont really understand the complaint

― https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_i_qxQztHRI (Princess TamTam), Friday, August 12, 2011 6:38 PM (58 seconds ago) Bookmark

this is like doing a poll of 'books that aren't novels' or something.

No argument that there's no consistency as to how people interpreted the concept of "documentary," but would it be possible to set definitive guidelines that would please everyone? That's why I'd rather let voters decide, and, as it worked out, for a film to place in the top 40 at least two different people would have had to agree that it belonged.

As Alfred Hitchcock famously said, "It's just a poll."

no that seems fair enough.

xp

ok sorry dr m. i think what something claims to be and what it might/might not be matters a lot, but trying to slot things along the lines of documentary/not-documentary is a fool's game and can be misleading.

Love Makavejev's The Switchboard Operator

― xyzzzz__, Friday, 12 August 2011 18:37 (2 minutes ago)

yeah, lotta fun, immediate like the french '60s stuff. makes me feel i ought to be watching WR.

'is this a documentary' is not so much 'not important' as it is 'a really interesting referendum on cinema', imo, just a pretty challenging thing to define + discuss + consider. understand how a year of school can kill this joy for you though.

We never discussed this in my school, fwiw

Eric H.: surely you knew that there'd be a pronounced tilt towards stuff from the last 10-15 years. I plead guilty myself--as I said before, I didn't start watching documentaries regularly till the mid-'90s, and I imagine many people would be in the same boat. Because of Moore and Morris and Hoop Dreams and some other things, they just started to get a much higher profile around then.

h8 sherman's march