An Impossible Job: ILX's 40 Favorite Documentaries

what's Harlan County about? never heard of it, but it's clearly crazy popular.

attempts at strike busting in a mining community. at one point one of the bosses' hired goons is caught shooting at strikers on film

the subtitle track on Grin (as far as I saw) only translated the other languages into French. It didn't subtitle the English narration. I might not have seen the "For the hearing impaired" option though. xposts

french narration, english subtitles wld be my preference based on sans soleil

my local cinema showed grin during a marker season but i was a fuckin ass and didn't go

no one repping for Hearts Of Darkness? kinda surprising.

hahaha it's really interesting if you like apocalypse now a lot, which i do, but it's all like "and we realized this was our own vietnam" no fuck off really

I checked back, and Hearts of Darkness only got one vote--that surprised me. One thing I forgot to mention in either this thread or the voting thread was Cinemania. Not great, but worth seeing if you spend way too much time at the movies.

*whistles innocently*

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2011/09/morgan-spurlock-documentaries.html

I think Brody would look more favorably upon the ILX results. (Another "Before You Die" construction, just like all the song polls going on. These people are really out to scare you.)

LOL, Shoah isn't even on the Spurlock list?

(Spurlock's full list)

50. Spellbound (2002)
49. Truth or Dare (1991)
48. The Kid Stays in the Picture (2002)
47. One Day in September (1999)
46. Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1998)
45. The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years (1988)
44. Burma VJ (2008)
43. When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006)
42. Catfish (2010)
41. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (2007)
40. When We Were Kings (1996)
39. Biggie & Tupac (2002)
38. March of the Penguins (2005)
37. Inside Job (2010)
36. Taxi to the Dark Side (2007)
35. Paragraph 175 (2000)
34. Brother’s Keeper (1992)
33. Tongues Untied (1989)
32. Dogtown and Z-Boys (2001)
31. Jesus Camp (2006)
30. Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004)
29. Man on Wire (2008)
28. Gasland (2010)
27. Tarnation (2003)
26. Murderball (2005)
25. Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005)
24. Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills (1996)
23. The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2000)
22. Shut Up & Sing (2006)
21. Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010)
20. Capturing the Friedmans (2003)
19. Touching the Void (2003)
18. Food, Inc. (2008)
17. Street Fight (2005)
16. Bus 174 (2002)
15. Crumb (1994)
14. Dark Days (2000)
13. The Fog of War (2003)
12. Bowling for Columbine (2002)
11. Paris Is Burning (1991)
10. Grizzly Man (2005)
9. Trouble the Water (2008)
8. An Inconvenient Truth (2006)
7. The Celluloid Closet (1995)
6. The War Room (1993)
5. Supersize Me (2004)
4. Waltz With Bashir (2008)
3. Roger & Me (1989)
2. The Thin Blue Line (1988)
1. Hoop Dreams (1994)

5. Supersize Me (2004)

classy

One spectator asked Costa whether the film was fiction or documentary, and before Costa could answer, Straub, with his impulsive bluntness, declared, “Documentary! What kind of a word is that, ‘documentary’!? What does a film have to do with documents? Who uses documents? The police!"

that's awesome, now I want to see all Straub-Huillet.

The problem with Spurlock’s list goes beyond the narrowness of his temporal and geographical range. Many of the films on his list are of interest for their subjects, and their subjects alone, which are captured in cinematically bland or unconsidered ways.

Morgan Spurlock, honorary ILXor

lol @ straub

C'mon, Morbius, we went over this last time--fully half of your 20 made the ILX list. That's a pretty good percentage.

spurlock's list was designed to cover the last 25 years only.

haha lol. i agreed with a bunch of brody's picks but that's sorta pertinent.

A good question would be WHY cover the last 25 years only? I assume it's like when ESPN puts up graphics of baseball records "since 1990" -- bcz old stuff is just boring.

The problem with Spurlock’s list goes beyond the narrowness of his temporal and geographical range. Many of the films on his list are of interest for their subjects, and their subjects alone, which are captured in cinematically bland or unconsidered ways.

Morgan Spurlock, honorary ILXor

― incredibly middlebrow (Dr Morbius)

Morbs you voted the Shoah #1, which is about as uncinematic as you can get.

A good question would be WHY cover the last 25 years only?

The reason he gives is that they've been more commercially successful:
http://youtu.be/t1M2Elfa_cI?t=45s

not a brilliant reason. nor even that verifiable. bet 'nanook' did bigger numbers than most of the ones he names,

people don't like old shit, which is shit, but hey this is a list for plebs who have probably watched 3 documentaries in their lifetimes so let 'em get started with Hoop Dreams or something because it can't do no harm.

maybe there's an army of kids who'll be like, oh word? formerly relevant gimmick-doc hero morgan spurlock voted this the 22nd best documentary of the last quarter-century?

motherfucker just super-sized my interest in the moving dramas of the everyday

lol

abanana, sorry, make your own Holocaust doc w/ tons of fast cutting

let 'em get started with Hoop Dreams or something because it can't do no harm

To me this is the key (although I'm not sure that's the best film to illustrate your point--Hoop Dreams is pretty great by almost any barometer). I just take Spurlock's list to be a general-interest introduction for people who have probably seen a Moore or two and nothing else. And that's good. That's the way I use lists, always hoping to discover something I didn't know about. Just from all the ILX votes that came in, so far I've watched three things I didn't know about: Street Smart, A Grin Without a Cat, and Lake of Fire. I plan to work my way through some others. Maybe someone else would complain that I should have known about them already, and furthermore should have seen them already, but so what. People who start investigating Spurlock's list will sooner or later find their way to Shoah and Harlan County. (Having said that, I've never had any desire to see Super Size Me.)

No Hoop Dreams or Steve James thread that I could find...Saw him give the best Q&A I've ever seen after Hoop Dreams tonight--what a storyteller. Didn't know that both Bo (Arthur's father) and Curtis (William's brother) were murdered--Curtis on 9/11/2001, no less.

Dr. Morbius actually says I few things on this thread that I almost kinda sorta consider the vague possibility of agreeing with

it's not exactly "OTM" but it's progress

"Ok, bye thread"? That was my favourite.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlvRFfoSk1U

really gritty docu by paul schrader's brother, lenny

I saw Sherman's March for the first time this afternoon--part of "the Essentials" at our new theatre. I didn't love it, but it'll stay with me. I started to find McElwee's passivity tiresome very early on, and by the time he's pestering the last woman, he's flat-out annoying. (That he realizes he's annoying doesn't make him any less annoying.) The women were all interesting, though, most of all one he wasn't after, Charleen. How significant was this? I know there are lots of experimental/essay-type documentaries that predate it, but was there an earlier feature documentary (with some limited first-run release, as I remember it) so subjective/confessional? I don't know.

Favorite line: "My interest in linguistics continues to grow."

crazy that this was morbs's last poll

lmao

I've clicked on a couple of titles, and this appears to be exactly what it says: 400 documentaries, many well known, you can watch online (via nice clean Vimeo transfers).

http://www.filmsforaction.org/walloffilms/

wallofilmgina

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