When Pina and I planned the film together, we had a couple of ground rules: no explanations, no interviews, no biographies. We wanted the work to speak for itself. She hated explaining her movement; she hated interpreting it. How to Watch: Stream on iTunes. An inimitable figure in her lifetime—and a point of reference for series like The Marvelous Mrs.
The film is primarily made up of archival footage, which effectively puts the viewer in the passenger seat as it demonstrates the thrills and dangers of the sport: Senna witnesses the chilling death of a fellow driver only the day before his own fatal crash, and lobbies heartbreakingly for better driver safety. Cutler spends months behind the scenes at Vogue , going to Fashion Weeks both foreign and domestic, tagging along on shoots and reshoots, and popping in to closed-door staff meetings, bearing witness to the arduous, entertaining, and occasionally emotionally demanding process that goes in to making an iconic publication.
In this animated documentary, Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman struggles to make sense of his experience as a soldier in the Lebanon war. The failures speak for themselves. Werner Herzog pieced together recovered snippets of more than hours of video shot by a former actor named Timothy Treadwell—who spent 13 summers living among wild grizzly bears in Alaska before he and his girlfriend were eaten by one of them in —to make the astounding, seminal, and critically lauded Grizzly Man.
Directors Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky of the Paradise Lost documentaries, which chronicle the lives of the wrongfully convicted West Memphis Three as they fight to be released from prison had used Metallica music in their films. The A. The film eventually led to one of the biggest food companies in the world changing their policies.
Hard to get more influential than that. In , in Great Neck, Long Island, Arnold Friedman, a retired schoolteacher in his 50s, and his youngest son, Jesse, then 18, were arrested and charged with committing repeated acts of sexual abuse on boys who attended the computer classes they taught in their basement. The final and saddest is delivered by Mr. He poses questions that still haunt this country nearly two decades later , like: Why is America addicted to guns?
What role does the media play? And why are we so content to live our lives in fear? Director Jeff Blitz takes on the National Spelling Bee in a fascinating portrait of a group of young people and their families, in which a peculiar, anachronistic word-obsessed subculture becomes a window into contemporary American society.
How to Watch: Stream on Criterion Channel. Varda, who pulls the treasures out of the stories around her as she reflects on her own mortality and the nature of her art, is a gleaner, too. The film was nominated for an Academy Award for its heartfelt, exuberant celebration of a culture and country that had been isolated from America for decades. If you know the music of the band, this is the backstory of how the Social Club became megastars all over the world.
Acclaimed documentary filmmaker Errol Morris was working as a private detective when he began investigating a prosecution psychiatrist named Dr. Hidden motives, withheld data, and questionable interpretations of the facts are everywhere, and each interview invariably creates more questions than it answers.
Originally intended to be a minute short film for PBS, Hoop Dreams instead became something much more than that: a rumination on ambition, competition, race, and class in contemporary American society that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the audience award for best documentary. It takes us, shakes us, and make us think in new ways about the world around us. It gives us the impression of having touched life itself. Filmmakers D. George Stephanopoulos and James Carville dealing with unforeseen problems and negative press, as their candidate is saddled with accusations of adultery and draft-dodging.
The true focus of this watchful, frankly admiring film is the Clinton campaign staff, with James Carville and George Stephanopoulos. Cue Madonna. The film takes its subject seriously, and the result is a tender, in-depth look at a subculture that is structured as a series of contrasts between dreams and reality, pretending and being—and which continues to resonate today.
It is one of the noblest films ever made. For nearly five years, the acclaimed German filmmaker Werner Herzog desperately tried to complete one of the most ambitious and difficult films of his career: Fitzcarraldo , the story of a man determined to build an opera house in the jungle and drag a riverboat through the rain forest, from one river system to another, in order to do it.
The production, shot on location deep within the rain forests of South America, was beset with problems seemingly from inception. Two of its stars left early: Mick Jagger, for a concert tour; Jason Robards, rushed to New York with amoebic dysentery and forbidden by his doctors to return, necessitating his replacement with Klaus Kinski. Due to the influence of television, documentary filmmaking developed into two distinct directions — creative theatrical documentaries versus factual television documentaries.
To avoid any misunderstanding, it is important to point out that while factual television documentaries can be very creative, due to the constraints imposed by television and its audience, they tend to be more informative and current affair-oriented. Filmmakers interested in releasing their documentary theatrically were able to go all out and choose any style or approach they desired. One of the best examples is Koyaanisqatsi.
This type of documentary which would be unthinkable on television. In the first decade of the millenium, the distribution channels stayed more or less the same. However, the instroduction of non-linear editing and relatively cheap and lightweight recording equipment made a huge impact on the style of documentary filmmaking.
Non-linear editing software gave editors complete freedom in arranging material, and looking for that perfect match between plot structure, sound and image. It resulted in films with scenes and sequences that resonate with the senses, much like commercials or music videos.
The best example is the widely-acclaimed Swedish documentary, Surplus , terrorized into being consumers As the title suggests, the film centers around an in-depth interview with Robert McNamara. It is a fascinating and stylish film that intelligently mixes interview fragments with archived footage, underscored by Philip Glass music, into a nearly two-hour timepiece of the Vietnam era. The low-budget documentary, We Will Be Happy one Day , perfectly shows the impact of lightweight digital cameras on documentary filmmaking.
The film failed to get the recogmition it deserved. Yet, with little doubt it is one of the best documentaries ever made.
It is a character-driven documentary comedy which is by far the most difficult style to execute in documentary filmmaking. The director must be fully aware of its charaters predicaments within their environment in order to translate that awareness into a comic dramatic plot that can sustain the length of the documentary.
The story is set in the poverty-stricken Lipiny quarter in Katowice, Poland. It turns out not to be as sad as it seems in the beginning. Daniel, the main character, dreams about making his own film. He wanders about with his mobile phone, recording his neighbors, and organizing a real casting for his production. His loving and devoted granny waits for him at home, ready to order him around and hinder his film career.
Behind the scenes, Director Pawel Wysoczanski helps Daniel organize his own story into an comically-engaging plot of how poverty smothers ambition, using the intimacy of mobile phone recording. This level of intimacy in We Will Be Happy One Day could never have been achieved without the use of a mobile phone and other lightweight video equipment.
Despite the existence of quality internet streaming since , neither YouTube, Vimeo, Netflix, or any of the other VOD-services have made any significant impact on documentary distribution.
As with the disruption in the music business that iTunes delivered, the documentary business is still waiting for that affect.
Perhaps the recent COVID pandemic will bring about a change by off-setting theatrical distribution and festival markets, but that remains to be seen. Through pre-sale constructions, TV-channels and theatrical distributors are often involved in the production of a documentary together with local or transnational funds. In fact, the internet and VOD are potentially threatening to documentary theatrical distributors and TV-channels because they undermine their right to exist.
To improve this impact and outreach of the documentary genre, Netflix and Amazon found it wiser to self-produce or engage directly with a documentary producer.
It is a very interesting development to see producers and VOD-services team up to create documentaries intended for the internet. DocsOnline is excited to see where this goes.
In fact, it is more than a profession — it is a mental state committed to the richness and ambiguity of life as it really is. Demolition of a wall. Arrival of a train at La Ciotat. Boat leaving the port. Read More. Man With A Movie Camera. Nanook of the North. The River. Land Without Bread. Triumph of the Will. The Battle of China. War comes to America.
Divide and Conquer. Sign up for our exclusive 7-day crash course and learn step-by-step how to make a documentary from idea to completed movie! Learn More. Return Home. Low-Budget Documentary Gear. Ulanzi Smartphone Rig. What People Are Saying.
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