7.9
UMBRELLAS takes a poignant, in-depth look at the concept and realization of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s project “Umbrellas.” The film presents the artists at their most triumphant and most vulnerable moments—from the exaltation of the project’s opening day through unexpected tragedies at the end.
7.9
For nearly five years, acclaimed German filmmaker Werner Herzog desperately tried to complete one of the most ambitious and difficult films of his career, FITZCARRALDO, the story of one man’s attempt to build an opera house deep in the Amazon jungle. Documentary filmmaker Les Blank captured the unfolding of this production, made more perilous by Herzog’s determination to shoot the most daunting scenes without models or special effects, including a sequence requiring hundreds of native Indians to pull a full-size, 320-ton steamship over a small mountain. The result is an extraordinary document of the filmmaking process and a unique look into the single-minded mission of one of cinema’s most fearless directors.
7.9
Redding, a venerable star of Memphis’s Stax record label, seduced the "love crowd" in one of his best, and last, performances. SHAKE! OTIS AT MONTEREY, feature the entire set of this legendary musician, a performance that has entered rock-and-roll mythology.
7.9
Bob Dylan is captured on-screen as he never would be again in this groundbreaking film from D. A. Pennebaker. The legendary documentarian finds Dylan in England during his 1965 tour, which would be his last as an acoustic artist. In this wildly entertaining vision of one of the twentieth century’s greatest artists, Dylan is surrounded by teen fans, gets into heated philosophical jousts with journalists, and kicks back with fellow musicians Joan Baez, Donovan, and Alan Price. Featuring some of Dylan’s most famous songs, including “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” DONT LOOK BACK is a radically conceived portrait of an American icon that has influenced decades of vérité behind-the-scenes documentaries.
7.9
On a beautiful June weekend in 1967, at the beginning of the Summer of Love, the Monterey International Pop Festival roared forward, capturing a decade’s spirit and ushering in a new era of rock and roll. Monterey featured career-making performances by Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Otis Redding, but they were just a few of the performers in a wildly diverse lineup that included Simon and Garfunkel, the Mamas and the Papas, the Who, the Byrds, Hugh Masekela, and the extraordinary Ravi Shankar. With his characteristic vérité style—and a camera crew that included the likes of Albert Maysles and Richard Leacock—D. A. Pennebaker captured it all, immortalizing moments that have become legend: Pete Townshend smashing his guitar, Jimi Hendrix burning his, Mama Cass watching Janis Joplin’s performance in awe.
7.7
Agnès Varda’s extraordinary late-career renaissance began with this wonderfully idiosyncratic, self-reflexive documentary in which the French cinema icon explores the world of modern-day gleaners: those living on the margins who survive by foraging for what society throws away. Embracing the intimacy and freedom of digital filmmaking, Varda posits herself as a kind of gleaner of images and ideas, one whose generous, expansive vision makes room for ruminations on everything from aging to the birth of cinema to the beauty of heart-shaped potatoes. By turns playful, philosophical, and subtly political, THE GLEANERS AND I is a warmly human reflection on the contradictions of our consumerist world from an artist who, like her subjects, finds unexpected richness where few think to look.
7.7
Chris Marker, filmmaker, poet, novelist, photographer, editor, and now videographer and digital multimedia artist, has been challenging moviegoers, philosophers, and himself for years with his complex queries about time, memory, and the rapid advancement of life on this planet. SANS SOLEIL is his mind-bending free-form travelogue that journeys from Africa to Japan.
7.8
Timely, intimate, and deeply empathetic, OUR BODY observes the everyday operations of the gynecological ward in a public hospital in Paris. In the process, veteran documentarian Claire Simon questions what it means to live in a woman’s body, filming the diversity, singularity, and beauty of patients at all stages of life. We see cancer screenings and fertility appointments, a teenager dealing with an unwanted pregnancy, a trans woman considering the beginnings of menopause. The specific fears, desires, and struggles of these individuals illuminate the health challenges we all face—even, as it comes to pass, the filmmaker herself.
7.8
The final film from the late, beloved Agnès Varda is a characteristically playful, profound, and personal summation of the director’s own brilliant career. At once impish and wise, Varda acts as our spirit guide on a free-associative tour through her six-decade artistic journey, shedding new light on her films, photography, and recent installation works while offering her one-of-a-kind reflections on everything from filmmaking to feminism to aging. Suffused with the people, places, and things she loved—Jacques Demy, cats, colors, beaches, heart-shaped potatoes—the wonderfully idiosyncratic work of imaginative autobiography VARDA BY AGNÈS is a warmly human, touchingly bittersweet parting gift from one of cinema’s most luminous talents.
7.7
Drawing on the Arab tradition of “The Thousand and One Nights,” LEILA AND THE WOLVES combines fictional drama, archival footage, fantasy sequences, mosaic pattern, and more to counter the colonial, male-dominated version of history. Leila (Nabila Zeitouni), a Lebanese woman living in London, travels across time and space to explore the collective memory of Arab women in Palestine and Lebanon and their hidden roles in historical events.
7.8
Italian-cinema icon Marcello Mastroianni starred in more than a hundred films over the course of his astonishing, half-century career, though he will perhaps always be best remembered for the six masterpieces he made with Federico Fellini, who cast the actor as his on-screen alter ego in international sensations like LA DOLCE VITA and 8½. In this sprawling documentary directed by Mastroianni’s longtime partner Anna Maria Tatò, the actor tells the story of his life with philosophical humility and sly wit, offering candid insight into the man behind the dashing image.
7.8
In Abbas Kiarostami’s second documentary feature about education, the filmmaker himself asks the questions, probing a succession of invariably cute first- and second-graders about their home situations and the schoolwork they must do there. It emerges that many parents are illiterate. Tellingly, many kids can define punishment (the corporal variety seems common) but not encouragement.
7.8
Les Blank returned time again to the world of Louisiana’s Cajun and Creole communities, and this exuberant documentary may be his definitive account of the history of Cajun and Zydeco music. Tracing the origins of the style and its enduring vitality through renowned musicians like Michael Doucet and BeauSoleil, Clifton Chenier, Marc and Ann Savoy, D. L. Menard, and others, I WENT TO THE DANCE is a bighearted tribute to a singular subculture and the people who keep its traditions alive.
7.7
Trickery. Deceit. Magic. In F FOR FAKE, a free-form sort-of documentary by Orson Welles, the legendary filmmaker (and self-described charlatan) gleefully reengages with the central preoccupation of his career: the tenuous lines between illusion and truth, art and lies. Beginning with portraits of the world-renowned art forger Elmyr de Hory and his equally devious biographer, Clifford Irving, Welles embarks on a dizzying journey that simultaneously exposes and revels in fakery and fakers of all stripes, not the least of whom is Welles himself. Charming and inventive, F FOR FAKE is an inspired prank and a clever examination of the essential duplicity of cinema.
7.8
Called the greatest rock film ever made, this landmark documentary follows the Rolling Stones on their notorious 1969 U.S. tour. When three hundred thousand members of the Love Generation collided with a few dozen Hells Angels at San Francisco’s Altamont Speedway, Direct Cinema pioneers David and Albert Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin were there to immortalize on film the bloody slash that transformed a decade’s dreams into disillusionment.
7.8
The only film directed by trailblazing feminist Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad finds unexpected grace where few would think to look: a leper colony whose inhabitants live, worship, learn, play, and celebrate in a self-contained community cut off from the rest of the world. Through ruminative voiceover narration drawn from the Old Testament, the Koran, and the filmmaker’s own poetry and unflinching images that refuse to look away from physical difference, Farrokhzad creates a profoundly empathetic portrait of those cast off by society—a face-to-face encounter with the humanity behind the disease. A key forerunner of the Iranian New Wave, THE HOUSE IS BLACK is a triumph of transcendent lyricism from a visionary artist whose influence is only beginning to be fully appreciated.
7.8
A spectacle of magnificent proportions and remarkable intimacy, Kon Ichikawa’s TOKYO OLYMPIAD remains one of the greatest films ever made about sports. Supervising a vast team of technicians using scores of cameras, Ichikawa captured the 1964 Summer Games in Tokyo in glorious widescreen images, using cutting-edge telephoto lenses and exquisite slow motion to create lyrical, idiosyncratic poetry from the athletic drama surging all around him. Drawn equally to the psychology of losers and winners—including the legendary Ethiopian marathoner Abebe Bikila, who receives the film’s most exalted tribute—Ichikawa captures the triumph, passion, and suffering of competition with a singular humanistic vision, and in doing so effected a transformative influence on the art of documentary filmmaking.
7.8
The year is 1961 and Ingmar Bergman is making a movie. While planted on the scene as apprentice to Bergman, Vilgot Sjöman (director, I AM CURIOUS–YELLOW, 1967), and a crew from Swedish Television begin to capture what would become a comprehensive five-part documentary on the making of WINTER LIGHT.
7.7
The Nazi persecution of homosexuals may be one of the least-told stories of the Third Reich. Directed by Oscar winners Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, PARAGRAPH 175 fills a crucial gap in the historical record, and reveals the lasting consequences of this hidden chapter of twentieth-century history. These are stories of survivors—sometimes bitter, but just as often filled with irony and humor; tortured by their memories, yet infused with a powerful will to endure. Their moving testimonies, rendered with evocative images of their lives and times, tell a haunting, compelling story of human resistance. Intimate in its portrayals, sweeping in its implications, PARAGRAPH 175 raises provocative questions about memory, history, and identity.
7.7
Newly restored, this elegiac concert documentary captures the extraordinary 1990 reunion of estranged Velvet Underground bandmates Lou Reed and John Cale. The occasion for this landmark event was a live performance of their album “Songs for Drella,” a wry and wrenching tribute to their recently deceased former manager Andy Warhol (the nickname, Drella, a portmanteau of Dracula and Cinderella, hints at the complex feelings the two men held for the artist, who exerted a Svengali-like influence over their early careers). Filmed with evocative austerity by renowned cinematographer Ed Lachman (THE VIRGIN SUICIDES, CAROL), SONGS FOR DRELLA is both a mesmerizing musical experience and a haunting reflection on memory, loss, regret, and the search for solace.
7.7
Written and directed by George Stevens Jr., GEORGE STEVENS: A FILMMAKER’S JOURNEY is a moving portrait of the life and work of one of the greatest Hollywood filmmakers of the twentieth century. From SWING TIME and GUNGA DIN to SHANE and GIANT, George Stevens helped shape American cinema. This 1984 documentary includes interviews with filmmakers Frank Capra and John Huston, actors Cary Grant and Spencer Tracy, and many others.
7.7
Director Bud Greenspan, whose career covering sporting events had begun some twenty years earlier, seized the opportunity to helm the official film of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics with such gusto that he would become the IOC's go-to person for Olympic movies. And this 284-minute record of the 1984 Games set the tone for his nine Olympic films to come. 16 DAYS OF GLORY is audacious and fresh and springs from a fascination with the energy and ambition that drive the finest athletes.
7.7
Director Larisa Shepitko’s husband, Elem Klimov, made this short documentary a year after the death of his wife in 1979. Using footage from her films, including the last image she ever recorded, as well as voice recordings and photos, Klimov’s film is a loving tribute to his wife’s life and work.
7.7
Les Blank creates a vivid portrait of bluesman Lightin’ Hopkins through a vital collection of musical performances and oral histories.
