7.7
CRISIS: BEHIND A PRESIDENTIAL COMMITMENT provided filmmaker Robert Drew, his crew and his audience the rare opportunity to watch a President of the United States deal with a national crisis. In this case, the crisis of the title was the attempted integration of the University of Alabama by African-American students by the Kennedy Administration and the machinations of then Governor George Wallace to stop them.
7.7
Directed by Georges Franju • 1949 • France This 1949 documentary by Georges Franju looks at the brutal reality of Paris’s abattoirs, while employing a disarmingly beautiful visual style.
7.6
This radically influential portrait of American dreams and disillusionment from Direct Cinema pioneers David Maysles, Albert Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin captures, with indelible humanity, the worlds of four dogged door-to-door Bible salesmen as they travel from Boston to Florida on a seemingly futile quest to sell luxury editions of the Good Book to working-class Catholics. A vivid evocation of midcentury malaise that unfolds against a backdrop of cheap motels, smoky diners, and suburban living rooms, SALESMAN assumes poignant dimensions as it uncovers the way its subjects’ fast-talking bravado masks frustration, disappointment, and despair. Revolutionizing the art of nonfiction storytelling with its nonjudgmental, observational style, this landmark documentary is one of the most penetrating films ever made about how deeply embedded consumerism is in America’s sense of its own values.
7.6
Grave robbing, torture, possessed nuns, and a satanic Sabbath: Benjamin Christensen’s legendary silent film uses a series of dramatic vignettes to explore the scientific hypothesis that the witches of the Middle Ages and early modern era suffered from the same ills as psychiatric patients diagnosed with hysteria in the film's own time. Far from a dry dissertation on the topic, the film itself is a witches’ brew of the scary, the gross, and the darkly humorous. Christensen’s mix-and-match approach to genre anticipates gothic horror, documentary re-creation, and the essay film, making for an experience unlike anything else in the history of cinema.
7.6
The latest from acclaimed Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho (BACURAU, AQUARIUS) is a multidimensional journey across time, sound, architecture, and filmmaking that explores the rich, complicated history of the filmmaker’s home city of Recife—the coastal capital of the state of Pernambuco—through the great movie theaters that served as spaces of conviviality during the twentieth century. Paeans to dreams and progress, these temples of cinema have also come to reflect major shifts in Brazilian society and politics. Combining archival documentary, mystery, film clips, and personal memories, PICTURES OF GHOSTS is a map of a city through the lens of cinema, offering a delightful tour in the company of a master storyteller.
7.5
Meet Big and Little Edie Beale: mother and daughter, high-society dropouts, and reclusive relatives of Jackie Onassis. The two manage to thrive together amid the decay and disorder of their East Hampton, New York, mansion, making for an eerily ramshackle echo of the American Camelot. An impossibly intimate portrait, this 1976 documentary by Albert and David Maysles, codirected by Ellen Hovde and Muffie Meyer, quickly became a cult classic and established Little Edie as a fashion icon and philosopher queen.
7.6
Traveling from the streets of Havana to the stage of Carnegie Hall, this revelatory documentary captures a forgotten generation of Cuba’s brightest musical talents as they enjoy an unexpected encounter with world fame. The veteran vocalists and instrumentalists collaborated with American guitarist and roots-music champion Ry Cooder to form the Buena Vista Social Club, playing a jazz-inflected mix of cha-cha, mambo, bolero, and other traditional Latin American styles, and recording an album that won a Grammy and made them an international phenomenon. In the wake of this success, director Wim Wenders filmed the ensemble’s members—including golden-voiced Ibrahim Ferrer and piano virtuoso Rubén González—in a series of illuminating interviews and live performances. The result is one of the most beloved documentaries of the 1990s, and an infectious ode to a neglected corner of Cuba’s prerevolutionary heritage.
7.6
What if you could morph your car into a mobile work of art and drive it down the road for all to see? What would it look like? What would the world think of you? How would you be changed? AUTOMORPHOSIS looks into the minds and hearts of a delightful collection of eccentrics, visionaries, and just plain folks who have transformed their autos into artworks. On a humorous and touching journey, we discover what drives the creative process for these unconventional characters. And in the end, we find that an art car has the power to change us and to alter our view of our increasingly homogeneous world.
7.6
Though it was never officially called a “war,” the French-Algerian conflict that spanned 1954 to 1962 had a profound effect on both countries and those who fought in it. In this epic documentary, director Bertrand Tavernier sheds light on this chapter of history through interviews with dozens of French conscripts and survivors, who speak with candor about their role in perpetuating colonial oppression. The result is a vital and probing work of historical remembering that refuses to look away from the traumas of the past.
7.6
A lost-and-found revelation from indie film and TV maverick Jan Oxenberg is a docu-fantasy narrative focused on the filmmaker’s hilarious, messy, Jewish family as they prepare to say goodbye to someone they love. Narrated by a cardboard cutout of Oxenberg’s scowling child self, THANK YOU AND GOOD NIGHT takes us on a journey through the proceedings, attempting to defeat death and never say goodbye. An early Sundance hit but virtually unseen for decades, the film reemerges as a singular, uncategorizable exploration of the meaning of life, death, and the tangled stuff that is a family. In this poignant, hilarious, and complex reflection on letting go, Oxenberg innovatively transforms personal tragedy into universally resonant art that is now claiming its rightful place as a classic of independent cinema.
7.6
Mark Lewis takes the nature documentary into new realms of the humorous, surreal, and downright bizarre with this stranger-than-fiction tale of the ultimate environmental self-own. The cane toad—Bufo marinus, a species native to Central America—was imported by the sack-load to Australia in 1935 in an attempt to rid the country of the greyback beetle, which was rapidly destroying the sugarcane crop. The toads adapted beautifully to their new surroundings. Problem was, the beetle could fly and they couldn’t. What the cane toad is unusually proficient at, however, is making more cane toads—thousands upon thousands more. CANE TOADS: AN UNNATURAL HISTORY tells the wild story of this amphibious assault—warts and all.
7.6
CRUMB director Terry Zwigoff’s first film is a true treat: a documentary about the obscure country-blues musician and idiosyncratic visual artist Howard “Louie Bluie” Armstrong, member of the last known black string band in America. As beguiling a raconteur as he is a performer, Louie makes for a wildly entertaining movie subject, and Zwigoff honors him with an unsentimental but endlessly affectionate tribute. Full of infectious music and comedy, LOUIE BLUIE is a humane evocation of the kind of pop-cultural marginalia that Zwigoff would continue to excavate in the coming years.
7.6
One of the most acclaimed music documentaries of all time is a joyous, funny, deeply emotional ode to gospel music and African American culture. Featuring the father of gospel, Thomas A. Dorsey; its matron, Willie Mae Ford Smith; and earth-shaking performances by the Barrett Sisters and the O’Neal Twins, SAY AMEN, SOMEBODY is a uniquely uplifting experience made with the same soulfulness and passion as the music it celebrates.
7.5
This riveting, unflinching, and hard-core documentary adeptly captures the spirit of a major cultural phenomenon and features performances by X, Circle Jerks, Black Flag, Catholic Discipline, Germs, and Alice Bag Band. Breaking down barriers of expression and social mores, these Los Angeles punks opposed everything, giving birth to an antiestablishment view of the world that permeates today’s music, politics, social attitudes, styles, and trends. Spheeris’s film documents their deliberate reaction to the mass commercialism of music. Still burgeoning at the time, many of the punk bands first seen here have since become legendary.
7.6
In one of his most personal works, Martin Scorsese sits down with his parents, Catherine and Charles, in their New York apartment for a free-flowing discussion that touches on family history, the immigrant experience, and the meaning of Italian American identity.
7.6
Spending most of her days at home following the birth of her son but curious as ever about the people and places that surrounded her, Agnès Varda found inspiration for DAGUERRÉOTYPES just outside her door: on Paris’s rue Daguerre, where she had lived and worked since the 1950s. The director turns her camera on the business owners whose shops are the street’s lifeblood: bakers, tailors, butchers, perfumers, music-store clerks, driving instructors, and others, who, between the everyday rituals of their work, talk of their lives, relationships, and dreams. Blending her photographer’s eye for still portraiture with her filmmaker’s gift for finding visual rhymes and resonances between images, Varda reveals the rich social fabric of an entire world—all without leaving her block.
7.6
In the late 1960s, the region of Dhofar in Oman rose up against the British-backed Sultanate in a democratic, Leninist guerrilla revolution. Director Heiny Srour and her team crossed five hundred miles of desert and mountains by foot, under bombardment by the British Royal Air Force, to reach the conflict zone and capture this rare record of an anticolonial war in which women played a central role.
7.6
An early documentary to portray the experiences of disabled people with compassion and complexity, Kazuo Hara’s searing debut is also one of the most unflinching films ever made about what it means to be an outsider. Produced in collaboration with the Green Lawn—a group of activists with cerebral palsy who work to raise awareness of the condition—GOODBYE CP blends jagged, shot-on-the-fly footage of the members’ seemingly Sisyphean struggle to take their message to the streets with raw, sometimes confrontational interviews in which they reveal the torment of living in a society cruelly indifferent to their existence. In making his subjects active participants in the film’s creation—a practice he would continue throughout his career—Hara powerfully asserts the humanity and agency of those who have long been denied both.
7.6
For his enthralling first feature, Allan King took his cameras to a home for emotionally disturbed young people. Situated inside the facility like a fly on the wall, we witness the full spectrum of emotions displayed by twelve fascinating children and the caregivers trying to nurture and guide them. The stunning WARRENDALE won the Prix d'art et d'essai at Cannes and a special documentary award from the National Society of Film Critics.
7.6
Made for Italian television, this powerful documentary by iconoclastic auteur Liliana Cavani profiles a number of women who participated in the Italian Resistance and survived the German invasion of Italy during World War II. Cited by Cavani as the inspiration for her controversial international breakthrough THE NIGHT PORTER, WOMEN OF THE RESISTANCE is a both an inspiring ode to the courage of the everyday heroines who fought back against fascism and a harrowing exploration of the desperate extremes to which war drives all involved.
7.6
A work of such overwhelming grandeur that Jean Renoir told director Margot Benacerraf after viewing the film, “Above all . . . don’t cut a single image,” this poetic documentary-narrative hybrid is a landmark of both neorealist and feminist South American cinema. For five hundred years, the Araya peninsula in northeastern Venezuela has been mined for its salt. Through images of breathtaking beauty, Benacerraf captures the everyday lives of three families and their back-breaking work in the salt marshes, exquisitely preserving an embattled but tenacious way of life.
7.6
In 1955, Henri-Georges Clouzot joined forces with his friend Pablo Picasso to make an entirely new kind of art film, “a film that could capture the moment and the mystery of creativity.” Together, they devised an innovative technique: the filmmaker placed his camera behind a semitransparent surface on which the artist drew with special inks that bled through. Clouzot thus captured a perfect reverse image of Picasso’s brushstrokes, turning the motion-picture screen into the artist’s canvas. Here, the master creates, and sometimes obliterates, twenty works (most of them, in fact, destroyed after the shoot), ranging from playful black-and-white sketches to vivid color murals. Exhilarating, mesmerizing, enchanting, and unforgettable, THE MYSTERY OF PICASSO is simply one of the greatest documentaries on art ever made.
7.5
Few films can claim as much influence on the course of cinema history as CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER. The fascinating result of a collaboration between filmmaker-anthropologist Jean Rouch and sociologist Edgar Morin, this vanguard work of what Morin termed cinéma- vérité is a brilliantly conceived and realized sociopolitical diagnosis of the early sixties in France. Simply by interviewing a group of Paris residents in the summer of 1960—beginning with the provocative and eternal question “Are you happy?” and expanding to political issues, including the ongoing Algerian War—Rouch and Morin reveal the hopes and dreams of a wide array of people, from artists to factory workers, from an Italian émigré to an African student. CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER’s penetrative approach gives us a document of a time and place with extraordinary emotional depth.
7.4
Restored by the Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata in association with Ciné-Tamaris and The Film Foundation. Restoration funding provided by the Annenberg Foundation, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and The Film Foundation.
