7.1
Deceptively simple in form and content, Jean Eustache’s A DIRTY STORY is a fascinatingly complex investigation of the relationship between fiction and documentary, verbal and visual storytelling, and personal and universal desires. The film’s two sections mirror each other: in the first, Michael Lonsdale performs the role of a man explaining to a roomful of friends his past voyeuristic obsessions, while the second section shows an unscripted recording of Jean-Noël Picq, the man Lonsdale plays, recounting the same real-life tale. Eustache presents dramatic and authentic versions of the “dirty story” without authorial commentary and thus encourages the viewer to untangle a web of structural correspondences between the narrations, as well as the sexual and moral implications of Picq’s candid confession.
5.7
For their short film on the XIII Olympic Winter Games Lake Placid 1980, directors Drummond Challis and Tony Maylam assumed the challenge of making a documentary without any offscreen commentary, relying on music to sustain the flow of images.
7.2
Featuring enlightening interviews with Angela Davis, June Jordan, and Alice Walker, this essential documentary is an exuberant celebration of Black American women and their achievements. Within the context of the civil rights, Black power, feminist, and LGBT movements, the trio reassess how women such as Rosa Parks and Fannie Lou Hamer revolutionized American society and the world. Featuring the music of Prince, Janet Jackson, the Neville Brothers, and the Staple Singers, A PLACE OF RAGE illuminates a stirring moment in American history from the perspective of those on the forefront of social change.
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.
7.4
Christo and Jeanne Claude's first grand-scale urban project, wrapping the oldest bridge in Paris - the same bridge where Christo courted Jeanne-Claude. A love story set in the heart of Paris: between a refugee artist and a French General's daughter; between a 400-year-old bridge and the people of Paris.
7.4
In 1970, a British film crew set out to make a straightforward literary portrait of James Baldwin set in Paris, insisting on setting aside his political activism. Baldwin bristled at their questions, and the result is a fascinating, confrontational, often uncomfortable butting of heads between the filmmakers and their subject, in which the author visits the Bastille and other Parisian landmark and reflects on revolution, colonialism, and what it means to be a Black expatriate in Europe.
7.9
Among the most important documentaries ever made, The Thin Blue Line, by Errol Morris, erases the border between art and activism. A work of meticulous journalism and gripping drama, it recounts the disturbing tale of Randall Dale Adams, a drifter who was charged with the murder of a Dallas police officer and sent to death row, despite evidence that he did not commit the crime. Incorporating stylized reenactments, penetrating interviews, and haunting original music by Philip Glass, Morris uses cinema to build a case forensically while effortlessly entertaining his viewers. The Thin Blue Line effected real-world change, proving film's power beyond the shadow of a doubt.
7.1
Made, in director Marlon Riggs’s own words, to “shatter the nation’s brutalizing silence on matters of sexual and racial difference,” this radical blend of documentary and performance defies the stigmas surrounding Black gay sexuality in the belief that, as long as shame prevails, liberation cannot be possible. Through music and dance, words and poetry by such pathbreaking writers as Essex Hemphill and Joseph Beam—and by turns candid, humorous, and heartbreaking interviews with queer African American men—TONGUES UNTIED gives voice to what it means to live as an outsider in both a Black community rife with homophobia and a largely white gay subculture poisoned by racism. A lightning rod in the culture wars of the 1980s that incited a right-wing furor over public funding for the arts, the film has lost none of its life-affirming resonance.
8.1
Made with a righteous political anger that anticipates the incendiary polemics of documentarians such as Michael Moore and Joshua Oppenheimer, Kazuo Hara’s most renowned film is a harrowing confrontation with one of Japanese history’s darkest chapters: the atrocities committed by the country’s military during World War II. Hara’s unforgettable subject and collaborator in THE EMPEROR’S NAKED ARMY MARCHES ON is Kenzo Okuzaki—a former soldier, convicted murderer, and defiantly anti-establishment agitator—who has made it his life’s mission to expose the crimes committed by Japanese officers against their own men while stationed in New Guinea. As the often-violent Okuzaki resorts to extreme measures in his crusade to find out the truth about what happened to two soldiers murdered by their commanders, what emerges is at once a shocking piece of investigative journalism, a courageous condemnation of militarism and blind obedience, and a riveting portrait of a single-minded man driven by a raw fury bordering on madness.
7.7
Drifting dreamily between past and present, this haunting portrait of jazz trumpeter Chet Baker contrasts archival footage of the musician as an impossibly beautiful icon of cool in the 1950s with the tragically ruined heroin junkie he became. Sublimely sculpted in shadowy monochrome, this Academy Award–nominated documentary by photographer Bruce Weber weaves together excerpts from Italian B movies, rare performance footage, and candid interviews with Baker, musicians, friends, battling ex-wives, and his children for an almost unbearably poignant elegy.
6.5
Les Blank revisits one of his favorite subjects—the vitality of Cajun culture—in this engaging portrait of Marc and Ann Savoy, artists who carry on Cajun traditions through music, storytelling, and food.
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.
6.8
Cheryl Dunye recounts the story of a black lesbian’s relationship with a white, upper-middle-class high school girl.
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.
7.9
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.
6.3
Les Blank’s wit and warmth shine through this droll portrait of a busload of American tourists on a whirlwind tour of Europe that takes them to twenty-two cities in ten countries over the course of two weeks. Wryly touching on cultural stereotypes versus realities as well as the ethics of modern tourism, INNOCENTS ABROAD is a gently satirical but always human look at what happens when the Old and New Worlds collide.
6.8
O SPORT, YOU ARE PEACE! is the official film of the Games of the XXII Olympiad Moscow 1980, Games that were dogged by a boycott on the part of the United States because of the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan. Undeterred, Moscow devoted enormous effort to the Opening and Closing Ceremonies, setting the bar high for future host cities, and director Yuri Ozerov records them in loving detail.
7.1
Grace and Virginia are young San Diego twins who speak unlike anyone else. With little exposure to the outside world, the two girls have created a private form of communication that's an amalgam of the distinctive English dialects they hear at home. Jean-Pierre Gorin's polyphonic nonfiction investigation of this phenomenon looks at the family from a variety of angles, with the director taking on the role of a sort of sociological detective. It's a delightful and absorbing study of words and faces, mass media and personal isolation, and America's odd margins.
7
For a French television series about grandmothers, Chantal Akerman interviews elderly women who survived the Shoah, including her own mother, whose experience in the Holocaust reverberated throughout the artist’s life and work.
7.2
The interests, obsessions, and fantasies of two singular artists converge in this inspired collaboration between Agnès Varda and her longtime friend the actor Jane Birkin. Made over the course of a year and motivated by Birkin’s fortieth birthday—a milestone she admits to some anxiety over—JANE B. PAR AGNÈS V. contrasts the private, reflective Birkin with Birkin the icon, as Varda casts her variously as a classical muse, a femme fatale, a Spanish dancer, Joan of Arc, and even a deadpan Laurel opposite a clownish Hardy in a fanciful slapstick spoof. Made in the spirit of pure, uninhibited play, this free-flowing dual portrait unfolds as a shared reverie between two women as they collapse the boundaries between artist and subject.
7.2
The second in Penelope Spheeris’s trilogy on alternative LA, THE METAL YEARS takes a fast-paced look at the outrageous heavy metal scene of the late eighties. Set in Los Angeles, the film explores the lives of struggling musicians, fans, and starstruck groupies. Featuring Alice Cooper, Ozzy Osbourne, Poison, and members of Aerosmith, Kiss, and Motörhead, as well as performances by Megadeth, Faster Pussycat, Lizzy Borden, London, Odin, and Seduce, this raucous and entertaining chapter chronicles the lonely naiveté of the striving bands, the endless flow of alcohol and drugs, and the relentless sexism endemic to the scene.
7.3
ARAB ISRAELI DIALOGUE is the passionate final documentary from trailblazing filmmaker Lionel Rogosin, in which Palestinian poet Rashed Hussein and Israeli writer Amos Kenan engage in a frank, sometimes bruising conversation on the conflict between their peoples. Rogosin provides an open forum for two formidable intellects to discuss the fates of their nations, and the ever-receding possibility of peace.
