Scots Taffer on 5/3/2010 at 04:58
I've been on a bit of a documentary binge recently, or rather an Errol Morris binge. As an aside, I also found this (
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/category/errol-morris/) interesting article/blog that Morris keeps on NYTimes - that article series at the top is well worth your time and an interesting dissertation on intent versus truth in image.
For those not familiar with Morris, I suggest starting with the movie I did (and loved) -
The Thin Blue Line. The film has incredibly cinematic recreations of events with the eye of a Spielberg-type as opposed to what you're used to seeing on TV (and in fact, his method pioneered the substandard form of recreations you see in most Discovery channel type docos) and the candid nature of his interviews really helps suck you into the heart of the subject matter. I have to comment on the sheer power of direction present in his work, because it is a notable and stand-out factor - he frames shots in ways that film-makers struggle to achieve that set-up a situation and a sense of time and place without going through any hand-holding. He focuses on minutiae, as a documentary-maker should, but does not allow it to cloud the bigger picture. He sees the significance in the minor detail of where a soft-drink cup lands and uses it to put a much larger detail into the limelight for interrogation. He does this through circling facts, using interviews, to elucidate the truth to the bigger picture.
The same cinematic sensibility is paired (again) with Philip Glass's score in
The Fog of War which focuses on Robert McNamara (it's subtitle is
The Eleven Lessons of Robert McNamara) and covers the Vietnam War, Cuban Missile Crisis and Ford motor company presidency amongst other things. Again, Morris reveals his true bias is towards drawing the human element out of the story and it's as much a study of a man in a position of great power and responsibility (and the errors and fallibility inherent in that) as it is a dissection of what happens in the corridors of power during intense crisis.
I've got
Standard Operating Procedures up next, the Errol Morris Abu Ghraib documentary (with Danny Elfman as the poor man's Philip Glass stand-in) which I'm worried might be a little too on the populist/culturally-relevant side of the fence for me to be engaged by, but I'm still open to the experience.
Up next, Werner Herzog. I saw
Grizzly Man some time ago and it remember it affecting me, but I'll be returning to it along with
Encounters at the End of the World.
I still need to get a hold of a copy of
Man on Wire and
Capturing the Friedmans.
Anyway, let's have it out - throw out your favourite documentaries, what makes them great, what they illuminate about the world, etc.
Fragony on 5/3/2010 at 05:12
Recommend Shoah, obviously about the holocaust. It's nothing more then a series of interviews really. Everybody gets heard, victims, killers, those who watched, those who couldn't. It's 10 hours long or so, and I din't know how they did it but the scale of the events slowly creeps up on you, the minimalist style feels a bit distant at first but it connects at some point and these stories become unbearable, and it keeps pounding and pounding it's torture. Very hard to watch, watch it anyway.
edit, oh and Deep Blue, amazing footage of Oceanic life. Check out everything these guys make.
Volitions Advocate on 5/3/2010 at 06:33
The last one I watched was awhile ago. I quite enjoyed it, and it fits with the theme of our forum:
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_of_Kong)
King of Kong: a fistfull of quarters.
Its about the underdog chasing a guiness record, and the the title holder being a douche bag who wouldn't give him the courtesy of a match face to face.
nerdy, awesome, and basically just true to life.
Obviously not a hard hitter or with subject matter that really matters to anybody, but it was good.
EDIT: silly trailer: (
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3K7wpatALDQ)
doctorfrog on 5/3/2010 at 07:51
Errol Morris is awesome as hell and Fog of War is one of my favorites, but that goes for all of his stuff, even Gates of Heaven, which gets a little slow. He has a great way of sitting back and just letting people highlight themselves, and some of the back and forth in Fog of War shows his hand in bringing MacNamara out. Wonderful soundtrack by Philip Glass.
I've also been pondering buying (
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0181288/) American Movie because I've seen it so many times, and want to see it again. It's a 1999 film about a guy whose circumstances are such that he probably should not be making movies, but he does anyway. I want to say that it gets to the heart of the American Dream blah blah, but it doesn't. It's just a great funny thing that's also terrible and sad and perfect in its own way. The end credits music says it all.
I just wish Mark Borchardt had kept making more movies over the years.(
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0372806/) Bright Leaves is imperfect and somewhat harder to watch, but for me it continues some of the train of American Movie. It's a quiet docu about a man investigating some of his family roots in the tobacco business, and finding something he didn't expect, but probably should have.
(Almost nothing.)I'm currently watching an older 3-part series by (
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1758338679527790685&ei=ckF9S5GsI8Ot-AaS38XYCA&q=the+living+dead#) Adam Curtis. Interesting so far, in a Chomsky kind of way.
And yes, it's preachy and kind of sickening in places, but every now and then I watch Bowling for Columbine. It has some pretty good bits.
I am not good at describing movies.
sp4f on 5/3/2010 at 11:52
I'm mildly addicted to documentaries so here are a couple of my favourite series.
Connections 1, 2 and 3: Sir James Burke takes you on a scientific mystery tour joining the dots from certain types of dutch sailing ships to the development of plastics and other unlikely links between seemingly unconnected scientific and engineering advances during human history.
The Day The Universe Changed: Another James Burke series documenting scientific and technological advances and how they changed the way that western civilisation perceives the world in the process.
The Ascent of Man: Slow paced but fascinating series written and presented by Jacob Bronowski following the development of human society via the development of science. Can sometimes send you to sleep by the combinations of long slow scenes and Bronowski's slow and careful diction if you aren't careful.
Civilisation: Kenneths Clark's vast documentary charting the development of western civilisation through art and cultural changes. The best way to experience this is to take a weekend and watch both this and Ascent of Man as they were both produced and written to complement each other.
Synth Britannia: Brilliant documentary following the groth and development of synth music in britain from the experimentation in the 70s by the Human League, Cabaret Voltaire, Throbbing Gristle and John Foxx through to the explosion of synth pop in the early 80s following Gary Numan and Depeche Mode.
The World at War: This is what you get if you combine extensively colour (and colourised) footage of WW2 with the silky smooth narration of Laurence Olivier. Fascinating but often quite harrowing.
Also a big fan of the Adam Curtis series like Pandora's Box, The Power of Nightmares, The Trap, The Centruy of Self and The Mayfair Set. If anyone knows where to find his earlier works like Inquiry: The Great British Housing Disaster or 25 Million Pounds let me know as I've been hunting for months now.
Aerothorn on 6/3/2010 at 14:13
I keep meaning to see Encounters at the End of the World - a friend of mine was interviewed for it (he was working at McMurdo at the time) though for some reason he opted to not appear on camera. It sounds pretty awesome.
As far as Morris goes, I've only seen Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, which I actually didn't like at all.
Namdrol on 6/3/2010 at 15:24
I've always had a lot of time for Nick Broomfield.
I reallly like the style he developed of filming the filming of which he was one of the first proponents
And the second of the Aileen Wuornos films is indescribably moving at the end as she's killed by the state.
I also just found out one of his early works was Tattooed Tears about juvenile DC's in California. Now that is some film.
(I've not seen any of the Morris films but they're now high on my to watch list)
And I love World at War but it was during this as a kid I had a major realisation that anything on film where the people realise they are being filmed has to be taken with caution.
Muzman on 6/3/2010 at 16:47
Broomfield is rather fun. He's a little too showy a lot of the time. Too often you are just watching him and his titanium balls. Wurnos is one of his better ones as it's a bit more personal than some of the later efforts. It's stunning how she is the sanest person in the film.
In general it's endlessly great watching him take these seemingly vast and murky secret lives and events and boil them down to just a small cast of sad weirdos. Makes you wonder what it was all about.
Anyway some highlights of mine:
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theremin:_An_Electronic_Odyssey) Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey. You might think it's a nerdy film about a Russian engineer who crossed a wire and made a weird sound effect for 50s horror films. You couldn't be further from the truth. This man personally lived the 20th century. Kinda astounding.
(
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0206681/) Demon Lover Diary.
This is probably really hard to find, but needs to mentioned with
American Movie. A small group of middleclass intelectual film grads crew for a maverick low budget filmmaker and his crazy biker friends (whom I think knew each other through pot dealers or something. Don't rightly recall) in the making of soon to be legendary cult classic (not)
The Demon Lover.
As the whole business gets dumber and more dangerous they plot ways to escape or sabotage the project, while the camera guy does his best to shag the barely legal.. I mean leading lady. And it's all downhill from there.
Probably funnier if you're a film student but it's still utterly bizarre and hilarious.
Speaking of Broomfield, I just watched Jon Ronson's
Crazy Rulers of the World, which is the forerunner of
The Men Who Stare at Goats. It's a three part series delving into the US military's ventures in psychic phenomena and new age mysticism in an effort to create clairvoyant super soldiers who can walk through walls, and how strange offshoots of that movement end up part of Waco, Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.
Ronson's not unlike Broomfield in that he seems to be able to talk his way in anywhere, give them all the rope they can ask for and they bear no ill will about it. (annoyingly he uncovers/gets involved in an even bigger and more damning mystery than the comic sideshow of the First Earth Battallion right at the end of the series and then walks away from it).
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocaine_Cowboys) Cocaine Cowboys.
The tale of the Miami drug trade's rise and the rise of Miami itself as we know it today. Basically the story of how
Miami Vice wasn't exaggerating and even toned the reality down an awful lot. Even
Scarface was tame by comparison.
So much mayhem the hardened gangsters couldn't stomach it any more by the end. The original trafficking guys keeping their hands clean and running circles around the cops repeatedly is pretty funny though.
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corporation) The Corporation
I've known people who've avoided this because it's a little too 'right-on' activist for them and they weren't quite as pink as the target audience etc, so I thought I'd better mention it. It's not like that at all. Yes it's got Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein in it, but the thing is the stuff they say is right. And the over all thesis is solid too. It's not an activist piece (well, technically I guess...). It's not even got bad guys and toadies like the Enron story. That would be too easy. It's an illucidation of a legal/business entity that is the biggest thing humans have ever made and how they behave in ways they don't even necessarily intend. If you like
The Wire's take on institutions this one's for you.
Scots Taffer on 7/3/2010 at 06:23
Quote Posted by Fragony
Recommend Shoah, obviously about the holocaust. It's nothing more then a series of interviews really. Everybody gets heard, victims, killers, those who watched, those who couldn't. It's 10 hours long or so
edit, oh and Deep Blue, amazing footage of Oceanic life.
10 hours of holocaust interviews? Sheesh. I don't mean to sound dismissive but I'm not sure if I could stomach TEN HOURS of miserableness at how horrible humans are to each other. That's not exactly what I look for in doco.
However, Deep Blue
is but I own all of The Blue Planet that the footage was culled from.
Hells yeah! :D
Quote Posted by Scots Taffer
Also, very, very late to the party, movie from 2007, but... Jesus Christ,
King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters was probably the best documentary I've ever seen.
Such a grand and epic feel to such a mundane idea. I'd put off watching it for so long because of the subject matter but I'm so glad I succumbed: the egos, the politics; it was hilarious, frustrating and emotional. I loved seeing Billy get smashed like a guitar at the end and showing him to be the impotent prissy little bitch with a mental attitude of a 16 year old and Steve getting his dues. The nature of the conflict in both the referee, who got into the organisation for the love of competition and slowly watched it devolve into a high-school level political bitchfest, and Sanders, the lawyer buddy who tried to cheat and got caught out, the parallels and personal struggles they both faced in the brilliantly edited arc of the story just made it even more compelling.
I've taken a few notes of recommendations. Currently getting a hold of
Aileen by Broomfield,
The Power of Nightmares series by BBC and
The Cove to add to the growing list.
Also holding out hope that
The Shark Is Still Working gets released sooner or later.
edit:
Encounters at the End of the World was my first full-on Herzog experience (
Grizzly Man seems far less personal by comparison), he has a very unique voice and there is a clear fascination with the people drawn to this land as well as the nature of the continent itself. Specifically, the interviews with the various scientists and workers draws out their personalities: odd, taciturn, half-mad, passionate, lost, peaceful. They speak to a range of emotions that humans undergo when confronted with a conundrum that challenges their world view.
Herzog also has a wicked sense of humour, I liked how at the outset of the doco he states that he's not there to do a movie about "fluffy penguins", despite this there is a segment on a penguin colony with an insular scientist who he drags a halting conversation out of with his absurd questions on gay and deranged penguins. Then he focuses in on a "geographically confused" penguin which refused to follow the path between the breeding grounds and the open sea, instead opting to head for the mountains and thousands of kilometres of open country, meaning certain death. There's a subversive satisfaction to Werner as he talks about this, as though: here's your walking with fucking penguins.
Fingernail on 7/3/2010 at 12:59
"Anvil: the story of Anvil" is great, it's been billed as like a real-life Spinal Tap, but quite obviously since it's dealing with real people it's actually very affecting seeing these two guys struggle to live their dream after they seem to have peaked way back in the 80s. It's a lot about ambition, success, friends and family - and it is also pretty funny in places.
