The Best Documentaries of All Time, Posted by Richard Brody

The Best Documentaries of All Time

Posted by Richard Brody

The new yorker, The new yorker

What’s the sound of two second shoes dropping? One is the fascinating follow-up to Sight & Sound magazine’s 2012 edition of their once-a-decade critics’ poll, in which I had the privilege of voting, of the best films of all time: namely, a forthcoming poll (which closed today, and in which I also participated) of the greatest documentaries. I’ll report back when the results are published. The second is a new round of discussion regarding the nature of documentary filmmaking itself, sparked by the superb and significant series “Art of the Real,” which is currently running at Film Society of Lincoln Center.

So, first, my list:

“Shoah” (1985, Claude Lanzmann)
“Histoire(s) du Cinéma” (1988-98, Jean-Luc Godard)
“Portrait of Jason” (1967, Shirley Clarke)
“The Children Were Watching” (1961, Robert Drew)
“Chronicle of a Summer” (1960, Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin)
“Night and Fog” (1955, Alain Resnais)
“Numéro Zéro” (1971, Jean Eustache)
“Strange Victory” (1948, Leo Hurwitz)
“The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On” (1987, Kazuo Hara)
“Welfare” (1975, Frederick Wiseman)

I’m the first to admit that it’s a somewhat tendentious list, with an odd preponderance of French movies. This isn’t merely the result of a personal affinity for an adoptive cinematic homeland but, rather, the crystallization of an idea (one that I hinted at here last week): the history of documentary filmmaking isn’t the fact of capturing events on the wing but the idea of doing so, not the invention of investigative recording but its reinvention. That’s why, for this list, I selected movies that open new vistas for documentary filmmaking, which imply vectors of activity and thought that are still being realized today by the era’s best documentarists—and why, in mentioning these films, each of them implies many others that they have inspired.

“Shoah” defines the very possibility of a film about the Holocaust; “Histoire(s) du Cinéma” fulfills the idea of the great movie archive (fiction and documentary alike) as the imprint of its time; “Portrait of Jason,” the portrait-film that’s a self-definition in real time; “The Children Were Watching,” the implication of filmmakers in the self-revealing performance of its subjects (cf. “The Unknown Known”); “Night and Fog,” the cinematic X-ray of history in present-tense events; “Numéro Zéro,” family history; “Strange Victory,” political psychoanalysis to reveal trauma and trouble in daily life; “The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On,” confronting a country’s past crimes through personal confrontation; “Welfare,” uncovering and analyzing the structures of institutions at work in events at hand.

What these selections have in common is the idea of history, the construction of history cinematically, and the manifest personal involvement of the filmmakers in that construction. The ultimate subject of all great documentaries is the presence of the filmmaker at the events on view or under consideration—and when, as in Wiseman’s work, the filmmaker is subtracted, it’s a conspicuous subtraction, as if by way of an onscreen equation. The implication of the past in the present, the ongoing effect of the past in the present, is another crucial documentary idea—the contextualization of reported events by means of visual archeology and intellectual analysis, the unfurling of the filmmakers’ own thought process by way of that analysis. That’s the source of these ten movies’ vital, dynamic, and ongoing inspirations for other filmmakers, as well as for these filmmakers’ own later works. The past in the present, the future in the present—the essence of the great documentary is in the cinematic conception of time, the disjunction between the real time of filming and the times that it implies. Rule of thumb: the greater and more wondrous that disproportion, the greater the film.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2014/04/the-greatest-documentaries-of-all-time.html?intcid=obnetwork