Legend Studio

Many of the films in this “must see” list are cited repeatedly in this book because they break new ground for their time, take special risks, or embody specially significant aspects of documentary language. Each handles significant subject matter too, and each will be a memorable experience.


1. Robert Flaherty, Nanook of the North (USA, 1922). The seminal documentary that seems like ethnographic observation but is in fact carefully staged throughout. Silent, but available with music. At least one version has a commentary; avoid it.


2. Dziga Vertov, The Man with the Movie Camera (USSR, 1929). The exuberant life of a movie camera in late 1920s Moscow as it penetrates every house, factory, and street in search of cinematic Truth. A humorous silent masterpiece of montage.


3. Luis Buñuel, Land Without Bread (Spain, 1932). Early sound film by the surrealist master that uses an ironic narration and romantic era Brahms to emulate a travelogue. The subject meanwhile is starving villagers living in abject poverty.


4. Basil Wright and Harry Watt, Night Mail (GB, 1936). British classic set on a mail train running overnight from London to Scotland. Most of the action was re-enacted in a railway carriage specially lit and rocked in a studio. Notable for Benjamin Britten score and poetic narrative by W.H. Auden—both capitalizing on the inherent rhythms of the train and the postal work.


5. Pare Lorentz, The River (USA, 1937). An influential ecology film about disastrous flooding in the Mississippi Basin and the abuse of the land causing it. Arresting imagery, superb montage, spare commentary, and Virgil Thomson’s magisterial score.


6. Humphrey Jennings, Fires Were Started (1943). A single night with a single firefighting unit during the London wartime Blitz, “an astonishingly intimate portrait of an isolated and besieged Britain”9 and the firemen who risked their lives fighting nightly blazes. Avoids fervid patriotism in favor of an ironical, poetic gaze.


7. Alain Resnais, Night and Fog (France, 1955). Weaving together past and present, Resnais summons us through Jean Cayrol’s narration to become an inmate in a nightmarish world of the Nazi extermination camps.


8. Fred Wiseman, The Titicut Follies (USA, 1967). Unforgettable “direct cinema” pure observational documentary. Life in an institution for the criminally insane borders on the surreal for the cruelty of the system toward the inmates.


9. Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin, Chronicle of a Summer (1961). The seminal participatory documentary in which the filmmakers ask Parisians in the street if they are happy, then turn the camera on their own process of inquiry.


10. The Maysles Brothers and Charlotte Zwerin, Salesman (USA, 1969). Classic handheld observational documentary about bible salesmen with profound things to say about the unreachability of the American dream for those on the fringes.


11. Werner Herzog, Land of Silence and Darkness (Germany, 1971). A (mostly) observational film that travels deep inside the experience of the deafblind and gives a stunning idea of what absolute solitude must be like.


12. Donald Brittain, Volcano (Canada, 1977). Vividly imaginative biography of Malcolm Lowrie, author of Under the Volcano, that takes us deep inside the lurid world of a heartbroken English alcoholic adrift in Mexico. The film has a wit and intensity that undoubtedly come from Brittain himself being an alcoholic like Lowrie and understanding his subject’s frustrations intimately.


13. Ira Wohl, Best Boy (USA, 1979). A family is in crisis as the aging parents confront what to do for their 50-year-old handicapped son. A superb biographical film that is both tender and tough. Long, long moments of wonderful sustained observation.


14. Eduardo Coutinho, Twenty Years Later (Brazil, 1984). The story of a forbidden film project about a murdered labor leader and his family. One by one, Coutinho traces the family members, who were dispersed and lost to each other. Each encounter is an emotional confrontation; each story is the result of a government’s brutality toward its dissidents.


15. Michael Apted, 28 Up (GB, 1986). A 21-year longitudinal study of a dozen or so 6-year-olds as they become adults. A participatory film composed mostly of sensitive, probing interview footage that adds up to a profound indictment of a class-determined social system.


16. Marlon Riggs, Tongues Untied (USA, 1989). Through a series of imaginative, elliptical, and disturbingly urgent tellings and performances, Riggs, who died of AIDS, shows what it is like to be black and gay in a racist, homophobic
society.


17. Errol Morris, The Thin Blue Line (1989). A formalist documentary noir using re-enactment, movie clips, and a gallery of Texan law enforcement types whom Morris faces with his unblinking interview style. Pursuing justice for a falsely imprisoned man, Morris’s film uses a strongly visual style, a minimalist Philip Glass score, and meticulous re-examination of a few key details in a bid to uncover the actual murderer.


18. Michael Moore, Roger and Me (USA, 1989). Ambush journalism, hilarious satire, and leftist sympathy for the working class come together. Playing the role of a simple-minded American worker, Moore tries to corner GM’s chairman in order to ask why he’s sending work abroad and laying GM’s hometown to waste.


19. Henry Hampton’s Blackside, Inc., Eyes on the Prize series (USA, 1990). Civil rights history told by those who risked their lives to fight American racism. Using much wonderful archive footage, the series feels personally experienced
and told.


20. Chris Durlacher, George Orwell: A Life in Pictures (GB, 2003). A biography of George Orwell. Lacking any movie footage or recording of Orwell himself, the film boldly recreates Orwell by putting his written words in the mouth of an actor who makes us believe he is Orwell. The producers even recreated fake childhood footage. It all works when it shouldn’t.