Documentaries I have loved

Ha ha. This reminds me of the opening line of my friend Jason's first philosophy essay at Trinity: 'Rene Descartes is a dead famous French philosopher.'

Do the Qatsi's count?

the most haunting:
silverlake life: the view from here

My favorites are probably Frederick Wiseman's, or at least the two I've seen. His technique is to shoot a lot of footage, edit it, and not really add any background music or provide any explanatory context, just "let the scenes speak for themselves", so to speak. It's fairly different from, say, the Errol Morris style. "High School" is about a late 60s Philadelphia high school, and is scary and fascinating in exactly the ways you'd expect: The faculty come up with all these petty ways to show how much more powerful and important they are than the students, and it's all very sad. "Meat" is a detailed look at the meat industry, following some cows as they go from the farm (where they're fattened) to the slaughterhouse (with a very long and detailed and disgusting at times disturbingly beautiful sequence of the entire slaughtering process) to the market.

In fact, I'm still trying to lay my hands on a copy of it.

I saw some of Wisconsin Death Trip. I didn't really get into it.

Here's what it has to say:

Plot Summary for
Wisconsin Death Trip (1999)

Wisconsin Death Trip is an intimate, shocking and sometimes hilarious account of the disasters that befell one small town in Wisconsin during the final decade of the 19th century. The film is inspired by Michael Lesy's book of the same name which was first published in 1973. Lesy discovered a striking archive of black and white photographs in the town of Black River Falls dating from the 1890s and married a selection of these images to extracts from the town's newspaper from the same decade. The effect was surprising and disturbing. The town of Black River Falls seems gripped by some peculiar malaise and the weekly news is dominated by bizarre tales of madness, eccentricity and violence amongst the local population. Suicide and murder are commonplace. People in the town are haunted by ghosts, possessed by devils and terrorized by teenage outlaws and arsonists. Like the book, the film is constructed entirely from authentic news reports from the Black River Falls' newspaper with occasional excerpts from the records of the nearby Mendota Asylum for the Insane. The film also makes use of the haunting black and white photographs taken by the resident portrait photographer of Black River Falls at the end of the 19th century. Contemporary color documentary footage of the town today is also included at the end of each section of the film that take place over the course of four seasons.

Bless your heart.

Also worth mention: Roger & Me, Gates of Heaven, Crumb

Has anyone seen "Heart of Darkness: A filmmaker's Apocalypse"? I never see it at my video store

As for dark days this was so scary a docu as lerts face it could you live like that - and when they all got moved out it was like ...what now, it certainly woke me up to what people go through in life - and i thought i new some stuff.

Hoop dreams i love, just love - "immma keep on and on, and ima never stop"

oooh Jon Ronson's them was fantastic and the holidays in the axis of evil was an eye opener. Man utd are gonna sell so many shirts in iraq now sadd@ms gone

I had been really curious about Capturing the Friedmans, ever since I first heard about it, but at the time it only seemed to last a couple of weeks in the local theaters, so I had to wait until HBO aired it to actually see it, and what I saw was quite haunting. You don't really know whether the two accused people were actually guilty or if they were fully innocent, and it does seem to say a lot not only about mass hysteria but also about dysfunctional family dynamics wrapped up in a seemingly perfect package.

I've gotten to see Garden a few times and I find it quite sad. It's the documentary about two teenaged runaways in Israel, one Jewish and the other Palestinian, who are both best friends and male prostitutes, who live out on the streets and do quite a lot just to survive. I first stumbled across this documentary while flipping channels and it drew me in. You do get to caring about the two boys featured in the documentary.

I wish there was some documentary out there about the New Romantic scene. I would love to see its origins, not only in London but throughout England, its rise, and how things were like at the clubs at the point where the scene was at its zenith. I would adore the opportunity to see my favorite musical genre covered in such historical terms. (But realistically, the chances of that happening are as good as, oh, say, the Boston Red Sox going to the World Series. Oh. Wait. *wink*)

All of a sudden been catching the odd one:

- Did anyone see the last doc Jon Ronson Made for C4 a few weeks ago? About the unitarian priest who provides er, 'comfort' to people who are about to die. Didn't quite know what to make of Jon concluding by saying he liked him!

- Terror's Advocate was also pretty amazing, first time I've been to see a doc in the cinema. Verges proved to be actually fascinating, but he was only the starting point for a history of mid and late 20th century terrorism.

- The Sorrow and the Pity hasn't been mentioned so I will now.

Does A Decade Under The Influence count? I loved those. Recently I've seen a few that I liked but didn't love: Helvetica and 51 Birch Street. I love a few that were mentioned earlier, Grey Gardens, Crumb, Gates of Heaven and of course the Up series. Most recent doc I recall loving is Mad Hot Ballroom.

Oh I forgot about Z Channel! I love love love that one.

Iraq In Fragments, Devil and Daniel Johnston, Half Japanese: The Band That Would Be King, The Mother, Forbidden Lie$, Summercamp!, Crumb, Salesmen, Darwin's Nightmare, Manda Bala, American Teen, The Trials of Darryl Hunt, The Falling Man, The Monastery, Off the Grid: Life on the Mesa , Hoop Dreams...

I think one reason I love documentary film so much is that the genre keeps getting better and better each year as films start to experiment more with the form.

I saw 'Encounters at the End of the World' this weekend, it was quite moving and funny.

I think one reason I love documentary film so much is that the genre keeps getting better and better each year as films start to experiment more with the form.

I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean. If anything documentary has gotten more conservative in the last 10-20 years. And when does your timeline start? Flahrety? Lumiere?

I like documentaries (a lot)

Documentaries I have seen in the past year or so and would recommend to others (in no particular order): Grey Gardens; King of Kong; Jesus Camp; Capturing the Friedmans; Vernon, Florida; Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe; The Devil and Daniel Johnston; Who the @#$% is Jackson Pollack; Gimme Shelter; Born Into Brothels; How to Draw a Bunny; Wordplay; Tarnation; When the Levees Broke;

Documentaries I plan to see: Lake of Fire; Jonestown; My Kid Could Paint That; Standard Operating Procedure; Hoop Dreams; No Direction Home; Fast, Cheap & Out of Control; Mr. Death; Cocksucker Blues; Why We Fight

All time favorites: American Movie, The Fog of War, The Thin Blue Line; Winged Migration; Crumb; The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years

It is worth mentioning that my girlfriend and I recently had the bright idea to watch the entirety of Ken Burns' The War in an all-day marathon. I highly recommend the series, but do not do as I did unless you're OK with a night of really fucked up dreams.

Question: Do I have an Errol Morris fetish? Answer: Yes.

Question #2: I can't remember the name of a film I saw earlier this year. It was about a reclusive artist with a mental illness who lived alone in a boarding house and, upon dying, bestowed upon the world a secret pile of drawings and writings that depicted a painstakingly detailed and brilliantly illustrated fantasy world involving a group of nubile teenage girls who were being preyed upon by some evil monsters or something. This movie was actually really great. Could someone please remind me what it is called?

Nice to see the Borchardt love on this thread. The man is a personal hero of mine.

In The Realms of the Unreal?

Yeah that's the one. And fast! Thank you sir.

Lake of Fire wasn't as brutal as I thought it would be. In fact, the only part that bothered me was when it turned into Chomsky & co. talking head party at the end. Not that I disagreed with what they said, but it lost any sense of narrative. Really good movie, tho.

I liked "This Film Is Not Yet Rated"...tons of surprising facts I didn't know about the MPAA, and pretty entertaining to boot.

SOund and Fury, which is about a deaf family whose five year old daughter wants a cochlear implant, is way hardcore and fascinating, too.