It was a revolutionary film combining superb cinematography and editing of Third Reich propaganda. She also documented the Berlin Olympics in the stunning film Olympia , Germ. The first in the series, "Prelude to War," a look at the events from , won the Academy Award for Best Documentary in The Oscar-winning wartime documentary The Memphis Belle , directed by famed William Wyler then a Lieutenant Colonel and released by the War Department, presented real-life footage of dozens of Allied bombing missions by the Flying Fortress' B bomber during the war.
Marcel Ophuls' four-hour epic The Sorrow and the Pity aka Le Chagrin et La Pitie , mentioned in Woody Allen's Annie Hall , used an interview technique and archival footage to tell the story of the Nazi occupation of France and subsequent French collaboration. Claude Lanzmann's unforgettable, eloquent minute epic Shoah Hebrew for 'annihilation' documented the personal experiences of several death-camp survivors of the Holocaust through interviews.
Other lesser known rock-and-roll and other music-related documentaries included:. All rights reserved. Filmsite: written by Tim Dirks. You might like this'? Apple is now entering the space. CNN has done an extraordinary job. I think there are a lot of places that one can now go to watch these films. He offers another reason documentaries are on fire these days: They're adopting techniques from scripted movies. Pogue encouraged Berlinger to brag a little, to identify his own contributions to the evolution of documentaries, especially in his first one, "Brother's Keeper," from For example, evocative title sequences, the use of an original music score, all these things that, a couple of decades ago, were unheard of in a documentary.
There's a beginning, there's a middle, there's an end; there's an antagonist and protagonist. And that's why we chose a murder trial [as the film's subject], because that has perfect dramatic structure. To him, documentaries are especially appealing because they can change the world. Cinema was the medium of choice because Americans had become absolutely movie-mad during the past decennia. Like so many documentary films of the period, the Why We Fight series is outright propaganda used to motivate the war effort.
In the s, two primary technological advances began to radically-transform documentary filmmaking. The first was the Eclair self-blimped mechanically very quiet camera, which made flexible sync filming a reality. It incorporated quick change film magazines, which allowed mere few seconds of downtime during magazine changes.
They solved the problem of recording sync without linking a recorder and camera by constricting wires. By the s, these improvements had changed every phase of location filming from news gathering and documentaries to improvised dramatic productions.
The camera was now sufficiently-mobile to become a subsidiary observer. There were no actual documentary directors needed to make imperious demands on the participant for the good of the recording process.
The camera and sound were now handheld and could follow the action wherever it lead. The camera became an active observer, showing the screen in the intimacy, immediacy and unpredictability of the new media form.
Great examples of documentary films made in the s and are Salesman and Gimme Shelter by the famous Maysles brothers. In truedirect-cinema style, Salesman follows a band of hard-nosed Bible salesmen on a sales drive in Florida.
The much-celebrated Gimme Shelter follows the Rolling Stones to their enormous outdoor concert in Altamont, California. The film shows the dangerous side of s counterculture, and culminates with the murder of a troublemaker in the crowd by the Hells Angels. Many camera crews were deployed and the film continually cuts from position to position in the swollen, restless crowd.
Another fine example of documentary film benefiting from new mobility was The Anderson Platoon , directed by the French embedded filmmaker Pierre Schoendoerffer.
He and his crew risked their lives to follow a platoon of GIs in Vietnam led by the black lieutenant Anderson. By the late s, increased camera mobility was matched by improvements in color-stock sensitivity.
Color shooting increased the price of filmmaking, and the stock budget remained a large impediment to documentary production. By this time, television had bitten deeply into cinema box office figures, and the documentary had migrated from cinemas to the home screen. Always potentially embarassing to its patron, the marriage between documentary and television has always been an uneasy one.
Documentaries now existed by permission of giant television networks, and were always susceptible to commercial, moral and political pressure groups. Although the documentary flourished in Europe within its widespread public broadcasting system, even the BBC with its liberal and independent reputation, drew the line at broadcasting Warrendale , Allen King , a Canadadian film about a controversial treatment center for disturbed adolescents.
It was made to show the effect of a nuclear attack on London, and has waited 20 years to broadcast. The s saw television tighten its grip on the format with minute slots, content and plot structure of documentary film.
When television stepped up, the Cinema Verite style stepped out. It was sheer horror for any commissioning editor to listen to a director proposing a Cinema Verite style documentary. By the end of the s and all through the s and s, documentary film history saw the emergence of very well-plotted and structured films.
It was about director Karin Junger who followed her two adopted Korean half-sisters as they return to Korea on an exhilarating, and sometimes painful, search for their personal histories.
Birthplace Unknown beautifully portrays the challenges that adopted children are presented with at adolesence. However, director Karin Junger took security and preparedness to the extreme ethically, when she decided not to tell her half-sister that she had fully researched their personal histories in detail before embarking on the journey. Another good example is the Dutch documentary, Procedure , witnesses to an execution , Jaap van Hoewijk which follows the execution of the convicted and infamous Californian murderer Robert Alton Harris in The film was released both theatrically 85 min.
How to Watch: Stream on Amazon. Honeyland is a film that unfolds in an alternately expansive and claustrophobic register. The filmmakers, who distilled plus hours of footage into a taught film, could not have known that this drama would become a parable between old and new, tradition and modernity, but the film is all the more captivating for it.
The film delivers a staggering visual feast in the footage of these runway shows, rarely seen by those outside the fashion world, and the emotional punch of witnessing an exuberant talent headed toward self-destruction. View Iframe URL. Marina Zenovich whose prior directorial credits include documentaries about Richard Pryor and Roman Polanski began working on a documentary about Robin Williams about a year after his death, and soon joined forces with Alex Gibney, who came on board as a co-producer.
The film interviews activists, academics, and politicians including Angela Davis, Michelle Alexander, and Jelani Cobb to get at the fundamental question of why the vast majority of incarcerated persons in the U.
Peck brings his subject back to life in archival footage and in readings of his work and correspondence by the actor Samuel L. And the future of the country depends on that. They give the people around them a vision of another freer, wilder, more spontaneous form of life, one that can be easily lost in a huge, stressful, rapidly modernizing place like Istanbul. Why did he misconstrue the timeline of his improprieties despite the very real likelihood that more sexy pen pals would come forward?
Why, for that matter, was he sending dick pics to strangers at all? The film about Russell, an enigmatic artist who played with the Beach Boys, Eric Clapton, Joe Cocker, and many, many more in his recording studio in northeast Oklahoma, was stalled due, in part, to a delay in securing all the music rights.
Before Amy Winehouse became a superstar who famously spiraled out of control until her death in , at age 27, from alcohol poisoning, she was a regular girl with a very extraordinary talent. We loved her so much that we made her larger than life; but when that kind of celebrity proved too much for her to handle, when she began to slip away into addiction and self-destruction, we turned on her. Laura Gabbert followed the beloved Los Angeles Times food critic Jonathan Gold for her documentary , which showed her subject—a titan of taste and talent—to be as multifaceted a man as he was a writer.
Gold was the first to win the Pulitzer Prize for food writing, largely because of his laser focus on L. The film also serves as a love letter to Los Angeles, the place where Gold was born and raised and, excepting a stint in New York when he worked at Gourmet in the early aughts, where he made his life. If you needed proof of its far-reaching real-life repercussions, when the documentary landed on the shortlist for an Academy Award, the church of Scientology allegedly launched a smear campaign to influence Academy members.
Relying on interviews and archival footage from the likes of Mick Jagger, Bruce Springsteen, Prince, David Bowie, Sting, David Byrne, and Phil Spector, the film proves a rollicking tribute and provides a new perspective on some of the most familiar music of the past century. Oppenheimer explores the mids massacre of communists and ethnic Chinese people in Indonesia in which nearly half a million people died by inviting some of the surviving and proud executioners to make their own movie about the events, and to tell the story through their own dramatic re-enactments.
They portray not only themselves, but also people they interrogated, tortured, and killed. The result is a topsy-turvy and surprisingly sympathetic if not without a sense of schadenfreude take on the American Dream, boom and bust. The film jets from Cape Town to Los Angeles to the Motor City, and in the process tells a great story too remarkable to spoil here.
In , three teenagers were convicted of murdering three young boys in West Memphis, whose bodies apparently showed signs of torture and ritual assault. Beginning with an examination into the police investigation, filmmaker Amy Berg brings to light new evidence surrounding the arrest and conviction of Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley.
All three were teens at the time and lost 18 years of their lives after being wrongly convicted and imprisoned. In Jiro Dreams of Sushi , the thenyear-old director David Gelb descends into a Tokyo subway station and finds a three-Michelin-starred, seat sushi restaurant, Sukiyabashi Jiro, helmed by year-old chef and owner, Jiro.
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