Top 10 Documentaries of All Time

[00:00] Here at CineFix, we've spent most of our time looking at narrative films, but, just like pretty much everyone else in the world, we've been getting pretty into Docs lately. So we figured it was time to take a deep dive. These are our picks for the 10 best documentaries of all time.

[00:16] To start things off, we want to first look at that, which feels like a documentary at its

[00:29] most traditional. The history doc, with moving, original and fascinating looks at American history in four little girls and 13th, non-American history in nostalgia for the light and west of the tracks, at the Vietnam War and the fog of war in hearts and minds, and the world wars

[00:44] in the sorrow and the pity, and they shall not grow old. We love 20 years later, the act of killing, the look of silence, and the cave of dreams. But at the very front of the pack, we think there is perhaps no more moving document of the past ever created than our first pick, Shoah.

[00:58] Shweizer, can you tell me, is it possible for you to do it, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, we have a brand, a brand, a brand, a brand, a brand, a brand, a brand, a brand, a brand, a brand,

[01:24] Yeah, that's just a scratch. Standing at nearly nine and a half hours long, Claude Landsman Shoah is a towering act of witnessing. A shocking combination of the stories told by victims, bystanders, and perpetrators.

[01:37] Some of these against their wishes and without their knowledge, Shoah is, on its face, a simple film. Hardly more than oral history, but in its execution, its prosaic tapestry woven of many personal narratives, its quiet imagery of places that are truly haunted.

[01:52] It eventually emerges as more than just a historical tragedy, the stuff of books and facts and statistics, but the unmistakable echo preserved as if in amber, of many real moments in many real human lives. It is immensely difficult but never dull, beautiful despite so much heartbreak and important, so

[02:08] very important, maybe more so than any other historical document ever made. After history, our minds next wandered to the realm of the social documentary.

[02:20] Standing with the earliest of innovators, Nanook of the North, and Land Without Bread, to the later standouts in high school, yes, Paris is burning, and the real-life boyhood of the UPSeries. Salesmen and Chronicle of a Summer are probably the gold standards of the social documentary

[02:33] form, but in terms of endless watchability, our second pick goes to Harlan County, USA. I had to boss man to say one time, he said do you be sure, don't get that new, no no place

[02:46] with a rock or fallen on him, I said does, what about me, I was driving mule in, what about me, the rock and fallen on me, he said we can always car another man since you gotta buy that mule.

[02:58] Harlan County, USA, is first and foremost the story of a year-long coal miner strike in Kentucky. There is picketing, and injustice, and real violence of the labor struggle sort that is all but forgotten in the America of today. It is also a story of a people, many people in a place and a career and a class, all given

[03:14] their due as irrepressibly unique individuals and yet connected in their commonalities all the same. It also happens to be a story of music, of the songs, to which these people in these places and these struggles give birth and how inextricably linked they really are.

[03:29] Narrowing in from our cultural landscape, some of our favorite documentaries of all time focus in on one or two subjects and use the medium of film to paint them in all their detail.

[03:41] This is the documentary as portrait, where you can find such incredible classics as Grizzly Mann, Peña, a portrait of a brilliant choreographer through her work, the aptly titled Portrait of Jason, Crumb, the deeply open profile of an underground comic artist, and especially

[03:56] the Quince Tree Sun, a meditative portrait of one man's sissiffian task of capturing honest beauty. However for this slot we think that there is something irresistibly fascinating about the big and little edie in Grey Gardens.

[04:18] It is impossible to overstate the importance of selecting the right subject for a portrait, and in Grey Gardens the Maisel Brothers have struck pager. Decades past each of their moments, Grey Gardens follows an eccentric mother and daughter once upon a social light pair as they share their evening years amidst the overgrown decay of their

[04:33] estate and their past and the raccoons and cats with which they dwell, grateful for an audience to perform for beyond each other, they sing and dance and banter for the camera, relive their glory years, their what could have been and the resentments they have honed about them,

[04:46] lonely in their irrelevance and image of a codependent relationship built and warped to sustain them emerges. But pity is not this documentary's primary mode, but an irrepressible delightfulness emerges nonetheless.

[04:59] Of course we can not forget the ever popular investigative documentary. Great true crime investigations include OJ made in America, the imposter and especially the thin blue line. While great exposé investigations include the likes of Titicut Follies, Hors Glory, Lake of

[05:15] Fire and all of Michael Moore's greatest hits. But our favorite exposé, my god if there isn't anything in the world quite as mad as the Emperor's naked army marches on.

[05:47] Emperor's naked army doesn't take very long before revealing itself to be all in all, Kinsu Okuzaki is a veteran of World War II who decides that the ripe old age of 65 take up the investigation of the mysterious deaths of three of his army mates that were stationed

[06:02] with him in New Guinea as the war was lost by Japan. His methods are less archival research and official inquiry and more ambush other 70-year-old veterans and force them to talk by threat of and actual violence.

[06:14] And it only gets way, way crazier from there. The act of documenting the ordeal without intervention raises some serious ethical questions but the wartime truth that is uncovered over the course of his investigation is so far

[06:26] beyond horrifying that one begins to understand Okuzaki as the whirling howl of all consuming rage that a war has left in its wake. Taking a step back from that, let's turn and take a look at sports stocks, from sweeping

[06:40] epics on a country's pastime like Ken Burns' baseball, to delightful looks at little niches like murder ball, from portraits of an entire career as in Sena to slices of a moment in sports history as in when we were kings.

[06:53] There's freedom's fury, touching the void, and the only kind of racist Olympia. But it really doesn't get any better than the genre-defining trophy holding all-time all-star of hoop dreams.

[07:22] To inner city 8th graders are recruited straight off the playground by talent scouts for a suburban prep school. For the next 6 years, we watch them grow, struggle, commute 90 minutes each way, succeed, fail,

[07:34] and ultimately strive to travel the long road from where they are to the realization of their dreams. And we have unprecedented access to their journey. These are young children dreaming as children do, invited into a demanding world of expectations

[07:46] and results and disappointment all on the precipice of adulthood. They become two very human faces on a very real American dream. After sports, we gotta look in music, there's the band biography, most notably Montage of

[08:02] Heck, and there's the backstage documentary, including Dig, Don't Look Back, and the incredible some kind of monster. And there's the concert documentary, who standouts include Monterey Pop, Give Me Shelter, and The Last Waltz.

[08:14] And we know it's crazy to give best music documentary to what on its surface just looks like a concert film, but by God, there's something magical happen in the talking heads stop making sense.

[08:41] Stop making sense is a blast. The music is awesome and endlessly jammed, the cinematography is better than most. The concert itself is wonderfully structured and well done in its visuals, but more than anything else, there is something so honest, and present, and unironic about the joy and

[08:57] togetherness we see in this musical family, especially in its bizarre genius frontman, David Bern, and how he connects with those around him. Watching him join and play and perform with his bandmates is a surprisingly transcendental treat, one that hits just the right kind of alchemy to rise beyond the average concert film

[09:13] up to the level of art. Of course, if we're going to look at music docs, we can't pass up the filmmaking ones. Many of the best of them are behind the scenes chronicles of some of the more insane entries

[09:26] in filmmaking history, hearts of darkness, lost in La Mancha, burden of dreams, and Hodorovsky's doom. But there's also the individual profile as in film worker and Kate plays Christine and the look into true indie film roots as in American movie and Raiders, the story of the greatest

[09:42] band film ever made. But our favorite, it's something else entirely. Abis Quresh Dami's Closer.

[10:09] We want to say very little about Closer. We recommend it unreservedly, of course, and feel no hesitation calling it genius. We can tell you that it's a film about misrepresentation, about a man who pretends to be his favorite director in order to impress a family, and that it explores the boundary between truth

[10:24] and misrepresentation in life, fiction, and film. Twisting back on itself in its analysis, but beyond that, we don't really think any of our words could possibly improve your experience with it. So go watch it, you'll see.

[10:37] Next up we're looking at the poetic mode of documentary filmic, the expositionless audio-visual collage that really does just observe and document and make no judgement beyond inclusion and assemblage. There are the early examples, man with the movie camera.

[10:51] And Berlin, symphony of a metropolis. Later we find meditations on Mirages in Vadimorgana, insects in microcosmos, and fishermen in Leviathan. We find the work of God-free regia, the Katsi trilogy, and visitors.

[11:05] Then there is the work of his one-time cinematographer, Ron Frick, who's some Sara we called the most beautiful film of all time. We still think it is, and if we hadn't gushed about it so much already, it might easily snap up this slot. But fortunately for us, it has a just as good if not better older brother in the form of

[11:20] Baraka. For 90 gorgeous minutes, Baraka issues all language in its ambitious attempt to reach

[11:43] its arms impossibly wide around the entirety of our earth and wrap it up all at once, immersing us in the vastness of its sights and sounds and rhythms and combinations, striving for the universal through the narrowest of specifics.

[11:56] Earth, humanity, individuals, culture, commodity, worship, often haunting, sometimes tragic, sometimes glorious, but always beautiful. Baraka is the crowning achievement in poetic documentary cinema, building upon Kojana

[12:09] Scottsy's rhythms and eye, and outlining the basic themes that some Sara would eventually go on to develop. It truly is a spectacular testament to the immense majesty of this thing called life.

[12:22] If you take your tone poem and add the words back in, you end up at our second-to-last slot with the essay film, graced with such greats as F is for fake, letter to Jane, and Histoire du Cinema. But atop them all, we will attempt to describe the nearly indescribable with our penultimate

[12:36] pick, Sans Soleil. The first image he told me about was a three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965.

[12:51] He said that for him it was the image of happiness, and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images, but it never worked. He wrote me, one day I'll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film with a long

[13:03] piece of black leader. If they don't see happiness in the picture, at least they'll see the black. From these almost two sublime opening images and words, you can sense that there is going to be something very special about Chris Marker's Sans Soleil.

[13:18] Made up of a fictional woman reading semi-fictional letters from a sort of fictional cameraman over the very real images of Marker's travels, mostly to Tokyo and Guinea-Bissau, we will not be the first to observe how Sans Soleil feels so much like the beautifully poetic travelogue

[13:33] of an alien anthropologist observing humanity empathetically, but from an almost extraterrestrial distance. The fictional relationships between the narrator and Chris Marker's words past his delightfully personal way of seeing into a humble, intimate light.

[13:46] This is documentary, keenly watching the world but fully aware that it's only doing it through one man's eyes.

[14:00] When things off at number one, we cannot ignore the complete about face of the camera's lens, pointed squarely back at its documentarian in the autobiographical doc. And amidst the ranks of the greats here, we find the best of Ross McElwee, time indefinite

[14:13] and Sherman's march, deeply personal films about loss and love and death and life. We find tongues untied, a story of black gay identity that blends the historical with the personal. We find Agnes Varda looking at herself in the gleaners and eye, and we find Waltz with

[14:27] Bashir's Ari Fulman investigating his own repressed memories. And finally, we find our top pick, the unbelievably intimate as I was moving ahead occasionally I saw brief clumps of beauty.

[14:39] I'm sorry that nothing much, nothing extraordinary has so far happened in this movie.

[14:56] We end as we began, again with a long, long cinematic journey, but this time of a very

[15:14] different sort. As I was moving ahead is an epic of the personal. It is a long and messy act of a man remembering his entire life through his home movies and recollections and poetry. It is difficult to imagine anyone watching all these moments of Jonas Mekis' life and

[15:28] not being reminded of their own little snippets of distant memories presumed lost rising back into view. Mekis calls it a masterpiece of nothingness. Maybe so, but the genius isn't how much he captures in that nothing.

[15:42] He captures an entire life, which is why it's our pick for one of the best documentaries of all time. So what do you think? Disagree with any of our picks? Do we leave out any of your favorite documentaries?

[15:55] We almost certainly did. There's bound to be at least 11 worthy documentaries out there, maybe even 12. Let us know what you think in the comments below and be sure to subscribe for more CineFix movie lists.