Best Documentaries

91
AlBStern wrote:I saw that. The survivors recounting their ordeal, step by step, while gesturing with what was left of their appendages was pretty powerful. The Taiwanese guy did a great job telling his story.
Anyone can watch it online here

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/view/

Very intense. I can't even begin to imagine how it felt for Rob Hall and his wife to speak to each other knowing it would be the last time they spoke.

Best Documentaries

93
Hour of the furnaces / Hora de los hornos

This legendary underground film criticized neo-colonialism and called for the overthrow of the Argentine government. Intended to be a film which "the System finds indigestible," La Hora was made and distributed outside of the commercial film industry. Because watching the film was illegal, the film transcended bourgeois entertainment: "We also discovered that every comrade who attended such showings did so with full awareness that he was infringing the System's laws and exposing his personal security to eventual repression. This person was no longer a spectator; on the contrary, from the moment he decided to attend the showing, from the moment he lined himself up on this side by taking risks and contributing his living experience to the meeting, he became an actor, a more important protagonist than those who appeared in the films." This brilliant documentary launched the Third Cinema movement and put Latin American cinema on the international map. It combines new and old film footage to explain the history of Argentina and the wave of revolutionary fervor that swept many countries in Latin America. From the Spanish invaders to modern military concerns financed by foreign powers, this feature examines racism, social upheaval, native massacres and the precarious political situations that could change in the wake of revolutionary rebellion. In a noted sequence, director Solanas juxtaposed images of American commericalism and scenes from a slaughterhouse with snatches of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band playing over top. The scene climaxes with a rapid staccato montage of starving children, bleeding cows and Coca-Cola signs matched with the sound of machine gun fire. The sequence is as thrilling as it is haunting--a masterpiece of pure cinema. This feature took the Critics Award at the Pesaro New Cinema Festival.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063084/

download it here: http://onebigtorrent.org/torrents/3057/ ... los-hornos
“As I have said before, the ever more sophisticated weapons piling up in the arsenals of the wealthiest and the mightiest can kill the illiterate, the ill, the poor and the hungry, but they cannot kill ignorance, illness, poverty or hunger.”

Best Documentaries

94
I don't think anyone has mentioned R. Flaherty's "Nanook of the North". Pretty much the first full-length documentary film. A film school staple (for whatever that is worth) and it does (if unintentionally) posit the issue of 'verite' as an irrelevant, or at least secondary concern, (as it should be).
In any case, Inuit culture is really fascinating to this guy...
Parenthesized Geek.
D. Perino deduced: "The Cuban Missile Crisis?...“It had to do with Cuba and missiles, I’m pretty sure.”

Best Documentaries

95
Los Angeles Plays Itself by Thom Andersen.

An absolutely brilliant analysis of how Los Angeles was portraited in movies along cinema history. Made only with samples of lots of movies and a voice over. The thesis proposed and the analysis of the scenes and the movies are very acute and interesting. A truly amazing doc about cinema and about Los Angeles, its history and its psychology.


Some others that everybody else mentioned and I second: Dig!, Crumb, The Devil and Daniel Johnston, The Filth and the Fury.

One I think no one else mentioned but it's great also: Le sang des bêtes by Georges Franju.

Some Herzog: Grizzly Man!

Best Documentaries

96
Rick Reuben wrote:I've mentioned this elsewhere, but this is good: 'SPIN'


I saw this one years ago and found it pretty funny, in a cynical sort of way. I recall that Jerry Brown really comes across as an obnoxious asshole.

A few of my favorites:

Touching the Void. A breathtaking and tense account of two mountain climbers who get in a pinch while descending from a mountain they climbed in Peru. Highly recommended.

Mr. Death is, of course, fantastic, but the Errol Morris movie that blew me away the most was The Thin Blue Line. It's actually worth watching this one critically, to witness how Morris frames the story to cast the innocent fella in the most positive light possible. For example, both persons recount the details of the evening that precede the murder, but only the genuinely guilty party recounts the "bad" stuff (e.g., pot smoking).

I really liked the Voices & Visions documentaries about poets that PBS aired years and years ago. They're worth watching if for no other reason than to hear James Merrill read, with his mellifluous voice, a couple of poems by Wallace Stevens.
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