When he was nineteen, Jeremiah Zagar began to film his father, Philadelphia mosaic artist Isaiah Zagar. He continued to follow him around with a camera for seven years for what became the documentary In a Dream.

Jeremiah set out to capture his parents' love, which is the creative force at the source of their family and their art. Then, one day, as they go to pick up Jeremiah's brother from rehab, his parents' forty-three-year relationship crumbles. Seemingly out of nowhere, Isaiah admits, on camera, that he has been having an affair with his assistant for years.

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We spend a lot of time in this slot telling you, the loyal Screengrab reader, about the ups and downs of independent film.  We've also addressed, not always with tongue out of cheek, the travails of the documentary filmmaker.  But we're dead serious when we tell you that being a documentarian can be a dangerous, and even deadly, business.  That's where Andrew Berends comes in, and this is where you can really help.

Berends is a documentary filmmaker who's never shied from going to dangerous places to pursue his art.  He's perhaps known for two feature films he did during an extended stay in Iraq:  When Adnan Comes Home and the deeply affecting The Blood of My Brother:  A Story of Death in Iraq.  (Berends also worked on "Gangs of Iraq", one of the more effective Iraq War segments of TV's Frontline program).  Recently, while researching a story on corruption and violence in Nigeria's oil-rich Niger Delta, Berends, his assistants, and several translators were arrested by the government and accused of spying.  Thanks largely to an outpouring of coverage in the film press and the assistance of the French organization Reporters Without Borders, the last of them were released last month.

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That's the question that William Goss is asking at Cinematical.  Documentaries, long thought to be boring slogs that were designed to educate first and entertain fifth, have recently started making big money and attracting media attention.  With that, they've also started to become entertaining first and informative last; and now, catering to an audience no longer consisting only of the fringe elements who liked documentaries for their own sake, their only previous requirement -- that they be true -- has come under increasing scrutiny.  

"At what point did we begin to craft documentary filmmaking specifically to the masses," asks Goss, referring specifically to the Breakast Club-esque, heavily choreographed American Teen, "and then what happens when the masses just don't show?"  And more than that, what happens when, in service to those massess, documentaries absolve themselves of their most sacred trust -- to reflect reality -- and start become something entirely different?

Obviously, this isn't the first time documentaries have blurred those particular lines in hopes of finding an audience.  Going as far back as Nanook of the North, we find scenes that are staged, reshot, or otherwise tinkered with.  Recreations have been a hot issue since the debut of Errol Morris' work; old Disney nature documentaries frequently blurred or even fabricated the truth about their subjects; and ideological bias has been an issue in documentary film since long before there was a Michael Moore.  But in recent years, it's become a more important question than ever, with such popular films as March of the Penguins, which used manipulated footage on its way to becoming one of the biggest documentary successes of all time, the similar Arctic Tale, and the upcoming Morning Light, an alleged real-life documentary about sailing in which the cast is selected no differently than that of a sitcom.  

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Olympia

Leni Riefenstahl's epic documentary of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. Your viewing pleasure may be somewhat tainted by the appearance of Adolf Hitler. He hosted the games and commissioned the film. The insanely long opening sequence shows nude and loin-clothed athletes, Greek ruins and German forests. Next, the camera pans over a map of Europe. Names of countries, Hungary, Austria, Czechoslovakia pop up. It reads like a roadmap for coming invasions. Then on to the stadium full of heiling masses. Jesse Owens' series of wins in the sprint races, an athletic bird-flip to Nazism, are a definite highlight. Gives some perspective on Olympic Games and politics, no?

Tokyo Olympiad

Set at the Tokyo Olympic Games of 1964, Kon Ichikawa's film opens with a wrecking ball on old fire-bombed buildings, then cuts to a brand new jet age Olympic stadium.

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Though we love movie-related lists as much as anybody -- indeed, as we love movie-related lists even more than anybody -- we've noticed a somewhat disturbing trend in the recent flood-tide of best-ofs: the documentary often gets the short shrift. Stuck somewhere between a feature film and an educational short, even with the new wave of populist docs that actually make money at the box office, doumentaries are rarely considered part of the mainstream corpus which gets shuffled around for various critics' Top Whatever lists, and thus, leave the average fan with no idea where to start when it comes to the medium.

That's something that Jonathan Kahana, a professor of cinema studies at NYU (and author of the recently released Intelligence Work:  The Politics of American Documentary) aims to change with this list.

Originally created as a feature for an in-flight magazine and later severely truncated (a process all to familiar to those of us who have tilled that particular soil), Kahana's list contains a dozen of the finest documentaries in history from the 1920s to the present, available on DVD and otherwise.  Compiled by the author to "pay it forward" to an upcoming generations of documentary fans, the list is a solid one -- we'll present it below in chronological order, but please do check out the link for Kahana's insightful commentary on each choice.

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Any day now, I'll start taking it for granted — but for the moment, every time I discover a great film streaming free online, it feels like a visit from Santa.  Today's free movie is the eye-opening 1996 documentary The Celluloid Closet, which caters not only to film buffs and gay culture aficionados, but to anyone with a short attention span. Based on Vito Russo's groundbreaking history of homosexuality in the movies, the film shows us how there have always been gay characters in films, literally from the very beginning. Sometimes these references were subtle (the "sissy" archetype in films like The Gay Divorcee) and sometimes overt (Greta Garbo smooching a lady in Queen Christina), as The Celluloid Closet demonstrates through a jaw-dropping series of film clips.  Which brings us to that short attention span bit; it's impossible to change the channel (or open a new browser window, as it were) during this film. You want too badly to see the next clip.

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As anyone who's perused the American Film Institute's lists can tell you, consensus is boring. Unfortunately, it's hard to get around when you conduct a poll. The International Documentary Association has asked its members to select the twenty-five greatest documentaries ever made. (They voted from a list of 700 films, but that complete list doesn't seem to be available on the IDA's website.) It reveals that documentarians are just as prone to sticking with the "new release" shelves and shying away from subtitles as the rest of us. Despite the "international" in the IDA's name, only two foreign-language films made the top twenty-five — Buena Vista Social Club landed at #20 and Night and Fog at #22. Never fear, though: Michael Moore will come to save the day, with three films on the list. While including a number of landmarks (Titicut Follies, Don't Look Back, Grey Gardens), the list leans towards high-profile recent documentaries, including major films (Capturing the Friedmans, Grizzly Man) and mediocrities (Born into Brothels, Spellbound). Any films made before 1955 are missing — so much for Dziga Vertov (without whom Koyaanisqatsi, the #14 entry, would look much different) and Robert Flaherty. A strict definition of documentary seems to have kept F for Fake and Close Up at bay. All but two films are available on DVD — I wonder if this has anything to do with Netflix's sponsorship of the poll.  Still, this list isn't entirely without merit in the long run — like the AFI's, it begs to be countered and is bound to spur dialogue, as it already has in the blogosphere. — Steve Erickson