The World of Lists: Documentaries Get Their Due

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 14:30:00 GMT

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.

1. Manhatta (Charles Sheeler & Paul Strand, 1921) & Rain (Joris Ivens, 1929)
2. Nanook of the North (Robert Flaherty, 1922)
3. The Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
4. Night and Fog (Alain Resnais, 1955)
5. Salesman (Alfred & David Maysles, 1969)
6. Harlan County U.S.A. & American Dream (Barbara Kopple, 1975 & 1991)
7. Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1982)
8. The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, 1989)
9. Little Dieter Wants to Fly (Werner Herzog, 1998)
10. The Gleaners and I (Agnes Varda, 2000)
11. The Corporation (Jennifer Abbott & Mark Achbar, 2003)
12. Bright Leaves (Ross McElwee, 2004)

What do you think, Screengrab readers? What did Kahana include that you'd have left off, and what did he omit that you'd make sure got in? What are your 12 favorite documentaries?

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The World of Lists: Documentaries Get Their Due