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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Family Pictures: Celia Maysles's "Wild Blue Yonder"

Phil Nugent — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 17:00:00 GMT

The brothers Albert and David Maysles established a shared reputation as towering figures in the area of documentary filmmaking based on such films as Salesman, Gimme Shelter and Grey Gardens. Since David's death in 1987, the 81-year-old Albert has continued to make films, while tending to his and his brothers' reputation, which has taken on a mighty aura; in the New York Observer Tom Roston notes that press coverage of Albert is "usually of the fawning variety; he tends to receive the living icon treatment reserved for the likes of Martin Scorsese. " He can be both touchy and territorial; when Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, the co-directors of the superb 1992 documentary Brother's Keeper, included a credit acknowledging their debt to David, Albert demanded that they remove it and accused them of, in Sinofsky's words, "trying to ride the Maysles coattails." (Recalling their exchange, Sinofsky says, “I told him I could have named it after Mussolini if I wanted to.”) The documentary film community is a tight little world that sometimes resembles a family that can be as dysfunctional as any other, but the latest dust-up over the Maysles' legacy really is a family affair.

Twenty-eight-year-old Celia Maysles was seven years old when her father, David, died. Her filmmaking debut, Wild Blue Yonder, which she directed and produced while also serving as her own cinematographer, had its U.S. premiere last week at South by Southwest. As she describes it, "The point of this story is me finding my dad. I wanted people to know how hard it was to lose a parent. To have such a complete void. If I could do what my dad did, it would be like getting to know him through the process. From the fund-raising and the frustrations and the filming, I’d get to walk in his shoes." It turned out that her relationship with her uncle, and his relationship to the film, fell into the "frustrations" category. Tom Roston writes that "Albert initially sat for several interviews with Celia. But when she made clear she desperately wanted to look at, and potentially use, footage of her father, Albert, as he explains on camera, was reluctant to let her use any footage... partly because he was making his own autobiographical film." Bruce Sinofsky says of Albert that "he’s fearful that if someone else gets his or her name in a book, it’s erasing his name.” By that stage of the game, Celia was desperate to get her hands on some actual footage of her father: “I had interviewed all these people and I still felt like I didn’t know him. I just wanted to see him.” Happily, the discovery of a film library that included footage of David made it possible for her to achieve personal catharsis and end her film the way she wanted to. Now Celia describes the difficulties she had with her uncle as “a blessing in disguise. I am really grateful to him. I owe him everything. If he had just been like, ‘Here, take this,’ I would have known this much of my dad.” For his part, Albert, who denies rumors that he actually tried to prevent the movie from getting made, complains that ”Unnecessarily, I come off badly" but does hail the finished film as "fairly well made.” He reports that his own "autobiographical" film, Handheld and From the Heart, which he's making in collaboration with his son Philip, should be completed next year.

The Screengrab : salesman

The World of Lists: Documentaries Get Their Due

Family Pictures: Celia Maysles's "Wild Blue Yonder"