Documentaries

This three-part film, made primarily by a five-person crew, documents the rising political tension in Chile in the mid-1970s, the violent counter-revolution against the Salvador Allende government, and the workers' response to the 'insurrection'. This is also available online at the Internet Archive.

While this is a documentary about art forger Elmyr de Hory and Howard Hughes hoax-biographer Clifford Irving, it is also more generally about all sorts of fakery, including the art of cinema itself. Welles presents this as a sort of essay on film and it is considered (by me to be) one of his finest pieces of work in his late career.

While there have been other excellent documentaries about the subject, like the more recent Apollo 11, for a long time this was the one that chronicled the Apollo space program to the Moon. Without narration it tells the story through original mission footage and audio from mission control and subsequent interviews. It also has an ethereal score by Brian Eno (recently re-released on CD).
For more space doc, see also The Farthest, about the Voyager spacecraft.

This documents the 1973 Brookside coal miner's strike in Kentucky against the mine and the Duke Power Company who refused to honor their United Mine Workers of America contract. The film is very much on the side of the workers, embedded in with them filming, as both sides eventually arm themselves against impending violence. However, Kopple chose not to narrate the images, but allow those from each side to speak to and for the camera.

The basic intent of this film was to follow two high-school basketball stars as they chase their dreams to play professionally in the NBA for a short PBS documentary, but this film becomes so much more in its following the lives of these two men to present a nearly three-hour portrait (from over 250 hours of footage). Because these two African-American teenagers are plucked from their neighborhoods in Chicago to attend a predominantly more white, more economically affluent high school with a highly competitive basketball program, issues of race, class, economics, education, etc. are all documented here. It was noticeably championed heavily by film critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert as the best film of 1994 (not just among documentaries).

While this portrayal of Inuit (then referred to as "Eskimo") people in northern Canada is widely considered one of the first known feature-length documentaries, it has also retrospectively been criticized for its staging of many of its scenes. For example, the lead figure, whose name was actually Allakariallak, usually hunted with a gun (and in modern clothing), but Flaherty suggested he wear more traditional garb and use a harpoon for effect (also the actress playing Nyla was not the wife of Allakariallak). Yet, it is the combination of the attempt at ethnography, under the lens of the time, and narrative feature convention that makes this a ground-breaking film.

This takes viewers backstage at the 1967 Miss All-American Camp Beauty Pageant, featuring the world of competitive drag (long before more well-known documentaries like Paris is Burning would much later). The camp of it all is contrasted with very honest interviews with the participants. And Andy Warhol is a judge!

Michael Moore investigates the impact of General Motors closing its automobile plants in his hometown of Flint, Michigan. The film is structured around his attempts to obtain an in-person interview with CEO Roger Smith and his documenting the economic and social effects of the closures on the town he grew up in (his father was an autoworker in one of the plants). It is a personal and persuasive kind of gonzo filmmaking that makes no attempt to be a neutral document of its time and place.

This meta-film blurs the line between fiction and documentary with its being a movie about making a movie; where the director hires film students for a film that doesn't exist as a way to document them. The Criterion Collection DVD includes the 1968 original ('Take One') and a later sequel from 2005 ("Take 2 1/2")

Jafar Panahi was convicted in 2010 of propaganda against the state of Iran, sentenced to 6 years in prison and a 20 year ban on making films. A year later, this film was smuggled out of Iran, on a USB flash drive hidden in a birthday cake, and screened at the Cannes Film Festival. It documents his house arrest, talking to lawyers on the phone about his appeal, and generally pondering the purpose of filmmaking. He has since won numerous awards, and international support condemning his treatment.