Al Weisel - CDNow's 10 Essential Documentaries
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| The 10 Essential Documentaries
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 | By
Al Weisel
CDNOW Senior Editor, Movies
The first films ever made were documentaries; that is, they
were nonfiction films about actual events. Thomas Edison and
the Lumière brothers astounded audiences by recording such
everyday occurrences as a kiss or a train entering a station
(these films are available on the collection Landmarks
of Early Film). Dziga Vertov's Man
With a Movie Camera and Walter Ruttmann's Berlin:
Symphony of a Great City elevated this point-and-shoot
technique to great art.
In 1922 Robert Flaherty applied the techniques of narrative
film to his documentary Nanook
of the North, igniting a controversy that still rages
to this day: How much of what we see in a documentary is true
and how much is manipulated by the filmmaker? Indeed, Adolf
Hitler realized that film was a great propaganda tool for
spreading his lies and hired the young filmmaker Leni
Riefenstahl to direct the notorious Triumph of the
Will. The allies, too, created counter-propaganda such as
Frank Capra's Why
We Fight series.
In the 1960s the cinema verité movement (literally, "cinema
truth") tried to restore credibility to the genre by recording
exactly what happened without the intervention of a narrator
in such films as Frederick Wiseman's Titicut Follies
(unavailable on video) and D.A. Pennebaker's Don't Look
Back. While even this technique sometimes left "facts"
open to interpretation, many documentarians, such as Joe
Berlinger (Paradise
Lost), Barbara Kopple, and Errol Morris, see the
notion that there is one "truth" as just another Hollywood
lie.
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| 1. Hoop Dreams (1994) |
 Director Steve James followed two Chicago inner-city
youths vying for basketball scholarships for four years. His
unprecedented project not only captured a real-life story as
engrossing and suspenseful as any dramatic film, it also
delivered a devastating indictment of how our society treats
one class of people.
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| 2. The Thin Blue Line
(1988) |
 Errol Morris revolutionized documentary filmmaking
with this beautifully shot film about a man unjustly
imprisoned in Texas (where else?) for a murder he didn't
commit. The film not only uses images and music (composed by
Philip Glass) in innovative ways, it also actually
accomplished something -- its subject was freed from prison
because of the film.
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| 3. Shoah (1985) |
 In
telling the story of the Holocaust, director Claude Lanzmann
interviewed scores of people around the world, who were both
victims and perpetrators of the Nazi's crimes. Despite its
nine-and-a-half-hour length, the film is never less than
riveting, from the chilling, excruciatingly detailed interview
with a concentration camp guard to the Polish train engineer
who draws his finger across his neck to show how he signaled
to the Jews the fate that awaited them.
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| 4. Triumph of Will (1934) |
 One of the most deservedly vilified films ever made,
Leni Riefenstahl's documentary about a Hitler rally in
Nuremberg is full of astounding, seductive images that
demonstrate how powerful the medium of film can be and how
easily it can be manipulated in the wrong hands.
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| 5. Don't Look Back (1967) |
 D.A. Pennebaker used the techniques of cinema verité
to make the first great rockumentary about Bob Dylan's first
British tour. The film serendipitously captures not only an
important moment in the career of a rock star -- Dylan at the
moment before he went electric -- but also a pivotal time in
our culture.
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| 6. Sherman's March (1986) |
 Although he started out to make a documentary about
the affect of Sherman's march on the South, director Ross
McElwee ended up making something far more rich and strange --
a deeply personal autobiography of a man unable to relate to
the people around him except through his camera.
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| 7. Rock Hudson's Home Movies
(1992) |
 Using the hoary technique of assembling film clips to
narrate actor Rock Hudson's life, Mark Rappaport radically
reinterprets and reedits the clips to tell a story that wasn't
told onscreen -- the often funny, often tragic tale of an
actor forced to hide his homosexuality and live a
lie.
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| 8. Harlan County USA (1976) |
 The story of Kentucky coal miners who go on strike
after the Eastover Mining Company cuts their wages, Barbara
Kopple's Oscar-winning cinema verité documentary is agit-prop
at its best.
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| 9. Paris Is Burning (1990) |
 In
Reagan's America a New York subculture of disaffected gay and
transgender youth created their own families to replace the
ones that rejected them and invented a whole culture with its
own lingo and a dance craze, voguing, that inspired
Madonna.
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| 10. Roger & Me (1989) |
 Instead of staying in the background like most
documentary filmmakers, gadfly Roger Moore puts himself at the
center of his acerbic account of the devastation caused to his
hometown of Flint, Mich., when General Motors closes its plant
there, and his attempts to confront the CEO of the company
about what he has done.
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