My Greatest Docs Ever
So this is my choice for the Sight & Sound “The Greatest Docs Ever”. I have chosen films that I have used in my work as a teacher and consultant, films that I have come back to because they have meant something to me. I have been influenced by meetings with the directors – Herz Frank, Lozinski, Kossakovsky, Apted, Glawogger, Matelis – and by reading about and listening to clever words by Leacock and Pelichian, not to forget Lanzmann. What the films all have in common, I think, are a belief in the values of Life how hard and unfair it may be to you. A humanistic fundament, can you say so? 6 of the films are from the Eastern part of Europe where I have been working quite a lot and from where most of the original, artistic documentaries come.
Those which are multi-layered, philosophical, essayistic in a Chris Marker-way, sketchy and close to the term “camera comme stylo”. To be stressed: This is a personal choice, if I had gone through film history decade after decade it would have been different.
1.Ten Minutes Older
Herz Frank (photo)
1978
It’s all there. The story of our lives. To be read in the face of a boy. An intellectual, concepedy documentary with Juris Podnieks as cameraman, “the story of good and evil” as the subtitle goes. I have shown it wherever I go to introduce that documentaries must be reflective and philosophical.
2. Shoah
Claude Lanzmann
1985
No words necessary, an obvious choice and Lanzmann’s follow-up “The Last of the Unjust” is an appendix that shows that the director/journalist is still able to add quality to documentary film history.
3. Anything Can Happen
Marcel Lozinski
1995
Playful and clever interpretation of what Life and Death, Joy and Sorrow is – the director’s charming son runs around in a park, where he meets old people
and ask them all kind of questions in a direct way that we grown-ups would never dare. The result is touching and great fun at the same time.
4. The Belovs
Viktor Kossakovsky
1994
I could have taken the director’s last masterpiece, Vivan las Antipodas, as well but this film from the countryside of Russia brilliantly depicts the Russian soul as we have experienced it in works of Dostoyevsky and Thechov.
5. Man With a Movie Camera
Dziga Vertov
1929
When you get bored of formatted documentaries, this is the one to make you trust the power of the documentary language, the joy of Life, the enthusiasm of what the new medium is able to achieve, innovative and playful, pure pleasure, to watch without music, please!
6. 7UP
Michael Apted
1964 –
It’s like watching yourself… wonderful hymn to human lives… you follow the characters with so much interest and empathy, you cry and laugh with them, it’s a magnificent series, and it also – in its style – is a look at how film and television language has changed through 50 years.
7. Megacities
Michael Glawogger
1998
Few directors have as Glawogger been travelling the world to tell stories about how people live and think and work. This is one of the works from his trilogy (the others are “Workingman’s Death” and “Whore’s Glory”), with a superb cinematography of Wolfgang Thaler, “la condition humaine” is the theme so far away from reportage as one can be.
8. Before Flying Back to the Earth
Arunas Matelis
2005
He comes from the Lithuanian school of poetic documentary, he made several beautiful b/w enigmatic short documentaries but when his daughter got leukemia and was at hospital for months, the director decided to make a film about children in a similar situation and he came up with his magnificent visual poetic homage to how children fight against their serious illness with all they got of courage and humour!
9. Seasons
Artavadz Pelichian
1975
I have never understood Pelichian’s montage theory but this his masterpiece will always attract an audience to see the power of the single image, at the same time as the film is anthropological, have totally abstract, non-figurative sequences, no words, Vivaldi “only”. You are speechless when you have been with peasants and sheep up and down the hills. If you look carefully there are small human stories, happiness and grief.
10. Jazz Dance
Richard Leacock
1954
I had to have Leacock on board… his filmography is extraordinary, his work with Flaherty is unique, his work with the other direct cinema people (Pennebaker, Maysles, Drew) likewise, but I have chosen this one that he himself has talked so well about, where he went bananas in a night club, filmed from the table, a jamming with the camera, a true FREE film.
