What's your favorite documentary film?

In anticipation of "SiCKO," a poll on the best docs.....
As great as Fahrenheit 9/11 was, the film that's had the biggest impact on me was "The Corporation." What doc, whether it be about politics, the military, socioeconomic systems, the environment, or whatever, has had the biggest impact on you?

I also wanted to vote for F911.

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19851124/REVIEWS/511240301

For more than nine hours I sat and watched a film named "Shoah," and when it was over, I sat for a while longer and simply stared into space, trying to understand my emotions. I had seen a memory of the most debased chapter in human history. But I had also seen a film that affirmed life so passionately that I did not know where to turn with my confused feelings. There is no proper response to this film. It is an enormous fact, a 550-minute howl of pain and anger in the face of genocide. It is one of the noblest films ever made.


The film's title is a Hebrew word for chaos or annihilation - for the Holocaust. The film is a documentary, but it does not contain images from the 1940s. There are no old newsreel shots, no interviews with the survivors of the death camps, no coverage of the war crimes trials. All of the movie was photographed in the last five or six years by a man named Claude Lanzmann, who went looking for eyewitnesses to Hitler's "Final Solution." He is surprisingly successful in finding people who were there, who saw and heard what went on. Some of them, a tiny handful, are Jewish survivors of the camps. The rest are mostly old people, German and Polish, some who worked in the camps, others who were in a position to observe what happened.


They talk and talk. "Shoah" is a torrent of words, and yet the overwhelming impression, when it is over, is one of silence. Lanzmann intercuts two kinds of images. He shows the faces of his witnesses. And then he uses quiet pastoral scenes of the places where the deaths took place. Steam engines move massively through the Polish countryside, down the same tracks where trains took countless Jews, gypsies, Poles, homosexuals and other so-called undesira bles to their deaths. Cameras pan silently across pastures, while we learn that underneath the tranquility are mass graves. Sometimes the image is of a group of people, gathered in a doorway, or in front of a church, or in a restaurant kitchen.


Lanzmann is a patient interrogator. We see him in the corners of some of his shots, a tall, lanky man, informally dressed, chain-smoking. He wants to know the details. He doesn't ask large, profound questions about the meaning of the extermination of millions of people. He asks little questions. In one of the most chilling sequences in the film, he talks to Abraham Bomba, today a barber in Tel Aviv. Bomba was one of the Jewish barbers ordered to cut off the hair of Jewish women before they were killed in Treblinka. His assignment suggests the shattering question: How can a woman's hair be worth more than her life? But Lanzmann does not ask overwhelming and unanswerable questions like this. These are the sorts of questions he asks:

But of those listed I've only seen 'Smartest Guys' so I'll go with that one. (Not a big Michael Moore fan)

standard for how documentaries are done, at least for TV. They're all done in his style now, with the voice-overs, the historians, the photos and the music. No re-enactments to cheese it up, either, which is why I like them so much.

:thumbsup:

It was quite the education in a musical form that I like, but really am not that versed in.

n/t

Which shows, in detail, the reality of how ordinary people can, and did, become collaborators with a murderous regime.

I voted for "The Corporation" because it points to what I believe is the fundamental problem of our society - control and domination by the "monied interests." So many of our problems are linked in one way or the other to this one. "Why We Fight" addresses this and I'm sure "Sicko" does too. "Who Killed the Electric Car" is a great case study of the same problem - monopolization of the economy and rule by the few.

Shirley Chisholm had guts of steel and was a warrior. This film looks at her run for the Presidency in 1972. She was UNBOUGHT and UNBOSSED.

DVD at Amazon.com

Shirley Chisholm, a Democrat from New York, was the first black woman elected to the United States Congress (in 1969), and then--long before the likes of Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton--the first African American of either gender to seek a major party's presidential nomination, an effort recounted in Unbought & Unbossed. Chisholm, who died in January 2005 (the 76-minute documentary was produced the previous year), undoubtedly knew that her chances of winning her party's 1972 nomination, let alone the general election, were nil; she ran, she said, to "shake up the system." But while her quest may have been hopeless (as it turned out, so was that of George McGovern, the eventual nominee, who lost to incumbent Richard Nixon in a landslide of historic proportions), it was hardly quixotic. Well-educated, articulate, and tough, Chisholm faced plenty of opposition, including from women and other black politicians; she was even physically attacked on the "Chisholm Trail," as she called her campaign ('72 was also the year that Alabama governor George Wallace, another would-be Democratic nominee, was shot and paralyzed). But she stayed the course all the way up to the Democratic convention in Miami, when she finally released her delegates to McGovern, and continued serving in the House of Representatives until 1983. Whether or not Shirley Chisholm met her goal of becoming "a catalyst for change," as she planned, is arguable. But that she had guts and the strength of her convictions is beyond debate.

:patriot:

http://imgred.com/

I just didn't know if the production values were good or not. I've been burnt by a lot of shoddy documentaries on what would have been good subjects.
Since someone's recommending it, i'll be sure to watch it now.

Of the choices that you listed, I've only seen "Supersize Me" (which I really enjoyed)...but the first documentary that really touched me was Best Boy (the story of a mentally challenged adult). There was a sequel called "Best Man" that revisted the story 20 years later...also very good.

I'm not sure if anyone is familar with another documentary called "The Teachings of Jon" (the story of a 40 year old man with Down syndrome). I saw it on PBS about a year ago and loved it (www.teachingsofjon.com)

Tim

Grey Gardens, by the Maysles brothers. Brilliant.

especially Lessons of Darkness, Grizzly Man, My Best Fiend, and Little Dieter Needs to Fly

Should be seen by all Americans about those who were here before us (and still are).
It will change the way you look at American history forever.

I saw it years ago, but its impact has never left me.

The only thing really questioning the govt involvement in 9/11. I would like to se SiCKo though.

:scared:

Scared me ... seriously delusional people indoctrinating kids.

Another good one is Hell House, that was about the "Christian" haunted houses that they have around Halloween; SERIOUSLY scary stuff (the people running it, not the houses).

Also loved Ken Burn's Civil War. The documentary Unprecedented (about the 2000 election) really got my blood pressure up, even after having followed the election so closely.

Other good ones to infuriate you; Bush's Brain and Orwell Rolls Over in His Grave.

That is Michael Moore at his best, when he just turns a camera on the clueless and lets them talk. Flint in crumbling around them, yet the rich people at the country club tell the camera how great things are there. "Our kids are in ballet!"

It was a wake-up call for me as a young adult - the moment I realized that the GOP and our corporate rulers were not as benevolent as they pretend...

:kick:

Alex is in the Oval Office

It's more entertaining than "Jurassic Park" with better cgi, and all of it is based on real paleontology.

The series includes "Walking With Dinosaurs," "Prehistoric Beasts" (mammals), "Monsters: Before the Dinosaurs," and "Cavemen." I would be hard-pressed to choose the best of them. I like the Age of Mammals a lot, so I might have to go with "Beasts."

Cuaron included it as a special feature in Children of Men.

on Quebec independance.

but since that's not an option, i voted for super size me. morgan spurlock and i grew up in the same part of w.va.

From the early 1980s. That has to be one of the Top 5 on any list.

To this day I can't watch it without crying.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fog_of_War

lots of good ones out there.

It brought corporate power and its stupidity into full view. It left no doubt who is in charge of policy in this country.

about Timothy 'Speed' Levitch, a tour guide on a double decker bus in NYC. Amazing. I really liked Roger & Me also; and for just plain weird, there's Living Dolls about the little girl beauty pageants.

Product Description
A courageous and startling film, Peter Davis' landmark documentary Hearts and Minds unflinchingly confronts the United States' involvement in Vietnam. Using a wealth of sources-from interviews to newsreels to documentary footage of the conflict at home and abroad-Davis constructs a powerfully affecting portrait of the disastrous effects of war. Explosive, persuasive, and shocking, Hearts and Minds is an overwhelming emotional experience and the controversial winner of the 1974 Academy Award® for Best Documentary.

Link: http://www.amazon.com/Hearts-Minds-Collection-Clark-Clifford/dp/B00006673L

Blow... You... Away...

but from the list, I would have to vote for "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" - it should be required viewing in every school.

It's not very political, but I've known people like those for half my life. And it's really funny how stupid they look with just a little bit of clever editing.

running our country. The tide started to turn after F911 played in theaters for months and months, then came out on DVD, was rented in video stores and shown on TeeVee for the next few years. People FINALLY saw what we're dealing with here. ...and they were left speechless, literally. Yep...Michael Moore is a National Treasure.

because of Clinton's welfare deform.

Which is why most liberals don't want to watch it.