Best Documentary Film Ever.....

[marmar]

I just followed up a huge Christmas dinner with the family by watching "Enron: Smartest Guys in the Room." Very good and very well done, up there with the very best documentary films I've ever seen. So I'm posting a poll, partially because I'm bored but also 'cause I'd like to see what my DU peeps think. :think:

P.S. - Even though I loved "Smartest Guys in the Room," and "The Corporation" has been an outlook-changing movie for me, I've still got to go with Fahrenheit 9/11.

[hippiechick]

1. "Future Shock" - 1972

... based on the essay by Alvin Toffler. Scared the livin' shit outta this (at the time) 8 year old.
And, in retrospect, was almost creepily prescient.

[NYCGirl]

2. "Shoah" — perhaps the most important film ever made:

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19851124/REVIEWS/511240301/1023

BY ROGER EBERT / November 24, 1985

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.

-snipped- (please read the entire review, it's so worth it)

And that is the final message of this extraordinary film. It is not a documentary, not journalism, not propaganda, not political. It is an act of witness. In it, Claude Lanzmann celebrates the priceless gift that sets man apart from animals and makes us human, and gives us hope: the ability for one generation to tell the next what it has learned.

[lvasconcellos]

3. Dang, I didn't see "other" until it was too late but...

You have GOT to see "Why we Fight" by Eugene Jarecki http://www.sonyclassics.com/whywefight/ It starts with the statement Dwight Eisenhower made as he left office warning us about the military industrial complex and delves in to the addition of Congressional involvement in the handing out of sweetheart contracts. Excellent doc, very good interviews.Provided basic truth about why we invaded Iraq, I took 3 young men and believe it deterred at least one from join the military.

[lvasconcellos]

4. Sir , No Sir!

Also a must see. Sometimes they come and go before you can see them. A total eyeopener about the resistance within the military against the Vietnam war. The history has been revised regarding why we left Vietnam, it was because the troops refused to follow orders (no duh- just go get killed for nothing dude). Now the Fox folks have convinced we left because of us pacifists at home, and that we could have "won" if we just stayed there. Awesome flick!!

[lvasconcellos]

6. http://www.sirnosir.com/

Check it out!

[marmar]

7. I will...

:hi:

[lvasconcellos]

8. Sorry about that link...

try this one http://www.sirnosir.com/home_filmtrailers.html There is an awesome part in it where Jane Fonda is totally cheered by masses of GIs. Now it's made to seem like she was an afterthought. Also good: rare footage of the HUGE numbers of GI dissenters that were in military brigs.
Fahrenheit 911 is an icon type movie and it did open a lot of minds and cause there to be open discussion of the war. It also enjoyed a wider distribution than a lot of other docs; my favorite new film genre. Did you see Jesus Camp? Very scary

[marmar]

10. Merci beaucoup...

:thumbsup:

[valerief]

5. There is no best here. They're all marvelous. nt

[Swamp Rat]

9. "Canadian Bacon"

:D

[burythehatchet]

17. .

:rofl:

[Ahpook]

11. Baraka has been a favorite..

It would hopefully explain to anyone that a prejudice mindset is a horrible place to be.It should show a connection that we all have with the earth. Unfortunately, quite a few see that as pointless and stupid.

I would expect it to be boring for a few people. If it isn't, you are A-ok in my book.

Check it out:)

[SoCalDem]

12. Harvest of Shame.. none close to it

[PurityOfEssence]

13. Harlan County, USA

True documentary work as it follows a strike and the ensuing struggle.

[Radical Activist]

14. Yep.

The above poll is more like "the best political documentary of the last 10 years."

[NYC]

16. That was excellent.

I had read King Coal written by Upton Sinclair around 1917. Little had changed. Just a lower level of violence.

Apparently, you can read it for free here:

http://manybooks.net/titles/sinclairuetext058coal10.html

[Roland99]

15. Fahrentheit 9/11 isn't really a documentary. I'd go with PBS Frontline: The Man Who Knew

Or possibly The Road to Guantanamo.

[ripple]

21. Frontline rocks. Iraq: The Lost Year was good, too n/t

[Roland99]

23. And Rumsfeld's War and Dark Side and...

:)

[burythehatchet]

18. I'd have to make an honorable mention for the body of Bill moyers'

work on PBS.

[judaspriestess]

19. Hoop Dreams

that documentary is awesome. I have not had the luxury of seeing the inconvenient truth. I hope to see it soon.

[stanwyck]

29. Incredible movie. America is in that movie

heart and soul. That movie really had an impact on me.

[verse18]

20. "Eyes on the Prize"

[ThomWV]

26. I agree.

I don't think that the others mentioned even come close by comparison.

[SanCristobal]

22. Martial Law: Rise of the Police State.

Most informative/amusing documentary ever made. Alex Jones reveals the truth behind 9/11, the secret right wing plot to bring Arnold to the presidency as a new Hitler, exposes Micheal Moore as a member of the Bush administration, and (the insanity of the rest of the film aside) exposes the heavy handed police tactics used during the 2004 RNC. It's freely available on YouTube, I suggest everyone educate themselves.

[edbermac]

24. The Titicut Follies by Frederick Wiseman

About mental patients at a Mass state hospital in the 1960's. The people there were treated so badly that state officials managed to ban the film for about 25 years on the grounds that it violated the patient's rights, but that was just blowing smoke on their part. Still pretty potent stuff and pretty sad.

[talk hard]

25. Inconvenient Truth is the most important one

and Farenheit 9/11 is the most controversial and I loved it.

[sam sarrha]

27. i liked the one on Iran Contra, the Boys Town DC Child Prostitution Ring Scandal

[Buzz Clik]

28. "The Battleship Potemkin", Segei Eisenstein

[Sabriel]

30. Hearts and Minds (1974)

A really well done doc about Vietnam. Disturbing images, even for today. Highly recommended, if you've never seen it...and if you can take another war documentary.

[razors edge]

31. 1984

I know, it wasn't a documentary, and MASH was about the Korean War.

[SanCristobal]

32. For all the people who voted for Fahrenheit 9/11.

Why? That movie was a HUGE let down. Moore not only missed the jugular, he never even aimed for it. Alex Jones summed it up perfectly; why didn't Micheal Moore talk about the biggest questions of 9/11? Many analysts believe it actually helped Bush win in 2004 because of all the controversy it created, controversy that it didn't deserve in the slightest. I remember leaving the theater bewildered; I expected the hard hitting critique of Bush we were all waiting for, and all I got was a lot of news outtakes and quotes taken out of context.

I'm not totally convinced that Moore really is just a corporate shill trying to hide the worst parts of the Bush administration and war on terror, but Alex Jones is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yy2QYoT4LWw

Again, Martial Law is the best political documentary of our time.

[Dirk39]

33. Adam Curtis!

Hello from Germany!
The best documentary films I've seen are both by Adam Curtis:

The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear (2004)
The Century of the Self (2002)

He made them for the BBC, but the Power of Nightmares was shown in Cannes, too.

I wish we had more journalists like him and more T.V. stations, who allow them to work.

Dirk

[Roland99]

41. Oh, yes. The Power of Nightmares was incredible.

[Broken_Hero]

34. 500 Nations...

But I do have to give a nod to Roger and Me...:D

[Spider Jerusalem]

35. What, nothing by Errol Morris?

"The Thin Blue Line" certainly belings on a list of the best documentaries of the past 20 years or so; "Mister Death" and "The Fog of War" were quite good, too.

[ironflange]

36. Koyaanisqatsi?

Is that considered a documentary? Or is it just a very very very long music video?

[JCMach1]

37. Sadly, "Triumph of the Will"

:(

[Bigmack]

38. Need more than one vote! nt

nt

[TahitiNut]

39. "The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara"

Deserves mention on this list.

[Bushwick Bill]

40. 9/11 Press For Truth.

Voting for the Jersey Girls.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5589099104255077250