The results have been published and so I am free to post my response.
In the last few years, I have had to confront the fact that I am an unintentional contrarian. I won’t go into all the details but I find it hard to ignore the evidence. Faced with this identity, which I did not choose, I think it has something to do with principle, honesty and a need to live with myself with some modicum of self-respect–but there must be some perversity mixed in there as well.
Take the ‘top 10 films’ poll for Sight and Sound. The film magazine’s editors have asked for my ‘top 10’ film list in the past, but I simply ignored the request. This time I got another invitation and a second nudge––on a day when I must have been thinking fondly about the BFI or just about the idea of expressing my opinions on a given subject (for the record, I am a longstanding fan of the BFI and admire its remarkable ability to self-destruct and somehow keep going). But really! Critics, programmers, academics and distributors are supposed to take polls like this seriously?
The big news, according to my good friend Ian Christie, is that Hitchcock has been on the rise and Citizen Kane fell to the number two position! It reminds me of when people ask me to list my favorite film. I respond by saying that I don’t answer those kinds of questions. Moreover, it is fair to say that the films that I most care about –the films I have written about at some length, with a deep intellectual engagement that has produced a corresponding appreciation of their aesthetic and cultural achievements––do not appear on the Sight and Sound list. A few examples include Ernst Lubitsch’s Lady Windermere’s Fan (1925), Oscar Micheaux’s Body and Soul (1925), Germaine Dulac’s La Souriante Madame Beudet (1923)–-or to go into the sound period Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line (1988) and Spike Lee’ Do The Right Thing (1989)–not to mention The John C. Rice-May Irwin Kiss (1896), Edwin S. Porter’s Life of An American Fireman (1903) and Union Films’ The Investigators (1948). Or least we forget the classic avant-garde: Brakhage’s Mothlight (1963) and Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943). But where does this get us?
One film on my top 10 list did make it onto the Sight and Sound counterpart! This just shows that I am not an intentional contrarian. If I was, I’d have listed Vertov’s Three Songs of Lenin (1933) or perhaps Enthusiasm (1931) instead of Man with a Movie Camera (1929), which turned up as number eight.
So: in a small fit of inspiration, I listed my top 10 nonfiction/documentary films with a brief commentary (as requested):
Top 10 Films
Sandow (1894)
Battle of the Somme (1916)
Nanook of the North (1922)
Man with a Movie Camera (1929)
Listen to Britain (1942)
Chronicle of a Summer (1961)
Don’t Look Back (1967)
Hearts and Minds (1974)
The Thin Blue Line (1988)
The Gleaners and I (2001)
Rationale:
–Sandow is on my list as a reminder that we should not ignore short films (including short one-shot films): besides being a wonderful film, it is also the first motion picture made for explicitly commercial purposes. And it is a document—though not a documentary—of the opening of Sandow’s act as it was performed in 1893-94.
–Battle of the Somme is a reminder that there were documentaries before Nanook—but again a great, powerful film. Indeed there were “documentaries” (documentary equivalents) before there were motion pictures, but that is the topic for a book.
–Nanook is there because one is either for Nanook or against it—and I am for it. It is the collaboration between Nanook and Flaherty which makes this film special. It is a co-authored film. [Note: this used to be on S&S’s top 10 list but no longer]
– Man with a Movie Camera is on the list, in part, because I wrote my first paper on the film, and it has inspired me. I also showed it to John MacKay when he was a teaching assistant in my Introduction to Cinema class, and he is now writing the definitive Vertov biography. Just as importantly, my daughter took his Russian cinema course and then (without knowing my past) wrote her first paper on Man with a Movie Camera. Next year she is going to be a teaching assistant for an Introduction to Media Studies course in the Department of Media, Culture and Communications at NYU.
–Listen to Britain because it shows how to make an inspirational film in wartime––one that is not based on hate–– and how to make a city symphony film that embraces the whole country and likewise embraces all kinds of sounds.
–Chronicle of a Summer is endlessly inspiring when it comes to imagining how to make a documentary and interrogate the process at the same time.
Don’t Look Back: of all the examples of cinema verite/observational cinema, this one stands out as a masterpiece. The term “masterpiece” is a term I generally abhor, but there are always exceptions. Certainly the documentary is far more sophisticated than generally recognized. I am a Pennebaker fan–-and will always be indebted to him for a host of reasons. Here’s one. I worked in Los Angeles several times. The first two times I returned to NYC, I dropped by his offices exhausted from the previous project and anxious about my re-entry into New York City. Each time he showed me a film: the first was Jane (1963) and the other was Daybreak Express (1954/58). These welcomed me back: each time I left feeling reassured and re-inspired–knowing I had chosen wisely in returning to my home base.
–Hearts and Minds is a documentary I worked on for two years and it is how I learned to make films and write books. My apprenticeship to Peter Davis, Richard Pierce, Lynzee Klingman, Susan Martin and Tom Cohen was inspiring and difficult in all the best ways. I’d hesitate to put Hearts and Minds on the list, but it continues to be widely shown. People often praise H&M in passing, before they know I worked on it. When we locked picture on the film, we were too exhausted to know what we had achieved. I’ve seen it a number of times since then. I have even taught it several times. I feel both fortunate and proud to have worked on this documentary.
–The Thin Blue Line inspired me to get back involved with documentary theory and history after a long hiatus while researching and writing on early cinema. It completely shook up my ideas—and everyone else’s—of what documentary could and should be. And it began an interaction with Errol Morris which has turned into some kind of low key friendship.
–The Gleaners and I––I love this film: it is hard edged but makes me cry: I think it is Agnes Varda’s relationship to her subjects, which is so special. If I can grow old and keep working the way she does, I’ll feel very fortunate.
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Are the above the 10 best documentaries of all time, by some objective criteria? Well those of us writing on documentary know that we are supposed to be skeptical about objective criteria.