The proliferation of documentaries on streaming services makes it difficult to choose what to watch. Each month, we select three nonfiction films — classics, overlooked recent docs and more — that will reward your time.
‘Nationtime’ (1972)
In March 1972, William Greaves — the director of brain-twisting (and title-stretching) docu-fiction hybrid “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 1” (1968) — turned his camera on the National Black Political Convention in Gary, Ind., an event designed at least in part as a correlative to the conventions that the major parties would hold later that year. But the goal, as The New York Times reported at the time, wasn’t to nominate a presidential candidate. Instead, the delegates in Gary sought to develop a vision to unify and increase political power for Black Americans.
The gathering ended without a consensus, as the text preceding a recent restoration reveals. But the documentary, titled “Nationtime — Gary” onscreen, is a fascinating time capsule of a pivotal moment in Black American history. At the podium, a fiery Jesse Jackson says that he doesn’t trust white Democrats or white Republicans, and speaks of the short-lived promise of recent societal shifts. Black Americans may have won the right to go to any school, he says, but many lack the ability to pay tuition. (“When will we get paid for the work we have already done?” he asks the crowd.) At another point, the poet and playwright Amiri Baraka, who was one of the organizers of the convention and was then known as Imamu Amiri Baraka, speaks of how Robert’s Rules of Order might not be followed as closely as in Congress. Rather, he says, the convention will run on “a thing called ‘African consensus’ that dated back a couple of thousand years before there was a Congress.” (Jackson credits Baraka with devising the delegates’ refrain: “What time is it? It’s nationtime.”)
Greaves highlights appearances by Betty Shabazz, the widow of Malcolm X; Coretta Scott King, the widow of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; and the Black Panther leader and Chicago Eight defendant Bobby Seale. Later in the film, Greaves captures performances by the comedian Dick Gregory and the musician Isaac Hayes, who is onstage with Shaft himself, the actor Richard Roundtree. Harry Belafonte participates in the proceedings and contributes some of the documentary’s voice-over, reading poetry. Other narration is delivered by Sidney Poitier, who defines the significance of the three-day assembly as follows: “For the first time in Black political history, Black people were able to combine two distinctly different kinds of political power: the power of the ballot box and the power of protest groups.”
‘Cameraperson’ (2016)
“Cameraperson” opens by asking viewers to take it as a memoir, but only once does the director, Kirsten Johnson, allow herself to be photographed. A longtime documentary cinematographer, Johnson assembled the film from footage she shot over 25 years, largely for others’ documentaries — although some of the most wrenching material concerns her own family, such as the interludes that show her mother at a ranch in Wyoming a few years after an Alzheimer’s diagnosis.
This prismatic film seamlessly intermingles the political and the personal, and both chronology and geography aren’t observed in strictly logical ways. Rather, the editing is intuitive and associational. One minute we could be in Washington, D.C., as Michael Moore talks with a corporal who refuses to return to Iraq. At another moment we could be in Kano, Nigeria, where Johnson follows the work of a tireless midwife. The filmmaker repeatedly circles back to a family of Bosnian Muslims who are among the few who returned to the town of Foca after the ethnic-cleansing atrocities of the 1990s. Potentially newsworthy footage that Johnson shot with the documentarian Laura Poitras in Yemen shares time with the simple spontaneity of a lightning strike caught on camera in Nodaway County, Mo.
The sheer variety of nonfiction work that Johnson has contributed to ensures that “Cameraperson” will have a certain amount of found surreality. The unlikely scene stealers include a boxer in Brooklyn whose mother consoles him after a loss and warns him to control his temper in public; and the philosopher Jacques Derrida, who likens Johnson to a different sort of philosopher — the kind who falls into a well while looking at the stars. The film invites viewers to consider the psychological impact of spending your life as an observer, as well as the ongoing relationship between nonfiction filmmakers and the people they chronicle. On a return visit to Foca five years after her first trip, Johnson apologizes to her subjects for seeing flashes of beauty amid the horrors.
‘Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger’ (2024)
By age 11, Martin Scorsese was already drawing storyboards for a sword-and-sandal picture in CinemaScope. But in David Hinton’s joyous “Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger,” Scorsese, the documentary’s narrator and onscreen guide, dates a possible origin of his obsession with cinema to watching Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s “The Red Shoes” (1948) in a theater as a child. He remembers that it was the first time he saw the bull’s-eye logo of the Archers — Powell and Pressburger’s production company — in color, and he recalls wanting to know how the filmmakers made a dancer turn into a scrap of newspaper in the centerpiece ballet sequence.
“These days, I’m told that Powell-Pressburger represent something called English Romanticism,” Scorsese says in the documentary. “But I don’t really know what that is. To me, the overwhelming impression of their films has always been to do with color, light, movement and a sense of music.” In “Made in England,” Scorsese takes viewers on a tour of one of the greatest creative partnerships in film history (excepting perhaps Hitchcock, the pair have a claim to being Britain’s finest filmmakers), with an eye and an ear that only another cinematic genius could bring to their work and a degree of personal passion that only a lifelong fan could have.
Scorsese still speaks with boundless amazement of Powell’s bravado in pulling the camera back in “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp” instead of showing a duel that has been elaborately set up. (“What matters is the meeting between the two men, and the relationship that comes out of it,” Scorsese explains, noting that the sequence had a direct influence on “Raging Bull.”) He is as magisterial discussing theme (such as the wartime mysticism in “A Canterbury Tale”) as he is discussing technique, as when he describes the experiments in “composed film” — writing music first and filming action later — that began with “Black Narcissus.” Scorsese even makes time for more obscure works in their partnership. He highlights a moment in “The Elusive Pimpernel” when Powell and Pressburger cut to fireworks every time a character sneezes. For Scorsese, this borderline avant-garde touch “represents their pure enjoyment in just making movies.”
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