Vilgot Sjöman
1962 • 145 minutes • 1.33:1 • Sweden
Spine: #212 Edition: Collector’s Sets
Vilgot Sjöman’s five-part television documentary on the making of Bergman’s 1961 Winter Light includes views of Bergman’s creative process and intimate conversations with the great director and members of his cast and crew.
Ingmar Bergman
1982 • 110 minutes • 1.33:1 • Sweden
Spine: #264 Edition: Collector’s Sets
Directed by Ingmar Bergman himself, this feature-length documentary chronicles the methods of one of cinema’s true luminaries as he labors to realize his crowning production.
Torben Skjødt Jensen
1995 • 94 minutes • 1.66:1 • Denmark
Spine: #128 Edition: Collector’s Sets
Torben Skjødt Jensen’s elegant documentary is a collage of memories and reflections on one of cinema’s greatest directors. Visually rich and densely layered, Carl Th. Dreyer—My Metier illuminates an artist too little understood and too important to overlook.
Louis Malle
1962 • 19 minutes • 1.33:1 • France
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus
In his short documentary Vive le Tour, Louis Malle presents his energetic evocation of the Tour de France.
Louis Malle
1973 • 72 minutes • 1.33:1 • France
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus
In his documentary Humain, trop humain, Louis Malle presents his meditative investigation of the inner workings of a French automotive plant.
Louis Malle
1974 • 95 minutes • 1.33:1 • France
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus
In Place de la république, Louis Malle presents his entertaining snapshot of the comings and goings on one street corner in Paris.
Louis Malle
1969 • 363 minutes • 1.33:1 • France
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus
Louis Malle called his gorgeous and groundbreaking Phantom India the most personal film of his career. And this extraordinary journey to India, originally shown as a miniseries on European television, is infused with his sense of discovery, as well as occasional outrage, intrigue, and joy.
Louis Malle
1985 • 89 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Edition: Collector’s Sets
In 1979, Louis Malle traveled into the heart of Minnesota to capture the everyday lives of the men and women in a prosperous farming community. Six years later, during Ronald Reagan’s second term, he returned to find drastic economic decline.
Louis Malle
1986 • 81 minutes • 1.33:1 • France
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus
In 1986, Louis Malle set out to investigate the ever-widening range of immigrant experience in America. Interviewing a variety of newcomers in middle- and working-class communities from coast to coast, Malle paints a generous, humane portrait of their individual struggles.
Charles Kiselyak
2000 • 200 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Spine: #256 Edition: Collector’s Sets
Charles Kiselyak’s A Constant Forge—The Life and Art of John Cassavetes is a detailed journey through the career of one of film’s greatest pioneers and iconoclasts, assembled from candid interviews with Cassavetes’ collaborators and friends, rare photographs, and archival footage.
Allan King
1967 • 101 minutes • 1.33:1 • Canada
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus
For his enthralling first feature, Allan King took his cameras to a home for emotionally disturbed young people. The stunning Warrendale won the Prix d’art et d’essai at Cannes and a special documentary award from the National Society of Film Critics.
Allan King
1969 • 96 minutes • 1.33:1 • Canada
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus
Billy and Antoinette Edwards let it all hang out for Allan King and crew in this jaw-dropping examination of a marriage in trouble, which “makes John Cassavetes’s Faces look like early Doris Day” (Time).
Allan King
1972 • 95 minutes • 1.66:1 • Canada
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus
In the early 1970s, ten teenagers (five boys and five girls) leave behind parents, school, and all other authority figures to live on a farm for ten weeks. Come On Children is a swift, vivid rendering of the growing pains of a counterculture.
Allan King
2003 • 143 minutes • 1.66:1 • Canada
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus
An extraordinary, transformative experience, Allan King’s Dying at Grace is quite simply unprecedented: five terminally ill cancer patients allowed the director access to their final months and days inside the Toronto Grace Health Centre.
Allan King
2005 • 112 minutes • 1.77:1 • Canada
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus
For four months, King follows the daily routines of eight patients suffering from dementia and memory loss; the result is searing, compassionate drama that can bring to the viewer a greater understanding of his or her loved ones.
Robert Flaherty
1922 • 79 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Spine: #33 Edition: DVD
Robert Flaherty’s classic film tells the story of Inuit hunter Nanook and his family as they struggle to survive in the harsh conditions of Canada’s Hudson Bay region.
John Lurie
1992 • 147 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Spine: #42 Editions: DVD, Hulu Plus
John Lurie knows absolutely nothing about fishing, but that doesn’t stop him from undertaking the adventure of a lifetime in Fishing with John. Featuring Jim Jarmusch, Willem Dafoe, and Tom Waits.
Albert Maysles, David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin
1968 • 91 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Spine: #122 Editions: DVD, Hulu Plus
While laboring to sell a gold-embossed version of the Good Book, Paul Brennan and his colleagues target the beleaguered masses—then face the demands of quotas and the frustrations of life on the road. A landmark American documentary.
Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Ellen Hovde…
1976 • 94 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Spine: #123 Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus, iTunes
In Albert and David Maysles’s 1976 cult classic, Grey Gardens, meet Big and Little Edie Beale—high-society dropouts, mother and daughter, reclusive cousins of Jackie O.—thriving together amid the decay and disorder of their ramshackle East Hampton mansion.
Barbet Schroeder
1974 • 90 minutes • 1.33:1 • France
Spine: #153 Editions: DVD, Hulu Plus
In 1971, self-styled dictator General Idi Amin Dada took control of Uganda; director Barbet Schroeder turns his cameras on the dynamic, charming, and appallingly dangerous tyrant.
Kon Ichikawa
1965 • 170 minutes • 2.35:1 • Japan
Spine: #155 Edition: DVD
Utilizing glorious widescreen cinematography, Kon Ichikawa examines the beauty and rich drama on display at the 1964 Summer Games in Tokyo. A spectacle of magnificent proportions, Tokyo Olympiad ranks among the greatest documents of sport ever committed to film.
Alain Resnais
1955 • 31 minutes • 1.33:1 • France
Spine: #197 Editions: DVD, Hulu Plus
One of the first cinematic reflections on the horrors of the Holocaust, Alain Resnais’ documentary Night and Fog (Nuit et Brouillard) contrasts the stillness of the abandoned camps’ quiet, empty buildings with haunting wartime footage.
Orson Welles
1975 • 87 minutes • 1.66:1 • United States
Spine: #288 Editions: DVD, Hulu Plus, iTunes
Trickery. Deceit. Magic. In Orson Welles’s free-form documentary F for Fake, the legendary filmmaker (and self-described charlatan) gleefully engages the central preoccupation of his career—the tenuous line between truth and illusion, art and lies.
Les Blank
1982 • 95 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Spine: #287 Editions: DVD, Hulu Plus, iTunes
Les Blank documents acclaimed German filmmaker Werner Herzog’s ambitious and troubled production of Fitzcarraldo, the story of one man’s attempt to build an opera house deep in the Amazon jungle.
Steve James
1994 • 171 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Spine: #289 Editions: DVD, Hulu Plus, iTunes
Filmed over a five-year period, Hoop Dreams follows young Arthur Agee and William Gates as they navigate the complex, competitive world of scholastic athletics, while striving to overcome the intense pressures of family life and the realities of their Chicago streets.
Barbara Kopple
1976 • 103 minutes • 1.78:1 • United States
Spine: #334 Editions: DVD, Hulu Plus
Barbara Kopple’s Academy Award–winning Harlan County USA unflinchingly documents a grueling coal miners’ strike in a small Kentucky town. With unprecedented access, Kopple and her crew captured the miners’ sometimes violent struggles with strikebreakers, local police, and company thugs.
Barbet Schroeder
1978 • 80 minutes • 1.33:1 • France
Spine: #340 Edition: DVD
In 1977, acclaimed director Barbet Schroeder entered the universe of the world’s most famous primate to create the entertaining, troubling, and still relevant documentary Koko: A Talking Gorilla.
Albert Maysles and David Maysles
2006 • 91 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Spine: #361 Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus
The filmmakers of Grey Gardens went back to their vaults of footage to create part two, The Beales of Grey Gardens, a tribute both to these indomitable women, Big and Little Edie Beale, and to the landmark documentary’s legions of fans, who have made them counterculture icons.
Hiroshi Teshigahara
1984 • 72 minutes • 1.33:1 • Japan
Spine: #425 Editions: DVD, Hulu Plus, iTunes
A unique, enthralling cinematic experience, Teshigahara’s Antonio Gaudí, less a documentary than a visual poem, takes viewers on a tour of Gaudí’s truly spectacular architecture.
Marie Nyreröd
2006 • 83 minutes • 1.77:1 • Sweden
Spine: #477 Editions: DVD, Hulu Plus
The most breathtakingly candid series of interviews that the famously reclusive director ever took part in, Bergman Island features legendary filmmaker Ingmar Bergman sitting down just four years before his death with Swedish documentarian Marie Nyreröd in his home on Fårö Island.
Al Reinert
1989 • 79 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Spine: #54 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray, Hulu Plus, iTunes
Al Reinert’s visually dazzling documentary For All Mankind is the story of the twenty-four men who traveled to the moon—told in their words, in their voices, using the images of their experiences.
D. A. Pennebaker
1967 • 78 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Spine: #168 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray, Collector’s Sets
In 1967, at the height of the Summer of Love, the first and only Monterey International Pop Festival roared forward, capturing a decade’s spirit and ushering in a new era of rock and roll. Monterey would launch the careers of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Otis Redding, but they were just a few.
D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus
1986 • 63 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Spine: #169 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray, Collector’s Sets
Jimi Plays Monterey and Shake! Otis at Monterey, acclaimed documentarian D. A. Pennebaker’s Monterey Pop companion pieces, feature the entire sets by these legendary musicians, performances that have entered rock-and-roll mythology.
David Maysles, Albert Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin
1970 • 91 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Spine: #99 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray
Called the greatest rock film ever made, this landmark documentary follows the Rolling Stones on their notorious 1969 U.S. tour.
Terry Zwigoff
1995 • 120 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Spine: #533 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray
Terry Zwigoff’s landmark 1995 film is an intimate documentary portrait of the underground artist Robert Crumb, whose unique drawing style and sexually and racially provocative subject matter have made him a household name in popular American art.
Terry Zwigoff
1985 • 60 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Spine: #532 Editions: DVD, Hulu Plus, iTunes
Crumb director Terry Zwigoff’s first film is a true treat: a documentary about the obscure country-blues musician and idiosyncratic visual artist Howard “Louie Bluie” Armstrong, member of the last known black string band in America.
Robert Epstein
1984 • 88 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Spine: #557 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray, Hulu Plus, iTunes
The Oscar-winning The Times of Harvey Milk, was as groundbreaking as its subject. One of the first feature documentaries to address gay life in America, it’s a work of advocacy itself, bringing Milk’s message of hope and equality to a wider audience.