The Documentary

Apr 16, 2009 — Next week, we release a definitive, three-disc set of the short documentaries of Jean Painlevé (1902–89), the pioneering French scientist-educator-filmmaker (and sometime Dadaist) whose mesmerizing studies of marine life, especially, have been attracting wide audiences and new fans for decades...

Mar 5, 2009 — Starting this Sunday, March 8, the Harvard Film Archive will devote a week of programming to the groundbreaking work of Agnès Varda with the series Ciné-Varda. The “grandmother of the New Wave” will appear in person at a handful of...

Nov 21, 2008 — Cartoonist, filmmaker, and animator Bill Plympton, whose illustrations have appeared in the pages of the New York Times, the Village Voice, and Vanity Fair, and whose short films became famous on MTV in the eighties, directed the documentary Walt Curtis:...

"Life caught unawares," that's how Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov defined the principle and art of documentary in the thirties. Yet the documentary has taken so many forms over the past century that it is too simple to call it the...

Aug 20, 2001 — Before Lars von Trier, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Andrei Tarkovsky, Ingmar Bergman, Robert Bresson there was Carl Th. Dreyer. The first great film artist to pursue the ineffable in cinema, Dreyer gave depth to what early silent filmmakers innately understood yet took...

With his candid portraits of musicians and political figures, this trailblazer of observational cinema redefined the documentary form and popular culture at large.

Jason Wood is the executive director of public programs and audiences at the British Film Institute. A widely published author on cinema and popular culture, he has written on and interviewed Atom Egoyan numerous times. He is also the codirector,...

Kent Jones is a filmmaker and writer. His films include the documentary Hitchcock/Truffaut and the fiction features Diane and Late Fame. He is the author of several books of criticism.

Apr 16, 2026 — This month, take a peek at movie history through the prism of the ’80s: our collection of the decade’s best remakes and the originals that inspired them reveals an era of wild reinventions and sly revisionism.

Mar 20, 2026 — This week: Thierry Frémaux on the Lumière brothers, Lynne Littman and Jane Alexander on Testament, and Christian Petzold on Hitchcock.