Yeah, that was a good one.
I also like William Wyler’s The Memphis Belle, Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki, and Bruce Brown’s The Endless Summer. (Okay, the last two aren’t really moving, but I like them.)
Monterey Pop, D.A. Pennebakers’ documentary about the Monterey Pop Festival, captures as no other flim ever did (not even Woodstock) the positive side of the 60’s counterculture, the heady feeling that freedom was in the air and anything was possible. Ravi Shankar’s performance is one of the finest musical moments ever caught on film.
Not a film but a series, Ken Burns’s *The Civil War * captured the tragedy and heroism of the American nation’s most crucial era. If anything, it deepened the profound respect, I might even say reverence, I feel for Lincoln.
Also a series and not a film, the BBC’s *World at War, * so ably narrated by Lawrence Olivier, broght home to me the immense sweep of the mid-20th century struggle that literally determined the fate of the entire planet. It first aired on Saturday night in the mid 70s, and I made a point of staying home to watch it. Nothing could pull me away from the TV when it was on.
I’ll have to put in a vote for Eyes on the Prize. More directly relevant to my life and those I love than any other documentary. It often makes me wish that I had lived to experience the Civil Right’s era first hand.
Oliver Stone’s JFK–I never realized before what a massive conspiracy was pulled off to hide the truth from us.
Oh god, yes. I’d fogotten about this…it did the same thing for me. It breaks my heart to see parents grieving for their children. Parents should not have to bury their children.
I have a lump in my throat thinking about it. I know Saving Private Ryan is onyl fiction, but there’s a scene in there, when the black car drives up Ryan’s driveway, and the mother, who has all four sons in the war sees it and just collapses to the ground. That was a beautiful scene, IMO, and certainly showed the fear every parent with a kid at war felt. (And feels).
I popped in to mention this, Dorjän beat me to the punch. Quiet and understated, but it packed a wallop, and used the music of the era, mostly gospel, very effectively.
I do not know the title of it, but I once caught a documentary about the genocide in Rwanda on an obscure satellite channel. Though I had known of the suffering that the people in that area endured, the film did an incredible job of making it strike you to the heart. I will never forget it.
**Paragraph 175 ** made me think ALOT about what some people sacrificed in order for me to be here.
Regret to Inform is another moving documentary about Vietnam, where the widows of American soldiers visit the country.
And I agree with Grey Gardens too. A strange film - even by documentary standards - and I’m not sure everyone would get it - but those who do will be really touched.
Other neat documentaries are Off the Charts: The Song-Poem Story (about the musical equivalent of vanity publishers),* Devil’s Playground *, about partying Amish kids(!), and the Up Series (kids interviewed when they were 7 years old have been re-interviewed every 7 years - I think they’re in their mid 40s now - the film titles are 14 Up, 21 Up, etc).
Among Errol Morris films, I find The Thin Blue Line to be the best.
And I almost hate to pass along a link to it, because it’ll probably overload their servers, but Folk Streams is an impossibly cool resource - full length documentaries on folk arts available for free. I haven’t watched them all, but Born for Hard Luck and Possum Trot are well worth watching because they center on some unforgetable characters.
The movie by the two French brothers that was just documenting a day in the life of a New York City Fire Department and ended up getting the only footage of the first plane hitting the World Trade Tower (HOLY SHIT!) and ended up documenting that whole day.
Shoot, I GOTTA see this one!
Just got done watching the sad and chilling Pripyat, about the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster.
Dang, I forgot all about Koyannisqatsi. Despite a disturbing and even depressing subject–it’s basically about how North America and most likely the rest of the globe aw well are probably heading towards ecological catastrophe–the combination of music and image in this film is mesmerizing.
Just a hint of vermouth, bartender.
Stranger
That film was horrific. I still get shudders when I think of the sounds of the bodies hitting the roof.
Please tell us this is a whoosh. :rolleyes:
Much as I enjoyed Ken Burns’s The Civil War documentary, Jonathan Demme’s bio of Nelson Mandela moved me the most. I came away from it incredibly impressed by Mandela’s courage, determination and and willingness to forgive. I would’ve been much more embittered than Mandela, but he walked out of his prison cell and went on to lead South Africa and avert a widely-predicted race war.
Slight nitpick: It was ITV, not the Beeb. I have the DVD set.
And related to WWII: Radio Bikini, a deeply disturbing documentary containing footage from the Pacific where nuclear tests were being made. It shows U.S. soldiers swimming in the lagoon shortly after the device is set off, being assured by their superiors that there’s nothing dangerous about atomic explosions.
Ignorance was surely at play, but it was a very, very upsetting movie.
Consider yourself told.
Prety amazing, though, the numbers of people who see JFK and take it as a biased documentary.
Oh, crap – how could I forget the National Film Board’s The Sterilization of Leilani Muir.
Synopsis - in the twenties, eugenics had more respectability in North America, and Canada was on the vanguard. Some provinces enacted laws mandating the forced sterilization of those deemed to be unfit to reproduce. A little later, Canada was cited as a shining example of forward thinking by some European folks looking to remake their own country as they embraced eugenics. Light was thrown on that, of course, and the whole mess was cleaned up in fifteen years or so.
Meanwhile, Canada’s less ambitious program continued, and (surprise) most of those declared “unfit” to reproduce were natives, immigrants, and the “morally unfit.” This went on (fairly quietly) until 1972.
The film’s subject is a one of the last women to be forcibly sterilized (without notification, at hospital for some other reason) who only found out about it after trying to get pregnant for some time, and being told by her doctor, “Uh, apparently you have no uterus.”
Huge WTF? film for me. “True North, strong and free.” 
I thought the same thing of this one. It was actually a good documentary when he was letting the various experts speak (folklorists and what-not), but Bryan Flemming came across as a bitter little git who in my opinion lost in the confrontation with the schoolmaster. I was also surprised at how much he used of the Passion of the Christ footage- I know that Fair Use is a gray area in some regards but I think he went a bit overboard (he used about 4 minutes of footage).
The best part was actually the extended interviews in the Special Features.
Some very good suggestions here. I’m regularly pleased to be on a board whose members display such good taste. 
Errol Morris does some remarkable work, it’s true. I personally think his first, Gates of Heaven, is his best, though it’s not exactly what I’d call moving. He maintains just enough of a distance from his subjects to stay objective, but he doesn’t pull back so far as to detach completely. Thoughtfully emotional, I’d call it. His films definitely stay with you for a long time.
I’d also like to point out that there are a couple of very good documentaries making the repertory rounds at the moment. Shakespeare Behind Bars goes into a Kentucky prison and meets a group of inmates as they discuss and rehearse a production of The Tempest, and the cumulative power of their stories is pretty amazing. There’s also Darwin’s Nightmare, which uses a smallish subject (the ecology of a particular lake in Africa) as a lens through which to view a much, much larger canvas. Harrowing.
The Devil and Daniel Johnston is also in circulation, but I haven’t seen it yet.