The 25 most influential documentaries

The extent to which brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière caused a panic with their theatrical exhibition of a train pulling into the La Ciotat station in France has been questioned for years by film historians. (The most sensational version holds that terrified audience members, believing the train might come bursting through the screen, fled the theater.) But what’s not up for debate is the 50-second film’s influence on the motion picture medium. The transporting potential of the moving image was now known.

Robert J. Flaherty’s silent film about an Inuit family living on the frigid Ungava Peninsula of northern Quebec was the first feature-length documentary to catch on with moviegoers — and though Flaherty was later criticized for staging certain elements, the movie nevertheless offered a deep immersion into a culture that had previously been accessible only via the written word and photography. Almost a century later, the film has lost none of its visual or emotional power.

Dziga Vertov’s “Man with a Movie Camera” is the greatest student film ever made. The Russian filmmaker employed every technique imaginable and invented perhaps a dozen along the way. It’s a film about day-to-day life in the Soviet Union, but it’s really about artistic exploration and a bratty unwillingness to obey the existing formal rules. Vertov gets away with it because he has the tools and then some.

Leni Riefenstahl was the go-to cinematic propagandist of the Third Reich, and, tragically, her formal brilliance played a crucial role in the nationalistic rise of Adolf Hitler. Filmed at the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, you may find the awe-inspiring, long-lens shots of soldiers uncomfortably familiar, given that George Lucas aped Riefenstahl’s aesthetic for the final scene of “Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope." Her influence is undeniable. Let’s hope that no one so abundantly talented ever follows her example again.

François Truffaut famously declared Alain Resnais’ post-WWII concentration camp documentary “the greatest film ever made," and while subsequent documentaries have delivered a more thorough examination of the Holocaust, Resnais’ film still stands alone for its immediacy (it was shot 10 years after the liberation of the camps) and devastating brevity. (At 32 minutes, it is somehow more deeply considered than any other film on this subject.)

This groundbreaking series of documentaries has been charting the hopes and heartbreaks of a group of British children (now adults) from varying economic/cultural backgrounds every seven years since 1964. Michael Apted has directed every installment since 1971’s “7 Plus Seven" and is expected to deliver “63 Up” this year. If it’s anything like the previous movies, it’ll be more dispiriting than inspiring, but that, alas, is life.

One year after The Beatles invaded America, folk superstar Bob Dylan returned the cultural favor and took England by storm with documentarian D.A. Pennebaker in tow. The resulting film is an invigorating depiction of an artist who knows full well he’s at his peak and doesn’t mind flaunting it. Yes, Dylan’s a cocky bastard throughout the movie, but watching him dismiss and dismantle his critics — and, of course, his would-be competition in Donovan — is an utter joy. Pennebaker’s vérité, direct-cinema style has been aped to the point of parody (literally in the case of Rob Reiner’s magnificent “This Is Spinal Tap”).

Frederick Wiseman exposed the abject cruelty of mental institutions with his debut feature documentary, which was banned from public exhibition for two decades thanks to aggressive litigation from the government of Massachusetts. Perhaps learning from this experience, his subsequent films (e.g. “High School," “Hospital” and “Public Housing”) have taken a more methodical view of our failing institutions, but they’re every bit as critical.

Marcel Ophüls' masterful four-and-a-half hour examination of collaboration and resistance in German-occupied France is absorbing, despairing and not entirely hopeless — though it’s disheartening to consider how frequently the wisdom imparted by the interviewees has gone unheeded in the 70-plus years since the end of World War II. Given the state of the world today, this record of normal people either rising up to or buckling under tyranny has never felt more necessary or ominous.

Filmmaking brothers Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin scored their first collaborative triumph with this direct-cinema documentary about door-to-door Bible salesmen futilely chasing the American dream in Boston and Florida. It’s a beautifully shot and adroitly observed examination of pavement-pounding capitalism in the late 1960s, establishing the Maysles’ reputation as skilled vérité craftsmen.

The Maysles brothers and Charlotte Zwerin veered from the quotidian milieu of “Salesman” to the grand but hardly glamorous world of rock-'n'-roll with this unforgettable account of the Rolling Stones’ ill-fated free concert at the Altamont Speedway in Northern California. The Maysles might’ve thought they were signing on for the West Coast version of Woodstock; what they captured was the mindlessly violent end of the hippie era.

Orson Welles’ stunningly witty and, at times, piercingly emotional treatise on the imprecise nature of authorship can be read as dazzlingly cinematic retort to film critic Pauline Kael’s infamous (and since discredited) assertion that the brilliance of “Citizen Kane” was largely the work of screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz. Or it can be simply enjoyed as a virtuoso magic act by one of the greatest filmmakers who ever lived. The documentary-as-essay has never been done better (try as Jean-Luc Godard might).

More Maysles! “Big Edie” Beale and her daughter “Little Edie” used to be prominent New York socialites. When the Maysles caught up with them in the mid-‘70s, they were eking out a ramshackle living in a dilapidated mansion with no running water. This quintessential work of direct cinema has proved unusually popular over the years, inspiring a made-for-HBO drama and a stage musical.

Barbara Kopple’s Academy Award-winning documentary about striking coal miners in Southeast Kentucky was, at the time, a rare piece of direct cinema that shrugged off the objective dictates of the form and fiercely advocated for one side — in this case, the workers over the rapacious, goon-hiring management. Kopple’s partiality compelled one of the pro-management scabs to explore hiring someone to shoot her. 

“Sans Soleil” is Chris Marker’s visual-essay masterpiece, but “A Grin Without a Cat” is more influential as a piece of left-leaning cinema that articulates a political posture through dynamic repetition; Oliver Stone’s masterfully disorienting “JFK” is a commercial rendering of Marker’s radical concerns and just as intellectually confused. But that’s the fun part. The assault of provocative imagery and ideology is both invigorating and infuriating. Marker’s not out here telling you how to feel. He just wants you to feel.

Errol Morris broke through with this idiosyncratic documentary about pet cemeteries that manages to be both drolly funny and strangely moving. It’s the perfect tone for an exploration of why we care so deeply about our pets and how we grieve for them when they’re gone. Morris’ talent for getting people talking was already well honed; given his recent whiffs with political figures (namely Donald Rumsfeld and Steve Bannon), it might be worthwhile for the filmmaker to sit down with more genuine weirdos again.

You may feel a sense of duty to watch Claude Lanzmann’s nine-and-a-half-hour documentary about the Holocaust, but once you start you’ll find you can’t look away. Lanzmann eschews stock footage of the concentration camps, allowing his interviewees to paint a devastatingly vivid panorama of grief. “Shoah” should be mandatory viewing in every high school all over the world; that it’s not is surely one reason we keep repeating the worst chapters of human history.

Michael Moore’s dogged efforts to interview General Motors CEO Roger Smith launched the documentarian’s career as a satirist and, unfortunately, celebrity. Moore is clearly motivated by righteous indignation over GM ghosting his hometown of Flint, Michigan, but he treats the desperation of the town’s citizens as a darkly comedic punch line. Regardless, the film was a sleeper hit at the box office and is probably more responsible than any movie over the last four decades for turning the documentary into a commercially viable genre.

The wrongful conviction of Randall Adams for the murder of Dallas police officer Robert Wood was overturned as a result of Errol Morris’ investigative documentary. How’s that for influential? Even though justice has since prevailed, Morris’ film still plays as a spellbindingly tense true-crime thriller, thanks in large part to Philip Glass’ eerie minimalist score.

Francis Ford Coppola was arguably the most respected filmmaker on the planet when he decided to follow up “The Godfather Part II” with a Vietnam-set variation on Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” called “Apocalypse Now." The finished film may be considered a rough-hewn masterpiece, but, as depicted in this making-of documentary directed by George Hickenlooper, Fax Bahr and Eleanor Coppola, the production was a logistical nightmare that nearly killed Coppola and his star Martin Sheen. 

Steve James’ three-hour tour de force about race, class and tragically limited opportunity in the United States was one of the most critically acclaimed films of the 1990s, and, unfortunately, the movie that forced the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to revise its documentary nominating process. The saga of high school basketball standouts Arthur Agee and William Gates does not follow the feel-good trajectory of a Hollywood sports film; it’s a film of big setbacks and tiny victories, with the latter generally occurring off the court.

Artistic preoccupations and personal fetishes have never been explored to a more disturbing yet non-judgmental degree than in Terry Zwigoff’s documentary about counterculture cartoonist R. Crumb. We can’t always govern what makes us tick, but we can make great art out of it. That’s the dynamic at play throughout “Crumb," which gets at dark truths most people spend their whole life suppressing.

The “West Memphis Three," who were convicted of murdering three young boys in 1993, are free today thanks in large part to the “Paradise Lost” documentaries directed by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky. The teenagers accused of the crimes were the victims of a provincial satanic panic due to their preference for heavy metal. Had the filmmakers not intervened (and procured the support of Metallica, which scored the films), it’s likely the trio would still be behind bars today.

Filmmaker Mark Borchardt has the right idea: He’s making a low-budget horror film (“Coven”) to scrounge up the financing for his cinematic labor of love (“Northwestern”). Unfortunately, he’s a drunk who’s drowning in debt, which forces him to enlist his friends and family to help him finish the movie he can’t afford to make in the first place. Chris Smith’s documentary is like “Hearts of Darkness” in miniature. Borchardt and his best friend, Mike Schank, are hilarious outcasts, but they mean well; they’re no Coppola’s, but the horror genre is riddled with passionate lunatics who transformed their errant passion into art.

Agnès Varda was one of our great cinematic essayists, but it took a few decades for art house audiences to catch on to her sui generis aesthetic as a documentarian. This film about French scavengers was not only a surprise hit on the limited-release circuit but also one of her most vital works. By immersing herself in this outsider culture, Varda is able to riff on deeply personal subjects like cinema, art and growing old. This is a magnificent film.