Paste Magazine: The 100 Best Documentaries of All Time
Created by Rodolfo.
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In documentary filmmaking, truth is almost always filled with lies.
It’s just the nature of the form, really—of any filmmaking at all, for that matter. Even a home video recording, if you’ve ever made or watched or starred in one, is marred by manipulation: Whether you’re aware you’re being “watched” or not, your truth is a sort of surreal quilt of camera placement, cuts and atmosphere, totally mitigated by the lens and then, further down the food chain, the ultimate observer. If you know you’re being watched, you act accordingly; if you don’t, the recording may carry a subtle tone of voyeurism, of intrusiveness—the feeling that something isn’t quite right.
And yet, from direct cinema to Dogme 95, truth has always been an idealistic goal for many filmmakers, and not necessarily the purity of it, but the translation of its most deeply held essentials. Arguably, documentary filmmaking has always been at the forefront of that aim, though during much of its primordial beginnings—especially throughout the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s—documentary filmmakers trolled truth as if it was yet another stuffy branch of bourgeoisie power.
In Land Without Bread (1933), Luis Buñuel parodied the white guilt of popular travelogue docs of the time, pointing out that sadness and economical devastation existed in Spain itself—no need to travel to some faraway land. In Nanook of the North (1922), the life of an Inuit clan was notoriously messed with. And Man with a Movie Camera (1929) pretty much just made a bunch of shit up. Their goals weren’t to leave truth unfondled, but to say that an unfondled truth is an unexplored one: shallow and meaningless.
Once Jean Rouche, Frederick Wiseman, D.A. Pennebaker and the Maysles, however, pioneered and then defined throughout the 1950s and ’60s what came to be known as cinéma vérité, documentary filmmaking shouldered the burden of truth, resolving to allow life to operate on its own, brushed only briefly by the manipulative fingers of the filmmaker. This was coupled with advances in filmmaking technology, notably that equipment became lighter, and more mobile. In turn, crews shrank, and coverage became paramount. That Nick Broomfield’s films are filmed with a minute crew on minute budgets, or that Oscar-winning Searching for Sugar Man (2012) was captured partly on an iPhone camera, means that today, as it is with most art, anyone can be a documentary filmmaker.
Which isn’t a bad thing. Because truth belongs to the people, by definition—it is ours to shape and hone and mold into something that enriches each of our lives and each of our worldviews however we see fit. That the following list leans heavily on films released in the past five years isn’t a coincidence, nor is it a factor of some shortsighted list-making. Instead, it points directly to our increased capacity to capture, reproduce and respect truth. If anything, we’re coming full circle.
Will the truth set you free? Probably not, but we believe the following 100 documentaries are the all-time greatest attempts to find out.
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54 +7
Exit Through the Gift Shop
2010, in 1 top list Check -
91 +7
Vals Im Bashir
2008 — a.k.a. Waltz with Bashir, in 11 top lists Check -
11 -
Chelovek s kino-apparatom
1929 — a.k.a. Man with a Movie Camera, in 24 top lists Check -
6 -
Grizzly Man
2005, in 9 top lists Check -
83 +7
Koyaanisqatsi
1982, in 12 top lists Check -
63 +7
The King of Kong
2007 — a.k.a. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, in 1 top list Check -
78 +7
Man on Wire
2008, in 6 top lists Check -
20 +7
The Act of Killing
2012, in 9 top lists Check -
62 +7
Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father
2008, in 2 top lists Check -
5 -
Nuit et brouillard
1956 — a.k.a. Night and Fog, in 17 top lists Check -
22 +7
Nema-ye Nazdik
1990 — a.k.a. Close-Up, in 21 top lists Check -
1 -
Hoop Dreams
1994, in 15 top lists Check -
76 +7
F for Fake
1973, in 11 top lists Check -
52 +7
Crumb
1994, in 12 top lists Check -
17 -
Stop Making Sense
1984, in 9 top lists Check -
7 -
The Thin Blue Line
1988, in 12 top lists Check -
81 +7
Inside Job
2010, in 4 top lists Check -
3 -
Sans soleil
1983 — a.k.a. Sans Soleil, in 16 top lists Check -
87 +7
Jiro Dreams of Sushi
2011, in 0 top lists Check -
41 +7
The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of...
2003 — a.k.a. The Fog of War, in 6 top lists Check -
58 +7
Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse
1991, in 2 top lists Check -
39 +7
American Movie
1999, in 5 top lists Check -
61 +7
Citizenfour
2014, in 3 top lists Check -
4 -
Grey Gardens
1975, in 10 top lists Check -
69 +7
Paris Is Burning
1990, in 12 top lists Check -
2 -
Shoah
1985, in 18 top lists Check -
33 +7
Capturing the Friedmans
2003, in 7 top lists Check -
67 +7
The Last Waltz
1978, in 9 top lists Check -
48 +7
Gimme Shelter
1970, in 8 top lists Check -
89 +7
The Imposter
2012, in 0 top lists Check -
84 +7
Nanook of the North
1922, in 17 top lists Check -
13 -
Les glaneurs et la glaneuse
2000 — a.k.a. The Gleaners & I, in 13 top lists Check -
56 +7
The War Game
1966, in 12 top lists Check -
49 +7
Harlan County U.S.A.
1976, in 11 top lists Check -
51 +7
Lektionen in Finsternis
1992 — a.k.a. Lessons of Darkness, in 6 top lists Check -
79 +7
Cave of Forgotten Dreams
2010, in 2 top lists Check -
70 +7
Stories We Tell
2012, in 7 top lists Check -
34 +7
Dont Look Back
1967 — a.k.a. Bob Dylan: Dont Look Back, in 10 top lists Check -
66 +7
Roger & Me
1989, in 12 top lists Check -
45 +7
Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood...
1996, in 2 top lists Check -
42 +7
The Look of Silence
2014, in 4 top lists Check -
35 +7
When We Were Kings
1996, in 7 top lists Check -
82 +7
Life Itself
2014, in 0 top lists Check -
40 +7
For All Mankind
1989, in 2 top lists Check -
21 +7
Nostalgia de la luz
2010 — a.k.a. Nostalgia for the Light, in 7 top lists Check -
43 +7
Burden of Dreams
1982, in 4 top lists Check -
23 +7
Seven Up!
1964, in 5 top lists Check -
37 +7
The Times of Harvey Milk
1984, in 8 top lists Check -
44 +7
Buena Vista Social Club
1999, in 3 top lists Check -
26 +7
28 Up
1984, in 5 top lists Check
Last updated on Jan 10, 2022 by Rodolfo; source