Documentary Movies

In seven different parts, Godard, Ivens, Klein, Lelouch, Marker, Resnais, and Varda show their sympathy for the North-Vietnamese army during the Vietnam War.

A stark and graphic portrayal of the conditions that existed at the State Prison for the Criminally Insane at Bridgewater, Massachusetts, and documents the various ways the inmates are treated…

Interview with Jason Holliday aka Aaron Payne. House-boy, would-be cabaret performer, and self-proclaimed hustler giving one man’s gin-soaked, pill-popped view of what it was like to be black and gay…

A rare archival short, Queens at Heart follows four shockingly courageous pre-Stonewall trans women, Misty, Vicky, Sonja, and Simone. They go out as women at night, but live as men…

A Man Vanishes examines the concept of Johatsu, tackling the phenomenon of people missing in Japan over the years. It picks one such person from the list, someone who had…

In this wildly entertaining vision of one of the twentieth century’s greatest artists, Bob Dylan is surrounded by teen fans, gets into heated philosophical jousts with journalists, and kicks back…

In 1966, German film critic Theodor Kotulla — who would go on to become one of the New German Cinema’s most uncompromising filmmakers — visited the set of Robert Bresson’s…

Bettie de Jong performs the same dance nine times, starting and ending in a reclined position. As the film proceeds the camera becomes more and more adventurous.

While in San Francisco for the promotion of her last film in October 1967, Agnès Varda, tipped by her friend Tom Luddy, gets to know a relative she had never…

The dangers of LSD are driven home to teenagers in this classroom training film, which is “narrated” by an LSD tab. The “tab” tells kids that he is “a depth…

An obituary of Che Guevara, made in forty-eight hours to be shown at the mass meeting on the 18th October 1967 in the Plaza de la Revolucion in Havana, where…

Documentary about a mountain range and surrounding area.

Originally produced for German TV, Improvised and Purposeful is a firsthand look at the “Cinema Novo” movement (otherwise known as the ‘Brazilian New Wave’). Director Joaquim Pedro de Andrade focuses…

A documentary covering the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo. It consists primarily of footage edited from the documentary TOKYO OLYMPIAD, directed by Kon Ichikawa.

Machover and Fruchter’s intimate documentary follows the trials and tribulations of a group of Students for a Democratic Society militants in their attempt to politicize and organize the people of…

This documentary explores assorted “forbidden” topics from all over the world. Among the subjects depicted herein are a racy TV commercial for a female martial arts school, rowdy teenagers protesting…

Images and poems of the celebrated couple Louis Aragon and Elsa Triolet. Elsa’s youth as recalled by Aragon, with commentary by Elsa.

An oblique documentary about the LSD group experiments of Timothy Leary, with off screen commentary of a participant and shots of Leary’s house and the surroundings.

A faux travelogue that mixes documentary and mockumentary footage. The camera looks through a one-way glass into the women’s dressing room at a lingerie shop, visits a Kyoto massage parlor,…

Lionel Rogosin’s plea for humanity and against war and fascism. For two years, Rogosin traveled to twelve countries to collect footage of war atrocities from their archives. He interspersed these…

Bruce Brown’s The Endless Summer is one of the first and most influential surf movies of all time. The film documents American surfers Mike Hynson and Robert August as they…

A “hidden camera” takes the viewer on a worldwide tour of sexual practices and rituals, including Tijuana strippers, Asian sex shows, British prostitutes, New York devil worshipers and a Mexican…

BBC television program exploring Visconti’s mastery of cinema, theater, and opera direction.

Following an introduction by Bing Crosby, the Cinerama screen widens for scenes of landscapes, cities, peoples, and entertainments of the Soviet Union. Highlights include the historic buildings and churches of…

The outrageous life of the American dancer of the 1920s, Isadora Duncan, whom Ken Russell described as “part genius and part charlatan”.

Eric Rohmer directs this short documentary that narrates the presence of women in French universities as of the time of its release — 1966. During the film’s short run, the…

A view from a helicopter of the ten Canadian provinces in 1966. The result is a big, beautiful and engrossing bird’s-eye portrait of the country. Nothing here is quite the…

“I was visiting Jerome Hill. Jerome loved France, especially Provence. He spent all his summers in Cassis. My window overlooked the sea. I sat in my little room, reading or…

A ship of athletes training on the rough seas becomes a symbol of Castro’s Cuba, the games projected on the backdrop of political struggle. This is the story of a…

An Englishman has just got off the train at St. Enoch Station and is asking a cab driver to show him around Glasgow. Naturally, the cab driver is happy to…

The insane government bureaucracy at a state pension window.

An educational film about power sources that’s rendered as a lyrical meditation on heat and vapor, The Four Elements is a poetic and avant-garde documentary Curtis Harrington made for the…

Documentary examining the work of sculptor Richard Lippold, particular his sculpture of the sun at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In the fall of 1964, just over a year before his death, Buster Keaton traveled to Canada to make The Railrodder, a short subject that now enjoys a small cult…

Pier Paolo Pasolini sets out to interview Italians about sex, apparently their least favorite thing to talk about in public: he asks children if they know where babies come from;…

Always On Sunday is a bio-pic on Le (Henri) Douanier Rousseau, a French naive painter.

This impressionistic portrait of the 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympics pays as much attention to the crowds and workers as it does to the actual competitive events. Highlights include an epic…

This insightful documentary features some of the major and most beautiful actresses to grace the silver screen. It shows how the movie industry changed its depiction of sex and actresses’…

An episode of the educational TV series “En profil dans le texte” directed by Rohmer, on the French philosopher Blaise Pascal, the subject of debate in Rohmer’s film “My Night…

Using morgue photos, newsreel footage, and a recording by Lena Horne, Cuban filmmaker Santiago Alvarez fired off ‘Now!’, one of the most powerful bursts of propaganda rendered in the 1960s.