The proliferation of documentaries on streaming services makes it difficult to choose what to watch. Each month, we’ll pick three nonfiction films — classics, overlooked recent docs and more — that will be worth your time.
‘Main’ (1960)
Stream it on Criterion Channel and Max. Rent it at Amazon, Apple TV, Google play and Voodoo.
The run-up to the presidential primary season is (at least, already) underway. To see how different the nomination process was back then, check out Robert Drew’s pioneering documentary.
The film needs to be viewed through the prism of its time. Doubly disorienting, it is an account of the 1960 Democratic presidential primary in Wisconsin at a point when most states had not yet held primaries; it’s also a fly-on-the-wall documentary from a moment when that form – made possible by the increasing portability of cameras and sound equipment – was new. While sitting in the room with John F. Kennedy, then the junior senator from Massachusetts, as he received news of the election returns may seem like the kind of sight you can easily see on TV today, in 1960 it was a innovative, close range. portrait, offering “an intimate look at the candidates themselves,” as the film’s opening narration puts it.
Kennedy ran against fellow senator Hubert H. Humphrey, of Minnesota, who during the events of the “Primary” was campaigning just one state away from his home. He said his advantage is with rural voters; Kennedy has strength in cities. Barnstorming seems quaint and pleasant by today’s standards. The film shows Humphrey building a chamber of farmers on how the Senate votes he took in Boston or New York were unpopular. Elsewhere, greeting Kennedy and singing along to his campaign song, a reworked version of Frank Sinatra’s “High Hopes”. And although most of the “Main” consists of speeches and shaking hands, it gives a sense of capturing the national conversation in microcosm. Some voters expressed fear that Kennedy’s Catholicism would influence his politics. One woman said she favored him because he was Catholic.
Drew, who takes credit as “conceived and produced” as opposed to calling himself a director, has made other films with Kennedy, such as “Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment,” which followed the actions of the Kennedy administration to support the incorporation of the University of Alabama in 1963. “Primary” may have ended with its two candidates in almost national status from where they began, but it inaugurated the direct-cinema movement. The people who worked on it – including Albert Maysles and DA Pennebaker as cameramen – went on to make their own groundbreaking documentaries.
‘4 Little Girls’ (1997)
Stream it Max. Rent it at Amazon, Apple TV, Google play and Voodoo.
Next month will mark 60 years since the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Ala., an act of terrorism that killed four women. Their deaths, Walter Cronkite said in an interview in Spike Lee’s moving documentary, became an “awakening” for Americans who, until that point, had failed to understand “the true nature of the hatred that prevents integration.”
Lee’s documentary, edited by Sam Pollard (“MLK/FBI”), is upfront about respecting the victims. The film opens with Joan Baez singing “Birmingham Sunday,” written in response to the bombing, over images of graves and the faces of four girls, Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Rosamond Robertson and Cynthia Wesley. We hear memories from friends and family members who knew them. McNair’s parents, Maxine and Chris, remember how painful it was to explain to Denise, at age 6 (she died at 11), why she wasn’t allowed to order from a diner. A friend of Wesley’s, Dr. Freeman A. Hrabowski III, Wesley’s sense of humor and kindness, and how they parted with the words “see you Monday,” never knowing what that Sunday would bring.
“4 Little Girls” also features interviews with civil rights leaders such as Rev. Andrew Young and Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, who teaches the audience how he narrowly survived another bombing in 1956. (The commentators, billed as “witnesses” in the credits , include Howell Raines, the executive editor of The New York Times from 2001 to 2003 , who wrote extensively about the events.)
But almost inevitably, Lee’s most memorable interview was with former Alabama governor George Wallace, a proud segregationist who now says his “best friend is a Black friend.” He insists on getting his aide, Eddie Holcey, in front of the camera. “Ed come here, just a minute,” he said. “One of my best friends is here.” Holcey, who Wallace barely looks at directly, and glances off-screen to do a kind of eyeroll, looks very irritated by how Wallace is using him.
‘Geographies of Solitude’ (2023)
Rent it at Apple TV, Google play and Voodoo.
Naturalist Zoe Lucas first visited Sable Island — a beach strip less than a mile wide, and 100 miles off the coast of mainland Nova Scotia — in 1971. Since then, she has been a tireless and a more solitary catalog of island life: its hundreds of wild horses, its invertebrates and its seabirds, among other animals. He heard discussing the possibility of finding species that don’t exist anywhere. The diets of birds, which tend to eat plastic, are an indicator of ocean pollution levels, another trend Lucas is monitoring.
In “Geographies of Solitude,” filmmaker Jacquelyn Mills, while not a naturalist (to be fair, she is credited as a director, editor, cinematographer, sound recordist and producer), takes an approach to this documentary that, in its way, like Luke’s. Both women see endless possibilities in the island’s riches. Mills uses natural elements to make short films without a camera that wouldn’t be out of place in a Stan Brakhage retrospective. Using a contact microphone, he and Zoe record the sounds made by the wood of a rotting A-frame on the island. He learned what happens to film stock when it is buried in horse manure. He processed seaweed film by hand and electronically rendered music from the crawling of a Sable ant.
Mills’ works are interspersed throughout the film, becoming a remarkable combination of environmental documentary and profile. It’s also a landscape film that makes a real effort to attune the audience to the sights and sounds, and slowly dips its toe into the avant-garde. Late in the film, Lucas says that his life appears to be Sable Island — “that’s all I have, that’s all I do, all the time,” he says, adding, with a hint of regret, “I lost everything else. .” “Geographies of Solitude” isn’t immersive enough to do that. But it captures a world where cameras rarely go.
