Standard Operating Procedure

The Six Pack

Six Documentaries That Bother to Have Great Visuals.

by Matt Prigge

The Man With a Movie Camera (1929): Despite boasting the look of authenticity, documentaries are just as capable of fiction as fiction itself; even a fly-on-the-wall type like D.A. Pennebaker (Dont Look Back) affects what he films by his mere presence and his power in the editing room. In a sense it’s more honest to go the route of Dziga Vertov and this silent masterpiece from a period where all that mattered was image and rhythm. Movie Camera cobbles together inventively filmed footage of Russia’s various metropolises into a dizzying display of cinema’s super-elastic potential.

Olympia (1938): Possibly one of the most unsettling aspects of cinema is that Leni Riefenstahl, one of the most technically adept filmmakers in history, made unspeakably gorgeous films … that helped popularize the Nazis in Germany. “Reality is absorbed into an artificial event,” said Amos Vogel of the plastic spectacle Triumph of the Will, and it also applies to this less overtly political and even more beautiful doc on the 1936 “Hitler Olympics.”

Night and Fog (1955): The flipside, in a way, to Olympia, Alain Resnais’ short doc revisits the Nazi concentration camps, and instead of offering mere facts it works up a poetic lather that’s even more affecting.

Lessons of Darkness (1992): “Ecstatic truth” is what Werner Herzog calls what he’s after with his nonfiction films, all of which offer striking visuals—particularly 1971’s Fata Morgana, which beats Koyaanisqatsi at its own game by a decade. Arguably more transporting is this grim, apocalyptic doc that travels over the Kuwait oil fires following the Gulf War.

The Kid Stays in the Picture (2002): As reality TV devours cinema verite, filmmakers like Brett Morgen—of Chicago 10 and this eye-popping illustration of Robert Evans’ infectious memoirs—give us a reason to see docs in theaters.

Standard Operating Procedure (2008): Only the latest from Errol Morris, one of visually striking documentaries’ best friends (see also: Gates of Heaven, The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War, et al.).