How to get a han­dle on doc­u­men­tary film? Giv­en not just the quan­ti­ty but the wide vari­ety of works in the field, with all their vast dif­fer­ences in style, dura­tion, approach, and epis­te­mol­o­gy, get­ting up to speed with the state of the art (or per­haps you con­sid­er it a form of essay, or of jour­nal­ism) can seem a daunt­ing task indeed. But as luck would have it, ten experts on doc­u­men­tary film — doc­u­men­tar­i­ans them­selves, in fact — have just done some of the work for you, select­ing a total of “Fifty Doc­u­men­taries You Need to See” for The Guardian.

Few pic­tures in the his­to­ry of cin­e­ma have played as impor­tant a role in the for­ma­tion of a genre as has Dzi­ga Ver­tov’s 1929 Man with a Movie Cam­era, which Man on Wire direc­tor James Marsh named as an essen­tial. “This was the first tru­ly sub­ver­sive, play­ful doc­u­men­tary,” he says. “It’s notion­al­ly a day in the life of a city in the Sovi­et Union and so it has, on a pure­ly sociological/historical lev­el, great val­ue. But what it does beyond that is to show you the means of pro­duc­tion: the film­ing, the cut­ting room, the edit­ing – all the things that are going into the mak­ing of this film.”

You can, of course, watch Man with a Movie Cam­era free at the top of this post. For the oth­er 49 Doc­u­men­taries You Need to See, you may have to do some more search­ing, but they’ll repay the effort many times over with their intel­lec­tu­al stim­u­la­tion, their unex­pect­ed dra­ma, and their explo­ration of the bor­der­lands between cin­e­mat­ic fic­tion and cin­e­mat­ic fact. Few films of any kind per­form that last mis­sion as astute­ly as Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-up (avail­able on Hulu if you start a free tri­al), about a man’s imper­son­ation of famous Iran­ian film­mak­er Mohsen Makhmal­baf, re-enact­ed with the very same peo­ple orig­i­nal­ly involved: the impos­tor, the fam­i­ly he tried to trick, the judge who presided over the ensu­ing tri­al, and even Makhmal­baf him­self.

Close-up (as well as one of Makhmal­baf’s own movies, Salaam Cin­e­ma) appears among the picks from Joshua Oppen­heimer, a doc­u­men­tar­i­an spe­cial­iz­ing in exam­i­na­tions of mas­sacres in Indone­sia. When you’ve watched all the rec­om­men­da­tions, you might con­sid­er cir­cling back and check­ing out Oppen­heimer’s The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence. By the same token, after you’ve seen Agnès Var­da’s The Glean­ers and I, have a look at Lucy Walk­er’s Waste Land; after Wern­er Her­zog’s Griz­zly Man, Kha­lo Mata­bane’s Sto­ry of a Beau­ti­ful Coun­try. But fair warn­ing before you launch into this view­ing project: once you come out of it, you won’t see the pos­si­bil­i­ties of cin­e­ma in quite the same way ever again — at the very least, you’ll see infi­nite­ly more of them.

For anoth­er list, see The 10 Great­est Doc­u­men­taries of All Time Accord­ing to 340 Film­mak­ers and Crit­ics.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

265 Free Doc­u­men­taries Online

Free: Dzi­ga Vertov’s A Man with a Movie Cam­era, the 8th Best Film Ever Made

Wern­er Her­zog Nar­rates the Touch­ing, Exis­ten­tial Jour­ney of a Plas­tic Bag

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Last month, Cana­da lost one of its impor­tant film­mak­ers, Col­in Low. Over a career span­ning six decades, Low worked on over 200 pro­duc­tions at the Nation­al Film Board of Cana­da. He won count­less awards, includ­ing two Short Film Palme d’Or awards at the Cannes Film Fes­ti­val. His work inspired oth­er soon-to-be-influ­en­tial film­mak­ers, like Ken Burns and Stan­ley Kubrick. And he helped pio­neer the giant-screen IMAX for­mat.

Above you can watch City Out of Time, Low’s short trib­ute to Venice. The 1959 film, writes the Nation­al Film Board of Cana­da, “depicts Venice in all its splen­dor. In the tra­di­tion of Venet­ian painter Canalet­to, the film cap­tures the great Ital­ian city’s elu­sive beau­ty and fabled land­scapes, where spired church­es and tur­ret­ed palaces soar into a blue Mediter­ranean sky.” The film also fea­tures a nar­ra­tion by a young William Shat­ner, then only 28 years old, whose voice sounds noth­ing like the one we’d hear sev­er­al years lat­er in Star Trek, nev­er mind those unfor­get­table spo­ken-word albums he start­ed releas­ing in the late 1960s.

City Out of Time will be added to our list of Free Doc­u­men­taries, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

The sec­ond film on the page is Low’s 1952 ani­ma­tion, The Romance of Trans­porta­tion in Cana­da, which won a Short Film Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Fes­ti­val.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

William Shat­ner Nar­rates Space Shut­tle Doc­u­men­tary

Nation­al Film Board of Cana­da Launch­es Free iPad App

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Venice (Its Streets, Plazas & Canals) with Google Street View

A Short His­to­ry of the Venice Bien­nale, the World’s Most Impor­tant Art Exhi­bi­tion

You’ll find many a bold claim on Wikipedia, even on the page for Bert Haanstra’s Glass, a 1958 short doc­u­men­tary on glass­mak­ing in the Nether­lands, which, as of this writ­ing, men­tions that the film “is often acclaimed to be the per­fect short doc­u­men­tary.” Just the sort of thing you’d want to take with a grain of salt, right? But if you watch Glass itself, which won the 1959 Acad­e­my Award for Doc­u­men­tary Short Sub­ject, you might find your­self join­ing in on that sup­posed cho­rus of acclaim.

Prashant Par­vat­neni at The Essen­tial Mys­tery calls Glass “at once a pas­sion­ate cel­e­bra­tion of human labour and crafts­man­ship and a bit­ing cri­tique of the mech­a­nis­tic mass-pro­duc­tion of objects. On the very sur­face this doc­u­men­tary can appear as a demon­stra­tive film keen­ly elu­ci­dat­ing the very basic process­es that go into the mak­ing of hand­made glass­ware and jux­ta­pos­ing it with the process of bot­tle-mak­ing in a mech­a­nised fac­to­ry.

Yet this very jux­ta­po­si­tion cou­pled with a Haanstra’s strong styl­is­tic inter­ven­tion takes the film into a polem­i­cal space.” Tak­ing a slight­ly dif­fer­ent tone, Colos­sal’s Christo­pher Job­son high­lights the jazz of the tra­di­tion­al half, and the “whim­si­cal score of more syn­the­sized music” in the mod­ern half. “Also,” he adds, “there’s a ton of great smok­ing!”

Job­son does­n’t men­tion that these guys also some­how man­age to keep smok­ing even while blow­ing glass — an impres­sive feat indeed, and just one of the impres­sive qual­i­ties on dis­play in Glass’ brief run­time. Even­tu­al­ly, the footage turns back from the fac­to­ry to the work­shop, and soon it begins oscil­lat­ing between the two, cut­ting to the jazzy rhythm and even mak­ing the machines and work­men into musi­cal instru­ments of a kind. The Dutch glass­mak­ing indus­try has sure­ly changed in the past half-cen­tu­ry, but stu­dents of Dutch film can’t ignore the work of Haanstra, who in addi­tion to this and oth­er doc­u­men­taries short and long, direct­ed fea­tures includ­ing Fan­fare, still one of the most pop­u­lar films in the Nether­lands ever. But as any film his­to­ri­an might sus­pect — and here comes anoth­er bold claim — Glass will out­live them all.

Glass will be added to our list of Free Doc­u­men­taries, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

via Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Why Man Cre­ates: Saul Bass’ Oscar-Win­ning Ani­mat­ed Look at Cre­ativ­i­ty (1968)

Oscar-Win­ning Ani­mat­ed Short, The Dot and the Line, Cel­e­brates Geom­e­try and Hard Work (1965)

Watch the Funky, Oscar-Win­ning Ani­mat­ed Film Fea­tur­ing the Music of Herb Alpert & the Tijua­na Brass (1966)

36 Free Oscar Win­ning Films Avail­able on the Web

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.