The Lists Project

[knives]

Serializing novels in magazines was a wide-spread practise in the 19th century. As was releasing novels in installments. No one thought them lesser novels for that, or currently thinks so.

That was my point or is this not directed at me.

[Yojimbo]

I'd go beyond that and say that for finite works there's no difference between 'cinema' and 'television' and that has been so for at least a decade in America and more so in Europe. Certainly something like Scenes From a Marriage to arbitrarily pull something up has the same artistic merits of its cinema bound peers. Given the vast differences in story telling there's definitely something different between say Doctor Who and Solaris because of a difference in mediums, but I don't think I say that for a television movie or documentary and a cinema movie or documentary. There's of course going to be difference in quality amongst certain films, but the medium doesn't seem to be a factor right now.

Was Scenes From a Marriage originally broadcast on television?

In its case it gets a 'leg-up' by virtue of beng directed by an acknowledged cinematic master, so that its 'television' aspects, such as its concentration on close-ups, and its dependence on dialogue, would tend to be ignored, or at least allowed for in evaluating its cinematic-art quotient. I'm not so dogmatic that I'd maintain that silent cinema is the purest form of cinema but the purer forms of cinema do tend to employ a lower quotient of such aspects.
Invariably the boundaries tend to get blurred, both as each division learns from each other, and its directors straddle both mediums.
For me the 'acid test' is 'the 'Best of Youth' test: it was a quality television production which was widely in cinemas and festivals. I don't consider it great cinema, or even particularly good cinema. But I may well be in a very small minority

[Yojimbo]

Serializing novels in magazines was a wide-spread practise in the 19th century. As was releasing novels in installments. No one thought them lesser novels for that, or currently thinks so.

I'm aware of that; I'm just questioning whether they would now be considered lesser achievements in the context of subsequent novels - such as, for example, 'Ulysses' - which first saw the light of day as a fully-realized whole

[knives]

It was indeed originally broadcast on Swedish television (same for Fanny and Alexander). Honestly I don't understand you dogmatism since a film is a film whether it is good, bad, shot primarily in close-up, or silent. The whole point of gathering these lists shouldn't be to make some distinction within the medium between 'valid' forms of expression and not but rather what is good from this little pocket of the medium. Television as an expression of documentaries is very important and shouldn't be excluded in any discussion on them. I mean would you seriously argue that the Up series isn't cinema just because they originated on television? Are we next going to invalidate as less 'pure' direct to video releases? Besides Bergman being famous what makes him better than others working in television on personal projects that he gets 'purity' suspension? If one mini-series is valid than all are. Likewise if we are going to treat the work of Burns or Apted as serious works than all television documentaries should at least initially be under that consideration.

Edit: No, for example Fahrenheit 451 was first serialized in Playboy after Joyce had already croaked.

[Mr Sausage]

Serializing novels in magazines was a wide-spread practise in the 19th century. As was releasing novels in installments. No one thought them lesser novels for that, or currently thinks so.

I'm aware of that; I'm just questioning whether they would now be considered lesser achievements in the context of subsequent novels - such as, for example, 'Ulysses' - which first saw the light of day as a fully-realized whole

Ulysses was serialized in a number of literary magazines during the seven years Joyce spent writing it. It was first prosecuted for obscenity in America when the Nausicaa chapter was printed in an American magazine called The Little Review.

And no, no serialized novel is considered a lesser work because it was serialized. That wouldn't make any sense. The end product is the end product, regardless of its publishing history. Many of the very greatest novels in history were serialized or published in installments.

[zedz]

I think a lot of 'cinema versus television' posturing is mere cultural signalling, with the assumption that one is equated with purity of artistic expression (hah!) and the other with crass commercialism. I remember back in the nineties, when the film society movement I was involved in proposed changing the word 'film' in our mission statement to the more inclusive 'moving image', there was vitriolic opposition from some of the old guard that this would allow for the inclusion of the dreaded television. Several of the same people opposing the move were later that same day asking why we couldn't programme The Decalogue (print freight and rights way too expensive), and when we'd be getting another retrospective like the Mike Leigh one we'd just shown (which consisted of three feature films and about a dozen TV works). Those, of course, weren't really television, because they were good.

Even trying to enumerate elements of 'cinematic' syntax is a hopeless task. The close-up is completely cinematic. In the teens and twenties, it was one of the hallmarks of cinema vis a vis theatre. It can be used as expressively as von Sternberg or Bergman, or as blandly as a daytime soap.

Then you get complete, fully formed auteurs like Alan Clarke, whose auteur credentials are almost entirely based on small-screen works (which are, ironically, usually more conventionally 'cinematic' than his feature films). And I'd defy anybody to stylistically distinguish Fassbinder's 'real' movies from his 'TV' ones (like Martha or Fear of Fear) without reference to their funding and production histories. How about Carlos? More 'cinematic' or less 'cinematic' than Late August, Early September?

[TMDaines]

And I'd defy anybody to stylistically distinguish Fassbinder's 'real' movies from his 'TV' ones (like Martha or Fear of Fear) without reference to their funding and production histories.

The plays stick out like a sore thumb: Das Kaffeehaus, Bremer Freiheit and Wie ein Vogel auf dem Draht.

[domino harvey]

I legitimately don't even understand what's happening on this page

[Yojimbo]

It was indeed originally broadcast on Swedish television (same for Fanny and Alexander). Honestly I don't understand you dogmatism since a film is a film whether it is good, bad, shot primarily in close-up, or silent. The whole point of gathering these lists shouldn't be to make some distinction within the medium between 'valid' forms of expression and not but rather what is good from this little pocket of the medium. Television as an expression of documentaries is very important and shouldn't be excluded in any discussion on them. I mean would you seriously argue that the Up series isn't cinema just because they originated on television? Are we next going to invalidate as less 'pure' direct to video releases? Besides Bergman being famous what makes him better than others working in television on personal projects that he gets 'purity' suspension? If one mini-series is valid than all are. Likewise if we are going to treat the work of Burns or Apted as serious works than all television documentaries should at least initially be under that consideration.

Edit: No, for example Fahrenheit 451 was first serialized in Playboy after Joyce had already croaked.

I guess the genesis of my difficulty with accepting documentary doesn't arise from any discussion here - or the choice of it ahead of my choice of 'War' - but primarily and almost totally in that the acceptance of documentary into the festival circuit has automatically opened the gates for far too many inferior works which previously would only have been considered worthy of showing on tv.
I don't consider the Up series as cinema: it's essentially a social experiment; it was never intended to be considered a visual art.
btw, has anybody seen any of the Russian version?. I saw one of them and I'd happily exchange my complete British box-set for an up-to-date Russian set: far more interesting programme, and more tragic
(and that's speaking as a contemporary of the British subjects)

[Yojimbo]

I think a lot of 'cinema versus television' posturing is mere cultural signalling, with the assumption that one is equated with purity of artistic expression (hah!) and the other with crass commercialism. I remember back in the nineties, when the film society movement I was involved in proposed changing the word 'film' in our mission statement to the more inclusive 'moving image', there was vitriolic opposition from some of the old guard that this would allow for the inclusion of the dreaded television. Several of the same people opposing the move were later that same day asking why we couldn't programme The Decalogue (print freight and rights way too expensive), and when we'd be getting another retrospective like the Mike Leigh one we'd just shown (which consisted of three feature films and about a dozen TV works). Those, of course, weren't really television, because they were good.

Even trying to enumerate elements of 'cinematic' syntax is a hopeless task. The close-up is completely cinematic. In the teens and twenties, it was one of the hallmarks of cinema vis a vis theatre. It can be used as expressively as von Sternberg or Bergman, or as blandly as a daytime soap.

Then you get complete, fully formed auteurs like Alan Clarke, whose auteur credentials are almost entirely based on small-screen works (which are, ironically, usually more conventionally 'cinematic' than his feature films). And I'd defy anybody to stylistically distinguish Fassbinder's 'real' movies from his 'TV' ones (like Martha or Fear of Fear) without reference to their funding and production histories. How about Carlos? More 'cinematic' or less 'cinematic' than Late August, Early September?

But is television a four-letter word?
I wouldn't care whether The Decalogue was described as 'great television', which it is: I certainly prefer it to any Kieslowski feature films I've seen, other than 'A Short Film About Killing', of course.

I wonder to what extent the close-up was used in the teens and twenties because of the nature of the acting; and also to create the big stars?. Also its the combination of close-ups and extensive dialogue that is more of a feature of television of the past forty years, or at least, up until recently.

[Yojimbo]

And I'd defy anybody to stylistically distinguish Fassbinder's 'real' movies from his 'TV' ones (like Martha or Fear of Fear) without reference to their funding and production histories.

The plays stick out like a sore thumb: Das Kaffeehaus, Bremer Freiheit and Wie ein Vogel auf dem Draht.

Speaking of which, does anybody else think 'Katzelmacher' was a major influence on 'Do The Right Thing'?
(and maybe 'Slacker', also)

[knives]

The performance style, which I've always considered the most radical and great part of Katzelmacher, is very different from those films so while I don't doubt that Lee and Linklater had already seen the film by then I don't really see it as a noticeable influence.

[zedz]

Fortunately, we don't have to vote for any of those 'inferior works' when we compile our 'best documentaries ever made' lists. Frankly, I think the 'there are too many bad documentaries around for documentaries to be considered as a worthwhile genre' argument could equally be applied to just about any other genre we could have tackled - and it would have sunk westerns instantly!

Lots of mediocre documentaries have been made for television, just as lots of mediocre documentaries have been made for the cinema, or shot as labour-of-love personal expression. The same can be said of fiction films of many stripes. Over the past thirty years, the vast majority of great documentaries have, in whole or in part, been funded by television. In this area / genre, probably more than any other, the TV / cinema distinction is meaningless in terms of distinguishing quality.

Maybe 35 Up isn't great 'visual art' (dahhling), but that doesn't mean it's not a great documentary, which is what we're going to be voting on. And it doesn't necessarily mean that it's not great art (in the non-Tarkovsky / non-elaborate tracking shot sense) either.

[swo17]

Frankly, I think the 'there are too many bad documentaries around for documentaries to be considered as a worthwhile genre' argument could equally be applied to just about any other genre we could have tackled - and it would have sunk westerns instantly!

I was just going to say, surely there are more terrible horror movies than there are terrible documentaries.

[zedz]

Just ask domino. He seems to have seen all of them!

[knives]

I don't think he's gotten to Joe D'Amato yet the lucky bastard.

[matrixschmatrix]

I think the 'cinema is a visual art' trope is sometimes overemphasized- if a movie accomplishes something, that accomplishment is valuable, be it sociological or historical or visual or auditory or whatever the hell. Particularly when that accomplishment couldn't possibly be translated to another medium, as I would say is the case with the Up series.

Then too, there may be nothing so spectacularly visual in the rest cinema as some of the stuff in nature documentaries- the Life series comes to mind- so it's not like you can just dismiss documentaries generally as being without visual interest.

[zedz]

Which reminds me that we were showing our very insect-savvy godchild Microcosmos the other night - about as good-looking a film as you can find. Until we hit the snail scene, and her mother clutched the girl's face to her breast and yelled: "Don't look! It's disgusting!! You'll be sick!!!" Between the two of them, we haven't had much luck actually getting to the end of any films. . .

[matrixschmatrix]

There's a whole episode in the Attenborough Life on Earth about parasites, tapeworms, and other things that live inside of one's colon- I think that's about the only time I was so grossed out by a natural history documentary that I couldn't stand to watch it first go.

[MichaelB]

There's a whole episode in the Attenborough Life on Earth about parasites, tapeworms, and other things that live inside of one's colon- I think that's about the only time I was so grossed out by a natural history documentary that I couldn't stand to watch it first go.

When I saw Brakhage's The Act Of Seeing With One's Own Eyes (would that qualify, I wonder?), fully 80% of the audience had left well before the end. The cinema programmer later told me that he'd deliberately scheduled it at the end of the programme because that reaction was not entirely unexpected.

On the subject of the cinema/television distinction, I agree with Zedz - when it comes to documentary, it's pretty much meaningless. Not least because the pattern of festival premiere followed by TV, bypassing theatrical distribution altogether, is so common as to be pretty much the norm these days. I don't think Marc Isaacs has ever made anything directly for the big screen, but it seems absurd to me to disqualify him from contention just because he works within a culture that has a stronger tradition of television than big-screen documentary.

And a number of comments have already revealed why this is such a worthwhile project, because if your idea of a "documentary" is merely a load of straight-to-camera talking heads interspersed with the occasional still or film-clip illustration, you've got untold numbers of treats in store. Here are some of my current favourites, all of whom are still very much active:

Marc Isaacs (UK) - observational documentaries that typically involve Isaacs picking a group of people (train commuters, lift passengers, people waiting for their court case to be heard) and chatting to them deceptively casually.
Helena Třestíková (Czech Rep) - the doyenne of the ultra-long-form documentary, by which I mean projects that began production years and sometimes decades earlier, graphically demonstrating how people like recidivist jailbird René (2008) or heroin addict Katka (2009) change over time (often in parallel with wider historical narratives).
Maciej Drygas (Poland) - a great film-archive archaeologist, often taking newsreel footage and matching it up to audio material from other sources: for instance, A Day in People's Poland (2005) matches nondescript "official" images with transcripts of things like interrogations that were happening behind the scenes.

...and many big-name filmmakers also have distinguished but comparatively unheralded documentary careers - Krzysztof Kieślowski, Ken Loach, Jonathan Demme et al.

(There will, inevitably, be a substantial bias towards British and central/eastern European documentary coming from my direction, for which I naturally apologise in advance - they've been my specialist research areas over the last decade or so.)

[NABOB OF NOWHERE]

(There will, inevitably, be a substantial bias towards British and central/eastern European documentary coming from my direction, for which I naturally apologise in advance - they've been my specialist research areas over the last decade or so.)

I trust you won't forget one name that meshed these two strands, namely Witold Starecki whose unbounded charm and infectious passion for film making encouraged many a would be documentary maker. His films for the BBC in the 80's and 90's like Asylum, Forget me not and, my favourite, Dog eat Dog are must sees for anyone enamoured of Marc Isaacs. Tragically Witold died a couple of years back but by then his take on 'reality' had long been superceded by a new genre pitting non-entities against each other in concocted conflicts.
And while we're talking of the ex Lodz gang, Bogdan Dziworski's film for the BBC The Prisoner is as startling as anything coming from any of his compatriots.

[colinr0380]

I was just going to say, surely there are more terrible horror movies than there are terrible documentaries.

The problem is that terrible horror films can be dismissed easily - even the worst documentaries (like say The Age of Stupid or The Bridge) get folded into and 'influence' the debate about their subjects (even skew them off into silly irrelevant or over-complicatory tangents), so can end up having a much more pernicious influence!

The other important note about documentaries which I think should always be held in mind when watching and assessing them is considering what has been left out or skipped over quickly from the narrative that is being constructed, and what bearing the absent material can have on the issue in question (usually an enormous one, even in documentaries that I think highly of - a recent example being Ken Loach's The Spirit of '45).

[MichaelB]

Influence is going to be a very interesting factor here - not just on other films, but on the outside world, which is something that fiction films rarely have to contend with.

For instance, something like Roger Graef's A Complaint of Rape had a colossal impact in the UK in 1982, the fallout from which led to a change in methodology when it came to rape investigations in general and victim interviews in particular. So on that score its historical importance is already a matter of record - indeed, it may well have been indirectly responsible for securing quite a few successful rape convictions. But how does it stand up as a film? And should we purely examine its cinematic merits, sidelining or even ignoring its cultural impact? Or does something like Errol Morris' The Thin Blue Line, which clearly has considerable artistic merit already, deserve extra points for getting a man off death row?

[colinr0380]

Exactly, a documentary can be an extremely powerful, important, necessary and so on piece of work and look cinematically inept on every level. Conversely you can get a beautifully slick, well produced film that utterly whitewashes its subject matter, or misses the point entirely (and of course to get into Godwin's Law territory here, is an aesthetically tasteful Holocaust film an oxymoron?)

MichaelB, your comment about A Complaint of Rape combined with the issue of aesthetics and 'taste' reminded me of that incredibly powerful and disturbing film Raw Deal: A Question of Consent which starts as a classically made documentary about a stripper who gets hired for a frat party and the events of the night that end with an allegation of violent rape. Which gets even more complicated when the upsetting videotapes showing the events of the night turn up and only add to the distressing ambiguity of the events. (Like all the best documentaries it does spark off into different interesting directions, such as the way that some of the boys involved use their social connections to get away scot free, and the way that the university for obvious reasons wanted to downplay the events, all while still remaining intently focused on its central subject)

We also shouldn't forget point of view as well. While this is on my mind (and apologies to diving into documentaries straight away while the animation project is still ongong) last night for obvious reasons of timing BBC4 showed the 90 minute film "North Korea: A State of Mind", a fly-on-the-wall documentary from 2003 that was co-produced with Arte. It followed a young girl training to become a gymnast and compete at state mandated "Mass Games" in front of Kim Jong-il.

It was a fascinating insight but I was highly amused at the way that whenever the voiceover emphasised the fact that the girl was training until 7 p.m. at night and pushing her body to the absolute limit, with the implication that North Korea was brutalising children into this patriotic lifestyle, that in a parallel universe that there could perhaps be a similar North Korean film about the run up to the London Olympics, following Tom Daly through his gruelling diving regime or watching children being formed into neat ranks by scampering officials to be ready for Sebastian Coe's appearance as the state official in charge, and making similar disapproving statements of the ideological extremes of the West!

In that documentary the insight offered by the portrait of the family was undercut to a large extent by the focus on the gruelling training and sacrifices (financial, familial, of their childhoods) that any athlete, North Korean or elsewhere in the world goes through to become the best at what they do. So they muddled up (or overcomplicated if you prefer) the North Korean issue up somewhat with the 'athlete' issue (not to mention the gender issues).

[Yojimbo]

Fortunately, we don't have to vote for any of those 'inferior works' when we compile our 'best documentaries ever made' lists. Frankly, I think the 'there are too many bad documentaries around for documentaries to be considered as a worthwhile genre' argument could equally be applied to just about any other genre we could have tackled - and it would have sunk westerns instantly!

Lots of mediocre documentaries have been made for television, just as lots of mediocre documentaries have been made for the cinema, or shot as labour-of-love personal expression. The same can be said of fiction films of many stripes. Over the past thirty years, the vast majority of great documentaries have, in whole or in part, been funded by television. In this area / genre, probably more than any other, the TV / cinema distinction is meaningless in terms of distinguishing quality.

Maybe 35 Up isn't great 'visual art' (dahhling), but that doesn't mean it's not a great documentary, which is what we're going to be voting on. And it doesn't necessarily mean that it's not great art (in the non-Tarkovsky / non-elaborate tracking shot sense) either.

All true, but I suppose, ultimately it all boils down to one's opinion, and whether one can produce a list of 50 that would stand up to repeat viewing - which is a criterion I tend to use for all my lists.
As things stand, I doubt very much that I'll be able to even come close, on this occasion.
(never mind get to see contributors 'dahhlings')