Andy Warhol - A Documentary Film

Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film is a four-hour 2006 documentary by Ric Burns about pop artist Andy Warhol. The film is Burns' cinematic argument that Warhol was the greatest artist of the second half of the 20th Century. In one segment, Burns compares Warhol's portraits of such celebrities as Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor with the icons of saints that Warhol saw in his boyhood Byzantine Catholic parish, where he spent many hours as a child. Burns follows Warhol through his meteoric rise in New York's commercial art world during the 1950s. Burns cites 1962, the year Warhol first exhibited his soup can paintings in Los Angeles, as the turning point in Warhol's career.

Us Now

Us Now is a documentary film project about the power of mass collaboration, the government and the Internet. The documentary weaves together the perceptions of leading thinkers on the power of the web, with the overriding suggestion that people gain a sense of satisfaction from active participation rather than symbolic representation in decision-making processes.

Us Now from Banyak Films on Vimeo.

The Rolling Stones: Gimme Shelter

Gimme Shelter is a 1970 documentary film directed by Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin, chronicling The Rolling Stones' 1969 US tour, which culminated in the disastrous Altamont Free Concert. The film is named after "Gimme Shelter", the lead track from The Rolling Stones' 1969 album Let It Bleed. The documentary is associated with the Direct Cinema movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The Maysles Brothers, who directed it, are strong figures of the era. The movement revolves around the philosophy of being a "reactive" filmmaker. Rather than investigating a subject matter through such documentary techniques as interviews, reconstruction and voiceover, direct cinema simply records events as they unfold naturally and spontaneously — like a fly on the wall.

Shake Hands With The Devil

Shake Hands with the Devil is a Canadian drama feature film starring Roy Dupuis as Roméo Dallaire- based on Dallaire's autobiographical book Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda. The film recounts Dallaire's harrowing personal journey during the 1994 Rwandan Genocide and how the United Nations failed to heed Dallaire's urgent pleas for further assistance to halt the massacre




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Kurt Cobain – About a Son

An intimate and moving meditation on the late musician and artist Kurt Cobain, based on more than 25 hours of previously unheard audiotaped interviews conducted with Cobain by noted music journalist Michael Azerrad for his book "Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana." In the film, Kurt Cobain recounts his own life - from his childhood and adolescence to his days of musical discovery and later dealings with explosive fame - and offers often piercing insights into his life, music, and times. The conversations heard in the film have never before been made public and they reveal a highly personal portrait of an artist much discussed but not particularly well understood.

Roger & Me

Roger & Me is a 1989 American documentary film directed by Michael Moore. With sarcasm and irony, Moore portrays the regional negative economic impact of the late General Motors CEO Roger Smith's summary action of closing several auto plants in Flint, Michigan, costing 30,000 people their jobs (eventually 80,000 to date) and economically devastating the city.

American Movie

Mark Borchardt is a scruffy, eccentric, blue-collar, beer drinking movie-lover whose dream is to be a filmmaker. However, his life is beset with personal problems: he is a high school dropout who works odd-jobs delivering newspapers and cleaning the local cemetery, he has many debts, he has a strained relationship with an ex-girlfriend and three children by her, and he appears to have the beginnings of a drinking problem. In the film's voiceover opening, he explains that he was a failure and has dreams of accomplishing more with his life. In his own words: "It's not about making films or in the long-run getting some money...but to create and complete."

An Emasculating Truth

According to the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, testosterone is declining in American men at the alarming rate of one percent a year. But why? That’s what Casey Neistat and Oscar Boyson sought to uncover in their film An Emasculating Truth. Ultimately, the short film goes beyond this question to further the current dialogue about today’s definition of masculinity in light of changing gender roles. Boyson, the film’s producer and on camera emcee, came to some very personal conclusions about what it means to be a man today, turning the camera on himself and asking the question ‘what does it mean to be a man?’

An Emasculating Truth from Emasculating Truth on Vimeo.

Grey Gardens

Grey Gardens is a 1975 documentary film by Albert and David Maysles, with Susan Froemke, Ellen Hovde, and Muffie Meyer. The film depicts the everyday lives of the two Edith Beales, a reclusive socialite mother and daughter of the same name who lived at Grey Gardens, a decrepit mansion at 3 West End Road in the wealthy Georgica Pond neighborhood of East Hampton, New York.


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Submission

The film tells the story of four fictional characters played by a single actress wearing a veil,^[ but clad in a see-through chador, her naked body painted with verses from the Quran. The characters are Muslim women who have been abused in various ways. The film contains monologues of these women and dramatically highlights three verses of the Quran, that authorize mistreatment of women, by showing them painted on women’s bodies. On November 2, 2004, Theo van Gogh was assassinated in public by Mohammed Bouyeri, Dutch-Moroccan Muslim with a Dutch passport. A letter, stabbed through and affixed to the body by a dagger, linked the murder to Van Gogh's film and his views regarding Islam. It was addressed to Ayaan Hirsi Ali and called for a jihad against kafir (Kafir refers to somebody who veils the truth) against America, Europe, and the Netherlands.


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Confessions of a Superhero

The film tells the life story of its four main subjects, all aspiring actors who have very different backgrounds. Dennis grew up in Los Angeles as an orphan, but claims to be the son of Oscar and Tony winning actress Sandy Dennis, though Sandy Dennis's family denies that she had any children. Wenger was a small-town cheerleader before moving to Hollywood to become an actress. McQueen moved to Los Angeles during the Rodney King riots and was homeless for four years before becoming the Hulk, and achieves the most success of any of the subjects in the film, winning a small role in Justin Lin's Finishing the Game. Allen claims to be a former mobster with a murderous past, though his wife casts doubts on his stories in the film.

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Confessions of a Superhero from Brian on Veehd.

Religulous

Religulous is a 2008 American comedy/political film written by and starring political comedian Bill Maher and directed by Larry Charles. A range of views on the various world religions are explored as Bill Maher travels to numerous religious destinations, such as Jerusalem, the Vatican, and Salt Lake City, interviewing believers from a variety of backgrounds and groups, including a former member of Jews for Jesus, Christians, Muslims, former Mormons, and Hasidic Jews.

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Meeting People Is Easy

Meeting People Is Easy takes place during the promotion of Radiohead's 1997 release OK Computer, containing a collage of video clips, sound bites, and dialogue going behind the scenes with the band on their world tour, showing the eventual burn-out of the group as the world tour progresses.Unlike other music documentaries, the film does not focus on the band's friendship with one another, families, or anything else outside the direct production, promotion and touring of a record. Most of the film contains footage consisting of music writing, concerts, promotional material, and abstract video footage.

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Van Diemen's Land

While not strictly a documentary by any means- The film is based on the story of Alexander Pearce. Who Led a group of transported convicts into the Tasmanian wilderness in hopes of reaching the settlements to the east. Their enthusiasm and bravado soon give way to hunger, which saps their strength and causes them to despair. Former urban dwellers, the English, Irish and Scottish convicts realise that not only are lost, but they do not even know how to hunt or fish. They eventually resort to cannibalism, killing and eating the weakest members of the group to survive.

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Man With A Movie Camera

Man with a movie camera is an experimental 1929 silent documentary film, with no story and no actors, by Russian director Dziga Vertov, edited by his wife Elizaveta Svilova who helped with the process of deleting and adding new frames into the film. Vertov's feature film, produced by the Ukrainian film studio VUFKU, presents urban life in Odessa and other Soviet cities. From dawn to dusk Soviet citizens are shown at work and at play, and interacting with the machinery of modern life. To the extent that it can be said to have "characters," they are the cameraman of the title and the modern Soviet Union he discovers and presents in the film. Keep in mind this was a silent film and as such the link below has an added soundtrack so it is best to turn off your speakers to immerse yourself visually.

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The Thin Blue Line

Another hard to track down film: The Thin Blue Line is a 1988 documentary film about Randall Dale Adams, a man convicted and sentenced to die for a murder he did not commit. Adams' case was reviewed and he was released from prison approximately a year after the film's release. Probably one of the best documentaries ever made, From the same director of Gates of Heaven- Errol Morris
Enjoy!

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Stop Making Sense

Stop Making Sense (1984) is a concert movie featuring Talking Heads live on stage. Directed by Jonathan Demme, it was shot over the course of three nights at Hollywood's Pantages Theater in December of 1983, as the group was touring to promote their new album Speaking in Tongues.

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talking heads - stop making sense (1984) from RobinBanks on Veehd.

The Bridge

The Bridge focuses on the large number of suicides that occur each year at the Golden Gate Bridge, capturing footage of the suicides and interviewing family members. Also interviewed are people who have attempted suicide at the bridge, witnesses of the suicides, and a jump survivor.
The movie was shot with multiple cameras pointed at a notorious suicide spot on the bridge during 2004. It captured 23 people as they took their final plunge, and then offers interviews with grieving families.
The most prominent suicide victim is that of Gene Sprague who is seen as a motif running throughout the entire film. Steel filmed him for 90 minutes as he walked up and down the bridge before he stood on the rail and fell backwards into the water.

Gates Of Heaven + Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe

Here is one that was so hard to find/dig up (no pun intended) that I was shocked when I found it. Gates of Heaven is a 1978 documentary film by Errol Morris about the pet cemetery business. The film, like Morris' other works, is unnarrated and the stories are told purely through interviews. It is divided into two main sections. The first concerns Floyd "Mac" McClure and his lifelong quest to allow pets to have a graceful burial. McClure's business associates and his competitor, a manager of a rendering plant, are interviewed. Eventually the business fails and the 450 animals have to be dug up and transported to the Bubbling Well Pet Memorial Park. This operation is run by John "Cal" Harberts and his two sons. This business is far more successful, and continues to operate today, run by Cal's son Dan Harberts.
Noted director Werner Herzog pledged that he would eat the shoe he was wearing if Morris' film on this improbable subject was completed and shown in a public theater. When the film was released Herzog lived up to his wager and the consumption of his footwear was made into the short film Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe- I provided the link to this as well below.
Enjoy!

Gates Of Heaven


Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe

Part 1


Part 2