Last year, two documentaries made their debuts on television and had more impact on me, and many other viewers and critics, than most movies in theaters. They were Adam Curtis’s The Power of Nightmares, which appeared originally on the BBC and had limited distribution in the US at film festivals and a few theaters, and Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, which was released on DVD the same week it premiered on PBS last fall. These long (3 to 4 hours) films, masterfully directed and edited, covered fascinating subjects with depth and feeling only rarely achieved in fictional/dramatic features. They both ended up in the top 5 of my year-end best list.
We seem to be experiencing something similar this year: two 4-hour documentaries have premiered recently that far outshine anything I have seen in theaters in 2006: Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke began airing on HBO in August, and Ric Burns’s Andy Warhol was on this past week on PBS. Both are exhilaratingly well done.
Spike Lee’s monumental look at Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, subtitled A Requiem in Four Acts, should be seen by every thinking, feeling person – and a few unthinking, unfeeling governmental officials should be forced to watch it endlessly. You may think you don’t want to sit through four more hours about Katrina — You are wrong.
From the first few minutes, Lee recreates the terror, the tragedy, the anger, and the gallows humor that surrounded those horrific days last year. And he does it primarily by just listening…simply letting dozens of ordinary people tell their stories to the camera, along with additional interviews with historians and elected officials. The accompanying clips from news footage take on much more weight and meaning with the cumulative power of each of these stories.
Article comments
1 - Sister Ray
I didn't see the Spike Lee documentary on Katrina, but I'm glad to hear he did a good job with it and went lightly on the politics.
I did see the Warhol doc and enjoyed it. I liked the concentration on his early life and career. I was touched by the image of a shy boy silently displaying his drawings. He also put in a lot of years of work in New York before he opened The Factory.
2 - DEONNE BETHLEY
THANKS FOR DOING THE KATRINA DOCUMENTARY, YOU DO A OVERWELLING JOB. IT OPEN THE EYES OF ALOT PEOPLE THAT HAD NO CLUE OF WHAT WE WENT THROUGH. MY KIDS WATCHED IT AND CRIED, BUT WAS HAPPY TO KNOW AND WELL BE ABLE TO REMEMBER NEW ORLEANS AS IT WAS BEFORE KATRINA.