The first films ever made were documentaries: depictions of everyday life as it simply existed, shot through a camera. When we watch movies today, we view them first as we would view these late-nineteenth-century relics – before we even approach the idea of them being narrative constructions, we see them first as depictions of life. As such, documentaries are a disruption of the narrative film, but they are also the precursor to it, and without them, we wouldn’t have Scorsese, Marvel movies, or Rob Schneider in The Hot Chick.
Though they have gained in popularity over the years, the impact and importance of documentaries is still staggeringly underappreciated. And even more underappreciated are those documentaries which break the fourth wall, blur the line between fiction and reality, and meditate on the nature of film itself. Of course, the true-crime documentary is as meticulously constructed as any Hollywood blockbuster. But sometimes the more interesting documentaries draw attention to their own form; they are less interested in informing or provoking thought than they are in showing the full fluidity of cinema and demonstrating that genre is illusory. These are just some of the best experimental documentaries ever made.
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6 The Owls
Parliament Film Collective
Filmmaker Cheryl Dunye is likely best known for The Watermelon Woman – a romantic comedy about a video store clerk researching the enigmatic legacy of a Black actress named Fae Richards. Though the film deftly blends documentary elements with its fictional story, it is perhaps The Owls, one of Dunye’s later films, that fits the category of “experimental documentary” even better.
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MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
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The Owls (an acronym standing for Older Wiser Lesbians) is primarily fictional, concerning a group of old friends, a reunion, and a horrible crime. The story is engaging enough – something of a middle-class Knives Out by way of Long Island – but what makes it truly interesting is that the story will periodically “break” to show interviews with the actors and Dunye herself (who also appears in the film) about the making of the movie. It’s a simple juxtaposition of real and fake that is nonetheless effective, hypnotic, and fascinating, and makes you question and meditate on the nature of what you’re watching. It is not so much a film within a film; rather, it is a film about a film encased in a larger film that is still the film.
5 The Exquisite Corpse Project
The “exquisite corpse” is the name of a popular process through which artists and storytellers can collaborate to generate work of a fragmented, stream-of-consciousness nature. They might each draw a different part of the body to create some kind of Frankensteinian monstrosity. In a storytelling context, Writer #1 might type 10 pages and then Writer #2 will type ten more pages based on having only seen the final page of Writer #1’s work.
It is this kind of storytelling conceit that governs The Exquisite Corpse Project. A group of five comics (including Adam Ruins Everything’s Adam Conover and Bojack Horseman’s Raphael Bob-Waksberg before they were famous) are challenged by their director friend Ben Popik to write a movie from scratch using the “exquisite corpse” method, and he will produce and direct it. What begins as a documentary gradually shifts into the creators’ devised narrative, with results both baffling and hilarious. In ways similar to The Owls, it provides a fascinating window into the creative process while also showing the fruits of that labor. Any fan of sketch comedy and absurdist narratives would do well to check this one out.
4 My Girlfriend Candice
It’s probably impossible to find a single dud in Casey Neistat’s massive library of videos. The internationally famous YouTuber is responsible for elevating the vlog and video essay to a cinematic art form, creating one video every day for eighteen months, and turning mundane everyday moments into epic moviemaking. His short docs are bite-sized masterpieces, suffused with a joie de vivre and an unending love for New York City.
Neistat’s short doc My Girlfriend Candice, a road movie chronicling the romantic relationship central to his life, is a perfect synthesis of his trademarks: snappy editing, melancholic romance, and biting narration. This true story, a contemporary National Lampoon’s Vacation, is joyful and full of remarkable self-awareness, but is also suffused with deep sadness and nostalgia – and admissions of guilt, both spoken and not. One sequence, involving a mini-rom-com shot on three iPhones, looks like an OK GO music video as directed by Wes Anderson. You might disagree with Neistat’s outlooks on life and find him hard to take at times, but it is also part of what makes his work so singular and entertaining.
3 City Hall
Zipporah Films
The great documentarian Frederick Wiseman would hardly consider himself an experimental filmmaker. Over the course of his decades-long career, he has made upwards of 40 docs (almost one per year) and all of them in the same style. The director’s approach to cinema verité is one of the most simplified, stripped-down versions you will see: there are no talking heads, no narration of any kind, just long scenes playing out from start to finish. But despite a seemingly uncreative approach, Wiseman’s films are epic, expansive, and hypnotic. And it’s probably because there are so few people who actually make movies like he does.
One need only look to City Hall, Wiseman’s latest film, which documents the seat of Boston’s municipal government. The picture runs four hours with no intermission (and still not Wiseman’s longest film by any means), but remains rapturous for its entire run. It is certainly not for everyone, but for viewers who are patient enough, it is full of rewards and phenomenal characters. Just as narrative films will ask us to find the real within the entertaining, Wiseman asks us to find the entertaining within the real – and it is there in spades.
2 Can’t Get You Out of My Head
BBC Films
The approach of British documentarian Adam Curtis veers wildly from academic to aesthetic and everything in between. His latest project, Can’t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World, is a six-part miniseries produced for the BBC, and it’s a real head-trip. Using found footage exclusively (as he is wont to do), Curtis’ brooding narration resembles a nightmarish Ken Burns as he weaves a rich tapestry of dystopian and stranger-than-fiction sagas from across 20th-century world history.
Even more memorable than the stories he tells or the arguments he makes are Curtis’ talents for juxtaposing music and visuals. Contained within the project are numerous sequences, outrageous and sublime, where the narration drops out completely and we are left watching strange, anachronistic montages set to Nine Inch Nails, Aphex Twin, and Sex Pistols (to name only three of the many needle drops). Curtis is surely a serious man, fascinated by history and eager to express his ideas, but he also has a perverse, idiosyncratic sense of fun about him. To watch Curtis’ work, you need not necessarily be interested in the subject matter, absorbing though it is. Rather, one of the reasons you watch Curtis is for his unique artistic sensibility – you are always curious to see what he will do next, and how he will connect such disparate dots.
1 Close-Up
Celluloid Dreams
Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up is the quintessential hybrid docufiction film, but it is also so much more than that. It chronicles the true story of a con man who scammed a family into believing that he was a famous film director. It’s an interesting enough tale on its own, but the linchpin here is that, though the film begins as a traditional documentary, Kiarostami will soon cast the real-life players to reenact the events of the story, and they will play themselves (including the filmmaker himself, as well as the director who was impersonated).
One of the most acclaimed films of all time from one of our greatest filmmakers, Close-Up is a strange, intimate, character-driven saga that transcends its seemingly high-concept premise. It does not so much blur the line between fiction and reality; rather, it blurs the line between reality and stories about that reality. The stories we tell about events aren’t necessarily equal to the events themselves, but could they not be just as real, if not more so?
