The proliferation of documentaries on streaming services makes it difficult to choose what to watch. Each month, we pick three non-fiction movies (classics, overlooked recents, and more) that will reward your time.
‘Primary’ (1960)
Stream it on the Criterion Channel and Max. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play and Vudu.
The run-up to the presidential primaries season is (somehow already) underway. To see how different the nomination process once was, watch Robert Drew’s groundbreaking documentary.
The film must be viewed through the prism of its time. Doubly disorienting, it chronicles Wisconsin’s 1960 Democratic presidential election, at a time when the majority of states were not yet holding primaries; it’s also a fly-on-the-wall documentary from a time when that form—made possible by the increased portability of cameras and sound equipment—was brand new. Sitting in the room with John F. Kennedy, the junior senator from Massachusetts at the time, receiving news of the election results may seem like something you can easily see on TV today, in 1960 it was an innovative, close portrait, which “offers an intimate view of the candidates themselves,” as the film’s opening narration puts it.
Kennedy ran against fellow Senator Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota, who campaigned just one state away from his home field during the events of “Primary.” His advantage is said to lie with rural voters; Kennedy has power in cities. The gale storm seems oddly sane and sympathetic by today’s standards. The film shows Humphrey pitching a peasant room about the fact that the Senate votes he won are not popular in Boston or New York. Elsewhere, cheering crowds greet Kennedy and sing along to his campaign song, a reworked version of Frank Sinatra’s “High Hopes.” And while much of “Primary” consists of speeches and handshaking, it gives the feeling of having captured the national conversation in a microcosm. Some voters express fear that Kennedy’s Catholicism would influence his politics. One woman says she favors him precisely because he is Catholic.
Drew, who is credited with being “conceived and produced” rather than calling himself a director, went on to make other films with Kennedy, such as “Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment,” which followed the Kennedy administration’s actions to integration from the University of Alabama in 1963. “Primary” may end up with two candidates roughly the same national status as where they started, but it ushered in the direct-cinema movement. People who worked on it – including Albert Maysles and DA Pennebaker as cameramen – went on to make their own groundbreaking documentaries.
‘4 Little Girls’ (1997)
Stream it on Max. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play and Vudu.
Next month marks 60 years since the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, an act of terror that killed four girls. Their deaths, Walter Cronkite says in an interview in Spike Lee’s moving documentary, became an “awakening” to Americans who had until then “understood the real nature of the hatred that hindered integration.”
Lee’s documentary, edited by Sam Pollard (“MLK/FBI”), leads by honoring the victims. The film begins with Joan Baez singing “Birmingham Sunday,” written in response to the bombing, over images of the graves and faces of the four girls, Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Rosamond Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley. Then we hear memories from friends and relatives who knew them. McNair’s parents, Maxine and Chris, remember how painful it was to explain to Denise, around age 6 (she died at age 11), why she wasn’t allowed to order from a lunch counter. A friend of Wesley’s, Dr. Freeman A. Hrabowski III, recalls Wesley’s sense of humor and kindness, and how they parted with the words “until Monday,” not knowing what Sunday would bring.
“4 Little Girls” also features interviews with civil rights leaders such as Rev. Andrew Young and Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, showing viewers how he narrowly survived another bombing in 1956. (The commentators, billed as “witnesses” in the credits, include Howell Raines, editor-in-chief of DailyExpertNews from 2001 to 2003, who wrote extensively about the events.)
But almost inevitably, Lee’s most memorable interview is with former Alabama governor George Wallace, a proud segregationist who now claims his “best friend is a black friend.” He insists on bringing his assistant, Eddie Holcey, on camera. “Ed, come over here for a minute,” he says. “Here’s one of my best friends.” Holcey, whom Wallace hardly seems to be looking at directly, and who looks off-screen to make an eyeroll of sorts, seems deeply annoyed at Wallace’s use of him.
‘Geographies of Loneliness’ (2023)
Rent it on Apple TV, Google Play and Vudu.
Naturalist Zoe Lucas first visited Sable Island—a stretch of beach less than a mile wide and 100 miles off the coast of mainland Nova Scotia—in 1971. Since then, she’s become a tireless and largely solitary cataloger of life. on the island: the hundreds of wild horses, the invertebrates and the seabirds, among other animals. She hears her talking about the possibility of finding species that are not found anywhere else. The diet of the birds, which tend to eat plastic, is an indicator of the level of ocean pollution, another trend Lucas follows.
In ‘Geographies of Solitude’, filmmaker Jacquelyn Mills, even though she is not a naturalist (to be fair, she is credited as director, editor, cinematographer, sound recorder and producer), takes an approach to this documentary that is similar in its way to those from Luke. Both women see limitless possibilities in the island’s treasures. Mills uses natural elements to create cameraless shorts that wouldn’t look out of place in a Stan Brakhage retrospective. Using a contact microphone, she and Zoe record the sounds made by the wood of a rotting A-frame on the island. She discovers what happens to film footage when it is buried in horse manure. She incorporates film into seaweed by hand and electronically reproduces music from the crawling of a sable ant.
Mills’ work is scattered throughout the film, becoming a striking combination of environmental documentary and profile. It is also a landscape film that does everything it can to tune the viewer to image and sound, and that gently dips its toe into the avant-garde. At the end of the film, Lucas says her life seems to be Sable Island – “that’s all I have, that’s all I do all the time,” she notes, adding with a touch of regret admits, “I’ve lost track of everything else. .” “Geographies of Solitude” isn’t really compelling enough to make that happen. But it captures a world where cameras rarely go.
