(Next on the schedule, on May 22, is "Gun Fight," on the politics of gun control, part of the network's "Choose or Lose" documentary series about young people and political involvement).
The documentary unearths a lost film the children's author made with Walt Disney in the 1940s while he was stationed in Washington as a spy for the British government.
Each film uses the idea of a lost film team making a documentary in the wilderness, and their footage returned.
Mike Todd's documentary re-examines a lost ancestral moment of black consciousness and black pop culture in the US.
Jean-Luc Godard said cinema's great failure was its failure to show the Holocaust, an objection that has, in fact, gained a new currency with the restoration of Sidney Bernstein and Alfred Hitchcock's all but lost official documentary German Concentration Camps Factual Survey, and André Singer's Night Will Fall, the documentary about how that film was nervously suppressed after the war.
As gorgeous and haunting as Turner's illustrative covers are, some jazz fans might still regret the lost period-documentary feel conveyed by, say, the portraits on many of the classic Blue Note album covers from the 1950s and '60s.
Nachman is, on his own terms, though, extremely thorough: there is a full recounting of what happened to Shelley Berman's career (he was seen, in a documentary, losing his temper and yanking a telephone receiver off the hook, and never recovered) and more than you probably need to read about the over-in-an-afternoon career of Vaughn Meader, the John Kennedy impersonator.
Maybe this single line justifies the price of admission to Bombay Beach, an eerily compelling documentary about lost souls in a lost place, made by the former music-video director Alma Har'el.
He observes but hardly shapes, and his compositional sense is lost in a documentary recording that spares a point of view on the subject and falls into the conventions of filming organized action with a static camera, and amorphous action with a roving and poking handheld one.
Wright has said that she worried about "succumbing" to telling a proper story, at the risk (I suppose) of losing the documentary virtues — impartiality, abundance of detail, variety and authenticity of voice.
