These images — of people, mainly black people, many of whom endure drug addiction, physical infirmities, poverty, homelessness, and harassment from the police — have an essential documentary urgency.
The essential documentary impulse is the impulse to catch life off camera, to film what was not planned to happen, or what would have happened whether someone was there to film it or not.
Still, for everyone who watches it today, "Triumph of the Will" has the essential documentary fascination: you feel that you are seeing things you were not intended to see.
The movie has an essential documentary value, one that extends far beyond the visual recording of performance: it reflects the actual historical background to Foster's songs, which is all too easily lost in their familiar renditions.
This essential documentary traces the civil-rights moments through the words of James Baldwin.
This whole phenomenon of alterado music, along with its North American fabrication, has been astutely covered by photographer and filmmaker Shaul Schwarz in last year's essential documentary "Narco Cultura" (now streaming on Netflix) and more recently in a trio of fascinating reports on Vice.com.com
From nightmarish negotiations with people smugglers to footage of bailing out sinking dinghies, this was the most essential, devastating documentary of the year.
(Holden) ★ 'NO END IN SIGHT' (No rating, 102 minutes) This essential, infuriating documentary calmly and thoroughly chronicles the incompetence and arrogance in the early days of the American occupation of Iraq, which set the stage for what was to follow.
(Scott) ★ 'NO END IN SIGHT' (No rating, 102 minutes) This essential, infuriating documentary calmly and thoroughly chronicles the incompetence and arrogance in the early days of the American occupation of Iraq, which set the stage for what was to follow.
