Usually documentaries take 45 minutes to get started, but within five minutes of this one, I was hooked.
Usually those documentaries seem to be about men in coloured stockbroker jackets shouting into huge mobile phones and thrashing Ferrari Testarossas along the King's Road.
In each case, Mr. Nossiter explores a different experience and a different way of remembering (or a way of experiencing what he calls "The Pleasures of Forgetting" in a chapter title), managing usually to find documentary evidence that lets the reader measure the gap between fact and myth.
Why not introduce the information about the early years of Freud's life not when a documentary usually would, near the beginning of the film, but instead when it becomes important to Freud -- just as all the influences of Freud's scientific and cultural background coalesce in the late 1890's, and psychoanalysis, if not the 20th century, is born?
Before his current factual project, the director of Nixon and JFK had presented America Undercover, a show devoted to exposé documentaries, while the director of Taxi Driver and Goodfellas has regularly contributed small-screen documentaries, usually on the subject of music, including The Blues and Living in the Material World.
Sports documentaries usually trade in either nostalgia or revelation.
It's a tragicomedy, balancing the absurdity of the Rodman's friendship with the leader of the secretive state with a sympathetic and nuanced eye not usually seen in documentaries about the DPRK.
Because, usually in historical documentaries, when you cut to an expert, it is someone you don't instantly recognize.
He doesn't normally get jobs like this, typically making his money flying film crews around the countryside to shoot B-roll for ecotourism documentaries, usually about lemurs.
Directed by Martin Scorsese at the invitation of widow Olivia Harrison, it is not especially informative in the way documentaries usually strive to be, a cataloging of causes and effects and significant facts and figures; nor has it been made as a brief for George's unsung genius.
Avra Douglas, a trustee of the Brando estate who worked for the actor for several years and was a family friend, acknowledged: "We weren't sure that the entire story could be told through Marlon's voice.... Stevan figured out a way to tell the story without having talking heads, as one usually sees in documentaries".
