Between Art and Reality: 5 Documentaries You Should Watch

Man With a Movie Camera (dir. Dziga Vertov)

Considered to be the film that established the documentary genre, Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera sums up exactly what most of these films are all about: demonstrating the ordinary, giving voice to the unheard and transforming cinema into actuality. The film follows a man with a camera who frantically shows the streets of four cities in the newly formed Soviet Union. As proposed by Vertov, the film acquires a dual function: to illustrate reality with honesty through the camera, used as an instrument much like the human eye, and to make a revolutionary cinema with the purpose of truly changing reality. To Vertov, the type of cinema that was being made back then, based on fiction, had little to no power in exploring and changing real life, as it did not resemble it, and should be replaced by factual imagery and sound. 

A Summer Chronicle (dir. Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin)

Filmed in 1960 Paris, A Summer Chronique tells the tale of love – or is it indifference? – between workers and immigrants of the most different origins, whose lives converge on screen. Rouch and Morin work upon the question of happiness in the capitalistic world to analyze how the struggles of the working class deprive people of truly achieving moments of bliss in their daily lives. As the film starts to focus on the lives of specific characters, we begin to see their relationships of love and hate forming right in the form of our eyes. A Holocaust survivor, men from Algeria fighting for their liberation, immigrant women, working-class men: as the lives of these very different people converge on camera, the viewer gets an insight into humanity’s truths and prejudices in a way no fiction movie has ever been able to do.  

Travel Songs (dir. Jonas Mekas)

Jonas Mekas’ Travel Songs accounts for a compilation of short movies which the filmmaker recorded between 1967 and 1981. As the name suggests, those short movies show different places in Europe he passed through between those years, such as Avignon, Ávila, Cassis, and Stockholm. While the idea might seem simplistic, almost as a filmed travel journal, the results are enough to make anyone cry at the aura created by the blurred images and melancholic voice-over. The shots idyllically display the mysteries of everyday life – people on the streets, glasses dancing in the wind over a table cloth, stray cats hovering around big cities. Everything is real, the song of everyday life lies in the way we look at what’s in front of us.  

Sans Soleil (dir. Chris Marker)

In Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, a woman narrates the thoughts of a world traveler. What seems, once again, to be a simple travel journal turns out to be an aggregate of memories turned into images. A film of both aesthetic and intellectual excellence, Sans Soleil accounts for a study on the passing of human beings through time and space. Raw memories and thoughts are turned into this audiovisual masterpiece through the simple use of a camera and the honesty of emotion towards it. Whereas people tend to look for fiction to escape thoughts and memories, Chris Marker here looks them in the eye, serving as a reminder of the beautiful sadness of the passing of time. 

News from Home (dir. Chantal Akerman).

Chantal Akerman was a Belgian filmmaker, and probably the most important European director of her generation. Born into a poor Jewish family who had been through the horrors of the Holocaust, Akerman flees to New York to pursue her dream of filmmaking. News from Home displays to the viewer images of the city accompanied by her mother’s letters, who, grieving her daughter’s sudden flight, pleads for connexion. The frenzy of daily life in New York City becomes the main character in the story as Akerman’s mother’s words begin to fade away. It is painful to watch this intimate connexion they used to share fade away in front of our eyes. The warmth of family is confronted with the lonely New York masses, creating a strange wistful feeling as the image fades from our screens.