DOCUMENTARY IS NOT A GENRE
Documentary is not a genre. It is a relationship to reality — a set of formal commitments about how cinema can engage with the actual world. Different documentary forms have completely different formal vocabularies, different ethical relationships to their subjects, and different arguments about what cinema can and should do with reality. Ranking all documentaries as a single category produces a list comparing incomparable things. Better to organise by form.
DIRECT CINEMA AND CINÉMA VÉRITÉ
The direct cinema and cinéma vérité tradition operates from the premise that the camera should observe rather than direct — that reality, observed closely enough, reveals itself without the filmmaker's intervention. In practice they differ in how they treat the camera's presence: direct cinema tries to make it invisible; cinéma vérité acknowledges it changes what it films.
Frederick Wiseman's films are the summit of American direct cinema: Near Death (1989, six hours in a Boston ICU), Titicut Follies (1967, banned for twenty-five years), High School (1968), At Berkeley (2013). Wiseman makes films of extraordinary duration that watch institutions from inside, without narration, without music, without interviews. The argument is implicit in the accumulation of observed behaviour — the institution reveals itself by continuing to function while being watched.
Chronicle of a Summer (Rouch and Morin, 1961): The cinéma vérité founding document. Parisian workers asked whether they're happy. The responses filmed. The filmmakers appear in the film. The subjects watch the film and comment on it. The process of filming is part of the subject. A film explicitly about the relationship between the camera and the truth it's supposedly capturing.
THE ESSAY FILM
The essay film places the filmmaker's voice and perspective explicitly in the frame — the documentary equivalent of the personal essay, first-person, formally meditative, concerned with the filmmaker's relationship to the subject as much as with the subject itself.
Sans Soleil (Chris Marker, 1983): A meditation on memory, Japan, the act of filming, and the relationship between image and time. Structured as letters from a fictional cameraman, narrated by a woman who has never met him. The most formally complex documentary in the essay tradition and the one most directly concerned with what cinema does to time.
The Act of Killing (Oppenheimer, 2012): Former Indonesian death squad leaders recreate their killings in cinematic genre styles they choose themselves — gangster film, musical, western. The most formally radical documentary of the last twenty years. The re-enactment is the argument; the subjects' self-presentation is the self-indictment. Disturbing in ways that conventional documentary cannot approach.
THE POLITICAL DOCUMENTARY
Shoah (Lanzmann, 1985): Nine hours and twenty-six minutes. The Holocaust told only through contemporary testimony — no archive footage, no reconstructions, only survivors and perpetrators speaking in the present tense. The formal decision to refuse archive footage is an ethical and formal argument simultaneously: the images of the camps have been absorbed into cultural memory in a way that has partially neutralised their horror. The living voice speaking in the present tense has not been absorbed.
I Am Not Your Negro (Peck, 2016): James Baldwin's unfinished manuscript 'Remember This House,' narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, woven through with contemporary footage of Black American life. The essay form applied to the political documentary — the argument is Baldwin's, the form is Peck's, the result is one of the most formally accomplished political documentaries of the recent era.
WHERE TO FIND THEM
MUBI and BFI Player between them carry most of the major documentary tradition accessible in the UK. Wiseman's films are available on MUBI and on his own platform (kanopy, institutional access). The Criterion Collection has released significant documentary titles on physical media. For Shoah: the physical editions are the correct version; streaming rights are complex. The essay film tradition is most completely represented on MUBI.
The re-enactment is the argument; the subjects' self-presentation is the self-indictment.