All All. Sign In. Hundreds of films have been identified as the best documentary films of all time. This is a list for my college students to learn about the history of documentary films and the greatest documentary films to date. The first eighteen films are the most important films in the early development of the documentary, and then the list is alphabetized. List activity. The Arrival of a Train. A train arrives at La Ciotat station. The first 18 titles are the most important historical documentary films in establishing the genre, aesthetics, and issues of this genre.
In the Land of the Head Hunters. Combining fact and fabrication, Edward S. Curtis' dramatization of the life of the Kwakiutl peoples of British Columbia revolves around a chief's son, who must contend with an evil sorcerer in order to win the hand of a beautiful maiden.
Nanook of the North. In this silent predecessor to the modern documentary, film-maker Robert J. Flaherty spends one year following the lives of Nanook and his family, Inuits living in the Arctic Circle. Early documentary film critic, Grierson's principles of documentary were that cinema's potential for observing life could be exploited in a new art form; that the "original" actor and "original" scene are better guides than their fiction counterparts to interpreting the modern world; and that materials "thus taken from the raw" can be more real than the acted article.
Grierson's definition of documentary as "creative treatment of actuality" has gained some acceptance, though it presents philosophical questions about documentaries containing stagings and reenactments. With Robert J. Flaherty's Nanook of the North in , documentary film embraced the artistic trends of romanticism emotionalism, celebration of the traditional, human passions and shortcomings, etc.
For instance, in Nanook of the North Flaherty did not allow his subjects to shoot a walrus with a nearby shotgun, but had them use a harpoon instead. Some of Flaherty's staging, such as building a roofless igloo for interior shots, was done to accommodate the filming technology of the time. Berlin: Symphony of Metropolis. This movie shows us one day in Berlin, the rhythm of that time, starting at the earliest morning and ends in the deepest night.
