The past is never past; in bringing the Holocaust to life in his towering nine-and-a-half-hour masterpiece, director Claude Lanzmann would stick solely to the present. Shoah is composed of the reflections of Polish survivors, bystanders and, most uneasily, the perpetrators. The memories become living flesh, and an essential part of documentary filmmaking finds its apotheosis: the act of testifying. Our top choice was an obvious one.
Thanks to the tech in our pockets, everyone’s a documentarian of sorts these days. But there’s a big difference between filming real life and uploading the footage to the internet and making a documentary, because the best docs put real life into context. They explain our understanding of the world around us. Sometimes, they reshape how we look at the world, and the people that populate it. The greatest documentaries even make us rethink our conception of ourselves.
There is no arguing, though, that we are living in a time of peak documentary. So to make it easier for you to choose what to watch, we’ve sorted the must-sees from the glorified iPhone videos. From the simple chronicle of a train pulling into a station in the 1800s to Apollo 11 blasting off into space, here are our picks for the best documentaries ever made.
Written by Joshua Rothkopf, Cath Clarke, Tom Huddleston, David Fear, Dave Calhoun, Phil de Semlyen, Andy Kryza, David Ehrlich and Matthew Singer
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