Documentaries

I'm incredibly fond of the BBC's "Storyville" documentaries. They're only, to my knowledge, broadcast on BBC Four. The documentary on Heinrich Himmler being the most interesting; not just due to the content but the way it was presented as readings from his private letters. It quite capably explains the state of mind of the german population at the time and just how a body with such strong discriminatory views came into power. The more recent one documenting the rise and fall of the mexican anti-cartel vigilante millitia was equally worth a watch.
I think some of these are available on iPlayer though I'm not quite sure how the older broadcasts could be accessed.

2 months later

I couldn't find a YT link due to copyright strikes but, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace is pretty good. It is about the impact that Computers and networks have had on society, culture, economics and science. It should be easy to find on most torrent sites and the like. It's really quite surprising just how far the influence reaches, changing society in such drastic yet unseen ways.

5 days later

can't wait to watch realms of the unreal! I LOVED Machines of Loving Grace, that's really important!

I've got SCRAPPER queued...

and I'm kind of excited/curious about the new micheal moore film.

2 months later

On a somewhat more lighthearted note, my sociology professor in my freshman year of college showed us a rather interesting web-documentary called "Everything is a Remix"; basically an examination of the concept of originality, with a discussion on copyright and IP law towards the latter half.

Since Vimeo embeds don't work, here's a link.

5 months later

Ken Burns makes pretty good documentaries from what I've seen.  I really liked The Roosevelts and The Civil. There's also a Vice documentary from a few years back about going on a tourist trip in North Korea which was also a good watch.

3 months later

If anyone loves street cars and are interested in seeing a world record run from New York to California, I suggest "32 Hours 7 Minutes". I've uploaded it to Nya.is if you're at all interested (takes a little time to load because large file).

Synopsis: A documentary film on the legacy of the U.S. Express - once known as the Cannonball Run - and the controversy shrouding the incredible secret behind the record time set on the last such illegal race nearly a quarter century ago.

10 months later

I've always been rather partial to Everything is a Remix. It starts off as a look at how what we call "creativity" is really just the combination of certain elements in previous works to come up with something new; essentially, how there's "nothing new under the sun."

The second part is where things get real interesting. It surprises us with a discussion of copyright laws, and contrasts this with the inherently interdependent concept of creativity it defined earlier.

Something that's worth mentioning is that prior to the concept of copyrights, fiction was less a number of discrete works and more of a loose canon endlessly modified by the individuals who purveyed it. We saw this in antiquity with Vergil's Aeneid, which was based off a character from Homer's Illiad; and we continue to see this today among writers who aren't concerned about profit, the largest such group likely being the fanfic community.

As a fanfic writer myself, I can personally attest to lifting concepts and ideas from other (oftentimes better) works and integrating them into my writings and roleplays. Without the possibility of profit (no matter how minuscule that may be), one tends to adopt a very communistic mindset, freely exchanging ideas and ingenuity with anyone and everyone. By my mark, that sort of world is something we all ought to strive for.

3 months later

Watched one a few days ago called The Ambassador. It's the tale of one Danish man's quest to become an African diplomat. Only an hour and a half long, I'd recommend it.

I haven't watched any in a long time. The last major one I can remember is Burden of Dreams by Les Blank, a document of Herzog making the Fitzcarraldo. This section was incredible. If you ever wondered what a year of living in the Amazon jungle trying to make a movie will do to you, and what kind of a rare breed you must be to persevere...

I love Herzog dearly, though unfortunately the young version of him looks like one of the biggest cunts I ever knew who I trained under for ESL... god am I glad those days are over.

3 years later

I recently remembered I bought a CuriosityStream subscription alongside my membership of Nebula. Given how the house is finally quiet enough to let me think, I decided I'd follow a recommendation by a YouTuber and watch Bombing War: From Guernica to Hiroshima, which detailed the broad strokes of strategic bombing during the interwar period and Second World War.

Production quality was extremely high. It apparently won awards for how well it was made, featuring striking visuals and a kind of storytelling that borders on historical drama. Admirably, the producers decided against low-budget reenactments you might see on old History Channel specials, instead opting to enhance hours of period footage with vivid colors and stereo audio. ^^

Admittedly though, the biggest draw for me was how the series explored and critiqued strategic bombing, particularly the Allied doctrine of bombing civilians to try and hasten the end of the war. The Germans rightly get most of the heat early-on for their bombing of civilians in Guernica and London, but they mostly focus on British and later American efforts in Germany, Italy, and Japan.

Two parts presented really stuck with me. One was that Dresden, despite having little strategic value (according to this documentary), was acting as the focal point for all German refugees fleeing the Soviet advance from the east; the other was that the generals of the Manhattan Project, realizing the extreme suffering of people who survived atomic weapons, (allegedly) classified everything related to these survivors top secret and invented the myth that using atomic weapons saved a million American lives. If that's true, the trick worked. I believed in it myself, not long ago.

I've... got a migraine right now, so I can't recall who it was, but I think one of the generals in charge of the Project said it best: "If we'd lost [the war], they would've tried us as war criminals."

https://curiositystream.com/series/302/bombing-war-from-guernica-to-hiroshima