It helps that Dick Johnson is a mellifluous soul, an incessantly warm and beaming man surrounded by friends and colleagues and acquaintances who all uniformly, genuinely love him, but from its opening shots, Johnson makes it clear that her father’s wonderful nature will only make saying goodbye to him that much more difficult.
With her follow-up, Dick Johnson Is Dead, Johnson continues to interrogate that fragility, crafting a deeply personal ode to that over which she has no control: her father’s death.
If every great documentary is about the responsibility of observation, then Kirsten Johnson’s Cameraperson is also about the fragility of that observation. There’s no interpreter, no one to explain Baldwin but Baldwin-and this is how it should be. The pleasure of sitting with Baldwin’s words, and his words alone, is exquisite. His decision to steer away from the usual documentary format, where respected minds comment on a subject, creates a sense of intimacy difficult to inspire in films like this. Peck could have done little else besides give us this feeling, placing us squarely in the presence of Baldwin, and I Am Not Your Negro would have likely still been a success. And so I Am Not Your Negro is not just a portrait of an artist, but a portrait of mourning-what it looks, sounds and feels like to lose friends, and to do so with the whole world watching (and with so much of America refusing to understand how it happened, and why it will keep happening). Baldwin’s overwhelming pain is as much the subject of the film as his intellect. All three black men were assassinated within five years of each other, and we learn in the film that Baldwin was not just concerned about these losses as terrible blows to the Civil Rights movement, but deeply cared for the wives and children of the men who were murdered. Raoul Peck focuses on James Baldwin’s unfinished book Remember This House, a work that would have memorialized three of his friends, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Medgar Evers. Here are 40 of the best documentaries currently streaming on Netflix right now: 1. If you’re looking to find new, compelling stories, there are plenty to peruse here, but browsing the documentary section of Netflix also might convince you that documentary movies didn’t exist before 1990.įor other genres and types, check out Paste’s many, many Best Movies lists, and then make your way through the following so-called “truths.” While the selection of docs available on Netflix isn’t what it used to be, the streaming giant has still provided groundbreaking and important documentaries a much broader audience, be it semi-obscure essentials like Casting JonBenet, The Queen and Shirkers, festival finds like Crip Camp and Mucho Mucho Amor, or Oscar-nominated originals like Strong Island and The Edge of Democracy. So many of best documentaries on Netflix are now Netflix Originals.