I didn’t see very many feature documentaries last year. This was not by design, it just turned out that way. I’m sure I missed some great ones, but of those I did see, the following eleven titles are my favorites. I’m not sure if it means anything, but six of them have music subjects. I stretched the parameters a bit to include two I saw early in January.

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Artie Shaw: Time Is All You’ve Got (Brigitte Berman, 1985)  This is an excellent study of a major figure in big band swing and jazz. My folks, especially my mom, really loved big band swing of the 1930s and ’40s. Through them, I developed a deep appreciation of it as well. I was more familiar with Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Woody Herman, and others than I was with Artie Shaw. I knew his name, but not much else until I saw this film. Through extensive on-camera interviews we get a picture of a complicated, multi-talented musician and author. He was a self-taught musician. He could never seem to settle down, repeatedly forming and disbanding successful groups. He was married eight times. His wives included Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, and Evelyn Keyes. Apparently he was hard to get along with. But he was one hell of a clarinet player. He died at age 94 on December 30, 2004 .

I couldn’t find a trailer for Time Is All You’ve Got, but here is a clip of one of his biggest hits, “Begin the Beguine.” It’s really great.

There are two scenes in the film that really stand out. We see Shaw in close up listening to one of his recorded songs. He’s deep in thought with eyes closed, moving to the music, following it with his hands. Berman holds on each shot until the song is over. I don’t recall seeing anything like this before. These are very strong moments. Berman was at the showing at Film Forum that I saw. In the lobby afterwards, I told her how much I liked those scenes. She said that Shaw had wanted her to take them out, which thankfully she didn’t do. Maybe he felt they were revealing too much of something.

Artie Shaw: Time Is All You’ve Got received an Academy Award in 1987 for Best Documentary Feature. Per James Barron in the New York Times: “After that, Berman spent more than a decade wrangling in courts in the U.S. and Canada after Shaw demanded a share of the profits — 35 percent, said Berman, adding that at one point she offered a smaller cut. Shaw rejected that, she said, and the case was settled without a payout in 2003.” This is ironic, since there basically were no profits. The film hadn’t recovered its production costs at that point. Last year, a 4K restoration was done. The run at Film Forum earlier this month is being called its theatrical premiere. Better late than never.

New York Times review by Glenn Kenny can be accessed here.

New York Times article by James Barron can be accessed here.

Artie Shaw: Time Is All You’ve Got is not yet available for streaming, though I’m sure it will be at some point.

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Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy (Nancy Buirski, director)  This is a deep dive into the making of Midnight Cowboy (1969), placing it in the context of the times, particularly showing a side of New York City seldom seen outside of underground films. This is typical of Buirski’s forensic approach to her subjects. In 2016, at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, I saw her terrific film, By Sidney Lumet (2015), one of the best studies of a film director I’ve ever seen. She let the film clips run on at length, rather than skimming the surface of many clips, which is the more usual approach. Buirski died last August 29, 2023, at age 78. This was a shock and a sense of real loss. I’d seen her at Film Forum that April when she introduced a screening of Desperate Souls. She doesn’t take the more typical route of clips and talking heads in her films. She goes deeper than that. Most of her films have a strong civil rights agenda and a desire for justice. These include The Loving Story (2011), The Rape of Recy Taylor (2017), and A Crime on the Bayou (2020). I hadn’t known that she was a founder of the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, held annually in Durham, North Carolina. As I said, her passing is a real loss. We’ll never seen the films she might have made. Her work was far from over.

Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Making of Midnight Cowboy is available for streaming on Amazon Prime and Kino.

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I Went to the Dance (Les Blank, Chris Strachwitz, directors, 1989)  This is my favorite of all the documentaries I saw last year, the best. Originally released in ’89, it’s back in theaters after a 5K restoration. I love cajun and zydeco music, but didn’t know much of the history, the sources and influences. I Went to the Dance does a great job of laying it all out in a detailed and incredibly entertaining, toe tapping fashion.

I Went to the Dance is not yet available for streaming, but I hope they take care of that soon.

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Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind (Ethan Coen, director, 2022)  Since 1984, Ethan Coen and his brother Joel have co-directed a large number of films, original and quirky in the extreme. Joel went solo with The Tragedy of Macbeth in 2021. Ethan’s Drive-Away Dolls will be released soon. In the meantime, Ethan made this film about Jerry Lee Lewis, and it’s a blast. The film is made up entirely of archival material, including performance footage, TV appearances, interview segments on talk shows. No talking heads shot for this film and no narration. It’s pretty much wall-to-wall Jerry Lee, unhinged and out of control.

I can’t find a trailer, but here are two clips that will give you a taste. The first is “Breathless,” performed on Dick Clark’s Saturday Night Beech-Nut Show in 1958. The second is at a venue in Bristol U.K. in 1983, Jerry Lee doing Chuck Berry’s “Lucille.” I particularly like this clip. It’s a very assured performance, and shows he could something with a piano besides pound on it.

Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind is available for streaming on Amazon Prime.

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Little Richard: I Am Everything (Lisa Cortés, director)  Jerry Lee Lewis and now Little Richard. Two figures at Ground Zero as rock n’ roll was evolving out of Black music, Gospel, and jazz. This is what parents in the ’50s were afraid of. Not mine, but I don’t think they were paying attention. This excellent and exciting film touches on all phases of Little Richard’s career. He rocked like nobody else. Few could match his exuberant energy and enthusiasm.

Little Richard: I Am Everything is available for streaming on Max and Amazon Prime.

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Menus-Plaisirs les Troigros (Frederick Wiseman, director) The following is edited from what I wrote after seeing this film at the New York Film Festival last year.

Since Titicut Follies in 1967, Fred Wiseman has made a career out of examining institutions of all kinds, often at lengths of three to four hours (or more), without identifying titles, narration, or talking-head interviews. Nothing fancy; we’re just there. This is immersive, in-the-moment filmmaking (though carefully edited and structured). Wiseman is one of the greatest living filmmakers. With the deaths of Al Maysles (age 89) in 2015 and D. A. Pennebaker (age 94) in 2019, he’s probably the last one standing of his generation. At age 93 he does not appear to be slowing down, which is great for the rest of us.

Per the Film Forum description:

“Frederick Wiseman’s 44th documentary takes us to Central France and Troisgros — a Michelin 3-star restaurant owned and operated by the same family for four generations, and destination for gastronomes from around the world. Behind the scenes, we are privy to passionate debates among the head chefs (a father and his two sons) about texture, color, and depth of flavors; visits to a bounteous produce farm, a local vineyard, and a massive cheese cave (where “each cheese has its moment of truth”); and waitstaff meetings focused on individualized customer preferences and food plating at a performance-art level. In his trademark style, Wiseman patiently illuminates the restless creativity of this culinary family as they experiment with dishes, methods, and ingredients — keeping their haute cuisine anchored in tradition while brilliantly evolving.”

Menus-Plaisirs Les Troigros is not yet availablel for streaming.

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 Naim June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV (Amanda Kim, director)  This film is an excellent introduction to Naim June Paik, a visionary Korean video artist who incorporated performance and installation art in his innovative and unique works. As seems true with many truly creative artists, his work reflects a great deal of humor. He was trained as a classical musician. While in Germany he became involved in the Neo-Dada art movement and developed a friendship with John Cage. While living in Japan in 1961-1962 he acquired one of first commercially available video recorders. He’s credited with coining the term “electronic superhighway” in 1974. Amanda Kim’s film puts us in the presence of a brilliant, quirky mind. It’s a gas.

Naim June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV is available for streaming on Amazon Prime.

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The Pigeon Tunnel (Errol Morris, director) The following is edited from what I wrote after seeing this film at the New York Film Festival last year.

The Pigeon Tunnel gives us John le Carré (pseudonym of David Cornwell) in an extended interview/interrogation by filmmaker Erroll Morris. Le Carré is fascinating to listen to as he talks about his life and work. Much of  what he says about his life — his early years, certainly — involve his father Ronnie, a career con man. I’d known nothing about this, so it was interesting to learn how heavily this abusive relationship influenced Le Carré’s life and the themes of his spy novels. Seeing the film I had to get past my aversion to Erroll Morris, which began in 1988 when I saw his film The Thin Blue Line. That film leaned heavily on re-enactments, which I don’t like. I realize this practice goes back to pioneering documentary filmmaker Robert Flaherty, who used staged scenes in Nanook of the North (1922), so there’s a precedent. In my possibly cranky opinion, it’s not a real documentary if re-enactments are used, but something else. For me, Fred Wiseman, D.A. Pennebaker, and Albert & David Maysles are true documentary filmmakers. Sure, they carefully structure their films through editing, but they don’t make stuff up. That said, if you have an interest in John le Carré and how he came to be what he became, The Pigeon Tunnel is definitely worth seeing. And I have to admit, the re-enactments scattered throughout don’t really get in the way.

The Pigeon Tunnel is available for streaming on Apple TV.

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Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis) (Anton Corbijn, director)  I’d never heard of Hipgnosis, a British design studio that created an astonishing number of iconic album covers for musicians and bands in the 1970s, but I certainly knew their work. We all did. Hipgnosis (a conflation of “hip,” “hipnosis” and “gnostic”) was founded by Aubrey “Po” Powell and Storm Thorgerson (what a name!) in 1968. They designed album covers for Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, T-Rex, Peter Gabriel, and many others. Here are some of them.

Squaring the Circle: The Story of Hipgnosis is excellent. Especially for those of us who were into this music, it’s fascinating to know how the album covers came to be, and the complicated, often clashing, personalities who did the work.

Squaring the Circle is available for streaming on Amazon Prime and Netflix.

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Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie (Davis Guggenheim, director)  This is a deeply affecting study of a hugely successful actor who was thrown a big curve with a diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease in 1991, which he publicly announced in 1998. Since then, he’s been a fierce advocate for education about the disease, treatment, and an eventual cure. He’s on-camera a lot in this film, telling us his story directly, which is illustrated with film clips and archival footage. It’s great seeing scenes from the Back to the Future trilogy (1985-1990) and Family Ties, but sobering to think of  challenges he faces with dignity and grace, humor and courage. This is an important film.

Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie is available for streaming on Apple TV.

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The Stones and Brian Jones (Nick Broomfield, director)   I hadn’t realized that Brian Jones had been the founder and original leader of the Rolling Stones in 1962, before Mick Jagger and Keith Richards eventually took over, steering it away from the blues band Jones wanted to what it became. Drugs and erratic behavior resulted in his being dismissed (i.e. kicked out) from the band in 1969. Less than a month later Brian would drown in the swimming pool at his home, joining the dead-at-27 club that includes Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and Janis Joplin.

This terrific film has lots of great archival footage, including some of fans rushing the stage at early gigs that had my jaw on the floor. It’s like waves of zombies in World War Z jumping on the stage only to be literally heaved off the stage by security guards wearing suits and ties. Complete riots. Those were the days.

The Stones and Brian Jones is available for streaming on Amazon Prime and YouTube.

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That does it for this one. See you next time. Until then, mind how you go. — Ted Hicks

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