Koyaanisqatsi (part of the Qatsi trilogy) consists primarily of slow motion and time-lapse photography of cities and many natural landscapes across the United States. Baraka tries to capture the great pulse of humanity as it flocks and swarms in daily activity and religious ceremonies. Travelogue films were very popular in the early part of the 20th century. There’s also a single, one-page list of all the documentaries http://movieexpert.net/ you can watch here, which makes it easy to read through the categories and titles. Some of the dozens of categories include Mystery, Science, Philosophy, Atheism, Religion, Countries, Business, Drugs, Celebrity, Archaeology, 9/11, Performing Arts, Space, Music, and Spiritual. Among all the best places to watch free movies online, below are the top sites that have free documentaries, specifically.
An account is unnecessary, so you can start streaming these movies right away. CNN Films brings distinguished, thought-provoking documentary programming to audiences on CNN’s platforms around the world. In this style, there is a host who appears on camera, conducts interviews, and who also does voice-overs. The order reflects Tomatometer scores (as of December 31, 2021) after adjustment from our ranking formula, which compensates for variation in the number of reviews when comparing movies or TV shows. The order reflects Tomatometer scores (as of December 31, 2022) after adjustment from our ranking formula, which compensates for variation in the number of reviews when comparing movies or TV shows.
It also created newsreels that were seen by their national governments as legitimate counter-propaganda to the psychological warfare of Nazi Germany orchestrated by Joseph Goebbels. Paramount Pictures tried to repeat the success of Flaherty’s Nanook and Moana with two romanticized documentaries, Grass (1925) and Chang (1927), both directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack. Contemplation is a separate area.[further explanation needed] Pathé is the best-known global manufacturer of such films in the early 20th century. Explore educational and mental health resources related to HBO documentaries.
Observational documentaries attempt to spontaneously observe their subjects with minimal intervention. Filmmakers who worked in this subgenre often saw the poetic mode as too abstract and the expository mode as too didactic. The first observational docs date back to the 1960s; the technological developments which made them possible include mobile lightweight cameras and portable sound recording equipment for synchronized sound. Often, this mode of film eschewed voice-over commentary, post-synchronized dialogue and music, or re-enactments.
It has shorts, indie films, and more, in several categories, including the documentary genre. After selecting the documentary genre, there’s a filter for subtitles so you can ensure that the movies will have captions in the language you prefer. Subgenres are supported, too, so you can find documentaries about something really specific, like music, religion, travel, history, or crime. Early color motion picture processes such as Kinemacolor (known for the feature With Our King and Queen Through India (1912)) and Prizma Color (known for Everywhere With Prizma (1919) and the five-reel feature Bali the Unknown (1921)) used travelogues to promote the new color processes. In contrast, Technicolor concentrated primarily on getting their process adopted by Hollywood studios for fiction feature films. Music Box is a collection of documentary films created by Bill Simmons exploring pivotal moments in the music world.
There’s a section for the most popular documentaries as well as newly added films. Compilation films were pioneered in 1927 by Esfir Schub with The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty. Similarly, The Last Cigarette combines the testimony of various tobacco company executives before the U.S. Congress with archival propaganda extolling the virtues of smoking.
- Grierson, Alberto Cavalcanti, Harry Watt, Basil Wright, and Humphrey Jennings amongst others succeeded in blending propaganda, information, and education with a more poetic aesthetic approach to documentary.
- Music Box is a collection of documentary films created by Bill Simmons exploring pivotal moments in the music world.
- Paramount Pictures tried to repeat the success of Flaherty’s Nanook and Moana with two romanticized documentaries, Grass (1925) and Chang (1927), both directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack.
- Bruce Woolfe reconstructed battles of World War I in a series of compilation films, a type of documentary that bases an interpretation of history on factual news material.
- Single-shot moments were captured on film, such as a train entering a station, a boat docking, or factory workers leaving work.
The propagandist tradition consists of films made with the explicit purpose of persuading an audience of a point. One of the most celebrated and controversial propaganda films is Leni Riefenstahl’s film Triumph of the Will (1935), which chronicled the 1934 Nazi Party Congress and was commissioned by Adolf Hitler. Leftist filmmakers Joris Ivens and Henri Storck directed Borinage (1931) about the Belgian coal mining region.
The fundamentals of the style include following a person during a crisis with a moving, often handheld, camera to capture more personal reactions. There are no sit-down interviews, and the shooting ratio (the amount of film shot to the finished product) is very high, often reaching 80 to one. The editors of the movement – such as Werner Nold, Charlotte Zwerin, Muffie Meyer, Susan Froemke, and Ellen Hovde – are often overlooked, but their input to the films was so vital that they were often given co-director credits. In Britain, a number of different filmmakers came together under John Grierson.
The films aimed for immediacy, intimacy, and revelation of individual human character in ordinary life situations. In the early 1950s attention once again focused on the documentary in the British free cinema movement, led by a group of young filmmakers concerned with the individual and his everyday experience. Documentaries also became popular in television programming, especially in the late 1960s and the early 1970s. Reflexive documentaries do not see themselves as a transparent window on the world; instead, they draw attention to their own constructedness, and the fact that they are representations.
Modern lightweight digital video cameras and computer-based editing have greatly aided documentary makers, as has the dramatic drop in equipment prices. The first film to take full advantage of this change was Martin Kunert and Eric Manes’ Voices of Iraq, where 150 DV cameras were sent to Iraq during the war and passed out to Iraqis to record themselves. The directors of the movement take different viewpoints on their degree of involvement with their subjects. Kopple and Pennebaker, for instance, choose non-involvement (or at least no overt involvement), and Perrault, Rouch, Koenig, and Kroitor favor direct involvement or even provocation when they deem it necessary. Biographical documentaries appeared during this time, such as the feature Eminescu-Veronica-Creangă (1914) on the relationship between the writers Mihai Eminescu, Veronica Micle and Ion Creangă (all deceased at the time of the production), released by the Bucharest chapter of Pathé. Yidio gathers free documentaries from around the web, and provides you with the link to watch them.