The proliferation of documentaries on streaming services makes it difficult to choose what to watch. Each month, we’ll choose three nonfiction films — classics, overlooked recent docs and more — that will reward your time.
‘El Mar la Mar’ (2017)
Stream it on Ovid. Rent it on Apple TV, Google Play and Vudu.
Proof that a documentary can be topical without holding the viewer’s hand in the slightest, this experimental feature from Joshua Bonnetta and J.P. Sniadecki concerns illicit border crossings in the Sonoran Desert. Or maybe it simply concerns a forbidding, overwhelming desert where such crossings happen to occur. “El Mar la Mar” is principally a sensory experience. Often the camera’s object of study is not a person but a landscape, or traces that people who have passed through that landscape left behind: a pair of glasses, a backpack, a footprint, a cellphone — objects getting bleached in the sun or covered over by windswept dirt.
It is a film designed to be heard as much as seen. (Against this backdrop, snatches of radio transmissions almost sound like communiqués from another planet.) Technically, “El Mar la Mar” is divided into three chapters — cryptically titled “Rio,” “Costas” and “Tormenta” — but the middle section is by far the longest. In English and Spanish voice-over, unidentified speakers share accounts of what they have seen in the area. There are multiple stories of people stumbling upon dead bodies or helping migrants who are cold, lost or in dire health. We also hear from those who have undertaken the crossing. (“It’s a terrifying silence,” one man says of what the journey sounded like. “You only hear your footsteps in the sand.”) Sometimes during these testimonies, the image is just a black screen, with the imperfections of the film processing — “El Mar la Mar” was shot on 16 millimeter — the only signs of movement.
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But in a sense, describing “El Mar la Mar” misses the point. This is a deliberately abstract, disorienting work that resists easy reduction to words. It offers an experience rooted in reality yet trancelike, haunting and oblique.
‘Jane’ (2017)
Stream it on Disney+. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play and Vudu.
The treasure of “Jane,” a primarily archival documentary from Brett Morgen (the David Bowie collage “Moonage Daydream”), is not simply its subject, Jane Goodall, but also the footage of her in the Gombe forest in Tanzania, where she conducted her pioneering studies of chimpanzees. The movie is built from more than 100 hours of what the opening titles describe as rediscovered material shot by Goodall’s first husband, the wildlife filmmaker and photographer Hugo van Lawick.
Clearly, liberties have been taken with the chronology of the footage. As Goodall, who is periodically seen being interviewed in a chair, narrates, somehow there is footage to accompany recollections of her earliest excursions, before she met van Lawick. But the trade-off of mixing and matching is that the film is wonderfully immersive. You get a chance to observe the animals up close, almost from Goodall’s point of view, and to witness the phenomena she discusses, like seeing how chimps can fish insects out of a hole with primitive tools. We get to watch the chimp Goodall named Flo raise her son, Flint, at the same time that Goodall raises hers, Grub. (Goodall says that she considered Flo, along with her own mother and Dr. Spock, a source of parenting advice.)
The sad events that followed — a polio epidemic and war among the chimps, Flint’s failure to develop a sense of independence from his mother — are depicted, too. Because the Van Lawick material did not have sound, all the accompanying natural noise, as in this year’s “Fire of Love,” has been reconstructed. Even without that, though, “Jane” is simply a joy to look at, thanks to the beauty of the setting and the pristine imagery.
‘MLK/FBI’ (2021)
Stream it on Hulu. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play and Vudu.
Sam Pollard’s “MLK/FBI” begins by raising an ethical question: Exactly what should historians do with material that the F.B.I. compiled on Martin Luther King Jr.? Are the documents even trustworthy, given that — it seems beyond dispute — surveillance of King was conducted for the purpose of discrediting him? Do historians who look at the files to learn something about King as a person become complicit?
Without ever quite resolving that tension (not that it needs to), Pollard’s absorbing, historically rich documentary offers an account of the shifting tensions among King, J. Edgar Hoover and Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. The international recognition magnified by King’s receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize apparently especially rankled Hoover. King’s opposition to the Vietnam War strained a productive relationship with Johnson. There is ample discussion of the various wiretaps, bugs and informants brought to bear against King. According to the film, King and Hoover met only once, at Hoover’s office with no press inside. When King left the meeting, he issued a verdict to reporters that sounded like faint praise at best: “I think we developed new levels of understanding.”
We get a sense of the emotional toll that King’s eventual awareness of the surveillance took on him. And the film, true to its title, also tries to explain what made J. Edgar Hoover and William C. Sullivan, the agency’s head of domestic intelligence at the time, tick. It doesn’t discount personal prudishness or the specific, pop-culture-managed conservative image Hoover wanted to project of the F.B.I.
In a technique that allows “MLK/FBI” to duck the usual talking-heads trap, Pollard puts voice-over from his interviewees over footage from the period. Title cards identify speakers by name, but the movie only shows them, and lists their credentials, at the end. The voices include historians like Beverly Gage, David Garrow and Donna Murch, King associates like Clarence Jones and Andrew Young and a retired F.B.I. agent named Charles Knox, who wonders how the F.B.I. could have failed to prevent King’s assassination. “I didn’t hear anything that would indicate that headquarters knew and chose not to do anything,” he says. Still, he adds, “But it was the question everybody had.”
