Songs and riffs go nowhere, practically in real time. What we hadn’t figured on, however, was just how insightful this nearly eight-hour portrait of a recording session would be on the creative process itself, much less radically change our view of the Beatles’ final act. We knew that Peter Jackson’s epic remixing of the footage shot during the Fab Four’s recording of Let It Be would alter our perspective on both the album and the 1969 documentary of the same name - especially when it was announced that it would no longer be a three-hour film but a docuseries unfolding over three nights on Disney+.
(Shout-outs also to: The Rescue, Gunda, I Carry You With Me, State Funeral, The Truffle Hunters, Attica, Listening to Kenny G and Adam Curtis’ mind-blowing “emotional history of the modern world” Can’t Get You Out of My Head.)
NETFLIX DOCUMENTARIES 2021 MOVIE
Here’s our list of the 10 best documentaries we saw this year, from a portrait of a pandemic still-in-progress to a restored concert movie for the ages, an essay on the evils of colonialism to an examination of a Civil Rights leader’s persecution.
NETFLIX DOCUMENTARIES 2021 TV
And it was a banner year for documentarians using longform, multi-episodic storytelling to their advantage - you’ll notice that we’ve included two entries that are great examples of how TV docuseries have become such a vital part of our vérité-with-benefits diet. (Dramatic recreations! Animated therapy sessions! Avant-garde split-screen-a-go-go!) It was a great year for music docs, with everyone from the Beatles to the Velvet Underground getting gamechanging looks back at their long and winding roads. Other times, things veered a lot closer to what Werner Herzog memorably referred to as “ecstatic truth.” It was a very good year for nonfiction movies that utilized a host of creative tricks, in the name of both workarounds and wild, swing-for-the-fences conceptual gambles.
Some of it came from straight reportage, tinged with personal touches. Gimme some truth, a wise man once said - and in 2021, documentaries did their damnedest to deliver exactly that in a variety of shapes, sizes and forms.
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