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Two from off the beaten path, both among the most fantastic documentaries I've ever seen:
Sherman's March
Marjoe
I originally saw Sherman's March in a theater when it came out, and Marjoe on tv sometime in the 70s. Neither is much screened anymore, and according to Wiki Marjoe was almost lost altogether until a negative was found and restored a few years ago. They both deserve a much wider audience.
Sherman's March
Sherman's March: A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love In the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation is a 1986 documentary film which starts out to tell the story of the effects of General William Tecumseh Sherman's march through Georgia (the "March to the Sea"). During filming, however, director/writer Ross McElwee's work shifted into a more personal story about the women in his life, his nightmares about nuclear war, and his obsession with Burt Reynolds. This shift of focus is brought about by a traumatic breakup McElwee experienced prior to beginning filming; McElwee's emotional state at the time made it difficult for him to separate personal from professional concerns.
In 2000, the Library of Congress deemed the film "culturally significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry.
In 2000, the Library of Congress deemed the film "culturally significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry.
Marjoe is an 1972 Academy Award winning documentary film produced and directed by Howard Smith and Sarah Kernochan about the life of evangelist Marjoe Gortner. Marjoe was a precocious child preacher with extraordinary talents, who was immensely popular in the American South. His parents earned large sums of money off him up until the point he outgrew his novelty. Marjoe rejoined the ministry as a young adult as a means of earning a living part-time, not as a believer, but as a charlatan. The film Marjoe documents his last revivals before coming out publicly as a phony. At the time of the film's release he generated considerable press, but the movie was never shown in theaters in the Southern United States, based on the fears of the distributor over the outrage it would cause in the Bible Belt.
I originally saw Sherman's March in a theater when it came out, and Marjoe on tv sometime in the 70s. Neither is much screened anymore, and according to Wiki Marjoe was almost lost altogether until a negative was found and restored a few years ago. They both deserve a much wider audience.
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