Thirty pieces, one century, laid out in the order it happened
The sections are the argument. This is the index — every title, grouped by movement, one click from here.
- Flaherty at the Ice HoleThe first documentary was also the first argument about what a documentary could be: Flaherty's Nanook of the North staged the life it claimed to show.
- Vertov's City, Shot in ThreeThe Composite City
- When the Igloo Had No Fourth WallDocumentary's Original Bargain, Made in the Arctic Cold
- The Camera That Changed Everything Weighed 6.5 KilogramsSync Sound Before 1960 Anchored You to a Wall
- Following Kennedy Through a DoorForty-Five Seconds That Changed American Documentary
- Dylan Holds Up the CardsA Sequence Made Outside the Rules
- What the Maysles Found on Georgica PondA House, Two Women and the Limits of Observation
- The Film Massachusetts Banned for Twenty-Four YearsA Camera Inside Bridgewater
- Rouch Said the Camera Was a ProvocationThe Witness and the Catalyst
- Kopple Stayed Thirteen Months
- Curtis in the BBC ArchiveThe Footage He Did Not Shoot
- Kapadia Makes Films Without InterviewsThe Archive as Witness
- Five Years, Two Families, One CameraHoop Dreams and the Documentary That Ran Longer Than the Game
- Herzog at the HeadphonesThe Filmmaker Who Made Himself the Verdict
- The Camera in Everyone's HandsTape Unlocks the Form