Editor’s Notes: Jodorowsky’s Dune opens in limited theatrical release this Friday, March 7th.
Filmmaking documentaries are insightful and essayist, complex and fascinating. Filmmaking documentaries bring three key ideas into light; making a film about a film, showing a film within a film, and a film about film itself. The documentary format is perfect for demonstrating the realities of the filmmaking process, exploring the industry of film, and showing the rare moments that can give such depth to the material discussed. To hone in on this sort of genre as the short DVD extras features that now accompany most feature films, is cutting short the progressive works of those significant pieces that came before the DVD regulars and those that have since developed out of these ideas. The scope of this documentary sub-genre is as diverse as the sub-genre of say zombie narratives within the horror genre. My pick of the top ten filmmaking documentaries are as much of a mixed bag as them come, all impressive in their content and more often than intended, brave in their motives. If this little collection doesn’t inspire the idea that filmmaking is more complex and impressive than you might expect, nothing will.
