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Marshall Curry’s Shortlist

Published on September 23, 2011

The Shortlist article series is your opportunity to learn about the films that inspire intellectual, artistic and activist leaders – leaders like Marshall Curry. We asked Marshall to share his favorite films and his thoughts on the power of documentary to change the world.

So what films make Marshall’s Shortlist? Keep reading to find out.

Who is Marshall Curry?

Marshall Curry got his start shooting, directing, and editing the documentary Street Fight, which followed Cory Booker’s first run for mayor of Newark, NJ. The film went on to be nominated for an Academy Award and an Emmy. Street Fight won the Audience Awards at the Tribeca Film Festival, AFI/Discovery SilverDocs Festival, and Hot Docs Festival. It also received the Jury Prize for Best International Documentary at Hot Docs and was nominated for a Writer’s Guild of America (WGA) Award.

After Street Fight, Curry was the Director and Producer, as well as one of the cinematographers and editors of the feature documentary, Racing Dreams.

Curry’s newest documentary, If A Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front, tells the story of a radical environmentalist who faced life in prison for burning two Oregon timber facilities. It won the Sundance Film Festival award for Best Documentary Editing and was acquired by Oscilloscope Laboratories.

In the summer of 2011 it was released to critical aclaim, called “an intriguing and important film” by Filmmaker Magazine, “a sterling example of journalistic documentary” by Salon.com, and “a wildly successful and engaging documentary” by New York Press. In the fall it will air on PBS’s documentary series POV.

Marshall Curry on the Power of Film

I love films that stretch me, that introduce me to new people or places or—best of all—show me things I think I already know in a new way that changes forever the way I see them. I’m not a purist about any particular documentary style. I love verite documentaries and talking-head historical documentaries, polemical documentaries that make arguments, and documentaries that explore topics with open minded curiosity. I love art documentaries like Koyaanisqatsi and hand-held personal documentaries. To me it’s like Duke Ellington’s line, “If it sounds good, it is good.” If a film can grab me and stretch me, and ideally elicit something that makes me a little bit gentler or braver or wiser, then it is doing good work in the world.
There are so many films that have changed who I am and the way I make documentaries. It would be impossible to name them all or prioritize them in any logical way, so here are a scatter-shot few that come to mind.

Marshall Curry’s Shortlist:

Spellbound
I dreaded going to this film because I assumed it would be a snarky send-up of geeky kids and their pushy stage parents. But instead it approached the characters and story with a generosity of spirit that brought out something great in the audience. The theater was full of people laughing but never sneering—recognizing the quirky, imperfect, hopefulness in our species. I also loved the way, at the very end, Jeff Blitz cut away from the moment when the best speller wins the championship. A less secure filmmaker would have milked the Hollywood moment, but by resisting the temptation, this film lifts you much higher: it’s not a film about who is the best speller; it’s about American dreams and diversity, about adolescence, about family. Such a great film.

Sherman’s March
This film completely changed my understanding of what documentaries are and what they could do. It broke all kinds of rules, pulling back the curtain on the filmmaking process, revealing the filmmaker not as a slick magician, but as a human being, trying to sort through life, and turning technical mistakes into magical moments of authenticity.

The Times of Harvey Milk
I didn’t know the Harvey Milk story when I saw this film years ago. Someone gave me a VHS tape, and I popped it in one night and was completely sucked in—and then stunned—by the characters and plot twists along the way. It is told so well—shining light on social and political issues, but always in the framework of a narrative film and a character-driven story. It makes its argument and stretches audiences not with facts and figures, but with a powerful relationship that is formed with the characters over the course of the film. In my mind, it’s the gold standard for an activist film.

Hands on a Hard Body
This is the film that encouraged me to start making documentaries above any other. I realized after watching it that the success of a documentary has much less to do with the budget (it cost a few thousand bucks to make) than with the ability to identify interesting characters and observe them in a compelling narrative arc. It’s funnier and more engaging and exciting than movies that cost 1000 times more to make. Ten years ago, as I stood on the shore, trying to decide if I should quit my job and try to make a documentary, this movie cheerfully called out, “Come on in! The water’s great!”

Rivers and Tides
This is one of the most beautiful films I’ve ever seen, and in some ways it teaches the opposite lesson from “Hands on a Hard Body”. It is a celebration of the importance of the craft of filmmaking—the ability of exquisite shooting and editing to shake us out of the ruts we live in. Andrew Goldsworthy’s artworks are amazing, strange twists on nature (rocks impossibly piled on top of each other, flower petals arranged like lava pits, ice chunks stuck together into slowly collapsing structures). And the film could have easily (and successfully) been a simple catalogue of the pieces. But instead it takes up the spirit of the art, and incorporates that spirit into the shooting and editing—creating mysteries and questions, and then revealing the answers in a way that made me laugh out loud with amazement again and again. Just when you think—“ok, I’ve got it now—I know where this is going”—a new twist stretches out a fresh part of your mind.

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