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Sam Green’s Shortlist

Published on April 26, 2010

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

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

Who is Sam Green?

Filmmaker Sam Green

Sam Green is a San Francisco–based documentary filmmaker. His film The Weather Underground was nominated for an Academy Award in 2004, broadcast nationally on PBS, and included in the Whitney Biennial.

Green’s most recent documentary Utopia in Four Movements premiered at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and is currently screening widely. His other films include Utopia Part 3: the World’s Largest Shopping Mall, lot 63, grave c, The Rainbow Man/John 3:16, N-Judah 5:30, and Pie Fight ’69.

Green received his master’s degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied documentary with acclaimed filmmaker Marlon Riggs. He has received grants from Creative Capital, the Rockefeller and Guggenheim foundations, as well as from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is currently an Artist in Residence at the Exploratorium museum in San Francisco.

Sam Green on the Power of Film

I am a passionate lover of documentary. To me, there is something so powerful and compelling about reality and real things. One of my all-time favorite movies (I didn’t put on the list below because it’s too hard to find) is called Selective Service System, a ten-minute film protesting the Vietnam War and the draft made by students Dan Lovejoy and Warren Haake at San Francisco State in 1970. The film is simple: one student operates the camera while the other very calmly and sits on a couch, removes his shoe and sock, takes out a long hunting rifle from a bag, and then after carefully aiming, he shoots a hole in his own foot. For the remainder of the film, he writhes around in pain on the floor as bright crimson blood spurts out of the wound. The movie hits you like a punch in the face. It’s real.

We see so many people shot or killed in movies, on TV shows, on the news and even in documentaries, yet it’s always brief. In a Hollywood movie, when someone is shot they might have a dramatic moment, but then very quickly afterward, they die. Selective Service System shows us the excruciating, painful, and often drawn-out reality of violence in a way I’d never seen before.

If you are watching a horror movie and it’s getting to be too scary, what do you say to yourself? “It’s only a movie.” When you say that, the power of the film immediately dissipates. You remember that you are sitting in a cinema watching a bunch of actors. It’s clearly not real. With Selective Service System, and with documentary in general, you can’t do that. It is real, and in that fact there is tremendous power. Obviously, documentary doesn’t always have to articulate terrible realities about the world. It can also capture wonderful things as well: whimsy, joy, fun, pleasure, the rush of falling in love. To me, this complex and rich reality is almost always more interesting than anything that I, or anyone else, might make up.

I always have a moment of panic when someone asks what my favorite movie is, or even my top three or five. I love and have been influenced by all sorts of films. It’s hard to narrow it down, but here’s an attempt: a list, in no particular order, of films that have moved and/or inspired me over the years.

Sam Green’s Picks

Tongues Untied: I attended the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism back in the early 1990s and was planning on becoming a newspaper reporter. On a whim, I took a video class taught by Marlon Riggs and loved it. I loved making documentaries—the collaborative nature of it as well as the feelings of exhilaration I experienced while editing. But I was also forever wowed by Marlon and his work. He brought together a rigorous journalistic approach to documentary with a lyrical, experimental sensibility, and I’ve always aspired to strike this same balance in my own work. Marlon passed away in 1994, and both he and his films are sorely missed.

Holy Ghost People: When I was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, I had a job showing films in classrooms. One day in a religion class I showed this film and was completely mesmerized by it. I brought it back to the office and watched it several more times. The film is a black-and-white verité documentary about a snake-handling Pentecostal church in West Virginia. It is breathtaking—both the filmmaking but also the world it captures. I later learned that Holy Ghost People was made by Peter Adair (Word is Out, Absolutely Positive) in 1967 when he was a student at Antioch College, which makes the film all the more remarkable.

The Power of Nightmares: For a long time I, like many documentary filmmakers, thought voiceover narration was lame. It always seemed clunky and didactic. In the past couple of years, however, my feelings about narration have completely changed. It’s so universally scorned that I’ve actually grown quite fond of it. And at a time when many documentary filmmakers seem to hide behind ambiguity or a veneer of balance and showing both sides, narration forces a filmmaker to actually say something, which is hard to do. In The Power of Nightmares, Adam Curtis parallels the rise of the Neoconservative and radical Islamic movements. It’s a three-hour essay film that is one of the most articulate, original and timely films I’ve ever seen. Plus, he uses a phenomenal trove of archival footage and some great Brian Eno songs.

The Thin Blue Line: I’ve watched this film dozens of times and have learned something about filmmaking on each occasion. The editing, the story telling, the cohesiveness of the artistic vision—Errol Morris is a giant in the field. Almost all of his films are great, I think.

The Tailenders: Adele Horne’s 2005 film is a portrait of a Christian missionary group that distributes audio recordings of the bible to indigenous communities around the world. On the surface, the film seems pretty straightforward, but it’s actually a wonderfully subtle and sophisticated look at globalization, capitalism, language, and power in the world today. One of the things I find so intriguing about The Tailenders is that it’s a very poetic and experimental film masquerading as a traditional documentary, and in many ways it’s a deconstruction of the traditional documentary form.

Seeing Red: I’ve learned a lot about making films by watching other documentaries. When I was making The Weather Underground, I had to figure out how to tell the story of a group while focusing on individual members. It was a big challenge. I came across Julia Reichert and Jim Klein’s 1983 Oscar winning documentary about the American Communist Party and watched it over and over again to see how they had navigated this storytelling challenge so deftly. I learned a great deal from that film, and when I finally met Julia Reichert a few years later, I gushed so much about how she was my hero that I’m still embarrassed by the memory.

Sans Soleil: When I was studying documentary at UC Berkeley, we were exposed to mostly traditional documentaries. I didn’t really even know there was an experimental documentary tradition. One day a classmate gave me a VHS tape of Chris Marker’s film Sans Soleil. I brought the film home not knowing what to expect, smoked some pot and watched it. My sense of documentary has never been the same!

Nobody’s Business: This is another film I’ve watched dozens of times and have always learned something from. Alan Berliner is one of the most creative and skillful all-around filmmakers I know of. He’s a fantastic shooter and marvelous editor. The way he uses sounds and rhythms in the cutting of this film and his approach to still photographs and documents—the kind of thing that makes many documentaries deadly boring—it is all masterfully done. His film Intimate Stranger is great, too.

Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y: Johan Grimonprez’ 1998 experimental documentary on the history of hijacking was a big hit in the fine art world and is appreciated in some corners of the doc world. It’s a heavy archival film—lots of great images and the editing is pretty spectacular. More than that, it is a film about huge ideas—terror, idealism, the role of the artist in society, the history of the 20th century. All of this is explored through a profoundly unique, poetic/experimental film language.

Lessons of Darkness: There are many Werner Herzog movies that could go on this list (Grizzly Man, The Great Ecstasy of the Sculptor Steiner), but somehow this one, his 1992 experimental documentary about the burning oil fields in Kuwait after the first Gulf War, feels to me like a perfect film. The tone, the music, the imagery, the pace—it’s 50 minutes long which seems like the exact right length down to the frame.

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I am so glad to read this article. If you don’t mind I am going to share it on our social networks, since Green is one of the director’s in our Kollective at Kontent Films.

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Posted on 2010 05 03 by Kontent Films