Best Documentary Movies of 1978
The Last Waltz
Martin Scorsese's documentary intertwines footage from "The Band's" incredible farewell tour with probing backstage interviews and featured performances by Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, and other rock legends.

George Carlin: Again!
Performing at the Celebrity Star Theater in Phoenix on July 23, 1978, Carlin mesmerizes his audience in the second of his 12 HBO specials. The show was originally planned as part of a concert/sketch movie, The Illustrated George Carlin, that never came to fruition.The routines include: Death, Kids & Parents, Newscast #2, Time and Al Sleet, the Hippy-Dippy Weatherman. -- From Amazon.com
Gates of Heaven
A documentary about the men who run a pet cemetery, and the men and women who bury their pets.

American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince
Martin Scorsese spends an evening with larger-than-life raconteur Steven Prince—a former drug addict, road manager for Neil Diamond, and actor—as he recounts stories from his colorful life.

She Had Her Gun All Ready
Two women- one passive and resigned, the other aggressive and domineering - interact in various locations in New York city. The film explores the dynamic between them before ending with a showdown at the roller-coaster on Coney Island.

Scared Straight!
The filmed depiction of a program where convicts tell troubled kids about the horrors of prison life.

Renaldo and Clara
Filmed in the autumn of 1975 prior to and during Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue tour – featuring appearances and performances by Ronee Blakley, T-Bone Burnett, Jack Elliott, Allen Ginsberg, Arlo Guthrie, Ronnie Hawkins, Roger McGuinn, Joni Mitchell, Mick Ronson, Arlen Roth, Sam Shepard, and Harry Dean Stanton – the film incorporates three distinct film genres: concert footage, documentary interviews, and dramatic fictional vignettes reflective of Dylan's song lyrics and life.

Claymation: Three Dimensional Clay Animation
A look inside the Will Vinton Studio, with specializes in stop-motion animations with clay.

Tom Waits: A Day in Vienna
Short documentary film on the great and powerful Tom Waits, including clips from live performances and interviews.

Fear and Loathing on the Road to Hollywood
Fear and Loathing on the Road to Hollywood, also known as Fear and Loathing in Gonzovision, is a documentary film produced by BBC in 1978 on the subject of Hunter S. Thompson, directed by Nigel Finch. The road trip/film pairs Thompson with Finch's fellow Briton the illustrator Ralph Steadman. The party travel to Hollywood via Death Valley and Barstow from Las Vegas, scene of the pair's 1971 collaboration. It contains interviews with Thompson and Steadman, as well as some short excerpts from some of his work.
Death on the Nile: Making of Featurette
Featurette documenting the making of the film "Death On The Nile".

Vertical Features Remake
Vertical Features Remake is a film by Peter Greenaway. It portrays the work of a fictional Institute of Reclamation and Restoration as they attempt to assemble raw footage taken by ornithologist Tulse Luper into a short film, in accordance with his notes and structuralist film theory. The footage consists mostly of vertical landscape features, such as trees and posts, shot in the English landscape.

Visions of a City
Sepia toning lends a romantic (even wistful) quality to Larry Jordan's film Visions of a City, which he shot in San Francisco in 1957 and edited in 1978. The pace is un-irritating, in contrast to the San Francisco of today; but unlike the equal weight Helen Levill gives to all her subjects, there is an internal evolutionary development in the Jordan film that ultimately delivers a story. Until the introduction of the human protagonist, poet Michael McClure, we are treated to an extravagant display of visual delights.

Always for Pleasure
An intense insider's portrait of New Orleans' street celebrations and unique cultural gumbo: Second-line parades, Mardi Gras, Jazz Fest. Features live music from Professor Longhair, the Wild Tchoupitoulas, the Neville Brothers and more. This glorious, soul-satisfying film is among Blank's special masterworks.
Grand Opera: An Historical Romance
Grand Opera marks a stock-taking of Benning's work and his life, presenting a personal and artistic autobiography woven together with a series of events dealing with the historical development of the number pi, Benning's travels, and homages to Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton, George Landow (Owen Land), and Yvonne Rainer.

Filming Othello
Filming Othello is a 1978 documentary film directed by and starring Orson Welles about the making of his award-winning 1952 production Othello. The film, which was produced for West German television, was the last completed feature film directed by Welles.

Roger Corman: Hollywood's Wild Angel
Documentary examining the life and career of producer/director Roger Corman. Clips from his films and interviews with actors and crew members who have worked with him are featured.
Beyond & Back
A documentary with interviews of people who claimed to have died and then come back from the dead.

Monsieur René Magritte
Documentary about the Belgian surrealist artist who died in 1967.

Guerillere Talks
This experimental short consists of eight unedited rolls of super-8 film, each of which profiles an individual woman in real time. The women engage in everyday behaviour, such as playing pinball or reading a letter aloud.

The Last Tasmanian
The story of the genocide of the Tasmanian aborigine population by British settlers. Specifically Truganini, the last living full-blood aborigine.

Reggae in a Babylon
The young, gifted and black generation of the '70s who started the British Reggae movement is captured in this unique documentary. Groove to the smooth sounds and see rare footage.

Mysterious Castles of Clay
Mysterious Castles of Clay is a 1978 film about a termite colony; filmed in Kenya by film-makers Joan and Alan Root, and narrated by Orson Welles. (narration replaced by Derek Jacobi, in a later release titled "Castles of Clay")

Floating Free
Floating Free is a 1978 short documentary directed by Jerry Butts featuring images of several of the contested events at the 1977 World Frisbee Championships. The film was nominated for an Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film.

Catastrophe
A film cataloguing some of the world's largest catastrophes.

With Babies and Banners: Story of the Women's Emergency Brigade
With Babies and Banners: Story of the Women's Emergency Brigade is a 1979 documentary film directed by Lorraine Gray about the General Motors sit-down strike in 1936–1937 that focuses uniquely on the role of women using archival footage and interviews. It provides an inside look at women's roles in the strike. The film was one of the first to put together archival footage with contemporary interviews of participants and helped spur a series of films on left and labor history in the US utilizing this technique. The film was also important in helping bring into view the history of American women being active in the public sphere, particularly in union and labor actions. The film was, further, ground breaking because it was produced and directed by women. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

In Between
Footage from 1964-1968 that did not find its way into the Walden reels is joined in this classic period piece. Mostly centered in New York, it also includes travel footage and appearances by David Wise, Salvador Dali, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Smith, Shirley Clarke, Jane Holzer and more. Mel Lyman plays his banjo on the roof.

Secrets of the Bermuda Triangle
Part documentary/part dramatization, this film details several of the highest-profile unsolved cases of disappearances, mysterious changes in personality and other strange occurrences related to the Bermuda Triangle.

Murita Cycles
Filmmaker Barry Braverman's documentary about his father, Murray.

Movies Are My Life: A Profile on Martin Scorsese
The very first full-length documentary on Scorsese offers an invaluable look at how he was perceived by his colleagues, and himself, in 1977. Catching Scorsese while he was in post-production on New York and editing The Last Waltz, British filmmaker Peter Hayden gets the manically hyper Scorsese to comment on his youth, his relation to his lead characters, and most importantly, his approach to direction. The doc doesn’t quite move at the pace of Scorsese’s revved-up speed-talking, but it does offer some real insight into his productivity in the 1970s, thanks to an impressive array of talking heads. Included are Scorsese’s collaborators Jay Cocks, Mardik Martin, Brian De Palma, Steven Prince (who co-produced this doc), and his mentor John Cassavetes. Also the performers, who discuss his working methods in detail — Jodie Foster, Liza Minnelli, and, of course, Robert De Niro.
Animated Motion: Part 5
In this fifth part, Norman McLaren deals not with motion (if motion is defined as a change of location in two- or three-dimensional space) but with change--change in the amount and color of light within an otherwise static screen. Normally, the animator combines such change with motion, but here it is studied in isolation.

Black Sabbath: Never Say Die
1. Symptom Of The Universe 2. War Pigs 3. Snow Blind 4. Never Say Die 5. Black Sabbath 6. Dirty Women 7. Rock And Roll Doctor 8. Electric Funeral 9. Children Of The Grave 10. Paranoid Recorded live in 1978, Never Say Die is a defining moment in Black Sabbath's history. This unique concert is one of Sabbath's final performances with the original line-up of Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward.

White Film
Spectrum and prism divide the screen; whites and light, etc. "Out of this purity comes all colors. I've always been attracted to refracted light and prismatic phenomena" says Bernard. For Richard Devereaux. Super 8, silent, non-narrative.
Faces of Death
A collection of death scenes, ranging from TV-material to home-made super-8 movies. The common factor is death by some means.

Wiz on Down the Road
A short promotional film on the making of “The Wiz” (1978). Includes a brief history of Oz portrayals in film and behind the scenes interviews.

The Red Bowmen
Every year, a ritual known as ida is performed by the Umeda people, who inhabit the dense primary forest of the Waina-Sawanda district of West Sepik, Papua New Guinea. Ida, the central social and cultural drama of the Umeda, is a fertility ritual, in which a dominant theme is the metamorphosis of the cassowaries. An ethnography by anthropologist Alfred Gell, Metamorphosis of the Cassowaries, complements the film.

Everest Unmasked
Italian and Austrian mountaineers Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler become the first humans to climb Mount Everest without supplementary oxygen.

Sinai Field Mission
SINAI FIELD MISSION shows the routine activities of the diplomats and electronics technicians who operate the U.S. Sinai Field Mission, the early warning system established in 1976 to help facilitate the disengagement between Egypt and Israel after the 1973 war. The major purpose of the Mission is to monitor the approaches to strategic passes and to verify the operations of the Egyptian and Israeli surveillance stations in the Sinai Buffer Zone.
Raoni
1978 French documentary film directed by Jean-Pierre Dutilleux and Luiz Carlos Saldanha on the life of Raoni Metuktire. The film portrays issues surrounding the survival of the indigenous Indian tribes of north central Brazil.
Daughter Rite
A feminist documentary about female relationships, especially between mother and daughter.

Auditions
A pseudo-documentary about the processes involved in putting together and casting actors and actresses for a porn film. Although several actual porn stars are in the film, it is not a porn film itself.

Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement
This documentary explores the growth and development of black theatre from its earliest roots, also examining its close ties with the civil rights movement. Included are interviews with veterans of the theatrical world such as James Earl Jones and Ed Bullins.
The Hollywood Greats: Charles Laughton
Documentary about actor and director Charles Laughton, produced for British television.

Controlling Interest
The first account on film of the growth of multinational corporations, their impact on people at home and abroad, and their influence on U.S. foreign policy. This is the film that helped kick-off the anti-globalization movement. Upon its release, CONTROLLING INTEREST quickly became a standard "audio-visual text" for those concerned about the growing impact of multinational corporations on global affairs. The film examines how the ever-increasing concentration and velocity of capital affect employment in the U.S., shape patterns of development in the Third World, and influence our nation's foreign policy.
AFI Life Achievement Award: A Tribute to Henry Fonda
Henry Fonda is honored for his career in theater, television and film by friends, family, and co-workers.
Blacks Britannica
A documentary illustrating the black community's understanding of, and response to, racism in Britain. It presents from a black working class perspective, an analysis of racism within the context of British history and the post-war crisis of the British economy. At the same time the film reflects the increasingly militant response within the black community to the continuing attacks upon it, both by organised fascist elements on the streets, and by the state itself.

Bing Crosby: His Life and Legend
Bing Crosby profiled through music and witnesses, including Fred Astaire, Rosemary Clooney, Ella Fitzgerald, Dinah Shore, Dean Martin and James Van Heusen.

Are We Alone in the Universe?
Presents evidence that visitors from other galaxies shared their advanced knowledge with ancient man.

The struggle of the blind
Within the assertive climate of the years after the restoration of democracy in 1974, a fringe group, the blind, many of them beggars, protested by demanding Bread and Education and not Beggary.

Ma Femme Chamada Bicho
The film documents the places where the Portuguese painter Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (1908-1992), and Hungarian Arpad Szenes were born, met, and lived together, painting, and living to each other.
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