The proliferation of documentaries on streaming services makes it difficult to choose what to watch. Each month, we select three nonfiction films — classics, overlooked recent docs and more — that will reward your time.
‘The Eternal Memory’ (2023)
Stream it on Paramount+. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV and Fandango at Home.
As a TV journalist, Augusto Góngora sought to preserve the national memory of Chile. During the Pinochet dictatorship, he was involved in underground newscasts that showed a country that state-controlled television would never reveal. In the years before Chile began its transition to democracy in 1990, he chronicled the nation as it, in his words, “passed from fear to joy.” His wife, Paulina Urrutia, is an actress who served as a culture minister during President Michelle Bachelet’s first term. Their work, in different ways, involves telling other people’s stories.
The conceit of “The Eternal Memory,” directed by Maite Alberdi, is that now they must apply their narrative instincts to their own lives. Góngora has Alzheimer’s — although for a while, the movie does not show anyone using that word. Rather, Alberdi trains her focus on the tenderness of the couple’s marriage, and the sweet way in which Urrutia keeps Góngora as sharp as he can be, jogging his memory, quizzing him on the time they’ve shared and making sure he stays active. There’s a charming tableau in which Urrutia slowly joins in with a dance that her husband is trying to show her. At one point he seems to participate in a rehearsal of a play that she’s in.
At least initially, Urrutia appears to have almost infinite patience for her husband’s confusion, but “The Eternal Memory” becomes thornier as it goes. She is visibly hurt when one day Góngora makes it to 3 p.m. without recognizing who she is. When the pandemic struck, Urrutia took over the shooting herself, which adds to the project’s intimacy, and there is little sense that she or Alberdi is holding anything back. Góngora died in 2023, after the documentary’s completion. So “The Eternal Memory” is now itself a memorial to a couple that, politically and personally, never lost sight of who they were.
‘Union’ (2024)
Rent it on Gathr.
Brett Story and Stephen Maing’s documentary isn’t streaming on conventional platforms. That is partly because of its subject: a unionization effort at an Amazon fulfillment center on Staten Island. It is not the sort of crowd-pleaser that turns up on Prime Video.
Nor is it a crowd-pleaser, exactly, although when workers at the warehouse, called JFK8, voted to form a union in 2022, it was seen as a victory for the little guy. The leaders of the effort did not have the support of an established labor organization, and indeed, at one point early in “Union,” they attend a meeting at what onscreen text describes as a “local office of a major national union.” The cameras don’t go inside, but the movie’s subjects emerge discouraged at what one says was a hostile tone. Shouldn’t these be allies? And the documentary suggests that Amazon itself was aggressive in its anti-unionization efforts. In one particularly charged scene, we watch activists for the union crash an anti-union presentation.
But Story and Maing could not have known how things would turn out when they began shooting, and in a sense that makes for a more interesting film. On one level, “Union” is simply about the hard work of organizing — about getting workers to chat over a burger or a hot dog and teaching them about the union. On another level, it shows that unions are rarely so united. Two of the main arcs in the film concern Christian Smalls, a founder of the union whose leadership capabilities are questioned by both Amazon and the would-be union members, and Natalie Monarrez, an early union supporter who comes to see it as just another boys’ club. The movie opens with a shot of a giant tanker carrying shipping containers, an image that gives a sense that workers are just a tiny part of a vast, crushing apparatus.
‘The Cinema Within’ (2025)
It’s usually like an exaggeration (and a cliché) to say that after watching a documentary, you’ll never look at something the same way. But that old saw is probably true when it comes to “The Cinema Within,” a documentary from Chad Freidrichs that asks what, on the surface, might sound like a silly question. Why, in movies, does the continuity editing system work?
Well, why wouldn’t it work? Experts in perception explain that, until movies, nothing in human evolution mirrored the essentially disorienting nature of leaping from one shot to another. “There’s a cut to a completely different shot,” says the editor Walter Murch, speculating on the origins of cinema in the documentary, “and it’s conceivable, given the nature of the human brain, that the whole audience gets seasick and throws up, and the idea of motion pictures would have died at that point.”
“Wind the tape back to the beginning, and cinema could have gone a lot of different ways,” says the film scholar David Bordwell, who died last year. “Why do we have what we have is the question.”
It turns out that continuity editing does work — and in many ways is closer to the way we see the world than you might think. Murch remembers reading an interview with John Huston in which Huston suggested that cuts come much closer than pans to how our eyes and brains work; we blink, Huston believed, to elide inessential information. Scientists like the cognitive psychologist Tim Smith back him up, explaining how we’ve evolved to see a particular area of our field of view in great detail. Between saccades — the darting motions that your eyes make to keep relevant information in that area — and blinks, “we’re functionally blind a third of our waking lives, which I find totally bizarre and threatening,” the cognitive neuroscientist Jeff Zacks says.
Tamami Nakano, who researches blinking, found that different viewers tend to blink at the same moments when absorbing narrative information. (Maybe the concept of editing is built into human physiology after all.) And Sermin Ildirar, a scientist whose research concerns film, went to a remote part of Turkey whose residents had never been able to see movies or TV. We see footage from her experiments. It’s fascinating to learn which editing techniques the subjects grasp intuitively and which leave them confused.
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