MoMA's Month of Life Stories

Each year, the international slate of films at the Museum of Modern Art's Documentary Fortnight can feel like a nonfiction follow-up to the museum's Global Lens survey in January. This year's edition, newly bundled with two Academy-based series under the streamlined banner Doc Month, again trots the globe, but one of its strangest pleasures comes from rather close to home.

"To My Great Chagrin: The Unbelievable Story of Brother Theodore" is Jeff Sumerel's portrait of the manic downtown monologist Theodore Gottlieb. "More exciting than being raped by a gorilla," Woody Allen quipped after an encounter with the late shock-haired émigré from Germany, whose hilarious semi-ironic tirades were equal parts S. J. Perelman and Georg Büchner.

Speaking with mock indignation, bulging white eyes, and a rolling Teutonic accent, Gottlieb sets a mood of otherworldly focus, presaging the imminent arrival of either doomsday or self-pity. Mr. Sumerel draws heavily from footage of performances from the 1970s forward, and from such acolytes as Eric Bogosian and Penn Jillette, before pivoting on the flummoxing revelation of Gottlieb's playboy past and flight from the Holocaust. That's a quintessentially 20th-century journey, but we're also stealing a glimpse at an influential underground figure from an increasingly bygone New York.

"We always try to do a New York story," a MoMA documentary curator, Sally Berger, said. "SprayMasters," another Gotham offering, revisits familiar territory — graffiti culture — but this time our guide is the avowed godfather of such chronicles, Manny Kirchheimer, director of the pioneering 1980 gem "Stations of the Elevated," four of whose featured artists appear in his new film. Though both films are must-sees in the program (and catnip to nostalgists), the strength of MoMA's series remains its eye-opening reach, geographical and otherwise. This year's offerings, culled from international festivals and submissions alike, tend toward environmental issues, boosted by a collaboration with the Toronto-based Planet in Focus International Environmental Film and Video Festival.

"We respond to the directions documentary filmmakers are taking, and we noticed there were a larger number of films about the environment," Ms. Berger said. This year, topics and slants range from an exposé on cut-rate Appalachian mining in "Black Diamonds" to travels with a proselytizer for recycled construction materials in "Garbage Warrior" to a visit with a self-sufficient Philippine prison farm in "Hors les Murs." And fans of the Indonesian filmmaker Garin Nugroho, whose hallucinogenic "Opera Jawa" drew sold-out audiences here last week, can experience him anew with his 2005 tsunami recovery documentary "Serambi." (Also screening are the current, droning granddaddy of enviro-docs, Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth," and a preview of Laura Dunn's insightful "The Unforeseen," to be released later this month.)

Sub-groupings in the series include a clutch of Brother Theodore-like biographical eruptions from Europe's wartime past, and a stirring underdog-female-pol double bill, "Enemies of Happiness" and "Run Granny Run," which recount battles for the disparate arenas of the Afghani parliament and the U.S. Senate.

The broad mandate of the Fortnight program also allows for introspection on the documentary as a medium, one whose pace of innovation has not quite matched its growth in popular acceptance. "I've always found that experimental documentary is a structural format or area that's underexplored," MoMA's chief curator, Rajendra Roy, said.

Surely a good example in this year's Fortnight is the one-night program of cell phone documentaries, co-curated by Ms. Berger and independent curator Sara Rashkin. Taking the idea of "handheld" shots to literal extremes, these shorts were all captured on camera phones, even one by the noted cinematographer Ed Lachman ("I'm Not There," "The Virgin Suicides") on a Motorola V710.

The cell phone slate makes for a thought-provoking capstone, since Fortnight also features a spotlight on 30-year doc stalwart Joan Churchill. Spanning different technical and, really, epistemological approaches, her career as a cinematographer and director yields a "recent history of documentary," said Ms. Berger. To be screened is a compilation of excerpts including "Gimme Shelter" and "Pumping Iron," works from her long collaboration with Nick Broomfield ("Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer"), and the Nixon-era mass-detention pseudo-doc "Punishment Park," which she shot for the uncompromising Peter Watkins.

Last but not least are the two Academy programs, screening together with Fortnight, that round out the overarching Doc Month. Oscar's Docs, 1941–45: Bravery and Bias, a worthy nod to the museum's archival setting, chronicles the battle for hearts and minds on the home front during World War II. Excerpted from an ongoing and comprehensive anthology of Oscar-nominated documentaries, this program marks a notable moment in documentary history: the first time the prizes were specifically allotted to nonfiction work, following the burst of creativity in the 1930s. At the time, the Academy established a selection committee of five volunteers from the film industry, and though none were documentary filmmakers, the group counted among its members none other than Henry Fonda and producer David O. Selznick.

"It was a very high-profile category during the war," said Ed Carter, documentary curator for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who brought the slate to MoMA.

The selections in Oscar's Docs, many of them combat films, wrench us back to a time in our nation's history when the world seemed to come crashing down on our doorstep. "December 7th" is a stirring blow-by-blow report of the Pearl Harbor attack, assembled by John Ford and Gregg Toland. Shot on the Fox back lot with actors and American fighter planes repainted with Japanese markings, the film also reflects how "documentary" was defined at the time by the factual basis of the content.

The 1942 film "Moscow Strikes Back" might better fit modern definitions. It thrills all the more for its breathtaking footage of the war on the Russian front. Part bonding tribute to Red Army bravery, part sneering jeremiad against Nazi "supermen," its scenes of snowbound Russian soldiers and scorched-earth Nazi atrocity were shot by a team of Russian cinematographers in deepest winter. (Contemporary response suggests the film was a rousing success: "Stings like a slap in the face of complacence," ran the 1942 review in the New York Times; "a scourge and lash against the delusion that there may still be an easy way out. Here is a film to lift the spirit with the courage of a people who have gone all-out.")

The other Academy program simply comprises this year's nominees for Best Documentary Short — an opportunity to browse a category of offerings not always readily available to non-Academy civilians. The lineup was announced last week: television doc veteran Cynthia Wade's "Freeheld"; "La Corona (The Crown)" by Amanda Micheli (who once made a nifty doc on stuntwomen) and Isabel Vega; Tim Sternberg's "Salim Baba," and "Sari's Mother" by James Longley, of "Iraq in Fragments" fame.

The Doc Month super-program is a typically sweeping offering from MoMA, one that fits safely after Sundance's look-at-me fest and on the cusp of the Oscars' annual selective spotlight of documentaries. You could do a lot worse than cherry-pick from this selection, and if you think you can do better, you might start by aiming your camera phone...

Through March 3 (11 W. 53rd St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-708-9400).