While Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu continue to dominate the world of streaming video, scads of smaller, leaner outfits have developed to serve niche audiences the content they want. Horror aficionados can find movie-streaming platforms with slasher flicks as far as the eye can see, there’s no shortage of sketch comedy streaming services, and arthouse types too far removed from their nearest arthouse can find obscure and foreign classics on services such as Mubi or Fandor. SundanceNow Doc Club tends to the documentary genre, offering a selection of challenging nonfiction films from contemporary and classic directors. The Doc Club will sometimes corral established filmmakers to curate their own collections of streaming offerings, providing a virtual look into their personal library.
Documentarian Alex Gibney has been cranking out hard-hitting exposés at a breakneck pace for the past decade or so, with three features in 2015 alone (the Scientology investigation Going Clear, the Steve Jobs biodoc The Man in the Machine, and the Frank Sinatra picture All or Nothing at All) and no sign of stopping soon. He won the Oscar in 2007 for Taxi to the Dark Side, the sad account of an Afghan cabbie named Dilawar who was murdered by American troops while being held in extrajudicial detainment in 2002. Today, the Doc Club pulled back the curtain on a new collection of documentaries hand-picked by Gibney himself, a compilation of his favorites including Wim Wenders’ eye-popping Pina Bausch doc Pina, Marcel Ophuls’ legendary The Sorrow and the Pity, and the flat-out perfect Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense. It’s a solid cross-section of genres and techniques, making for a pretty respectable crash course in the documentary form as a whole.
Today, Uproxx exclusively brings our readers an interview clip of Gibney discussing one of these selections, the 1986 autobiography hybrid Sherman’s March. What began as an investigation of Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman’s bloodsoaked push through Georgia and north through the Carolinas pivoted into an extremely personal meditation on the filmmaker, Ross McElwee, and his relationship with women. It’s a film quite unlike any other, and to hear Gibney speak with scholarly passion about a film with clear influence on his own grants viewers a new appreciation. Take a look below:
