Documentaries return to the theater

I've written more times than I can count about the change in the documentary landscape. If you want to count, a good place to start would be with my number of posts tagged with the "documentaries" label, which is 18. Probably not all of those posts are about the waxing and waning -- mostly waning -- in the prominence of documentaries, and to a lesser extent, my interest in them. (I'll get into that latter in a moment.) But a good chunk have been.

Even so, it took something like Thursday night to put into perspective how much things have really changed.

When I went to see The Gospel According to Andre at Cinema Nova, it was the first documentary I'd seen in the theater in 27 months.

That's two years and three months, people. The date of that last viewing was April 4, 2016, and the movie was the Mt. Everest documentary Sherpa.

And though I didn't love that movie, it was not that movie that drove me away from seeing documentaries in the theater. In fact, it was documentaries on the whole, and how so few of them were feeling like essential viewings that penetrated the zeitgeist.

I'm not going to rehash all of my thoughts on this. I will say that a complicating factor was likely my participation in the selection of films for two straight years of the Human Rights & Arts Film Festival (HRAFF), which oversaturated my viewing schedule with documentaries for a period of about five months over two consecutive years. I vetted my last such film 18 months ago and in ways I'm still recovering.

But documentary oversaturation or not, I'm still the type of viewer, the type of critic, who likes to see the movies people are talking about in the theater. And there just aren't as many documentaries that people, or at least the cinephiles I listen to on podcasts, have been talking about the last few years.

I'm wondering if the market is now correcting itself, however. Andre is kicking off an informal flurry of biographical type documentaries that are opening at Cinema Nova in the next few weeks, starting with RGB a week from now, followed quickly thereafter by Whitney and McQueen. I suppose at some point they'll also release the most acclaimed documentary of the year to this point, Won't You Be My Neighbor? Though they'll have to spell it "Neighbour."

I certainly won't be catching all of those on the "big" screen -- "big" being a relative term when you consider the postage stamp on which they screened Andre -- but RGB is a certainty, meaning there's no chance of another 27-month layoff between big-screen documentaries.

Alas, The Gospel According to Andre may have proven why I don't prioritize documentaries on the big screen like I once did. I do still think their general absence from the zeitgeist, the Mr. Rogers movie notwithstanding, has had more to do with it. But the fact that so many documentaries follow such a familiar structure, showcasing an interesting but inessential person or pastime, is the really limiting factor in their appeal to me. Even the ones that do break through to the zeitgeist are usually hewing to these age-old styles and formats.

But as I've also spoken about before, almost every documentary someone has seen it fit to curate for you to see has real merit. The floor for their quality tends to be high. And Andre conforms to that pattern as well. It was definitely well worth my time ... especially compared to that underwhelming sherpa documentary, anyway.