Looking forward to a rad week for nonfiction film – The Boston Globe

Like the US and Europe, Japan developed an experimental documentary movement in the 1960s and 70s that reflected and influenced the social, cultural, and political changes of the time. The Harvard Film Archive program Three Radical Japanese Filmmakers presents a trio of the more significant artists.

Motoharu Jonouchi, who was at the organizational forefront of the movement, is represented by Gewaltopia Trailer (1969) and Shinjuku Station (1974). Both are part of the so-called Gewaltopia series in which shots of spaces, objects, and clips from old movies including a political demonstration, an eyelid inscribed with calligraphy, a nuclear blast, and the 1920 silent movie The Golem are assembled into metaphorical statements.

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Masanori Oe and Marvin Fishmans Great Society (2016) presents a collage of images of events from the Lyndon Johnson era, such as the Vietnam War, antiwar demonstrations, the counterculture, and the civil rights movement as well as the inevitable nuclear bomb blast.

Perhaps the most significant film in the program and certainly the one with the most portentous title is Rikuro Miyais Phenomenology of Zeitgeist (1967), which records a happening in front of a bookstore in the city of Shinjuku. It is projected on multiple screens.

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Three Radical Japanese Filmmakers screens Friday at 7 p.m. at the Harvard Film Archive. The films will be introduced by researcher and curator Go Hirasawa.

For more information go to hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/films/2017marmay/radical.html.

One of my favorite documentaries of 2016, Tickled started out as a short, lighthearted feature about competitive endurance tickling. The gripping end result, by New Zealands David Farrier and Dylan Reeve, is a descent into an alternative universe of paranoia, power, and sociopathy. Its like a graphic novel by Thomas Pynchon.

Tickled airs Monday at 10 p.m. on HBO.

For more information go to http://www.hbo.com/documentaries/tickled.

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The blues dont get much more authentic than the music of Fred McDowell (1906-72), a Mississippi sharecropper who was discovered by the legendary Alan Lomax in 1959. McDowell toured with the Rolling Stones in the mid-1960s, was a guiding light for Bonnie Raitt, and influenced the music of Taj Mahal. Joe Yorks Shake Em On Down: The Blues According to Fred McDowell compiles interviews and never-before-seen performance footage of McDowell to tell the story of this giant of American music.

Shake Em On Down can be seen Sunday at 9 p.m. as part of the Reel South series on PBSs World Channel. It will stream online the day after broadcast at WORLDChannel.org.

For more information go to http://www.scetv.org/reelsouth.

A documentary that Ive been hearing a lot about and am looking forward to seeing is Mr. Gaga by Israeli filmmaker Tomer Heymann. Its about Ohad Naharin, a choreographer and the artistic director of the Batsheva Dance Company in Tel Aviv. It won the audience award at last years South by Southwest Film Festival and was nominated for a European Film Award. A critic friend tells me, I dont want to give too much away, but there are narrative developments from the you-cant-make-that-up realm. Sounds like my kind of picture.

Mr. Gaga can be seen March 5 at 5 p.m. at the Firehouse Center for the Arts in Newburyport.

For more information go to http://www.firehouse.org/see-a-show/116-mr-gaga.

Trixie Little and the Evil Hate Monkey (the latter less intimidating than he sounds like a more hirsute version of Will Ferrell in Elf) had a dream to perfect their act a kind of low-tech, burlesque Cirque du Soleil and become stars. In her film aptly titled Us, Naked: Trixie and Monkey, documentarian Kirsten DAndrea Hollander follows their sometimes tempestuous, sometimes triumphant progress for seven years, including a stint at the New England Institute for Circus Arts in Brattleboro, Vt. If you dream it, you can be it, especially if youre willing to wear funny fake ears.

Us, Naked: Trixie and Monkey debuts Tuesday on DVD, VOD, and Digital.

For more information go to usnakedthefilm.com.

What better place to analyze how capitalist organizations work in a conspicuous consumption economy than in a Dallas Neiman-Marcus department store in the 1980s? Thats where auteur Frederick Wiseman sets up shop for The Store (1983), a surprisingly funny and fully engrossing documentary that covers every department in this department store from cashier to corporate office, from chi-chi customers to smile exercises for salespeople showing how it all works, and sometimes doesnt.

The Store screens as part of the Frederick Wiseman: For the Record series on March 5 at 12:30 p.m. and March 8 at 7:30 p.m. at Museum of Fine Arts.

For more information go to http://www.mfa.org/programs/series/frederick-wiseman-for-the-record.

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Looking forward to a rad week for nonfiction film - The Boston Globe