The Largest Documentary Film Festival in the U.S. Is Kicking Off in New York.

Today marks the start of Doc NYC, the nation’s largest documentary film festival, and quite a few of the selections in the current crop have artistic themes at their center.

We sifted through the more than 200 films, which are on view in New York through November 28, to highlight those about art, artists, and the broader art world, including documentaries about incarcerated artist Jesse Krimes and pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge.

The Art of Making It

Director Kelcey Edwards offers a snapshot into the lives of several young aspiring artists—including Jenna Gribbon, Gisela McDaniel, and Chris Watts—illustrating how the challenges they face to gain recognition in the high-end art world are reflective of larger systems in place in our society. Commentators include Brooklyn Museum director Anne Pasternak, curator Helen Molesworth, and collector Stefan Simchowitz, known for identifying up-and-coming artists primed for market recognition.

Saturday, November 13, 1 p.m., SVA Theatre, 333 West 23rd Street, New York.
Thursday, November 18, 9:15 p.m., Cinépolis Chelsea, 260 West 23rd Street, New York.
Streaming Sunday, November 14–Sunday, November 28, 2021.

Bad Attitude: The Art of Spain Rodriguez 

Described by R. Crumb as a “working-class Latino crossed with left-wing radical crossed with crazy artist,” Spain Rodriguez was part of anti-war and civil rights protests in New York in the 1960s and made decidedly non-P.C. art that would almost certainly be judged as sexist, homophobic, and possibly racist by today’s standards. In her documentary about her late husband, Susan Stern makes the case that Rodriguez’s underground comics helped push the medium in exciting new directions, allowing it to evolve beyond a childish corporate medium into an art form in its own right.

Saturday, November 13, 7:25 p.m., Cinépolis Chelsea, 260 West 23rd Street, New York.
Monday, November 15, 5 p.m., Cinépolis Chelsea, 260 West 23rd Street, New York.
Streaming Sunday, November 14–Sunday, November 28, 2021.

Exposing Muybridge

Gary Oldman in Exposing Muybridge directed by Marc Shaffer.

Director Marc Shaffer spent nine years documenting the life of 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge, who famously used 24 cameras triggered by trip wires to capture multiple views a galloping horse in motion—including with all four legs off the ground at once. The film, which features Gary Oldman, who wrote and stars in the forthcoming Muybridge biopic Flying Horse, considers the question of whether there is truth in photography, and how Muybridge employed the fledgling medium in service of both fact and…