Free Documentaries — Watch Public-Domain Nonfiction Films

Documentary film spent its first decades as a genuinely experimental form, and two of its founding landmarks are free to watch here. Robert Flaherty's "Nanook of the North" (1922) — a year with an Inuit hunter and his family on the shore of Hudson Bay, building an igloo, spearing seal through the ice, waiting out a blizzard — is usually cited as the first feature-length documentary, though Flaherty staged and re-shot much of it, and the film has been argued over on exactly those grounds ever since. Dziga Vertov's "Man with a Movie Camera" (1929) went the opposite direction entirely: no actors, no titles, no story, just one day in a Soviet city captured by a cameraman who runs, climbs and lies under trams to get the shot, then reassembled through split screens, freeze frames, stop motion and dizzying cutting into a manifesto for what a camera could see that an eye could not. Both films entered the public domain the way most of this catalogue did — copyrights that lapsed rather than any deliberate release — and both are still taught as the two poles documentary filmmaking has argued between ever since: Flaherty's staged intimacy against Vertov's unstaged spectacle. Watch them back to back for the argument, not just the history.