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Steve James picks five favorite documentaries

A scene from “Le Joli Mai,” by Chris Marker.Harvard Fine Art Library

Many were disappointed when “Life Itself,” Steve James’s eloquent documentary about the life and death of Roger Ebert, didn’t get a best documentary Oscar nomination this month. His lauded “Hoop Dreams” (1994) met the same fate. Academy vagaries aside, he remains one of America’s most important documentarians.

Here are five films that are among those that, as he writes, “have profoundly influenced the way I looked at both my own work and the art of documentary.” Their common elements? “Uncompromising honesty and complexity.”

Le Joli Mai (1963)

A protean, iconoclastic documentarian, Chris Marker made this film in Paris as the Algerian war came to an end. “I first saw this over 30 years ago and it liberated me from the constraints of what a documentary should be,” writes James. “It is an essay, a visual poem, a serendipitous exploration of the city and a series of poignant interviews combined. Marker seeks the soul of a city, and closes with the words, ‘As long as poverty exists, you’re not rich. As long as despair exists, you’re not happy. As long as prisons exist, you’re not free.’ ”

Tongues Untied (1989)

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This Marlon Riggs documentary was one of the first to show what it means to be black and gay in America. “When it first aired on public television, conservatives wanted it banned,” writes James. “Now it’s hard to imagine a film so honest and candid ever being broadcast. And it remains just as relevant 26 years later. While gay rights in the West have made strides, it is still very much an issue in many places. More performance than documentary, it creates a mosaic of unimpeachable truth. Which is what the best documentaries do.”

Fallen Champ: The Untold Story of Mike Tyson (1993)

This less-known work by Barbara Kopple, Oscar winner for “Harlan County, U.S.A.” (1976), taught James a lot. “I first saw it while finishing ‘Hoop Dreams,’ ” he recalls. “It turns the ‘sports biopic’ into something far more layered, all without interviewing Tyson himself because he demanded editorial control.”

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American Movie (1999)

“The funniest documentary I’ve ever seen,” James writes about Chris Smith’s film about aspiring auteur Mark Borchardt. “Yet so much more. Smith has made a comedy that deepens into tragedy, while never giving up on Mark and his American Dream.”

The Staircase (2004)

Jean-Xavier de Lestrade’s TV documentary miniseries about a notorious murder impressed James for its extraordinary access to its subject. “It is ostensibly a ‘trial documentary’ like his Academy Award-winning ‘Murder on a Sunday Morning’ (2001),” James explains. “But this sprawling novel of a documentary takes us deeper inside a murder trial than any film, fiction or nonfiction. All other legal dramas seem false in comparison.”

PETER KEOUGH