Obit.

The journalism in the New York Times is phenomenal, best in the United States, and tied with The Economist for best among English language news sources overall. And -- in my experience -- the further back you go into the New York Times, the better the journalism is.

Obit takes you way back, into the obituary pages of the New York Times. A front page obituary is rare, but in all cases there is a detailed process for selecting who will get an obituary, what will be said about them, and how it will be said. And there are valuable lessons to be learned in an obit. As one of the obit writers says, an obituary says very little about a person's death. It's mostly a celebration of their life.

There's also a lot to be learned about the care that Times reporters put into their work. The guy who runs the storage room full of old photographs and obit material casually told a lot of great stories about some of the old obits he's seen.

I'd happily watch a documentary about the Times business, sports, or entertainment sections. Or just about any section. But the obits seem like a great place to start.

"Maybe a sentence or two will be about the death." Obituarist

Dying is no fun, but the obit writers at the New York Times make the most of it. They treat the assignment as a celebration of life, a real life, a history of people who made differences in the lives of others. Additionally, more than the responsibility of finding out the facts of a life is getting the facts correct.

Obit is a surprisingly upbeat documentary about a decidedly downbeat subject. The reporters are animated about the celebration and the discoveries they uncover in their journalistic pursuit. Most of them were accomplished journalists who are chosen because that part of the paper has grown from a pasture for declining reporters to a field of artistic possibilities energized by the lives the reporters chronicle.

Much of the time they are going on gut feeling. When they reported on John Fairfax, the first to cross an ocean in a rowboat, they hit a goldmine because his life outside the rowboat was even more interesting.

In one of the most prominent obits, the somewhat discursive doc features the death of William Wilson, one of the first TV consultants, who advised JFK the night in 1960 when he defeated Richard Nixon by virtue of Kennedy's telegenic superiority, helped in no small part by Wilson's choice of such details as the makeup he hurried to buy at a pharmacy.

An interesting part of such obits as Wilson's is the choice for lead paragraph or the headline or where in the paper it should go--front page or obit section--and how long in words. These decisions are not fed into an algorithm but rather are the province of writers and editors who know history and culture well enough to make the decision.

The NYT is my favorite newspaper, so good that I read the obits along with the editorials. Such a gift to me ensures that my own obit will exude the joie de vivre we both share.

Another excellent addition to the absolutely fascinating niche world documentaries list.

I totally want to be an Obituarist now! If only it were that easy to become one, but I imagine there would be so many dues to be paid.

That closing (reverse) montage, totalling less than a minute, is possibly the best I have ever seen that simultaneously evokes strong emotions, triggers questions is life's meaning, purpose, and mortality, and is a powerful walk down memory lane.

"Life is not a simple arc. Life is ups and downs and bumps and changes; scrapes and reversals and tangents. You are lucky if your life has a consistent theme, because most of it is buffeted."

OBIT. (2016)

I found this documentary about the obit writers at the New York Times fascinating, uplifting, full of life, and beautifully shot down to subtle details such as the fact that Margalit Fox's georgeous tapestry scarf matches the aqua blue of the antiquish tyewriter in the left rear of her shots. The chaotic disarray of the news clip room, the morgue, managed by curator, Jeff Roth, (in cuffed short shirtsleeves and narrow tie), who has worked there since 1993, sings with bulging, sliding files of yellowed history. As a professional organizer, my instincts might otherwise have been to "have a go" at bringing array to this laudable photo and article repository, (which seems by all tokens to be long past any point of return), yet I was captivated by the messy poetry in this story, very well told by Vanessa Gould.

"It's the job nobody thinks they want, a kind of Siberia," obit writer Margalit Fox says, "but it's the best beat in journalism because you're paid to tell peoples' stories. Obituaries have next to nothing to do with death, and absolutely everything to do with life."

The unique tasks of an obit writer, as well as the delight in encapsulating and honoring someone's life, are well presented in this film. Writer William Grimes explains, "A fortunate death for me is one that occurs and you hear about it at 9:00 a.m. and you have all day to put something together. The unfortunate death for me is the one that occurs and you hear about it when you're getting ready to leave... You walk out the door, and an editor comes over to you and says, 'Not so fast.'"

Among many riveting through-lines in the film was Bruce Weber's coverage of the death of William P. Wilson, the man who insisted on a single pole podium and applied Kennedy's light makeup before the Nixon Kennedy debate. Just days after the election, Kennedy himself acknowledged, "It was the TV more than anything else that turned the tide." The film offers up minute aspects of how Weber wrote this story, while also weaving in historic information of many other notable lives in order to illustrate how this obit team works to do justice to them at their time of death.

The obit mistake and the pre-written obits are discussed with flourish and wit, but retain humanity and reverence to life. Even the cubicles in each interview served, to me, (someone who has never worked in such a workspace), as a character in the film as the lilting music by composer Joel Goodman punctuated each Annie Hall-esque narrative observation. The NYT's obit crew are wry, grounded, quick-on-the uptake, talented journalists, the perfect team, compelling and compelled, to get this job done. Director of photography, Ben Wolf, did a spectacular job including a dazzling array of newsreels and vintage photo clips.

This film is unsentimental, yet moving; weighty, but inspiriting. I give it ten stars and highly recommend this movie. If you hate it, don't kill me.

It's an intriguing subject for a documentary and shows something of the cultural relevance of writing obituaries. A also appreciate the approach which shows the work in progress but also something of its pitfalls. What I don't like is the nearly permanent, unnecessary underscoring: in fact, the strongest parts are without music or - like the typewriter sequence - with a visual choreography to the music.