Documentaries on the Arts: 5 Must-Watch Films

The screen is dark at first. Then grain, color, a slow dissolve. A painter leans closer to a canvas, the sound of a brush dragging through thick oil. Or a stage manager whispers “Places” into a headset, the red cue light glows, and a world that did not exist five minutes ago starts to breathe.

Art documentaries, when they are done with care, feel like sitting in the wings of someone else’s mind.

The short answer: if you care about set design, immersive theater, and the long, messy story of how artists build worlds, you should watch “F for Fake,” “Rivers and Tides,” “The Great Beauty,” “The Act of Killing,” and “Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present.” They are not all “about” stagecraft, but they all understand something crucial: art is not a product, it is a constructed experience in time and space. These films show that construction with unusual honesty and visual force, and they will make you look at your own work differently.

What makes a great art documentary for designers and theater-makers?

For anyone who spends their days shaping spaces, light, and narrative, most art documentaries fall flat. Too much talking. Too many experts explaining why something matters, while the camera politely hovers at a distance.

You do not need more commentary. You need to feel the process.

The five films in this article share a few traits that matter for set designers and immersive makers:

• They pay attention to how space is built and framed, not just what an artist “means”.
• They admit that illusion, manipulation, and performance are part of any artwork, including the film itself.
• They give you time: long shots, silence, and room for your own thinking, instead of endless exposition.

If you work with space, light, or narrative, your real medium is experience. These films are masterclasses in shaping experience, not just documenting it.

Each title below includes what it is, why it matters for people in set design and immersive theater, and what you can steal from it, shamelessly, for your own practice.

For clarity:

1. “F for Fake”: When the frame becomes the trick

Orson Welles starts with his own hands. Close to the camera, doing a magic trick. He smiles, half conspiratorial, half mocking. The whole film is like that: a stage magician revealing his secrets while performing more elaborate ones right in front of you.

“F for Fake” calls itself “a film about trickery and fraud.” That is accurate on the surface. It follows art forger Elmyr de Hory, writer Clifford Irving, and Welles himself as they circle questions of authorship, ownership, and authenticity.

Underneath, it is something else: an essay about how images create belief.

For a designer, this film is blunt: your work is a beautiful lie, and that is not a problem, unless you refuse to admit it.

Why it matters for set design and immersive theater

Welles edits like a stage magician cutting between viewpoints. A gesture begins in one shot and finishes in another; a story starts as truth and slides into invention without warning. The structure is itself a set: walls that move, doors that were painted on.

“F for Fake” treats editing as set design in time. It builds and rebuilds the room of the viewer’s trust.

In immersive theater you ask the audience to walk through something that looks solid but is not. A corridor that leads nowhere. A window that is not real glass. A character who knows your name because they read it off a prop.

Welles is doing this with narrative: he sets up a “true story” and then pulls the floor out from under it. The key lesson is not cynicism; it is craft. How much information do you give? When do you reveal the trick? How do you control the rhythm of suspicion and belief?

You can trace several concrete parallels:

– The use of unreliable guides. De Hory and Irving are charming, theatrical, and plainly unreliable. Welles lets them talk, then cuts in archival footage or alternate accounts that contradict them. In immersive theater, a similar tactic can turn a friendly character into a shifting mirror; what they show you is never quite the whole picture.

– The blending of documentary footage with staged material. Some scenes in “F for Fake” are obviously staged, others are ambiguous. The audience is left to decide. In an installation, mixing “real” objects (historic documents, authentic furniture) with invented material has the same effect: people begin to question where the line is.

– The self-insertion of the maker. Welles walks through his own film as a character, not a neutral observer. If you have ever stepped in front of the audience during a show, or written your own anxiety into a character, you will recognize the move.

When the maker steps into the work, the fiction does not collapse. It becomes more honest about its own artifice.

For set designers, this film also presents a quiet warning: surface style is easy. Welles has extraordinary style. The later sections of the film only land because he is willing to cut through his own flair and ask whether any of it matters, or if it is all just glitter.

If your immersive piece leans on “cool” lighting and detailed props but has no real question at its center, you are doing what Welles mocks here: you are forging.

What you can steal

Borrow the structure, not just the topic. Design a piece that openly rearranges its own narrative. A corridor where scenes repeat with small changes. A projection that begins as documentary and slowly reveals that it is staged. Let “F for Fake” give you permission to show the seams of your illusion, instead of hiding them.

2. “Rivers and Tides”: The slow architecture of disappearance

A strand of wool in the wind, wrapped around branches, stretching off into fog. Stones piled into a fragile arch, one more pebble away from collapse. A tide that comes in and calmly erases hours of labor.

“Rivers and Tides” follows sculptor Andy Goldsworthy as he makes ephemeral works from leaves, ice, stone, water. The film itself is quiet. Long, patient shots. Ambient sound. The kind of pacing that allows your breathing to slow.

If “F for Fake” is about illusion, “Rivers and Tides” is about fragility.

Why it matters for set designers and immersive artists

You probably work in an art form that disappears the moment the budget runs out or the run ends. A set is struck. A warehouse experience closes. There is a strange sadness in that, and also a strange freedom.

Goldsworthy faces that reality head-on. He builds within natural cycles. The river will rise. The sun will melt the ice. The wind will tear the leaves.

“Rivers and Tides” shows process as the real artwork. The finished thing is just a brief pause in the flow.

For anyone who builds environments, this film is a study in:

– Material honesty. Goldsworthy lets materials behave as they wish. Ice cracks. Twigs bend. Colored leaves stain water. Set designers sometimes fight materials: forcing wood to mimic metal, plastic to mimic stone. This film nudges you in the opposite direction: play to the grain of what you have.

– Context as collaborator. He does not plop sculptures into neutral spaces. A red leaf circle becomes intense because the river behind it is gray. A stone arch feels precarious because the tide is crawling closer. Think of your set not as an object but as a precise relationship with its room, its smell, its sound.

– Time as a fourth wall. The works change in front of you. The film watches pieces collapse and be remade, not as failure but as part of the structure. In immersive work, you can treat time in a similar way: objects that age over the course of a night, lighting states that slowly tilt the mood, scents that shift.

A set that admits it will decay has a different emotional weight than a set that pretends it is permanent.

The film also confronts the artist’s ego in a subtle way. Goldsworthy occasionally looks frustrated, childish, when a piece collapses. The camera does not flinch. It is a useful mirror: our obsession with “getting it right” sometimes crowds out the simple act of paying attention to the world we are working in.

What you can steal

Look at your next project and ask: can some part of this be designed to fail? A wall that crumbles gently over a performance. A ceiling installation that sags. A sand floor that records footprints. Embrace grammars of erosion.

Also, pay attention to how “Rivers and Tides” uses silence. The lack of constant commentary gives space for reflection. Your venues and installations can do the same: reduce sound where you can, allow stillness to exist without fear that the audience will “get bored.”

3. “The Great Beauty”: A city as a theatrical machine

Rome at night: washed in sodium orange. A rooftop party. Moving bodies. A track of lights and glitter. Somewhere, a giraffe in a plaza. A nun. A cardinal discussing food with monastic seriousness. The film “The Great Beauty” is technically a narrative feature. It is not a documentary in the strict sense, but for anyone working in set design or immersive experiences, it functions like one: a documentary of excess, of curated decadence, of urban space used as moving stage.

The protagonist, Jep Gambardella, is a writer who spends his nights drifting through parties, performances, and quiet corners of the city. The camera does the same. Each location feels like an installation with its own logic: minimal, grotesque, sacred, vulgar.

Why it matters for spatial storytellers

Many art documentaries focus tightly on an artist’s studio. “The Great Beauty” turns an entire city into a gallery of experiences and asks a hard question: when everything is styled, when every room is photogenic, does anything actually mean something?

That question should sting a bit if you are in immersive work. It is very easy to build pretty rooms that say nothing.

“The Great Beauty” is a study of how spectacle can both enchant and numb. It shows what happens when design loses contact with any real need.

Look at:

– The choreography of parties. People move in loops. Background performers, often barely noticed by the characters, shape the mood. Many sequences could be lifted directly into immersive theater. Notice how music, costume, and architecture lock together.

– The contrast between noise and quiet. After a dense, loud event, the film cuts to an empty street, a silent cloister, a balcony at dawn. That shift in tempo is not decorative; it is the only reason the loud parts have any effect. Too many experiences forget this and push constant high intensity.

– The layering of sacred and profane imagery. Relics in glass cases. Botox in white clinics. Religious processions and performance art pieces bleeding into each other. This layering is useful when you are designing for audiences who are jaded; you will not “shock” them with gore or nudity, but you might disturb them with a collision of styles they cannot neatly categorize.

The film also gives a sharp portrayal of art-world performance: people who talk about art all night yet rarely allow it to touch them. That is relevant because immersive theater risks becoming elite entertainment instead of an encounter. Sorrentino quietly criticizes spaces that become Instagram backdrops, detached from any deep intention.

If the audience’s first impulse is to photograph your set rather than inhabit it, ask whether you are making an image or making a world.

What you can steal

Study the architecture of the parties and salons. How are they framed? What sightlines are offered? How do entrances and exits work? Many scenes use archways and staircases to create natural prosceniums inside a 360-degree space.

Then, look at how one room transitions into another. The passage from chaos to stillness is where the film breathes. In your own projects, design the corridors as carefully as the main rooms. The audience’s emotional state is shaped there, in the in-between.

4. “The Act of Killing”: Reenactment as nightmare set design

A man sits on a rooftop in a bright satin shirt, explaining how he killed people decades ago. Then he acts it out. There are props, costumes, elaborate sets. He is smiling, then not. The film “The Act of Killing” is one of the most disturbing uses of performance you are likely to see.

It documents former death squad leaders in Indonesia as they reenact their crimes in the style of their favorite movies: gangster films, musicals, historical epics. The director lets them stage their fantasies, going so far that they begin to confront, in fragments, what they did.

This is not an easy film. It should be watched with care. For artists who manipulate space and performance, it is also essential, because it forces a confrontation with the ethics of what we do.

Why it matters for immersive makers and set designers

At its core, “The Act of Killing” asks: what happens when you build a set for someone else’s delusion?

The film turns set design into a moral field: every curtain, every prop, every lighting cue becomes entangled with real violence.

From a purely craft angle, the reenactments are extraordinary. Surreal sets with giant fish. Rivers dyed red. Elaborate sound stages that mix village architecture with studio lighting. These are visions of how perpetrators imagined themselves: grand, heroic, cinematic.

The discomfort comes from recognizing tools we use all the time:

– Costumes that let people step into another identity.
– Sets that exaggerate reality to heighten emotion.
– Staged rituals of confession and absolution.

The film shows how easily these tools can be co-opted by power. The men at the center are proud; they believe they are heroes. The cameras and sets initially feed that belief. Only slowly, as the reenactments become more raw, does a fracture appear.

For immersive creators, this should raise questions:

– Who are you centering? Whose fantasy or trauma is the environment serving?
– Are you reinforcing a harmful myth by staging it, even if your intention is critical?
– Where is the line between catharsis and voyeurism for the audience?

When you invite the audience to “participate,” you are not only giving them agency; you are also asking them to carry some of the ethical weight of the story.

“The Act of Killing” is rigorous in how it shows process. We see the planning meetings, the costume fittings, the awkward pauses when someone realizes that playing a victim is not fun. Those cracks are where the film’s power lies.

In your own work, showing process can be equally powerful. Instead of hiding the mechanics, you might let the audience see a wig fitting, a prop breakdown, a scene reset. That exposure can prevent your piece from becoming a sealed fantasy that excuses itself from reality.

What you can steal

From a design standpoint, study how the film uses clashing visual languages. A grotesque, brightly lit musical set is placed next to a bleak, real riverside location. The contrast jolts the viewer awake. In an installation, such jarring transitions can stop the audience from sinking into comfortable passivity.

Ethically, take it as a provocation. If your work touches historical violence, social injustice, or collective trauma, ask whether your design choices aestheticize pain in a way that lets the audience feel “moved” without any real engagement. This film suggests that such comfort is dangerous.

5. “Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present”: The set as a vessel for presence

A square of white light inside the main atrium at MoMA. Two chairs facing each other. A table that is later removed. A woman in a long dress, sitting still for hours, day after day. Around her, absolute quiet, ringed by crowds.

“Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present” documents the retrospective of Abramovic’s performance work and, in particular, the central piece where she sat, silently, across from strangers for more than 700 hours.

The documentary is often remembered for the tears: visitor after visitor sits down, meets her gaze, and starts to cry. That is not the only thing that matters. For anyone in immersive theater, the subtlety of the staging is the real lesson.

Why it matters for experiential designers

On paper, the setup is obvious: two chairs, facing. Yet every choice around that arrangement is careful.

The lighting. Flat, but clean. No heavy theatrical contrast. The location. Dead center of the museum, visible from multiple floors. The flow. People queue in a long snaking line, watching as they wait, building anticipation.

The “set” of “The Artist Is Present” is minimal, but it carries an enormous charge because it frames a simple, high-stakes encounter between two humans.

The film walks you through the logistics in detail. Assistants, curators, guards, all orbit this calm center. There is costume design, too: Abramovic’s dresses function like moving sculptures, their colors marking different phases of the run.

What matters here for immersive makers:

– The power of clear rules. One person at a time. No talking. No touching. Those boundaries are what allow people to feel safe enough to be vulnerable. In many immersive shows, rules are fuzzy; that can be playful, but it can also create anxiety. Sometimes precision is more liberating than open-endedness.

– The role of durational commitment. Abramovic’s physical strain is not a side note; it is baked into the work. The audience senses that, even if they do not know the exact number of hours. In your own work, long-running elements (a performer who never speaks, a lamp that never turns off, a live feed that never cuts) tell the audience that something is at stake.

– The museum as a stage. The film shows how a “neutral” white cube is guided, gently, into becoming a temple of attention. You can see crowd control as scenic design; queues as a dramaturgical tool; benches and sightlines as part of the script.

Attention is your rarest resource. Design is the art of protecting it.

The documentary also reveals the gap between intention and reception. Critics argue. Visitors project their own stories onto Abramovic’s stillness. Former collaborators question her motives. In other words: no matter how carefully you design a space or performance, you do not control what people will do with it.

That fact should not paralyze you. It should make you sharper. What can you control? The clarity of invitation. The physical safety of the environment. The integrity of your own purpose.

What you can steal

Strip one of your concepts down until you reach its minimum viable staging. Then ask: can I remove more? A single table. A single sound. A single performer. Watch how the focus intensifies.

Also, consider how your projects manage time. Abramovic’s piece is not “bingeable”; it asks for commitment. In our culture of rapid consumption, any experience that calmly refuses haste carries a quiet power.

Watching these films as an artist, not just a fan

These five films will not give you neat formulas. They barely give you comfort. That is why they are worth your time.

“F for Fake” will poke at your pride in your own cleverness.
“Rivers and Tides” will remind you that your work will vanish, and that this is not tragedy but truth.
“The Great Beauty” will force you to ask whether visual splendor can become a kind of anesthesia.
“The Act of Killing” will drag the ethics of representation into the harshest possible light.
“Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present” will show how almost nothing, framed with care, can be overwhelming.

Treat these documentaries not as entertainment about art, but as living studios. They are rooms you can walk through more than once, noticing different tools on each visit.

If you watch with a designer’s eye, you will start to see shared patterns:

– Framing is everything. Where the camera stands is as decisive as where you put the audience.
– Time is not neutral. Long shots, repetition, duration reshape perception as surely as any set piece.
– Ethics and aesthetics are not separate. How something looks, how it is framed, who is centered, and who is erased are all moral choices.

Use that awareness the next time you sketch a floor plan, draft a light plot, or choose the material for a wall that the audience will touch.

Not every art documentary deserves a place in your creative diet. Many flatten art into trivia and artist biographies into myth. These five resist that flattening. They respect the intelligence of the viewer, and they respect the complexity of making.

Watch them with your notebook open. Pause often. Argue with them. Steal from them. Then go back to your own spaces and ask, with a little more rigor: what experience am I really building here, and for whom?