In the centre of Harlem, if you walk along Malcolm X Boulevard, you will find – between Muhammad’s Mosque No 7 on West 127th Street and the Haitian Evangelical Missionary Church on West 128th Street – a small, rickety building. It contains some ragged seats, a dusty floor and a screen. I first entered the Maysles Cinema in the autumn of 2011, when I found myself living in New York and emerging from something of a cultural torpor. For a few years, I’d been lost in the mania of social media. When you are constantly tweeting, opining and facebooking, your capacity to absorb culture – and, I suspect, to think deeply – shrivels. Trying to read a novel or watch an intelligent film after two hours on Twitter is like trying to listen to a Billie Holiday song on your way out of a Slipknot concert.
That autumn, I had sworn off social media. In the Maysles Cinema and at the IFC Centre in the West Village, I started to slow down – enough to witness what seemed to me like a Vesuvius-scale eruption of an art form: the sudden moment at which it explodes in a hundred different directions and starts to burn through the culture. Everyone was talking about the “golden age of television” but another golden age had begun – that of non-fiction film-making. In a short space of time, I saw at least a dozen documentaries that were among the most exciting works of culture I had seen anywhere; and, unlike TV drama, or the novel, or theatre, it was an art form in the process of discovering new ways of showing the world, instead of (beautifully) improving on old ones.
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