In producing a genuine contender for the best documentary of 2017, Raoul Peck provides an inspired insight into the mind of writer and activist James Baldwin in I Am Not Your Negro. Born in Haiti, Peck started making shorts in 1982 and first came to attention when his debut feature, The Man By the Shore (1993), screened at Cannes. Until now, he has been best known for Lumumba (2000), which chronicled the power grab that followed the Congo securing independence from Belgium in 1960, and Sometimes in April (2005), which centred on the Rwandan Genocide. But, having reflected on the aftermath of the 2010 Haitian earthquake in Fatal Assistance (2013) and Murder in Pacot (2014), Peck turns his attention to the ongoing struggle for racial equality in the United States in this Oscar-nominated meld of interview, archive footage and film clips that is linked by extracts read by Samuel L. Jackson from the unfinished manuscript for Remember This House, which reflects upon the sacrifices made by Baldwin's murdered Civil Rights friends, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.

This remarkable documentary opens with a startling clip from The Dick Cavett Show in 1968, in which the genial, liberal-leaning host asks James Baldwin if he had become more hopeful about the status of `the Negro' in American society since the passing of the Civil Rights Act four years earlier. Allowing himself a wry smile, Baldwin laments the use of such pejorative language before averring that the situation for black people is pretty dire across the entire planet. A blast of Buddy Guy's furious protest song, `Damn Right, I've Got the Blues', over a montage of still images depicting black protesters being brutalised by the police suggests that things have scarcely improved five decades on.

In a letter to agent Jay Acton proposing Remember This House in 1979, Baldwin states that he wishes to celebrate the achievements of his friends, Medger, Malcolm and Martin, while also castigating those who betrayed their ideals and the martyrdom. Clips follow of the 26 year-old King backing the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott and Leander Perez of the White Citizens Council denouncing the enrolment of nine black students at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957. As troops are called in to keep order, Baldwin recalls seeing newspaper pictures of 15 year-old Dorothy Counts being spat on as she walked to school in Charlotte, North Carolina and realising that he could no longer fight the cause from Paris.

Caricatured images from contemporary advertisements and illustrations show over Big Bill Broonzy's `Black, Brown and White', as Baldwin admits to missing little about America during his exile. But he felt he needed to reconnect with his family and the folks from the Harlem neighbourhood of his youth. He eulogises about the way black faces light up when they smile and the unique sense of style that he first became aware of when he was about seven and he saw a black woman in a store who seemed as beautiful to him as Joan Crawford had been in Harry Beaumont's Dance, Fools, Dance (1931). White teacher Orilla `Bill' Miller had an even greater impact, as she encouraged the 10 year-old Baldwin to read and express himself. She also took him to plays and films like Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack's King Kong (1933), which made him wonder why white people detested blacks and why he couldn't bring himself to hate whites (even though they made no secret of their loathing of his beloved teacher).

Baldwin resented the fact that the only people who looked like him in movies were loathed stereotypes like Willie `Sleep`n'Eat' Best in Frank R. Strayer's The Monster Walks (1932) and Stepin Fetchit in W. Forest Crunch's Richard's Answer (1945). He also refused to see the title character in Harry A. Pollard's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1927) as a hero because he opted not to take vengeance in his own hands, unlike John Wayne in John Ford's Stagecoach (1939). But Baldwin couldn't identify with white men whose sense of entitlement to claim the land as their own made them his enemy. No wonder he recalled with such dread seeing black janitor Clinton Rosemond (who resembled his father) being intimidated by the police in Mervyn LeRoy's They Won't Forget (1937), as he knew that films were a reflection of the country in which he lived. Speaking to the Cambridge Union in 1965, he recalls the shock he felt when, around the age of seven, he saw himself in the Indians being killed by Gary Cooper. To Baldwin's mind, therefore, Hollywood was part of a conspiracy to ensure a legend was made out of a massacre in depicting the expansion of the frontier as an epic adventure rather than a crime.

Being a witness to such felonies as the murder of Medger, Malcolm and Martin proved tougher than Baldwin had anticipated, however, and he confides in a letter to Acton that he was not looking forward to interviewing their widows and children. He recalls his first encounter with Malcolm, when he unnerved Baldwin by staring at him from the front row during a lecture, and curses the white misconceptions of this noble man that resulted in his assassination. By contrast, he first met Medger when he asked him to participate in the investigation into the murder of a young black man.

Baldwin was not a Muslim or a Christian and steered clear of both the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (as he felt it imposed class distinctions) and the Black Panthers, as he didn't want African-American kids to believe that all white men were devils. He didn't play an active role in confronting bigotry on the streets or in organising marches. Instead, he remained at large in order to write articles like `Letter From a Region in My Mind', which conveyed his impressions of the struggle as a witness with a duty to ensure the truth was widely disseminated. As a consequence, he came on to the radar of FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, who used a 1966 memorandum to deputy Alan Rosen to highlight the fact that he was `an homosexual' who was capable of committing acts that could undermine the security of the state.

Three years earlier, the police under Eugene `Bull' O'Connor had used force to control a non-violent protest in Birmingham, Alabama and Baldwin had been a guest of Dr Kenneth Clark on a TV programme entitled The Negro and the American Promise, in which Malcolm had accused Martin of being a latterday Uncle Tom for not fighting back. Yet, Baldwin believes that his friends had ceased to be poles apart and had come to share a common vision by the time Malcolm was shot. He mourns the fact that they died before change came (all under the age of 40), although footage of the riots Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014 questions the extent to which things had become any different for black people in the intervening half century.

During his segment on the show, Baldwin had grieved for `the death of the heart' and branded the cruel white majority `moral monsters' for their inability to understand the pain caused by slavery, segregation and racial supremacy and their refusal to accept him as a human being. On the Florida Forum programme in 1963, he damned John and Robert Kennedy for being as apathetic and ignorant about the realities of the black experience as any other whites, as they made no effort to explore the other side of the segregated divide. Yet Baldwin felt uncomfortable during this period with being `the Great Black Hope of the Great White Father' and a non-racist in comparison to the supposedly bigoted Malcolm.

Another potent spokesperson of the day was playwright Lorraine Hansberry, whose hit play A Raisin in the Sun, was brought to the screen in 1961 by white director Daniel Petrie and black actor Sidney Poitier. Baldwin cursed her dying of cancer at the age of 34, recalls with pride their meeting with Attorney General Bobby Kennedy and how she had shamed him for dismissing the suggestion that America could be transformed if his brother escorted a black child to an integrated school. She also hoped that the photograph of policemen standing on the neck of a Birmingham woman was not a true reflection of the civilisation they were shaping.

His admiration for her was matched by his esteem for Medger and he remembers their last meeting before he flew to Puerto Rico to work on a play. He heard he had been gunned down in his car port in front of his wife and children on the car radio on a beautiful day. Bob Dylan sang a tribute in `Only a Pawn in Their Game' in DA Pennebaker's Don't Look Back (1967), but Baldwin lost a friend who had sustained him in a battle he found exhausting, if only because he was so often dismissed as an eccentric, while white patriots like John Wayne were dubbed heroes for spouting wild theories no one dared to challenge.

According to Baldwin, white America had no idea what to do with its black population and suspects many wished they could implement their own Final Solution. The problem was that blacks were nowhere near as docile as the whites supposed and Baldwin reveals that growing up on the streets of New York taught him a toughness that was replicated in very different environments across the country. Over photos of Tamir Rice, Darius Simmons, Trayvon Martin, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Christopher McCray, Cameron Tillman and Amir Brooks (who all died young in the early 21st century), Baldwin remembers the bodies of kids of his own generation piling up because they dared to assert their right to exist and challenge the basis tenets of the white world's power structure. But the problem is not just one of race, as people of the same blood are unwilling to stand beside each other for fear of reprisal.

Echoing this contention, a clip from John M. Stahl's Imitation of Life (1934) shows light-skinned Fredi Washington hiding behind her book because she fears mother Louise Beavers will betray her racial origins to her classmates. Indeed, Baldwin claims (over old photos of black and white slaves in New Orleans) that few of the ancestors of America's assimilated populations came to the New World willingly. But the whites have remained terrified of their private selves and have invented `the Negro problem' to `safeguard their purity' and, as a consequence, they have become `criminals and monsters'. Scenes with Sidney Poitier and Richard Widmark from Joseph L. Mankiewicz's No Way Out (1950) and with Tony Curtis in Stanley Kramer's The Defiant Ones (1958) strengthen Baldwin's argument that America suffers from a bottomless emotional poverty and a terror of human interaction that generates a paralysis that prevents any departure from a hideous status quo.

As Curtis and Poitier fight while chained at the wrist, Baldwin derides the premise of the screenplay, as it misunderstands the basic nature of their antipathy. because the black man's hatred is rooted in rage and the white man's in fear. He also points out that black audiences yelled at Poitier in disbelief for leaping off the train when Curtis fails to clamber aboard, as they wanted him to free himself and not reassure the white boy that he had no reason to feel loathed and afraid. Over a commercial in which a black man sings inside a banana skin, Baldwin notes that Hollywood is scared of the fact that Poitier and Harry Belafonte are sex symbols and goes out of its way to neutralise their appeal in pictures like Kramer's Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), although he suspects that this is the last time the studios can get away with an interracial romance without letting the lovers kiss.

Poitier did more than merely reassure in Norman Jewison's In the Heat of the Night (1967), however, as he actively confronts Rod Steiger's bigoted sheriff. Yet, during their climactic train scene, the smiles exchanged were the closest cinema could come at the time to a fadeout kiss between two men - although this was more a reflection of reconciliation than sexual attraction. But heterosexual relationships between blacks and whites were equally frowned upon and, over a dance clip from Horace Ové's Pressure (1976), Baldwin recalls having to keep his distance from a white female friend whenever they went out together.

According to Baldwin, people can't stand too much reality and many whites would have been deeply disturbed by The Secrets of Selling the Negro Market (1954), a short that was sponsored by the publishers of Ebony magazine to encourage companies to advertise their wares in the African-American media. Yet, while Bobby Kennedy insisted that things were improving at such a pace that a time would soon come when a black man could become president of the United States, Baldwin told his 1965 Cambridge audience that his pronouncement was greeted with derision in Harlem, as blacks had been in the country for 400 years and were less than impressed with being told in a patronising manner that they might be allowed a crack at the top job if they behaved themselves. Nevertheless, Peck ends this segment with slow-motion footage of Barack and Michelle Obama waving to the crowds on his Inauguration Day with one black and one white bodyguard walking behind them and Bill Broonzy's `Just a Dream (On My Mind)' playing on the soundtrack.

Speaking in Cambridge, Baldwin states that the national economy has long relied on the exploitation of black labour. Yet this has convinced the whites that a ninth of the population is inferior to them. In his eyes, however, his ancestors had a crucial stake in the forging of the nation and that it should be entitled to an equal share in its prosperity. Peck cuts from the standing ovation Baldwin received from the students to a montage of stills of the famous faces that were present at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on 28 August 1963. That evening, Baldwin was joined on television by Marlon Brando, Joseph Mankiewicz, Charlton Heston, Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte, with the latter declaring that the success of the campaign depends on the whites who have tried to hide away from the issues facing up to the realities being perpertrated in their name and doing something about it. But Baldwin later wrote that what was needed was for white citizens to grow up and for pampered, priviliged individuals like John Wayne to wake up to the truth.

Baldwin was dining in London with his sister when the news came that Malcolm had been gunned down at a rally in February 1965. His death did much to bolster support for a more radical approach and, speaking in July 1967, Black Panther H. Rap Brown stated bluntly that violence was as American as cherry pie. Following riots in Oakland, California, Baldwin guested with Dick Cavett and avowed that Malcolm might still be alive if black people lobbying for freedom were treated in the same way as Irish, Poles or Jews making the same demand.

Such chillingly persuasive words contrast starkly with the message contained in the 1960 US Savings Bond short, The Land We Love, which celebrates the fun white folks can have beneath Liberty's torch. But Peck intercuts footage of the August 1965 riots in the Watts district of Los Angeles to show how hollow the commentary sounds. Baldwin complains, with complete justification, that democracy means nothing if its promises only apply to the priviliged few and not everyone. He opines that television perpetuates social myths and stereotypes and lulls people into accepting that they are sharing in the good life when the daily experience of the majority is brutal and ugly. Moreover, cornball quiz and talk shows reduce the ability to face reality and amend it.

Back on the Cavett Show, the host brings out Yale philosophy professor Paul Weiss to join Baldwin and singer Elly Stone. He disagrees with much of what Baldwin has said and asks why he always has to view matters in terms of colour when he has much more in common with white authors than black men who have no time for books. But Baldwin counters that he left the USA in 1948 because he feared for his life in everyday situations because cops and bosses didn't want him there. He could have gone to Hong Kong or Timbuktu, but he went to Paris and it gave him the chance to write without having to look over his shoulder. As the audience applauds, Peck shows images of black men being harassed by the police before Baldwin reveals that he believes the Christian church is as segregated as the rest of society. When Weiss tries to protest, Baldwin declares that the country's institutions are all set up to keep the black population in its place and allow the white to use whatever repressive force they deem necessary to protect their own interests.

Over another clip from Uncle Tom's Cabin, Baldwin accuses every Western nation of peddling a humanist lie that falsifies their history and deprives them of moral authority. As happy white folks frolic on a `Once a Year Day' in George Abbott and Stanley Donen's The Pajama Game (1957), Baldwin muses that they have become so used to enjoying the benefits of life that they no longer dare ask who has to suffer for their pleasure and, as a consequence, they have no idea how mutinous the underclass has become. As Peck shows recent footage of cops employing rough tactics, Baldwin suggests that a society that depends so heavily on coercion is close to collapsing and a clip from Robert Siodmak's Custer of the West (1967) and a photograph of the battlefield at Wounded Knee in 1890 illustrate the contention that force never works the way the ruling class thinks it does, as the amount of duress required betrays the strength of the adversary and the fear and panic of the oppressor.

While Baldwin was living in Palm Springs and working on a biopic of Malcolm X with Billy Dee Williams, he learned that Martin has been shot in the head. Other than weeping tears of helpless fury, he remembers little about the remainder of the day. At the funeral, however, he steeled himself because he suspected if he started to cry he would not be able to stop. Sammy Davis held his arm when he felt his emotions rising and he reminded himself that `the story of the Negro in America is the story of America'. Yet, while the American way of life has failed to make people happier or better, Baldwin remains optimistic that something can still be done to make a transition without bloodshed, even though too many people with the power to make the key decisions would rather protect their profits and bolster their security.

Over an extract of a teenage gunman going on the rampage in Gus Van Sant's Elephant (2003), Baldwin laments that America is not the land of the free and is only sporadically the home of the brave. He finds it astonishing that the black population has not succumbed to raging paranoia, although he is equally surprised when people accuse him of being bitter. As we see footage of Rodney King being beaten in March 1991, as Baldwin says that there are two levels of experience that can be summed up on one side by Ray Charles and on the other by Gary Cooper (seen in Billy Wilder's Love in the Afternoon, 1957) and Doris Day (David Butler's Lullaby of Broadway, 1951), whom Baldwin dubs `two of the most grotesque appeals to innocence the world has ever seen'. As Day ponders her new beau in Daniel Mann's Lover Come Back (1961), Peck match cuts to a female lynch victim dangling from a tree and Baldwin declares that it's impossible to keep black people in ghettos without the jailer becoming monstrous and the penned in gaining a superior knowledge of their opponent.

As Baldwin wisely states, not everything that has been faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it has been faced and this is his challenge for America. `History is not the past,' he continues, `it is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history. If we pretend otherwise we literally are criminals.' He dismisses the notion that the world has ever been white and brands `white' a metaphor for power and the Chase Manhattan Bank. In closing, he tells Cavett that he is an optimist and that the future of the country depends on the whites working out why they needed the blacks in the first place and why they chose to treat him so appallingly for four centuries. Once they have the correct answer, the United States can finally move on.

In some ways, this is a frustrating film, as it keeps throwing up topics that need exploring in greater detail. There's only patchy biographical detail on Baldwin and his achievements as a man of letters. We also learn little about Medger Evers and how his approach to the cause differed from those of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Indeed, Peck presumes a good deal of foreknowledge and, in the process, exposes the ignorance of many ashamed viewers. But, while images like the one of Malcolm laughing with Muhammad Ali makes one wish for more Baldwiniain insights into the Nation of Islam (and the Black Panthers), they also highlight the need for a major documentary series on the black experience in America that could combine the talents of Peck and such provocative US-based film-makers Eva DuVernay, Ezra Edelman, Spike Lee, Julie Dash, Cheryl Dunye and John Singleton.

Nevertheless, this is a magnificent documentary. At one point, Baldwin says, `to look around the United States today is enough to make prophets and angels weep'. An entire nation should hang its head in shame because not only does the same situation persist in 2017, but it's also likely to deteriorate in the foreseeable future. The real crime, however, is that the malaise dates back to before the Founding Fathers drew up the Constitution after wrenching independence from the British, as the very people responsible for instituting the heinous mistreatment of the black populace once fled Europe to escape their own forms of prejudice and persecution. Yet, instead of learning from their experience and enshrining tolerance at the heart of their system, they opted to lash out at the easiest target and ease their own pain by inflicting more on the subjugated slaves.

The fury of Kendrick Lamar's closing credit rap, `The Blacker the Berry', is entirely justifiable, therefore. But, while Baldwin could state, `my countrymen were my enemy', Peck is more interested in Baldwin's hope than his despair and, together with editor Alexandra Strauss, he has found archive material and movie clips that deftly complement the case made with such poetic passion in the expertly chosen and delivered texts. In short, this deserves to stand alongside its fellow Oscar nominees, Ava DuVernay's 13th and Ezra Edelman's O.J.: Made in America, as it's a work of life-changing political art and, frankly, it's a privilege to look, listen and learn.

The week's second documentary comes with more than a little local interest. Yet, while the title suggests its focus will fall primarily on the owner of the Formula One team based at Grove near Wantage, Morgan Matthews's Williams also offers shrewd insights into the contributions that Sir Frank Williams's late wife Virginia and fortysomething daughter Claire have made to both his career in motor sport and his recovery from the 1986 road accident that left him a quadriplegic in need of round-the-clock care.

Opening with a notification that certain scenes had been reconstructed to help tell the story, the documentary takes a time to settle into a narrative pattern. Amidst the din of a racing garage, we are introduced to Frank and Claire (who became deputy team principal in 2013) and learn that the Williams F1 team has not won the world championship since Jacques Villeneuve in 1997 and haven't topped the podium at a Grand Prix since Pastor Maldonado became the first Venezuelan to win at this level in Barcelona in 2012. What Matthews doesn't mention, however, is that Williams hadn't tasted victory for eight years and it's clear that without Sir Frank's passion for the sport, the team may well have folded.

Without Ginny, however, the end would have come much more quickly, as she nursed her husband through the six weeks that he clung on to life after his crash and continued to do so until she succumbed to cancer in 2013. Friend Pamela Cockerill shows Matthews the dictaphone tapes containing the conversations they had in 1989 when Ginny decided to write a book about her life. Claire admits that she thought her mother was having an affair, as she spent so much time being furtive and Matthews uses a soft-focus sitting-room scene to recreate the cosy tête-à-têtes that Ginny and Cockerill enjoyed during the writing of A Different Kind of Life.

Frank and Ginny met a few weeks before she was due to marry another man. He was into motor sport and introduced his 20 year-old fiancée to the aspiring driver who simply took her breath away. The feeling was entirely mutual, but she went ahead with the wedding and tried to make the best of her new life. But, as her brother Jamie Berry and Frank's best mate David Brodie recall, they were destined to be together, as she used to stalk him around the garage in Slough in the hope of bumping into him.

Raised by a single mother in Jarrow, Frank had endured a tough childhood and found in motor-racing a camaraderie he had not known as a boarder at St Joseph's College in Dumfries. Almost as soon as he left, he bought a racing A35 and moved into a flat in Harrow with a group of aristocratic petrolheads, including Piers Courage, Roger Bunting and Charles Lucas. Engineer Frank Dernie remembers them being good-time toffs, but Frank had to earn a living and Brodie reveals that he used to buy and sell parts and recondition cars for clients in Italy in order to keep the newly separated Ginny in the style to which she had become accustomed.

Despite having a reputation as a speed merchant on the saloon car circuit, Frank was also known for being reckless and he admits to having rolled a fair number of road and racing cars. So, when the chance came to build a Formula One car for Courage to drive in 1969, he took it with both hands and driver Howden Ganley and future Williams sponsorship manager Peter Windsor remember the dashing Courage and the dogged Frank being a formidable team. But, following a second spot at Monaco, Courage was killed at the Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort in June 1970 and Sir Jackie Stewart recalls the incident with a grimace of regret and kind word for his widow, Sally. Brodie also reflects on the toll the loss took on Frank, who blamed himself for the death of a friend in his car, as he would do again when Ayrton Senna was fatally injured in a Williams car at Imola in May 1994. Claire recalls being told by Ginny to control her emotions at the funeral, but Frank admits shedding tears for Courage and Senna.

Lifting the gloom, Matthews lurches forward to show Finn Valtteri Bottas getting third place in Mexico in 2015. Claire reveals that Williams runs on an annual budget of £110 million, but she refuses to see herself as an underdog and regrets that Ginny never got to see her running the team with her father. But she smiles at the memory of Frank leaving his pregnant bride and going back to work after their registry office wedding and refusing to go on family holidays, while Williams Engineering Director Patrick Head suggests that he was always a bit of an oddball, who used to run round each circuit to stay fit.

But he was also single-minded and this determination got Williams through a lean patch in the mid-1970s when they survived because Ginny sold her London flat (much to the dismay of her parents). However, while it seemed as thought the corner would be turned when oil magnate Walter Wolf bought out the debt in 1976, Frank found being a junior partner an uncomfortable experience and he fell into a depression after he was locked out of the factory and the renamed Wolf car won its first race in South American. Ginny and Brodie sustained his spirits and he landed the opportunity to re-enter the sport with driver Patrick Neve through a deal with the Belle Vue Belgian beer company that allowed him to open a factory in an abandoned carpet warehouse near Didcot.

This bouncebackability is clearly a Williams hallmark, but Claire feels only pain when Bottas and Felipe Massa miss the chance to triumph at Silverstone in 2015 and end up coming fourth and fifth. How the team could do with a Patrick Head, who had brought a new reliability to Williams cars from 1977. Indeed, Frank calls his appointment his best decision after marrying Ginny. Dernie and driver Alan Jones remember the impact that Head's pioneering use of `ground effect' had on the car. Yet because Jones broke down while well ahead at Silverstone in 1979, it was No.2 driver Clay Regazzoni who had the distinction of securing the first Williams Grand Prix win after a decade of trying. However, it was Jones who went on to become world champion and two more drivers' and constructors' crowns followed in the early 1980s.

With success came temptation, however, and Brodie and F1 hospitality maven Lynden Swainston hint at the odd indiscretion from the groupies known as `screwdrivers'. But Ginny took the infidelities in her stride, even though it annoyed her when Frank used to lie in the face of accusation. Claire admits she wouldn't put up with such treachery, as Matthews explores how much the sport has changed to enable her to rise to such a prominent position within Williams. But, as she reveals at a press conference, she didn't seek a job and her father had nothing to do with the appointment, which has clearly caused a degree of familial friction with her older brother, Jonathan, who runs the team's heritage department. No mention is made of their middle sibling, Jaime, as we see home movies and old photos, while Uncle James Berry suggests that Ginny could have sorted the feud. But it continues to fester and Claire puts it down to the fact that Jonathan resents being gazumped by a pushy girl.

Veering back to F1, Dernie remembers the problems the team had working with Nigel Mansell in the mid-80s and how many of the backroom crew preferred his new teammate, Nelson Piquet. But during pre-season testing in the South of France, Frank and Peter Windsor were involved in a crash because the former was speeding to get home to run in a half marathon. Piquet, Dernie and Mansell sped to the spot and the latter went in the ambulance to ensure Frank received the best care. Ginny and Head flew in the next day and Windsor remembers the French doctors being prepared to let Frank die. However, she arranged a flight to London and remained at his bedside, with Head claiming she resuscitated him on three occasions when he had clinically died. Even the medics at the Royal London Hospital sought permission to switch off the life-support machine, but Ginny kept the faith and Frank lived to fight another day, albeit in a wheelchair.

With Frank in intensive care, Head ran the team and Piquet won the Brazilian Grand Prix to kick-start the season. However, he and Mansell detested each other and the internecine bickering was used to motivate Frank to make a full enough recovery to come and referee the feuding superstars. To this day, Piquet remains convinced that British bias prevented him from winning a third world title, but Dernie insists that Mansell was so unpopular that nobody actively sough to tilt the balance in his favour. Archive footage shows Frank being helped out of a car and into his chair, as the narrator explains that he was paralysed from the neck down and carer Michael Waldher concurs that he somehow found the ability to propel the wheels with arms that had no feeling. But, while she highlights the pain he endures on a daily basis, Claire seems frustrated that Frank has never read Ginny's book, which she had written so that he could see what she had been through to keep him afloat (as emotion was never up for discussion in the Williams household). Cockerill, Swainston and James Berry also resent his refusal to acknowledge the depth of her sacrifice, but he clearly has no intention of reading his late wife's innermost thoughts on the events that transformed their relationship.

Back on the track, Frank attended the 1986 British Grand Prix at Brands Hatch. Mansell edged out Piquet in a thrilling race and Ginny was allowed on to the podium to collect the constructors' cup. Claire now gets to play a major part in the running of the team and she enjoys teasing Frank about his detachment from the real world because all he thinks about is F1. This evidently became the case after Ginny died and her brother (who comes across as a disapproving presence throughout) hopes that he came to realise how much he loved her. Dernie and Brodie suggest as much by revealing that Frank now sleeps in his flat at the factory because there was no one to go home to. Yet, when he pays a visit to Claire, she reads an extract from the book that reduces her to tears and Frank is clearly moved by Ginny's words about his condition and how much she misses the infuriating man she married.

Ending touchingly on a shot of Frank waking with a start to the roar of an engine after dozing off in the pits, this is very different to such other F1 actualities as Asif Kapadia's Senna (2010), Paul Crowder's 1 (2013), Hannes M.Schalle's Lauda: The Untold Story (2015) and Roger Donaldson's McLaren (2016). Sports fans might complain about the gaps that Matthews leaves in the Williams team story, particularly in connection to Damon Hill and Ayrton Senna. But, as a snapshot of a family negotiating an extraordinary series of problems, this works surprisingly well.

The armchair chat and the hospital recovery sequences are a miscalculation, although it could be argued that they are a necessary storytelling evil and that Matthews manages them sensitively enough. But the affectionate contributions of the talking heads and the unflinching honesty of Frank, Jonathan, Claire and the tape-recorded Ginny make this unexpectedly potent and compelling.

One suspects that Barnaby Clay is familiar with Bob Fosse's All That Jazz (1979), as the stylised heart surgery sequences in his documentary, SHOT! The Psycho-Spiritual Mantra of Rock, bear more than a passing resemblance to those in the Oscar-winning musical. Tracing the highs and lows of 69 year-old photographer Mick Rock's colourful career, this is a personal reflection rather than an analytical appreciation. There are no pally anecdotes from fellow survivors of the glam and punk eras, as Rock does most of the talking in reflecting on the friendships that he forged with some of the biggest names in the music business and the excesses that nearly cut his life drastically short.

Lying in a mocked-up operating theatre wearing sunglasses and an oxygen mask, Michael David Rock has a multi-coloured flashback of his time photographing icons like David Bowie, Queen and Debbie Harry. The echoey sound of Iggy Pop's `I Wanna Be Your Dog' accompanies emergency service radio chatter, as Rock stands aside from himself and relives the heart attack he suffered in New York in 1996. A taped conversation with Lou Reed joins the mix, as Rock (who considers himself to be an assassin seeking his subject's aura) declares that he is a man who always fulfils.

Returning to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, Rock wanders through the dining hall and punts along the Cam while recalling how his mother pushed him to rise above his humble London background and project himself. He cites the influence of the Romantic, Symbolist and Beat poets on his emerging sense of self, which was given a boost by the lycergic experiences that opened his third eye. Over stylised visuals suggesting the trip, Rock explains how the teachings of Yogi Bhajan could produce a similar feeling of release and the world looked a very different place when he combined the two.

While under the influence in 1967, Rock picked up a friend's camera and was soon hooked on the way a subject changes between two clicks. Heading to London in the Summer of Love, he started making home movies and became friends with Syd Barrett, who was emerging as the leader of Pink Floyd. When he went solo, Barrett asked Rock to shoot the cover image for The Madcap Laughs (1969). Standing over a long light table, Rock flicks through discarded shots and remembers the painted floorboards and Barrett's naked girlfriend shaping the concept. But, within two years, Barrett had lost interest in music and had retreated to Cambridge, which Rock feels is a great shame because he had the soul of a Rimbaud or a Baudelaire.

He quickly found a new star to follow, however, after he covered a David Bowie gig at Birmingham Town Hall in 1972. Nobody would have backed Ziggy Stardust as a winner, but something appealed to Rock and he hitched his wagon. He was lucky in that Bowie felt Rock viewed him as he saw himself and he trusted him sufficiently as an insider to offer him seismic moments such as kneeling on stage at Oxford Town Hall to bite Mick Ronson's guitar. Moreover, he hired him to direct the videos for `The Jean Genie' (1972) and `Life on Mars' (1973) and Rock muses on the irony that Bowie made himself a star by acting as one when he was still a relative unknown.

Bowie introduced Rock to Lou Reed at a Save the Whales concert at the Royal Festival Hall. Rock realised how much in awe Bowie was of Reed and he claims they were the light and dark sides of a symbiotic entity. While photographing him at the Scala in 1972, he took the shot (for which he got £100) that ended up on the cover of the seminal Transformer album. One week later, at the same venue, he got the image that would adorn Iggy Pop's Raw Power. Talk about being in the right place at the right time. Comparing him to an iguana, Rock recalls how still the audience was, as though it had no idea how to respond to Iggy's new brand of rock. He claims Syd, Reed, Bowie and Iggy were chimeras and he felt the magic emanating from them and became addicted.

Four decades on, Rock still feels that glam was the avant-garde in drag and he notes how the likes of Mick Jagger, Elton John and Rod Stewart latched on to it. He credits Marc Bolan as its founder, as he looks through snaps he took at trendy haunts like Biba, where Bryan Ferry was a regular. As one of the gang, Rock dutifully applied his make-up and - as a gaggle of white-coated medics shuffle in and out of the operating theatre - he got to photograph the cast of The Rocky Horror Show, as well as everyone from Jerry Garcia and Marianne Faithfull to Mott the Hoople and Thin Lizzy. The montage of images, as Rock rootles around in a cluttered storeroom in his house, confirms his status as the shutterbug to the stars. But he plays down his role with the self-guying modesty of someone clinging on as best he could at a time when being prolific was the only way to make a decent living.

Freddie Mercury approached Rock in 1973 and he first photographed Queen at Imperial College. Needing an image boost, the band allowed Rock to call the shots and he drew inspiration from a glamour still of Marlene Dietrich with her hands crossed over her chest in Josef von Sternberg's Shanghai Express (1932) that led to an iconic shot of Mercury and the cover of Queen II (the blocking of which would recur in the video for `Bohemian Rhapsody' in 1975). Standing at the light table, Rock remembers Roger Taylor joking that Mercury knew where he wanted to go and suggests that he was playing coliseums in his mind long before Queen hit the big time.

As he works with a female model, Rock declares that photography should be kept simple. Rather pretentiously, Clay uses a red filter for a close-up as Rock cites the influence of German photographer Horst P. Horst's single-light working method and Russian theatre director Konstantin Stanislavsky's theory of feeding off the energy of a space. He explains how he uses power-breathing, yoga and mantras to focus himself and relies on an alliance between his eye and his gut to get the best shots. Debbie Harry once claimed that his drag name would be Miss Direction because he had a habit of catching people off guard, as a montage follows that includes such familiar faces as Bowie, Ferry, Andy Warhol and Truman Capote, Ray Davies and Cat Stevens.

Following a dolly through an avenue of blown-up images, Rock shows us a selection of party pictures featuring Bowie (kissing Lou Reed), Iggy and Mick Jagger. He claims to have been an insider looking in rather than a paparazzo, but there is something reportagic about these shots, especially when he captured Jagger, Ronnie Wood and Rod Stewart having a snorting session interrupted by the cops. But he remained a poet at heart and set off to New York to work on stage and album concepts with Reed that resulted in the covers of Rock and Roll Heart and Coney Island Baby (both 1976). He likes the pictures Reed took of him in this period and is particularly pleased with snaps of Reed with Nico and John Cale. But he never got all the members of The Velvet Underground in the same room at the same time.

As we hear Reed and Rock discussing the meaning and impact of the song `Heroin', the latter claims that he used to love getting up to mischief around 4am (`the hour of the wolf') and he jokes about the girls and his prudish visits to S&M clubs as Clay creates a blur of negative strips to convey the craziness of the time. But things were about to step up a notch, even though Reed confides on tape that he hates punk and thought The Ramones were dirty and talentless.

Rock first saw them at CBGB in 1974 and he recalls the place being empty. But he overcame his conviction they were the ugliest combo around to shoot the cover for End of the Century (1980). Back in Blighty, he answered Malcolm McLaren's call to photograph The Sex Pistols and his portrait of Johnny Rotten made the cover of High Times magazine in October 1977. He also did the Penthouse cover for Debbie Harry in February 1980 and suggests she was like Marilyn Monroe and Bowie in that it was impossible to take a bad picture of her.

Around the same time, Rock did the covers for Talking Heads (77), The Dead Boys (We've Come for Your Children, 1978), Joan Jett (I Love Rock`n'Roll, 1981) and reveals how he based the respective images on the Midwich Cuckoos, The Rolling Stones and Elvis Presley. He mentions Carl Jung in trying to explain why certain images work and others endure. But he ties himself in knots and has to admit that he doesn't know. Moreover, Rock struggles to understand how he managed to get so much good work done when he was taking so much cocaine and speed that professionalism sometimes went out of the window. Yet, during the seven-day benders, he could do covers like Carly Simon's Come Upstairs (1980) and such videos as Saratoga's `Hall of the Mountain King' and Ace Frehley's `Insanity' (both 1987), which provoke chuckles of recognition.

Yet, while he worked with Mötley Crüe and Madonna, Rock could feel himself losing his grip. He missed Lou Reed's wedding and felt he needed to clean up his act before he approached him and Bowie again. But he suffered his heart attack first and Clay intercuts between a recreation of the incident on location in the West Side, the Robert Palmeresque medics entering the operating theatre and bleached-out negative images of his gurney being wheeled through a hospital corridor, as Rock recalls reciting Psalm 23 as he teetered on the edge of the precipice his mother had warned him about.

Using a throbbing light on his chest to disorientate, Clay has Rock read Baudelaire in French over a shot of him walking along a New York dockside. The camera approximates a fast track through an artery, as Bowie's taped voice declares that he, Dylan, Lennon and Bolan are false prophets and fake gods because the artist only exists in the mind of the fan. Yet, as the Doctor Who-like psychedelic time tunnel montage ends on a monochrome shot of Rock wired up in a hospital bed, he announces that he doesn't want to talk about three heart attacks and quadruple bypass surgery in his forties, as it's something he prefers to acknowledge rather than analyse.

He claims he owes his survival to Andrew Loog Oldham and Allen Klein (who had connections with the Stones and The Beatles). Now, he is working again and younger artists clamour for him because he still hangs out with Bowie, Iggy, Debbie and Ferry. He would rather be known as `the man who shot the 70s' than be forgotten and finds it droll that his pictures of the subversive rebels of yesteryear are now hanging in establishment galleries. At the 2013 Scala launch of his book on Transformer, he and Reed admit that they got lucky more often than other people, while Rock himself suggests he is merely someone with a gift for being fascinated.

Ending on a flurry of grainy `at work' shots that show Rock has lost none of his irreverence, wit or energy, this is a lively and laudably candid account on Mick Rock's life and times. Clay occasionally strays into hallucinatory self-indulgence, but his enthusiasm for Rock and the milieux he haunted is readily evident and he finds a willing accomplice in a subject whose plain-speaking gift of the gab chips away some of the cant that keeps threatening to creep in. Working with a range of formats, cinematographer Max Goldman holds his own against the stills and home movies edited with chic dexterity by Drew Denicola and Michael Dart Wadsworth.

Might this have benefited from a few objective opinions? Perhaps. But Rock knows enough about his specialist subject to ensure that his recollections remain fresh and insightful, especially where his own shortcomings are concerned. Moreover, he gives Clay his head in the same way the Bowie and Reed trusted him and this speaks volumes for the man and the way he created his art.

While it's likely that Paul Goodwin's Future Shock! The Story of 2000 AD will only attract a cult following,, this life and times account of the famous British comic will be greeted with impassioned enthusiasm by those devoted adherents. First published by IPC in February 1977, the weekly was clearly intended to provide a new home for enduring character Dan Dare and to cash in on the craze for all things sci-fi generated by George Lucas's Star Wars (1976). But launch editor Pat Mills had different plans and worked with John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra to create Judge Dredd, who would be a mainstay of the franchise through some difficult times.

Mills remained at the helm for the first 16 issues, after which Kevin Gosnell briefly took charge before Steve MacManus arrived to steer the comic into the late 1980s. During his reign, the comic became increasingly edgy, subversive, darkly satirical and action-packed (ie violent). But IPC eventually pushed the title into its Fleetway subsidiary before Robert Maxwell purchased it in 1987.

Since Captain Bob's four-year tenure, 2000 AD has been published by Egmont UK, Fleetway (again) and Rebellion Developments. It has spawned a couple of Judge Dredd films - the first directed by Danny Cannon in 1995 and starring Sylvester Stallone, while the second saw Karl Urban headline for Pete Travis in 2012 - and launched the careers of such writers and artists as Alan Grant, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, Brian Bolland, Mike McMahon, Emma Beeby, Dave Gibbons, Colin MacNeil, Gary Erskine, Henry Flint, Cam Kennedy, D'Israeli, Ian Edginton, John Higgins, Peter Milligan,, Bryan Talbot, Chris Weston, Rob Williams, Steve Yeowell and Dan Abnett.

Many chip in here, alongside editors David Bishop, Karen Berger, Andy Diggle and Will Dennis, and such superfans as writer Lauren Beukes, film-maker Nacho Vigalondo and musicians Scott Ian and Geoff Barrow, and Paul Gravett, the curator of the British Library's Comics Unmasked show. But, while some of the animated strips are amusing, the recollections about on-page credits, editorial and creative in-fighting, evolving artwork styles, the genesis of new characters and the 2000 AD impact on Marvel and DC titles in the United States and Doctor Who in the UK are strictly for aficionados, who won't mind the fact that this is essentially a chatfest in which the talking heads reiterate what the others have said about how daring and groundbreaking the comic was and how much fun it was to work on such an iconoclastic and idiosyncratically British publication.