Back in the ’60s Ed Pincus made some key social-issue documentaries and wrote a how-to book that became a bible for low-budget filmmaking. If he’d kept on that track, he would have remained a respectable figure in the world of nonfiction film. Instead, Pincus rejected the idea that a camera could record something without changing it, and made a first-person documentary about his own life, Diaries (1971–76), released in 1982. That 200-minute epic was scorned as Me Generation navel-gazing by The New York Times, but also widely acclaimed. Pincus’ work was influential (his former Harvard student Ross McElwee clearly aped the Pincus style in his classic Sherman’s March), but the man himself dropped out of filmmaking for 30 years to raise flowers and family in Vermont.