The history of documentary filmmaking is bound up with notions of ethnography, the work of Robert Flaherty serving as a pioneering and critical example. With such influential films as Nanook of the North (1922) and Moana (1926), Flaherty used cinema to understand people unlike himself and relate what he’d learned to a general audience. Many have critiqued Flaherty’s work over the years, specifically with regard to its underlying assumption that the subjects needed a third party to document them. (There’s also the issue of Flaherty fabricating certain aspects of Eskimo life in Nanook, but that’s another kettle of fish.) Still, the ethnographic approach can generate insights that a firsthand document might not. An outsider’s study of a group of people can contextualize behaviors and rituals in universal terms; it can also have the effect of making the subjects seem exciting and new. As contemporary filmmaker Ben Russell has demonstrated in his work (Let Each One Go Where He May, Good Luck), ethnographic filmmaking techniques can seem positively avant-garde when employed imaginatively. This lesson also comes across in two artful new documentaries screening in Chicago this week, Bettina Perut and Iván Osnovikoff’s Los Reyes and Roberto Minervini’s What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire? Both films play up their outsider perspectives to provocative, sometimes beautiful results.

Minervini alternates scenes of the Panthers with portraits of a woman named Judy Hill, an ex-convict who’s recently opened a bar, and two boys named Ronaldo and Titus, school-aged brothers who are learning to navigate playtime and familial responsibilities in a dangerous neighborhood. Like Los Reyes, the structure of Minervini’s film feels intuitive and poetic; the progression doesn’t feel tied to events so much as to the spirit of lower-class Black New Orleans. That spirit is communal in nature, as What You Gonna Do shows repeatedly how the subjects rely on one another for moral support.

Directed by Bettina Perut and Iván Osnovikoff. In Spanish with subtitles. 77 min. Fri 8/30-Thu 9/5. Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846-2800, siskelfilmcenter.org, $8-$12.

What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire? ★★★ Directed by Roberto Minervini. 123 min. Fri 8/30-Thu 9/5. Facets Cinémathèque, 1517 W. Fullerton, 773-281-9075, facets.org, $10.