Documentary film
A documentary film is a nonfiction, motion picture intended to "document reality, primarily for instruction, education or maintaining a historical record". The American author and media analyst Bill Nichols has characterized the documentary in terms of "a filmmaking practice, a cinematic tradition, and mode of audience reception a practice without clear boundaries".
Research into information gathering, as a behavior, and the sharing of knowledge, as a concept, has noted how documentary movies were preceded by the notable practice of documentary photography. This has involved the use of singular photographs to detail the complex attributes of historical events and continues to a certain degree to this day, with an example being the conflict-related photography achieved by popular figures such as Mathew Brady during the American Civil War. Documentary movies evolved from the creation of singular images in order to convey particular types of information in depth, using film as a medium.
Early documentary films, originally called "actuality films", briefly lasted for one minute or less in most cases. While faithfully depicting true events, these releases possessed no narrative structure per se and were of limited interest. Over time, documentaries have evolved to become longer in length and to include more categories of information. Some examples are explicitly educational, while others serve as observational works; docufiction movies notably include aspects of dramatic storytelling that are clearly fictional. Documentaries are informative at times, and certain types are often used within schools as a resource to teach various principles. Documentary filmmakers have a responsibility to be truthful to their vision of the world without intentionally misrepresenting a topic.
Social media organizations, such as Dailymotion and YouTube, with many of these platforms receiving popular interest, have provided an avenue for the growth of documentaries as a particular film genre. Such platforms have increased the distribution area and ease-of-accessibility given the ability of online video sharing to spread to multiple audiences at once as well as to work past certain socio-political hurdles such as censorship.
Definition
Polish writer and filmmaker Bolesław Matuszewski was among those who identified the mode of documentary film. He wrote two of the earliest texts on cinema, Une nouvelle source de l'histoire and La photographie animée. Both were published in 1898 in French and were among the earliest written works to consider the historical and documentary value of the film. Matuszewski is also among the first filmmakers to propose the creation of a Film Archive to collect and keep safe visual materials.The word "documentary" was coined by Scottish documentary filmmaker John Grierson in his review of Robert Flaherty's film Moana, published in the New York Sun on 8 February 1926, written by "The Moviegoer".
Grierson's principles of documentary were that cinema's potential for observing life could be exploited in a new art form; that the "original" actor and "original" scene are better guides than their fiction counterparts for interpreting the modern world; and that materials "thus taken from the raw" can be more real than the acted article. In this regard, Grierson's definition of documentary as "creative treatment of actuality" has gained some acceptance; however, this position is at variance with Soviet film-maker Dziga Vertov's credos of provocation to present "life as it is", and "life caught unawares".
The American film critic Pare Lorentz defines a documentary film as "a factual film which is dramatic." Others further state that a documentary stands out from the other types of non-fiction films for providing an opinion, and a specific message, along with the facts it presents. Scholar Betsy McLane asserted that documentaries are for filmmakers to convey their views about historical events, people, and places which they find significant. Therefore, the advantage of documentaries lies in introducing new perspectives which may not be prevalent in traditional media such as written publications and school curricula.
Documentary practice is the complex process of creating documentary projects. It refers to what people do with media devices, content, form, and production strategies to address the creative, ethical, and conceptual problems and choices that arise as they make documentaries.
Documentary filmmaking can be used as a form of journalism, advocacy, or personal expression.
History
Pre-1900
Early film was dominated by the novelty of showing an event. Single-shot moments were captured on film, such as a train entering a station, a boat docking, or factory workers leaving work. These short films were called "actuality" films; the term "documentary" was not coined until 1926. Many of the first films, such as those made by Auguste and Louis Lumière, were a minute or less in length, due to technological limitations.Films showing many people were often made for commercial reasons: the people being filmed were eager to see, for payment, the film showing them. One notable film clocked in at over an hour and a half, The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight. Using pioneering film-looping technology, Enoch J. Rector presented the entirety of a famous 1897 prize-fight on cinema screens across the United States.
In May 1896, Bolesław Matuszewski recorded on film a few surgical operations in Warsaw and Saint Petersburg hospitals. In 1898, French surgeon Eugène-Louis Doyen invited Matuszewski and Clément Maurice to record his surgical operations. They started in Paris a series of surgical films sometime before July 1898. Until 1906, the year of his last film, Doyen recorded more than 60 operations. Doyen said that his first films taught him how to correct professional errors he had been unaware of. For scientific purposes, after 1906, Doyen combined 15 of his films into three compilations, two of which survive, the six-film series Extirpation des tumeurs encapsulées, and the four-film Les Opérations sur la cavité crânienne. These and five other of Doyen's films survive.
Between July 1898 and 1901, the Romanian professor Gheorghe Marinescu made several science films in his neurology clinic in Bucharest: Walking Troubles of Organic Hemiplegy, The Walking Troubles of Organic Paraplegies, A Case of Hysteric Hemiplegy Healed Through Hypnosis, The Walking Troubles of Progressive Locomotion Ataxy, and Illnesses of the Muscles. All these short films have been preserved. The professor called his works "studies with the help of the cinematograph," and published the results, along with several consecutive frames, in issues of La Semaine Médicale magazine from Paris, between 1899 and 1902. In 1924, Auguste Lumière recognized the merits of Marinescu's science films: "I've seen your scientific reports about the usage of the cinematograph in studies of nervous illnesses, when I was still receiving La Semaine Médicale, but back then I had other concerns, which left me no spare time to begin biological studies. I must say I forgot those works and I am thankful to you that you reminded them to me. Unfortunately, not many scientists have followed your way."
1900–1920
were very popular in the early part of the 20th century. They were often referred to by distributors as "scenics". Scenics were among the most popular sort of films at the time. An important early film which moved beyond the concept of the scenic was In the Land of the Head Hunters, which embraced primitivism and exoticism in a staged story presented as truthful re-enactments of the life of Native Americans.Contemplation is a separate area. Pathé was the best-known global manufacturer of such films in the early 20th century. A vivid example is Moscow Clad in Snow.
Biographical documentaries appeared during this time, such as the feature Eminescu-Veronica-Creangă on the relationship between the writers Mihai Eminescu, Veronica Micle and Ion Creangă, released by the Bucharest chapter of Pathé.
Early color motion picture processes such as Kinemacolor and Prizma Color and the five-reel feature Bali the Unknown ) used travelogues to promote the new color processes. In contrast, Technicolor concentrated primarily on getting their process adopted by Hollywood studios for fiction feature films.
Also during this period, Frank Hurley's feature documentary film, South about the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition was released. The film documented the failed Antarctic expedition led by Ernest Shackleton in 1914.
1920s
Romanticism
With Robert J. Flaherty's Nanook of the North in 1922, documentary film embraced romanticism. Flaherty filmed a number of heavily staged romantic documentary films during this time period, often showing how his subjects would have lived 100 years earlier and not how they lived right then. For instance, in Nanook of the North, Flaherty did not allow his subjects to shoot a walrus with a nearby shotgun, but had them use a harpoon instead. Some of Flaherty's staging, such as building a roofless igloo for interior shots, was done to accommodate the filming technology of the time.Paramount Pictures tried to repeat the success of Flaherty's Nanook and Moana with two romanticized documentaries, Grass and Chang, both directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack.
City symphony
The "city symphony" sub film genre consisted of avant-garde films during the 1920s and 1930s. These films were particularly influenced by modern art, namely Cubism, Constructivism, and Impressionism. According to art historian and author Scott MacDonald, city symphony films can be described as, "An intersection between documentary and avant-garde film: an avant-doc"; however, A.L. Rees suggests regarding them as avant-garde films.Early titles produced within this genre include: Manhatta ; Rien que les heures/Nothing But The Hours ; Twenty Four Dollar Island ; Moscow ; Études sur Paris ; The Bridge and Rain, both by Joris Ivens; São Paulo, Sinfonia da Metrópole, Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis ; Man with a Movie Camera ; Douro, Faina Fluvial ; and Rhapsody in Two Languages.
A city symphony film, as the name suggests, is most often based around a major metropolitan city area and seeks to capture the life, events and activities of the city. It can use abstract cinematography or may use Soviet montage theory. Most importantly, a city symphony film is a form of cinepoetry, shot and edited in the style of a "symphony".
File:Mikhail kaufman on train.jpg|thumb|In this shot from Man with a Movie Camera, Mikhail Kaufman acts as a cameraman risking his life in search of the best shot.
The European continental tradition focused on humans within human-made environments, and included the so-called city symphony films such as Walter Ruttmann's, Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis ; Alberto Cavalcanti's, Rien que les heures; and Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera. These films tend to feature people as products of their environment, and lean towards the avant-garde.