Documentary

Documentary Definition

Documentary is the genre of film and television distinguished by its sense of a “historical real” — the depiction of actual people and events. It has existed as long as film itself: the one-reel actualités produced by the Lumière brothers in 1895, and the more complex films that followed, such as Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) and Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera (1929), were marked by exactly this quality. The apparent ability to capture “reality” continues to distinguish documentary from fiction; the genre appeals through its truth claims, whether at the level of fact or of image, stimulating what Bill Nichols calls “epistephilia,” a desire to know — an “informing logic, a persuasive rhetoric, or a moving poetics” promising information, insight, and awareness. The early filmmakers, of course, would hardly have known they were making “documentary”: the genre had not yet been conceived.

Grierson and the Founding of the Genre

A comprehensive history is difficult, given the genre’s variability: documentary responds continuously to technological advances, cultural and political shifts, breakthrough texts, and changing market opportunities and pressures. It is John Grierson, founder of the influential British Documentary Movement, who is usually credited with coining the term and providing its first definition in the 1930s — “the creative treatment of actuality.” Grierson did not dwell on the contradiction implicit in that phrase, but the tension between “evidence” and “artifice,” as John Corner observes, has continued to reverberate. His legacy is many-sided: he wrote copiously on the art of documentary, dreamed of “putting the working class on film,” and tied the genre to instruction and civic education. His “social issue” documentary — built on a problem/solution scenario and still a mainstay of public broadcasting — established enduring conventions: anonymous narration, interviews reinforcing the film’s “voice,” and a rhetorical editing style.

From the Interwar Years to Television

During the interwar period a transnational strand flourished that fused politically progressive or dissident attitudes with formal innovation: from the Grierson stable Drifters (1929) and Song of Ceylon (1934); from Europe Land without Bread (1933) and The Spanish Earth (1937); from America The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1937). The war curtailed this wave — documentary was harnessed to the war effort and, outside spectacular or poetic works such as Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1934) or Jennings’s Listen to Britain (1942), became predictable in structure and tone. Ethnographic documentary, heir to Flaherty’s complex legacy, continued meanwhile — ranging from “travel” films of exotic “disappearing savages” to work of genuine ethnographic worth, though much retained the “I–You” split of the anthropological gaze, replicating colonial power relations. Jean Rouch’s films — Les Maîtres fous (1955), La Chasse au lion à l’arc (1957–65) — registered the strains of failing empires and anticipated radical anti-colonial practice; he then turned his camera on his own “tribe,” Parisian youth, in the groundbreaking Chronique d’un été (1961), which deployed and defined cinéma vérité. In the immediate postwar years, while canonical works such as Blood of the Beasts (1949), Night and Fog (1955), and later The Sorrow and the Pity (1971) continued the poetic, politicized tradition, most documentaries were made by governmental film boards to aid reconstruction, adhered to set formulae, and remained largely forgettable. Television then eroded the genre’s experimental edge further, becoming — and remaining — the principal site of documentary funding and distribution. Documentary was bound into broadcasting’s commercial contract, transmuting in the US into more sensationalist magazine-style programming (with exceptions such as Direct Cinema’s fly-on-the-wall films), while faring somewhat better in the UK and Commonwealth, where a Griersonian public-service ethos persisted in series such as Panorama.

Television Documentary Today

Despite cultural variation and a volatile international broadcast sector, television documentary is remarkably uniform. Works are gathered into “strands” running for “seasons” across public, state, commercial, and specialist channels. Current affairs and investigative programs, nature, history, and science documentaries remain staples, with “national interest” strands mandated to shore up cultural identity on state systems. Much of this output is “unauthored,” its form dictated by genre and timeslot expectations — though high-end strands such as the BBC’s Storyville or HBO’s Cinemax Reel Life collect riskier “independent,” often auteur-produced work. Television documentary has also had to contend with, and been influenced by, the rapid rise of “reality television” and popular factual programming, now spanning survivor, celebrity, and dating shows and observational programs set in airports or on the police beat. Critics and filmmakers are divided: some argue reality TV has revived documentary by making broad audiences receptive to non-fiction; others revile it for destroying the genre’s educational and political mandate, shaped as it is by an economics of competition, entertainment, and ratings remote from documentary tradition.

Alternative Movements and the Return to Cinema

Alongside broadcast television, alternative media movements developed rapidly in the 1960s and 1970s using the new, inexpensive medium of video. Political, leftist, and agitprop collectives such as Newsreel in the US produced Marxist, radical, and feminist documentaries, while anti-colonial “Third Cinema” films such as Argentina’s La Hora de los Hornos (1968) were deeply influential. Experimental film and video flourished outside commercial circuits in New York, Berlin, and London. With the demise of the organized left at the Cold War’s end, documentary engaged with identity-based movements — feminism, AIDS activism, ethnic liberation — as well as environmental and anti-globalization struggles, a trend continued by digital platforms and “digidocs” embedded in activist and educational websites. This political lineage has fed a recent phenomenon: documentary’s return to the big screen. High-profile works such as The Thin Blue Line (1987) and Roger and Me (1989), followed by Moore’s Bowling for Columbine (2002) and Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), proved documentaries could generate controversy, acclaim, and large profits, with successors ranging from The Corporation (2003) and Super Size Me (2004) to softer hits such as Spellbound (2002) and Être et avoir (2002).

Documentary Theory

Until the late 1970s, writing on documentary consisted largely of insider accounts casting the documentary-maker as hero-outsider, while the emerging wave of critical theory and film studies focused on Hollywood classical cinema. As theory matured, documentary came under serious investigation, and its close alignment with “reality” threw the “problem of realism” into sharp relief: recording reality assumes “a real ‘out there'” that can be shown without linguistic or cinematic signs — an impossibility, compounded by the Althusserian argument that “reality” is itself an ideological construction. Realist documentary was accordingly criticized for reinforcing hegemonic belief systems, appearing to capture raw truth while delivering ideology — critiques that privileged interactive, self-reflexive modes which reveal their own constructedness. Approaches have since diversified: Bill Nichols’s influential modal taxonomy still prevails; Brian Winston (1995) takes a historical view of the ambiguities within the Griersonian tradition; Michael Renov (2004) traces subjectivity in a genre historically associated with objectivity. Edited collections have multiplied — some of the most useful emerging from the annual Visible Evidence conference — and growing numbers of scholars now engage with reception, audiences, and populist variants such as reality TV, docudrama, and mockumentary.

Makers and the Problem of Realism

Practitioners, though they tend simply to get on with the job, are well aware of their role in re-presenting “reality.” Every step of production is mediated, generating daily ethical and political dilemmas, and films are measured against some “truth” or “history” out there. In different language, makers grapple with the same issues as the academy: the controversy over Michael Moore’s “creative” use of timelines, arguments over the truth of reality TV, the rise of mockumentary, and debates about bias all show that the tension between “creative” and “actuality,” between artifice and evidence, continues to reverberate among makers, audiences, and academics alike.