documentary
Documentaries are complex visual or audio storytelling forms that apply creative treatments to actuality, in the words of documentary pioneer John Grierson. Sometimes this definition has had a slightly different wording: the creative interpretation of actuality. The slight difference gives some sense of how elusive defining documentary can be. Despite the challenge, the consideration of how documentary can be defined both clarifies how we make sense of any single instance that bears the term documentary and advances how seeking a definition has provoked talented creators and interpreters of documentary stories to defy the definition and, in the process, rebuild it.
Documentaries can be very short or very long, they can be silent films or digital images, they can be images accompanied by different kinds of sound, and they can be just audio. To begin to build a definition that clarifies the form, several conventional practices can be discussed, and following that, the form can be considered for all the ways the conventional practices are manipulated or confronted in a way that enhances the experience of the viewer.
Documentary practices and uses
As a starting point, documentary is a media form that observes, manipulates, and then redistributes stories about the world around us, within us, and beyond our sensory experience at micro and macro levels. Its origins are rooted in media that recorded things in the world, capturing images and/or sounds, and making them available in different times and spaces. Its ancestry can be split into the fields of observation like history, journalism, geography, and anthropology that use words and images to gather facts together and write them down for diverse distant audiences. Documentary has been used as well to consolidate and share accumulated knowledge from both hard and soft sciences, from the study of the natural world, to the investigation of psychological and sociological questions, to the historical exploration of politics, war, social movements, and to the lives of individuals, cultural groups, and their experiences in the arts, religion, and meaning. Along with these intellectual ancestors, documentary is a product of changes in technologies that can be used to record and preserve, from descriptive language and images, to photographic and audio technologies that fixed images and sounds into different media, to the distribution systems of radio, phonograph records, television, film theaters, and a wide range of digital distribution channels.
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For most creators and audiences, documentaries tell stories that assert a notion of what is true or make an argument for the truth of a specific perspective or experience. Documentaries are stories featuring people pretending to be themselves. Creators make recordings of things in the world that they are either not making up or that are being made up for the purposes of audio and visual demonstration. The recordings of things in the world, and the constructions that illustrate things in the world, are then edited together into story forms that are influenced by related media practices. For example, early film technologies were trying to find better ways to make moving photographs of things in the world in order to share how they look to audiences not actually present.
Origins in motion studies and actualities
One of the most well-known of these predecessors to documentary films is the motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge, who in 1872 took photographs of a horse named Occident running in order to analyze how a horse ran. The pictures were commissioned by Leland Stanford, who also started Leland Stanford Junior University, or what is now known as Stanford University. Muybridge was doing observation science and was not concerned about the definition of documentary as we think about it. In 1878, Muybridge took sequential photographs of a horse running, creating the motion study The Horse in Motion, which is considered a landmark precursor to cinema. Seeing the way these motion experiments worked fundamentally changed notions of space and time.
These experiments in recording sequences of still photos that create the illusion of motion are the foundation for the earliest documentaries. In France, the LumiÚre brothers made short films, starting when they photographed workers leaving their factory in March 1895. Hand-cranked through a projector, the film was about 50 seconds long. Not much to tell a story, but revolutionary in what it suggested: that an incident in one place could be recorded, fixed in a medium, and transported for people to see in another place. The French factory workers on film were seen at a screening in Egypt in 1896. These early films were referred to as actualités. The complexity of moving and setting up equipment made the logical next move to recording news events more complicated, though prescheduled events were an early frequent subject. For other events, recreations were shot, suggesting that ideas of authenticity were not yet seen in documentary as clearly defined, and in many contexts that challenge of deciding the authenticity of a reconstructed actuality is still controversial.
A particular actuality document suggests a disturbing potential of documentary. On January 4, 1903, the elephant Topsy was electrocuted on Coney Island in New York City, after the animal killed a drunk spectator who burned the elephant with a cigar. The electrocution was filmed by Thomas Edisonâs company. The 74-second film was released January 17, 1903, on coin-operated kinetoscopes owned by Edison. This single incident of actuality exemplifies an issue that haunts documentary: Does the power to record and share things mean that the form always should?
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Origins of the term documentary and early works
In 1922, Robert Flaherty made the film Nanook of the North, which is frequently cited as the start of English-language documentary. Nanook was quite successful, and told the story of an Inuk man and his family, who were living in the Canadian Arctic. Since the distinction between documentary film and fiction film was not yet widely used, Nanook is seen as problematic. It consists of staged recreations of a native lifestyle that had already been abandoned to the past, though they were an important part of Inuk history. Flaherty was interested in sharing what he had learned as a prospector who became familiar with these native populations, and originally shot footage in 1914â15, though he ended up having to reshoot in 1920â21 after the initial footage caught fire (legend says Flaherty dropped a cigarette on the camera negative). On the reshoot, Flaherty decided on an approach that was more ethnographic reconstruction than the original travelogue approach.
Building on this success, Flaherty made Moana (1926). Shot in Samoa in 1923 and 1924, Flaherty used the same approach of ethnographic reconstruction to document life, what French and European scholars now call docu-fiction, which becomes important to documentary when it comes to filmed or recorded recreations. Flahertyâs film Moana was reviewed by John Grierson for The New York Sun, in which he wrote âOf course, Moana being a visual account of events in the daily life of a Polynesian youth and his family, has documentary value.â This review is widely credited with one of the earliest influential uses of the term documentary. In 1922, Grierson had noted how documents have an important and central value to historians, scholars, and lawyers for their value as primary sources that reflect a factual and authentic record. The same applies to journalists, whose work is fundamentally grounded in fact and authenticity verified through documentation.
Audiences come to understand documentaries as viewers build experience with the visual and audio languages the films use, the conventional choices that producers make, the unconventional experiments that they may undertake, and the contexts that give them cultural meaning. Questions of form are also questions of technology, since the machinery used to record actualities, interviews, visual, or audio events, and the treatment of these materials in postproduction play a central role in how the form of documentary is experienced and understood.
Silent era documentaries included several city symphony films that portrayed urban life in ways that reflected the connection between film and art. Paul Strandâs Manhatta (1921) and Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927) by Walter Ruttmann are two examples, though Dziga Vertovâs Man With a Movie Camera (1929) is often cited as the greatest documentary ever made. These films featured innovative techniques, experiments in style, and a poetic storytelling voice.
Connections to persuasion and propaganda
While documentary was developing as a mode of storytelling, its complex historical link to persuasion and propaganda grew. In the 1920s, for example, both documentary pioneer Grierson and John Reith, who was the director-general of the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) when it was chartered in 1927, spent time in the United States learning about the uses of mass persuasion by big business as well as by the U.S. government. Documentaryâs power as a persuasive form was championed by Grierson, who saw the potential of film manipulationâcreative treatment of actuality, in his wordsâthat could express ideas that were possible with the way the world was observed and recorded could be treated or interpreted.
In the middle of the 20th century, with the rise in the use and potential of radio, film, and later television to create documentary, the tension between creative treatment and actuality became significant. Luis Buñuelâs film Land Without Bread (1933) remains controversial when discussed as a documentary. The film displays Buñuelâs influences from both ethnography and Surrealism. The exaggerated narration contrasts with the conditions of misery experienced by the inhabitants of this mountainous region of Spain. It was banned for a period of years after its release. Triumph of the Will (1935) is a Nazi propaganda film made by Leni Riefenstahl, which presents a document of a 1934 Nazi Party congress.
The controversy over how to think about documentary as a persuasive approach continues to challenge scholars, as is the case with the propaganda films made for the U.S. government by Pare Lorentz during the Roosevelt administration (The Plow That Broke the Plains in 1936 and The River in 1938) as well as the Frank Capraâdirected Why We Fight films during World War II. And in the United Kingdom, documentary moved from a persuasive form to depictions of imperial economics, from the years under the Empire Marketing Board in the 1920s and early 1930s, to the General Post Office Film Unit through most of the 1930s, and later to the propaganda work of the Ministry of Information at the outbreak of World War II. A standout film from the pre-war era, Night Mail (1936) displayed the nationalistic pride that came from the complex efficiency of the mail delivery system across the United Kingdom. Participants in the film included arts luminaries like W. H. Audenâs verse commentary, set to music composed by Benjamin Britten. In terms of the authenticity of the production, Night Mail combined actual train footage with material shot on elaborate set constructions intercut together.
Radio and television documentary
Radio documentary, a form using edited sound to create nonfiction storytelling, has its origins in the late 1930s. Seen as documentaries produced for entertainment purposes, Allen Funtâs original radio program Candid Microphone started in June 1947 and was an important precursor for what later became reality television (via Funtâs own Candid Camera, variably airing between 1948 and 2014). More journalistic work was being done by the CBS Documentary Unit in the late 1940s. The era saw a culture interested in audio programs that combined journalistic authenticity with dramatic storytelling techniques. The expansion of this kind of material was also enabled by audio recording equipment becoming more portable, allowing for practical ways to gather authentic sound.
In coming to understand journalistic documentary as a historical movement, the work of Edward R. Murrow and his colleagues, which gained prominence through radio journalism during the war, turned into a powerful documentary production unit. Early audio documentary work is highlighted by the phonograph records produced through the collaboration of Murrow and producer Fred Friendly in 1948, released as a series of 78 RPM records in a box set called I Can Hear It Now, 1933â1945. The records combined sound actualities with narration, and two follow-up albums were released in 1949 and 1950. This led to the development of the radio program Hear It Now (1950â51), a magazine format nonfiction radio program that features pieces of sound actuality, frequently described as hearing history in the making.
Completing the journey from phonograph-based documentary audio to radio-based programming, Hear It Now moved to television, becoming See It Now. Working with producer Friendly, Murrow used the news documentary form to investigate political issues. In 1954, it famously documented an investigation into alleged communist infiltration of the U.S. government conducted by U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy, accusing him of turning the congressional investigation into persecution, and exposing the tactics of accusation that, Murrow argued, tried to turn dissent into disloyalty.
The last of See It Now in 1958 was followed by the documentary series CBS Reports, which ran from 1959 through the 1990s. The great potential of this form of journalistic documentary can be seen early on in the episode Harvest of Shame (1960). Broadcast on the day after Thanksgiving in 1960, it documented the experiences of the migrant workers whose living and working conditions were deplorable and exploitative. The programâs importance to documentary is partially based on how the program provoked an argument about the relationship between observation and interpretation, since it clearly advocates for political change and increased critical consciousness to argue for change in these working conditions.
Vérité and direct cinema
The technology of filmmaking went through a dramatic change in the 1950s and 1960s, through the development of lighter and much more portable cameras, crystal-based sync sound equipment that enabled double system recording (visuals and audio on two different machines), better battery systems, and faster film stocks that required less light to produce sufficiently high-quality images. For documentary, these changes led to a wide-ranging change in the possibilities of film production, since the filming and recording could move into the world so much more easily, and the subjects could be followed in action. Other factors are also significant contributors to the implementation of change. The desire for change in the United States was also driven by the TV journalistâs stylistic need to get past illustrated narrated lectures; and in France, the desire for change was grounded in the way ethnographic work was incorporating actuality documentary into its discipline.
The film Primary (1960) became a critical landmark in the juncture between journalism, documentary, technology, and style. The film was produced by Robert Drew with a collection of documentary makers who were then or later significant to the form: Richard Leacock, Don Pennebaker, and the brothers Albert and David Maysles. The style of the film was made possible by the portable equipment, but it was the style of fluid movement with characters and synchronized sound that made the film stand out. Its portrayal of John F. Kennedyâs primary campaign in Wisconsin had a style that captured the energy of the moment.
Interestingly, Drew was motivated by a desire for journalism to capture life in a more authentic way than had been done. Drew criticized Murrowâs See It Now work as being too much of an illustrated lecture. But he also saw some observational film segments in the program, a couple of pieces by film photographer Bill McClure, that captured a kind of real-life energy that would later become the groundbreaking journalistic documentary style of Primary. However, the networks refused to air the documentary, and it ran on four stations owned by Time Inc., Drewâs employer at the time.
The style was adopted by other filmmakers as well. Direct cinema was the name applied to the documentary movement that took advantage of these technological changes and adopted some versions of the style, especially in Canada and the United States. In France, cinĂ©ma vĂ©ritĂ©, like direct cinema, aimed to capture sound-synchronized film of life as lived. But where direct cinema was observing (fly on the wall), cinĂ©ma vĂ©ritĂ© was participating (fly in the soup). Filmmakersâ work acknowledged the presence of cameras and filmmakers as part of the film, rather than disguising or hiding their presence. The question is, which has a better grasp on observing the world: camera footage that does not involve or directly acknowledge the camera, or camera footage that is admittedly conscious of the role of the camera in the world it observes? Can the camera unobtrusively record the world, or is its very presence transformative? And how does this difference affect the way we think about truth in relation to documentary?
The issues of authenticity in documentary were also in play, perhaps as a reaction to the persuasive politics of documentary of the previous decades. Arguably, the new generation of documentary filmmakers could benefit from these improved technologies, but they were also quite aware of the challenges posed by persuasive forms (propaganda or not). Also, in several places, the importance of film as a communication and educational medium led to public sector efforts to be more involved in supporting documentary filmmaking.
Rise of the filmmaker
The BBC, which began in 1922 and became a public service (and publicly funded) broadcast service in 1927, initially focused on radio. Developments in television as a primary distribution means for documentary led to the creation of Special Enquiry, the BBCâs earliest documentary series (1952â57). The investigative journalism documentary series Panorama started in 1953 and remains on the air. While public sector and corporate radio and television had places where documentary flourished, in the world of film production and distribution, a spirit of independent documentary moved forward as its own art form.
In Night and Fog (1956), Alain Resnais combined graphic archival and (then) contemporary footage of victims of the Holocaust to consider the meaning of Nazi concentration camps, and the question of responsibility. Frederick Wiseman made his films using a direct cinema approach to examine a variety of institutions, often provoking controversy when the observed depiction reflected poorly on an institution; Titicut Follies (1967) recorded the way an institutionâs staff treated patients or inmates with mental problems; High School (1968) showed how faculty and staff work to reproduce mainstream values in high school students in ways that are simultaneously demeaning, comical, and problematic. Errol Morris is known for his film The Thin Blue Line (1988), which argued that a man on death row was actually innocent of the murder for which he was convicted. Morris played with the relationship between how people tell their stories and the way one can document truths and lies.