The conditions that have privileged the voices of white males in communication forms carry into documentary as well. However, often documentary has become a way for women to enter filmmaking.

Alice Guy, later known as Alice Guy-Blaché, was a French film industry pioneer in both nonfiction and fictional film. The catalog of the company she ran (she was a pioneer film company owner as well as a filmmaker) lists several actuality shorts produced in 1906–07. Early Russian filmmakers included Esfir Shub, who directed the first found footage documentary, The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927), and Yelizaveta Svilova, who worked with her partner Dziga Vertov on Man With a Movie Camera, and also made post–World War II documentaries The Fall of Berlin (1945) and Nuremberg Trials (1946).

In the 1930s, Mary Field worked with F. Percy Smith on a pioneering wildlife series called Secrets of Nature, which began in 1922. In that series, Field directed The World in a Wineglass in 1931. She was involved in early educational film production, as well as natural history filmmaking. She directed The Mystery of Marriage (1932), a nature documentary about gender roles, and They Made the Land (1938) about Scottish land reclamation. She also supervised the series The Secrets of Life (1934–1950).

Agnès Varda had worked with Night and Fog director Alain Resnais on a fictional film of hers, but that was soon followed by documentary work like her 16-minute film L’opéra-mouffe (1958), which was released in the United States under the title Diary of a Pregnant Woman. Varda’s later documentary work included participation in the multisegment documentary Far From Vietnam (1967) with fellow documentary makers Resnais, Chris Marker, and Joris Ivens; Mur Murs (1981) about the murals in Los Angeles; and The Gleaners and I (2000). Her style has traces of experimentalism reflective of the French New Wave film movement.

Many contemporary women documentary makers present complex pictures of culture and politics. In 1954, Nancy Hamilton made Helen Keller in Her Story, and became the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 1955. The second was Sara Kernochan, who codirected the 1972 documentary Marjoe. A significant documentary directed by singer Judy Collins and Jill Godmilow in 1974, Antonia: A Portrait of the Woman, was nominated for Best Documentary Feature.

One of the most important women documentary makers is Barbara Kopple. Using many of the cinéma vérité traditions, Kopple’s work brings to life parts of American culture that bring unique perspectives to the viewer, like her documentary about striking coal miners, Harlan County USA (1976), and her many documentaries about artists, such as her portrait of the musical group the Dixie Chicks and their controversial comments in Shut Up and Sing (2006), or the portrait of a singer struggling against many kinds of marginalization in Miss Sharon Jones! (2015).

Some of the greatest insights into the world of women and documentary come through the film Cameraperson (2016). Kirsten Johnson uses footage she has shot over her career as a documentary cinematographer to explore the power of images and the ethics of documentary filmmaking. She has worked with Laura Poitras, who makes documentaries that construct complex investigations into abuses of power and corporate excess, including the Emmy-nominated film Flag Wars (2003), co-directed with Linda Goode Bryant, about gentrification in Ohio, and Citizenfour (2014), about Edward Snowden, which won the 2015 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. In a 2019 interview for IndieWire, Poitras identified the significance of documentary in an environment where journalism may not be enough to shed light on the darkness: “I think documentaries do a lot of the investigating that the ecosystem for newspapers has been able to support. So many newspapers are closing and documentaries have been able to do essential work in terms of holding power to account, creating critical analysis of the historical moment while having a lasting impact. It’s not just about a 24-hour news cycle.”

LGBTQI+ and documentary

Documentarians from the LGBTQI+ community have also been active in documentary production and represent a growing movement. The Jack Smith film Flaming Creatures (1963), which bridges experimental and documentary, was championed by experimental film pioneer Jonas Mekas, but was seized by the New York Police Department on obscenity charges, due to its frank depiction of gay culture and sexuality. The history of lesbian and gay documentary witnessed a growing interest in alternative documentary making that comes to light in the later 1970s, with Arthur Bressan Jr.’s Gay USA (1977), about the gay rights movement, and the film produced by the Mariposa Film Group, Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives (1977). In 1985, The Times of Harvey Milk (1984) directed by Rob Epstein won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

Documentaries from and about the LGBTQI+ community have experienced significant growth since 1985, as queer community political movements redefined identity and politics in relation to public spaces, community, and the nation. Because the situations and subjects that these works sought to document and (re)imagine are fluid, at risk, and in flux, most of them mix documentary modes. This mix of modes included an examination of the constructed ways of representation found in (auto)biography, ethnography, and the way audiences acclimate to these reflexive modes of discourse.

A bridge between queer cinema and documentarians of color can be found in the work of Marlon Riggs. His examination of caricatures of Black people in Ethnic Notions (1986) uses documentary to raise the question of representation as a set of social practices, against an argument about what the hypothetical effect of such images might be. As has been the case throughout the history of documentary, questions of the mode of speaking, as well as the authority to speak, are fundamentally complex. Riggs’s 1989 experimental documentary Tongues Untied can be viewed as an interrogation of the ability of documentary to move through a world full of different media, offering startling observations about how the role of the author—the notion of authority—raises questions about the roles of objectivity and subjectivity, since its depiction of Black gay life is both personal and performed for the camera.

African Americans and documentary

The significance of African American documentary filmmaking reaches back to the silent era, though surviving material underscores the marginalized position of such work. Most of the knowledge historians of documentary have been able to assemble about early African American documentary comes through diary entries, newspaper accounts, and similar kinds of sources. For example, information about a 1909 film called A Trip to Tuskegee, made by George Broome working in conjunction with Booker T. Washington, is compiled from such sources. The film depicted exteriors of the Tuskegee Institute, footage of Washington, and scenes of students involved in road construction and agricultural work, as a way of presenting the work of the institute. The screenings of this film in New York City contributed to the debate between Washington’s camp, who sought a kind of gradual improvement in the lives of Blacks through industrial education programs, and those aligning with W.E.B. Du Bois, who sought a kind of education aspiring toward leadership, which came through a liberal arts education steeped in literature, the arts, and intellectual development.

Many of the African American documentaries that have been lost were reported to focus on Black soldiering in both World Wars. Carlton Moss was involved as the script writer for The Negro Soldier in 1944 (with a directing credit to Frank Capra). Moss followed this with another film on Black soldiers (Teamwork, 1946), but turned his producing work to films documenting the role of Black arts and cultural innovation through the 1970s, and then becoming a teacher of film production. The newsreel work of William Alexander, and the pioneering television work of William Greaves, such as the public television program Black Journal (1968–77) contributed to a legacy of African American documentary. Greaves went on to make the cinema verité–styled Emergency Ward (1959) while he spent time working in Canada’s National Film Board. He was commissioned by the U.S. Information Agency to make Wealth of a Nation in 1964, which discussed freedom of speech and expression in art among African Americans, and From These Roots (1974), about the Harlem Renaissance.

In addition to the important work of Marlon Riggs, there were a small number of documentaries by Black directors in the 1980s and 1990s, but after 2000 the number of films became much more significant. In 2010, Roger Ross Williams was the co-winner of the Best Documentary, Short Subjects Academy Award for Music By Prudence about Zimbabwean vocalist Prudence Mabhena.

The documentary series Eyes on the Prize was a landmark 14-part series depicting the history of the American civil rights movement. It was produced in two sets of episodes that ran on PBS in 1987 and 1990. The sixth episode of the first set, “Bridge to Freedom” (1965), was codirected by Callie Crossley and James DeVinney. In 1988, Crossley became the first Black director to receive an Academy Award nomination. This series used a combination of extensive, deeply researched archival footage combined with contemporary witness interviews to tell the story of civil rights. Other significant Black documentary directors who received Academy Awards include T.J. Martin (Undefeated, 2011), and Ezra Edelman (O. J.: Made in America, 2016). While Undefeated benefited from Hollywood financing and producer participation from rapper and record producer Sean Combs, O.J.: Made in America was produced through ESPN Films.

Documentary exhibition and distribution

Issues of financing and distribution have been a challenge throughout the history of documentary. Since the shift from film to video, and with the advance of the quality and light sensitivity of cameras, microphones, and lenses, independent documentaries have benefited from lower costs, especially after the introduction of the Canon 5D Mark II in 2008. Small DSLR cameras were combined with reasonably cheap and powerful editing software (like Avid, Final Cut, and Premiere) to make documentary production tools available to a much larger number of filmmakers.

But it is perhaps in distribution and exhibition that documentary’s role in culture has experienced the most change. Seeing a documentary in a theatrical setting goes back to the silent film days. Radio documentary became notable in the 1950s, at the same time that television became a significant way for people to see documentaries. Commercial television network documentaries were typically produced through news divisions, and maintained a journalistic style, perhaps most clearly seen in the new magazine format of 60 Minutes, which first aired in 1968. At the same time, the public television system offered several series for both journalistic and independent documentaries. The Frontline investigative journalism series has been airing since 1983, while the series POV began airing independently produced documentaries in 1988, and Independent Lens has been on PBS since 1999.

A further expansion of television outlets came with the growth of cable television services, which greatly expanded the amount of visual programming available to American households. Documentary benefited from this expansion, perhaps most notably with the expansion into documentary of Home Box Office, commonly known as HBO. The company started as a channel that programmed theatrical fiction films in 1972, but as it grew it expanded into documentary in 1979, most notably with the series Time Was, hosted by Dick Cavett, which offered an archival footage-based portrait of decades starting with the 1920s. The HBO documentary series America Undercover started airing in 1983, under the supervision of Sheila Nevins. Since it was a pay-TV service, and outside the normal standards and practices of the networks, many of the documentary subjects were the kind that would never appear on broadcast television, and only rarely on the public TV airwaves. HBO offered a combination of hard-hitting investigative documentaries, depictions of crime and sex, and films that represented significant nonfiction storytelling.

Documentary in digital space

A new era of distribution and access to documentary developed with the Internet. Podcasting became a crowded arena for the development of a wide variety of documentary storytelling, most visibly exemplified by the significant success of the series Serial, which first aired in 2014. Major nonfiction podcast genres include true crime, history, art and music documentaries, and explorations of technology and culture.

Platforms like YouTube and Vimeo have become places where visual documentaries are distributed, and the public domain and Creative Commons repositories in the Internet Archive, especially the Prelinger Archive, enable other means of distribution. Traditional organizations like PBS also offer many documentaries online, while pay-to-view services include the Netflix, and Amazon. Public libraries have also moved from offering documentary titles on tape or disc that can be borrowed to shared library streaming services.

The original version of this article was published by SAGE Publications in The SAGE Encyclopedia of Journalism.