documentary A practice of filmmaking that deals with actual and factual (and usually contemporary) issues, institutions, and people; whose purpose is to educate, inform, communicate, persuade, raise consciousness, or satisfy curiosity; in which the viewer is commonly addressed as citizen of a public sphere; whose materials are selected and arranged from what already exists (rather than being made up); and whose methods involve filming ‘real people’ as themselves in actual locations, using natural light and ambient sound. Although filmmaking of this type dates to the earliest years of cinema (see actualities; travelogue), the term ‘documentary’ was only coined in the 1920s, when founder of the British Documentary Movement John Grierson defined it as ‘the creative treatment of actuality’. Pioneering documentaries include Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922), as well as the city symphonies and poetic documentaries made across and beyond Europe in the 1920s and 1930s by such filmmakers as Walther Ruttman, Alberto Cavalcanti, Dziga Vertov, Joris Ivens, Henri Storck and Basil Wright. In the same period, a public service ethic for documentary making was established with the formation of government- and public corporation- sponsored documentary film units and through campaigning filmmaking by trade unions and political parties. In the early 1960s, an explosion in documentary filmmaking was brought about with the widening availability of lightweight cameras and sound recording equipment, along with fast film, all of which enabled unobtrusive shooting in available light (cinéma vérité, direct cinema). These various forms of documentary have since developed internationally along a number of lines, each of which has generated further developments of its own. They include, most prominently, television reportage and poetic observations of working lives and poverty, especially in non-western countries. These in turn have fed on the one hand into conventions and institutions of art cinema and on the other into militant documentary making, a movement facilitated since the 1970s by the availability of video and latterly digital video. Filmmakers in Central America and Latin America have been among leading contributors to documentary with, for example, the work of Marta Rodriguez and Jorge Silvia in Colombia and of Jorge Sanjines’s Ukamau group in Bolivia; while Patricio Guzmán made the three-part La batalla de Chile/The Battle of Chile as a document of events leading up to the Chilean coup.
In the west, a militant countercinema has included labour movement documentaries (for example Harlan County USA (Barbara Kopple, US, 1976) about a miners’ strike in Kentucky) and anti-Vietnam war films like The War at Home (Glenn Silber and Barry Alexander Brown, US, 1979); feminist documentaries (such as Not a Love Story/C’est surtout pas de l’amour (Bonnie Sher Klein, Canada, 1982), on the pornography industry, and The Nightcleaners (Berwick Street Film Collective, Britain, 1975), on a campaign to unionize women cleaners. Shoah (France, 1985), Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour document of the Holocaust, represents an important strand of documentary-making as testimony. The years since the 1980s have seen a resurgence of documentary films, many made with public and/or television funding and enjoying successful theatrical releases: these include Hoop Dreams (Steve James, US, 1994); The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, US/Britain, 1998); Être et avoir/To Be and to Have (Nicolas Philibert, France, 2002); Suite Habana/Havana Suite (Fernando Pérez, Spain/Cuba, 2003); and Man on Wire (James Marsh, Britain, 2008). In 2004 Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore’s attack on the Bush regime, became the top-grossing documentary of all time. Contemporary hybrid and crossover genres such as docudrama, docusoap, ‘faction’, and reality TV incorporate key forms and conventions of documentary. In Film Studies, documentary film is the subject of considerable historical inquiry. It also inspires debates on cinema’s potential to capture and communicate unmediated reality; studies of the formal conventions and narrative structures peculiar to the practice; work on film and politics and, relatedly, on various national cinemas, especially those of Latin America.
Further reading: Austin, T. and W. de Jong, Eds. (2008). Rethinking Documentary: New Perspectives, New Practices. Maidenhead, Open University Press; Burton, J., Ed. (1990). The Social Documentary in Latin America. Pittsburgh, PA, University of Pittsburgh Press; Chanan, M. (2007). The Politics of Documentary. London, British Film Institute; Ellis, J. C. and B. A. McLane (2005). A New History of Documentary Film. New York, Continuum.