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A documentary film (often described simply as a documentary) is a nonfiction Film intended to "document reality, primarily for instruction, education or maintaining a Recorded history". The American author and Media studies Bill Nichols has characterized the documentary in terms of "a filmmaking practice, a cinematic tradition, and mode of audience reception that 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 Photograph to detail the complex attributes of History and continues to a certain degree to this day, with an example being the War 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 "", 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 film, while others serve as 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 . 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.
The word "documentary" was coined by Scottish documentary filmmaker John Grierson in his review of Robert Flaherty's film Moana (1926), published in the New York Sun on 8 February 1926, written by "The Moviegoer" (a pen name for Grierson).Ann Curthoys, Marilyn Lake Connected worlds: history in transnational perspective, Volume 2004 p.151. Australian National University PressBarry, Iris. "The Documentary Film, Prospect and Retrospect." The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art 13:2 (December 1945), 8.
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" (that is, life filmed surreptitiously), and "life caught unawares" (life provoked or surprised by the camera).
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.Betsy A. McLane (2025). 9781441124579, Continuum International Publishing Group. . ISBN 9781441124579 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.
Films showing many people (for example, leaving a factory) 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.Charles Ford, Robert Hammond: Polish Film: A Twentieth Century History. McFarland, 2005. , p.10. 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 (1906), and the four-film Les Opérations sur la cavité crânienne (1911). 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:Mircea Dumitrescu, O privire critică asupra filmului românesc, Brașov, 2005, Walking Troubles of Organic Hemiplegy (1898), The Walking Troubles of Organic Paraplegies (1899), A Case of Hysteric Hemiplegy Healed Through Hypnosis (1899), The Walking Troubles of Progressive Locomotion Ataxy (1900), and Illnesses of the Muscles (1901). 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.Rîpeanu, Bujor T. Filmul documentar 1897–1948, Bucharest, 2008, 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."Ţuţui, Marian, A short history of the Romanian films at the Romanian National Cinematographic Center. Excerpts of prof. dr. Marinescu's science films.
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 (1909).
Biographical documentaries appeared during this time, such as the feature Eminescu-Veronica-Creangă (1914) on the relationship between the writers Mihai Eminescu, Veronica Micle and Ion Creangă (all deceased at the time of the production), released by the Bucharest chapter of Pathé.
Early color motion picture processes such as Kinemacolor (known for the feature With Our King and Queen Through India (1912)) and Prizma Color (known for Everywhere With Prizma (1919) and the five-reel feature Bali the Unknown (1921)) 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 (1919) about the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition was released. The film documented the failed Antarctic expedition led by Ernest Shackleton in 1914.
Paramount Pictures tried to repeat the success of Flaherty's Nanook and Moana with two romanticized documentaries, Grass (1925) and Chang (1927), both directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack.
Early titles produced within this genre include: Manhatta (New York; dir. Paul Strand, 1921); Rien que les heures/Nothing But The Hours (French films; dir. Alberto Cavalcanti, 1926); Twenty Four Dollar Island (dir. Robert J. Flaherty, 1927); Moscow (dir. Mikhail Kaufman, 1927); Études sur Paris (dir. André Sauvage, 1928); De brug (1928) and Rain (1929), both by Joris Ivens; São Paulo, Sinfonia da Metrópole (dir. Adalberto Kemeny, 1929), (dir. Walter Ruttmann, 1927); Man with a Movie Camera (dir. Dziga Vertov, 1929); Douro, Faina Fluvial (dir. Manoel de Oliveira, 1931); and Rhapsody in Two Languages (dir. Gordon Sparling, 1934).
A city symphony film, as the name suggests, is most often based around a major metropolis area and seeks to capture the life, events and activities of the city. It can use abstract cinematography (Walter Ruttman's Berlin) or may use Soviet montage theory (Dziga Vertov's, Man with a Movie Camera). Most importantly, a city symphony film is a form of cinepoetry, shot and edited in the style of a "symphony".
The European continental tradition ( See: Realism) 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 (of which John Grierson noted in an articleGrierson, John. 'First Principles of Documentary', in Kevin Macdonald & Mark Cousins (eds.) Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary. London: Faber and Faber, 1996 that Berlin, represented what a documentary should not be); 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.
Pare Lorentz's The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1938) and Willard Van Dyke's The City (1939) are notable New Deal productions, each presenting complex combinations of social and ecological awareness, government propaganda, and leftist viewpoints. Frank Capra's Why We Fight (1942–1944) series was a newsreel series in the United States, commissioned by the government to convince the U.S. public that it was time to go to war. Constance Bennett and her husband Henri de la Falaise produced two feature-length documentaries, (1935) filmed in Bali, and Kilou the Killer Tiger (1936) filmed in Indochina.
In Canada, the Film Board, set up by John Grierson, was set up for the same propaganda reasons. It also created newsreels that were seen by their national governments as legitimate counter-propaganda to the psychological warfare of Nazi Germany orchestrated by Joseph Goebbels.
In Britain, a number of different filmmakers came together under John Grierson. They became known as the Documentary Film Movement. Grierson, Alberto Cavalcanti, Harry Watt, Basil Wright, and Humphrey Jennings amongst others succeeded in blending propaganda, information, and education with a more poetic aesthetic approach to documentary. Examples of their work include Drifters (John Grierson), Song of Ceylon (Basil Wright), Fires Were Started, and A Diary for Timothy (Humphrey Jennings). Their work involved poets such as W. H. Auden, composers such as Benjamin Britten, and writers such as J. B. Priestley. Among the best known films of the movement are Night Mail and Coal Face.
Calling Mr. Smith (1943) is an anti-Nazi color film created by Stefan Themerson which is both a documentary and an avant-garde film against war. It was one of the first anti-Nazi films in history.
Cinéma vérité and similar documentary traditions can thus be seen, in a broader perspective, as a reaction against studio-based film production constraints. Shooting on location, with smaller crews, would also happen in the French New Wave, the filmmakers taking advantage of advances in technology allowing smaller, handheld cameras and synchronized sound to film events on location as they unfolded.
Although the terms are sometimes used interchangeably, there are important differences between cinéma vérité (Jean Rouch) and the North American "Direct Cinema", pioneered by, among others, Canadians Michel Brault, Pierre Perrault and Allan King, and Americans Robert Drew, Richard Leacock, Frederick Wiseman and Albert and David Maysles.
The directors of the movement take different viewpoints on their degree of involvement with their subjects. Kopple and Pennebaker, for instance, choose non-involvement (or at least no overt involvement), and Perrault, Rouch, Koenig, and Kroitor favor direct involvement or even provocation when they deem it necessary.
The films Chronicle of a Summer (Jean Rouch), Dont Look Back (D. A. Pennebaker), Grey Gardens (Albert and David Maysles), Titicut Follies (Frederick Wiseman), Primary and (both produced by Robert Drew), Harlan County, USA (directed by Barbara Kopple), Lonely Boy (Wolf Koenig and Roman Kroitor) are all frequently deemed cinéma vérité films.
The fundamentals of the style include following a person during a crisis with a moving, often handheld, camera to capture more personal reactions. There are no sit-down interviews, and the shooting ratio (the amount of film shot to the finished product) is very high, often reaching 80 to one. From there, editors find and sculpt the work into a film. The editors of the movementsuch as Werner Nold, Charlotte Zwerin, Muffie Meyer, Susan Froemke, and often overlooked, but their input to the films was so vital that they were often given co-director credits.
Famous cinéma vérité/direct cinema films include Les Raquetteurs, Showman, Salesman, Near Death, and The Children Were Watching.
A June 2020 article in The New York Times reviewed the political documentary And She Could Be Next, directed by Grace Lee and Marjan Safinia. The Times described the documentary not only as focusing on women in politics, but more specifically on women of color, their communities, and the significant changes they have wrought upon America.
The nature of documentary films has expanded in the past 30 years from the cinéma vérité style introduced in the 1960s in which the use of portable camera and sound equipment allowed an intimate relationship between filmmaker and subject. The line blurs between documentary and narrative and some works are very personal, such as Marlon Riggs's Tongues Untied (1989) and Black Is...Black Ain't (1995), which mix expressive, poetic, and rhetorical elements and stresses subjectivities rather than historical materials.Struggles for Representation African American Documentary Film and Video, edited by Phyllis R. Klotman and Janet K. Cutler,
Historical documentaries, such as the landmark 14-hour Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years (1986Part 1 and 1989Part 2) by Henry Hampton, 4 Little Girls (1997) by Spike Lee, The Civil War by Ken Burns, and UNESCO-awarded independent film on slavery 500 Years Later, express not only a distinctive voice but also a perspective and point of views. Some films such as The Thin Blue Line by Errol Morris incorporate stylized re-enactments, and Michael Moore's Roger & Me place far more interpretive control with the director. The commercial success of these documentaries may derive from this narrative shift in the documentary form, leading some critics to question whether such films can truly be called documentaries; critics sometimes refer to these works as "mondo films" or "docu-ganda." However, directorial manipulation of documentary subjects has been noted since the work of Flaherty, and may be endemic to the form due to problematic ontological foundations.
Documentary filmmakers are increasingly using social impact campaigns with their films. Social impact campaigns seek to leverage media projects by converting public awareness of social issues and causes into engagement and action, largely by offering the audience a way to get involved. Examples of such documentaries include Kony 2012, Salam Neighbor, Gasland, Living on One Dollar, and Girl Rising.
Although documentaries are financially more viable with the increasing popularity of the genre and the advent of the DVD, funding for documentary film production remains elusive. Within the past decade, the largest exhibition opportunities have emerged from within the broadcast market, making filmmakers beholden to the tastes and influences of the broadcasters who have become their largest funding source.
Modern documentaries have some overlap with television forms, with the development of "reality television" that occasionally verges on the documentary but more often veers to the fictional or staged. The "making-of" documentary shows how a movie or a video game was produced. Usually made for promotional purposes, it is closer to an advertisement than a classic documentary.
Modern lightweight digital video cameras and computer-based editing have greatly aided documentary makers, as has the dramatic drop in equipment prices. The first film to take full advantage of this change was Martin Kunert and Eric Manes' Voices of Iraq, where 150 DV cameras were sent to Iraq during the war and passed out to Iraqis to record themselves.
Bodysong was made in 2003 and won a British Independent Film Award for "Best British Documentary."
The 2004 film Genesis shows animal and plant life in states of expansion, decay, sex, and death, with some, but little, narration.
This form of documentary release is becoming more popular and accepted as costs and difficulty with finding TV or theatrical release slots increases. It is also commonly used for more "specialist" documentaries, which might not have general interest to a wider TV audience. Examples are military, cultural arts, transport, sports, animals, etc.
Poetic documentaries, which first appeared in the 1920s, were a sort of reaction against both the content and the rapidly crystallizing grammar of the early fiction film. The poetic mode moved away from continuity editing and instead organized images of the material world by means of associations and patterns, both in terms of time and space. Well-rounded characters"lifelike people"were absent; instead, people appeared in these films as entities, just like any other, that are found in the material world. The films were fragmentary, impressionistic, lyrical. Their disruption of the coherence of time and spacea coherence favored by the fiction films of the daycan also be seen as an element of the modernist counter-model of cinematic narrative. The "real world"Nichols calls it the "historical world"was broken up into fragments and aesthetically reconstituted using film form. Examples of this style include Joris Ivens' Rain (1928), which records a passing summer shower over Amsterdam; László Moholy-Nagy's Play of Light: Black, White, Grey (1930), in which he films one of his own kinetic sculptures, emphasizing not the sculpture itself but the play of light around it; Oskar Fischinger's abstract animated films; Francis Thompson's N.Y., N.Y. (1957), a city symphony film; and Chris Marker's Sans Soleil (1982).
Expository documentaries speak directly to the viewer, often in the form of an authoritative commentary employing voiceover or titles, proposing a strong argument and point of view. These films are rhetorical, and try to persuade the viewer. (They may use a rich and sonorous male voice.) The (voice-of-God) commentary often sounds "objective" and omniscient. Images are often not paramount; they exist to advance the argument. The rhetoric insistently presses upon us to read the images in a certain fashion. Historical documentaries in this mode deliver an unproblematic and "objective" account and interpretation of past events.
Examples: TV shows and films like Biography, America's Most Wanted, many science and nature documentaries, Ken Burns' The Civil War (1990), Robert Hughes' The Shock of the New (1980), John Berger's Ways of Seeing (1972), Frank Capra's wartime Why We Fight series, and Pare Lorentz's The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936).
Reflexive documentaries do not see themselves as a transparent window on the world; instead, they draw attention to their own constructedness, and the fact that they are representations. How does the world get represented by documentary films? This question is central to this subgenre of films. They prompt us to "question the authenticity of documentary in general." It is the most self-conscious of all the modes, and is highly skeptical of "realism". It may use Brechtian alienation strategies to jar us, in order to "defamiliarize" what we are seeing and how we are seeing it.
Performative documentaries stress subjective experience and emotional response to the world. They are strongly personal, unconventional, perhaps poetic and/or experimental, and might include hypothetical enactments of events designed to make us experience what it might be like for us to possess a certain specific perspective on the world that is not our own, e.g. that of black, gay men in Marlon Riggs's Tongues Untied (1989) or Jenny Livingston's Paris Is Burning (1991). This subgenre might also lend itself to certain groups (e.g. women, ethnic minorities, gays and lesbians, etc.) to "speak about themselves". Often, a battery of techniques, many borrowed from fiction or avant-garde films, are used. Performative docs often link up personal accounts or experiences with larger political or historical realities.
Another problem is the lack of postproduction script or the poor quality of the transcription. A correct transcription is essential for a translator to do their work properly, however many times the script is not even given to the translator, which is a major impediment since documentaries are characterised by "the abundance of terminological units and very specific proper names".Matamala, A. (2009). Main Challenges in the Translation of Documentaries. In J. Cintas (Ed.), New Trends in Audiovisual Translation (pp. 109–120). Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters, p. 111 When the script is given to the translator, it is usually poorly transcribed or outright incorrect making the translation unnecessarily difficult and demanding because all of the proper names and specific terminology have to be correct in a documentary programme in order for it to be a reliable source of information, hence the translator has to check every term on their own. Such mistakes in proper names are for instance: "Jungle Reinhard instead of Django Reinhart, Jorn Asten instead of Jane Austen, and Magnus Axle instead of Aldous Huxley".
The documentary Beetles, Record Breakers makes use of 15 different terms to refer to beetles in less than 30 minutes (longhorn beetle, cellar beetle, stag beetle, burying beetle or gravediggers, sexton beetle, tiger beetle, bloody nose beetle, tortoise beetle, diving beetle, devil's coach horse, weevil, click beetle, malachite beetle, oil beetle, cockchafer), apart from mentioning other animals such as horseshoe bats or meadow brown butterflies.Matamala, A. (2009). Main Challenges in the Translation of Documentaries. In J. Cintas (Ed.), New Trends in Audiovisual Translation (pp. 109–120). Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters, p. 113
This poses a real challenge for the translators because they have to render the meaning, i.e. find an equivalent, of a very specific, scientific term in the target language and frequently the narrator uses a more general name instead of a specific term and the translator has to rely on the image presented in the programme to understand which term is being discussed in order to transpose it in the target language accordingly.Matamala, A. (2009). Main Challenges in the Translation of Documentaries. In J. Cintas (Ed.), New Trends in Audiovisual Translation (pp. 109–120). Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters, p. 113–114 Additionally, translators of minorised languages often have to face another problem: some terms may not even exist in the target language. In such cases, they have to create new terminology or consult specialists to find proper solutions. Also, sometimes the official nomenclature differs from the terminology used by actual specialists, which leaves the translator to decide between using the official vocabulary that can be found in the dictionary, or rather opting for spontaneous expressions used by real experts in real life situations.Matamala, A. (2009). Main Challenges in the Translation of Documentaries. In J. Cintas (Ed.), New Trends in Audiovisual Translation (pp. 109–120). Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters, p. 114–115
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