Research - History of Documentaries

Here is a short interview with famous director Martin Scorsese on the history of Documentary films.

Documentary Film History

Throughout history, documentary film has encompassed a broad category of visual expression that is based on the attempt, in one fashion or another, to "document" reality.
Although "documentary film" originally referred to movies shot on film stock, it has expanded to include video and digital productions that can be either direct-to-video or made for a television series. Documentary, as it applies here, works to identify a "filmmaking practice, a cinematic tradition, and mode of audience reception" that is continually evolving and is without clear boundaries.

Scorsese begins his interview by mentioning the first evidence of 'documentary' style film from pre-1900s France in which they would film single shot pieces of footage of trains coming into a station or factory workers leaving work they would document everyday acts and this was called "actuality" filming at the time as the word "documentary" wasn't brought into place until 1926.

Between 1900-1920s Travelogue films were very popular in the early part of the 20th century. They were often referred to by distributors as "scenics." Scenics were among the most popular sort of films at the time.  Pathé is the best-known global manufacturer of such films of the early 20th century. A vivid example is Moscow clad in snow (1909). Also during this period Frank Hurley's documentary film, South (1919), about the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition was released. It documented the failed Antarctic expedition led by Ernest Shackleton in 1914, to some people this was the very first proper "documentary' film.

The city symphony
The continental, or realist, tradition focused on humans within human-made environments, and included the so-called "city symphony" films such as Walter Ruttmann's Berlin, Symphony of a City, Alberto Cavalcanti's Rien que les heures, and Dziga Vertov's Man with the Movie Camera. These films tend to feature people as products of their environment, and lean towards the avant-garde.

Kino-Pravda

Dziga Vertov was central to the Soviet Kino-Pravda (literally, "cinematic truth") newsreel series of the 1920s. Vertov believed the camera — with its varied lenses, shot-counter shot editing, time-lapse, ability to slow motion, stop motion and fast-motion — could render reality more accurately than the human eye, and made a film philosophy out of it.

Newsreel tradition

The newsreel tradition is important in documentary film; newsreels were also sometimes staged but were usually re-enactments of events that had already happened, not attempts to steer events as they were in the process of happening. For instance, much of the battle footage from the early 20th century was staged; the cameramen would usually arrive on site after a major battle and re-enact scenes to film them.

Between 1920s-1940s the Documentary genre of filmmaking turned into propaganda for Nazi Germany where films made with the explicit purpose of persuading an audience of a point. 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. 

Between 1950-1970 Cinéma vérité (or the closely related direct cinema) was dependent on some technical advances in order to exist: light, quiet and reliable cameras, and portable sync sound.

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.

Modern Documentaries

Compared to dramatic narrative films, documentaries typically have far lower budgets which makes them attractive to film companies because even a limited theatrical release can be highly profitable.

The nature of documentary films has expanded in the past 20 years from the cinema verité 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.

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 computer game was produced. Usually made for promotional purposes, it is closer to an advertisement than a classic documentary.

Films in the documentary form without words have been made since 1982, the Qatsi trilogy and the similar Baraka could be described as visual tone poems, with music related to the images, but no spoken content. Koyaanisqatsi (part of the Qatsi trilogy) consists primarily of slow motion and time-lapse photography of cities and many natural landscapes across the United States.