Documentary film began in 1895 with the short actuality films created by the Lumiere brothers to document real life. The first feature-length documentary was Nanook of the North in 1922, which staged scenes for dramatic effect. John Grierson coined the term "documentary" and emphasized poetic elements over social issues. Direct Cinema in the 1950s/60s used lighter cameras and synchronous sound to present social/political issues directly, pioneered by filmmakers like the Maysles brothers. Similarly, French Cinema Verite in the 1960s favored handheld cameras and location filming for a sense of authenticity. Mockumentaries later challenged audiences by using documentary techniques to fool viewers.

1. A Short History of DocumentaryA Short History of Documentary

2. Documentary began
when the first films were
invented by the Lumiere
brothers in 1895. The
Lumieres created a camera
that could only hold 50 feet
of film stock and their films
were short unedited clips
capturing the life around
them. These were called
‘Actualites’.

3. Un Train Arrivee (1895)
Their most famous film
simply shows a train
pulling into a station,
however audiences were
fascinated by these first
moving photographs as
they were able to see the
detail of movement
captured by a film camera
for the first time.

4. Documentary, as we know it today,
began with Nanook of
The North, made by Robert
Flaherty in 1922. In fact the word
‘documentary’ was invented by
John Grierson to describe this
film. Nanook was the first feature
length factual film and the first to
use what Grierson described as
‘the creative interpretation of
reality’. This meant that Flaherty
had staged most of the scenes for
the camera in order to make the
film more dramatic and exciting for
the audience.

5. Grierson went on to head the
GPO film unit in England in the
1930s and he became a major
exponent of this poetic-realist
approach to documentary.
Nightmail (1936) began as an
informational film about the mail
train from London to Edinburgh but
the filming and editing emphasised
the poetic elements of film form:
movement, rhythm, light and sound.
Critics of Grierson accused him of
neglecting the social and political
issues in his films in favour of a
modernist approach that celebrated
machinery more than human beings.

6. • It was this backlash that led to the next major
development of documentaries in the 1950s and 1960s.
Direct Cinema, a movement that began in the
United States, aimed to present social and political
issues in a direct, unmediated way giving the impression
that events are recorded exactly as they happened
without the involvement of the film-maker. The
development of smaller lighter film cameras using
smaller film stock (16mm as opposed to 35mm film
which is used in feature films and in documentaries up
to that time) pioneered by news camera men allowed
the camera to be held on the shoulder (hand-held) and
to film in a more spontaneous manner.

7. Key names in this
movement are D.A.
Pennebaker, The
Mayles Brothers and
Fred Wiseman. The
modern social issue
documentary such as
Supersize Me has its
origins in Direct Cinema.
The filmmaker usually has a
political and/or social
agenda and seeks to present
the events as ‘real’ even
though they are in full
control of the editing
process.

8. • At the same time as Direct
Cinema was being developed in
America, a similar movement
was happening in France called
Cinema Verite (‘cinema
truth’). Cinema Verite is a
minimalist style of film making
that conveys the sense that the
viewer is given a direct view of
what was actually happening in
front of the camera without the
artifice usually incorporated in
the film-making process.
Cinema Verite favours hand-
held camera, natural lighting,
location filming, and direct
sound.

9. Jean Rouch was an important documentarian
working in this style in the 1960s. However Cinema
Verite techniques have also been used by drama
film-makers such as Ken Loach leading to the
term ‘drama-documentary’ being used to describe
films like Cathy Come Home

10. The use of cinema verite techniques can make a
film seems more ‘real’ and truthful to an audience
and in recent time film-makers have used the codes
and conventions of the documentary to fool
audiences into thinking a programme or film is
factual when it isn’t. This form of film-making is
called mockumentary

11. Because mockumentaries
demonstrate how easily the codes
and conventions of documentary can
be faked, they can often cause us as
viewers to consider why we place so
much faith in documentary itself.