Documentary film
Based on Wikipedia: Documentary film
In 1922, a filmmaker named Robert Flaherty released a movie about an Inuit man named Nanook. It became a sensation. There was just one problem: almost everything in it was staged.
Flaherty wouldn't let Nanook use the shotgun he actually hunted with. Instead, he made him hunt walrus with a harpoon—the way his ancestors might have done a century earlier. He built a special igloo with no roof so his cameras could capture interior shots with enough light. The film presented itself as a window into authentic Arctic life, but it was really a carefully constructed fantasy of what that life used to be.
This tension—between capturing reality and crafting a compelling story—has defined documentary filmmaking from its very beginning. And that beginning happened earlier than you might think.
Before Movies Could Tell Stories
The very first films weren't documentaries in any meaningful sense. They were novelties. A train pulling into a station. Workers leaving a factory. A boat arriving at a dock. These "actuality films," as they were called, lasted about a minute—sometimes less—because that's all the technology of the 1890s could manage.
The Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, pioneered this form in France. Their films had no narrative, no message, no argument. They simply showed something happening. People paid to watch them for the same reason you might stop to watch a street performer: it was new, it was interesting, and then you moved on.
But even at this primitive stage, filmmakers discovered something crucial: people will pay to see themselves on screen. Factory workers who appeared in a Lumière film would gladly pay admission to watch it. This commercial insight would shape the medium for decades to come.
The Surgeons and the Scientists
While most early filmmakers chased entertainment, a few recognized film's potential for something more serious.
In May 1896, a Polish filmmaker named Bolesław Matuszewski recorded surgical operations in hospitals in Warsaw and Saint Petersburg. Two years later, he was filming alongside French surgeon Eugène-Louis Doyen, documenting one procedure after another. By 1906, Doyen had recorded more than sixty operations on film.
Why bother? Doyen gave a remarkable answer: watching the films taught him to correct mistakes he hadn't even known he was making. Film became a mirror that showed him his own blind spots.
Around the same time in Bucharest, a Romanian neurology professor named Gheorghe Marinescu was doing something similar. Between 1898 and 1901, he filmed patients with various walking disorders—organic paralysis, hysteria treated with hypnosis, progressive locomotor ataxia. He called these works "studies with the help of the cinematograph" and published his findings in a French medical journal, including sequential frames from the films.
Auguste Lumière himself later acknowledged Marinescu's pioneering work, admitting he'd been too busy with other concerns to pursue biological studies when he first encountered it. "I must say I forgot those works," Lumière wrote in 1924, "and I am thankful to you that you reminded them to me."
These medical films established something important: documentary could be a tool for understanding, not just a curiosity for entertainment.
The Word "Documentary" Arrives
For the first three decades of cinema, nobody called these films "documentaries." The word didn't exist in this context until 1926, when a Scottish filmmaker named John Grierson used it in a review of Robert Flaherty's film Moana.
Grierson wrote the review under the pen name "The Moviegoer" for the New York Sun. In praising Flaherty's film about life in Samoa, he reached for a new term to describe what made it different from fiction films. The word stuck.
But Grierson didn't just name the form—he defined it. His phrase "creative treatment of actuality" became the standard definition for decades. Notice how slippery that phrase is. "Actuality" suggests truth, reality, things as they are. But "creative treatment" acknowledges that a filmmaker shapes that reality through choices about what to film, how to film it, and how to edit it together.
This was in direct tension with another approach championed by the Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov. Vertov believed in "life as it is"—footage captured secretly, without the subjects' knowledge that they were being filmed—and "life caught unawares," meaning moments captured by surprising or provoking people with the camera. For Vertov, the filmmaker's presence should be invisible or disruptive, never collaborative.
These two philosophies still battle today. Is a documentary more truthful when it captures spontaneous reality, or when it carefully constructs a narrative that conveys deeper truths? There's no settled answer.
The City as Symphony
In the 1920s and 1930s, a remarkable genre emerged that treated cities the way composers treat orchestras.
The "city symphony" films were exactly what they sound like: visual poems about urban life, edited with the rhythm and structure of musical compositions. Walter Ruttmann's Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis from 1927 captured the German capital's daily rhythm from dawn to night. Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera, released in 1929, portrayed Soviet urban life through a dizzying array of camera techniques—slow motion, fast motion, freeze frames, split screens, superimpositions.
These weren't straightforward documents of city life. They were influenced by the artistic movements of their era: Cubism, Constructivism, Impressionism. They fragmented reality and reassembled it into something new. A historian might describe them as the intersection between documentary and avant-garde film—documentaries that were also art experiments.
The genre spread across continents. Manhatta showed New York in 1921. São Paulo, Sinfonia da Metrópole captured Brazil's largest city in 1929. Even Moscow got its symphony treatment in 1927, directed by Mikhail Kaufman, who happened to be Dziga Vertov's brother.
One particularly evocative example was Moscow Clad in Snow from 1909—a contemplative film that simply watched the Russian capital under winter's blanket. Sometimes documentary meant stepping back and observing, rather than constructing an argument.
Romance and Deception
Remember Flaherty and his staged igloo? That approach defined an entire tradition of documentary filmmaking.
Flaherty didn't see any contradiction between documentary and staging. His films about the Inuit, about Samoan islanders, about Irish fishing communities consistently showed people living the way their grandparents might have lived—not the way they actually lived in the present. He was documenting a romanticized past that existed mainly in his imagination.
Hollywood noticed the commercial success of Nanook of the North and wanted more. Paramount Pictures sent filmmakers Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack to make similar "exotic" documentaries. They produced Grass in 1925, following the Bakhtiari people of Persia on their annual migration, and Chang in 1927, about a family in the jungles of Siam.
Cooper and Schoedsack would later channel their taste for adventure and exotic settings into something different: the 1933 fiction film King Kong. The line between documentary and fiction was always blurrier than it appeared.
Propaganda Wars
Documentary's power to shape opinion didn't escape notice from governments.
The most notorious example remains Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will from 1935. Commissioned by Adolf Hitler himself, the film transformed the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg into a spectacle of power. Riefenstahl deployed innovative camera techniques—moving cameras, aerial photography, dramatic angles—to make the Nazi movement appear vast, unstoppable, and historically inevitable.
The film remains studied today, partly for its technical innovations and partly as a case study in how documentary techniques can serve totalitarian ends. It's both a landmark of the form and a warning about its potential for manipulation.
But propaganda documentaries weren't only a fascist tool. On the political left, filmmakers Joris Ivens and Henri Storck made Borinage in 1931, documenting the harsh conditions of Belgian coal miners. The Spanish surrealist Luis Buñuel created Las Hurdes in 1933, a disturbing portrait of poverty in rural Spain that blurred the line between documentary observation and surrealist provocation.
In the United States, the government itself became a documentary producer during the New Deal era. Pare Lorentz made The Plow That Broke the Plains in 1936, connecting the Dust Bowl environmental catastrophe to agricultural mismanagement, and The River in 1938, making the case for flood control and conservation. These films mixed ecological awareness with government messaging—documentaries in service of policy.
When World War Two arrived, the U.S. government commissioned director Frank Capra—best known for feel-good Hollywood fare like It Happened One Night—to create the Why We Fight series. Running from 1942 to 1944, these films were explicit persuasion, designed to convince American audiences that the war was necessary and just.
The British Movement
Across the Atlantic, John Grierson—the man who coined the word "documentary"—wasn't just theorizing. He was building institutions.
Grierson assembled a remarkable group of filmmakers in Britain who became known as the Documentary Film Movement. Working under government sponsorship, they created films that were simultaneously propaganda, public information, and genuine art.
The results could be surprising. Night Mail, released in 1936, documented the postal train that ran overnight from London to Scotland. On paper, it sounds bureaucratic. But the film featured a score by the composer Benjamin Britten and a poem commissioned from W.H. Auden, one of the era's most celebrated poets. The mundane machinery of mail delivery became something almost lyrical.
Similar crossovers marked other films from the movement. Coal Face featured another Britten score and Auden collaboration. Humphrey Jennings, perhaps the most poetic filmmaker in the group, made Fires Were Started during the London Blitz and A Diary for Timothy as the war ended. The novelist J.B. Priestley contributed writing.
Grierson took his institution-building skills to Canada as well, establishing the National Film Board. The justification was wartime propaganda—countering Nazi Germany's sophisticated psychological warfare campaigns—but the organization outlasted the war and continued making documentaries for decades.
What Is Truth in Documentary?
The film scholar Bill Nichols has observed that documentary remains "a practice without clear boundaries." That fuzziness isn't a bug—it's fundamental to the form.
Consider the basic question: what makes something a documentary rather than a fiction film? Both involve cameras. Both involve editing. Both involve choices about what to show and what to leave out. Both can include staged scenes, reenactments, and carefully composed shots.
The American film critic Pare Lorentz proposed a simple definition: a documentary is "a factual film which is dramatic." But this raises more questions than it answers. How factual? Dramatic in what way?
Other scholars argue that what distinguishes documentary is intent—the filmmaker's purpose in conveying a perspective on real events, people, or places. Scholar Betsy McLane suggests that documentaries exist specifically to let filmmakers share their views on subjects they find significant. The form offers "new perspectives which may not be prevalent in traditional media."
This matters more than it might seem. If documentaries are inherently perspectival—shaped by what filmmakers find important and want audiences to understand—then the naive expectation that they simply "show reality" misses the point entirely.
The Roots Run Deep
Before there were documentary films, there was documentary photography.
Photographers like Mathew Brady made their reputations capturing images of the American Civil War. A single photograph could convey complex truths about historical events in ways that written descriptions couldn't match. The camera seemed to offer direct access to reality—a mechanical witness that didn't interpret or embellish.
This belief in the camera's objectivity transferred to film. The earliest actuality films traded on exactly this promise: here is reality, captured and preserved, available for anyone to see.
But the promise was always partly false. Even a single photograph involves choices: where to stand, when to click the shutter, what to include in the frame and what to leave out. Film multiplied these choices exponentially. Add editing—the selection and arrangement of shots—and the filmmaker's shaping hand becomes impossible to ignore.
Matuszewski, the Polish filmmaker who recorded surgical operations and wrote some of the earliest texts about cinema, understood this early. Writing in 1898, he argued for the creation of film archives to preserve visual materials. He recognized that film had documentary and historical value—but also that this value depended on careful preservation and contextualization.
The Newsreel Legacy
For most of the twentieth century, audiences encountered documentary most often through newsreels—short films shown before feature presentations in movie theaters.
Newsreels occupied an odd position. They presented themselves as news, as factual records of current events. But they were often staged. Battle footage from the early twentieth century was particularly unreliable; cameramen typically arrived after major engagements had ended and filmed reenactments rather than actual combat.
The Soviet director Dziga Vertov worked extensively in newsreels during the 1920s, producing a series called Kino-Pravda—literally "film truth" or "cinema truth." For Vertov, the newsreel wasn't just a commercial product but a philosophical project. He believed the camera could capture reality more accurately than the human eye, with its ability to slow down time, speed it up, freeze moments, and juxtapose images in ways human perception couldn't match.
This faith in the camera's superior vision would influence documentary theory for decades. It also raised troubling questions. If the camera shows us things differently than our eyes do, is it showing us reality more accurately—or transforming reality into something new?
The Ongoing Tension
Documentary film began with a simple promise: to show you something real. But from the very beginning, filmmakers discovered that "showing reality" required making it up.
Flaherty staged his Arctic scenes because authentic footage of Inuit life was impossible to capture with 1920s technology. War photographers arrived after battles because filming during combat was suicidal. Medical filmmakers worked in controlled settings because operating rooms don't accommodate camera crews without preparation.
None of this meant the films were false, exactly. They were what Grierson called "creative treatments of actuality"—shaped versions of real life, crafted to communicate something true about the world even when the specific scenes were manufactured.
The scholar Nichols puts it well: documentary is a "mode of audience reception" as much as a filmmaking practice. We watch documentaries differently than fiction films, bringing different expectations about truth and evidence. What makes a film a documentary isn't only how it was made but how we understand it.
Into the Digital Age
The platforms we use to watch video have transformed documentary's reach.
For most of documentary's history, seeing a film required going somewhere—a theater, a school, a community center. Distribution was controlled by gatekeepers: studios, television networks, educational institutions. A documentary that couldn't find a distributor might never find an audience.
Platforms like YouTube and Dailymotion changed this fundamentally. A documentary can now reach global audiences without any traditional distributor. Geographic barriers have crumbled. So have some political barriers; documentaries banned in one country can be viewed by citizens who find ways around censorship.
This democratization has costs. Quality control has weakened. Propaganda can spread as easily as thoughtful investigation. The line between professional documentary and amateur video has blurred. But the core change is undeniable: more people can make documentaries, and more people can see them, than at any previous moment in history.
The Filmmaker's Responsibility
What obligations does a documentary filmmaker have?
The answer varies depending on who you ask. Some emphasize accuracy: don't misrepresent facts, don't deceive viewers about what's real and what's staged, don't take quotes out of context. Others emphasize fairness: give subjects a chance to respond to criticism, don't exploit vulnerable people, consider the impact your film might have on the lives it depicts.
Still others focus on honesty about perspective. Every documentary embeds a point of view. The filmmaker who pretends to objective neutrality may be less trustworthy than one who openly acknowledges their angle. At minimum, filmmakers have what one formulation calls "a responsibility to be truthful to their vision of the world without intentionally misrepresenting a topic."
But this language reveals the ongoing tension. "Truthful to their vision" acknowledges that documentaries are personal expressions, shaped by individual perspectives. "Without intentionally misrepresenting" sets a floor for honesty, but leaves enormous room for selective emphasis, careful framing, and persuasive editing.
Documentary remains, as it has always been, a practice without clear boundaries—a form that promises truth while necessarily constructing it.