Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Video
1) ‘We believe that the cinema’s capacity for getting around, for
observing and selecting from life itself, can be exploited in a new and
vital art form. The studio films largely ignore this possibility of opening
up the screen on the real world. They photograph acted stories against
artificial backgrounds. Documentary would photograph the living scene
and the living story.’
2) ‘We believe that the original (or native) actor, and the original (or
native) scene, are better guides to a screen interpretation of the
modern world. They give cinema a greater fund of material. They give
it power over a million and one images. They give it power of
interpretation over more complex and astonishing happenings in the
real world than the studio mind can conjure up or the studio
mechanician recreate. ‘
3) ‘We believe that the materials and the stories thus taken from the
raw can be finer (more real in the philosophic sense) than the acted
article. Spontaneous gesture has a special value on the screen. Cinema
has a sensational capacity for enhancing the movement which tradition
has formed or time worn smooth. Its arbitrary rectangle specially
reveals movement; it gives it maximum pattern in space and time. Add
to this that documentary can achieve an intimacy of knowledge and
effect impossible to the shim-sham mechanics of the studio, and the
lily-fingered interpretations of the metropolitan actor.’
1
"original" scene are better guides than their fiction counterparts to
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
views align with Vertov's contempt for dramatic fiction as "bourgeois
excess", though with considerably more subtlety. Grierson's definition
of documentary as "creative treatment of actuality" has gained some
acceptance, though it presents philosophical questions about
documentaries containing staging’s and reenactments.
In his essays, Dziga Vertov argued for presenting "life as it is" (that is,
life filmed surreptitiously) and "life caught unawares" (life provoked or
surprised by the camera).
History
Pre-1900
1900-1920
Travelogue films were very popular in the early part of the 20th
century. Some were known as "scenics". Scenics were among the most
2
popular sort of films at the time.[4] An important early film to move
beyond the concept of the scenic was In the Land of the Head Hunters
(1914), which embraced primitivism and exoticism in a staged story
presented as truthful re-enactments of the life of Native Americans.
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.
1920s
Romanticism
Kino-Pravda
3
Dziga Vertov was central to the Russian Kino-Pravda (literally, "cinema
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
1920s-1940s
Pare Lorentz's The Plow That Broke the Plains and The River 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 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.
In Canada the Film Board, set up by Grierson, was created 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).
4
such as J. B. Priestley. Among the most well known films of the
movement are Night Mail and Coal Face.
1950s-1970s
Cinéma-vérité
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.
5
overlooked, but their input to the films was so vital that they were
often given co-director credits.
Political weapons
Modern documentaries
Box office analysts have noted that this film genre has become
increasingly successful in theatrical release with films such as Super
Size Me, March of the Penguins and An Inconvenient Truth among the
most prominent examples. 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.
6
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.
Compilation films were pioneered in 1927 by Esfir Schub with The Fall
of the Romanov Dynasty. More recent examples include Point of Order
(1964), directed by Emile de Antonio about the McCarthy hearings and
The Atomic Cafe which is made entirely out of found footage that
various agencies of the U.S. government made about the safety of
nuclear radiation (e.g., telling troops at one point that it's safe to be
irradiated as long as they keep their eyes and mouths shut). Similarly,
The Last Cigarette combines the testimony of various tobacco
company executives before the U.S. Congress with archival
propaganda extolling the virtues of smoking.