Documentary film

The term �documentary� to describe a particular class of non-fiction film comes into general use in English by the early 1930s, but films having the characteristics of what would come to be regarded as documentaries pre-existed the application of the word.The concept of the photograph as a document � in the sense of the image being accurate and faithful evidence of what is before the camera�s lens � dates from the outset of the introduction of the technology in the 1840s.With the coming of cinematography, the camera�s capacity to capture the �real� was its initial selling point and, although, the cinema was soon captured for fiction, coverage of news events, actualities (as the French termed them), continued.Films of travel � �travelogues� (from 1908) or �documentaires romanc�s� � and the first ethnographic film appeared (1911), as did scientific movies both popular (Cheese Mites, 1903, Charles Urban) and scholarly (Mechanics of the Brain, 1926, Vesvolod Pudovkin�s footage shot in Pavlov�s lab).Governments were quick to see film�s value as propaganda (Urban�s Battle of the Somme, 1916); so were charities (Save the Children�s Russian Famine, 1921).European artists, such as the painter Fernand L�ger, experimented with the manipulation of images of the everyday often in a non-narrative form (Ballet mechanique, 1924).Overall, though, non-fiction film was resistant to the growing sophistication of the fictional cinema�s narrative techniques.�Documentary� came to describe a specific non-fiction cinema that melded the camera�s ability to document the world with fiction�s compelling narratives, but without so manipulating the original material that its claim on the real would become attenuate.Edward Curtis� In the Land of the Headhunters (1914), for instance, combined non-actors (aka �real� people), authentic settings and costumes (albeit in Curtis� established still-photographic style of recreations of the immediate past) with a fictional story that had no relationship with the Kwakiutl culture he was supposedly recording.He saw the work, nevertheless, as �documenting�, in some sense or another, Native American reality (Holm and Quimby, 1980).Robert Flaherty, a prospector filming in the Canadian Artic, failed in his earliest attempts to move beyond what he described as �a scene of this and a a scene of that�.no story� (Christopher, 2005:322); but Headhunters showed him how.In 1920/21, with specialised technology (hand-cranked Akeley cameras specifically designed for use in the wild), Flaherty filmed a dramatic 20 year-old true Inuit story of survival.He cast a trapper, Allakarialuk, renamed for the film �Nanook�, as the hero of his reconstruction of this tale.Leaving Curtis� fictional story-telling behind, Flaherty�s breakthrough was to

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