The History Of Documentaries Film Studies Essay

The History Of Documentaries Film Studies Essay infotainment claim is a broad category of visual expression that is based on the attempt, in one fashion or an other(a), to catalogue reality. A docudrama painting is a characterization that attempts, in some way, to document reality. withal though the scenes argon c arefully chosen and arranged, they are not scripted, and the bulk in a infotainment inject hold are not actors. infotainment film is a term that stresses the recording or documenting function of the camera. A pip infotainment intends to be a cinematic document in the historic record. The documental classification accommodates form ally structured and seemingly unstructured films that are both definitely non-fictional or not entirely fictional or scripted. The term is said to cast been coined by British pioneer of the non-fiction film, antic Grierson, who is sometimes cal conduct the father of classical nonsubjective for his views that documental film sh ould set actuality scarcely not to the exclusion of creative, imagi inherent treatment of the film materials and cinematic techniques.Documentary filmmakers seek to render the world as they see it. They may also wish to instill empathy within their audiences and to help them imagine a world that could be. In other words, documentary makers are obliged to document factuality, but their work does not preclude advocacy of ideas or alter representation of the worlds they document. Documentary is commonly used to distinguish films whose purpose is to inform report, inform, or expound from those films whose purpose is to persuade or argue a case, where the term propaganda is sometimes used as an alternative to documentary. Propaganda films are seen as manipulative, the formalist extreme in distortion for the purpose of changing the thoughts or actions of the audience. In both cases, however, the film is considered a documentary in the sense that it is to a greater extent(prenomi nal)(prenominal) faithful to factuality than fictional filmsat least(prenominal) on the surface.Documentary films hold played a long and venerable role in the heathen bread and butter of modern society, whether the films in question are home pics, judicature propaganda, ethnographical records, and historical studies, explorations of the natural world, film essays, or any of the other varieties of forms that fall under the heading of non-fiction film. With the advent of digital cameras and computer-based non-linear editing programs, more and more stack have access to the tools for creating such(prenominal) films, fueling a vast new interest in the documentary form, and through their creative activity bringing to light new and unexpected arenas of the human experience.Although documentary film originally referred to movies shot on film stock, it has subsequently expanded to include video and digital doings that can be either rule-to-video or make for a television serial pu blication. 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.Sometimes, a documentary film may rely on voice- everyplace narration to describe what is happening in the footage in other films, the footage will speak for itself. Often, a documentary film will include interviews with the people in the film.The soonest film of any sort was a documentary film. These induced one shots of actual even offts, such as a boat leaving shore, and were referred to as actuality films. Other earlyish forms of the documentary film included propaganda films, such as the famous Leni Riefenstahl movie, Triumph of the Will, which made Adolph Hitler appear heroic.One type of documentary film that became prevalent in the 1950s was called cinema verite, which is the literal cut translation of cinema truth. Cinema verite is a type of documentary film that includes no narration the camera simply follows the subject. One famous spokesperson of such a film is Dont Look Back a archives film about Bob Dylan, c all overing his tour of the United realm in 1965.In recent eld, the documentary film genre has egress more fashionable and high profile, though it is still far less(prenominal) popular generally than the action or adventure film genre. legion(predicate) of todays examples of the documentary film have a political or other than controversial agenda, such as An inconvenient Truth, Super Size Me, and Fahrenheit(postnominal) 911. Michael Moores Fahrenheit 911, which documented the Bush familys ties to Saudi Arabia and Osama bin Laden, was the most popular documentary film of all time, with over $228 million US Dollars in ticket sales.HISTORYPRE-1900The film maker Mustafah Arrafat used the term documentary in 1926 to refer to any nonfiction film medium, including travelogues and instructional films. The earliest moving pictures were, by definition, documentaries. They were single-shot moments holdd on film a train come in a station, a boat docking, or a factory of people getting off work. Early film (pre-1900) was dominated by the bric-a-brac of showing an event. These short films were called actuality films. (The term documentary was not coined until 1926.) Very unforesightful storytelling took place before the turn of the century, due mostly to technological limitations, namely, that movie cameras could hold only very small amounts of film. Thus many of the initial films are a minute or less in length, as made by Auguste and Louis Lumire.1900-1920Travelogue films were very popular in the early part of the 20th century. Some were known as scenics. Scenics were among the most popular sort of films at the time.2 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 exotism in a staged story presented as truthful re-enactments of the life of Native Americans.Also during this period Frank Hurleys documentary film about the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition South was released (1919). It documented the failed Antarctic expedition led by Ernest Shackleton in 1914.1920sROMANTICISMWith Robert J. Flahertys Nanook of the North in 1922, documentary film embraced romanticism Flaherty went on to film a number of firmly staged romantic films, ordinarily showing how his subjects would have lived 100 years earlier and not how they lived right then (for instance, in Nanook of the North Flaherty did not allow his subjects to shoot a walrus with a nearby shotgun, but had them use a harpoon instead).Some of Flahertys staging, such as building a roofless igloo for interior shots, was done to accommodate the film technology of the time.The city symphonyThe continental, or realist, tradition focused on humans within human-made environments, and included the so-called city symphony films such as Berlin, Symphony of a c ity (of which Grierson noted in an article3 that Berlin delineate what a documentary should not be), Rien que les Heures, and manhood with the Movie Camera. These films tend to feature people as products of their environment, and lean to fightds the avant-garde.Kino-PravdaDziga Vertov was central to the Russian Kino-Pravda (literally, cinema truth) newsreel serial of the 1920s. Vertov believed the camera with its varied lenses, shot-counter shot editing, time-lapse, ability to slow interrogation, stop motion and fast-motion could render reality more accurately than the human eye, and made a film philosophy out of it.Newsreel traditionThe 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, oft of the battle footage from the early 20th century was staged the cameramen would usually do on sit e after a major battle and re-enact scenes to film them.1920s-1940sThe propagandist tradition consists of films made with the explicit purpose of persuading an audience of a point. One of the most notorious propaganda films is Leni Riefenstahls film Triumph of the Will. Frank Capras why We Fight series was a newsreel series in the United States, commission 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).In Britain, a number of different filmmakers came together under canful Grierson. They became known as the Documentary Film Movement. John Grierson, Alberto Cavalcanti, Harry Watt, sweet basil Wright and Humphrey Jennings amongst others succeeded in blending propaganda, information an d education with a more poetic aesthetic approach to documentary. Examples of their work include Drifters (John Grierson), Song of Ceylon (Harry Watt), Fires Were Started and A daybook for Timothy (Humphrey Jennings). Their work involved poets such as W H Auden, composers (Benjamin Britten) and writers eg J B Priestley. Perhaps amongst the most well known films of the faeces are Night Mail and Coal Face1950s-1970sCinma-vritCinma vrit (or the closely related direct cinema) was dependent on some proficient advances in order to exist light, quiet and reliable cameras, and portable adjust sound.Cinma vrit 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 unfol ded.Although the terms are sometimes used interchangeably, there are important differences between cinma vrit (Jean Rouch) and the North American Direct Cinema (or more accurately Cinma direct, pioneered among others by French Canadian Michel Brault, Pierre Perrault, Americans Robert Drew, Richard Leacock, Frederick Wiseman and Albert and David Maysles).The directors of the travail occupy different viewpoints on their degree of involvement. Kopple and Pennebaker, for instance, choose non-involvement (or at least no overt involvement), and Perrault, Rouch, Koenig, and Kroitor favor direct involvement or even provocation when they deem it necessary.The films Primary and Crisis Behind a Presidential commission (both produced by Robert Drew), Harlan County, USA (directed by Barbara Kopple), Dont Look Back (D. A. Pennebaker), Lonely boy (Wolf Koenig and Roman Kroitor), Chronicle of a Summer (Jean Rouch) and Golden Gloves (Gilles Groulx) are all frequently deemed cinma vrit films.The fundamentals of the style include pastime a person during a crisis with a moving, oftentimes handheld, camera to capture more personal reactions. There are no sit-down interviews, and the shot ratio (the amount of film shot to the finished product) is very high, often reaching 80 to one. From there, editors find and sculpt the work into a film. The editors of the movement such as Werner Nold, Charlotte Zwerin, Muffie Myers, Susan Froemke, and Ellen Hovde are often overlooked, but their input to the films was so vital that they were often given co-director credits.Famous cinma vrit/direct cinema films include Les Raquetteurs, Showman, Salesman, The Children Were Watching, Primary, Behind a Presidential Crisis, and Grey Gardens. redbrick DOCUMENTARIESBox office analysts have noted that this film genre has arrest increasingly successful in theatrical release with films such as Bowling for Columbine, Super Size Me, Fahrenheit 9/11, March of the Penguins and An Inconvenient Truth a mong the most prominent examples. Compared to dramatic register films, documentaries typically have far lower budgets which makes them attractive to film companies because even a peculiar(a) theatrical release can be highly profitable. Fahrenheit 9/11 set a new record for documentary profits, earning over US$228 million in ticket sales and selling over 3 million DVDs.The nature of documentary films has changed in the past 20 years from the cinema verit tradition. Landmark films such as The Thin sad Line by Errol Morris incorporated stylized re-enactments, and Michael Moores Roger and Me placed far more interpretive control with the director. Indeed, the commercial success of these documentaries may derive from this narrative shift in the documentary form, leading some critics to question whether such films can truly be called documentaries critics sometimes refer to these works as mondo films or docu-ganda. However, directorial manipulation of documentary subjects has been noted since the work of Flaherty, and may be endemic to the form.The recent success of the documentary genre, and the advent of DVDs, has made documentaries financially viable even without a cinema release. Yet funding for documentary film production remains elusive, and within the past decade the largest parade opportunities have emerged from within the broadcast market, making filmmakers beholden to the tastes and influences of the broadcasters who have pay back their largest funding source.6Modern documentaries have some overlap with television forms, with the teaching 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.Modern lightweight digital video cameras and computer-based editing have greatly aided documentary makers, as has the dramatic dro p in equipment prices. An example of a 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.THE EARLIEST DOCUMENTARIESOriginally, the earliest documentaries in the US and France were either short newsreels, instructional pictures, records of current events, or travelogues (termed actualities) without any creative story-telling, narrative, or staging. The first off attempts at film-making, by the Lumiere Brothers and others, were literal documentaries, e.g., a train go in a station, factory workers leaving a plant, etc.The first documentary re-creation, Sigmund Lubins one-reel The Unwritten Law (1907) (subtitled A Thrilling Drama Based on the Thaw-White Tragedy) dramatized the true-life murder on June 25, 1906 of prominent architect Stanford White by mentally unstable and jealous millionaire husband Harry Kendall Thaw over the affections of c horine Evelyn Nesbit (who appeared as herself). Alluring chorine Nesbit would become a brief sensation and the foundation garment for Richard Fleischers biopic film The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing (1955), visualized by Joan Collins, and E.L. Doctorows musical and film Ragtime (1981), portrayed by an Oscar-nominated Elizabeth McGovern.The first official documentary or non-fiction narrative film was Robert Flahertys Nanook of the North (1922), an ethnographic look at the harsh life of Canadian Inuit Eskimos living in the Arctic, although some of the films scenes of obsolete customs were staged. Flaherty, often regarded as the Father of the Documentary Film, also made the marge film Moana (1926) about Samoan peaceful islanders, although it was less successful.The term documentary was first used in a review of Flahertys 1926 film. His first sound documentary feature film was Man of Aran (1934), regarding the rugged Aran islanders/fishermen located west of Irelands Galway Bay. Flahe rtys fourth (and last) major feature documentary was his most controversial, Louisiana Story (1948), filmed on location in Louisianas wild bayou country.Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, better known for King Kong (1933), directed the landmark documentary Grass A Nations Battle for Life (1925), the first documentary epic, which traced the travels of the Bakhtyari tribe in Persia during their migrational wanderings to find fresh grazing lands. The filmmakers side by side(p) film was the part-adventure, travel documentary filmed on location in the Siamese (Thailand) jungle, Chang A Drama of the Wilderness (1927), about a native tribal family.Other European documentary film-makers made a series of so-called non-fictional city symphonies. Alberto Cavalcanti and Walter Ruttman directed Berlin Symphony of a Big City (1927, Ger.) about the German city in the late 1920s. Similarly, the Soviet Unions (and Dziga Vertovs) avante-garde, observational documentary The Man with a Movie Camera (1929) presented typical periodic life within several Soviet cities (Moscow, Kiev, Odessa) through an exhilarating montage technique. And French director Jean Vigo made On the Subject of square-toed (1930). Sergei Eisensteins October (Oktyabr)/10 Days That Shook the World (1928, USSR) re-enacted in documentary-style, the days contact the Bolshevik Revolution, to commemorate the events 10th anniversary.