Quick Summary of Salient Points 1895 - present
- Actualities
- Flaherty
- Vertov / Kino Pravda
- British Documentary Movement
- Cinema Verite / Direct Cinema
- Reality TV
1895 - 1900
Experiments with moving image, 'Actualities': recording of actual events and people, actual people doing what they actually do. Earliest films were 'documents'.
eg, The Lumiere Brothers 'Workers Leaving Factory' (1895)
This 46 second long film shows workers at the Lumiere factory leaving at the end of the working day. Unedited 'slice of life'. There are actually three different versions of this scene, seemingly shot at different times of the year as the style of seasonal clothing alters from film to film.
1922
Robert Flaherty's film 'Nanook of the North' was created after original footage of Flaherty's journey to Northern Canada where he filmed inuit Nanook and his family, and their customs and way of life, was lost due to Flaherty dropping a cigarette onto flammable film stock on which he had filmed. To complete the film Flaherty returned to the North and asked Nanook to re-enact the everyday actions that Flaherty had filmed previously. After the release of the film, considered to be the first feature length documentary, Flaherty was criticised for recreating the action and staging what was supposed to be real.
1929
Dziga Vertov's 1929 film Man with a Movie Camera was a groundbreaking film which recorded life in Soviet Russia.
The film was intended to be without scenario, sets or titles and included footage of the cameraman filming as part of teh footage of the film (although you rarely see the footage that was actually being shot by the cameraman that is shown in the film). The editing of the film included montage and cross cuts.
Whilst researching the film further I found an excellent paper by Denisa Krausova which discusses the film and Vertov. Link: http://www.academia.edu/2114425/DZIGA_VERTOV_-_Man_with_a_Movie_Camera
Vertov's rejection of traditional filming techniques, was known as Kino Pravda (Cinema of Truth): a cinema intended to record life without imposing upon it. The belief being that the camera could reveal a greater truth.
1929 - 1940s
British Documentary Movement
The most influential figure in the British Documentary Movement was John Grierson who made his first feature in 1929. Grierson wanted to show the lives of ordinary, working Britons and in his words "use the cinema as a pulpit" to show the real socio-economic situation in the north of England. Grierson is also credited with coining the term 'documentary', which he defined as "the creative treatment of actuality".
There is a very informative article about Grierson and the British Documentary Movement by Michael Deacon on the Telegraph website: Link: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/8660672/The-British-Documentary-Movement.html
Another influential film maker in the British Documentary Movement was Humphrey Jennings, who, in the early thirties, worked as a film maker for the GPO Film Unit and was considered rather 'experimental' at the time. His documentary work included work on the Mass Observation project and war propaganda films such as 'Listen to Britain (1942) which was shown in North America and Canada which was a beautiful 'poetic visual' piece, without words, depicting life in Britain and reassuring Americans of the validity of their involvement in the war.
The BFI online site has a very informative page dedicated to the life and work of Humphrey Jennings which I found when researching this post. Link: http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/453623/
Listen to Britain (1942)
1960s
Cinema Verite / Direct Cinema
Although often referred to together, we were taught in class of the differences between Cinema Verite and Direct Cinema.
Practitioners of Cinema Verite, such as Jean Rouche would be involved with the subjects of their films and create an event to reveal the truth. Especially in the films of Rouche there would be a blurring between fiction and documentary.
The principle of Direct Cinema was to take the camera to an event and stand back, uninvolved, and wait for the truth to be revealed. An example of this capturing without being involved is the Bob Dylan film Don't Look Back by D A Pennybaker. In this film the film maker doesn't point the camera at the subject as he is addressing the press conference along with the journalists and TV crews but goes 'behind the scenes' intending to be unobtrusive and captures unguarded moments instead.
It was the advancements in technology that made the above styles of documentary possible. As cameras become more portable, and without the need for cables and lights and heavy, bulky equipment, film makers were able to gain access to aspects of life that were previously 'unfilmed'. And so we enter the present era of Observational Cinema...
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