documentary film,
motion picture that shapes
and interprets factual material for purposes of education or
entertainment. Documentaries have been made in one form or another
in nearly every country and have contributed significantly to
the development of realism in films.
John Grierson, a Scottish
educator who had studied mass communication in the United States,
adapted the term in the mid-1920s from the French word documentaire.
The documentary-style film, though, had been popular from the
earliest days of filmmaking. In Russia, events of the Bolshevik
ascent to power in 1917-18 were filmed, and the pictures were
used as propaganda. In 1922 the American director
Robert Flaherty presented
Nanook of the North, a record of Eskimo
life based on personal observation, which was the prototype
of many documentary films. At about the same time, the British
director
H. Bruce Woolfe reconstructed battles of World
War I in a series of compilation films, a type of documentary
that bases an interpretation of history on factual news material.
The German
Kulturfilme, such as the feature-length
film Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit (1925; Ways
to Health and Beauty), were in international demand.
The British documentary film movement, led by Grierson,
influenced world film production in the 1930s by such films
as Grierson's
Drifters (1929),
a description of the British herring fleet, and Night Mail
(1936), about the nightly mail train from London to Glasgow.
The United States, too, made significant contributions
to the genre. Early examples include two films directed by Pare
Lorentz: The Plow That Broke the Plains
(1936), set in America's dust bowl, and The River (1937),
a discussion of flood control.
The production of documentaries was stimulated by
World War II. The Nazi
government of wartime Germany used the nationalized film industry
to produce propaganda documentaries. The American director
Frank Capra presented the Why We Fight (1942-45) series
for the U.S. Army Signal Corps; Great Britain released London
Can Take It (1940), Target for Tonight (1941), and
Desert Victory (1943); and the National Film Board of
Canada turned out educational films in the national interest.
In the early 1950s attention once again focused on the documentary
in the British free cinema movement, led by a group of young
filmmakers concerned with the individual and his everyday experience.
Documentaries also became popular in television programming,
especially in the late 1960s and the early 1970s. See
also cinéma
vérité.
Copyright (c) 1995 Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Related Propaedia Topics:
Types of motion picture classified by intention; e.g., storytelling films, documentary films, news films, propaganda films, promotional films, educational films, short subject or filler films