Auguste and Louis Lumiere’s most famous actuality film is L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat, or The Arrival Of A Train At La Ciotat Station, in which a continuous camera shot depicts a train arriving at La Ciotat station. At the first public film screening of a collection of Lumiere’s films in the Salon Indien of the Grand Café, Paris in 1895, legend has it that the fear and horror of the train advancing towards them proved too much for the audience, and that they jumped up, and moved back in a wave of panic. However, this remains unconfirmed, and another notable documentary by the brother’s is La Sortie de I’ Usine Lumiere a Lyon (Workers Leaving The Lumiere Factory), a 46 second film, in which mostly female workers leave the Lumiere Factory after completing a days work.
In 1903, Edwin S Porter created the film The Life of an American Fireman for the Edison Manufacturing Company, in which a fireman rescues a woman and child from a burning building. The film was the first to merge shots of both inside and outside the house, and blends stock footage of a fire engine leaving a station with staged sequences of the woman’s rescue. Also in that year, Porter went on the create The Great Train Robbery, a highly praised and historically important film. It was partly a documentary film, as it was based on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’s robbery of a train, with it’s most famous scene consisting of an outlaw firing his gun directly at the camera, causing a natural ducking reaction from the audience at the time.
In 1906, The Story of The Kelly Gang, based on the true story of notorious outlaw Ned Kelly, was made in Australia, and at 70 minutes long, was the longest narrative drama/ biography seen ever in Australia and possibly even the world. In 1914, In The Land Of The Head Hunters was created by Edward S Curtis, concerning the world of the Kwakwaka'wakw peoples of the Queen Charlotte Strait region of the Central Coast Of British Columbia, Canada. However, to call the film a documentary is a controversial issue, as although it is very accurate in it’s representations of the people’s art, culture and technology, there is a strong possibility that it may be mostly fictional.
Nanook Of The North, a 1922 documentary concerning the life of an Eskimo inuit (indigenous people inhabiting the Arctic regions of Canada) named Nanook and his family. The film is largely regarded as a masterpiece and the first feature length documentary, despite the possibility of some events being deceptively staged.
While Nanook Of The North embraced Romanticism, various other documentary sub genres were also born including Kino Pravda, powered by film makers who believed that video cameras could render reality even more accurately than the human eye, and newsreels which were usually re-enactments of events such as battles which had already happened.
City Symphony, which focused on humans in man made environments, was also born at a similar time, with avant garde influences, with films such as Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, which focused on a day in Berlin, from dawn to midnight, depicting how the city had overcome the enormous depression, and The Man With A Movie Camera, offering a similar dawn to dusk technique, this time focusing on several cities, including Moscow, Kiev and Odessa.
In the 1930’s quite a few propaganda films were created to persuade an audience to agree with a particular point, with the most notorious of these being Triumph Of The Will, a record of the 1934 Nazi Party Convention in Nuremburg in which Hitler is characterised as some sort of God, probably the most powerful propaganda film ever made.
Later in the 1930’s, The Plow That Broke the Plains served as a wake up call attempt to make people more aware of the dust bowl disasters affecting farmers in Oklaholma and Texas at that time, and The River focused on making people aware of natural disasters including floods from the prehistoric times to the Depression era. On the other hand, 1939’s The City, focused on the plans of development of the perfect city of the future, concerning a huge modern development which would hopefully improve the lives of people living in New York and Chicago, amongst other cities.
Round about this time, the National Film Board Of Canada was created and focused on creating newsreels to act against Nazi propaganda at the time. Frank Capra’s Why We Fight was a series of newsreels created between 1942 and 1944 in attempts to try to convince the US public to go to war.
Round about this time, the documentary film movement was created by John Grierson and featured directors such as Alberto Cavalcanti, Harry Watt, Basil Wright and Humphrey Jennings. Their main ambitions were to successfully blend a poetic artistic approach, with education, information and propaganda techniques.
The end of the Second World War brought about a decrease in the size of the budgets filmmakers could afford and due to this and the fact that the government no longer required propaganda documentaries, the amount of documentaries made also decreased.
The Louisiana Story, about a Cajun boy and his family who live next to an oil derrick, backed by the company Standard Oil, was made in 1948. However, it remains controversial whether the film can actually be regarded as a documentary, as the events and characters featured in the film are fictional and amateurs were handpicked by professionals to act out their roles.
Round about this time, numerous documentaries were also created to inform the public about the methods of surviving nuclear attacks, and to attempt to reassure people that they were safe despite the danger and reality of nuclear weapons during the Atomic Age.
At the end of the 1950s, documentaries were also being shown on television. One particularly memorable and famous short film of the 50’s was 1955’s Night and Fog which documents the hellish world inside the German concentration camps in WW2. Even at only 32 minutes long, the film is an unforgettable masterpiece which incorporates a relatively calm narration which only adds to the horrors and reality of the holocaust.
In the 1960s, the cinema verite movement, in which filming techniques such as voiceovers or lighting are kept to a minimal, and handheld cameras are often used, originated from France as an observational style of film-making depicting ordinary people in every-day situations. The movement was encouraged by the new invention of more lightweight, hand held cameras with synchronised sound, including the development of the first fully portable 16mm synchronised camera and sound system in 1959.
Examples of famous films in the movement include Primary (1960), Grey Gardens (1976), and Don’t Look Back, a 1967 documentary covering Bob Dylan’s 1965 United Kingdom concert tour.
The late 1960s brought about a number of documentaries due to the rise of political, social and sexual activism with added emphasis on Civil rights, anti war movements and the women’s movement. Independent, radical film collectives were also created to document and chronicle recent political and social events and to produce political protest films.
The 1970s introduced a new style of documentary filming- in first person. This allowed the audience to view what was on screen literally through the eyes of the speaker, was more realistic, and emerged as something of a unique genre. First person documentary techniques would later be explored in films such as The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield.
1971’s The Sorrow and the Pity was about the French Resistance during WW2, and the collaboration between the French Vichy government and Nazi Germany during the war. At a total length of 251 minutes, it was made in two parts, and only released on French television in 1981, after being banned for years. It won both the Special Award from the New York Film Critics Circle, and the Best Foreign Film Award from the National Board Of Review, as well as being nominated for Best Documentary Feature by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It successfully blended a mix of archive footage and contemporary interviews to great and original effect.
Also in the same year, New Day Films Co-operative was formed by filmmaking feminists Liane Brandon and Amalie Rothschild, which distributed independent social issue films made by independent filmmakers. It was the first distributor to be run entirely by and for other filmmakers.
1973 brought about An American Family, the first reality TV show which was aired in 12 episodes cut down from almost 300 hours of footage, and concerns the lives of the Loud family, including the divorce of Pat and Bill Loud, and the lifestyle of their homosexual son Lance in New York.
In 1983, Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out Of Balance was created as the first of the Quatsi trilogy of films which all feature no dialogue or voiceover narration, and include soundtracks by Phillip Glass. The film itself consists of stock footage and time lapse (where each frame of film is captured at a much slower rate than it will be played back) stock footage of many natural landscapes and cities in the USA. Powaqqatsi followed in 1988, and Naqoyqatsi in 2002. The films became known as documentaries without words, and other films such as Bodysong and Baraka are further examples of this form.
Also in 1984, Ken Burn’s 11 hour documentary series The Civil War, shown on PBS (Public Broadcasting Service), averaged the most viewers ever for that channel with an average of more than 14 million viewers each evening.
Another critically praised film of the 1980s was 1985’s Shoah, a five hundred and seventy minute documentary on the Holocaust. It consists mostly of interviews with survivors, witnesses and ex- Nazis and features no archive footage, and is now regarded as one of the best historical documentaries ever made.
In 1987, PBS showed a documentary series which featured independent films which included strong political or social points of view, and allowed viewers to respond to them, called P.O.V (Point Of View).
The ITVS (Independent Television Service) was established after negotiations with the government in the early 1990s, to ensure that diverse voices are represented on public television.
On 3rd March 1991, George Holliday, an amateur film enthusiast shot a twelve minute videotape depicting the actual arrest and beating of Rodney King by the Los Angeles Police after a high speed chase, and this was shown so often on the channel CNN, that one CNN executive called it “wallpaper”.
Other famous/ critically acclaimed documentaries of the 1990s included 1994’s Hoop Dreams and 1995’s Anne Frank Remembered, plus the making of of Apocalypse Now, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmakers Apocalypse (1991), and Nirvana Live! Tonight! Sold out!! (1994), a 90 minute video album which was partly compiled by Kurt Cobain until his death.
DVDs were also introduced in the 1990s and reality television was also created, which was based more on fictional or staged occurrences than those used in other documentaries.
In the early 20th century, cameras were improving to become even more portable, and this encouraged the 2004 film Voices of Iraq, where a total of 150 video cameras were distributed during the war so that the Iraqi people could record themselves and to give them “a voice”.
Other famous documentaries of the 21st century include Fahrenheit 9/11, March Of The Penguins, Super Size Me and An Inconvenient Truth. Reality TV programmes also increase in numbers with programmes such as The Osbournes, Big Brother etc.
Patrick Johnson 11S1
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