DOCUMENTARY FILMS (HISTORY)

 A Documentary or nonfiction film is an elaborate method of recording the lives and activities of real people but ‘constructed’ or ‘recreated’ to tell an interesting story.

The Documentary has its beginnings in 1922 when Robert Flaherty, an Englishman, took his camera to the Arctic Region to film the life of an Eskimo family. The result was ‘Nanook of the North’, a documentary film that pioneered the documentary tradition in cinema and later in television.

John Grierson popularized the term documentary and turned it into a popular artistic form with his documentary entitled ‘Drifters’ on location in the North Sea. It provided a glimpse of the fisherman of that region. Some of his other outstanding documentaries are ‘Weather Forecast’, ‘Song of Ceylon’, ‘Coal Face’ and ‘Night Mail’.

By the 1930s the documentary film was an established form and came to be patronized and supported by national governments, particularly during the war years.

The label ‘Cinema verite’ or ‘Cinema of Reality’ sums up the type of film a documentary aims to be.

John Grierson defined documentary as ‘the creative interpretation of reality’.

S. Sukhdev, the veteran documentary filmmaker revised this definition to ‘the creative interpretation of recreated reality’.

The documentary evolved as a reaction to shooting in a studio with a selected cast, generally chosen from among the urban elite. The pioneers of the documentary frowned upon the synthetic fabrication of the studio and insisted on the existence of real men and women, real things and real issues. They believed in story-material taken from life in the raw and in spontaneous gestures and unrehearsed speech. They wanted the cameras and the sound recording equipment to be taken form the studio to the field and the factory, the road and the dockyard.

Over the years, several genres of the non-fiction evolved ranging from ‘naturalist’, ‘realist’ to ‘experimental’ and ‘abstract’. There were also ‘ethnographic’ films, ‘training’ or educational / instructional films and ‘propaganda’ films.

The genres were defined in terms of the methods of filming (and editing) actual people and events.

The video documentary is the most recent format (beginning around the 1970s).

CENDIT of New Delhi and SEWA of Ahmedabad were the foremost organizations that promoted video documentary in India.

The video format is inexpensive, flexible and easily accessible and therefore is the ideal alternative to big media.

This format has now been overtaken by the digital format which can be uploaded to television channels, internet sites, you tube, mobile phones, etc.

There are several documentary film festivals and other film festivals where over hundred documentaries are screened.