Documentary

History of Documentary Film

While scholars of early film have been much preoccupied with the emergence of storytelling and narrative, the dominant mode of early cinema, beginning with the first films of the Lumières in 1895, was the actuality, or what might be called “documentary before documentary”. An instinct for what Siegfried Kracauer (1960) called “the seizure of physical

Documentary Film

Among the qualities that distinguish films considered documentary are: (1) explicit reference to the historical world that surrounds the film, (2) a persuasive effort that encourages viewers to see or understand some aspect of the actual world in a particular way, and (3) an indexical relationship between the image and the reality it refers to.