DOCUMENTARIES
The word "documentary" was first applied to films of this nature in a review of Robert Flaherty's film Moana (1926), published in the New York Sun on 8 February 1926 and written by "The Moviegoer," a pen name for documentarian John Grierson.
Grierson's principles of documentary were that cinema's potential for observing life could be exploited in a new art form; that the "original" actor and "original" scene are better guides than their fiction counterparts to interpreting the modern world; and that materials "thus taken from the raw" can be more real than the acted article. In this regard, Grierson's views align with Vertov's contempt for dramatic fiction as "bourgeois excess," though with considerably more subtlety. Grierson's definition of documentary as "creative treatment of actuality" has gained some acceptance, though it presents philosophical questions about documentaries containing stagings and reenactments.
Pare Lorentz defines a documentary film as "a factual film which is dramatic." Others further state that a documentary stands out from the other types of non-fiction films for providing an opinion, and a specific message, along with the facts it presents
Documentary Practice is the complex process of creating documentary projects. It refers to what people do with media devices, content, form, and production strategies in order to address the creative, ethical, and conceptual problems and choices that arise as they make documentaries.
History
Pre-1900
The filmmaker John Grierson used the term documentary in 1926 to refer to any nonfiction film medium, including travelogues and instructional films. The earliest "moving pictures" were, by definition, documentaries. They were single-shot moments captured on film: a train entering a station, a boat docking, or a factory of people getting off work. Early film (pre-1900) was dominated by the novelty of showing an event. These short films were called "actuality" films. (The term "documentary" was not coined until 1926.) Very little storytelling took place before the turn of the century, due mostly to technological limitations, namely, that movie cameras could hold only very small amounts of film..
1900-1920
Travelogue films were very popular in the early part of the 20th century. Some were known as "scenics". Scenics were among the most popular sort of films at the time. An important early film to move beyond the concept of the scenic was In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914), which embraced primitivism and exoticism in a staged story presented as truthful re-enactments of the life of Native Americans.
Early color motion picture processes such as Kinemacolor and Prizmacolor used travelogues to promote the new color process. Also during this period Frank Hurley's documentary film, South (1919), about the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, was released. It documented the failed Antarctic expedition led by Ernest Shackleton in 1914.
Modern documentaries
Box office analysts have noted that this film genre has become increasingly successful in theatrical release with films such as Super Size Me, March of the Penguins and An Inconvenient Truth among the most prominent examples. Compared to dramatic narrative films, documentaries typically have far lower budgets which makes them attractive to film companies because even a limited theatrical release can be highly profitable.
Landmark films such as The Thin Blue Line by Errol Morris incorporated stylized re-enactments, and Michael Moore's Roger & Me placed far more interpretive control with the director. Indeed, the commercial success of these documentaries may derive from this narrative shift in the documentary form, leading some critics to question whether such films can truly be called documentaries; critics sometimes refer to these works as "mondo films" or "docu-ganda." However, directorial manipulation of documentary subjects has been noted since the work of Flaherty, and may be endemic to the form.
The recent success of the documentary genre, and the advent of DVDs, has made documentaries financially viable even without a cinema release. Yet funding for documentary film production remains elusive, and within the past decade the largest exhibition opportunities have emerged from within the broadcast market, making filmmakers beholden to the tastes and influences of the broadcasters who have become their largest funding source.
Modern documentaries have some overlap with television forms, with the development of "reality television" that occasionally verges on the documentary but more often veers to the fictional or staged. The making-of documentary shows how a movie or a computer game was produced. Usually made for promotional purposes, it is closer to an advertisement than a classic documentary.
Modern lightweight digital video cameras and computer-based editing have greatly aided documentary makers, as has the dramatic drop in equipment prices. The first film to take full advantage of this change was Martin Kunert and Eric Manes' Voices of Iraq, where 150 DV cameras were sent to Iraq during the war and passed out to Iraqis to record themselves.
Other documentary forms
Compilation films
Compilation films were pioneered in 1927 by Esfir Schub with The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty. More recent examples include Point of Order (1964), directed by Emile de Antonio about the McCarthy hearings and The Atomic Cafe which is made entirely out of found footage that various agencies of the U.S. government made about the safety of nuclear radiation (e.g., telling troops at one point that it's safe to be irradiated as long as they keep their eyes and mouths shut).
Docudramas tend to demonstrate some or most of the following characteristics:
A focus on the facts of the event being treated, as they are known;
The use of literary and narrative techniques to flesh out or render story-like the bare facts of an event in history;
A tendency to avoid overt commentary and explicit assertion of the creator's own point of view or beliefs.
Docudramas, then, are distinct both from the main line of historical fiction, in which the historical setting is a mere backdrop for a plot that could be set in many periods, and from straight documentary or journalistic writing in its creation of a coherent narrative out of the materials of history.
History
The impulse to incorporate historical material into literary texts has been an intermittent feature of literature in the west since its earliest days. Aristotle's theory of art is based on the use of putatively historical events and characters. Especially after the development of modern mass-produced literature, there have been genres that relied on history or then-current events for material. English Renaissance drama, for example, developed sub-genres specifically devoted to dramatizing recent murders and notorious cases of witchcraft.
However, docudrama as a separate category belongs to the second half of the twentieth century. The influence of New Journalism tended to create a license for authors to treat with literary techniques material that might in an earlier age have been approached in a purely journalistic way. Both Truman Capote and Norman Mailer were influenced by this movement, and Capote's In Cold Blood is arguably the most famous example of the genre.
Notable works
Ed Wood (1994)
Hillsborough (1996)
Bloody Sunday (2002)
The Laramie Project (2002)
The Last Dragon (2004)
Touching the Void (2003)
The Day Britain Stopped (2003)
End Day (2005)
Good Night, and Good Luck. (2005)
Supervolcano (Drama documentary) (2005)
The Road to Guantanamo (2006)
Bobby (2006)
United 93 (film) (2006)
Hollywoodland (2006)
The Lost Tomb of Jesus (2007)
The Lena Baker Story (2008)
TV series
America's Most Wanted
E! True Hollywood Story
Space Race
Cook's Last Voyage
A Haunting
Rescue 911
Unsolved Mysteries
COPS
Airport
Border Security
Bondi Rescue
Motorway Patrol
The Village
Mockumentary (also known as a pseudo-documentary), a portmanteau of mock and documentary, is a film and TV genre, or a single work of the genre. A mockumentary is one of the comedy genres, although there are serious mockumentaries. The mockumentary is presented as a documentary recording real life, but is in fact fictional. It is a commonly used medium for parody and satire. They are often used to analyze current events and issues by using a fictional setting around it.
Mockumentaries are often presented as historical documentaries with b roll and talking heads discussing past events or as cinéma vérité pieces following people as they go through various events. Examples of this type of satire date back at least to the 1950s (a very early example was a short piece on the "Swiss Spaghetti Harvest" that appeared as an April fool's joke on the British television program Panorama in 1957), though the term "mockumentary" is thought to have first appeared in the mid-1980s when This Is Spinal Tap director Rob Reiner used it in interviews to describe that film.[citation needed]
The false documentary form has also been used for some dramatic productions (and precursors to this approach date back to the radio days and Orson Welles' production of H. G. Wells' novel, The War of the Worlds).
Mockumentaries are often partly or wholly improvised, as an unscripted style of acting helps to maintain the pretense of reality. Comedic mockumentaries rarely have laugh tracks, also to sustain the atmosphere, although there are exceptions - for example, Operation Good Guys had a laugh track from its second series onwards.
EXAMPLES
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, about a Kazakh journalist's journey through the United States. (US, 2006)
Reno 911!Comedy Central parody of COPS about an inept police force in Reno, Nevada.
Larry David: Curb Your Enthusiasm, HBO Special about the making of a HBO special.
Turn on any TV and you will see that most channels have several shows that are documentary in style.
CBC even has a channel dedicated to documentaries.
Documentaries are not limited to TV or Film. There are many documentaries on Radio as well. CBC radio is filled with them. “The Current” every morning is a good example.