Directing the Documentary, 7th Edition

C H A P T E R 2

The Nature of Documentary

Origins

The documentary approach has never stopped expanding and changing, which makes it a slippery beast to pin down. It does, however, always concern real people doing real things in their own real lives. As such, people were filming reality of one sort or another from cinema’s very beginnings in the 1890s, and onward through the Edwardian and World War I periods that followed (Figure 2-1). Until the pioneer documentarian Robert Flaherty (Figure 2-2) orchestrated nonfiction material in the early 1920s, nobody thought of using factual materials to say something overarching about the human condition. Others had used reality to tell a narrative, but Flaherty added the thematic and socially critical ...