1.1 Documentaries In a Nutshell

1.1 Documentaries in a Nutshell

A Brief History of Documentary Film:

An example of a modern Documentary

Documentary film is a non-fictional motion picture intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction, education, or maintaining a historical record. Such films were originally shot on film stock,the only medium available at the time,but now include video and digital productions that can be either direct-to-video, made into a TV show, or released for screening in cinemas.

A scene From "Berlin, Symphony
of a great city"

 Pre-1900. Early films before the 1900s was mainly dominated by the novelty of showing an event. They were mostly single shot movements captured on very early filming cameras. The original term for documentary films was “Actuality films”. The term documentary would come until the 1920s. An early type of documentary film that is our idea of a documentary can link to is called, “Berlin, Symphony of a great city.” 

It is the first documentary of its kind to focus solely on a city as a whole and the director, Walter Ruttmann says Documentaries are like a “ Visual Poem” Most of the documentaries made from the 60s-70s were mainly to do with what was happening at the time for example many political documentaries were being made. For example, Chile: A Special Report, was the first public look at the 1973 overthrow of Salvador Allende government. So, documentaries are really giving people a chance to look at what’s happening all over the world from different perspectives. This is what we want to achieve with whatever topic we intend to research.