Documentary Film:
Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primary for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record. A "documentary film" was originally a movie shot on film stock--the only medium available--but now includes video and digital productions that can be either direct-to-video or made for a television program.
"Documentary" has been described as a "filmmaking practice, a cinematic tradition, and mode of audience reception" that is continually evolving and is without clear boundaries.
Defining documentary:
In popular myth, the word, documentary was coined by Scottish documentarian John Grierson in his review of Robert Flaherty's film Moana (1926), published in the New York Sun on 8 February 1926, written by :The Moviegoer".
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.
In his essays, Dziga Vertov argued for presenting "life as it is" and "life caught unawares".
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.
There are clear connections in terms of practice with magazine and newspaper feature-writing and indeed to non-fiction literature. Many of the generic forms of documentary, for example the biopic or profile' or the observational piece. These generic forms are explored on the University of Winchester Journalism Department 'features web' where 'long form journalism' is classified by genre or content, rather than in terms of production as film, radio or 'print'.
"Documentary" has been described as a "filmmaking practice, a cinematic tradition, and mode of audience reception" that is continually evolving and is without clear boundaries.
Defining documentary:
In popular myth, the word, documentary was coined by Scottish documentarian John Grierson in his review of Robert Flaherty's film Moana (1926), published in the New York Sun on 8 February 1926, written by :The Moviegoer".
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.
In his essays, Dziga Vertov argued for presenting "life as it is" and "life caught unawares".
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.There are clear connections in terms of practice with magazine and newspaper feature-writing and indeed to non-fiction literature. Many of the generic forms of documentary, for example the biopic or profile' or the observational piece. These generic forms are explored on the University of Winchester Journalism Department 'features web' where 'long form journalism' is classified by genre or content, rather than in terms of production as film, radio or 'print'.