Documentary

Documentary has existed as long as film itself. The one‐reel actualités produced by the Lumière brothers in 1895 and the more complex films that followed these early experiments – for example, Nanook of the North (directed by Flaherty, 1922) and The Man with a Movie Camera (directed by Vertov, 1929) – were distinguished by their sense of a “historical real,” the depiction of real people and events. This apparent ability to capture “reality” has continued to demarcate documentary from fiction; indeed the genre, with its intimate connection to the physical world, appeals by virtue of its truth claims, whether these exist at the level of fact or image. Documentary stimulates what Bill Nichols calls “epistephilia” or a “desire to know,” conveying an “informing logic, a persuasive rhetoric, or a moving poetics that promises information and knowledge, insight and awareness.” The film‐makers above, however, would hardly have known that they were making “documentary” at the time they were in production, as the genre had yet to be conceived

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Depiction · Documentary film · Epistemology · Film director · Linguistics · Literature · Movie theater · Poetics · Poetry · Rhetoric · Virtue · Visual arts · Cinema and Media Studies · History · Philosophy · Photography and Visual Culture · Visual Culture and Art Theory

• Reality TV

  Annette Hill•Reality Tv•2004

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