Reading Response to "Intro to Documentary"

The word "documentary" was first applied to films of this nature in a review of Robert Flaherty's film Moana, published in the New York Sun on 8 February 1926 and written by "The Moviegoer", a pen name for documentarian John Grierson. Documentaries seem to have a certain obligation towards "truth." Nowadays, when people are asked what “documentary” is, they always say "It is a type of film that is based on the real world and real people, depicting things as they are or telling about historical events in a supposedly truthful or objective manner.” No single criterion seems to qualify or disqualify a given film. For example, it is often considered that actors belong to fiction films and not to a true documentary. On the other hand there are exceptions that we are ready to accept, such as a TV-documentary using professional actors to re-enact a crime scene in order to make us understand how something may have happened. Indeed it would be immoral to have the real criminal perform another knife stabbing on the real victim - even though that could be said to be more true or closer to the original event. Producing a documentary is a complex craft and just as any other creative endeavor, it demands several layers and a focus on the overall intent. When presenting a great documentary, I think that it’s very important to make sure that the topic isn't something mundane or universally agreed-upon. More intimate documentaries have just as much of an opportunity to resonate with an audience if the story they tell is captivating. As film became a more popular mode of representation, the purpose became not only to record reality, but also to promote certain ideals of what was real, how the world should be viewed, and what social changes were necessary for the good of mankind. The camera was used to explore and analyze events and people, to inquire about meanings, to make the audience question their reality. By using specific techniques to form the production, documentarians can make their footage seem like the absolute truth and control to a large extent how the viewer receives the film.