A documentary film tells a story about real life, with claims to truthfulness. A movie that does its best to represent real life and that doesn’t manipulate it. Documentary is defined and redefined over the course of time, both by makers and by viewers. Viewers certainly shape the meaning of any documentary, by combining our own knowledge of and interest in the world with how the filmmaker shows it to us.

Nanook of the North is considered one of the first great documentaries, but its subjects, the Inuit(Inuit are a group of culturally and historically similar Indigenous peoples).

 Flaherty built his story from his own experience of years living with the Inuit, who happily participated in his project and gave him plenty of ideas for the plot. Flaherty asked them to do things they no longer did, such as hunt for walrus with a spear, and he showed them as ignorant about things they understood.

The term ‘‘documentary’’ emerged uneasily out of early practice. When entrepreneurs in the late nineteenth century first began to record moving pictures of real-life events, some called what they were making ‘‘documentaries.’’ The term did not stabilize for decades, however. Other people called their films ‘‘educationals,’’ ‘‘actualities,’’ ‘‘interest films,’’ or perhaps referred to their subject matter—‘‘travel films,’’ for example the work of the great American filmmaker Robert Flaherty’s Moana (1926), which chronicled daily life on a South Seas island.

He defined documentary as the ‘‘artistic representation of actuality’’—a definition that has proven durable probably because it is so very flexible

 

In the 1990s, documentaries began to be big business worldwide, and by 2004 the worldwide business in television documentary alone added up to $4.5 billion revenues annually. Reality TV and ‘‘docusoaps’’—real-life miniseries set in potentially high-drama situations such as driving schools, restaurants, hospitals, and airports—also flourished. Theatrical revenues multiplied at the beginning of the twenty-first century. DVD sales, videoon-demand, and rentals of documentaries became big business. Soon documentaries were being made for cell phones, and collaborative documentaries were being produced online. Marketers who had discreetly hidden the fact that their films were documentaries were now proudly calling such works ‘‘docs.’’

 The truthfulness, accuracy, and trustworthiness of documentaries are important to us all because we value them precisely and uniquely for these qualities

 

Documentary is an important reality-shaping communication, because of its claims to truth. Documentaries are always grounded in real life, and make a claim to tell us something worth knowing about it.

 

Theatrical wildlife films such as March of the Penguins (2005) are classic examples of consumer entertainment that use all of these techniques to charm and alarm viewers, even though the sensationalism, sex, and violence occur among animals

 

Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, a sardonic, anti-Iraq war film, addressed the American public directly, as people whose government was acting in the public’s name. Right-wing commentators in commercial media attempted to discredit the film by charging that it was indeed propaganda. 

 

He was putting forward, as he had every right to, his own view about a shared reality, frankly acknowledging his perspective. Further, he was encouraging viewers to look critically at their government’s words and actions. 

 

. ‘‘A ‘‘regular documentary’’ often means a film that features sonorous( imposingly deep and full.), ‘‘voice-of-God’’ narration, an analytical argument rather than a story with characters, head shots of experts. 

number of cuts, script or storytelling structure). Filmmakers choose the way they want to structure a story—which characters to develop for viewers, whose stories to focus on, how to resolve the storytelling. Filmmakers have many choices to make about each of the elements. For instance, a single shot may be framed differently and carry a different meaning depending on the frame: a close-up of a father grieving may say something quite different from a wide shot of the same scene showing the entire room; a decision to let the ambient sound of the funeral dominate the soundtrack will mean something different than a swelling soundtrack.