The turn of the 20th century witnessed not only the invention of the motion picture but also tremendous growth of popular interest in journalism, picture postcards, lectures by travelers (frequently illustrated with slides), and so forth. The motion picture quickly came to serve society’s need to learn about the geography and social conditions of the world at large. Some of the first motion pictures depicted exotic locations, contemporary events (battles, coronations), and unknown cultures. Indeed, as late as 1908 such a major company as Biograph actually produced more nonfiction films than narratives. This would soon change, in part because the production of documentary films is dependent on world events and is therefore more haphazard and more difficult than the fully controlled process of making fiction films in studios. The decline of the nonfiction film has also been attributed to the belief that, after a decade, audiences were saturated with “views” and “actualities,” as such films were called. Moviegoers were no longer drawn to the sheer recording ability of motion pictures; they demanded imaginative entertainment instead.

Most scholars prefer that all artistry be eliminated from ethnographic films so that the visual data recorded by the camera remain as fresh and uninterpreted as possible. The audience for these films typically consists of members of a university or museum community for whom entertainment is less significant than authenticity. When such films are prepared for mass television audiences, however, many concessions may be necessary, including the addition of extensive explanatory narration, musical accompaniment, and scenic photography .

Both anthropologists and Hollywood producers immediately recognized the attraction of Flaherty’s work, initiating several long-lived genres. In Hollywood, King Kong (1933), one of the most famous monster movies ever made, was conceived by producer-director Merian C. Cooper, who was inspired by his experience shooting travel documentaries. The surprising success of The Gods Must Be Crazy (1981), a comedy about life in the Kalahari desert of Botswana, shows that audiences half a century later continued to enjoy a mixture of foreign locations and familiar dramas. The San of the Kalahari are also the subject of an important ethnographic film, John Marshall’s The Hunters (1958). Marshall’s tradition dates to the 1930s and to the films the anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson made in the Pacific.

One sort of film that has had continuous appeal, albeit for a specialized audience, has been the travel film. Much of the attraction of such films—from the crude pictures cranked out by Lumière cameramen in Japan , Africa, and the Arctic, to Robert Flaherty ’s Nanook of the North (1922) and other films, to National Geographic Society presentations on television—results simply from the thrill of seeing a foreign culture or a distant location. Flaherty proved, however, that there could also be tremendous artistry in such films. His unforgettable compositions matched the harmonious rhythm of his editing to render the lives of his subjects in a gloriously romantic tone.

Newsreels and documentaries

The argument over the role of art and artlessness in travelogues and ethnographic films is also pertinent to newsreels, where the standard principles governing journalism must apply. In the first years of cinema, reconstructions of such events as The Dreyfus Affair (Méliès, 1899) and the assassination of U.S. Pres. William McKinley in L’Assassinat de McKinley (Pathé, 1901) were commonly accepted. Since then, viewers have required that newsreel material be neither prearranged nor fabricated, and they have become aware of the effects of the intrusiveness of the reporter and the limitations of point of view on the objectivity of any documentary film.

News films, more than any other type of motion picture, depend on their timeliness. Hence, for all of its ability to show the actual world, the motion picture failed to provide genuine news until it did so by means of television. Too stale and infrequent for day-to-day coverage, newsreels showed not news but parades, ceremonies, sporting events, bridge building, and similar events. The March of Time, inspired by Time magazine and produced by Louis de Rochemont from 1935 to 1951, was a series in which a topic of political or social importance was discussed in depth in a 30-minute film. The series was an immediate and continued success. From the mid-20th century, however, it was television that developed the screen presentation of news, comment, and discussion beyond anything known before.

It is less in the straight presentation of reality than in its creative interpretation that the documentary has produced works of lasting value. Among the pioneers of the documentary besides Flaherty were the Russian theorist Dziga Vertov, whose films include Chelovek s kinoapparatom (1929; The Man with the Movie Camera), and the British producer-director John Grierson, whose Drifters (1929) inspired a school of fine directors to produce a succession of memorable documentaries through the 1930s. With the outbreak of World War II, Humphrey Jennings’s Fires Were Started (1943) and Harry Watt’s Target for Tonight (1941), two among many outstanding British wartime documentaries, dramatized Britain’s war effort better than fictional films could.

Scene from Drifters (1929), directed by John Grierson and produced by the British Film Board Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archive, New York

In the United States, Pare Lorentz made dramatic documentaries about soil erosion and the Dust Bowl, such as The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1937), during the era of the Great Depression, and, during World War II, Frank Capra, who had been an outstanding director of Hollywood comedies, made a series of documentaries under the title Why We Fight. The later French movement cinema verité made films that are much closer to journalism than to the careful compositions of the English documentary school. Though often untidy, they are fresh and realistic. Television deeply affected the development of the documentary film in two major ways: by providing a training ground for documentary directors and by building a supply of news film that could be adapted to documentary form. Point of Order (1964), an American documentary film that ran successfully in motion-picture theatres, was made from television films of the U.S. Senate hearings on the charges and countercharges made by Sen. Joseph McCarthy and the U.S. Army.

The Vietnam War gave rise to a plethora of documentary essays, some of them politically committed, some attempting a balanced exploration of the situation. American cinema verité, sometimes called “direct cinema,” matured during the war, though not only in response to it. The first of the rock concert films, D.A. Pennebaker’s portrait of Bob Dylan, Don’t Look Back, first played theatrically in 1967, and that same year Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies, which exposed the horrendous conditions in a Massachusetts institution for the mentally ill, caused such an uproar that it was banned in that state. Excitement over public events and celebrations permitted this spate of documentaries to compete with fiction films for screens in larger cities. The films, which were often of inflammatory content, were kept off television but nonetheless influenced that medium tremendously. Hearts and Minds (Peter Davis, 1974), for example, a powerful though one-sided attack on U.S. Vietnam policy, had an enormous impact just because it could not be shown on television. Conversely, in the 1980s many documentaries were increasingly seen on television rather than on movie theatre screens. Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985), for example, a nine-and-a-half-hour examination of the Nazi concentration camps, received limited theatrical distribution in many areas because of its length but still managed to reach wide audiences through the distribution markets provided by the growing cable television and videocassette industries. Ken Burns’s 11-hour film The Civil War (1990) was made specifically for public television in the United States, where it was widely watched.