The history of Documentaries

By definition a documentary consists of or based on official documents and uses

pictures or interviews with people involved in real events to provide a factual report
on a particular subject. The first official documentary was Robert Flaherty's Nanook
of the North (1922), an ethnographic look at the harsh life
of Canadian Inuit Eskimos living in the Arctic, although
some of the film's scenes of obsolete customs were
staged. When documentaries first came out, they were
quite popular. I found out that, in Russia, events of the
Bolshevik ascent to power in 1917–18 were filmed, and the
pictures were used as propaganda. Then in 1922 the
American director Robert Flaherty produced Nanook of
the North, which was the prototype of many
documentary films. Something else that I found out was
that the Nazi’s at wartime used the nationalised film
industry to produce propaganda documentaries.
Documentaries became popular in television
programming, especially in the late 1960's and the early
1970's but during the last two decades, documentaries have become more very
popular covering topics like pop stars, political figures,
education and historical events. The latest
documentary that made a big impact was about a
celebrity, it was called Jesy Nelson: odd one out. Jesy
Nelson is a singer in the band Little Mix, this
documentary was about how she felt being in little mix,
and how it made her really depressed to the point of
almost committing suicide. She talks about how she is great full for the experience of
the band and how she is now in a better head space thanks to her boyfriend. As you
can tell this documentary is very different from Nanook of the north as Jesy’s
documentary covers things like depression and anxiety which are very current issues
whereas Nanook of the north is more about his lifestyle.

The development and technology

From 1922-2019 there have obviously been massive technology developments, from
camera work to editing and the platforms that we watch them on. The camera
quality has progressed massively. The earliest known cameras were based on the
mechanical Nipkow disk used in experimental broadcasts through the 1910’s and
1930’s. All electronic designs based on the video camera, such as Vladimir Zworykin's
Iconoscope and Philo Farnsworth's image dissector,
overthrew the Nipkow system by the 1930’s. The
video cameras that they used would have shot in less
than 144p whereas today we are shooting in 4K and
now almost 8K. Video camera tubes were devices
based on the cathode ray tube that were used to capture television prior to the
introduction of charge-coupled device image sensors in the 1980s. Several different
versions of tubes were in use from as early as 1930s till 1980s. In 1961 cameras with
reflex viewing (looking through the lens while filming) plus zoom lenses permitted
cinematographers to alter the view, from close up shots to long shots, for example-
without having to stop to change lenses or focus. As for sound, ¼ inch magnetic
tape recorders were developed which could synchronized with the cameras. When
crystal synchronization was added, there was no longer even the need for a cable
between the camera and recorder. In the early 70’s we had the introduction of the
first-person documentary — a category of nonfiction film fuelled by first-hand
experience versus reporting. Today, documentaries are often used as a way to
speak truth and power and many fall under the category of social-change or
advocacy films. In the last two decades, the home for documentaries has narrowed,
this is possibly due to budget cuts in television focusing more on popular soaps and
reality TV. Company’s like Netflix and Amazon are producing
more content like documentaries due to the large audience
that they have. Netflix has had some very popular
documentaries over the past few years some of them
include; conversations with a killer: the Ted Bundey tapes,
making a murderer, the disappearance of Madeleine
McCann and Jack Whitehall: Travels with my father. A lot of Netflix’s
documentaries are crime related and they get a lot of attention and
views. The BBC still continue to do documentaries and they are
mainly with Sir David Attenborough, his most popular documentary
series is blue plant and planet earth. His current series is called seven
worlds one planet. Documentary storytelling approaches will
defiantly continue to evolve but the mission to illuminate, as we’ve
seen for over a century, will remain deeply ingrained in the genre.

Productions
From my research, I researched two productions. The first one that I researched was
Nanook of the north. Nanook of the North is a documentary about the lives of the
indigenous Inuit people of Canada's northern Quebec region. Although the
production contains some fictional elements, it vividly shows how its resourceful
subjects survive in such a harsh climate, revealing how they construct their igloo
homes and find food by hunting and fishing. The film also captures the beautiful, if
unforgiving, frozen landscape of the Great White North, far removed from
conventional civilization. I have learnt a lot about the history of the Nanook of the
North, it was set in 1922 and was the first documentary ever made. It was filmed on
film as they didn't have digital cameras back
then, that's why the footage is quite grainy, that is
not the only reason why the footage isn't great,
the documentary was filmed in really harsh
conditions of the northern Quebec in Canada
and it would of been really hard to capture good
footage but surprisingly they got some clear footage in the documentary. It must
have been quite difficult to film this in these the conditions and it would have been
extreme weather and would have been very freezing. The man who filmed the
documentary was also a novice when he filmed it, he was an explorer and was
really interested in the environment. Back then there wasn't a lot of funding so he
would of had to do it all by himself and wait a long time to produce it. Not only was
this the first documentary ever made but it is classed as the best documentary ever
made. The second production that I looked at is called Amy, this is about the
famous singer song writer Amy Winehouse. This documentary is made up of all
archive footage about her and her life, from home videos from when she was a
child, passed interviews, some footage at her old concerts and footage of her new
concerts. This type of documentary is very different to documentaries that I have
watched in the past, most documentaries that I watch have people being filmed or
they have gone out to solely film the topic that the documentary is about whereas
this one as her dead came suddenly they didn’t have one on one footage with her.
Even though this does not compare to the challenges that they would have faced
filming Nanook of the North but finding all the footage for Amy would have been
quite hard. They would have had to dig hard to find and footage they can to fill up
space but doing it this way would have been so
much cheaper the having a full on production
team filming her all the time, they would have just
asked her family for footage like home videos
and stuff that they may have taken on their
phones when she was alive, in this documentary
have they also use some fan footage that have
been shot on their mobile phones. This production
is very powerful in the way that it shows her life, it shows things from her drug
addiction to her as a child at home. All of the footage shown in this is raw and really
helps to connect to the audience in my opinion. This is mainly speaking from
experience as I watched it and really started to connect to it. The hardest parts for
me to watch was when she was filmed with all the drugs out on the table. There was
a scene in the film when her ex-boyfriend Blake Fielder filmed her doing drugs. They
obviously didn’t show her doing them but they showed them on the table and he
says that they are about to do it. I really like the style of this production as it would
have been a low budget production as it was all archive footage.

Bill Nichols
Bill Nichols is quite important to documentaries as a whole. He
is an American film critic and theoretician best known for his
work as founder of the contemporary study of documentary
film. He was born 19 August 1942 in Alabama. He wrote a book
in 1991 called, "Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in
Documentary", which applied modern film theory to the study
of documentary film for the first time. Since then Bill has come
up with something called “modes” which has shaped the why
documentaries have been made and taught about in film
studies for education. Modes are a way of determining the
common concepts and themes of the various documentary styles, devised by the
Bill Nichols himself. There are 6 different suggested modes of documentary: poetic,
expository, observational, participatory, reflective and performative. Nichols'
discussion of modes does progress chronologically with the order of their
appearance in practice, documentary films often return to themes and devices in
previous modes. Therefore, it is inaccurate to think of modes as historical
punctuation marks in an evolution towards an ultimate accepted documentary
style.