What Makes a Documentary?
Bill Nichols states three assumptions in his book regarding Documentary film making.
1. Documentaries are about reality; they’re about something that actually happened.
2. Documentaries are about real people.
3.Documentaries tell stories about what happens in the real world.
Now although these are a great starting point, I believe they are just that, a start. Documentary films are meant to portray real life as it happens, not as a writer determines. Yes, all of these assumptions can also be applied to feature/theatrical films. A lot of them are “based on a true story” or “inspired by true events.” In the same fashion a lot of these films have actors portraying real life people telling real world events about events that really happened. However, where Documentary films break this mold is that they have no actors, they have no set, script, or lines. Some documentaries are made from a handful of people around a Handycam. Call it the new age “Man with a Movie Camera.” However, although documentaries have this role of real events captured in real time or told by the real people that does not excuse these films from a little bit of dramatization. For instance, let’s take Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North. It is credited as one of the first documentary films ever. However a vast majority of it was staged in order to be shot on film correctly. A Film School Rejects blog post outlines some key events that were staged and even goes as far as describing Nanook as the original Blair Witch Project.
The article describes Flaherty’s film making as “obtrusive” and “sacrilege to the spirit of the ocumentary picture.” To this I can partially agree but, there are a lot of things Flaherty accomplished with his film. The Inuit people were shown in a way that the rest of the world had never seen. Yes, there was a lot of staging and pre-set situations to display more old world practices of the Eskimo. But, in that same fashion these people were Esimo’s portraying real events. Not everything can be cinema verite. Although documentaries are meant to be gripping real life stories involving the actual people from the event, they are still a movie, and they are still meant, to some extent, to be entertaining. Man with a Movie Camera is a good example of entertainment meshed with Documentary film making. The idea that the film is a documentary film, documenting the man making a film. It’s made very apparent that you as the viewer are watching a movie.After reading the Nichols and Barnouw chapters it is clear that Documentary films are something that has come in waves and comes in a lot of different forms. They are still entertainment however, this is almost never to be out shined by the truth present in the story. That is what I believe is a key in Documentary films.