“You photograph the natural life, but you also, by your juxtaposition of detail, create an interpretation of it” – John Grierson.

• The term nonfiction film is most commonly applied to documentary cinema, but it has also been used to describe avant-garde films.
• Avant-garde and documentary cinema occupy opposite poles on the classification chart of styles and types of film, documentary realism and avant-garde formalism both start from a suspicion of the use of spectacle and narrative in fiction films to involve spectators in a world of fantasy and illusion.

Legendary documentary about the American food industry

The Documentary Mode

• Depends on the basic assumption that film images provide evidence of a state of affairs that exists, or once existed, in the world outside the film.
• No documentary is simply an objective representation of facts, and the key question for the great documentary filmmakers has been how to create a convincing interpretation of reality without distorting the evidence.
• Documentaries are structured more like essays.
• The raw images provide the evidence that it is then organized to develop an argument. This argument is constructed largely through the way in which the images are edited together and through the way in which the images relate to the soundtrack.

Stages which critics classify genre movies:

• Primitive or formative
• Classical
• Revisionist or critical
• Parodic or reflexive

Grierson and the Classical Documentary

• The first films made and screened by the Lumiere brothers in 1895 were brief segments of everyday life, often referred to as “actualities”. Most historians agree that the first true documentary was the work of Robert Flaherty, an American explorer who used a camera to record his travels in the Canadian Arctic and eventually released a feature film called Nanook of the North (1921).
• The term “documentary was first applied to film by John Grierson. He argued that film should be used for social purposes and felt that Flaherty had shown the way, but had not yet gone far enough because he still organized his films around the exploits of an individual hero and tended to present a romantic view of exotic cultures. Flaherty deliberately misrepresented a culture!
• Grierson thought that Flaherty was too concerned with making his images beautiful and not concerned enough with the social purposes of a film intended to demonstrate the benefits of industrial development.
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  Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth

  In a probing yet playful approach to a sensitive subject, this documentary examines the values that prompt people to alter their looks through cosmetic surgery. Personal accounts of men and women, young and old, who have decided to change their bodies are counterbalanced by comments from professionals who explain the effects of physical appearance on our lives. The film focuses mainly on the experiences of Daisy de Bellefeuille, a frank and feisty woman who decides to counter middle age with a facelift. The film provides us with a front-row seat during a facelift operation, as well as a close-up look at the results.

• Grierson’s major contribution to the future of the documentary was made as a producer whose enthusiasm could convince governments and industry of the value of sponsoring films that would make people more aware of social issues.
• Established the National Film Board (NFB) of Canada in 1939. Grierson called the documentary the “creative treatment of actuality.” Although Grierson often stressed the social objectives of the documentary rather than its aesthetics, Grierson was well aware of the need for creative techniques to develop a convincing interpretation of actuality.
• Grierson’s documentaries established the classical style in which the images are subservient to a verbal argument that has been scripted in advance. The commentary unifies the film and is spoken in a voice of authority. It is often referred to as a voice- of-God commentary, since the speaker is apparently omniscient and remains off screen.

Grierson’s approach has been criticized for 3 major reasons:

• Wanted to bring about social change
• Argued that documentary was opposed to the “illusions” of the Hollywood dream factory.
• The emphasis on the commentary meant that people were not allowed to speak for themselves.
• Grierson later claimed that Housing Problems (1935) was the origin of cinema verite