History of 'Documentary' films

Documentary is a non fictional motion picture intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record. IN my film I want to document a persons real life, which is a twist on the teen genre.The term 'Documentary' was not coined until 1926. The first documentary style film was 'Auguste  and Louis Lumiere, which were only a minute long.

In the 19th century many different surgeons and professors filmed their own work e.g.Eugene Doyen recorded more than 60 operations and said that his first films taught him how to correct professional errors he had been unaware of, which shows documentaries help the audience. This relates to the idea of my film as I want people to take and learn something from it. 

'Travelogue' films became popular in the early 20th century, as they would reenact different kinds of people in a 'scenic' film, an example is a film about native americans.

In the 1920's, there were sub genres of documentaries starting to occur e.g. romanticism, city symphony and newsreel tradition.In the 1920-40's era propaganda documentary films started to appear, which would want to persuade their audience to do something. A good example is in 1934 when the 'Nazi party congress' was commissioned by Adolf Hilter. In this era most propaganda films would relate their film to the government.

In the 1950-70's era, 'Cinéma vérité' also known as 'Direct Cinema' was introduced and is dependent on some technical advances in order to exist: light, quiet and reliable cameras, and portable sync sound.This kind of film involve a smaller crew of helpers and advancing in handheld cameras and synchronized sound to film events on location as they unfolded. The fundamentals of the style include following a person during a crisis with a moving, often handheld, camera to capture more personal reactions.

Nowadays documentaries are looked at having a lower budget to mainstream genre films but makes it attractive to film companies. The interpretation of the film can be taken differently to the audience or the directors wants a certain opinion.

Modern documentaries have some overlap with television forms, with the development of "reality television" that occasionally verges on the documentary but more often veers to the fictional or staged.

There are different documentary forms e.g. docu-eroticamentry, doc-fiction, DVD documentary, complication films and observational documentaries. These types cross and relate to other genres of film.

Types of Documentaries:

• Participatory documentaries believe that it is impossible for the act of filmmaking to not influence or alter the events being filmed. What these films do is emulate the approach of the anthropologist: participant-observation. Not only is the filmmaker part of the film, we also get a sense of how situations in the film are affected or altered by her presence.
• Reflexive documentaries do not see themselves as a transparent window on the world; instead they draw attention to their own constructedness, and the fact that they are representations.
• Performative documentaries stress subjective experience and emotional response to the world. They are strongly personal, unconventional, perhaps poetic and/or experimental, and might include hypothetical enactments of events designed to make us experience what it might be like for us to possess a certain specific perspective on the world that is not our own.This relates to my type of film as it is about one person making it very personal and real life and I want to experimental with it.