History Of Documentary

1877: Eadweard Muybridge takes sequential photographs that show a horse in motion. Muybridge invented the zoöpraxiscope in 1879, a device for projecting and animating his photographic images.

1883: Etienne Jules Marey starts work on chronophotography - the photography of people in movement.

1895: Auguste and Louis Lumière carry out the world's first public film screening on December 28, 1895 in the basement lounge of the Grand Cafe in Paris.


Above: Lumiere Camera


1919: Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov issues a manifesto which calls for a new style of cinema that documents real life. Vertov says that the future of cinema depends on reporting the truth. In 1922, he begins to produce Kino Pravda (literally "Film Truth"), a series of news reportage films that foreshadows both later newsreels and later documentary styles, including cinéma vérité .

1920’s: European experimental filmmakers start working in styles that use avant-garde cinema filming and editing techniques and abstract narratives to create impressionistic, visual poems. Examples of this are: Walther Ruttmann’s Berlin: A Symphony of a Great City (Berlin, die Symphonie der Grosstadt) (1927) and Alberto Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures (1926).



Nanook


1922: Robert Flaherty films Nanook Of The North, generally cited as the first feature-length documentary. The film uses many of the conventions of later documentary and ethnographic filmmaking, including use of third-person narration and subjective tone, and a focus on an indigenous person as the film's hero.

1925: Sergei Eisenstein films Battleship Potemkin, a fictional recounting of an uprising again the Czar that combines documentary elements with experimental editing and narrative techniques.


John Grierson

1928: John Grierson joins the British Empire Marketing Board (EMB), a governmental agency, and organizes the E.M.B. Film Unit. Grierson gathered around him talented and energetic filmmakers, including Edgar Anstey, Sir Arthur Elton, Stuart Legg, Basil Wright, Humphrey Jennings, Harry Watt, and Alberto Cavalcanti.



1930-37: The Worker's Film and Photo League is formed in the US (transformed into Frontier Films in 1937) with the outset of making independent documentaries with a politically and socially progressive viewpoint.


Leni Riefenstahl


1935: German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl is commissioned by Adolph Hitler to film the annual Nazi Party rally of 1934. The resulting film, Triumph of the Will, is a extremely importnat both in documentary technique and in the use of film as a powerful propaganda medium.

1938: John Grierson visits Canada on invitation to consult on the possibilities of a national Canadian film organization. He is appointed Government Film Commissioner in October 1939. Within six years of accepting the job as head of the National Film Board, Grierson gets a team of more than 800 filmmakers.


1950-60’s: Using newly developed, lightweght, hand-held cameras with synchronized sound, a new generation of young filmmakers in the US and Europe attempts to redefine the nature of the documentary film.

1953: National Educational Television (later the Public Broadcasting Service is founded.)

1955: Armstrong Circle Theatre is first broadcast on American television. The program is generally considered the first continuing sixty-minute series to utilize the form that would come to be known as "docudrama"—dramatic recreations of real events.


1958: The National Film Board of Canada begins production of The Candid Eye—thirteen half-hour films, many of which demonstrate the new ideas of what will come to be called Cinéma Vérité, or Direct Cinéma .

1959: Drew Associates developed the first fully portable 16mm synchronized camera and sound system.

 
Robert Drew


1960: In 1960 Drew Associates produces Primary, the first film in which the sync-sound motion picture camera is able to move freely with characters throughout a breaking story. Primary is widely regarded as the earliest example of American "Direct Cinéma ."

1962: Canadian filmmaker Wolf Koenig produces Lonely Boy, a profile of pop singer Paul Anka, and one of the earliest pop concert films.

1965: 

• Sony introduces the first consumer 1/2-inch video tape recorder. 
• Philips introduces the compact cassette for consumer audio recording and playback on small portable machines.

1968: Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) established

1970s: The late 60’s and 70’s saw a shift in the narrative approach of many documentaries. Although cinéma vérité, third-person narrative and other earlier documentary forms continued, first-person video storytelling, fueled by the flood of camcorders into the marketplace in the 1970’ and after, starts to emerge as a new genre.



1973: PBS series, An American Family, is created an early version of what would later be called "reality TV". It provides a close-up view of the Loud family. It captures the most intimate details of the family's life, including the parents' divorce proceedings and the New York lifestyle of their gay son.

1975: Sony introduces the Betamax consumer videocassette recorder (VCR) (cost: $2295)

1976: JVC introduces the VHS format VCR (cost: $885)

1980: Sony introduces the first consumer video camcorder.

1982: Sony's Betacam, a single-unit broadcast-use camera hits the market.

1984: Release of This is Spinal Tap, a hilarious vérité-style "mockumentary" about a fictional heavy metal band. Credited for popularising mockumentaries in the mid-1980's

1988-1991: Congress passes legislation allowing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to negotiate with a national coalition of independent film producer groups to establish the Independent Television Service so that diverse voices be championed on public television.



1999: The Blair Witch Project, a faux vérité documentary, grosses over $100 million in the US alone

2001: An enormous rash of television programs utilizing some of the techniques of cinema vérité hit the network and cable airwaves—so called "reality TV." These include MTV’s The Real World and The Osbournes, Big Brother, The Fear Factor, The Bachelor and The Bachelorette.


2001-Present: Box office analysts have noted that documentaries have become increasingly successful in theatrical release. Films such as Fahrenheit 9/11, Super Size Me, Earth and March Of The Penguins are all strong examples of that. The low budgets and high profitability attracts film companies much better than traditional films do.