History of film documentary

Nonfictional motion picture

"Documentary" redirects here. For other uses, see Documentary (disambiguation).

A documentary film (often described simply as a documentary) is a non-fictional motion picture intended to "document reality, primarily for instruction, education or maintaining a historical record".^[1] The American author and media analystBill Nichols has characterized the documentary in terms of "a filmmaking practice, a cinematic tradition, and mode of audience reception [that remains] a practice without clear boundaries".^[2]

Research into information gathering, as a behavior, and the sharing of knowledge, as a concept, has noted how documentary movies were preceded by the notable practice of documentary photography. This has involved the use of singular photographs to detail the complex attributes of historical events and continues to a certain degree to this day, with an example being the conflict-related photography achiev

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The Story of Film: An Odyssey

documentary by Mark Cousins

The Story of Film: An Odyssey
Film poster
Genre	Documentary
Based on	The Story of Film by Mark Cousins
Written by	Mark Cousins
Directed by	Mark Cousins
Narrated by	Mark Cousins
Country of origin	United Kingdom
Original language	English
No. of episodes	15
Producer	John Archer
Editor	Timo Langer
Running time	minutes
Production company	Hopscotch Films
Network	More4
Release	3 September&#;()&#;– 10 December &#;()

The Story of Film: An Odyssey is a British documentary film about the history of film, presented on television in 15 one-hour chapters with a total length of over minutes. It was directed and narrated by Mark Cousins, a film critic from Northern Ireland, based on his book The Story of Film.^[1][2]

The series was broadcast in September on More4, the digital television service of UK broadcaster Channel 4. The Story of Fi

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Authentic talking cinema: the history of documentary

Though scholars of early rulle have been much preoccupied with the emergence of storytelling and narrative, the dominant mode of early cinema – beginning with the first films of the Lumières in – was in fact the actuality, or what might be called documentary before documentary. 

An instinct for what Siegfried Kracauer described as the “seizure of physical reality” produced a huge variety of images, which despite their brief and fragmentary character were not without ideological implications, since they generally reproduced social stereotypes unthinkingly and frequently projected and enhanced the iconic imagery of state power and authority. 

Cinema was born in the ‘civilised’ countries of Europe and North amerika, and these early films also traded on exotic pictures from every corner of the world, which not surprisingly reflected the colonial ideology of the day. The French at this time used the term ‘documentaire’ for what