ABSTRACT
Emerging as it did from a number of artistic, commercial and scientific endeavours, non-fiction (and in fact all) cinema lacks a birthday. Chief amongst its pioneers, however, were perhaps Thomas Edison and Auguste and Louis Lumière. Edison, whose Kinetoscope enjoyed shortlived success in 1894, employed bulky camera and processing equip-
ment to the end of making studio-originated films – usually of professional performers – for this peep-show-type device. More crucially for documentary, the Lumières, in 1895, developed a five-kilogram, handcranked (and thus portable) camera capable of capturing life ‘on the
run’, outdoors in daylight and with minimal preparation. The same year, in Paris, they publicly unveiled their invention: a machine, the cinématographe, that heralded the arrival not only of the famous train (in L’Arrivée d’un Train en Gare, 1895), generating the legendarily (and maybe apoc-
ryphally) unsettling illusion of motion towards an audience, but also
cinema as a projected, enlarged and shared phenomenological experience. Making short films on a variety of usually unscripted subjects (the
majority of these were termed ‘actualities’), the Frenchmen took their shows to every continent bar Antarctica. As Erik Barnouw notes, ‘Edison began the process; Lumière and others carried it forward … In the end it was Louis Lumière who made the documentary film a reality –
on a worldwide basis, and with sensational suddenness’ (1993: 5). ‘[S]o far as the genesis of film art is concerned,’ concurs Dai Vaughan, ‘those early shows mounted by the Lumière brothers represent the nearest we will find to a singularity’ (1999: 1). Cinema proper was thus insti-
gated – as was a fascination with its mimetic ability to capture the incidental details of quotidian life and play them back as in a dream. The titular subjects were often not as captivating as airborne brick dust, leaves or the undulations of the sea: the random playing of time and
nature on the Earth and on humankind – a simple poetry to be found in the new magic of the moving image.
