ABSTRACT
Documentary is easy to identify but difficult to define. Anyone can tell that a particular film or TV programme is a documentary, but the range of documentary styles is vast. A film like An Inconvenient Truth argues passionately for a particular view; Primary is content to observe without comment; Chris Marker's Sunless knits together seemingly unconnected thoughts into a highly personal essay; Capturing the Friedmans tells a compelling story … yet all of these films are called documentaries. Some film-makers are rigorous in their belief in simply letting events unroll in front of their cameras; others will organise full-scale reconstructions of events, or see no problem in directing their subjects to behave in particular ways. Both methods have resulted in films that are called ‘documentaries’. Uniting all these approaches is a need to get at ‘facts’; to translate the realities of the world onto the screen; to portray the world as it is and – usually – to offer it up for critical scrutiny or to look at it anew. Documentaries insist ‘these are the facts’; ‘this is how things are’; ‘this is what happened’; ‘this is what I believe’; ‘this is how they behave and why’. At the heart of documentary film- and programme-making lies an urgency to communicate. Documentary is about showing and telling.
