ABSTRACT
This chapter describes brief history of filmmaking development, outlines the history of documentary films, and reviews the introduction of television, since it is one of the prime conveyers of documentaries. The documentaries are truthful stories about people, places, events, and things set in the past or present. Before the advent of television and video, documentaries were called 'documentary films' because they were shot on film stock, the medium of that earlier time. Today the term 'documentary' is more often used to describe the genre. Television was created as a result of many inventors from numerous countries working over several decades to use electromechanical methods to scan, transmit, and then reproduce an image. Whether documentaries record the present or recall events about people of the past, or feature a combination of past and present, the invention and development of television certainly helped bring documentaries into the public eye.
