An Introduction to Film

storytelling: documentary film is more concerned

with the recording of reality, the education of view-

ers, or the presentation of political or social analy-

ses. In other words, if we think of a narrative movie

Narrative commonalityEven those narrative films

bearing an overt ideological message or a dark theme are

designed to engage an audience with a story. A twisted

formal exercise like David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr.(2001) [1],

an earnest political thriller like Stephen Gaghan’sSyriana

(2005) [2], and an animated crowd-pleaser like Gore

Verbinski’s Rango(2011) [3], all deliver different messages

and are each designed to appeal to a different audience. But

they all employ the same narrative structures and techniques

designed to transport viewers into a story, get them invested

in the characters, and make them care about the end results,

despite knowing up front that none of it is real.

1

2

3

as fiction, then the best way to understand docu-

mentary film is as nonfiction.

But it would be a mistake to think that simply

because documentary filmmakers use actual people,

places, and events as source material, their films

always reflect objective truth. Whatever their alle-

giance, all documentary filmmakers employ story-

telling and dramatization to some degree in

shaping their material. If they didn’t, their footage

might end up as unwatchably dull as a surveillance

video recording everyday comings and goings. As

the subsequent chapters will repeatedly illustrate,

all elements of cinematic language—from the cam-

era angle to the shot type to the lighting to the

sound mix—color our perceptions of the material

and are, thus, subjective to some degree. And no

documentary subject that knows she is being

filmed can ever behave exactly as she would off

camera. So the unavoidable act of making the

movie removes the possibility of a purely objective

truth. And truth, of course, is in the eye of the

beholder. Every documentary filmmaker has a per-

sonal perspective on the subject matter, whether

she entered the production with a preexisting opin-

ion or developed her point of view over the course

of researching, shooting, and editing the movie. The

informed documentary viewer should view these

mediating factors thoughtfully, always trying to

understand the ways in which the act of cinematic

storytelling and the filmmaker’s attitude toward

the people and events depicted affect the interpre-

tation of the truth up on the screen.

These complicating factors may have influenced

film critic John Grierson, who originally coined the

term documentaryin 1926 to delineate cinema that

observed life. Some time after he’d started mak-

ing documentaries himself, Grierson described

the approach as the “creative treatment of actual-

ity.” Robert J. Flaherty’s pioneering documentary

Nanook of the North(1922) demonstrates the com-

plex relationship between documentary filmmaking

and objective truth. Flaherty’s movie included

authentic “documentary” footage but also incorpo-

rated a great deal of staged reenactments. He report-

edly encouraged the Inuit subjects to use older,

more “traditional” hunting and fishing techniques

for the film instead of their then-current practices.

TYPES OF MOVIES 71