Documentary film

A documentary film is a nonfiction motion picture created to record reality, often for teaching, learning, or preserving history. Bill Nichols, an American author and media analyst, described the documentary as a filmmaking practice, a cinematic tradition, and a way audiences engage with media—one that lacks firm boundaries. The form grew out of documentary photography, which used single images to capture the complexity of historical events, such as Mathew Brady’s conflict-related photographs during the American Civil War. Early documentary films, originally called “actuality films,” typically lasted a minute or less and showed real events without narrative structure.

Over time, documentaries became longer and more varied, including educational works, observational pieces, and docufiction, which blends dramatic storytelling with fictional elements. They are often used in schools to teach principles, and filmmakers are expected to be truthful to their vision without intentionally misleading audiences. Platforms like Dailymotion and YouTube have expanded the reach and accessibility of documentaries, helping them spread to multiple audiences and bypass censorship.

Definition

The Polish writer and filmmaker Bolesław Matuszewski was among the first to identify the documentary mode, writing two early texts on cinema in 1898—Une nouvelle source de l’histoire and La photographie animée—which considered film’s historical and documentary value. He also proposed creating a film archive to preserve visual materials. The word “documentary” was coined by Scottish filmmaker John Grierson in a 1926 review of Robert Flaherty’s Moana, published in the New York Sun under the pen name “The Moviegoer.” Grierson believed cinema could observe life as a new art form, that real actors and scenes were better than fiction for interpreting the modern world, and that raw materials could feel more real than acted ones. His definition of documentary as “creative treatment of actuality” contrasts with Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov’s aim to present “life as it is” or “life caught unawares.” American film critic Pare Lorentz called a documentary “a factual film which is dramatic.” Others note that documentaries differ from other nonfiction films by offering an opinion and a specific message alongside facts.

Scholar Betsy McLane argued that documentaries let filmmakers convey their views on historical events, people, and places they find significant, introducing perspectives often absent from traditional media like books or school curricula. Documentary practice involves the complex process of creating projects, addressing creative, ethical, and conceptual choices with media devices, content, form, and production strategies. Documentary filmmaking can serve as journalism, advocacy, or personal expression.

Pre-1900

Before 1900, early film focused on the novelty of showing events in single-shot moments—a train entering a station, a boat docking, or factory workers leaving. These “actuality” films, often made by Auguste and Louis Lumière, lasted a minute or less due to technological limits. Some were commercially driven, as people paid to see themselves on screen. One notable exception, The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight, ran over an hour and a half using pioneering film-looping technology by Enoch J. Rector, showing a 1897 prize-fight across the United States.

In May 1896, Bolesław Matuszewski filmed surgical operations in Warsaw and Saint Petersburg hospitals. In 1898, French surgeon Eugène-Louis Doyen invited Matuszewski and Clément Maurice to record his operations in Paris, starting a series of surgical films before July 1898. Matuszewski’s last surgical film was in 1906.