assignment #11

I . History of Documentary Film

A. Pre-1900-Between July 1898 and 1901 the Romanian professor Gheorghe Marinescu made several science films in his neurology clinic in Bucharest. Early film was dominated by the novelty of showing an event. They were single shot moments captured on film: a train entering a station, a boat docking, or factory workers leaving work.

B. 1900–1920-Travelogue films They were often referred to by distributors as "scenics." Scenics were among the most popular sort of films at the time. Early color motion picture processes such as Kinemacolor and Prizmacolor used travelogues to promote the new color process.

C. 1920s

1) Romanticism-With Robert J. Flaherty's Nanook of the North in 1922, documentary film embraced romanticism; Flaherty filmed a number of heavily staged romantic films during this time period.

2)The city symphony-These films tend to feature people as products of their environment, and lean towards the avant-garde.

3) Kino-Pravda-Vertov believed the camera — with its varied lenses, shot-counter shot editing, time-lapse, ability to slow motion, stop motion and fast-motion

4) Newsreel tradition-newsreels were also sometimes staged but were usually re-enactments of events that had already happened.

D. 1920s–1940s-  The propagandist tradition consists of films made with the explicit purpose of persuading an audience of a point. One of the most notorious propaganda films is Leni Riefenstahl's film Triumph of the Will (1935), which chronicled the 1934 Nazi Party Congress and was commissioned by Adolf Hitler

E. 1950s–1970s-

1) Cinéma-vérité-
Cinéma vérité and similar documentary traditions can thus be seen, in a broader perspective, as a reaction against studio-based film production constraints. Shooting on location, with smaller crews, would also happen in the french new wave, the filmmakers taking advantage of advances in technology allowing smaller, handheld cameras and synchronized sound to film events on location as they unfolded.

2) Political weapons-In the 1960s and 1970s, documentary film was often conceived as a political weapon against neocolonialism and capitalism in general, especially in Latin America, but also in a changing Quebec society. La Hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces, from 1968), directed by Octavio Getino and Fernando E. Solanas, influenced a whole generation of filmmakers.

3) Modern documentaries-The nature of documentary films has expanded in the past 20 years from the cinema verité style introduced in the 1960s in which the use of portable camera and sound equipment allowed an intimate relationship between filmmaker and subject.

4) Documentaries without words- Films in the documentary form without words have been made. From 1982, the Qatsi trilogy and the similar Baraka could be described as visual tone poems, with music related to the images, but no spoken content.