Doc Beginnings

Origin stories from all subjects and places tend to become shrouded with mythology. It seems to be typical of us as humans to determine the value of thoughts and expressions long after their initial conception. So it is with documentary film. Its history is not singular and its origins are murky due to its evolution through many heads and hands. Though it could be claimed that documentary films owe in great part their heritage to the Lumiere mode of production, I must agree with Nichols' proposition that this may be undue credit. The Lumiere brothers didn't invent documentary, though they did make cinematic documents. Nichols explains that it would take leaps before filmmakers would make self-aware films that were institutionally recognized and purported as 'documentaries'. The Lumiere brothers simply made films. They were void of genre in their conception since no such thing existed at that time.

The murky evolution of certain film practices becoming established as documentary-esque was made evident when viewing Drifters and Coal Face. Both films undertake to provide a like-minded perspective of reality. Both have a similar interest in national identity and industrialization and seem to follow similar conventions in structure and form (though the advent of sound gave Coal Face the ability to narrate the 'intertitles', its narration is quite similar to the purpose of the intertitles in Drifters). Seeing the similarities between these films helped me to understand that 'documentaries' were born, in a sense, only once there were filmmakers in proximity to agree on an established idea of documentary. Before a common vocabulary had been established, it may have been purely experimentation and exploration that characterized the creation of films with 'documentary' qualities. Once proximity is established, we can see very soon after the creation of self-aware 'documentary' films such as Nanook of the North (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHbU2LdStwk) and Land Without Bread, which relied on the audience's trust to successfully tell their story. The establishment of a vocabulary set the stage for a genre to be born and the audience's assumption and acceptance of the veracity documentary. This allowed filmmakers to truly give an indexical representation of the world with their own voice, or poetic expression/experimentation.