. Conclusion: Art and Facts This survey has not touched on films and videos that push the boundaries of nonfiction art, such as Georges Fr...
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Conclusion: Art and Facts This survey has not touched on films and videos that push the boundaries of nonfiction art, such as Georges Franju’s Le Sang des Bêtes (Blood of the Beasts) (1949), Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1982) and Le Tombeau D’Alexandre (The Last Bolshevik) (1993), Jay Rosenblatt's Human Remains (1998), Bill Viola’s I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like (1986), or Juan Downey’s J. S. Bach (1986). Works like these defy easy categorization and perhaps should be considered as a separate genre. There has been much theorizing but no general agreement about what is a documentary. For most makers of documentaries the form excludes attack and how-to 23 videos as well as propaganda and industrial films paid for by their sponsors. But these boundaries are not altogether fixed. Nanook of the North, Flaherty’s first film, was financed by a French fur company hoping to enlarge its business; his last, Louisiana Story (1948), by the Standard Oil Company hoping to create a good image about its oil drillings.
General Motors has paid millions of dollars to sponsor many of PBS’s prestige documentaries and the company has been allowed to run 15-second commercials on the network in support of its sponsorship. Documentaries may be nonfiction works, but not all nonfiction works are documentaries. From its origins in the Enlightenment, the documentary project has used art to record facts; and by recording, to illuminate; and by illuminating, to bring before a wider public. In each period of its history the documentary has fulfilled an artistic and a social function, both giving pleasure and informing, seeking truth in both the aesthetic and the material realms. The pull between art and facts is the dynamic process that lies at the center of documentary production. Balancing the claims of each and honesty in motive are what differentiate documentaries from other nonfiction products. By the end of the twentieth century video technology itself was undergoing further change with the development of the Internet and the industry’s acceptance of a digital future. The implications for documentary makers of this development are uncertain. Some see potential in the way documentary material - text, sound, interviews, still and moving images - can be supplied in interactive, non-linear form, with Web sites supporting in greater quantity and more detail what is edited into a film or video documentary. But for others, the documentary’s integrity as a work of art will always remain the primary challenge of the form. *
* * * * Bibliography: Barnouw, E. (1993). Documentary, a History of the Non-Fiction Film. Second revised edition, Oxford Univ. Press, New York. Barsam, R. (1992). Nonfiction Film: A Critical History. Revised and expanded edition, Indiana Univ. Press, Bloomington. Bluem, A. W. (1965). Documentary in American Television: Form, Function, Method. Hastings House, New York. Brownlow, K. (1978). The War, The West, and The Wilderness. Secker & Warburg, London. Einstein, D. (1987). Special edition: a guide to network television documentary series and special news reports, 1955-1979. Scarecrow Press, Metuchen. Einstein, D. (1997). Special edition: a guide to network television documentary series and special news reports, 1980-1989. Scarecrow Press, Lanham.
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