II. ORIGINS OF THE DOCUMENTARY The documentary impulse predates the film camera. It can be traced back to the enlightenment, the spirit of ...
II. ORIGINS OF THE DOCUMENTARY The documentary impulse predates the film camera. It can be traced back to the enlightenment, the spirit of scientific enquiry that transformed the intellectual climate of Western civilization in the 17th and 18th centuries, and incidentally produced the first encyclopedias. A prime Enlightenment project was to discover more about the globe itself. In the 18th century Britain and France, the premier maritime powers of Europe, commissioned voyages of discovery with the dual purpose of establishing national claims to distant lands and reporting on topography and strange peoples. Both the mercantile and the scientific objectives required detailed reports with accurate visual records.
Professional artists were recruited to accompany expeditions. The first and most famous example of a project of this kind were the three seaborne explorations (1768-1780) undertaken by the British navy under the command of James Cook which led to the discovery of New Zealand and Australia, and the mapping of a third of the globe. Cook, himself a brilliant navigator and cartographer, carried with him on all his voyages a retinue of naturalists, astronomers, and artists. Between them the professional artists Francis Parkinson, Alexander Buchan, William Hodges and John Webber produced many hundreds of images of people and places until then unknown 5 outside their own world. Half a century later, a similar documentary motive inspired a famous private expedition in the United States.
In 1833 a Prussian aristocrat, Prince Maximilian of Wied (near Coblenz on the Rhine), set out to explore the American West, at that time known only to a handful of mountain men and fur trappers. Maximilian brought with him, at his own expense, a young Swiss artist, Karl Bodmer. Together they travelled up the Missouri River to the heart of the Indian territory in the foothills of the Rockies. Bodmer's drawings and watercolors (some 500 in all) formed a comprehensive visual record of a way of life that was soon to disappear. Bodmer paid careful attention to the marks Indian chiefs painted on their faces and torsoes, to details in their headdresses and ornamentation on their clothes and bodies, realizing that these signs were the Indians' own form of documentary record. Bodmer’s work appeared on the eve of the invention of the camera. After Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre’s demonstration of the new device in 1839, photography quickly spread throughout the world. A mechanical means of making a visual record challenged the older technology of the artist’s eye and hand. By mid-century it had supplanted it. The relationship between artistic form and factual detail that marked documentary artists like Bodmer was dramatically illustrated on the Hayden Federal Survey expedition of 1871 to the Yellowstone region of the Rockies.
Accompanying the scientists on the expedition were two artists, the photographer Henry Jackson and the painter Thomas Moran, and each was conscious he would be judged by the other’s work. Together, their images convinced Congress to declare the Yellowstone a national wilderness park, the first national park in the world (Goetzmann, 1986). By the end of the nineteenth century photography had become the dominant form of visual record. Its truth telling status had worked a revolution in human perception. In this connection, two precursors of the filmed documentary should be mentioned, Jacob Riis (1849-1914) and Lewis Hine (1874-1940). Both men used photography for the purpose of social reform, Riis in the course of reporting on police work in the New York slums for the New York Tribune and Hine as an activist with the Progressive Reform Movement’s survey of Pittsburgh in 1907 and then as a reporter on child labor. Hine’s photographs of immigrants, industrial workers, and children have been used countless times by later makers of documentary films to illustrate the human face of America’s industrial revolution.
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