The origins of the film and video documentary can be traced back to the period of the European Enlightenment when artists, followed later b...
The origins of the film and video documentary can be traced back to the period of the European Enlightenment when artists, followed later by photographers, began using visual documentation to support scientific projects, notably land and sea-borne expeditions of exploration and discovery. Their efforts predate the invention of the motion picture camera, which appeared in the last decade of the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century the history of the documentary was marked by changes in technology as well as by the political and cultural uses to which documentary films were put. The first half of the century, the era first of the silent and then of the sound film, saw documentaries emerging as a distinctive genre but one that had difficulty competing with fictional drama for audiences in commercial movie theaters. Both totalitarian and democratic governments in the 1930s financed nonfiction films with the result that in World War II the documentary form effectively succumbed everywhere to the demands of propaganda. The advent of television after World War II brought new sources of funding and new outlets for documentary films, as well as new approaches to their form. Faced with an enormous demand for television programming, commercial networks and public service broadcasters alike saw a need to balance entertainment shows with newsbased, historical,
and human interest documentaries. For some 25 years documentaries became a staple of network television schedules, watched by mass audiences and covering all sides of human experience. Deregulation in the 1980s transformed this situation, with the documentary migrating from commercial networks to cable channels. While public service broadcasters maintained their interest in the traditional documentary, video technology made independent production of documentaries more widespread, further extending the range of subject matter, and enabling documentary makers with marked individual styles to emerge. By the end of the twentieth century, the documentary genre had established itself worldwide, though in a wide variety of forms, and with no general agreement on how the genre itself should be defined. But whatever technological or cultural changes may lie in the future, documentary makers still face the challenge of making the right aesthetic choices when they present information about the actual world in which we live
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