Documentaries

I

Introduction

Documentaries, carefully structured television and radio programmes that explore real-life subjects in detail. Documentaries deal with any area of life—history, culture, and the natural world, as well as topical events. They examine their subjects in depth and aim to be authoritative. To this end, documentaries use “primary sources”—people and documents close to the subjects—or expert narration. Some use realism to convey authority, as in cinéma vérité. Journalistic documentaries are investigative, concerned mainly with problems—for example, social deprivation, repressive governments, corruption, commercial exploitation, and the horrors of war.

II

History

Documentaries already had a presence in cinema by the late 1920s and early 1930s, most famously in Britain through the work of John Grierson and other film-makers who were working as part of the General Post Office (GPO) film unit. These realist documentaries, which often examined the lives and occupations of the working class (e.g. Industrial Britain, 1933, Robert J. Flaherty; Housing Problems, 1935, Edgar Anstey/Arthur Elton), were described as British cinema’s “finest hour” by film critics who at that time showed little regard for popular British cinema. During the same period, radio showed an interest in the documentary form, and when television began to expand into a mass medium in the 1950s, it too began to explore the possibilities of the documentary. While influenced by documentary traditions from cinema, early TV documentaries (“story-documentaries”) in Britain were often studio-based reconstructions of true situations and events, in part because of the various technological constraints of producing live material “on-the-spot”. Between 1946 and 1956, BBC story-documentaries explored features on juvenile delinquency, marriage, divorce, borstal, women at work, children in care, and “maladjusted children”. As this suggests, the medium rapidly turned its attention to society at large, engaging with the sphere of social issues and current affairs.

In the American context after World War II, topical television documentaries benefited from the vision of two men, reporter Ed Murrow, famous for his wartime radio reports from London, and producer Fred Friendly. American networks broke the restraints of news by submitting issues to more detailed examination within a larger social perspective.

British and Canadian television scored outside the news field with inspired “personal” documentaries by individuals who often produced work of high artistic merit. By the late 1960s and 1970s, expert documentaries on grand themes flourished. Four BBC series achieved particular fame: Civilisation (1969), which included two years’ effort by the art historian Kenneth Clark; America (1972), on the history of the United States by the acclaimed journalist Alistair Cooke; The Ascent of Man (1973), on the development of science as seen by noted polymath Jacob Bronowski; and The Age of Uncertainty (1977), concerning world economic problems described by the American authority John Kenneth Galbraith. Thames Television lavished three-and-a-half years’ work on 26 episodes of The World at War (1974), a history of World War II.

Additionally, popular television added to everyday knowledge of wildlife in programmes about creatures in their natural locations. The best also advanced scientific understanding. The Frenchman Jacques Cousteau, for example, did so with his televised underwater explorations in the 1960s and 1970s. Similarly, beginning in the 1950s the British naturalist Sir David Attenborough enabled millions of viewers of his popular documentaries around the world to experience unique images of wildlife in various habitats.

It is important to note that from the very start, the characteristics of television as a medium and the space in which it is viewed impacted on the development of the documentary form. For example, the domesticity of television has encouraged the desire for intimate subject-matter, particularly in forms of observational film-making that offer the sense of getting close to people’s lives. This feeling of intimacy, as well as the appeal to mundanity and domesticity, is manifest in producer Paul Watson’s observational series for the BBC, The Family (1974) (the British version of An American Family, 1972), which documented the ongoing lives of the members of a working-class family in Reading (The Wilkins family). As this example makes clear, television also ushered in the documentary serial form to suit its own scheduling patterns.

III

Style

Documentary styles vary. In his 1994 study Representing Reality, the documentary historian Bill Nichols mapped out different types of documentary form. These included the observational documentary (in which the film-maker claims to intervene as little as possible—often equated with “fly-on-the-wall”), expository documentary (authoritative interviews, voice-over), reflexive documentary (the film-maker as part of the film itself—often questioning the process of film-making), and the interactive documentary (focusing on the interaction between film-maker and subject, overtly crossing the line of objectivity). However, these different styles are regularly blurred in television documentaries, in no small part in recent years due to the hybridization of the documentary and its mixing with other generic forms (see below).

IV

Technology and Funding

Personal documentaries of all kinds rely on individual talent. Others are the work of teams, including researchers and editors, although small-scale technology encourages the efforts of lone individuals, especially in situations of risk. Small video cameras and small sound recorders help because they can easily be taken anywhere. However, the costs of good-quality television documentaries are high. To meet them, producers have several choices: to sell their work in many countries if it appeals across different cultures; to take sponsorship; to be funded by a broadcasting organization with big audiences; or to arrange co-production deals with several broadcasting stations in different countries.