Documentary Voice & Vision

Chapter 1Finding and Developing Ideas

■ What is a Documentary?

Documentary as a form has many points of origin. Some people look to Robert Flaherty’s footage of Inuit life in Northern Canada in Nanook of the North (1922), others to works by Dziga Vertov and his innovative portrait of urban life in the new Soviet Union in Man with a Movie Camera (1929). For many others, the edifying documentaries of the 1930s British documentary movement, described by founder John Grierson as a “creative treatment of actuality,”¹ still serve as defining models for today’s documentarians. Wherever we locate its origins, at its most basic, documentary film offers us some kind of vision of how the real world looks and operates. Documentary filmmaking is a fascinating ...