CategoriesStyles and Movements
Documentary Film
Moving images that record real people, places and events, from the first actuality films to artists' long-form observation.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for Documentary Film are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
Films of real events are as old as cinema: the Lumière brothers' short scenes of factory workers and arriving trains in the mid-1890s were documents before they were entertainment. Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922) mixed observation with staging, and Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera (1929) turned a day in Soviet cities into a dazzling study of film itself. Lightweight cameras with synchronised sound later made possible the fly-on-the-wall styles of cinéma vérité and direct cinema.
Artists have drawn on all of this. Wang Bing's patient films follow workers and families in China, beginning with the nine-hour West of the Tracks (2003). Laura Poitras documents surveillance and state power, as in Citizenfour (2014). Barbara Hammer made experimental films about lesbian lives and histories. The Mumbai collective CAMP works with archives and footage shot by communities themselves. Such works are often shown as installations, blurring cinema and art.
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