DFG Docs

Documentary film — the makers, the works and the movements, from 1922 to now.

Portrait of Robert J. Flaherty
Photo: Portrait of Robert J. Flaherty · Wikimedia Commons

Flaherty held the seal hole as long as the wait lasted. The argument about what a documentary is was finished before anyone thought to start it.

One hundred and four years of pointing a camera at people who did not ask for it

Start at the ice hole

Seven movements, in the order they happened

The flagship piece

Flaherty at the Ice Hole

Terraced back yards with washing strung between them
Housing Problems (1935) put slum tenants in front of a camera and let them speak without a narrator — the most copied idea in the form.Photo: Destiny Edor / Pexels

The first documentary was also the first argument about what a documentary could be: Flaherty's Nanook of the North staged the life it claimed to show.

The walrus was real. The harpoon was chosen over a rifle for the camera's benefit. Both things are true, and the form has been arguing about them for a hundred and four years.

Read the piece

Grierson took the public money and told the Post Office it was making art

He coined the word and then built the thing: the Empire Marketing Board unit, the GPO Film Unit from 1933, the National Film Board of Canada in 1939. His own Drifters (1929) is dutiful. What the unit produced was not.

Night Mail (1936) ends with Auden's verse cut against Britten's score and the rhythm of the train, and it still moves at the speed it was made at. Humphrey Jennings, whom Grierson never much liked, made Listen to Britain (1942) with almost no commentary at all — an argument that the sound of a country is the documentary.

Seven years before any of it, Vertov had answered Flaherty with the opposite bet: no story, no titles, no actors, and the man carrying the machine left in the frame.

The Grierson section

Poster artwork for the GPO Film Unit's Night Mail, 1936
The sorting carriage, cut to Britten. Nine minutes of it, and no one has bettered the edit.Photo: Night Mail · Wikimedia Commons
A period portrait of a man holding a hand-cranked movie camera at eye level
The man with the movie camera, filmed carrying it.Photo: Portrait, man, movie camera Fortepan 12963 · Wikimedia Commons
“A creative treatment of actuality.”
John Grierson, First Principles of Documentary, 1932 — the definition he is stuck with
Portrait of John Grierson Photo: John Grierson · Wikimedia Commons

The five years the camera got light enough to follow somebody out of a room

An Éclair NPR paired to a Nagra III, crystal-locked, no cable between them. Drew Associates shot Primary (1960) on that principle and the form changed inside a decade — Pennebaker's Dont Look Back (1967), the Maysles' Salesman (1969), Wiseman's Titicut Follies (1967). In Paris, Rouch and Morin used the same kit for the opposite purpose and called it cinéma vérité.

Vintage super 8 movie cameras arranged in rows on a flat surfaceDVD cover for the documentary Primary, featuring profile photos of JFK and a womanMan in glasses and scarf speaks at a microphone during a Barnes & Noble eventMovie poster for Grey Gardens showing a woman in a fur coat before a weathered mansionMovie poster for Titicut Follies showing a sketched nude figure with arms raised overheadCinéma Vérité Vs Direct Cinema

Éclair NPR · 1960 · Primary · 1960 · Dont Look Back · 1967 · Grey Gardens · 1975 · Titicut Follies · 1967 · Chronicle of a Summer · 1961

What the equipment decided before anybody argued about it

Six who stayed in the room longer than was comfortable

Portrait of Robert J. FlahertyRobert Flaherty1884 – 1951Invented the form and staged it in the same gesture.Portrait of John GriersonJohn Grierson1898 – 1972Coined the word, then built the units that made the films.Jean Rouch framing a shot with his handsJean Rouch1917 – 2004Held that the camera was a provocation, not a witness.Portrait of D. A. PennebakerD. A. Pennebaker1925 – 2019Put the sequence first and refused to explain it.Release poster for Senna, 2010Asif Kapadiaborn 1972Built two features from archive alone, with no interviews shot.Release artwork for Grizzly ManWerner Herzogborn 1942Stayed audible in his own films and judged them out loud.

The Makers section

The movements had addresses: Inukjuak, Blackheath, Montreal, Paris, Cambridge Mass.

Where each movement actually worked, from Flaherty's winter on Hudson Bay to the Drew Associates rooms in Massachusetts.

InukjuakMontrealBridgewaterNew YorkLondonBlackheathSheffieldParis
Every pin is a place a movement actually worked in, and each one links to the piece that covers it.Geometry: supplied map kit, projected coordinates

Where it gets shown, and who is standing in the queue

Rows of empty seats in a darkened auditorium before a screening

Sheffield, since 1994

The Showroom has hosted DocFest since 1994, and what sells there sets a year of British commissioning.

Photo: Tima Miroshnichenko / Pexels
A cinema façade with a documentary poster mounted above the entrance

The front of the house

IDFA in Amsterdam has run the largest documentary audience in the world since 1988, alongside its industry market.

Photo: Darya Sannikova / Pexels
A tightly packed shelf of spines under a strip light

The back catalogue

A premiere lasts a week. A disc release, a strand slot or a restoration is how a film keeps being seen.

Photo: Valentin Ivantsov / Pexels

The festival piece

The last ten years, when the form stopped asking permission

Movie poster for 13th showing a shackled prisoner walking beside an American flag

The Thirteenth Amendment as Argument — One Clause, Ninety-Four Minutes

Photo: 13th (film) · Wikimedia Commons
Movie poster for "The Act of Killing" showing dancers in pink emerging from a giant fish sculpture

Perpetrators in Costume — When Killers Choose Their Genre

Photo: The Act of Killing · Wikimedia Commons
Movie poster for Citizenfour showing a bespectacled man looking down, bathed in blue light

Eight Days in Room 1014 —

Photo: Citizenfour · Wikimedia Commons

The Now section

Colophon

Set and printed with the support of