Documentaries

Documentary Practices and Uses

As a starting point, documentary is a media form that observes, manipulates, and then redistributes stories about the world around us, within us, and beyond our sensory experience at micro and macro levels. Its origins are rooted in media that recorded things in the world, capturing images and/or sounds, and making them available in different times and spaces. Its ancestry can be split into the fields of observation like history, journalism, geography, and anthropology that used words and images to gather “facts” together and write them down for diverse distant audiences. Documentary has been used as well to consolidate and share accumulated knowledge from both hard and soft sciences, from the study of the natural world, to the investigation of psychological and sociological questions, to the historical exploration of politics, war, social movements, and to the lives of individuals, cultural groups, and their experiences in the arts, religion, and meaning. Along with these intellectual ancestors, documentary is a product of changes in technologies that can be used to record and preserve, from descriptive language and images, to photographic and audio technologies that fixed images and sounds into different media, to the distribution systems of radio, phonograph records, television, film theaters, and a wide range of digital distribution channels.

For most creators and audiences, documentaries tell stories that assert a notion of what is true or make an argument for the “truth” of a specific perspective or experience. Documentaries are stories featuring people pretending to be themselves. Creators make recordings of things in the world that they are either not making up or that are being made up for the purposes of audio and visual demonstration. The recordings of things in the world, and the constructions that illustrate things in the world, are then edited together into story forms that are influenced by related media practices. For example, early film technologies were trying to find better ways to make moving photographs of things in the world in order to share how they look to audiences not actually present.

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