Is this reel life, or is this fantasy?
1922 Robert J. Flaherty releases Nanook of the North, which follows the life of a Inuk family in Canada’s arctic. Although many scenes were staged, scripted or wholly invented — “Nanook” isn’t even its subject’s real name — it’s still regarded as the first feature-length documentary, and helped distinguish the form, which until then was a mix of medical films, recreated travelogues and news reels.
1929 Dziga Vertov films a series of “Kino-Pravda” (film-truth) newsreels, culminating in Man With a Movie Camera, a day in the life of city dwellers across the Soviet Union.
1935 Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will marks a turning point for propaganda films, using documentary styles to make the case for Nazi Germany.
1939 Canada’s National Film Board is founded, in part to create propaganda documentaries in support of our country’s involvement in the Second World War.
1942 The Academy Awards create a category for best documentary. The majority of the 25 nominees are short war propaganda films.
1958 Canadian filmmaker Michael Brault pioneers direct cinema, which takes advantage of advances in film and sound capability to present a more unvarnished
look at the world. Here, the filmmaker acts as a voyeur or observer, avoiding narration, interviews and even different camera setups.
1960 Jean Rouch makes Chronique d’un été, the first cinéma vérité film, which opens with a discussion of whether it’s even pos- sible to be sincere in front of a camera. Similar in style to direct cinema, vérité films often try to make a documentary seem more “real” by acknowledging the artificiality inherent in making a movie about something.
1968 Salesman, by Albert and David Maysles, brings direct cinema to wider appreciation.
1973 Orson Welles’s F For Fake explores the lives of famous forgers while engaging in some trickery of its own.
1984 This is Spinal Tap uses documentary tropes to tell the fictional story of a clueless heavy metal band, popularizing the concept of a mockumentary.
1988 Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line incorporates staged re-enactments into an examination of a murder case.
1989 Michael Moore’s Roger and Me popularizes a style that focuses specifically on the documen- tarian’s journey through an issue.
1989 COPS, a direct-cinema look at the jobs of police officers, debuts on Fox. MTV’s The Real World would try the same think with horny Gen Xers three years later.
2000 Survivor debuts on CBS, kicking off a wave of “reality TV,” which borrows documentary conventions to film “real” interactions between non-actor participants.