Chapter Five

Question Five: How Did Documentary Filmmaking Get Started?

            In this chapter Nichols considers how documentary filmmaking found its voice. He points out that no one set out to invent this voice or build a documentary tradition. Today, it comes with the desire of filmmakers and writers to understand how things got to be the way they are. The goals of those before them were to make a film that answered their own needs and intuitions about how to represent the subject of their choosing. There are two origin myths of documentary filmmaking, they are:

      1.    The filmmaker was a hero who travelled far and wide to reveal hidden corners and remarkable occurrences that were part of our reality 

      2.   Film images possessed the power to reproduce the world by dint of a photomechanical process in which light energy passed through lens onto a photographic emulsion. (Nichols 122)

         The combination of these two qualities forms the mythic foundation for the rise of documentary film. However, like many mythic origins there are problems that arise within them. One example Nichols gives, the capacity of film to provide rigorous documentation of what comes before the camera leads in at least two other directions besides documentary: science and spectacle (124). Nichols then provides us with four key elements that form the basis for documentary film.

     1.    Indexical Documentation (shared with scientific images and the cinema of attractions)

     2.   Poetic experimentation

     3.   Narrative story telling

     4.   Rhetorical oratory (Nichols 128)

       The next three sections focus on the last three elements of the four key elements. Poetic experimentation in cinema comes from the cross-fertilization between cinema and the various modernist avant-gardes that flourished in the early part of the 20^th century. As well as poetic experimentation, the development of an even more dominant narrative element cinema continued after 1906. History and biography usually take the form of narratives but in a nonfiction mode. Next, rhetorical oratory, a classic voice of oratory sought to speak about the historical world, addressing questions of what to do, what really happened, or what someone or something was really like.