Documentary movie

Documentary movie is a expression of an aspect of reality, shown in audiovisual form of the movie. The organization and structure of images and sounds (texts and interviews), according to the author's point of view, determines the type of documentary.

The chronological sequence of the materials, the treatment of the narrator's figure, the nature of the materials —completely real, recreations, infographic images, etc.— give rise to such a wide variety of formats today, ranging from pure documentary up to creative documentaries, going through very varied reportage models, the docudrama (format in which the real characters interpret themselves), reaching the mockumentary.

Frequently, fiction programs adopt a structure and narrative mode that is very close to the documentary, and in turn, some documentaries reproduce resources typical of the creation of works of fiction.

By 1899, several inventors were in the race to develop new devices to capture motion from photographs, including the American Thomas Alva Edison and the French Lumière brothers. The latter would achieve the triumph in 1895 with their apparatus: the "cinématographe" or cinematograph. This was portable and weighed only five kilograms, compared to Edison's gigantic "kinetoscope" or kinetoscope, which required several men to move it from one place to another and was generally anchored to the ground in a kind of study.

These different techniques offered the possibility of easily transporting the cinematograph anywhere, being able to portray the reality of the outside world. In addition, this device offered other very attractive features: with just a few small adjustments it could be transformed into a projector and also into a printing machine. What could or can be called cinema (cinematography) is a kind of document.

Louis Lumière himself would embody the figure of the documentary messiah, not only with his great invention, but also with the first documentary film, the sequence shot La Sortie des usines Lumière à Lyon. Then came the public presentation of the invention where Lumière publicly screened said film at the Salon indien du Grand Café in Paris on December 28, 1895.1 After that presentation, others followed in different parts of France, creating great uncertainty. Lumière not only limited himself to presenting this film, but would also make others, including important personalities who came to see his invention and who had unknowingly been captured by Lumière's lens, and later, with great surprise, be portrayed in the films those who attended and attended.

However, Lumière's plans were not limited to these demonstrations. With great vision and cunning, he dedicated himself to hiring and training a small army of travelers who would be in charge of taking his invention to all corners of the planet; people who at the same time went to document these places and to show some films already made by Lumière.

His staff was in charge of capturing single-shot films, called "current affairs" films, where moments such as the arrival of boats at a port, the approach of a train, people at work, etc. were portrayed. In this way, this early stage of the birth of cinema was marked by the fashion of showing an event in short periods, mainly due to the fact that the cameras could only contain small amounts of film, many of them of a minute or less in duration.

However, this cinema was later called document cinema because if it was true that it showed images of reality, it did not show a clear point of view of it nor did it try to form an opinion of its own; they were only shots that were consistent with the evolution of cinematographic language at that time, these films are not documentaries. The term as documentary was later attributed to John Grierson who, in addition to doing various works, theorized on the subject.