In Nanook of the North (1922), Robert Flaherty showed an Inuit family surviving on the ice of northern Quebec. Audiences around the world were moved. Later research found that much of it was arranged. The man called Nanook was named Allakariallak; the igloo was built extra large and cut open so the camera had enough light; and Nanook of the North staged many scenes, such as a hunt with harpoons at a time when local hunters often used rifles. Was it a fraud, or a portrait of a way of life the subjects themselves helped recreate? That question sits at the heart of documentary.

What is a documentary?

John Grierson, a Scottish filmmaker, first used the word "documentary" for a film in a 1926 review of Flaherty's Moana. He later described the form as the creative handling of real events, and the word "creative" matters. Every documentary involves choices: what to film, what to leave out and how to edit it. A documentary is not a window onto reality. It is an argument or a story built from recorded material, and viewers judge it by its honesty because it makes claims about the real world.

Traditions of documentary

In the Soviet Union, Dziga Vertov rejected staged drama altogether. Vertov called his approach kino-pravda, meaning "film truth", and in Man with a Movie Camera (1929) he celebrated the camera's mechanical eye while also showing the cameraman and the editor at work, reminding viewers that the film was made. In Britain, Grierson led a state-funded documentary movement that aimed to educate citizens, producing films such as Night Mail (1936) about the overnight postal train. Many such films use an authoritative narrator who explains the images, a style scholars call expository.

New technology changed the form around 1960. Lightweight cameras that recorded synchronized sound let small crews follow people anywhere. In the United States, direct cinema tried to observe events without interviews, narration or interference, the "fly on the wall" ideal. Primary (1960), made by Robert Drew's team, followed John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey through the Wisconsin primary election. In France, the anthropologist and filmmaker Jean Rouch took the opposite view. Cinéma vérité openly provoked and questioned its subjects, treating the camera as a catalyst. In Chronicle of a Summer (1961), Rouch and the sociologist Edgar Morin stopped people on Paris streets to ask whether they were happy, then showed the subjects the footage and filmed their reactions.

The film scholar Bill Nichols later sorted documentaries into modes, including expository, observational, participatory and reflexive. No mode escapes choice. An observational film still decides where to point the camera and which hundred hours to cut.

Ethics

Documentary subjects are real people who must live with the film after the crew leaves. Informed consent means subjects understand how they will be filmed and shown, and agree. Consent is complicated when the filmmaker holds the camera, the edit and the money, and the subjects are poor, young, grieving or from a culture the filmmaker is visiting. For much of film history, colonized and Indigenous peoples were filmed by outsiders far more often than they filmed themselves. That began to change as equipment grew cheaper. Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001), an Inuit-language feature directed by Zacharias Kunuk, won the prize for best first feature at Cannes, an Inuit story told by Inuit filmmakers almost eighty years after Nanook.

Today digital tools make faking easier than ever, which gives documentary honesty new weight. Spotting manipulated footage is covered in Media Literacy; the point here is that trust in a documentary rests on the filmmaker being open about methods.

Worked example: The Thin Blue Line

In 1976 a Dallas police officer, Robert Wood, was shot dead during a traffic stop. Randall Dale Adams was convicted and sentenced to death, later reduced to life in prison. The filmmaker Errol Morris, investigating, came to believe Adams was innocent. His film The Thin Blue Line (1988) combined interviews with stylized reenactments of the shooting, restaged again and again to match each witness's conflicting story, over a hypnotic score by Philip Glass. Near the end, on audio tape, the other man in the case, David Harris, comes close to admitting the killing.

The film helped win Adams' release in 1989. The irony is instructive. Purists of direct cinema would have rejected reenactment, yet staging here served the truth, because Morris never presented the reenactments as real footage. They show versions of events, and their contradictions expose the weakness of the prosecution's case. Nanook hid its staging; The Thin Blue Line displayed it. The test of a documentary is less whether anything was arranged than whether the filmmaker is honest about what the viewer is seeing and fair to the people on screen.