Authentic talking cinema: the history of documentary

Though scholars of early film have been much preoccupied with the emergence of storytelling and narrative, the dominant mode of early cinema – beginning with the first films of the Lumières in 1895 – was in fact the actuality, or what might be called documentary before documentary.

An instinct for what Siegfried Kracauer described as the “seizure of physical reality” produced a huge variety of images, which despite their brief and fragmentary character were not without ideological implications, since they generally reproduced social stereotypes unthinkingly and frequently projected and enhanced the iconic imagery of state power and authority.

Cinema was born in the ‘civilised’ countries of Europe and North America, and these early films also traded on exotic pictures from every corner of the world, which not surprisingly reflected the colonial ideology of the day. The French at this time used the term ‘documentaire’ for what in English was called the travelogue, which emerged before World War I as one of the most popular proto-documentary genres, along with wonders-of-science and expedition films. And the recent rediscovery in Britain of the work of Mitchell & Kenyon reminds us that turning the camera on your own community was also a fundamental propensity…