"Documentary as a concept or practice occupies no fixed territory. It mobilizes no finite inventory of techniques, addresses no set number of issues, and adopts no completely known taxonomy of forms, styles, or modes. The term documentary itself must be constructed in much the same manner as the world we know and share. Documentary film practice is the site of contestation and change. Of greater importance than the ontological finality of a definition--how well it captures the "thingness" of the documentary--is the purpose to which a definition is put and the facility with which it locates and addresses important questions, those that remain unsettled from the past and those posed by the present." Bill Nichols, film theorist
The documentary is difficult to define, impossible to pin down. As Bill Nichols has written, it is a form at home with the notion of change. In Eric Barnouw's history of the non-fiction film, the documentary maker is an active agent, posing through the previous 110 years of film history as: prophet, explorer, reporter, painter, advocate, bugler, prosecutor, poet, chronicler, promoter, observer, and catalyst.
The documentary maker creates an image of the world with multiple objectives in mind, responding not only to those things that complicate a definition of the historical world, but to personal desires and goals. Documentary form vacillates from the objective to the subjective and reflexive. Why are we attracted to the things we are? Why do we select some subjects over others? How do we use the camera and to what end? Can any representation of the world ever be adequate?
Living History
Documentary Production
by Anna McAlpine