British Documentary Analysis

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Development of British Documentary Introduction A documentary film is defined as a nonfictional motion picture intended to document some aspects of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record (Saunders and Dave 10-15). The term documentary was first used by John Grierson in who is a Scottish and used this term in 1926 when reviewing a film by the title “Moana” and which was originally done by Robert Flaherty. According to Grierson held that the principles of documentary required that cinema’s potential for observing life needed to be exploited from a new art form and that the fiction actor and scene needed to be replaced with the original actor and original scene respectively, as the original actor…show more content…
According to Stollery and Corner, the state and industry-sponsored British documentary film production did not decline after this period (388). Other documentary film makers came in and continued with the development of the documentary film industry. Some documentary theorists like Brian Winston stated to criticising the Griersonian tradition ( Russell and Taylor 8) and these criticism contributed a lot in enabling filmmakers go a step further to do what Grierson and his colleagues had not achieved during their generation. The close of the Crown Film Unit which was in the year 1952, marked an end of an era as there were various strong factors that indicated the substantial shift in the documentary film industry. Stollery wrote an article on the reputation of Humphrey Jenning in the documentary film industry as he had become the major authority in the discussion of the British documentary movement but Stollery notes that there has not been sufficient exploration of the cultural factors that had shaped his reputation (Stollery and Corner…show more content…
The today’s industry however, owes a lot to the film industry of the time of filmmakers such as Grierson. The industry has continued to enjoy continuous development to get to where it is today. Jane L. Chapman states that “although documentary history cannot be ignored, the genre needs to be understood as being complex, multi-faceted and influenced by a range of different context (54). Chapman defines documentary practise as the process of creating documentary projects (55). It is what people do each day with media devices, content and form and production strategies with a purpose to address creativity and moral and conceptual problems and choices that arise as they make their documentary (Grossman 34). Some other definition used by scholars to describe documentary practice uses such terms as formal codes, categories and conventions that are mostly used by filmmakers to create non-fictional representations of the historical world. The filmmaker’s practices are not only informed by the existing documentary traditions but also by the trending and changing environmental issues that surround these filmmaker, such as daily emerging media environments, content, devices and uses of these devices. Emerging media are in-turn greatly affected by changes in the political status of a country, economic status of such countries as well as the cultural

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