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The 1960s and 1970s
By the late 1960s and the 1970s the development of lightweight, hand-held cameras with synchronised sound offered film-makers greater freedom of movement, particularly in the case of news reportage.
Cinéma vérité
Cinéma vérité was particularly popular during this period and documentary films such as Don't Look Back (1967) directed by DA Pennebaker, which takes a candid behind-the-scenes look at the Bob Dylan tour of Britain in 1965, established a style that is still familiar today. The use of hand-held cameras meant that the film-maker could be impersonal and intrusive, so intimate personal reactions and events are captured. In Don't Look Back, Dylan's onstage performances are juxtaposed with Dylan in off-guard moments.
An important component of cinéma vérité was the way hours of material were edited to create a cohesive impression of the subject matter. In Pennebaker's film, Bob Dylan is presented as enigmatic throughout. Similarly, today's Reality TV shows rely heavily on editing to present impressions, favourable or unfavourable, of the contestants.
Compilation films and film essays
The creation of compilation films is not a recent development in the field of documentary. It was pioneered in 1927 by Esfir Schub with The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty. A more recent example is The Atomic Café (1982), made entirely out of found footage which various agencies of the US government made about nuclear safety.
Non-fiction film can also be used to produce the more subjective reflective attitude characteristic of essays. Important essay film-makers include Chris Marker, Guy Debord, Raoul Peck and Harun Farocki.
Political films
The freedom of expression afforded to film-makers by hand-held cameras also coincided with an upsurge in radical left-wing politics in the late 1960s, which in turn led to the formation of independent film workshops and film co-operatives, and more polemical films emerged as a result.
In the Year of the Pig
The spirit of the age was evoked in films such as In the Year of the Pig (1968) and Millhouse (1971) by Emile de Antonio which took a critical look at the Vietnam war and President Nixon; La Hora de los Hornos (1968), directed by Octavio Getino and Fernando E Solanas, a radical documentary/manifesto from Argentina; L'aggettivo donna (1971) directed by Ronny Daopolus and Annabella Miscuglio, a radical feminist documentary from Italy; Es kommt darauf an, sie zu verändern (1973) directed by Claudia von Aleman, which looks at women's working conditions in West Germany, and A Letter to Jane (1972) by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorrin from France, which focuses on a newspaper photograph of actress Jane Fonda talking to North Vietnamese people.
In the UK, two influential film collectives were formed in 1968 - Cinema Action and Amber Films in Newcastle and in London. Typical of Cinema Action's output were Not a Penny on the Rents (1968), a campaign film opposing GLC rent rises for council homes (with shades of Housing Problems) and People of Ireland! (1970), a film examining the 'Free Derry' resistance zone. Meanwhile, Amber Films produced films that reflected working practices in their own community. The film Launch (1974) was described by film critic Chris Auty as 'a tone poem on working life with a distinctive combination of loving nostalgia and political protest.'
Modern documentaries
The Thin Blue Line
Landmark films of the 1980s, such as The Thin Blue Line (1988) by Errol Morris, which incorporated stylised re-enactments, and Michael Moore's Roger and Me (1989), which made claims of chronology that were later questioned by critics, placed overt interpretive control in the hands of the director.
Indeed, the commercial success of the documentaries mentioned above may owe something to this narrative shift in the documentary form, leading some critics to question whether such films can truly be called documentaries and often refer to them instead as 'mondo films' or 'docu-ganda'. However, directorial manipulation of documentary subjects has been noted since the work of Robert Flaherty, and may be endemic to the form.
Recently, there has been a surprisingly successful trend in the cinema for issue-led film-makers to provide a style matching opinion with fact - Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) and Bowling for Columbine (2002) and Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me (2004) being recent examples.
A different treatment of a social issue can be found in this pack in Hidden (Gömd) (2002) directed by Hanna Heilborn, David Aronowitsch and Mats Johansson. The creative use of animation to illustrate the documentary sound maintains the anonymity of the characters, while bringing the story of the 12-year-old Peruvian refugee Giancarlo to life. By using animation the directors could explore not only new methods of representation, but also open the field of documentary and make it accessible to Giancarlo's contemporaries.
