Introduction

This historical overview, by Eddie Dyja, with contributions by Fiona Scott, offers another way of understanding non-fiction and documentary film.

Whether watching the antics of the housemates in Big Brother, marvelling at the close-up spectacle of nesting blue tits in Springwatch or feeling the suspense as Sir Alan Sugar pauses in The Apprentice before firing one of his would-be employees, we have gained much of our understanding of documentary modes and non-fiction techniques from television.

Today's Reality TV may seem far removed from the early cinematic images portrayed, for instance, in the films of Mitchell and Kenyon, however there are more similarities with these films and other documentary films than first meets the eye. In most instances, the documentary film-maker offers the audience a guarantee of integrity. We believe that we are witnessing live events in the Big Brother house in the same way that we accept that archive films of people leaving a factory in the 1900s show real-life occurrences.

The documentary film-maker and the Reality TV maker both open their camera lens on the world and allow the audience to share his or her vision. That vision might be undefined to begin with but found as the action in front of them unfolds. Alternatively, the vision may require some sort of narrative to enable the audience to engage more effectively in the proceedings. Sometimes subjects can be misinterpreted, distorted or even faked, but even with that knowledge we continue to have an implicit faith in the veracity of what we are seeing.

In some cases we listen to the voice of a narrator who never appears on the screen, or we allow rhythms and musical moods to inform our ideas of what we are seeing. These combinations allow images to be understood, often in a subtle way - unlike that of say, football commentators, who can drown us in a deluge of self-evident verbiage.

The recent success of the documentary genre in the cinema with films as diverse as Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), March of the Penguins (2005), Super Size Me (2004) and Touching the Void (2003) has coincided with the popularity of DVDs. The 'making-of' documentary now forms a fixture in the Extras menu of many DVD releases. Both cases seem to reflect the documentary tradition of defining, informing and influencing us about our culture. Furthermore, documentary films and non-fiction works often gain in value as new generations, investigating the past, find new meanings in them. We may perceive details that meant less to the people who made and first viewed the films than they do to us.