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Documentaries
We are the Lambeth Boys, UK 1959 Dir Karel Reisz
"Sometimes you have to lie. One often has to distort a thing to catch its true spirit." Robert Flaherty
As we enter the 21st Century with a mixture of millennial angst and a desire to contemplate past achievements, film and television provides what is arguably the most important medium for reviewing the last one hundred years of social history. As Asa Briggs wrote in his introduction to the National Film Archive's of Non-Fiction Films catalogue (1980), 'From the study of films and film makers historians can explore their own interests in ways impossible to their predecessors. First, they can see how things looked - in movement ... Second, they can secure a sense of immediacy... Third, they can apply their critical gifts both to the analysis of the films as artefacts and to the motives of their makers'.
The configurations of fact and fiction are central to cinema, but the tension between the two is particularly problematic in the field of documentary. The viewer is asked to both suspend belief and acquiesce in the film-maker's perception of unbiased, objective, and in the case of cinéma vérité, unmediated truth. As a result, documentary is a loose and contested term, incredibly difficult to categorise in film. As Bill Nichols points out in 'The Voice of Documentary' (Film Quarterly vol.36 no.3 Spring 1983), styles and strategies will always change because the accepted reality of one generation will seem artificial to the next. Propaganda documentaries (as opposed to propaganda dramas) provide one of the biggest ideological problems amongst a listing of non-fiction films insofar as the film-makers' intent is historically proven to have been for the politically motivated manipulation of belief, rather than an attempt at the objective presentation of fact. As such, films which in other circumstances may have been categorised as propaganda are here catalogued in the section on social documentaries, while the Nazi films of Leni Riefenstahl and others are located in the final chapter. Among the different genres of documentary, this catalogue includes selected titles that may not be strictly defined as non-fiction, such as biopics, drama-docs, experimental work and 'mockumentaries' (fakes). In early 1999 the media news was dominated by revelations of faked television documentaries, actors pretending to be 'real people' on shockumentary confessional chat shows and even celebrity cribbing on game shows. As the possibilities for deception multiply, so is our insistence on knowing the truth perhaps stronger than ever.
The aim of this catalogue is to outline the basic chronology of documentary film, highlighting its major historical developments when the bfi has 35mm, 16mm or video copies of specific titles for hire to exhibitors, for sale as clip footage to film-makers or to study in-house by researchers and students. In the case of materials from the National Film and Television Archive (NFTVA), the titles listed here are inevitably selective and represent only a fraction of these extensive holdings, but at least suggest highlights and offer ways in to the collections.
