Documentaries

"Life caught unawares," that's how Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov defined the principle and art of documentary in the thirties. Yet the documentary has taken so many forms over the past century that it is too simple to call it the mere recording of reality. From its anthropological origins in the works of Robert Flaherty, the documentary has come to encompass Soviet and Fascist German propaganda of the thirties; the Direct Cinema and vérité methods of the sixties, as in the films of the Maysles brothers; and the populist social-reform tradition of today. What all the great documentaries have had in common is their ability to capture a place and time so vividly as to equal the imagery and storytelling of even the best fiction.