Documentary

A documentary film is a nonfictional motion picture intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record. It consists of or is based off official documents/information.

Documentary began when the first films were invented by the Lumiere Brothers in 1895. The Lumieres created a camera that could only hold 50 feet of stock film and their films were short unedited clips capturing the life around them. These were called actualities. The first official documentary or non-fiction narrative film was Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922), an ethnographic look at the harsh life of Canadian Inuit Eskimos living in the Arctic, although some of the film's scenes of obsolete customs were staged. The word Documentary was invented by John Grierson to describe this film. Grierson also described it as ‘the creative interpretation of reality’.

“Q: What is documentary for?
A: To record actuality.
Q: Why would one want to do that?
A: To inform people about it.
Q: Inform to what ends?
A: Either to affect our understanding--to change, increase, reinforce it--what may (but is not necessarily designed to) lead to action, may make better persons of us, and which may in turn make the world a better place to live in (Flaherty) or to make better citizens of us and to move us to collective action in order make a better society (Grierson).”

Undefeated is an Ethnological documentary which is a type of documentary that looks in the lives and culture of a particular group in a scientific or in this case an analytical fashion. On the other hand, A Complete History Of My Sexual Failures is a Mockumentary which Is a fiction film that uses a documentary form to suggest it’s a documentary but is often comical. It is also perhaps a documentary reconstruction because it is based on true events but not all of it.

Other types of documentary include Investigative documentary which A Complete History Of My Sexual Failures also fits in to. Personal documentary and authorative documentaries are two other types that a complete history fits. These documentaries’ also fit a range of different modes such as observational mode and investigative mode. A Complete History uses interactive mode which enables the ‘star’ to interact and almost converse with its audience.

Undefeated however is not so scripted and therefore rules out using interactive mode, but some characters do interact with the camera person in an interview style. As they do it A Complete History. Instead they use observational mode where they simply record things happening in front of the camera in long takes until they have what they need.

A Documentary filmmaker sets forth “not simply to register events and circumstances, but to find the most moving examples of them” (Bluem, 1972:10)