Documentary Genre

Documentary genre:

A documentary is a nonfictitous film intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record. Documentaries main purpose has been to inform and educate, but in recent years the aspect of entertainment has become more important, especially with maintaining viewership of the documentary.

The term documentary was coined by ‘John Grierson’ in 1926, he coined the term when reviewing Robert Flaherty’s Moana.

Documentaries are now shown through television and there are channels specifically known for showing documentaries as opposed to other shows on their channel.

A problem over recent years that has been linked with more modern documentaries is that of disneyfication.  In Layman's terms, this refers to the dumbing down, of the documentary, or genre as a whole. 

Documentaries can be split into 6-sub categories, these being the following:

·         Poetic documentaires.

·         Expository documentaries

·         Observational documentaires.

·         Participatory documentaries 

·         Reflexive documentaries.

·         Performative documentaries.

Documentaries are not confined to just one of these sub-categories, but can have overlapping elements.