What is documentary?

Question 1

‘Documentary’ is a term that is popularly asserted to have been first used by John _________, to describe Robert Flaherty’s film Moana (Famous Players – Lasky Corp, US, 1926), coming from the French documentaire, or travelogue, a form that grew out of the actualities of early cinema.

Answer 1

Grierson

Question 2

Canadian explorer and prospector Robert ________ was fascinated by the Inuit peoples of northern Canada, and began shooting short films of their lives ethnographic films).

Answer 2

Flaherty

Question 3

In 1916 Flaherty lost all 30,000 feet of his feature documentary when a burning cigarette started a fire in his editing room.

Deciding to reshoot and refocus the film, he produced a documenatry feature revolving around one central character and his family, Nanook of the _______ (Revillon Freres, US, 1922).

Answer 3

North

Question 4

The success of this film (Nanook of the North) defined not only the nature of the ___________ documentary, but gave a resurgence and direction to documentary filmmaking, and got the major world film studios interested in financing them.

Answer 4

Ethnographic

Question 5

Documentary is an approach to the ‘real’ as opposed to the ________, and in dealing with issues of fact, of real events, of actually, the approach is both popular with audiences and highly significant in terms of study.

Answer 5

Fictional

Question 6

John Grierson later further explained documentary as not just the approach to actuality, but as the ‘creative treatment’ of _________, and it is this creative treatment that defines both subject and documentary form.

Answer 6

Actuality

Question 7

It also clearly implicates the hand of the filmmaker as being behind the structured ______________ of the subject (and by association the expected audience response), and brings out the central question of documentary in relation to the ‘real’ – whose ‘real’ is shown on screen?

Answer 7

Representation

Question 8

The very act of structuring images gives them meanings they do not possess on their own, and so, to a major extent, a filmmaker cannot depict the ‘real’, but instead offers a partial or selective view of the ‘real’ which should be considered in relation to production context, ________ and intention.

Answer 8

Ideology

Question 9

It could be argued that the only true documentaries are those made in the primitive period of early cinema, the _________.

Answer 9

Actualities

Question 10

Which is considered the first documentary?

Answer 10

Moana