by Peter Burton

Created on: April 17, 2008

Documentaries that changed the world !

Micheal Moores' Fahrenheit 9/11 and Sicko have revived the documentary as a film form in recent years. The following recommended documentary films had the power to change the course of events in the real world .They have been either innovative in some aspect of film technique or led to changes in the way filmmakers represented the "creative treatment of reality" (John Grierson). All of the films have been highly influential.

Nanook of the North (1922) combined the editing techniques and dramatic structure of fiction film with real life characters, Inuit Eskimos, to try and represent and establish a common humanity across cultural differences. These fiction techniques allowed the filmmaker Robert Flaherty to create tension and expectation in any given scene amidst the overall narrative question of whether the Inuit would survive. This was an original way of making documentary films.

Walter Ruttman's "Symphony of a City" (1927) began a trend of films about cities around the world - poetic "City Symphonies". German-born Ruttman had been highly influenced by Viking Eggeling - a Dadaist. Ruttman combined Eggeling's techniques with those of Dziga Vertov to create a rhythmic plot-less representation of dawn to dusk in Weimar Berlin.
Film critic Siegrfried Kracauer and film maker Vsevolod Pudovkin criticised Symphony of a City for not capturing the mood of growing crises in Weimar Germany. However the film was revolutionary in its form.

The Russian film maker Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera has the revelatory capacity of unscripted documentary footage at its heart, but combined these with montage and film technique. Vertov's goal was the classical Marxist one of unity of form and content. Centrally his was to be a cinema about facts - footage of real people in real life situations preferably filmed without their knowledge using film technology that was superior to the human eye - its ability to see long distances, slow down or speed up motion. Editing provided further liberation from the confines of time and space.

In the pursuit of a deeper level of truth Vertov and his "Kinoks" [a 1920s collective of Russian film makers, kinoks means "cinema-eyes"] experimented with everything - freeze frames, multiple frames, animation, telescopic and microscopic lenses, multiple exposures, subliminal cuts of one or two frames, slow motion, fast motion, cameras in plains, hand held and in cars. Vertov also theorised about the use of contrapuntal

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