Documenting the history of cinema's least appreciated genre

John Grierson has a lot to answer for. Not only was he the populariser of that most dreary and off-putting of terms, "documentary", but he proceeded to convince us that the only type of documentaries worth making were the type that he approved of: utilitarian, pedagogic and impersonal.

In Britain, Canada the United States and various other parts of the world, we've been suffering from a Griersonian hangover ever since; suspicious, if not down-right dismissive, of all other forms of documentary. The point is to stress how diverse and fascinating our documentary heritage really is, and encourage today's film- makers to continue to explore the imaginative possibilities of cinema's most flexible, but least appreciated, genre.

Even in its infancy, when films were composed of a single shot, cinema was divided into two camps: those who looked to the real world for their subject matter, and those who filmed performances. At the forefront of the latter group was Thomas Edison. His first film - the first film? - was Fred Ott's Sneeze, a brief record of his assistant pretending to sneeze.

On the other side of the divide, were the Lumiere brothers. If Edison was the originator of the fiction film, they were the fathers of documentary. The audiences who came to see their first cinematographe programme in Paris in December 1895 were confronted not by exotic performances, but by vignettes from everyday life: workers passing through factory gates, a train pulling into a station, a baby being fed, a boat leaving harbour.

When the future filmmaker Georges Melies saw the Lumiere's film Le Dejeuner de Bebe, in which Auguste Lumiere and his wife are seen feeding their baby, Melies noted that the spectators were transfixed, not by the animated figures themselves, but by the rustling foliage in the background. Similarly, in A Boat Leaving a Harbour, it was the movement of the waves which attracted their attention, and in Demolishing a Wall, the brickdust that filled the air.

Melies suggests that the audience readily accepted the movements of photographed people because they were accustomed to the theatre, and to the idea of performers colluding in an illusion. But the brickdust, the rustling leaves and the waves were astonishing because they showed that the Lumiere films were not an illusion, or a performance, but a flickering mirror of a past reality. The cinema, unlike any previous art form, was able to represent the spontaneous - the very essence of life itself.

This insight surfaces regularly in the history of documentary. The Direct Cinema of the 50s and 60s - Richard Leacock, Don Pennebaker, the Maysles Brothers - valued immediacy, intimacy and "the real".

They rejected the glossy"professional" aesthetic of traditional cinema, unconcerned if their images were grainy and wobbly and occasionally out of focus - in fact, these flaws seemed to guarantee authenticity and thus became desirable.

The advocates of Direct Cinema were always quick to codify exactly what they thought was the "right" way to make a documentary and what was the wrong way, drawing up a kind of filmic 10 commandments: thou shalt not rehearse, thou shalt not interview, thou shalt not use commentary; thou shalt not use film lights; thou shalt not stage events; thou shalt not dissolve. Paradoxically, the film-making movement which seemed to stand for iconoclasm and freedom became one of the most codified and puritanical.

Direct Cinema (sometime known as cinema verite) was the dominant documentary form up until the late 70s. Today, however, apart from a few purists like Fred Wiseman, there are few orthodox practitioners left. The grandchildren of those original films are the endless 'documentaries' about firemen, hospitals and vets which clog our televisions.

Yet there is a political dimension to the term "documentary" which has to be reckoned with. Ask the average person what documentaries are and they're likely to say that they're boring films about exploited workers, teenage mothers and other social problems.

Despite its dominance of the genre, the social problem documentary does not seem to satisfy many contemporary documentarists. The newer generation of film-makers have reacted against its perceived preachiness, looking instead for a style that is imaginative, challenging, and visually stimulating. The classic documentary of social concern is not in fashion.

But at its best, the 'traditional' left-wing, social documentary had real aesthetic power and social impact. The documentarist's ambition to change the world was, often, a noble one.

As the documentary enters its second century it finds itself less constrained by the ideological and aesthetic dogmas which have by turns driven and hindered its development.

Two trends in particular have dominated recent innovations. The first is the desire to make films which although educational and informative are also unashamedly entertaining. This in turn has lead to a return of the documentary from the small screen to the cinema.

The second trend is a willingness to challenge the boundaries between documentary and fiction - witness the work of Chantal Ackerman, Earl Morris and Chris Marker. 'Documentary' to them is more a statement of attitude than content.

Integral to this movement is a sense that the image itself - which at one time seemed to have a definite and secure relationship with actuality - no longer seems to play such a fixed role in our lives. More and more, screens and images are places where we access aspects of the real world, but also escape or ignore it.

Moreover, the photographic or video image, which once seemed to be a straighforward reflection of reality, is now liable to manipulation and and distortion through the techniques of digital effects.

In consequence, the very 'documentary' quality of the documentary - its role as 'evidence' - open to question. In its place film-makers are having to look for other justifications for their films.

This is extracted from Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary, edited and introduced by Kevin Macdonald and Mark Cousins (Faber and Faber, #12.99) Despite the plethora of fly-on-the- wall documentaries Oscar winner Kevin Macdonald is upbeat about the form's future relevance

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