History of Documentary Film "Age of Silent Film"

Since the initial discovery of cinema, the filmmakers in America and France have tried to document what is around them by means of their findings. Like the Lumiere brothers, they recorded the daily events going on around them, like the workers who left the factory, a train entering the station, a construction worker who worked, and so forth. The shape is still very simple (only one shot) and its duration was only a few seconds. The films are more often termed "actuality films". Several decades later in line with technology improvements developed into a film camera or expedition travel documentation, like South (1919) which tells the failure of an expedition to Antarctica.

Milestones early emergence of the documentary that many officially recognized by historians is the film Nanook of the North (1922) by Robert Flaherty. Film describes the lives of a Eskimo named Nanook in the Arctic region. Flaherty spent the time up to sixteen months to record the daily activities Nanook and his wife and son, such as hunting, eating, sleeping, and so forth. Flaherty Nanook of commercial success brings on an expedition to Samoa region to produce a kind of documentary film entitled Moana (1926). Although not as successful as Nanook but through this movie the first time recognized the term "documentary", through the review John Grierson in the newspaper New York Sun. Because of its importance for the early development of the documentary film, historians often named Flaherty as the "Father of Documentary Film. "

Nanook success also inspired filmmaker-producer Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack to produce important documentary, Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life (1925) which describes a group of local tribes who were migrating in the region of Persia. Then continue with Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness (1927) a documentary journey that took place in the interior forests of Siam (Thailand). Exotic those films will greatly affect the production of films (fiction) Cooper's phenomenal production, namely King Kong (1933). In Europe, some influential documentary filmmakers are also emerging. In the Soviet Union, Dziga Vertov raises the theory of "kino eye". He argues that a camera with all the technique has more value than the human eye. He practiced his theory through a series of short news snippets series, Kino Pravda (1922), and The Man with the Movie Camera (1929) which describes the everyday life of larger cities in the Soviet. Other European cinematographer-filmmaker Walter Ruttman is influential with his film, Berlin - Symphony of a Big City (1927) and Alberto Cavalcanti with film Rien Que les Heures.