The first film, shown to an audience on December 28, 1895, by the Lumière brothers on Boulevard des Capuchins, was a documentary: the cameraman captured the arrival of the train at La Ciotat station. Decades later, Andrei Tarkovsky would call it a film of genius. What was so brilliant about it? An inconspicuous train arrives at an inconspicuous station, ordinary passengers get off and walk down the platform, ignoring the camera man’s handwheel (who knew what he was doing back then?). What was brilliant in this film was life itself, its authenticity, its uniqueness! Much later, when documentary filmmaking would recognize itself not only as a tool for chronicling life, but also as an independent form of cinema, the following phrase would become popular among its masters: “Life is more talented than I am”.
Cinematographers have always been attracted by exoticism, ethnography, fires, natural disasters, acts of war, the life of royalty, technical novelties like flying airplanes and dirigibles, car racing – anything sensational, “attraction,” anything that can attract the public to the halls of cinematographs. Operators traveled around the world in search of fascinating subjects, sometimes exposing themselves to mortal risk. Film history has preserved the legend of the operator, who turned the handle of the camera until a lion jumped on him and did not begin to crush to death.
The main boundary between fiction and non-fiction cinema, or otherwise between fiction and documentary, would not be realized until much later. At first, neither the creators nor the audience thought about it. In 1902, one of the pioneers of cinema George Méliès (1861-1938) on the eve of the coronation of King Edward VII of England in Westminster Abbey shoots its staged version in his studio pavilion in Montreux with the participation of extras dressed in more or less suitable costumes. His film even outstrips the release of truly chronicled footage of the event, the audience watches the story with complete confidence, and even Edward VII himself (that’s the magic of cinema!) “recognizes himself” in Meles’s opus. It took time for feature film to develop its own language (zooming in, shooting from different angles, movement, editing techniques, lighting principles, etc.) and to declare itself as an art so that the documentary film gradually began to recognize its own distinctiveness, its special, its only inherent place among the screen arts. It owes this debt most to two filmmakers: Robert Flaherty and Dziga Vertov.
Robert Flaherty (1884-1951) began as a mining engineer. In the 1910s he explored the Canadian polar region in search of oil, kept a diary, and on one of his expeditions he took a camera and shot a lot of scenes of Eskimos’ life. Collecting material on the editing table, Flaherty carelessly set fire to the film with a cigarette, and the entire negative perished. He would later call that moment a lucky finger of fate.
