Luis Buñuel directed a “surrealist” http://moviepros.net/ Las Hurdes (1933). Newsreels at this time were sometimes staged but were usually re-enactments of events that had already happened, not attempts to steer events as they were in the process of happening. For instance, much of the battle footage from the early 20th century was staged; the cameramen would usually arrive on site after a major battle and re-enact scenes to film them. Dziga Vertov was central to the Soviet Kino-Pravda (literally, “cinematic truth”) newsreel series of the 1920s. Vertov believed the camera – with its varied lenses, shot-counter shot editing, time-lapse, ability to slow motion, stop motion and fast-motion – could render reality more accurately than the human eye, and created a film philosophy from it.
Documentary film, motion picture that shapes and interprets factual material for purposes of education or entertainment. Documentaries have been made in one form or another in nearly every country and have contributed significantly to the development of realism in films. John Grierson, a Scottish educator who had studied mass communication in the United States, adapted the term in the mid-1920s from the French word documentaire. The documentary-style film, though, had been popular from the earliest days of filmmaking.
Read about Netflix TV programmes and films and watch bonus videos on Tudum.com. Documentary24 has several categories of free documentaries, such as War, Business, Religion, Nature, Lifestyle, and Culture. Or, browse videos by tags like Internet, Ships, BBC, Asia, Banks, Africa, Sport, TED, WWE, Terror, and others.
In Russia, events of the Bolshevik ascent to power in 1917–18 were filmed, and the pictures were used as propaganda. In 1922 the American director Robert Flaherty presented Nanook of the North, a record of Eskimo life based on personal observation, which was the prototype of many documentary films. Bruce Woolfe reconstructed battles of World War I in a series of compilation films, a type of documentary that bases an interpretation of history on factual news material. The German Kulturfilme, such as the feature-length film Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit (1925; Ways to Health and Beauty), were in international demand. Early documentary films, originally called “actuality films”, lasted one minute or less.
Videos can be filtered by source, release date, MPAA rating, decade, and other criteria. Every movie page has the runtime, a Watch Later button (it works if you log in), related movies you might also like, and general data like cast and crew information. There are also series’ listed under a documentary section, but they’re separate from the movies. Films For Action has thousands of free documentaries available for viewing. The site frequently adds new features and content, including opportunities for social activism.
- Some of the dozens of categories include Mystery, Science, Philosophy, Atheism, Religion, Countries, Business, Drugs, Celebrity, Archaeology, 9/11, Performing Arts, Space, Music, and Spiritual.
- The Nazi government of wartime Germany used the nationalized film industry to produce propaganda documentaries.
- Congress with archival propaganda extolling the virtues of smoking.
- From 1982, the Qatsi trilogy and the similar Baraka could be described as visual tone poems, with music related to the images, but no spoken content.
They prompt us to “question the authenticity of documentary in general.” It is the most self-conscious of all the modes, and is highly skeptical of “realism”. It may use Brechtian alienation strategies to jar us, in order to “defamiliarize” what we are seeing and how we are seeing it. With Robert J. Flaherty’s Nanook of the North in 1922, documentary film embraced romanticism. Flaherty filmed a number of heavily staged romantic documentary films during this time period, often showing how his subjects would have lived 100 years earlier and not how they lived right then. For instance, in Nanook of the North, Flaherty did not allow his subjects to shoot a walrus with a nearby shotgun, but had them use a harpoon instead.
These docs are available in categories like Religion, Society, Crime, Media, Conspiracy, Biography, and Nature. The thousands of films available can be viewed in a sortable list, or viewed by the date added, rating, votes, title, and shares. Top Documentary Films has tons of free documentaries online that are available from the public domain. Check out our top picks for websites where you can download free movies and sites that have free films for kids. Documentary filmmaking can be used as a form of journalism, advocacy, or personal expression. There’s an app you can use to find documentaries on your phone, but you’ll most likely need to install other apps because most if not all the movies on Yidio are actually hosted on other sites.
The below link is for on-demand films, but there are also live channels that serve documentaries, like Documentary+. Tons of videos in all sorts of categories are found at Popcornflix, with hundreds listed specifically as documentaries. There doesn’t seem to be a way to browse the documentaries by category or popularity, but the one-page listing is easy to scroll through and peruse. Some of the categories these movies are organized in include cities, big ideas, gender, police and prisons, transition, vision, human rights, empire, and consumerism.
Some of Flaherty’s staging, such as building a roofless igloo for interior shots, was done to accommodate the filming technology of the time. The Nazi government of wartime Germany used the nationalized film industry to produce propaganda documentaries. The American director Frank Capra presented the Why We Fight (1942–45) series for the U.S. Army Signal Corps; Great Britain released London Can Take It (1940), Target for Tonight (1941), and Desert Victory (1943); and the National Film Board of Canada turned out educational films in the national interest. Expository documentaries speak directly to the viewer, often in the form of an authoritative commentary employing voiceover or titles, proposing a strong argument and point of view. (They may use a rich and sonorous male voice.) The (voice-of-God) commentary often sounds “objective” and omniscient.
To stream docs, open the On Demand Documentaries page, or browse the live movie channels, like this one that’s dedicated to documentaries. Pluto TV streams free TV shows and movies through a computer, smart TV, or mobile device. Since Plex is more than just a movie streaming service, it does a great job with additional details and functions. For example, on every movie page is a cast list, from which you can find other movies those people are in. Documentary Tube has more than 40 categories of free documentaries, including Disaster, Health, Aliens/UFO, Technology, Media, Gambling, and Strange.
Many of the first films, such as those made by Auguste and Louis Lumière, were a minute or less in length, due to technological limitations. Documentary practice is the complex process of creating documentary projects. It refers to what people do with media devices, content, form, and production strategies to address the creative, ethical, and conceptual problems and choices that arise as they make documentaries. Social media platforms (such as YouTube) have provided an avenue for the growth of the documentary-film genre. These platforms have increased the distribution area and ease-of-accessibility.