A documentary film or documentary is a non-fictional motion-picture intended to "document reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction, education, or maintaining a historical record". Bill Nichols has characterised the documentary in terms of "a filmmaking practice, a cinematic tradition, and mode of audience reception [that remains] a practice without clear boundaries".
The cinema of Japan has a history that spans more than 100 years. Japan has one of the oldest and largest film industries in the world; as of 2021, it was the fourth largest by number of feature films produced. In 2011 Japan produced 411 feature films that earned 54.9% of a box office total of US$2.338 billion. Films have been produced in Japan since 1897, when the first foreign cameramen arrived.
Mise-en-scène is the stage design and arrangement of actors in scenes for a theatre or film production, both in visual arts through storyboarding, visual theme, and cinematography, and in narrative storytelling through direction. The term is also commonly used to refer to single scenes that are representative of a film. Mise-en-scène has been called film criticism's "grand undefined term". It has been criticized for its focus on the theatrical or dramatic design aspects rather than the plot itself, as those who utilize Mise-en-scène tend to look at what is "put before the camera," rather than the story. The use of mise-en-scène is a rather significant one as it allows the director to convey messages to the viewer through what is placed in the scene, not just the content of the scene. It adds almost a fourth dimension to the movie as viewers must think about why a certain item was placed in the film. Why did the director decide to put certain items in the film?
Maya Deren was a Ukrainian-born American experimental filmmaker and important promoter of the avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s. Deren was also a choreographer, dancer, film theorist, poet, lecturer, writer, and photographer.
Lessons of Darkness is a 1992 film by director Werner Herzog. Shot in documentary style on 16mm film from the perspective of an almost alien observer, the film is an exploration of the ravaged oil fields of post-Gulf War Kuwait, decontextualised and characterised in such a way as to emphasise the terrain's cataclysmic strangeness. An effective companion to his earlier film Fata Morgana, Herzog again perceives the desert as a landscape with its own voice.
Cinema of Africa is both the history and present of the making or screening of films on the African continent, and also refers to the persons involved in this form of audiovisual culture. It dates back to the early 20th century, when film reels were the primary cinematic technology in use. During the colonial era, African life was shown only by the work of white, colonial, Western filmmakers, who depicted Africans in a negative fashion, as exotic "others". As there are more than 50 countries with audiovisual traditions, there is no one single 'African cinema'. Both historically and culturally, there are major regional differences between North African and sub-Saharan cinemas, and between the cinemas of different countries.
Michelle Citron is a film, video and multimedia artist, scholar and author.
Gerald Peary is an American film critic, filmmaker, editor of the University Press of Mississippi, and a former curator of the Harvard Film Archive.
The Lincoln Motion Picture Company was an American film production company founded in 1916 by Noble Johnson and George Perry Johnson. Noble Johnson was president of the company, the secretary was actor Clarence A. Brooks. Dr. James T. Smith was treasurer, and Dudley A. Brooks was assistant secretary. The company is known as the first producer of race movies. Established in Omaha, Nebraska, the company relocated to Los Angeles the following year. It remained in operation until 1923, closing shortly after announcing a final project, The Heart of a Negro. The point of the creation of Lincoln's was to eliminate the stereotypical roles of "slapstick comedy" in Hollywood at the time for Black actors and actresses. "best advertised and most widely known Race Corporation in the world" is the famous slogan for the company.
Charlotte Zwerin was an American documentary film director and editor known for her work concerning artists and musicians. However, she is most known for her editing contributions to the direct cinema and cinéma vérité documentaries Salesman (1969), Gimme Shelter (1970) and Running Fence (1978) in which she was given co-director credits along with the two cinéma vérité pioneers Albert and David Maysles.
Manthia Diawara is a Malian writer, filmmaker, cultural theorist, scholar, and art historian. He holds the title of University Professor at New York University (NYU), where he is Director of the Institute of Afro-American Affairs.
Documentary mode is a conceptual scheme developed by American documentary theorist Bill Nichols that seeks to distinguish particular traits and conventions of various documentary film styles. Nichols identifies six different documentary 'modes' in his schema: poetic, expository, observational, participatory, reflexive, and performative. While Nichols' discussion of modes does progress chronologically with the order of their appearance in practice, documentary film often returns to themes and devices from previous modes. Therefore, it is inaccurate to think of modes as historical punctuation marks in an evolution towards an ultimate accepted documentary style. Also, modes are not mutually exclusive. There is often significant overlapping between modalities within individual documentary features. As Nichols points out, "the characteristics of a given mode function as a dominant in a given film…but they do not dictate or determine every aspect of its organization."
Zeka Laplaine, sometimes credited as José Laplaine, is a director and actor from Ilebo in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The child of a Portuguese father and Congolese mother, he moved to Europe when he was 18. His 1996 short film Le Clandestin was featured at the 2010 Amakula International Film Festival in Uganda. He portrayed a cowboy alongside Danny Glover in Death in Timbuktu, a film within a film in the Council of Europe Film Award-winning film, Bamako. Laplaine is a member of France's "Guilde Africaine des Realisateurs et Producteurs".
This is a list of reference works on documentary films.
Zohra is a 1922 silent 35 mm short film from Tunisia by Albert Samama ('Chikly'). It was the first indigenous North African film production. The movie script was written by Chikly's daughter, Haydée Chikly, who also edited and starred as the key female protagonist in the film.
Black film is a classification of film that has a broad definition relating to the film involving participation and/or representation of black people. The definition may involve the film having a black cast, a black crew, a black director, a black story, or a focus on black audiences. Academic Romi Crawford said, "I think a black film is a film work that takes into account in some way the relationship of African-Americans or blacks from the African Diaspora to filmmaking practice, means and industry. For me, it's in that relation between blacks and the film industry. How one engages in that relationship can be a mixture of black director and black acting talent; black director and black content in story; black content in story, no black director; black production money, nothing else that reads as black."
The cinema of Gabon has had an uneven history. Though President Omar Bongo and his wife, Josephine Bongo, encouraged filmmaking in the 1970s, there was a 20-year hiatus until filmmaking started to grow again in the new millennium.
Cinema of Sudan refers to both the history and present of the making or screening of films in cinemas or film festivals, as well as to the persons involved in this form of audiovisual culture of the Sudan and its history from the late nineteenth century onwards. It began with cinematography during the British colonial presence in 1897 and developed along with advances in film technology during the twentieth century.
Curtis A. McDowell was an American underground filmmaker.
