Defining documentary

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to define documentary film. After a brief review of existing definitions, the author proposes his own. The methods of working on the set and the textual features of the films are considered as distinguishing documentary filmmaking from other film genres. Issues such as the filmmakers’ interference with the filmed reality, the criteria for distinguishing between fictional and non-fictional elements, the admissibility of special effects, the specificity of editing, and the place of the documentary film among other nonfictional genres are considered. The final definition is confronted with the most recent genres of documentary cinema, namely the animated documentary, the mockumentary and the web-documentary.