Documentary has become the flagship for a cinema of social engagement and distinctive vision. The documentary impulse has rippled outward to the internet and to sites like YouTube, Vimeo, Vine, and Facebook, where mock-, quasi-, semi-, pseudo- and bona fide documentaries, embracing new forms and tackling fresh topics, proliferate. The internet and its next-to-nothing costs of dissemination, along with its unique forms of word-of-mouth enthusiasm, combined with the hunger of many for fresh perspectives and alternative visions, give the documentary form a bright and vibrant future.

The Oscars from the mid-1980s onward mark the ascendancy of the documentary as a popular and compelling form. Never known for its bold preferences, often sentimental in its affections, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has nonetheless been unable to help itself when it comes to acknowledging many of the most outstanding documentaries of the current golden age. Consider just some of the Oscar nominees since the 1980s:

A concise, overarching definition is possible but not fundamentally crucial. It will conceal as much as it will reveal. More important is how every film we consider a documentary contributes to an ongoing dialogue that draws on common characteristics that take on new and distinct form, like an ever-changing chameleon. We will, however, begin with some common characteristics of documentary film in order to have a general sense of the territory within which most discussion occurs.

It is certainly possible to argue that documentary film has never had a very precise definition. It remains common today to revert to some version of John Grierson’s definition of documentary, first proposed in the 1930s, as the “creative treatment of actuality.” This view acknowledges that documentaries are creative endeavors. It also leaves unresolved the obvious tension between “creative treatment” and “actuality.” Creative treatment suggests the license of fiction, whereas actuality reminds us of the responsibilities of the journalist and historian. That neither term has full sway, that the documentary form balances creative vision with a respect for the historical world, identifies, in fact, one source of documentary appeal. Neither a fictional invention nor a factual reproduction, documentary draws on and refers to historical reality while representing it from a distinct perspective.

Commonsense ideas about documentary prove a useful starting point. As typically formulated, they are both genuinely helpful and unintentionally misleading. The three commonsense assumptions about documentary discussed here, with qualifications, add to our understanding of documentary filmmaking but do not exhaust it.

Documentary films, though, refer directly to the historical world. Documentary images present people and events that belong to the world we share rather than invent characters and actions to tell a story that refers to our world obliquely or allegorically. One consequence is that documentaries strive to respect known facts and offer verifiable evidence. They do much more than this, but a documentary that distorts facts, alters reality, or fabricates evidence jeopardizes its own status as a documentary. (For some mockumentaries and for some provocative filmmakers, this may well be exactly what they set out to do. This Is Spinal Tap [1984] and David Holzman’s Diary [1968] are prime examples of this possibility.)

Real people, or social actors, as Erving Goffmann pointed out several decades ago in his book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), present themselves in everyday life in ways that differ from a consciously adopted role or fictional performance. A stage or screen performance calls on the actor to subordinate his or her own traits as an individual to represent a specified character and to provide evidence through his or her acting of what changes or transformations that character undergoes. The actor remains relatively unchanged and goes on to other roles, but the character he or she plays may change dramatically. All of this requires training and relies on conventions and techniques.

The presentation of self in everyday life involves how a person goes about expressing his or her personality, character, and individual traits rather than suppressing them to adopt an assigned role. We learn to do this as we grow up. The presence of a camera is not very different from meeting a new person. We play ourselves in one of the many ways we have learned to do so: friendly, guarded, seductive, charming, persuasive, deceptive, cunning, or cruel. We’ve rehearsed presenting aspects of ourselves many times before. To adopt a new persona, be it friendly or manipulative, domineering or subdued, in an unfamiliar manner usually takes the training expected of an actor. The self we present may have multiple facets, but this is just what the camera captures.

In other words, a person does not present in exactly the same way to a companion on a date, a doctor in a hospital, his or her children at home, and a filmmaker in an interview. Nor do people continue to present the same way as an interaction develops; they modify their behavior as the situation evolves. Friendliness invites a friendly presentation of self, but the introduction of a sarcastic remark may prompt guardedness. Embarrassment or determination may blossom in front of the camera, and in a documentary, we assume this quality stems from the social actor’s own persona rather than from a role they’ve been asked to play. Films such as Battleship Potemkin (1925), Bicycle Thieves (1948), Salt of the Earth (1954), and Shadows (1960) and TV shows like Real World and Survivor give us untrained social actors playing roles that they seem to inhabit naturally, yet the roles are so strongly shaped by the filmmaker or producers that these works are usually treated as fiction. We may assign more realism to certain forms of fiction than they deserve, although some reality TV shows consciously create a blurry boundary between the actual people depicted and the role they seem to adopt at the bequest of the show’s creators.