Documentary and fiction

Student Name: Marina Oriente Student ID: ORI12374960 Assignment Tutor Name: Dr Emily Caston Assignment Title: Politics of Screen Practice Unit Title: Politics of Screen Practice Course & Year: Film &Television 2013 Due date: 14th March 2013

‘Nanook of the North, seems poised between documentary and fiction...it marks a moment before the distinction between fiction and documentary is set’. (William Rothman) Discuss.
By Marina Oriente

The history of cinema has always been significantly related to ethnographic film and documentary since its very early stages of development.
From the first photographic moving image experiment made in June 19, 1872, aiming to determine weather a running horse ever had the four legs in the air. Followed by a series of technical inventions, Thomas Edison’s and W. K. L. Dickson’s early Kinetograph (1891) and Kinestoscope (1893) camera and viewing apparatus, to the Phantoscope, projector developed by Charles Francis Jenkins, which allowed for the first time in history film to be screened to an audience.
The later invention of the Cinématographe (1895), by Louis and Auguste Lumière, had a huge impact in society; Even bringing attention of the scientific world with as many as 60 operations being recorded by doctors and neurosurgeons in Europe.
The Lumière Brothers were busy with the filming and screenings of the so called "actualités", short extracts of daily life, and according to the media historian Erik Barnouw, this programs were so popular that within two years they had approximately one hundred operators at work around the world, both showing their films and photographing new ones to add to a steadily increasing catalogue.
What came later, in the beginning of the 20th Century , the ‘travelogue films’ were often referred to by distributors as “scenics”. They were amongst the most popular sort of films at the time. Travelogues are defined as nonfiction films that take place as