by Joan Dean

The central dilemma of documentaries is implicit in the word’s meaning and etymology. The American Heritage Dictionary says that a documentary "presenting facts objectively without editorializing", but it also acknowledges the word comes from the Latin "documentum" a lesson, example, warning; from docere, to teach.

Even in the earliest films when, for instance, the Lumieres photographed a train arriving at a station from a single fixed perspective, the question of selectivity is at hand. Critics still hotly dispute the objectivity of Robert Flaherty, the first auteur of documentary features. In a career spanning three decades from Nanook of the North (1922) and Moana: A Romance of the Golden Age (1925) to Man of Aran (1934) and Louisiana Story (1948) Flaherty combined a highly romantic vision with strong anthropological interests. Small wonder that his only collaboration with the celebrated British documentary producer and theorist John Grierson was an uneasy one. Grierson was dedicated to informing and improving the public through a heightened consciousness of British social conditions of the day. Flaherty's romantic views found little compatibility with Grierson's insistence on the wonders of modern mass production in their Industrial Britain (1933). Grierson, perhaps best known for Night Mail (1936), also collaborated with the Brazilian documentarist Alberto Cavalcanti on Coalface (1935).

But the landmark among documentaries of the 1930s remains Leni Riefenstahl's The Triumph of the Will (1935). The Nazis were the first political organization to recognize how powerfully film could forge an emotional loyalty to a political ideology. They had, in fact, made dozens of "election films" before commissioning Riefenstahl to film Adolf Hitler's 1934 Nuremberg rallies. During WWII, both Britain and the US aggressively countered Nazi propaganda with scores of documentaries that often enlisted the talents the most successful commercial feature film directors — the likes of John Ford, John Huston, George Stevens, William Wyler and Frank Capra.

In the fifties and early sixties, American documentary making languished in an uncomfortable but finally symbiotic relationship with television documentaries. The symbiosis came not only from technological innovations but from film-makers moving from one medium and the other. But by the 1960s television's need to produce commercially viable, mainstream work as well as the limits of the small screen were all too obvious. The sixties saw the first of Frederick Wiseman's scathing studies of American institutions: Titicut Follies (1967, set in the Bridgewater, Massachusetts State Hospital for the criminally insane), High School (1968), Law and Order (1969), and later Hospital (1970) and, the film that could turn Hannibal Lector into a vegetarian, Meat (1976). The sixties also saw the emergence of the Maysles Brothers (Albert and David) in Salesman (1969) which was followed by Gimme Shelter (1970) and Christo's Valley Curtain (1974). D. A. Pennebaker's chronicle of Bob Dylan's tour of England Dont Look Back (1965) and Monterey Pop (1968) played not just to what people want to see, but what they wanted to hear.

By 1970 the floodgates were well and truly open: Marcel Ophüls's The Sorrow and the Pity (1970) and A Sense of Loss (1972), Michael Wadleigh's Woodstock (1970), Barbara Kopple's Harlan County, U.S.A. (1976), George Butler's Pumping Iron (1976), and Martin Scorsese's The Last Waltz (1978) demonstrate a breathtaking range in both style and substance.

Ten years ago the American documentary film seemed to be in trouble once again. The governmental funding agencies had been drastically scaled back and momentarily teetered on extinction. In 1987 Burton Benjamin, whose credits include Ireland: The Tear and the Smile (1962) for American television, published "The Documentary: An Endangered Species." But oddly, ironically, documentary film-making has flourished in the past decade. The nature documentary has found a popular home in the spectacular IMAX format with epics like Everest, Blue Planet and Mission to Mir. (Actually I didn't see the last of these because one of my worse nightmares is imagining what it must smell like on board Mir).

In 1991, moreover, several documentaries actually made money: Madonna's Truth or Dare, A Brief History of Time, Eleanor Coppola's account on the making of Apocalypse Now, Hearts of Darkness, and Michael Apted's enduring 35 Up. More recently, Jupiter's Wife, Looking for Richard, and When We Were Kings attest to the power and range of American documentaries.

One reason the American documentary flourishes is a fierce determination, especially among groups who saw themselves previously disenfranchised, to document the contributions and alternative lifestyles of minorities, women, gay and lesbians. Among the recent films chronicling gay and lesbian presence in American culture, for instance, Robert Epstein's The Life and Times of Harvey Milk (1984), the compilation film by Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman The Celluloid Closet (1996), Jennie Livingston's excursion into the underworld of high drag, Paris Is Burning (1990), and Douglas Keeve's Unzipped (1995) are only a few of such films to find wide scale distribution and commercial success.

Another reason for the renewed of interest in American documentaries lies in demand and financing from an unanticipated source: cable television channels, most notably Home Box Office (HBO). In 1996, for instance, HBO produced Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, a project which began filming while the investigation of the gruesome murders of three young boys in Arkansas was still unfolding. So immediate is much of the information captured by directors Joe Belinger and Bruce Sinofsky that when the grandfather of one of the suspects came across what later proved to be the murder weapon, he turned it over to the film-makers rather than the authorities.

Yet a third reason for the renaissance in American documentary making can be summed up in two words: Errol Morris. His Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control, this year’s finest documentary, joins his earlier films Gates of Heaven, The Thin Blue Line, Vernon, Florida and A Brief History of Time as stubbornly, incomprehensibly ignored for an Oscar. In 1988 a Washington Post survey of 100 film critics named Thin Blue Line as the year's best film (not just documentary). Were the Academy's slights not enough, Morris was sued by Randall Adams, the very man whose conviction for the murder of a Texas law officer was only overturned because of the film.