The word documentary was coined reviewing a 1926 film
Before "documentary" had a name, cameras chased trains, factory gates, and prize fights as "actualities." In 1926 Scottish filmmaker John Grierson, reviewing Robert Flaherty's Moana under a pen name, gave the genre its lasting label—and defined it as the creative treatment of actuality.
A documentary is a nonfiction film meant to record reality for instruction, education, or historical memory. Bill Nichols calls it a practice, tradition, and mode of reception without sharp borders. It grew from documentary photography—Mathew Brady's conflict images among early models—and from one-minute actuality shorts that showed events without narrative. Platforms such as YouTube and Dailymotion later widened distribution past some local censorship barriers.
Polish filmmaker Bolesław Matuszewski argued cinema's historical value in two 1898 French essays and urged a film archive. Grierson coined "documentary" in a New York Sun review of Moana published 8 February 1926 as "The Moviegoer." He prized original people and places over fiction stand-ins; Pare Lorentz later called a documentary "a factual film which is dramatic," while others stress that documentaries also argue a viewpoint. Practice spans journalism, advocacy, and personal expression.
Pre-1900 novelty ruled: Lumière actualities often ran a minute or less. Enoch J. Rector's looping technology screened the full 1897 Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight at over ninety minutes. Matuszewski filmed Warsaw and Saint Petersburg surgeries in May 1896; Eugène-Louis Doyen recorded more than sixty operations by 1906 and said the footage taught him to correct his own hand movements. Between 1898 and 1901, Gheorghe Marinescu made preserved neurology films in Bucharest. Travel "scenics" thrived early; Edward S. Curtis's In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914) staged exotic reenactments as if they were straight record.
Source: Documentary film
