Robert Joseph Flaherty, was an American filmmaker who directed and produced the first commercially successful feature-length documentary film, Nanook of the North (1922). The film made his reputation and nothing in his later life fully equaled its success, although he continued the development of this new genre of narrative documentary with Moana (1926), set in the South Seas, and Man of Aran (1934), filmed in Ireland's Aran Islands. Flaherty is considered the father of both the documentary and the ethnographic film.
Flaherty in 1922
R.J. Flaherty taking a movie, Port Harrison, QC, 1920-21
BBC publicity shot of The Last Voyage of Captain Grant BBC TV 1938
Nyla, who played the role of the wife of Nanook, and her child
A documentary film or documentary is a non-fictional motion picture intended to "document reality, primarily for instruction, education or maintaining a historical record". Bill Nichols has characterized the documentary in terms of "a filmmaking practice, a cinematic tradition, and mode of audience reception [that remains] a practice without clear boundaries".
A 16 mm spring-wound Bolex "H16" reflex camera – a popular entry-level camera used in film schools
The cover of Bolesław Matuszewski's 1898 book Une nouvelle source de l'histoire (A New Source of History), the first publication about documentary function of cinematography
Frame from one of Gheorghe Marinescu's science films (1899)
Geoffrey Malins with an aeroscope camera during World War I