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
Docufiction is the cinematographic combination of documentary and fiction, this term often meaning narrative film. It is a film genre which attempts to capture reality such as it is and which simultaneously introduces unreal elements or fictional situations in narrative in order to strengthen the representation of reality using some kind of artistic expression.
Moana, by Robert Flaherty, the first docufiction in film history (1926)
Robert Flaherty