What is a documentary?Essential to a documentary is that it focuses on questioning actual people on events, often in a social context. Placing the audience in a position to form an opinion about what we are seeing. The term documentary was coined by John Grierson in 1926. The purpose of a documentary is to document something that has happened, it can be shown using actual footage or reconstruction. It can use narrators voiceover to anchor the meaning or rely on the participants themselves, perhaps with an occasional intersection by the narrator.

What are the features of a documentary?According to John Corner (of the University of Liverpool), there are 5 essential elements to a documentary. These are:

-Observational (Fly on the wall). These make us pretend the camera is unseen or is ignored by the people taking part in the events. The unseen observation puts the audience in the role of an eyewitness

-Interviews can be used to make a contrast with the observation sequences. The interviewer is either seen or unseen. The interviewee addressed the interviewer, and not the audience. Sometimes pictures can be dubbed over the speakers replies in support of what they are saying. Interviews can be structured in two ways, allowed to run fully or segments of the interview taken with cuts in between.

-Dramatisation. Although documentaries use a sense of drama, this feature is specifically used to portray people and events. The filmmaker could not get access to in real life. These sequences are based on fact.

-Mise-en-scene, what filmmakers and directors put into a frame, for example, lighting and props in interviews.

-Exposition, what the line of argument is in a documentary.

There are 6 different types of documentary:-Fully narrated.