Documentaries are just not my favourite kind of movie watching. The fact is I don't trust the little bastards. I don't trust the nature of those who think they are superior to fiction films, I don't trust their claim to have cornered the market on the truth, I don't trust their inordinately high, and entirely underserved, status of bourgeois respectability.'
– Marcel Ophüls, documentary filmmaker
These are strong words, particularly from such a master of the genre. Like Ophüls, film critics often have reservations regarding documentaries. As historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, remarked: 'The line between the documentary and the fiction film is tenuous indeed. Both are artefacts: both are contrivances. Both are created by editing and selection. Both, wittingly or not, embody viewpoint.' A second concern is the tendency of films to lull the critical powers of viewers. Nevertheless, it is apparent that documentaries have clear potential benefits – to inform, move, inspire, promote positive social change, strengthen group identities and provide glimpses of the world beyond our knowledge. Presumably, it was a belief in such benefits that inspired Ophüls to continue making documentaries, despite his professional mistrust of the form.
The story of the documentary began in 1926, with the following statement: 'Of course, Moana, being a visual account of events in the daily life of a Polynesian youth and his family, has documentary value.' Thus wrote John Grierson, the founder of the British documentary movement, who ran the artistically free General Post Office (GPO) Film Unit, in a review of the sequel to the revolutionary Nanook of the North (1921). This so-called 'actuality' film (meaning that it was made prior to Grierson's coinage), the first example of what was later to be dubbed docu-fiction, was directed by the American pioneer Robert Flaherty. While this was the first use of 'documentary' in connection with film, the form can be traced back to the very birth of cinema.
In the adventurous early days of documentary-making, during the 1930s, Ceylon inspired one of the finest 'factual' films ever made, an experimental work that featured extraordinary modernist visual and sound collages, the Song of Ceylon from 1934 (see Himal January 2010, 'A magically depicted reality'). This was not the first documentary concerning the island, however, having been preceded by Charles Urban's A Ramble through Ceylon (1910) and Curious Scenes in India (1912). One can also view James FitzPatrick's travelogues Charming Ceylon (1931) and Tropical Ceylon (1932) – although they are nowhere near the quality of Song of Ceylon – on YouTube, but both of them have condescending, sometimes racist narrations.