documentary

Pluraldocumentaries

1. 1
   nouncountable or uncountable

   A film, television program, or publication that presents a social, political, scientific, or historical subject in a factual, informative way.

   She directed a documentary on the history of jazz in New Orleans.

   The new documentary examines climate change through interviews with leading scientists.

   Note

   Out of the adjective came the noun, a step French documentaire had already taken, so a documentary film is simply called a documentary. Single works are counted, with the plural documentaries. Brooks Barnes and Michael Cieply's 2014 report has fifteen of them in sharp-elbowed competition for Oscar nominations. For the form as a whole, the genre sense takes over.

2. 2
   adjective

   Serving to record or illustrate a subject.

   Her documentary photography captures the daily lives of factory workers.

   The series adopts a documentary style that records the routines of hospital nurses.

   Similarfactual, observational

   Note

   Here the record is made rather than consulted. The documents sense describes material taken from records, as in documentary evidence. This one describes work that itself records or illustrates, as in documentary photography. The test is direction: evidence drawn from files looks back to papers already written, while a documentary photograph is the record being made.

3. 3
   adjective

   Relating to documents, or based on the information that written documents and records contain.

   The historian relied on documentary sources held in the royal archives.

   Documentary evidence confirmed the original boundaries of the estate.

   Similararchival, written, recorded

   Oppositeoral

   Note

   The sense nearest the word's makeup: document plus the suffix -ary, borrowed from French documentaire and ultimately from Latin documentum. Here the word points back to papers themselves, so documentary evidence and documentary sources are drawn from records. It is not comparable. A source is documentary or it is not, never more documentary than another. Documentative and documentational are rarer near-synonyms.

4. 4
   noununcountable

   Factual films, programs, and publications considered collectively as a genre.

   He has worked in documentary for more than twenty years.

   Modern documentary often blends candid interviews with archival footage.

   Oppositefiction

   Note

   Spoken of as a field, the word drops its article and its plural, the way fiction or theater does: someone works in documentary. Modifiers name its branches. Nicole Seymour's Bad Environmentalism (2018) writes of the emotional appeals that environmental documentary typically makes. Saying a documentary here would shift the meaning to a single film or program.

5. 5
   adjective

   Factual in content and objective in presentation, with nothing invented.

   The novel's documentary passages report the trial verbatim, free of invention.

   He chose a documentary treatment, recording events exactly as they occurred.

   Similarfactual, objective, realistic

   Oppositefictional, invented

   Note

   A standard of method more than of subject: the work reports and does not invent. It usually describes a film or book, as in a documentary film. Its opposite is the staged or posed. Martin Krieger, writing in Gay Community News in 1982, insists that history photographs are not documentary, because they show the world as it was supposed to be.

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