Such films, called Neorealism in Italy and sometimes cinéma vérité in France, tried to achieve a documentary-like objectivity by using non-actors in leading roles and incorporating segments of actual documentary footage into the story.
But the documentaries achieve a higher level of portraiture when they are taken as a single, multivolume personal history, and continuities of theme and character emerge.
By virtue of its title alone, "Tabloid," Errol Morris's astonishing new documentary, achieves a degree of serendipitous timeliness.
This 90-minute documentary achieved a limited theatrical release back in 2011, and charts the fight for survival for one of America's most respected and beloved newspapers, The New York Times.
Shooting without permits, using no real script (dialogue was post-dubbed), and liberated by the same new lightweight cameras that powered the 60s documentary boom, Godard achieved an off-the-cuff, free-form documentary feel that felt totally new and invigorating in 1960.
Yet through this almost diagrammatic style, he manages to achieve something like documentary realism: he captures the exact way a cat curls up on a bed, or arches its back when it hears a tin of tuna being opened on the countertop; the exact way that a toddler will climb up and out of its high-chair; the weight in people's bodies and how they carry it.
Excluding concert films, The Imposter has achieved the biggest debut for a documentary since Senna roared off with £375,000 including £27,000 in previews last summer.
People sometimes ask me what I'm trying to achieve with my documentaries.
Mr. Pierce was flummoxed about how best to achieve this — until he stumbled upon a documentary on cable television about polar bears.
Interviews allow us to explore the complexities of CED in more depth than could be achieved just through documentary review or a study of the currently published literature.
It's partly for this reason that Meryl Streep, who chaired the judges at Berlin, argued that Rosi had re-thought what can be achieved with the documentary genre.
