These two arresting images put the process of photography front and center, even as they undermine the medium's historical, documentary function.
More important, though, is their documentary function, as records of art that either no longer exists, or exists only as ruins, or as ideas never realized.
From the simple tape splice to the more recent cutting and pasting of digital audio, the ability to edit gave rise to a "record consciousness," an approach that sought to move beyond the simple documentary function of the recording studio to exploit its potential for composition and experimentation.
An entirely different segment of the film industry is the subject of the Japanese director Tetsuaki Matsue's "Annyong Yumika" ("Hello Yumika" in Korean), an actual documentary that functions as a mash note to the porn star Yumika Hayashi, who died in 2005.
Arbus brought about nothing less by fusing photography's documentary and expressive functions, and charging that synthesis with a conviction of reality so strong that it resembles myth.
They focus, with sober detachment, on the details of crime and the working of the criminal mind, expressing no more shock than would a documentary on the functioning of the Ford assembly line.
A computational architecture hosts an author function; documentary authoring is implemented as query-display-edit facilitated by an inference engine.
Lord Charteris, formerly the Queen's private secretary, put it thus when he told a television documentary: "One of the functions of the royal family in the minds of the people is to be the continuing story of Peyton Place..
The New Yorker's Pauline Kael put the rhetorical question: "If events are created to be photographed, is the movie that records them a documentary, or does it function in a twilight zone?
Mervyn LeRoy's 1930 "Show Girl in Hollywood" is a backstage musical set in a movie studio that also functions as a documentary on early sound technology.
