The documentary film and the narrative film

Number of pages: 187 Some cinematic theories celebrated raw cinema material, which records the physical world and objects and places and real people, which are originally realistic. As for those cinematic theories, which focused first on the authority of the filmmaker in distorting reality or manipulating it, they were essentially expressive theories: meaning they concern the filmmaker's expression of the raw materials more than their concern with the depicted reality itself. Thus, the theory of film, almost entirely, was colored by the opposition between realism and expressiveness, and these two approaches dominated the history of film theory and practice, since the era of the Lumière brothers, who were influenced by the obsession with transferring raw realism onto film, in addition to Méliès, who was clearly taken by what could be done with raw materials. Expressionism dominated film theory during the twenties and thirties. For his part, Dr. W. Groughth described two main "schools" in film practice, the American and the German – while realism, albeit secondarily, was a common style in cinematic practice during the first four decades of cinema history, and it only became a standalone theory at the end of the thirties (through the practical practice of British documentary filmmakers led by John Grierson) and in the forties with the emergence of Italian neorealism. There were valid reasons for this late flourishing: especially, because the realist theory implicitly considered film to be of lesser importance, as it believed that reality is more important than "art." Is it possible for a documentary filmmaker to remain a novelist at the same time?