by valerie.schwarz - Media Design -

The Origins of (Travel) Documentaries

The history of documentaries has always been tightly intertwined with the history of cinema itself. When the Lumière Brothers first shared their groundbreaking invention – the Cinématographe – with the world in the late 19th century, the first films which ever saw the light of day were what would now be considered documentaries.
One of the first films the two brothers showcased was aptly titled “La Sortie de l’Usine Lumière à Lyon” or “Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon” and showed just that (Kaganovski et al., 2019).
According to Geva’s definition of a documentary (Geva, 2021) this film not only made history as the first piece of cinema but also as the first ever documentary.
However defining what constitutes as a documentary in the first place is not as straightforward as one might assume. Ever since the Scottish filmmaker John Grierson first coined the term “documentary” in 1926 and defined it as “the creative treatment of actuality”, experts and enthusiasts alike have tried to define what makes a documentary and keep coming to different conclusions (Plantinga, 2005).
I will however focus on the definition of documentaries at a later point and stick to analysing how they developed for now.

The Lumière brothers not only created documentaries showing ordinary events like workers leaving a factory, but they also toured the world to on one hand showcase their work, but on the other hand also to collect more of the variety the world had to offer. One thing that drew viewers into the Lumières’ screenings was a promise of “The Other”, the unknown, the faraway. Wherever they went with their shows, “the Other” meant something different, but the films were always presented in a way as to make it seem as different as possible from what people were used to. However, everywhere these films were showed and enjoyed, there was one consensus as to which place on earth was the most different and foreign to all of these viewers – The Arctic. A place incredibly hard to reach and even harder to document, the Arctic was later compared to the moon in its potential to fascinate millions of people. The public was entertained and captured by the many brave crews setting out to reach and explore the North as well as the South Pole in the early 20th century (Kaganovski et al., 2019).

Auguste and Louis Lumière were no exception. Their fascination even went so far that they financed the fourth French Antarctic expedition under Jean-Baptiste Charcot, who in turn named a mountain on the Antarctic Peninsula after them – the Lumière Peak, or Sommet Lumière in French (Wikipedia, 2024).

As one can see, the Lumière brothers, and with them cinema as a whole, can neither be separated from the Arctic expedition movement of the early twentieth century nor from the principle of documentaries as a whole and especially travel documentaries. Because that is what these early movies created by traveling the world with their Cinématographe were – the very first travel documentaries.

Between the nineteenth century and the present day, many things have changed, and just as everything else, film has evolved and adapted to phenomena such as industrialisation and globalisation.
Nowadays, travel documentaries are no longer the only way viewers are able to experience certain places, as reaching them has become a lot more realistic throughout the last couple of decades. Travel documentaries have thus shifted from bringing the destinations to the people toward bringing the people to the destinations. The tourism industry has seized the chance to use travel documentaries to their advantage and often employ them to promote their products (Lopriore, 2015).

However, one major issue that keeps gaining significance throughout the last couple of years, partly due to the rise of travel content on social media, is so-called “Overtourism” (Dodds et al., 2019).
I will discuss the term, its origins as well as potential consequences and solutions in future blog entries, but for now I want to focus on what this development might mean for the future of travel documentaries.

Documentaries will, a lot of the time, also try to make the viewers see certain, sometimes global, issues and urge them to take action towards a better world (Jack et al., 2005).
I believe that travel documentaries of the future have some responsibility to address certain problems that are closely connected and partly caused by travelling, such as climate change and overtourism. Moreover, travel documentaries should also aim to treat local culture and people with respect and to portray them as accurately and unbiasedly as possible to avoid spreading stereotypes like movies such as “Nanook of the North” did in the beginning of documentaries (Kaganovski et al., 2019).

With this short overview of the origins and history of documentary cinema as well as a brief outlook into the potential future, I wanted to give a very broad introduction into my research topic, narrowing it down as I keep writing more blog entries.

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