history of doco in Aus

Pre-1900, The French used the term documentary to refer to any non-fiction films, especially for travelogues and instructional films. The earliest non-fiction moving pictures were single-shot moments with a minute or less than a minute length of a train entering a station or a boat docking or a factory of people getting off work. Due to the limitations of the technological issues, very little stories could take place in a film.
From 1900-1920 Travelogue films were very popular as known as ‘scenics’. From 1920s to 1970s many different themes were introduced through the documentary such as Romanticism with Robert J. Flaherty’s nanook of the North in 1922, and Newsreel tradition. In the 1960s and 1970s documentaries were also used as a political weapon against neo-colonialism and capitalism in general for example The Hour of the Furnaces in 1968 directed by Octavio Getino and Fernando E. Solanas.
In modern days, documentaries saw a possibility in success of theatrical release with films with examples like Super Size Me, Fahrenheit 9/11, March of the penguins and so on. Some argue that commercial success of the documentaries had changed the nature of documentary films in the past 20 years as it was in cinema verite tradition. So some critics referred some of these films as ‘mondo films’ or ‘docu-ganda’, which is similar to mockumentary. Mockumentary is a documentary recording real life, but is in fact fictional.
The advent of DVDs and development of the Internet had made documentaries financially viable without a cinema release. Most recently, online presentation for the documentaries became a trend, whether it is made for television broadcasting or theatrical purposes.