Actuality film

The actuality film is a non-fiction film genre that, like the documentary film, uses footage of real events, places, and things, yet unlike the documentary is not structured into a larger argument, picture of the phenomenon or coherent whole. In practice, actuality films preceded the emergence of the documentary. During the era of early cinema, actualities—usually lasting no more than a minute or two and usually assembled together into a program by an exhibitor—were just as popular and prominent as their fictional counterparts. The line between "fact" and "fiction" was not so sharply drawn in early cinema as it would become after the documentary came to serve as the predominant non-fiction filmmaking form. An actuality film is not like a newspaper article so much as it is like the still photograph that is published along with the article, with the major difference being that it moves. Apart from the traveling actuality genre, actuality is one film genre that remains strongly related to still photography.

Despite the demise of the actuality as a film genre around 1908, one still refers to "actuality footage" as a building block of documentary filmmaking. In such usage, actuality refers to the raw footage that the documentarist edits and manipulates to create the film.

The first actuality films date to the time of the very emergence of projected cinema. The Lumière Brothers in France were the principal advocates for this genre and also coined the term — "Actualités" — and used it as a descriptor in the printed catalogues of their films. La sortie des usines Lumière (1895) — the first film exhibited by the Lumières—is by default the earliest actuality film; it might have not been the first one made, but it was definitively the first one shown publicly, on December 28, 1895.

Although the Edison Company in the United States was producing films and exhibiting them via the Kinetoscope going back to 1893, the films themselves were studio-bound creations made in Edison's makeshift movie studio the Black Maria; although Bucking Broncho (1894) was the first Edison subject to be filmed outdoors, it necessitated the construction of a special pen next to the Black Maria. The Edison, and early Biograph, motion picture cameras were bulky, engineering-heavy designs that could not be lifted or carried by a single person and required transport by way of horse cart. The Lumière cameras—from the very start—were small, light and also functioned as projectors. The Paul-Acres camera, registered in Britain in 1895, was likewise a smaller and more readily portable device than the Edison model, and Birt Acres filmed The Derby (1895) on it in May. But this, and Paul's other films, were not projected in public until February 1896.

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