Movies

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, travelogues, newsreels, reenactments, and other short films depicting current events were just as popular and prominent as their fictional counterparts. In fact, the line between "fact" and "fiction" was not so sharply drawn as would become after the documentary came to serve as the predominant non-fiction filmmaking form.

Despite the demise of the actuality as a film genre, 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.

See also

Documentary film

External resources

The Library of Congress American Memory Collection