The Documentary, Between Definitions and Indefinitions

Abstract

This essay reflects on the documentary regarded like kind of the movie art. It propose a definition of this genre correlated with the other two cardinal genres (the movies of fiction and the movies of animation): His common and analogous factors as well as his differences. Also it examine similarities and differences in the various uses, institutions and values of the documentary record −cinema art, journalism and didactics− and manifestations as the false documentary, without forgetting the movies of animation that reconstruct facts and truthful memoirs, often confused falsely with the documentary movies (the genres cannot be defined by veracity or falseness of the theme but of his modes of doing). It all intertwines in a esthetic conceptual system, of the theory of the art (plays, novels, painting…) and particularly of the cinema.