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performing certain social functions. Grierson’s perspective of documentary greatly influenced the development of Australian documentary films and directed the orientation of post-war government film production.
Documentary Truth and Reality
Many scholars have pointed out that documentaries are not absolutely true reflections of ongoing social phenomena. Instead, documentaries are largely characterised by creativity, dramatisation, and fiction in the production process. Grierson was the leader of this school of thought. According to Grierson, documentary film consists of ‘arrangements, rearrangements, and creative shapings of natural material’ and is artificially edited to interpret social reality. Beattie (2004) stated,
Instead of using the idea of ‘creative treatment of actuality’ developed by Grierson; Rotha, Road, and Griffith (1968) used the phrase ‘the birth of creative cinema’ (pp. 70–71) to indicate the same idea. They argued that new methods of creative treatment of what is documented could surpass simple and plain description and thus inject more imaginative, expressive, and deeper meanings for the reality.
Documentary is not drama; however, many scholars have argued that it can still contain dramatised elements as long as there is not distortion. The invented term docudrama represents this line of thought. Grierson was a strong proponent of this concept. For him, documentary is a dramatisation of everyday life and social reality. Cowie (1997) argued, ‘For Grierson documentary would be the “drama of the doorstep”, showing to the citizen the world and him or herself, not as mere recordings of scenes from real life but as a creative and dramatised representation of reality’ (p. 54). Grierson disregarded the idea that documentary should be based