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to realise that this difference of approach is not simply due to the caprice of one school of film-makers as opposed to another, but arises out of a fundamental difference of aims. A story-film — and this will have to serve as a working distinction between documentary and story-films — is concerned with the development of a plot ; the documentary film is concerned with the exposition of a theme. It is out of this fundamental difference of aims that the different production methods arise.
This distinction is necessarily rather vague. It is of course true that many films, quite distinctly " documentary " in flavour, have used a plot, and that many commercial story-films show a marked documentary influence. The distinction is one of total emphasis rather than of subject-matter alone. Thus Nanook of the North can be considered a documentary because its " plot " is merely a dramatised rendering of the film's theme, namely, the life of an Eskimo. On the other hand, a film like Scott of the Antarctic is a story-film : it is the adventure story of a set of characters with the setting in the Antarctic, not an essay in Antarctic exploration.
The absence of a plot is at once an advantage and a disadvantage to the documentary director. Many an indifferently made story-film can hold an audience simply by telling an intriguing story. An exciting plot can generate enough interest and suspense to compensate for shortcomings in the acting and presentation. The documentary does not have this advantage. Here the theme must be presented in a novel, stimulating way to hold an audience at all ; even if the theme itself is one in which the spectator might reasonably be expected to be interested, it is in the manner of the presentation, in the aptness and originality of the visual associations, and in the purposeful editing, that the film will gain its interest. In a documentary the theme is only the merest starting point, demanding interpretation. The film's merit will rest on the quality of the treatment, not in the spontaneous entertaining power of the theme itself. In many cases, the simplest themes have provided the starting point for the most successful documentaries.
What the documentary director loses in missing the suspense of a plot, he gains in his freedom to edit his films in an original and expressive way. He is not tied by the strict chronology of events laid down by a set story, but can present facets of his theme and alternations of mood in the order and tempo he chooses. He does not have his images anchored by a dialogue track, but can experiment with evocative uses of actual and commentative sound.
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