The Documentary Genre, a Shared Form of Writing History

Does the documentary film result from a collaboration between the skills of directing and those of writing history? The inaugural experiments conducted in the America of the Great Depression and France of the Popular Front show the importance of the collective or the contribution of individual researchers in the process of realization. In France, the involvement of the History Committee of the Second World War in the writing of Alain Resnais' film Nuit et Brouillard will go unanswered: most of the great documentary filmmakers work at a distance from historical expertise. If some historians have developed a real familiarity with the audiovisual tool, it was not until the 1990s to see researchers themselves become directors, in a context where the creation of the ARTE channel, in connection with a public policy of support for creation, allows France to open up a demanding space for collaboration between the world of research and that of film production. Today, the passage, the translation of the language from scientific knowledge to that of film has become a more shared field of experimentation in the writing of history.