It was once assumed that documentary films were impersonal records of real events or people: you set up the camera, shoot the situation, and it might appear on the TV news. Critics like André Bazin nourished this theory by stressing that the lens (called the objectif in French) is “impassive” and that “between the originating object and its reproduction there intervenes only the instrumentality of a nonliving agent.” The underlying fallacy here – as anyone who has ever taken a photograph can attest – is that framing, camera angle, lighting, and proximity to subject are “objective.” The selection of high-angle versus low-angle, for example, results in a different image: the subject might be the same, but the camera placement determines whether it seems insignificant, threatening, or neutral.

The corollary assumption was that a fiction film is an artificial construct, strongly plotted into a linear narrative progression, using actors, sets, visual tricks, and so on. Such oversimplified categories no longer hold, especially after the advent of Italian neorealism. This film movement in postwar Italy eschewed polished scripts, professional actors, makeup, studios, and addressed itself to the daily problems of impoverished Italians. Films like The Bicycle Thief, Open City, and La Terra Trema ascribed a new dignity to “reality” and to the notion of the cinema as a sensitizing mirror. The closest analogue in American culture is perhaps Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, in which Walker Evans's stark photographs of American sharecroppers in the 1930s are animated and deepened by the direct perceptions of James Agee's rich prose.