So where should a study of US documentary begin – with the first copyrighted film? The five-second Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze was directed in January 1894 by William Kennedy Laurie Dickson in Edison's West Orange, New Jersey, laboratory, appearing over a year before the Lumière Brothers' cinématographe films. The Sneeze has been called the first ‘film of fact’ – that is, the first motion picture record of a real event – and so might represent the ‘very genesis of the documentary idea’ (Jacobs 1979: 2). For others, the Edison films are the earliest ‘filmed recordings of actuality’ (Ellis and McLane 2005: 6). Still, most agree it would be overly simplistic to see these films as prototypes for documentary, per se, due to varying ideas and histories of documentary film. Moreover, though labelled with the scientific-sounding preix ‘kinetoscopic record’, The Sneeze could be closer to dramatic fiction than to nonfiction: a neat bit of acting by an Edison employee, Fred Ott.

The cinema developed as a collusion of technologies – photography, persistence of vision devices, projection – that were underwritten by legacies of intersecting and often competing inventions, social impulses, commercial imperatives, popular cultural phenomena and ways of seeing the world. Rather than trace documentary film's origins, then, I'd like to explore some contours of pre- and early cinema that might characterize a documentary impulse – a combination of enlightenment, engagement and spectacle that underlies the production and apprehension of documentary realities.