Actuality Film - Legacy

Legacy

In a commercial sense, the actuality is of no more worth than its value as stock footage to use in documentaries. Some documentaries have been fashioned from early actualities and passed off as historic without further comment, such as a compilation entitled The San Francisco Earthquake which is rendered in a way that makes the original source material impossible to divine. However, actuality films are an inherent part of the development of early motion pictures and the genre deserves study in its own right; the UNESCO Lumière project, BFI's Mitchell and Kenyon collection and certain films in the Library of Congress paper print collection remain the only studies in the genre conducted in a systematic way. The sheer numbers of such films are part of the problem; early actuality films exist in the thousands, and many remain unidentified.

Although actuality films may have disappeared from movie theaters, actuality films, or video, has made something of a comeback in the digital era. One late 20th century actuality video seen thousands of times on television in the months leading up to the LA consumer riots of 1993 was the police beating of Rodney King, filmed by an amateur through the front window of their residence. The advent of YouTube has led to some resurgence of interest in actuality styled film and video apart from "home movies," and the web has seen the advent of home-based webcams pointed out the window, and other things resulting from the easy availability of access to digital video. Whereas early film makers would shoot film after film and never have to proffer a single release form, the legal implications in the digital era are different; there is now a thin line between actuality filming and unwanted surveillance.