A documentary is a form of film made, as the name implies, with the intent to document something. Such films are real, that is to say they contain no people acting out characters, and very rarely rely on the recreation of scenes of past events. Documenting as a film form was first recognised by Polish cinematography pioneer Bolesław Matuszewski in his 1898 text "Une nouvelle source de l'histoire" ("A New Source of History"). The term itself was coined in 1926 by John Grierson, in a review of the film Moana: A Romance of the Golden Age.
The style is the earliest form of film-making, with the first films dating back to the 1870s in the form of Actuality cinema. The Travel Documentary was a common and popular style in the early 1900s through 1920s. City Symphony showcased an avant-garde side of the style from the 1920s onwards, creating poetic scenes through city imagery alone. Up until the 1950s, many fiction films showed short Newsreel films prior to the features themselves.
