Over the past half-century, the Boston area has been the fountainhead of American documentary filmmaking. Many of the pioneers of cinema vérité (that is, sync-sound shooting from within evolving events) have had Boston connections – Robert Drew, the Maysles Brothers, Frederick Wiseman, Richard Leacock, Ed Pincus are examples. And WGBH has been a pioneer in television documentary, especially about race. Cambridge in particular has been crucial in nurturing two major genres of nonfiction cinema: ethnographic filmmaking and personal documentary.

Originally understood as filmmaking devoted to the recording of indigenous, pre-industrial cultures on the verge of transformation, ethnographic cinema evolved at Harvard’s Film Study Center in the work of John Marshall and Robert Gardner, and a modern flowering of ethnographic cinema has been the achievement of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab. Personal documentary – the use of cinema-vérité shooting to investigate the filmmakers’ personal lives – was instigated by Ed Pincus at MIT’s Film Section, and in the hands of Pincus’ students, Ross McElwee most famously, has become one of the most popular forms of documentary.

While ethnographic film and personal documentary may seem very different, they are essentially two sides of the same cinematic coin: as filmmakers explore distant cultures, they are learning more about the nature of their own culture and their own personal experiences; and as personal documentarians have turned their cameras onto their families, they’ve produced cultural documents that, as time goes by, come to represent far more than the personal. – Scott MacDonald