Meaning of Documentary | Babel Free

Definitions

1. A film, TV program, publication etc. which presents a social, political, scientific or historical subject in a factual or informative manner.
   countable, uncountable
2. Own or relative to the document.
3. Such works collectively, as a genre.
   uncountable
4. Said of an audiovisual piece, done with the intention to reflect some appearance of the reality.

Equivalents

Examples

“Fifteen documentaries are in sharp-elbowed competition to be among the five Oscar nominees.”

“If you watched Victoria Beckham’s lavishly produced Netflix documentary last October, you might have wondered why it didn’t even glance on the biggest elephant in Brand Beckham’s room[…]. But most big documentaries these days aren’t documentaries any more in the way previous practitioners of the craft might have understood the word. As her husband’s was before it, Victoria’s doc was a self-commissioned advertorial on which the subject also served as executive producer.”

“Such sequences draw attention to the affective appeals that environmental documentary typically makes, precisely by absenting those appeals.”

CEFR level