As the previous chapter showed, cinema embodied the idea and physical experience of the modern world in motion – from the legacies of moving crowds and exhibits at world fairs to the disorienting speed of fast travel. Emerging nonfiction genres such as the travelogue encapsulated film's ability to capture a god's eye view of the moving world: the tourist gaze helped to stabilize the blur of modern urban life, delivering views of far-flung sites and peoples as consumable spectacles. The virtual journeying provided by panoramic, first-person and mobile perspectives bolstered the viewer's belief in knowing the world through the accretion of images. Yet there are other strands in documentary's development that engaged more critically with modern spectacle – what Thomas Elsaesser calls the modern ‘tyranny of the eye’ – in particular, the modernist avant-garde (1996: 16).

Important links between avant-garde work and documentary remain relatively overlooked even as, in recent decades, clear boundaries between documentary and other cinematic forms have come into question. Indeed, documentary is often still viewed as the avant-garde's opposite. While the latter implies innovation, experimentation and playfulness in both content and form (traced to the traditions of fantastic and otherworldly ‘trick films’ of showmen like Méliès), documentary is seen as an established mode (usually traced to actualities and the Lumières) for revealing the ‘real’, if often hidden, worlds we inhabit. Valued for formal transparency and heuristic authority, documentary, Bill Nichols notes, has been known for its ‘discourses of sobriety’. It is seen to ‘speak directly about social and historical realities’, engaging issues such as foreign policy, medicine, science, economics and education (2001a: 39).