The documentary is arguably the most challenging and influential genre of media today. It touches, informs, and sometimes outrages millions of viewers seeking facts and insights in a complex world. This introduction to the genre starts and ends with workers leaving the factory: we begin with the earliest “actuality” films of the Lumière brothers and end with Jia Zhang-ke’s salute to Chinese workers over a century later along with the latest digital explorations of documentary “truth.” Ethical, technical, and aesthetic issues are foregrounded. We examine the role of scripting, re-enactment, archival footage, sponsorship, music, narration, animation, point of view, autobiography, and performance. We discuss some of the many uses of documentary—as a tool for social change and political activism, a means of personal expression, a form of popular entertainment, as propaganda, and as visual history, ethnography, and journalism. The course emphasizes how changing technology, shifting social, cultural, and political contexts, and the personalities and talents of influential individuals and collectives continually re-define what documentary is. Weekly screenings and discussions are of classic as well as more contemporary and/or iconoclastic works by: Vertov, Flaherty, Grierson, Riefenstahl, Rouch, Gúzman, Marker,Trinh, Godmilow, Panh, among others. NOTE: This course was formerly titled "Documentary: It's Art and History."