Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical | Introduction to the History of Documentaries

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A black, white, and dark blue striped header image with the text Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical Introduction to the History of Documentaries

In my second week of hiatus from texts written by J.R.R. Tolkien, I wanted to talk about documentaries, one of the most popular ways to learn about history, science, and nearly any other topic. Tolkien’s works are pseudo-historical, presented as translations of a heavily edited ancient text with a modern historical essay added to the front as a Prologue and a series of Appendixes added to the back by various authors. Additionally, characters within the book halt the narrative to describe historically and culturally significant people, places, events, and ideas using both prose and song. Today, screens have largely replaced writing, with documentaries serving the population that once read textbooks. A film adaption faithful to the text could utilize the elements of a documentary to convey its layers of world-building information.

Defining the Documentary

When creating a documentary, filmmakers collect artifacts in a range of media, then turn the varied experiences into a film. There is no limit to what might be included in a documentary, which may reference formally published books, newspapers, magazines, and other print materials, but they can also use private journals and letters. Besides choosing an appropriate actor to be the narrator or voice-over, music is a crucial part of many documentaries, whether the song is composed specifically for the film, or licensed for use. A well-known example in American history buff circles is the opening to Ken Burns’ The Civil War featuring a dramatic reading of a letter written from Union Soldier Sullivan Ballou of Smithfield, RI to his young wife, Sarah, while the modern folk tune Ashokan Farewell by Jay Ungar plays underneath.

Visuals are the most important aspect of a documentary, as good visuals can make up for poor sound quality. Filmmakers may combine still images of paintings, photographs, and other artwork with moving image such as found footage, newly shot footage, reenactments, and animation. Statistical information may be conveyed with infographics and charts, while documentaries focused on travel or wars often include maps. Other helpful aspects include title cards denoting sections or chapters of the documentary and overlays giving the name and job title or significance of an interviewee.

Documentaries come in fiction forms. Mockumentaries are parody, satire, or pranks like news segments on April Fool’s Day or featured films such as the 2007 animated kids’ movie Surf’s Up about the Penguin World Surfing Championships. In contrast, pseudo-documentaries are fictional stories using a documentary style that may purport to be real. Scripted reality television shows fall into this category, as would scenes from the hypothetical Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical.

A Brief History

The word “documentary” took its modern meaning in English by 1935 with its first appearance in a review made by film critic John Grierson. He borrowed the word from the French film documentaire, which appeared by 1919. The concept of using film as factual documentation existed since the turn of the 20th century. Many of these early films had extraordinary technical expertise, especially considering the filming technology at the time. However, the storylines were biased towards imperialism, colonization, and exoticism, along with heavily relying on undisclosed staged reenactment.

The first box office hit feature-length documentary in the United States was Nanook of the North by Robert J. Flaherty, with its popularity making it among the first of twenty-five films selected for the United States National Film Registry in 1989, joining deliberately fictional favorites like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Star Wars, and The Wizard of Oz. Flaherty collaborated with Inuk actor Allakariallak to portray the precolonial hunter-gather lifestyle of Inuit people in Canada. Allakariallak hunted with a harpoon instead of his usual gun and pretended to have never seen a gramophone.

Besides feature-length films, early 20th century moviegoers were treated to newsreels highlighting the events of the contemporary world. In 1909, the first newsreels were made by Charles Pathé for United States, Britain, and Franch. His company evolved into a prestige theater brand which continues to operate in Europe. Rival companies appeared across the western world. Fox News was a silent newsreel brand from 1919 to 1930, while its sister company Fox Movietone created sound newsreels, from 1927 through 1963. This company worked with the Navy to distribute footage of Pearl Harbor mere days after the attack that brought the United States into World War II.

In fact, production of newsreels peaked during the 1930s and 1940s. The U.S. War Department and Office of War Information later created their own newsreels, deliberately showing graphic combat to the American public so civilians could better understand what soldiers faced during the war. New Deal documentaries commissioned by the Roosevelt administration promoted the Civilian Conservation Corps and other government-funded organizations. Adolf Hitler commissioned documentaries lauding the views of the Nazi party. In the British Empire, Grierson started the Documentary Film Movement, which used the work of artists and poets like W.H. Auden, who later became a highly regarded literature reviewer and an advocate for Tolkien’s works, especially the commentary on surviving the World Wars. Auden last appeared on this blog during the essay on Peter S. Beagle’s introduction letter.

Many newsreels are viewable online today. Eleven million feet of 20th Century Fox newsreels are preserved in the Moving Image Research Collections at the University of South Carolina, which collaborates with the National Endowment for the Humanities, while UCLA Film & Television Archive holds twenty-seven million feet of newsreel in the Hearts Metrotone News Collection, and The March of Time by Time Inc., which ran in theaters from 1935 to 1951, is housed at the University of Indiana.

In the 1950s came a shift from narrated documentaries to cinéma-vérité, French for “truthful cinema”. The concept had similarities to an early Soviet filming style, Kino-Pravada, Russian for “film truth”. These newsreels created by Dziga Vertov between 1922 and 1925 used hidden cameras, and the filmmaker received no permission from those portrayed in the documentary. Conservators at Austrian Film Museum collected and digitized nearly all these films, which document the lives of Russians during the transformation of their country from a tsarist empire to a socialist state.

Years later in the United States and Great Britain, artists like Robert Drew, Richard Leacock, and D.A. Pennebaker pioneered the cinéma-vérité style, while French filmmaker and sociologist Edgar Morin, who coined the term, was the “godfather”. [At the time this is posted, Morin is 102 years old and published his latest book just last year in 2023.] Morin described the intent of the style as “the filmmaker stands not between the viewer and the subject but for the viewer”.

Drew’s most celebrated films were Primary, a direct cinema documentary on the Democratic primary of 1960 between John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey, which took place in Wisconsin, and Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment from 1963 on the integration of the University of Alabama, which he created with Leacock. Both films are on the National Film Registry. Meanwhile, Pennebaker has been called a “pre-eminent chronicler of Sixties counterculture” for his documentary on the 1965 tour of Bob Dylan through the UK, Dont Look Back (spelled without an apostrophe, which pains me) and worked with David Bowie for the film Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars filmed in 1973 but not released until 1979.

A Golden Age of Documentaries?

The modern era of documentaries arguably began around the 1980s as both filming technology and viewing technology became less expensive and more commonplace. Cable networks like the History Channel and National Geographic, streaming services like Kanopy, Curiosity Stream, free online platforms like YouTube, and the ever popular Public Broadcasting Station (PBS) all provide a plethora of documentaries. Some shows and filmmakers have risen to the top. French ocean explorer and red beret enthusiast Jacques Cousteau was ahead of the game, as he debuted with his 1956 documentary Le Monde du silence [The Silent World] based on his book by the same name and established himself as the preeminent underwater filmmaker. In the United States, controversial director Michael Moore creates documentaries on American issues such as outsourcing blue-collar labor to developing countries, gun violence, the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, and the pharmaceutical industry. After his success with The Lord of the Rings and lack of success with The Hobbit, Peter Jackson switched gears to create Get Back, a lengthy documentary on British rock band The Beatles using previously unseen footage.

Much of my early exposure to documentaries came via PBS. Rick Steves has gleefully traveled Europe since 2000, while Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. explores African American history and the genealogy of celebrities. The series Frontline, which debuted in 1989, presents complex topics from around the globe through intelligent yet understandable reporting. But few filmmakers have affected the world of documentary through style and volume as historian Ken Burns.

Having released his first documentary in 1981, about forty-three years ago, Burns and his team have since put out thirty-five more to date with an additional four currently in production, averaging to a new documentary every fourteen months or less. Topics have included The Brooklyn Bridge, The Shakers, The Civil War, and Baseball, all uniquely American interests. Burns’ style of cropping, slowly panning, and zooming on images to create movement, often while a narrator delivers calming voiceover, has been dubbed the “Ken Burns Effect” and replicated in digital editing software. These techniques were first used in animatics, or animated storyboards by filmmakers who create fiction films, and hold the viewer’s interest more than a static image.

Two problems lingering since the beginning of the genre have been exposed during this era, which CBS News declared “The Golden Age of Documentary Filmmaking” in 2021. First, the sheer volume of documentaries now produced due to the low cost of entry mean many films have low artistic quality, never mind a lack of research or accuracy. According to a 2023 article in New Statesman, streaming services are to blame for this glut, as the companies focus on profits rather than quality entertainment. Cash-strapped PBS and its British counterpart BBC sometimes air less “nuanced” material because of the need to compete with Netflix or Hulu.

Additionally, as the reader may have noticed from the names in this essay, filmmakers of the past were predominantly White and male. This does not discredit their excellent work, but they inevitably presented information from a perspective based on their own experiences, which many people would not find relatable. PBS and Ken Burns have made a concerted effort to improve diversity with an $11 million grant initiative announced in 2021, and the first round of Ignite Mentorship for Diverse Voices launching in 2023. With modern distribution and viewership higher than ever, the market has plenty of room for new filmmakers of all backgrounds, but they must be provided with a platform.

Documenting Middle-earth

As mentioned in my introduction, the pseudo-history of Tolkien’s Middle-earth and Arda, the rest of his fantasy world, lends itself to being conveyed in a documentary style format. Because of time and skill restraints, the sections of the hypothetical animated musical that I “bring to life” will be animatics with visual movement not unlike the Ken Burns Effect used in many modern documentaries. I plan to add overlays providing date, time, and location, along with cutaways to maps and blueprints. Songs appearing in the text frequently come with an explanation given by the singer or added by the “translator”. For example, Aragorn presents a quick explanation of “The Tale of Tinúviel”, sings highlights from the ballad, and closes with a lecture on the poem’s form and historical context. Legolas does the same with “The Song of Nimrodel”. Besides mimicking the techniques used when teaching a university level English literature class, which was Tolkien’s main job, their nerdy excitement over art and culture perfectly meshes with the documentary format.


Read past installments of Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical