John Grierson

John Grierson was a pioneering Scottish documentary maker, often considered the father of British and Canadian documentary film. In 1926, he coined the term "documentary" in a review of Robert Flaherty's Moana.

In 1927, Grierson was employed as an Assistant Films Officer of the Empire Marketing Board (EMB), a governmental agency which had been established in 1926 to promote British world trade and unity throughout the empire. In late 1929 Grierson completed his first film, Drifters, which he wrote, produced and directed. The film, which follows the heroic work of North Sea herring fishermen, was a radical departure from anything being made by the British film industry or Hollywood.

In his essay First Principles of Documentary (1932), Grierson argued that the principles of documentary were that cinema's potential for observing life could be exploited in a new art form; that the "original" actor and "original" scene are better guides than their fiction counterparts to interpreting the modern world; and that materials "thus taken from the raw" can be more real than the acted article. In this regard, Grierson's views align with the Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov's contempt for dramatic fiction as "bourgeois excess", though with considerably more subtlety.