Tim Hetherington, the British photojournalist and director of Restrepo, was killed last week by a mortar blast in Misurata, Libya. He will be remembered amongst a pantheon of filmmakers that made Britain the natural home of the documentary film.

Scottish filmmaker John Grierson first coined the term in 1926, while Humphrey Jennings, a founder of the Mass Observation movement, was one of the only filmmakers to try and accurately capture the experience of living through the Blitz.

These were political filmmakers who believed that film was key to providing information to normal people, and saw that process as a central part of the welfare movement. When Jean-Luc Godard talked of film as “truth 24 frames a second”, he was subscribing to their mentality. 

As such, the documentary was high-minded and straight-faced, serious and dutiful. It was the journalism of film that considered facts as sacred. 

What would these pioneers have made of the documentary scene today? There’s a fair chance they’re spinning in their grave. Because now, the cat’s out the bag.

Documentary film, and indeed film in general, is weathering a revolutionary storm. Now, almost anyone can make a doc, and it can be anything they want it to be. Decent cameras are small and light and cheap and maybe even connected to your mobile phone. There isn’t any need for film – we have digital. Batteries last for days. Every new laptop comes with its own editing software. 

And while this digital democracy is no bad thing, it has consequences. Now, for every serious, sincere, campaigning documentary, there is an imposter, a cheat and a charlatan. For every one man with a camera and a commitment to objectivity, there is another with an axe to grind, a joke to be had, and no qualms about blending fiction with fact, fact with fiction.

Last December, Financial Times critic Nigel Andrews wrote of this plurality in an article titled Startling Truths Born of Artifice: “It has been happening all year – these screen couplings, more and less momentous, between truth and fiction, sometimes covert, sometimes overt. When the “documentary” has not been wooed respectfully, or even romantically, by fiction, it has been assaulted, bruised, pushed around.”

Take films like Catfish or Exit Through the Gift Shop or I’m Still Here, documentaries that disguise themselves as fiction, leading to the inevitable question: are they fiction disguised as documentary? 

But, for those less interested in smoke and mirrors, this ease of use and portability means that docs can now also achieve a new humanism, cleaving closer than ever before to the vagaries of our behaviour. The modern documentarian can get close up and inhabit their subject like never before, leaving nothing out of bouds, no landscape that isn't navigated, not a war left unseen.

Take the way we see war on our screens. We remember Vietnam for the fiction films it spawned – Platoon, Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter. But the films that define the conflict in Afghanistan are made not by dramatists working retrospectively, but by documentarians working proactively.

In this sense, films like Restrepo, Hetherington’s legacy, and Armadillo (out now in cinemas), are part of a zeitgeist; highly intimate, experiential accounts of counter-insurgent warfare that have been filmed on the ground, a metre away from a soldier in the midst of a fire fight. 

So, for all those assaulting, bruising and pushing around the idea of “truth 24 times a second,” there are others holding it ever-more close. It is they who will help the documentary reach a new age of reckoning. 

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Image taken from Tim Hetherington's Restrepo.