Actuality film

Actuality film is a non-fiction film genre that uses footage of real events, places, and things (essentially B-roll), in a similar way to documentary film. Unlike documentaries, actuality films are not structured into a larger narrative or coherent whole. In practice, actuality films preceded the emergence of the documentary. During the era of early cinema, actualities—usually lasting no more than a minute or two and usually assembled together into a program by an exhibitor—were just as popular and prominent as their fictional counterparts.^[1] The line between "fact" and "fiction" was not as prominent in early cinema as it would become once documentaries became the predominant non-fiction filmmaking form. Actuality as a film genre is related to still photography.

Although actuality films production ceased around 1908, the term "actuality footage" is sometimes used in documentary production to refer to the raw footage.