If this no longer seems a remarkable breach of both privacy and decorum, if it no longer smacks of dirty voyeurism to watch such footage, understand that the "real life on camera" aesthetic of An American Family -- and the documentary tradition out of which it emerged -- has come to permeate our visual landscape and our deepest desires.

In the literal-minded province of Motion Pictures that is "documentary," we expect some form of expository purpose (information, motivation, exposure, acclaim) with a high degree of reality (unorchestrated footage of nonprofessional performers) and truth (facts, figures, reproducible results). Within these vastly broad expectations, though, documentaries exist on a long continuum, with the artifice of storytelling at one end and the visceral capture of real life at the other. It's easy to understand why we watch things that tell us a story, fact and fiction alike: Storytelling is perhaps one of the most universal impulses after the trinity of food, clothing, and shelter. What is it, then, about the end of the spectrum where visuals are unvarnished and narrative apparently aimless? What desire of ours do such works gratify? We are all secret voyeurs, perhaps, but then why not spend our days peeping and spying? It turns out, somehow, that we covet too the displacement film adds to our voyeurism. We are junkies of experience at one remove. We are addicted to what we call -- with the abstraction and obfuscation that is typical of a culture confronted with the core of its own alienation -- the real.

I AM NOT TALKING ABOUT APPEARANCES -- instead, something that occurs in the gut, something experiential. Not realism, then. Not the replication of detail, the re-creation of truth, not these. Rather, the actual: what once was. Roland Barthes' small, inscrutable miracle of a book Camera Lucida springs from the attempt to define and understand this "reality effect."

Beginning as a phenomenologist and not a theorist, from the experience of his own body and not the thoughts of others, Barthes searches for the essence of photography and his own passion for it. His meditations cohere around the historical actuality of a photograph, which is condensed in what Barthes calls the punctum: the particular detail of an image that makes it real for the viewer, makes it clear that what is in the image once existed just so, "the necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens." The term is from the Latin; "punctum is also: sting, speck cut, little hole -- and also a cast of the dice. A photograph's punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)." Not every photograph contains such a prick for every observer. This experience of the real, in terms of a static image, exists in the infamously fickle eye of the beholder. At the unmediated end of the documentary spectrum, though, are works whose reality effect is so strong, whose bruising details so plentiful, that no beholder can resist the pull, the experience of authenticity contained therein.

Here, then, is the heart of it: We respond to the bruises and pricks of the real -- especially when they are free of narrative disguises --because they solace an overriding anxiety about the reality of our own lives. Film itself is a Victorian innovation, one allowing viewers a nearly magical displacement in time, and also in place. And although the annals of photographic tampering are heavy with evidence to the contrary, it's important to bear in mind that, until quite recently, to see a filmic or photographic image was certainly to know the truth, to see something unquestionably real. This invention of film as a technology of experience (as opposed to a purveyor of narrative) is coincident with the beginnings of a 20th century crisis of the self, in which flowered the time-honored (now shamed) tradition of defining and defending the self's boundaries by near-obsessional attention to all that is other. Filmed images extended the capabilities of human sight, and expanded the potential field of anxiety-soothing middle-class voyeurism and vicarious experience. See the other and know the self, on one vector -- and, crosswise, if the one feels unreal, inauthentic, then experience the other's realness to cure the haunted self.

DOCUMENTARY PROPER, as feature film, begins in 1922 with the release of Robert Flaherty's box-office success Nanook of the North. Created out of two decades of research, filming, and living with Eskimos in Northern Canada, Flaherty's portrayal of everyday life among the Eskimo was a romanticized tribute to (in his own words) "the former majesty and character of these people, while it is still possible -- before the white man has destroyed not only their character, but the people as well." Imagine, the masses rushing to watch a film of real Eskimos building their homes, obtaining their food, raising their children. (Imagine, the masses watching teenagers living together in a fancy apartment, struggling to forge careers and find mates.)

While Flaherty camped with his camera in the Canadian wilderness, in Russia, just after the Bolshevik revolution, Dziga Vertov (a revolutionary pseudonym), his wife, and his brother began to invent an entirely different expression of reality on film that would greatly influence the development of documentary film. Beginning with a manifesto denouncing "the old films, based on the romance," as "leprous" and "morally dangerous," Vertov started producing the Kinopravda, a screen newspaper which travelled the countryside bringing truth to the peasants. Of course it was propaganda, but what Vertov did was to focus relentlessly on communities of real people working and playing together, sending the footage out into the vast countryside, in order to assist the dispersed population in feeling that they were part of a coherent culture and in shedding the illusions of their pre-revolutionary lives. "Step by step," he wrote, "hundreds of thousands, millions of citizens -- uneducated or simply hiding from the noisy advance of 'today' will have to sharpen their senses before the shining screen of Cinema."

Vertov believed the camera to be superior to the human eye as a perceptor of truth. His goal was not just to "capture" reality, but to reveal it, and as such he would serve as a guiding light for that part of the documentary tradition that sought to show its viewers a window into "real life" and to allow those viewers to draw their own conclusions -- i.e., to keep narrative sculpting minimal.

Vertov's masterwork The Man with a Movie Camera is a visual allegory of film's capacity to enhance vision -- and comprehension -- of the manmade world. Man begins with shots of a theater being prepared for a screening: seats are set up, camera readied, and the audience of markedly ordinary folk enters the room and settles itself. Their chosen entertainment, the film, then begins with a series of jumpy shots of a sleeping city, as if seen by a darting eye. A woman asleep, an empty street. As the day dawns, the city wakes, and a man with a movie camera assembles his instrument and rides out in a car to explore his surroundings. Vertov's film flashes from camera-eye view to shots of the cameraman, first making visual analogies between the human eye and the camera's lens, and then following the daring cameraman as he catches novel sights -- like a view at wheel-level from a rushing train -- for the audience to see without peril. The man with a movie camera goes places we cannot, and is gifted with special powers of sight. He can -- the film demonstrates -- slow down action, reverse it, and freeze it. He can zoom close, or back away. He can juxtapose two sights to produce a revelation, such as the connections between the labor of coal miners and the power generated by burning coal. Vertov so relentlessly fixates on the physical technology of film that he even offers a primer of the editing process, demonstrating how a series of stills adds up to a moving picture and how spliced film joins separate moments. In the context of two decades of "morally dangerous" fiction film, Vertov believed his audience required an object lesson in the original assumption of film-viewing: the realness of what appears on the screen.

Vertov's work was briefly popular with the mass audience he chased (and enduringly admired by filmmakers), but they perhaps learned their lesson too well. Public affection turned to the fiction-film works -- like those of Eisenstein -- with realist aesthetics deeply indebted to Vertov, but with the narrative and moral structures of the "dangerous romances" audiences loved and Vertov despised. Nonetheless, Vertov's films taught filmmakers and their audiences a new repertoire of visual idioms of the real. This sort of unsentimental education becomes, in a way, the special province of documentary-makers as motion-picture techniques and audiences expand.

To wit: while Vertov lauded the technology of the camera, it was, until mid-century, an unwieldy apparatus of the visual: sound was laid in separately. Under the ageis of Time, Inc. in the late 1950s, Robert Drew and Richard Leacock gathered a group of young filmmakers -- including D. A. Pennebaker and Albert and David Maysles -- to "carry the candid photography tradition of Life magazine forward into film." Their first task was to develop a compact method for recording synchronized sound, and thus allow themselves to tape candid images accompanied by candid speech for the first time -- and to do away with the technique of voice-over narration.

As required by the genre conventions of such a tale, these young men, along with Frederick Wiseman, became brave pioneers of a new documentary technique -- what Albert Maysles calls "direct cinema." With synchronized sound and the rejection of voice-over, direct cinema uses long-duration shots (i.e., without cuts), minimal camera movement, and the passage of time as narrative device. The Maysles brothers' Salesman (1969) watches a group of travelling bible salesmen on sales calls in people's homes, in their hotel rooms at night, and at large sales meetings. It opens in medias res, one of the men in the midst of a pitch, and introduces itself only briefly with a sequence of titles of the mens' names and nicknames, and the film's title, and in no way explains itself. Likewise, the marathon works of Wiseman focus on American institutions -- High School, Hospital, Law and Order, Basic Training -- and include some of the longest shots in all of cinema.

Meanwhile, in Europe, Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin founded another approach. Cinéma vérité (named for Vertov's kinopravda, both translating as "film-truth"), had filmmakers acting as provocateurs and pushing the abilities of film to heighten human perception and understanding. Vérité introduces the device of the interview into the documetary toolbox. These two approaches, one interventionist and one passively observant, profoundly influenced documentary style, fiction filmmaking, and our very expectations of the ability of film to produce the craved "reality effect." Witness the ever-expanding popularity and ubiquity of reality-based TV in the prime-time world, and of "Real Confessions" of daytime talk shows and courtrooms. If the Louds on PBS marks an initiation into "Reality TV," the invention of MTV's Real World in 1992 makes it mainstream.

Real World is fabulously boring and at the same time impossible to turn off. An alchemy of high artifice and Peeping-Tom reality, it's strangely comforting. Picking up the interventionism of vérité, Real World places media-savvy kids together and shows them doing the things kids do best: being stupidly self-absorbed and being cruel to each other. Rather than the "more real" quality of the primitive and exotics which comforted our forebears, the lives of the natives here are (thankfully) even more empty and unreal than our own. By some complex and algorithmic logic, Real World is the inevitable endpoint on a trajectory from Flaherty to Vertov to Direct Cinema to Vérité. If documentary taught us to assuage modern alienation by watching, ever more directly, the lives of others, if direct cinema helped us comprehend footage without narrative arc, if vérité brought us to expect orchestrated conflicts -- then they have brought us gently to our Real World addiction. The cure here is disgust instead of fascination. Real World and its ilk are about reality as grotesque -- a twisted, exaggerated, horrifying magnification of the real. Reality TV shows us the monsters in our own sensationalistic hearts -- and drowns out that frightful signal with the noise of our own laughter.

We need never have seen a film by Vertov or the Maysles or Jean Rouch to have learned the lessons their work has taught our visual culture. Their ideas and expressive idioms come to us via their influence on the work of more mainstream filmmakers, and through what sociologist Elizabeth Long calls the "concatenation of unremarkable cultural transactions" that build our tastes and passions. The forms have changed but the anxieties remain. As the contents of TV Guide attest, at some level we are troubled by the same suspicion as the late-Victorian middle class: that we are disconnected, ghostly, insubstantial, and alone -- the very suspicion that created an audience for documentary film in the first place.

Kio Stark  is working on a dissertation about gamblers, real-estate sharks, and smugglers in pre-WWII Miami. If you know any of these people, please contact her. She has also written for the Nation, New York Newsday, and Word.

"Real World" producer Andrew Hoegl responds to Kio Stark. Read their electronic exchange.