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The distinction between diegetic or non-diegetic sound depends on our understanding of the conventions of film viewing and listening. We know of that certain sounds are represented as coming from the story world, while others are represented as coming from outside the space of the story events.

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Interesting article from The Guardian

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Movie people are forever telling the rest of us that movies can change the world - but they would say that, wouldn't they? It justifies the outrageous salaries, the decadent lifestyles and the grandiose awards acceptance speeches. Certainly, if James Cameron could point to figures detailing a fall in ocean-liner/iceberg collisions following Titanic's release, his "I'm the king of the world!" Oscar proclamation might have been more forgivable. But beyond the bluster of Hollywood and the joy of escapism, what kind of real-world impact can cinema really have?

The creators of the Puma Creative Impact award believe it can be massive. Its stated aim? "To honour the documentary film creating the most significant impact in the world." As the documentarist Morgan Spurlock, a juror for the award, says: "There's real power in a documentary, and there's real power in movies to begin with. Movies transcend culture; they transcend countries, and to be able to have something that can create global awareness is necessary today." It's this shared belief that helped assemble the jury including royalty (Queen Noor of Jordan), documentary bigwigs (Spurlock) and Hollywood stars (Thandie Newton) that will give a €50,000 (£43,000) prize to the winner in London next week.

Spurlock's most famous film can more easily claim to have changed the world than most Oscar winners. In 2004, Super Size Me kickstarted a public nutrition debate that has since been adopted by others including Jamie Oliver and Michelle Obama, and which still continues. Six weeks after the film premiered, McDonald's announced that it was eliminating the Super Size option from its menu.

Perhaps the negative publicity surrounding Ken Loach and Franny Armstrong's documentary McLibel had already worn down the fast food giant. Armstrong would go on to make The Age of Stupid, a finalist for the Creative Impact award, which launched the 10:10 carbon cutting initiative in 46 countries and raised almost £1m in funds to sustain it. "As soon as we finished the film, the audiences at screenings all started asking the same question: what can we do?" Armstrong says. "So, even though we'd initially thought the film would be our contribution to the fight against climate catastrophe, we felt that we probably should come up with a specific answer."

The Puma award is new, but these sorts of successful campaigning docs are not. Errol Morris's 1988 film The Thin Blue Line, about a wrongly convicted man on death row, sadly did not change the world, but it certainly changed the life of one man. Randall Adams, who had been imprisoned for murdering a Texas police officer in 1976, was exonerated and released from prison in 1990, thanks to Morris's persuasive argument.

The stories of narrative cinema's effect on the real world are almost as plentiful. We know how DW Griffith's gleefully racist epic The Birth of a Nation contributed to the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the American south. Ken Loach's Cathy Come Home, when it first aired in 1966, was watched by a quarter of the British population, and the volume of phone calls it prompted crashed the BBC's switchboard. The homelessness charity Shelter was set up as a result. But perhaps the greatest testament to the power of cinema is how the sight of Clark Gable's bare chest in It Happened One Night caused a massive drop in sales for men's undershirts.

Except it didn't. Like much of the evidence presented for movies changing the world, the Gable undershirt yarn appears to be apocryphal. Even if there were solid statistics for men's underwear sales in the 1930s to draw on (there aren't), only faulty post-hoc reasoning could lead you to the conclusion that Gable's manliness was the cause. Leveller heads might point to the Great Depression as a more plausible explanation. Similarly, McDonald's always attributed the demise of Super Size to a fall in sales, not any documentary; and the foundation of Shelter was well underway before Cathy Come Home's broadcast (although the film did recruit new supporters).

Thankfully, the Creative Impact award requires a more stringent standard of proof than has usually been required to claim a movie has changed the world. "When film-makers applied, we asked them to give us lots and lots of data and information," says Jess Search, CEO of award partners, Channel 4 Britdoc. "It was a bit like a tax return."

Yet for every agenda-changing film of the kind the award recognises, there are a hundred smaller documentaries on equally worthy issues that barely register with audiences - let alone leave a lasting impression on society. Saturday-night movie audiences will usually choose the mindless action movie over a crusading documentary on the plight of Nicaraguan basket weavers. And, if said mindless action movie features, say, an Audi being driven by Daniel Craig, it will probably have a more measurable impact on our behaviour, too - in the form of car sales.

The jury may still be out on cinema's ability to divert the course of history, but its ability to sell stuff has never been in dispute - look out for the plug for Wrigley's PK Chewing Gum in Fritz Lang's M (1931) - which is why an estimated $1.8bn (£1.2bn) was spent last year on product placement. Cinema's most evident impact hasn't been moral improvement, but persuading audiences to buy what they don't need - be it cigarettes or an unpalatable political ideology. As any guilty appreciator of Nazi mise en scene in Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will can tell you, the devil not only has the best tunes, he also has a pretty impressive DVD collection.

In recent years, campaigning documentaries have done a lot to rid themselves of the reputation for dingy worthiness. Into Eternity (2010) was a thorough exploration of nuclear waste disposal, yes, but it was also brilliantly creepy, noirish sci-fi. The Oscar-nominated Inside Job (2010) used a voiceover from movie star Matt Damon and sweeping shots of city skylines to get audiences up to speed on subprime mortgages - an impressive feat in itself. Meanwhile, feature films have become as ethically minded as campaigning documentaries. Socially conscious blockbusters such as the oil-industry drama Syriana (2005), Blood Diamond (2006) and the upcoming Machine Gun Preacher, which tackles the subject of child soldiers in Sudan, have successfully married themes of contemporary injustice with Hollywood storytelling.

What all these movies boast is an ability to "raise awareness" among their audience, and in some cases that's enough. When Philadelphia came out in 1993, the simple decision to cast the unimpeachably wholesome Tom Hanks as a homosexual man dying of an Aids-related illness did more to confront homophobia and destigmatise HIV/Aids than any number of government programmes.

Unfortunately for armchair activists, being aware of a problem isn't the same thing as addressing it. If a movie like Machine Gun Preacher fails to leave its audience adequately energised, it raises the distasteful possibility that human suffering is just another entertainment genre. As a despairing character comments in Hotel Rwanda, a 2004 drama about the Rwandan genocide: "If people see this footage, they'll say, 'Oh my God, that's terrible,' and they'll go on eating their dinners."

Orlando Bagwell, an Emmy award-winning film-maker and director of the New York-based JustFilms initiative that supports films on social issues, says today's film-makers have learned how to interrupt dinner. "I think technology now allows us to not only make films more actively available to the public, but at the same time to take advantage of that moment when people finish watching a film and they feel like, 'What can I do?'"

There are now several organisations, such as Good Screenings, Britdoc and Resist, that attempt to capitalise on that embarrassingly brief moment by making practical links between campaigning documentaries with activist organisations. If Cathy Come Home had been released today, those callers to the BBC phone lines would have been directed to a website where they could have signed an online petition, donated money to a related good cause and found out the date of the next anti-government-cuts demo.

Perhaps if the impact of cinema is hard to quantify, it is not an indication of its failure to change the world, but of the occasionally insidious way in which it does so - not by changing the world, exactly, but by subtly changing the minds of the people in it. "We managed 25 million viewers for McLibel," says Armstrong. "For Age of Stupid we have many more resources and backing, so we're aiming for 10 times that number. If we do reach 250 million people, then so what? What influence could 250 million angry, inspired, motivated citizens possibly have?"

If after all that, the world still doesn't change, maybe it's not the movies we should be blaming. Great movies can turn audiences into activists, but does that make up for all the time wasted watching Transformers: Dark of the Moon, when we should have been out, defending our civil liberties? Probably not.
The Puma Creative Impact award is announced on 11 October. Details: puma.britdoc.org

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Reel to real: can documentaries change the world?

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Movie people are forever telling the rest of us that movies can change the world - but they would say that, wouldn't they? It justifies the outrageous salaries, the decadent lifestyles and the grandiose awards acceptance speeches. Certainly, if James Cameron could point to figures detailing a fall in ocean-liner/iceberg collisions following Titanic's release, his "I'm the king of the world!"

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Top Ten list from the Guardian

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To best understand this 1929 silent documentary, one ought to know that its director, the exotically named "Dziga Vertov", was actually born David Abelevich Kaufman in 1896. Some say the name derives from the Russian word for spinning top, but the pseudonym is more likely an onomatopeic approximation of the sound made by the twin reels of film as the director ran them backwards and forwards through his flatbed editor. For Vertov, film was something physical, to be manipulated by man, and yet, paradoxically, he also saw it as a medium that revealed the truths of life.

10. Man With a Movie Camera

To best understand this 1929 silent documentary, one ought to know that its director, the exotically named "Dziga Vertov", was actually born David Abelevich Kaufman in 1896. Some say the name derives from the Russian word for spinning top, but the pseudonym is more likely an onomatopeic approximation of the sound made by the twin reels of film as the director ran them backwards and forwards through his flatbed editor. For Vertov, film was something physical, to be manipulated by man, and yet, paradoxically, he also saw it as a medium that revealed the truths of life.

Heavily influenced by futurism and constructivism, both key concerns of the Soviet avant-garde, Vertov set out with a simple plan - to record a day in the life of urban Russia. Significantly, though, there is nothing mimetic about this documentation; Vertov's plan was to make the camera and the celluloid itself as significant as the scenes portrayed. Hence the result is a heady and vertiginous piece of cinema, using optical effects, split screens and double exposures as it jump-cuts, by association, from city to city and moment to moment, the titular "man with a movie camera" more of a magician - maybe even a cyborg - than a social historian, and far from a passive bystander.

Seen now, its celebration of the burgeoning machine age is still resonant but not without humour - even if its constantly self-reflexive nature borders on exhausting (the breakneck 65-minute film has had arguably more influence on art and music than it did on cinema itself, perhaps bested in the latter regard by Dali and Bunuel's more purely surreal Un Chien Andalou, premiered later the same year). Indeed, you could draw a direct line from Vertov's film to the deadpan electronic beats of Kraftwerk, whose 1978 album Man Machine the Polish-born director would surely have relished. Damon Wise

The cartoonist Robert Crumb is a man who made his name by sketching gleeful and disturbing pictures of a dysfunctional USA, who is reported to masturbate over his own drawings, and who confesses to becoming sexually aroused by the sight of Bugs Bunny in drag. Terry Zwigoff's bewitching 1994 documentary, however, reveals him to be arguably the sanest brother in the most wild and wonky brood this side of the Addams family. It was Crumb's abiding good fortune to find an outlet for his demons. His other siblings were not so blessed.

Crumb (the movie) paints a portrait of the artist as snickering, self-loathing geek, pushing the boundaries of taste with his exultant inky emissions and view of modern-day America as a kind of circus of the damned. Zwigoff - Crumb's former friend turned tormentor - chases him down and shoots him at length. Having established Crumb as a successful, serious artist, the film then turns the clock back to his nightmarish upbringing in a hothouse home where he and his brothers hid from the world and drew their comics in a frenzy. Maxon Crumb would later grow up to be a sex pest, all but losing control of his motor functions as he recalls assaulting a woman in his local shop. But the film's dark centre is filled by tragic Charles, the Colonel Kurtz of American cartooning, who ventured further and further upriver while scribbling his own version of the Treasure Island tale and now lives at home with mum, strung out on anti-depressants and periodically fantasising about killing his younger brother.

Zwigoff's film is black as pitch and twisted like a pretzel. Small wonder that Crumb reacted with horror when he finally sat down to view his likeness up on screen. Xan Brooks

8. Grey Gardens

Directed by David and Albert Maysles, Grey Gardens is surely one of the most hypnotic studies of human behaviour ever recorded. For a time, its shattered-mirror assembly is really quite frustrating, offering slivers and fragments of its subjects, until suddenly it snaps from chaos into order, albeit of the most subjective kind. Made in 1975, it depicts a world now long gone, but unusually for a documentary of the period, it presents a situation that was unthinkable even then: two once-wealthy socialites living in squalor, gloom and cat shit in New York's fashionable East Hampton area.

Both women are named Edith Beale - Big Edie and Little Edie - and the film begins with the two women in their rundown house, a newspaper clipping screaming, "Mother And Daughter Ordered To Clean House Or Get Out," a second clipping telling us that the pair are Jackie Kennedy's aunt and cousin. This, however, is a much as we get in the way of third-party context: the Maysles's approach is to go inside the Beales' world and show us what they see there. It turns out to be an extraordinary vision of life through the looking glass. Artworks moulder, raccoons nibble at the once-grand 28-room mansion, and Little Edie mixes cocktails in empty mayonnaise jars. And suddenly Big Edie will drop a bombshell, saying of her daughter, "She had a proposal of marriage from Paul Getty." Turning to Little Edie, she adds, "Remember Paul? The richest man in the world?"

What Grey Gardens does quite brilliantly is to present these two wild women at face value and then reveal them as they are: thoroughbred eccentrics, by no means as crazy as they look. And though they come as double act (Big Edie shooting down her daughter with an acid tongue), Little Edie is the film's poster girl. With her strange taste in clothes, often wearing sweaters on her apparently bald head (it is never explained), Little Edie has since become an icon for gay culture and the fashion world alike: a true original. DW

7. A Propos de Nice

Around the time he released his Man With a Movie Camera in late 1929, Vertov claimed that he had found "an authentically international absolute language of cinema," free from "foreign elements" from theatre and literature. That same year, Vertov's younger brother, the Paris-based cameraman Boris Kaufman, teamed up with novice film-maker Jean Vigo to work in the same vernacular: no scenario, no intertitles, no performers, no sets.

Vigo was the son of an anarchist-leftist who'd been strangled in prison when Vigo was 12, and immured in one of the grim boarding schools he would denigrate in his Zero de Conduite. Vigo's loathing of militarism, uniforms, clerics and authority was bred in the bone alongside an inborn subversiveness and a deeply lyrical aesthetic. A Propos de Nice is thus both scathing and exquisite. Vigo dwells at first on Nice's gilded gargoyles, the idle rich at play in this Mediterranean pleasure dome: the bourgeoisie making their evening promenade - ostensibly on parade, but recoiling at the camera's approach - buttoned-up, aloof, ugly, angry.

The other Nice edges in slowly: a filthy tramp among the rich, a child with smallpox, a cat in the garbage. Then a bizarre parade of people in huge papier-mache masks gives way to a repeated shot of pretty working-class girls dancing and flashing their drawers at the camera below them, an image of pure unharnessed hedonism and unselfconscious joy intercut with images that scorn the sombre mausoleums of generals and monarchists and blasphemously mock the tedium of a Catholic funeral procession.

The contrasts may be simple, perhaps obvious, and certainly there's venom, but it is the lyricism that lingers, and which would find its purest refinement in Vigo's third and final film, the luminous L'Atalante. John Patterson

6. Fahrenheit 9/11

Michael Moore's takedown of the Bush administration's reaction to the terrorist attacks on New York's World Trade Centre in September 2001 remains, by some margin, the most successful non-fiction feature to play in America - even March of the Penguins and Justin Bieber: Never Say Never don't come close. After winning the Palme d'Or from Quentin Tarantino's Cannes jury in 2004, it made the unexpected leap from arthouse to mainstream, gaining unexpected support from ordinary citizens whose spouses, sons, daughters, brother and sisters were soldiers in the field.

What's most surprising, in retrospect, is that Fahrenheit 9/11 is very much a game of two halves. The first, in which Craig Unger's book House of Bush, House of Saud is the road map, sets up lots of questions that aren't always answered, rattling the closets of George W Bush's cabinet in a bid to expose their vested and mostly lucrative interests in the war. Midway, though, the film changes tack; now the recipient of covert, digitally shot footage shot by embedded journalists, Moore is able to reveal the true miseries of the situation in Iraq, as experienced by both sides.

Viewed now, it's clear that Fahrenheit 9/11 is, in anything, a precursor of WikiLeaks and the first sign that digital technology would be a significant tool in the fight for democracy. And despite its sprawling, digressive structure, its raw and angry belief in truth and justice remains relevant today. Asked in 2009 if he still thought the film was a worthy Cannes winner, Tarantino replied: "As time has gone on, I have put that decision under a microscope and I still think we were right," he said. "That was a movie of the moment - Fahrenheit 9/11 may not play the same way now as it did then, but back then it deserved everything it got." DW

5. The Sorrow and the Pity

In the late 1960s, director Marcel Ophüls was commissioned by French TV to shoot a documentary about the 1940-1944 Nazi occupation. He unearthed old sins, uncovered old witnesses and came back with a devastating 265-minute expose, a rap sheet as long as your arm and a film which exploded the myth of Vichy France as a hotbed of patriotic fervour. So troublesome were the picture's findings that it was not screened on French TV until 1981.

Weaving vibrant newsreel footage with contemporary interviews, The Sorrow and the Pity installs the town of Clermont-Ferrand as the microcosm for a cowed, craven country, presided over by the Blimpish Marshal Pétain and serenaded by the honeyed tones of Maurice Chevalier. Collaboration is the norm. A hairdresser shops her friend to the Gestapo, while a shopkeeper named Klein puts an ad in the local paper to assure customers he's not Jewish. France, it appears, was caught off guard and then sold down the river by its own middle-class. "The workers always showed more resistance," explains one old-timer. "But the bourgeoisie were scared."

In the film's second half, heroes belatedly emerge from the rubble. We are told of Gaspar, the bull-necked boss of the local Maquis, a mercurial Jewish politician who broke out of his prison cell and the faceless students from Clermont-Ferrand high school, who joined the Resistance and are no longer around to tell the tale. "Many of them have streets named after them," boasts their proud former teacher, who stood by and did nothing. XB

4. Nanook of the North

For good or ill, Nanook of the North is the Birth of a Nation of documentary film. It cast a shadow just as dark and wide over the films in its wake, it established the grammar and syntax of the classical feature documentary at a stroke, and it exemplified all the flaws, contradictions and controversies latent in the form - observation versus intervention; objectivity or immersion; staged recreations, among many others - that would engage its practitioners for decades into the future.

Filming in the late teens of the last century, Robert Flaherty lived among the Inuit of Hudson Bay for several years after 1913. He lost his early footage in a fire and reconfigured his approach, confining himself to the story of a single hunter-fisherman. His footage still transfixes the viewer after a century: five family members and a puppy emerging from a single tiny canoe; Nanook spearing fish and harpooning seals on wild icy seas; rescuing an ice fox pup; the construction of an igloo with ice-block windows in under an hour.

Ethnographic documentary was born here ... kind of. Flaherty was not simply observing, he was recreating a way of life that was within the living memory of his subjects, but on the wane. Many Inuit now hunted with rifles, not spears, and wore modern rubber waterproofs, not sealskin. These Inuit tribesmen weren't mired in a primitive hunter-gatherer stage of life; in fact half of them were members of Flaherty's crew, including one cameraman, and Flaherty had two common-law wives during his sojourns, which you might say compromises the purity of the endeavour.

These rich and perplexing issues have been argued over by entire schools of thought in documentary, from the British in the 1930s to the cinema vérité purists of the 60s, through Jean Rouch, the Maysles brothers and Errol Morris. But it all springs from here. JP

3. Grizzly Man

Werner Herzog's insistence that his documentaries are simply fiction films "in disguise" never really rang completely true until this jaw-dropping study of ill-fated adventurer Timothy Treadwell signalled the director's return from critical neglect in 2005. Although documentaries had always been an integral component of Herzog's filmography - he has the rare distinction of telling the same story twice, once as the doc Little Dieter Wants to Fly and again as the fiction movie Rescue Dawn - Grizzly Man is perhaps the director's most complete and representative genre piece: an unbelievable true-life story, explored with the director's arch, deadpan Bavarian outlook and drone.

Herzog's film is very much a documentary of its time, in which straight reportage was no longer enough and films such as Capturing the Friedmans (2003) and DiG! (2004) began drawing on the three-act structure to compose a narrative that put emotional twists and turns before straight factual revelations. Although Treadwell was only recently dead when the film debuted, Herzog puts himself square into the story, and his masterstroke is that just when Grizzly Man seems to peter out halfway through, the director goes back to the beginning: revealing the shocking truth about Treadwell, who presented himself as a wildlife expert when in fact he was anything but.

Herzog is in his element here, retracing Treadwell's steps and even listening to the recording of his death, attacked by a hungry bear as his screaming girlfriend walloped it with a frying pan ("You must never listen to this," he solemnly informs the friend who provided the tape - as if she's ever going to!). The result is the film that best represents Herzog's view of life, fiction work or otherwise. "I believe the common character of the universe is not harmony," he says at one point, "but chaos, hostility, and murder." As an alternative to Attenborough, nature has never been laid so bare. DW

2. The Thin Blue Line

The idea of the police as a thin blue line - a solid, unflagging protection between proper society and anarchy - is a comforting and utterly false one as depicted here, debunked over and over again as Errol Morris untangles the utterly unsafe conviction at the centre of this landmark documentary. Randall Adams, the man accused of killing a police officer in Dallas, Texas in 1976, was an itinerant worker with no motive for murder. The teenager uncovered by Morris as the likely culprit, David Harris, was a petty criminal who had bragged about the crime and went on to be convicted of another murder. How Adams was sent to death row and Harris was sent free is a story of conflicting motives and memories, of small-town biases and basic mistakes - both frustratingly specific to Adams' unlucky circumstances and telling of an entire justice system.

That The Thin Blue Line eventually led to Adams' exoneration adds a happy coda to the film, but it remains sombre and enraging at the same time. Morris recounts the story in linear, exquisite detail, using simple cuts, his signature re-enactments and even Philip Glass's hypnotic score to draw conclusions that an entire city's worth of attorneys and policemen never managed. The interviewees, rarely identified by name, are colourful glimpses into 1970s Texas: a Greek chorus who prove, without Morris ever having to say it, just how easily justice can be miscarried. An astonishing feat of reporting, The Thin Blue Line proves that facts - the presumed basis of the entire documentary genre - are as slippery and subject to manipulation as any fictional narrative. With his probing camera, Morris combines fact and fiction to suss out the truth that no one else could. Katey Rich

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To best understand this 1929 silent documentary, one ought to know that its director, the exotically named "Dziga Vertov", was actually born David Abelevich Kaufman in 1896. Some say the name derives from the Russian word for spinning top, but the pseudonym is more likely an onomatopeic approximation of the sound made by the twin reels of film as the director ran them backwards and forwards through his flatbed editor.