Robert J. Flaherty

Robert Joseph Flaherty, FRGS (/ˈflæ.ərti, ˈflɑː-/; February 16, 1884 – July 23, 1951) was an American filmmaker who directed and produced the first commercially successful feature-length documentary film, Nanook of the North (1922). The film made his reputation and nothing in his later life fully equaled its success, although he continued the development of this new genre of narrative documentary with Moana (1926), set in the South Seas, and Man of Aran (1934), filmed in Ireland's Aran Islands.

Flaherty is considered the "father" of both the documentary and the ethnographic film. Description above from the Wikipedia article Robert J. Flaherty, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.