Abstract: The issue of documentary in relation to authenticity has been a hot topic since the early 1990s. The word “authenticity”, on the one hand, has progressively implicated excessive understanding and expectation of documentaries, and on the other hand turns out to be increasingly vague and generalized due to its growing connotation. The importance of the issue is selfevident in that no theoretical discussion of documentary can escape it. Nevertheless, it also provokes chaos due to the conceptual generalization of “authenticity” which incurs random interpretation of the noumenon of documentary. In view of this, the implications of “authenticity” should be more cautiously and carefully analyzed in the documentary theoretical discourse system and the onesizefitsall attitude should be rejected. Sorting out various opinions concerning “documentary records and authenticity” may help depict the topographic map of the current research in documentary film theories.
Key words：

Key words:  documentary;     documentary, authenticity, documentary records