John Grierson
The documentary film developed alongside the narrative film, though largely during the sound era. It was shaped most profoundly during the 1930s as filmmakers began to record sociological an anthropological studies of different populations. Some of the early films were treated much as narrative films were and were widely released in theaters, achieving some popularity. In the early 1930s, this included such films as Nanook of the North and Moana, both by Robert Flaherty. These films were different not only because they presented real people in real situations but because they were filmed on real locations and not in studios. The silent film had sometimes gone outside the confines of the studio, but the advent of sound tied the camera to the soundstage again, at least for a time. These new reality films took the camera in the field and took the audience to places it would never see otherwise. These films gained an audience, and some of their techniques were carried over into some Hollywood films, such as Trader Horn, partially filmed in Africa, and Eskimo, partially filmed in the snows of Alaska and Canada. Some filmmakers recognized the possibilities inherent in these films and began developing an aesthetic that would serve as a guide for other filmmakers. A key figure in the process was John Grierson in Britain, a man who saw the possibilities of the documentary film and also possessed a strong social sense that made him want the documentary to serve the needs of the people, to promote democracy, and to serve the national interests of Britain and later of other countries that could use the form to reach an audience. Grierson was also key in the creation of a number of documentary film units in Britain and Canada over the next two decades or more. He wrote widely on film and taught a number of documentarians how to achieve their goals. He inspired more than one generation of filmmakers and came to represent the documentary to most of them. Many of his ideas would continue to infuse the movement and still serve as keystones for documentary filmmakers to this day.
Biography
John Grierson would become associated with the development of the documentary film in the 1930s. The term "documentary" was first used in France as docamentaire and referred to travel films. Grierson did not necessarily like the term, but her introduced it in America in a review he wrote for the New York Sun in February, 1926, using it to describe Robert Flaherty's Moana, an account of the South Sea islanders. He would later define the term as "the creative treatment of actuality," and over the next few decades, this film form would "come to represent a vast and far-reaching use of the film for social analysis" (Hardy 11). Grierson was not the only theorist or practitioner of documentary filmmaking, but he would be the central driving force and inspiration for the movement. He recognized the value of this type of film, understood the medium enough to give "skilled and persuasive form to his ideas" (Hardy 11), and served as a teacher for others. He would also serve as a political force promoting the documentary film.
John Grierson was born in 1898 at Deanston, a village near Staling, in Scotland. His father was the schoolmaster at nearby Cambusbarron, and the elder Grierson believed that learning was power, an idea his son took to heart as well. He would also bring the first film show to the classroom, the first ever given in Scottish educational circles. John entered Glasgow University as a Clark Scholar, though his studies were interrupted by three and a half years of war service in the Navy during World War I. This time also confirmed Grierson in his love of ships and the sea. He returned to Glasgow University and graduated in philosophy. For a short time, he lectured at Durham University before being appointed in 1924 to a Rockefeller Research Fellowship in Social Science. He then spent three years in the United States and studied the press, the cinema, and other media affecting public opinion, and he also worked for short periods on many American newspapers, including the New York Sun. He went to Hollywood and first met Chaplin, von Sternberg, and other leading film figures of the period. He began to write on film aesthetics because it interested him, but his main focus at the time was on the analysis of the reactions of the film-going masses to the films they saw. As Hardy writes,
It is important to remember that Grierson's interest was aroused first in the cinema, not as an art form, but as a medium for reaching public opinion. Grierson has never sought to disguise this approach and has often firmly emphasised it. (Hardy 12)
Grierson would write in 1933, for example, have no great interest in films as such. Now and again shapes, masses and movements so disport themselves that I have a brief hope that something of the virtue of great painting may one day come into cinema; but I have but to consider the economic bases of production to suspend the hope indefinitely. For the absolute pleasures of form a man would more wisely look to painting and be done with it. Outside considerations of commerce do not so frequently distort; the skill is more intense because more confined; and the artist, on a cheaper canvas, can more easily command the bewildering perfections of harmony. I look on cinema as a pulpit, and use it as a propagandist; and this I put unashamedly because, in the still unshaven philosophies of cinema, broad distinctions are necessary. (Cited by Hardy 12)
Grierson made a distinction among such purposes as entertainment, education, and other uses to which cinema may be put. He also saw a reason why the professional propagandist might be particularly drawn to cinema because it gives access to the public, is capable of "direct description, simple analysis and commanding conclusion, and may, by its tempo'd and imagistic powers, be made easily persuasive. It lends itself to rhetoric, for no form of description can add nobility to a simple observation so readily as a camera set low, or a sequence cut to a time-beat. But principally there is this thought that a single say-so can be repeated a thousand times a night to a million eyes, and, over the years, if it is good enough to live, to millions of eyes" (cited by Hardy 13).
Hardy indeed finds that Grierson's time in America was key in the development of his thought on film, stating that when Grierson left Britain, film was simply one aspect of a fascinating subject, while when he returned to England in 1927, "he was deeply absorbed in the possibilities of its use as a medium of education and persuasion" (Hardy 13). He needed to find a department which might be convinced of the service films might render, and he found one in the Empire Marketing Board, a group already using posters, newspapers, exhibitions, and school classroom walls and was only beginning to use film. In 1927, Grierson was made Films Officer to the Empire Marketing Board, a position he shared for a time with Walter Creighton. His first work was on the North Sea herring fisheries, a subject on which Grierson made his first film. That film was Drifters in 1929.
Hardy emphasizes the long-term effect of this film. When first made, Drifters aroused immediate interest because of its subject-matter and its technique alike. Cinema in Britain was then studio-bound, and here was a film that drew its drama at first-hand from real life.:
Grierson's simple story of the North Sea herring catch brought what were then new and striking images to the screen: drifters swinging out to sea from small grey harbours; nets flung wide from restless vessels; fishermen moving about their everyday tasks. Here was workaday Britain brought to the screen for the first time: what has become familiar to-day through a thousand documentary films had then the impact of startling discovery. In technique also Drifters struck a note which was new in Britain. Grierson had studied the work of the Russian directors -- had indeed helped to prepare the version of Potemkin shown in America -- and he applied to his own film the principles of symphonic structure and dynamic editing evolved by Eisenstein and Pudovkin. Drifters might have broken new ground in its theme and remained technically dull; in fact, its form was little less exciting than its content. (Hardy 14)
In the long-term, however, the film vindicated Grierson's belief that in film he had found the most useful medium for his purposes as a sociologist. He would write that the documentary film movement "was from the beginning an adventure in public observation. It might, in principle, have been a movement in documentary writing, or documentary radio, or documentary painting. The basic force behind it was social not aesthetic. It was a desire to make a drama from the ordinary to set against the prevailing drama of the extraordinary: a desire to bring the citizen's eye in from the ends of the earth to the story, his own story, of what was happening under his nose. From this came our insistence on the drama of the doorstep" (cited by Hardy 14-15).
Grierson also notes that the early documentary filmmakers were concerned about the way the world was going and wanted to use all the tools at hand to push the public towards greater civic participation.
With the success of Drifters, Grierson was able to further his ideas, but rather than directing other films, he devoted his time to building up a film unit and training its members, gathering young men of like mind, including Basil Wright, Arthur Elton, Stuart Legg, Paul Rotha, John Taylor, Harry Watt, Donald Taylor, Edgar Anstey, and more. these men were "united by a common enthusiasm and a common aim" (Hardy 15). The E.M.B. Film Unit in the early 1930s had an atmosphere that was energizing and inspirational, with Grierson being one of the main reasons for this state of affairs. He also saw the documentary film as basically a British movement, and certainly Britain was welcoming to him and the movement and offered considerable support.
The E.M.B. Film Unit grew two people to over thirty by 1933 and moved from a cellar in the Charing Cross Road to an attic in Wardour Street, and later to an office in Oxford Street. The unit produced over a hundred films. Hardy says that the most memorable of these were films immediately after Drifters and were films that demonstrated Grierson's quality as a producer. These films included Industrial Britain, made by Robert Flaherty,; Wright's Country Comes to Town, on London's market services, and O'er Hill and Dale, an account of a day in the life of a Border shepherd; and Elton's Upstream, about salmon fishing in Scotland, and Shadow on the Mountain, on Professor Stapledon's pasture experiments at Aberystwyth. These were experimental films were Grierson's first contribution to the task of bringing Britain and the British Commonwealth. The documentary film was now clearly a movement.
Grierson was working as a promoter of the unit to Whitehall, to produce new films with the day-to-day progress of perhaps twenty films at a time, caused to be established the Empire Film Library at the Imperial Institute, and to serve as the primary voice promoting the documentary idea. He also lectured all over the country before learned bodies, film societies, discussion groups, universities, conferences, and schools, and at the same time he wrote tirelessly about documentary theory. Much of what he wrote was published through Cinema Quarterly, the Edinburgh journal founded by Norman Wilson and Forsyth Hardy. Grierson later expanded this into a monthly magazine called World Film News. As part of his program, he enlisted the active support of critics and journalists in London and also in the English provincial cities and in Scotland. The Empire Marketing Board was dissolved in 1933, but the documentary film movement was well established by then and survived:
Already members of the unit had made films, under Grierson's guidance, for one or two Government departments and a number of enlightened industrial undertakings.
But it was important that the unit Grierson had established should continue as a training school and as a clearing-house for documentary theory and practice. Hardy 17)
Grierson experimented as much with new techniques as with new subject-matter during this time.
The G.P.O. Film Unit he opeated for the Post Office had acquired its own sound equipment, and Grierson used this to demonstrate his belief that "the soundtrack need not simply provide the obvious accompaniment in dialogue and music to the visuals but could make an individual and different contribution" (Hardy 17), as was shown in films like Song of Ceylon, Night Mail, Pett and Pott, and Coal Face. The use of sound in these films was far in advance of contemporary studio thought or achievement. Cavalcanti was brought in from France as a guest producer and left the his signature on many of the G.P.O. films.
Among those participating in some way were W.H. Auden, Walter Leigh, and Benjamin Britten. Hardy cites these films as representing "the most considerable achievement yet recorded in the imaginative use of sound, and they did much to keep the G.P.O. Film Unit in the foreground of public attention in Britain and to win recognition for British cinema abroad" (Hardy 18).
Grierson as producer did not impose any rigid requirements on the filmmakers and let the style of the films be influenced largely by the subject-matter. This was part of his view of the way subjects should be treated by this form of filmmaking. He notes that at one level, the vision of the documentary may be journalistic, while at another, it may aspire to poetry and drama. As Grierson's period of control at the G.P.O. came to an end, however, a general change of style was apparent in the films, was heralded by the Saving of Bill Blewitt, a story film set in a Cornish village using real people as characters, and in North Sea, a story of the ship-to-shore radio service which again used real people. An even greater change of style could be seen in the emphasis placed on these subjects as sociological observation was made more and more an integral part of the films. This emphasis could be seen in the G.P.O. production We Live in Two Worlds and Forty Million People and even more in the work done outside the Unit by the directors Grierson had trained, with such films as Workers and Jobs, Housing Problems, and Enough to Eat, and evenmore notably in such later films as the Londoners, Children at School, to-day We Live, and Wealth of a Nation, all films sponsored by the many industries and organizations outside the Government and which were now beginning to use film on a large scale, films produced by the rapidly growing number of documentary units founded by members of the original Grierson group (Hardy 18-19).
Grierson resigned from the G.P.O. Film Unit in June, 1937, at a time when there was already a larger volume of documentary production outside than inside Government sponsorship. What was needed was a central advisory body, and Grierson then set up Film Centre in association with Arthur Elton, Stuart Legg, and J.P.R. Golightly in order to provide a consultative and policy-forming center for a movement. Film Centre was not a producing unit but a unit that undertook investigation and research, offered advice on the use of documentary film, and supervised production, with Grierson acting as a fount of ideas and initiative. One example of his work at this time involved the Films of Scotland Committee, with the aim of the projection of the country in terms of film. To improve the image of Scotland seen in films, Grierson drew up a production program of seven films that described the country's character and traditions, its economic planning for industrial development, its agriculture, education, and sport. The films were produced by different units and used different styles, but all are marked by Grierson's production genius so that they remain a unique and remarkably comprehensive record of a country's achievement and outlook. Grierson saw the Scottish films as part of what he called "the battle for authenticity" that reached a peak in the year before the outbreak of war.
Hardy notes,
Documentary in Britain had not achieved its comparative freedom in social comment without meeting considerable opposition. Most of this had been concealed from the public and much of it had been overcome by Grierson's tenacity and integrity of purpose. It was brought into the open, however, by the selection of films made for the New York World's Fair. The selection was in the hands of the British Council's Film Committee... And the films chosen to represent Britain reflected the Council's belief in the importance of tradition and ceremonial. Documentaries dramatizing Britain's struggle to solve her social and industrial problems were excluded. The resulting controversy was bitter, touching as it did the core of all that Grierson stood and had striven for. He had the support of the press in Britain and the United States and ultimately, in response to a direct request from the World's Fair for the authentic documentaries of Britain, the films were sent from Film Centre and shown, not as part of the official British exhibit, but in the Arts and Science Pavilion. Grierson's purpose was achieved; but I feel that the struggle and all that it implied had something to do with his ultimate decision to move into a fresh field. (Hardy 20)
In 1937, the British Government created the Imperial Relations Trust, an organization similar in some ways to the E.M.B., and in 1938, Grierson was commissioned to visit Canada, Australia, and New Zealand to investigate the possibilities of film production in those locations. He completed his Canadian survey in 1938 and visited Australia in 1940. When World Wear II started, he was in North America. In October 1939, the Canadian Government made him Film Commissioner and executive head of the National Film Board. In Canada, he found the Government's Motion Picture Bureau and the National Film Society of Canada, a co-operative organization of educators and laymen dedicated to creating an informed and enthusiastic film audience. In addition, there was a certain amount of effective work being done by amateur filmmakers. In the new organization, Stuart Legg was already in Canada, while Stanley Hawes, Raymond Spottiswoode, and Norman McLaren came from London, Hollywood, and New York to help their former chief. Grierson again gathered assistants of like mind and temperament. He made the National Film Board a really active concern in 1941 when it took over the Motion Picture Bureau in Ottawa and began training technicians to carry out a long-term program of film production. Th e staff at the time numbered forty, and by the mid-1960s it had reached over seven hundred. The Board produces between two and three hundred films a year., including two major series, Canada Carries on and World in Action, each issued once a month to theaters. Most of the films are meant to be shown outside of theaters in schools and factories or by traveling projectionists in the rural areas.
Hardy also finds that Grierson's activities in Canada are an extension of the ideas and experiments he had developed in Britain, and the National Film Board is using films "as they have never been used before, in a planned and scientific way to provide what might be described as a supplementary system of national education" (Grierson cited by Hardy 21). The two major series produced by the board had quite deliberate purposes, with Canada Carries on devoted to Canadian achievements and showing what Canadians need to know and think about to be Canadians, putting the series in the tradition of the films Grierson made in Britain. The other series, World in Action, instead looks outward at world affairs that affect Canada, as well as every other country on the globe. This is similar to the series Grierson consulted on for a period in Briatin, March of Time. For Grierson, this series went beyond the journalistic style in film, for he also saw the series as offering prestige for the country of origin, especially when shown in theaters in Canada, Britain, and the United States.
Another Canadian development in line with Grierson's policy was the extension of the non-theatrical field, for Grierson had long been aware that there is a "greater seating capacity in schools and village halls, in church halls and community centers, than there is in the cinema theaters; and in all his activities this non-theatrical use of films has been to the forefront" (Hardy 22). This trend began with the Empire Film Library at the E.M.B. And continued at the G.P.O., where non-theatrical audience size increased to over five million a year. Grierson developed this even more in Canada by establishing film depositories across the country, arranging industrial circuits, sending traveling units into the rural areas, and devoting more than half of his production program to films for this audience. This was a way of reaching even more of the people and of making film even more of a democratic art. He saw this as a revolution in both the film industry and in education. He saw the need for films addressing education both professional and civic, requiring films showing the real interests of real people. The National Film Board offered Grierson the advantages of centralized and coordinated control of a nation's film activities, and he used these to underline his own social conscience and vision. He saw the National Film Board as a service to the Canadian public and as a way to "create a better understanding of Canada's present" (Hardy 23).
Even while in Canada, Grierson kept close touch with documentary in Britain and continued to be the most powerful single influence on the movement, in part because almost all the leading British realist directors were, at one time or another, members of the E.M.B. Or G.P.O. Units under Grierson. Grierson resigned his position as Canada's Film Commissioner in October, 1945, and one reason was his perception that he needed to go further than Canadian Government sponsorship could carry him:
His immediate aims were to produce for showing in the cinemas a fortnightly series of films on world affairs; and to discover an economic basis for a real international flow of films devoted to matters of common international interest. The formation of International Film Associates, an organization for research and investigation, registered in Washington, was the first significant step taken by Grierson in making a start on his new plans. This was followed in the spring of 1946 by the formation of a complementary producing organization, the World to-day, Inc., with an annual production program of forty films on world affairs for international circulation. (Hardy 23)
This was part of Grierson's view of documentary as a force for internationalism, something long in his mind and more and more a focus of his activities. Hardy says Grierson had to resolve a difference in viewpoint. For the most part, documentary's concern "has been to inform and educate our generation in the nature of the modern world and its implications in citizenship" (Hardy 23). Early in the movement, a good deal of effort was directed to the exposition of aesthetic theory. Later, more emphasis was placed on the quantity of production and the extent of circulation:
Because of Grierson's immediate influence, the Canadian Film Board offers the best illustration of this new viewpoint. Here, there are no large films and none pretentious, but there are hundreds of them a year, short and simple, humble and honest, progressively covering the whole wide field of practical civic interest. (Hardy 24)
Grierson was key in this shift, and he was also key in building up the realist film movement. His writings serve to indicate his thinking on the subject and to relate his views to various sources kin his experience. These writings have also served to inform later generations and to explicate principles that filmmakers in this are still follow.
Antecedents
Grierson was familiar with the works of the Russian directors of the 1920s and with their theoretical work on editing. He had in fact supervised the American version of Sergei Eisenstein's the Battleship Potemkin and had studied the editing principles of Eisenstein and Pudovkin (Hardy 14). The essential elements of film theory were developed in the silent era by Soviet filmmakers intent on exploring the power of film in order to make it into a political and social tool that could be used in furtherance of the aims of the Soviet state. The film theory that developed after 1917 mirrored the dialectics of Hegel that also infused Marxist thought, and in film, successive shots were seen as offering opposing ideas from which a synthesis was then produced that would have a certain effect on the viewer. Sergei Eisenstein represented one particular branch of Soviet film theory, and this was a revolutionary branch that was exemplified in his films from the beginning. Eisenstein was a theorist as well as a filmmaker, and he would be extremely influential through his writings on film as well as through the films he directed. He would later fall out of favor in the Soviet system during the Stalinist era, though he would remain at the forefront of world cinema and would maintain a strong reputation based on his classic works Potemkin, Alexander Nevsky, and Ivan the Terrible: I and II.
A contemporary of Eisenstein, director Grigori Kozintsev, said of his colleague:
In Eisenstein's case the most important thing to consider is not so much his place in the history of the contemporary cinema, but in the history of modern culture as a whole. To say that Eisenstein was one of the greatest film directors of our time is to say something both very obvious and very little. I believe myself that he was essentially an investigator, in search of an art form that had not yet been created, and his films were just the first steps in the development of that art. (Swallow 42)
Yet, these films were giant steps, taking the incipient artistry of the motion picture to the level of an art form and creating for it an aesthetic that differentiated it from other art forms. Eisenstein was not a prolific filmmaker -- in a 22-year career he made only 7 films, and four of these were made in a period of four and a half years (Swallow 43).
The motion picture was not yet three decades old when Eisenstein started his filmmaking activity, but in that time film had stopped being a novelty and had already achieved some recognition among the arts. The Soviet cinema had achieved an international reputation even before World War I. After the Revolution, a move was made to nationalize the film industry, which at first was resisted but which was eventually effected. The Soviet regime exercised tight control over film production: "Films with a revolutionary content began to appear marked by the cloying, eulogistic manner then in vogue" (Barna 76). Over the next several years, the industry struggled to find a voice and a structure, and critical and theoretical arguments over issues of artistic integrity and what we might today call "political correctness" were legion. The two major theoretical threads that emerged were held by Dziga Vertov on the one hand and Sergei Eisenstein on the other, and the division occurred with the release of Eisenstein's first film, Strike, in 1925:
Strike unleashed a veritable furor of comment and controversy, centering on the role of the individual in the fiction film, a question that had been implicit in the polemics over both the actor and the popularity of foreign films. The issue now became explicit, and Dziga Vertov had a worthy rival in Eisenstein, the inventor of a new kind of fiction film. (Youngblood 80-81)
Strike illustrates certain important elements in Eisenstein's aesthetic. One of his favorite reflections went as follows:
Biologically we are all mortal, but we become immortal in what we achieve for society -- in those contributions we make towards carrying the torch of social progress from one generation to the next. (Swallow 46) second prescription offered by Eisenstein was as follows and helps define the difference between Eisenstein and Vertov:
The films I make are never "film eyes" but always "film fists." I never make films in which the camera is an "objective witness," to be watched by an impassive eye of glass. I prefer to hit people hard on the nose. (Swallow 46-47)
This contrasts with Vertov's desire to use the camera as an objective witness to history, in essence elevating the documentary to the highest level through "news" films without any comment, either implied or stated, so that the camera would only record whatever it happened to see. Strike was a film with a very different impetus, a committed work in both conception and execution that was originally intended to be part of a cycle of films concerned with the history of the working-class movement in Russia. Swallow writes:
In Strike the workers are handled for the most part naturalistically, whereas the capitalist bosses and their agents are often held up to ridicule, for it was Eisenstein's habit to poke fun at those he disliked (Swallow 47).
Ivor Montagu, a friend to Eisenstein as well as a film critic and filmmaker, has stated:
Two aspects of Eisenstein's career are apparent in every foot of Strike. On the one hand, here and there, actual material is arranged with economy into a realism poignant in its universality; on the other, the fantastic clowning of the circus shows itself in detail everywhere, and in the exaggerated, even hypertrophied, treatment of particular episodes and the plot in general. (Swallow 47)
In the 1930s Eisenstein published a series of notes outlining his methodological approach to filmmaking, and though the notes were written long after the production of Strike, they do indicate the method by which this film was structured. Eisenstein distinguishes three distinct creative stages, and this begins with what he calls "the first vision":
The most important thing is to have the vision. The next (i.e., the second stage, that of elaborating the script) is to grasp and hold it. In this there is no difference whether you are writing a film-script, pondering the plan of the production as a whole, or thinking out a solution for some particular detail. (Barna 76-77)
Eisenstein explained that dialogue, characters, costumes, and movements -- all the elements of the film -- swarmed simultaneously into his mind. Always, though, he would strive to maintain that first vision that had appeared in the beginning. The third stage in the process was called "facing the camera," the point at which the dream became a reality and the film was actually shot. The fourth stage was the montage stage, and this was of singular importance:
On the cutting-table the filmed material revealed many surprises and accidental intrusions which had to be eliminated or modified where they threatened to obscure the original vision. But in the final stage the "first vision" itself underwent deliberate modifications, necessary corrections. A new vision was born, and in accordance with this new, superior vision, Eisenstein -- past master of montage "in hindsight" -- virtually recreated his film (Barna 77).
Eisenstein's film theory was always political in nature, shaping the demands of the aesthetic to the superior requirements of politics, all in keeping with his stated view that we transcend the limitations of life to the degree that we serve society at large. He suggested that the Soviet cinema would create a new film language, and clearly he intended to be part of that process and to offer his insights into what that language should entail:
believe that only now can we begin to hazard a guess concerning the ways in which a genuine Soviet cinema will be formed, i.e. A cinema which not only will be opposed to bourgeois cinema in respect of its class attributes, but will also categorically excel it by virtue of its methods (Leyda 32).
Reviews of Strike indicated the degree to which Eisenstein was able to convey his political aesthetic through the images on the screen. One of the most enthusiastic reviews appeared in Soviet Screen and applauded both the "dialectics" of the work and the strong influence of constructivism as showing that a new form had been found for the Soviet cinema.
Another review praised the film for extolling class consciousness and internationalism and for being absolutely unlike a Western film. As might be expected, Dziga Vertov was an outright enemy of the film and "declared that the movie was only a 'reform' of the fiction film" (Youngblood 81).
The constructivist elements represented by Eisenstein referred to the film theory of Aleksei Gan and Lev Kuleshov. They saw filmed theater as the art of the past, and what they wanted was an art of the future: "The cinema of the future was inseparable from technology, both to be at the service of the first proletarian government" (Youngblood 4). Gan in particular saw film as anti-art, while Kuleshov emphasized the need for experimentation and for filmmaking to seek a new way of testing images for their power to persuade. Kuleshov found the essence of film in montage, in the changing of shots rather than in the limits of the individual shot (Youngblood 5-7). The constructivists influenced both strains of Soviet theory, Vertov and Eisenstein. Vertov tended to the documentary and to the view that the anti-art nature of film was best expressed with no art at all, with only a recording of events in as near an accidental fashion as possible. Eisenstein saw film as anti-bourgeois-art rather than anti-art as a whole and also agreed with Kuleshov about the power of montage. He would show that power in stark relief in his masterpiece, Potemkin.
Eisenstein's methodology with Strike began with the first vision, and the first vision for this film included a frontal attack on the "bourgeois" film and its influences and the creation of a revolutionary art that would be without compromises. He suggested now introducing Marxism-Leninism into films and the finding of its equivalent in cinematographic terms to forge a link between dialectics and film (Barna 81). With Potemkin, "Eisenstein was passionately intent on discovering new artistic techniques for reinvigorating film art and on finding a cinematographic equivalent of the revolutionary feeling he was striving to express" (Barna 91). Barna also finds, however, that the finished product also shows the importance of spontaneity and discovery (91). The vital importance of editing after the fact is also apparent in this film:
in Potemkin he enlarged on his montage experiments in Strike, bringing to perfection the new language discovered there. Potemkin founded a language that fundamentally affected the whole evolution of cinematography from that time to the present day. (Barna 104)
The film differs in a number of respects from the traditional fiction film. The Battleship Potemkin is itself the "hero" of the film. The film was released in 1926 and attracted the most attention that year, and both praise and criticism were heaped upon it by the press:
For most present-day critics, Potemkin stands as the vindication and purest example of the "Russian" technique of rhythmic montage (especially in the Odessa steps sequence); for many, it is the perfectly constructed movie. The combination of Eisenstein's instinct for dynamics and dramatic construction (even without a traditional hero) and his brilliant cameraman Eduard Tisse's pictorial sense... won the film its justly enduring fame. (Youngblood 83)
Montage for Eisenstein is an emotive issue, a means of eliciting responses and of promoting the inherent excitement of the clash of ideas and people. He explains the dialectic of montage in an essay written in 1938:
The "Leftists" in matters of montage went to another extreme: while handling pieces of film, they discovered a certain property of montage which so impressed them that they could not shake off the impression for several years afterwards. This property reveals that any two pieces of a film stuck together inevitably combine to create a new concept, a new quality born of that juxtaposition. (Eisenstein 63)
Eisenstein in 1938 expressed the feeling that he and others had been wrong to adopt this idea so thoroughly. He said they were right to see that the result of the juxtaposition of two montage pieces is something more like the product than the sum, but he says it was a mistake to overrate the possibilities of juxtaposition and to underrate research into the problem of the material juxtaposed. By the latter Eisenstein means to analyze the nature of the pieces themselves. He says in 1938 that what should be sought is greater attention to the content of the whole, or that which unifies the whole (Eisenstein 64-65).
Political and revolutionary film and filmmaking was the subject of Eisenstein's work and his theoretical writings. October was his next film and turned to the second Russian revolution, the revolution in ideas that took place after the overthrow of the czarist government. It is evident that the dialectic view of film montage was still strong in Eisenstein's work, and that that same dialectic mirrored the ideas involved in the second Russian revolution and in the development of a Marxist-Leninist state. October is highly effective as an example of propaganda, but its value as a work of history is questionable beyond its value as a work of art and for what it expresses of the way the Soviet government viewed itself and the revolution that brought it to power. Political and revolutionary film and filmmaking was always the subject of Eisenstein's work and his theoretical writings. The film has historical value in terms of how it presents its ideas and how it reflects the thinking of Russian society at that time.
In terms of historical accuracy within the story told, though, this is not as valuable given that the film was produced specifically to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the October Revolution, was so commissioned by the government, and so presents the government's point-of-view without question. To that end, of course, it is very effective as propaganda because Eisenstein makes the idea of revolution itself come alive and seem inevitable.
Eisenstein's sound films show a different perspective, and they are the works of a more mature filmmaker who is now experimenting with different aspects of filmmaking. Alexander Nevsky in 1937 was conceived as a piece of history with contemporary overtones:
The defeat of the invading Teutonic Knights by the forces of Alexander Nevsky in the thirteenth century became by implication a comment on Nazi aggression and, more ominously, proved to be a prophecy of what was to happen in Soviet Russia three years later (Swallow 124).
From a technical standpoint, Alexander Nevsky served for Eisenstein as a means of addressing issues and problems in audio-visual composition. He wanted to create with this film an organic fusion of sound and image. In order to shape his first vision, Eisenstein also had to decide how to cope with the issue of the proper presentation and structure of a historical film:
The answers came to Eisenstein as he elaborated his plan for the film. History should be interpreted from the viewpoint of its topical relevance. The first essential was clarity... There was no need to debase the heroes of the past nor to elevate modern man to bring them to a common level. (Barna 207)
This essential process was Eisenstein's method and elevated filmmaking to the level of an art, an art that expressed ideas and that did so in a unified fashion. Always, Eisenstein sought unity, even though he would later look back on his films and believe that he had been less interested in unity than in the dialectical process in his early films. Viewed today, these films retain their coherence and their power, and they had a huge influence on the development of film aesthetics long after their initial release.
These Russian works had documentary elements or documentary-like elements. October and Potemkin in particular aspired to the sort of reality sought by Vertov and Kuleshov. Eisenstein differed in the way he shaped the narrative more than recorded it and in the fictional embellishments he added to films like Potemkin, showing again that while he sought truth, it was a truth based on editing effects more than an effort to recreat reality.
The film also suggests that the soldiers of the tsar were especially brutal and that there was a long-standing conflict between the people and their rulers. This is most evident as the soldiers march down the Odessa steps, firing indiscriminately into the crowd of citizens, showing that the citizenry is thought of as completely subservient to the power structure and that the power structure in no way sees it necessary to respond to the desires of the people. This sequence is especially affecting as Eisenstein selects certain specific figures from the crowd and makes the viewer identify with them as they are shot by the almost faceless troops. Notable as well is the baby carriage drifting down the steps out of control, a symbol of the way the people are left to themselves in the danger zone that is their life in Russia. The mother is killed so that she can no longer protect her child, representing the future of Russia.
Eisenstein actually invented the scene on the Odessa steps. The Potemkin incident really occurred, and Russian troops did shoot civilians in different parts of the city, but there was no concentrated fighting such as is seen in the film centered on these famous steps, though many believe there was just because this film was so effective. The fact that there is no real lead in the film is important because the people in the film are seen more as types than individual. They are masses of people representing social classes in conflict -- the sailors, the soldiers, the citizenry (primarily seen as workers). The sailor who challenges the order to fire has a name--Vakulinchuk -- while no one else is so identified. Certain individuals have been identified from the Odessa steps sequence, notably the young man with books who is called the Student, but these individuals are not made into truly separate characters but are singled out to make the viewer identify with their plight in a more general way. Eisenstein's filmmaking method and the way he treats the characters in this film are the same -- he juxtaposes opposites in order to create a synthesized view of events. When he inserts a closeup of the student reacting in horror, whatever shot follows will be seen as the reason for the expression on the young man's face and will connect to the next set of shots. Similarly, the soldiers firing and the citizens reacting produce a sense in the viewer of extended meaning related to the nature of political life in Russia, to the desire for and need for revolution, to the way the rights of the people were being violated, and so on. His primary intent in the film is to celebrate the fact that soldiers and sailors would themselves revolt against orders telling them to kill fellow citizens and that they could be counted on to join the revolution, as would happen again in 1917.
Andrew Tudor points out that Eisenstein's great obsession was the language of film and that he brought a wide range of learning and a sharp intelligence to bear on this cinematic element. To look at film in this way, though, he had to operate within a whole range of assumptions, assuming a certain context. Eisenstein wrote about the idea of the rhythm of montage, and Tudor notes,
It is now a commonplace to assume that accelerated cutting raises the level of emotional tension in an audience. In terms of behaviorist psychology, that the stimulus provided by a particular pattern of rhythm provokes a certain response on the part of the audience. Now much of Eisenstein's analysis of montage rests on such ideas of tempo, or, at least, on more complex versions of this basic notion. This sort of suggestion about psychological response to a particular set of stimuli can be one (or both) of two things: either a straight psychological assumption, or part and parcel of a larger psychological body of knowledge. (Tudor 59)
Tudor says this means more than simply the development of a psychology and sociology of film and instead suggests the need "for a less specialized awareness of the role of the social and psychological context in our responses to, and evaluation of, film" (Tudor 60). Tudor says that the next generation of filmmakers just accepted that Eisenstein was right, seeing film theory as if it were context-free. Only later would the realist debate come to dominate the field, but until then, only John Grierson and to a lesser extent Rudolf Arnheim addressed this problem left to them unknowingly by Eisenstein:
Arnheim pursued his interests into areas outside of our present scope and into the more general realms of a psychology of art. Grierson, on the other hand, developed an aesthetic explicitly grounded in his more general views of society and the role of the cinema within it. In so doing he became the first major exponent of a socially derived theory of film, a strand of thought which thenceforth continued to weave in and out of the literature. In centering his aesthetic on a morality of social responsibility he elevated one element in the context of film to the pinnacle of aesthetic importance. It is this original claim which still makes him interesting. (Tudor 61) more immediate influence on Greirson can be found in the works of Robet Flahety, notably Moana, which Grierson wrote about in several places. Grfeirson notes that he had referred to Flaherty and indicated how Flaherty had walked away from the studio to coe to grips with the essential story of the Eskimos, then with the Samoans, then with the people of the Aran Islands, and he fidns that at some point, the documentary director in Flaherty diverged from the studio intentions of Hollywood. He notes how this played out with reference to Moana, how the studio wanted to impose a ready-made dramatic shape on the raw material and so wanted Flaherty "into a rubber stamp drama of sharks and bathing belles. It failed in the case of Moana; it succeeded (through Van Dyke) in the case of White Shadows of the South Seas, and (through Murnau) in the case of Tabu, in the last examples it was at the expense of Flaherty, who severed his association with both" (Grierson 78). Clearly, Grierson admired the stand Flaherty took and recognized the value of escaping from the studio to seek real life, and he writes,
With Flaherty it became an absolute principle that the story must be taken from the location, and that it should be (what he considers) the essential story of the location. His drama, therefore, is a drama of days and nights, of the round of the year's seasons, of the fundamental fights which give his people sustenance, or make their community life possible, or build up the dignity of the tribe. (Grierson 76)
Grierson sees this mode of interpretation as reflecting Flaherty's particular philosophy of things. Grierson may admire this approach, but he also sees this as a Neo-Rousseauism "implicit in Flaherty's work" and that "dies with his own exceptional self" (Grierson 76). Also says this view "represents an escapism, a wan and sistant eye, which tends in lesser hands to sentimentalism. However it be shot through with vigor of Lawrentian poetry, it must always fail to develop a form adequate to the more immediate material of the modern world. For it is not only the fool that has his eyes on the ends of the earth. It is sometimes the poet: sometimes even the great poet... " (Grierson 76).
The documentary form began most clearly with the Russians, who sought real locations for their works even when they were fictionalizing the narrative. At the same time, there was considerable artifice in the dynamics of montage. Pudovkin saw that the juxtaposition of images could create a narrative in itself, as in his experiment I which he took a bland, expressionless face and edited it against different images -- food, a baby, a kitten -- and showed that the viewer would assume that the face was expression whatever was appropriate to the other image, such as hunger, lover, happiness.
He could create an emotion and a narrative line in this way, and certainly doing so was not a documentary approach because it did not "find" the emotion in real situations but created it from artificial situations, from the juxtaposition of images and not from real human behavior. Eisenstein approached montage more in terms of the Hegelian synthesis cited above and so created a dynamic rhythm through the succession of images, again not by recording only what is found in the world but by creating the dynamic to carry the audience forward. The Germans used images in a dynamic way as well in order to create an expressionistic vision, as in Berlin: The Symphony of a City. Robert Flaherty sought a documentary mode as a reaction to the artifice imposed on him by Hollywood studios. Grierson was familiar with the modes of narrative filmmaking from the silent era into early sound and also reacted to the efforts to find a new truth in the documentary, and from these beginnings he developed a theory of the documentary and put that theory into practice. What he helped start would develop over the next several decades into a more complex categorization, with different categories having more or less of Grierson in them.
The Documentary
Several ways of classifying the documentary would be developed in time. The classification of documentary films into six modes was proposed and explained by Bill Nichols. As Nichols describes these six modes, he suggests that each of the six corresponded to a particular period in documentary filmmaking when that mode prevailed, though all persist and may be found in some films at any given time. The observational mode is considered by some to be the truest form, given that it involves the least direct interference or interpretation by the filmmaker. As Nichols writes, these are films that "eschew commentary and reenactment [and] observe things as they happen" (Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary 138). This is considered by many to be the most "documentary-like" of all the documentary forms, and perhaps the best-known practitioner of this form is Frederick Wiseman.
The six forms can be described as follows:
1. Poetic documentaries first appeared in the 1920s and were a type of reaction against the content and form of the early fiction film. The poetic mode tended not to use continuity editing and instead organized images from the material world by making use of associations and patterns, both in terms of time and space. There were no well-rounded characters, meaning life-like people, and instead, people were presented as entities. The films tended to be fragmentary, impressionistic, and lyrical, and they achieved effects using a disruption of the coherence of time and space. This was quite the opposite of the fiction films of the day, at least for the most part. What Nichols calls the "historical world" was thus broken into fragments and stitched back together aesthetically in film form. Among the examples Nichols cites are Joris Ivens' Rain (1928), with a subject of a passing summer shower over Amsterdam; Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's Play of Light: Black, White, Grey (1930), a film of one of the filmmaker's kinetic sculptures, focusing not on the sculpture itself but on the play of light around it; Oskar Fischinger's abstract animated films; Francis Thompson's N.Y., N.Y. (1957); and Chris Marker's Sans Soleil (1982). As can be seen, this form can be found long after it was started in the 1920s.
2. The expository documentary speaks directly to the viewer, perhaps by using an authoritative commentary in terms of voiceover or titles, with the speaker expounding a strong argument and a point-of-view. Such films are rhetorical and have as their goal persuading the viewer to a point-of-view or an idea.
Images are not as important as the commentary, and the images exist to advance the argument. The rhetoric used tries to force the viewer to see the images in a certain fashion. Such an approach can be objective, as with historical documentaries in this mode. This form is often seen today with televised documentaries, such as a&E Biography or America's Most Wanted. Many PBS documentaries with a point-of-view use this approach, like the films of Ken Burns. In World War II, Frank Capra made the series Why We Fight and used this mode.
3. Observational documentaries, as noted, try simply to observe lived life with a minimum of intervention.
A filmmaker using this mode might see genre the poetic mode as too abstract and the expository mode as too didactic. The observational mode is practiced by filmmakers like Frederick Wiseman and was fueled by the creation of new equipment allowing for greater mobility, but it also derived from a dissatisfaction with the moralizing quality of the expository mode (Nichols, Introduction to Documentary 33). Frederick Wiseman is a documentarian whose work avoids any narration at all, and as a result his work is viewed as highly objective. Wiseman's films do not concentrate on a few individuals or stories. They have no leading characters and no dramatic narrative in the conventional sense. The filmmaker also avoids what other documentarians do and so does not tell his viewer how to interpret the pattern of the film. Although his films are obviously the products of a strong viewpoint, Wiseman makes no editorial statement either directly through narration or indirectly through the interview technique. He also does not use other elements, such as music, to manipulate the spectator's feelings (Atkins 536-550).
The key element in the use of narration seems to be involved with the question of audience and effect, with narration an element in telling the audience how to view the material, while the lack of narration indicates that the filmmaker wants the viewer to determine meaning for him or herself to a much greater degree. Many see the observational mode as limiting and as keeping the filmmaker to the moment. It also requires that the filmmakers maintain a disciplined detachment from the events.
4. Participatory documentaries suggest that it is impossible for the act of filming not to influence or alter the events being filmed. These films emulate the approach of the anthropologist with participant-observation. Interactive documentary as practiced by Rouch and de Antonio makes the perspective of the filmmaker more evident, allowing the filmmaker to engage with individuals more directly while not reverting to classic exposition. Interview styles and interventional tactics are used so the filmmaker can participate in the events (Nichols, Introduction to Documentary 33). In some cases, the filmmaker is not only part of the film but also conveys how situations in the film are affected or altered by his or her presence, as Nichols writes: "The filmmaker steps out from behind the cloak of voice-over commentary, steps away from poetic meditation, steps down from a fly-on-the-wall perch, and becomes a social actor (almost) like any other. (Almost like any other because the filmmaker retains the camera, and with it, a certain degree of potential power and control over events)" (Nichols, Introduction to Documentary 33). This approach was labeled cinema verite and found "truth" in the encounter itself rather than in some absolute truth. Films of this sort were made before cinema verite itself was created, such as Dziga Vertov's the Man with a Movie Camera (1929), but the later era produced Rouch and Morin's Chronicle of a Summer (1960), Ross McElwee's Sherman's March (1985), and many others. The films of Michael Moore seem to fit into this category to a great degree and certainly area built on the participation of the filmmaker himself (Cohan and Crowdus 25-30).
5. Reflexive documentaries are not presented as a transparent window on the world, and instead the filmmaker draws attention to the fact that the film has been constructed. The film never pretends it is anything other than a representation. Such a film forces the viewer to question the authenticity of the documentary itself. Nichols says that with the reflexive mode, the representation of the real worlds is itself the subject of cinematic meditation, and the filmmaker may then engage in metacommentary. This mode concerns itself with how we talk about the world and developed "from a desire to make the conventions of representation themselves more apparent and to challenge the impression of reality which the other three modes normally conveyed unproblematically" (Nichols, Introduction to Documentary 33).
Documentary films that follow this approach pose the ethical dilemma of how to represent people in two distinct ways. The first way is to pose the question as an issue the text itself may address specifically. The second way is for the text to pose the question as an issue for the viewer in the way it emphasizes the degree to which people, or social actors, appear before us as signifiers. The way people are presented in such a documentary becomes problematic as we consider the extent to which we see a constructed image rather than a slice of reality:
Interactive films may draw attention to the process of filmmaking when this process poses a problem for the participants; the reflexive mode draws attention to this process when it poses problems for the viewer. (Rosenthal 57)
The documentary involves a certain reflexive component given that the material is shot and shaped by filmmakers with a point-of-view. Rosenthal points to an interesting issue that he says has been much ignored in theoretical discussions, though it is addressed by Nichols. That is the topic of audience and effect:
Most concerned documentary filmmakers work with two clear, if unstated, purposes in mind: to witness and to affect. To witness is to say, "Look -- this happened, pay attention." To affect is to move the audience, to hope that the film will cause emotional, political, and social change. (Rosenthal 15)
There are different ways in which the reflexive mode manifests itself. One way is through narration in which the narrator-filmmaker may intrude more than is usual in other forms by conducting interviews, commenting directly to social actors, and so on. Narrated documentary thus sets up a tension between first-person subjectivity and third-person objectivity at all levels, while conversely the non-narrated film has the aura of objectivity because the camera images always give the sense of objectivity. In addition to narration, the reflexive mode may deliberately challenge our idea of reality by recreating scenes. This is one reason for the ethical questions raised by staged scenes such as are found in Errol Morris's the Thin Blue Line -- these staged scenes are subjective in that they have been shaped and are not real but based on a subjective interpretation of the evidence, but they appear to the viewer to be objective, as if they were taken on the scene at the time of the event (Bates 3). The viewer is asked to sort out the truth in this particular film, and the viewer has to do this by sifting through real images and recreated images as well.
6. Performative documentaries emphasize subjective experience and an emotional response to the world, and these films are personal, unconventional, perhaps poetic and/or experimental, and might include hypothetical enactments of events designed to make us experience what it might be like for us to possess a certain specific perspective on the world that is not our own. This mode might also lend itself to certain groups (e.g. women, ethnic minorities, gays and lesbians) allowing them to "speak about themselves." Performative documentaries may include personal accounts or experiences with larger political realities. Among these films would be Alain Resnais' Night and Fog (1955), which contains a commentary by Holocaust survivor Jean Cayrol and which is not a historical account of the Holocaust but rather a subjective account about memory. As noted, the theoretical writings of John Grierson anticipate many of these forms while developing a more specific documentary form that the explains in some detail.
Theoretical Writings
These different types of documentary can be seen as the product of different applications of Grierson's theories and his ideas about the purpose of the documentary film. Andrew Tudor notes that Grierson's theory was not formulated in the abstract but rather emerged as a set of loosely related ideas which came out of his experience in the documentary movement in England, Scotland, and Canada:
His writings are perhaps best conceived of as weapons in a lengthy, single-minded, and practical fight for what he saw as a socially responsible branch of the cinema. Thus, in attempting to distill the essence of his argument it is always possible to overstress a view which may only have been formulated thus for the immediate purpose of debate. (Tudor 66-67)
Tudor notes that on more than one occasion, Grierson denies that he would want to extend his arguments specifically in support of documentary to apply to all films, for he accepts more than one type of cinema. Still, there is in his work a clear sense of the general desirability of realism and of social responsibility, and these are the factors he develops as the keynote to documentary:
This belief that the medium should disport itself responsibly, almost weightily, turns up frequently in his general film criticism. Much though he admired the Joe Sternberg of the Salvation Hunters and the Exquisite Sinner, the 'von' of Shanghai Express becomes the maker of an empty film. To Grierson it is '... A masterpiece of the toilette', an ineffective disguise for the thinnest of themes. It is Sternberg's fall into vacant aestheticism which prompts the lovely aphorism 'When a director dies, he becomes a photographer.' (Tudor 67)
Tudor further notes that this criticism becomes more pointed on the Hitchcock of the 1930s and also on the "aesthetic" critics of the period as Grierson writes, believe the highbrows, in their praise of him, have sent Hitchcock off in the wrong direction, as they have sent many another: Chaplin, for example. They have picked out his clever little pieces, stressed them and analyzed them until they are almost everything in his directorial make up. We have waited patiently for the swing of event (preferably of great event) to come into his films, something that would associate him more profoundly with the dramatic wants of common people. Something serious, I am afraid, will have to happen to Hitchcock before we get it. (Grierson 51)
What Grierson wants from Hitchcock are the very things he wants from the documentary, these being "great events" and the "common people," and a "seriousness of purpose and a sort of populism are the keys which run through Grierson's work" (Tudor 64-65).
Tudor points out that other elements are secondary to Greirson's main concern, which is purpose, the purpose for making the documentary. The founding film of the movement was Drifters, and while this was stylistically influenced by Eisenstein, Grierson made sure that the style was always harnessed to the dominant idea: Grierson is a pragmatist of the people; his first concern is with society, and the 'art of film' is a rather distant second" (Tudor 65). Grierson said that the documentary movement "used" the aesthetes, Cavalcanti and Flaherty, though he objected to Flaherty's romantic views: "In his greatest moments of evangelical fervor Grierson conceives himself as struggling against the whole of individualist culture" (Tudor 65).
Tudor also finds meaning in the way Grierson synthesized his views based on his own expereicne and the tenor of the times:
His views on film grow out of his analysis of twentieth century society; he thus has a practical social interest in film theory. For him the cinema has a potentially great role to play in the solution of twentieth century problems. Problems like maintaining peace, increasing international understanding, and maximizing opportunities for citizenship. The justification for one form of film as against another, for realism as opposed to fantasy, for the collective ethic as opposed to the individualistic, lies in this social role. Ultimately Grierson's reference point is democracy with a capital D. (Tudor 66)
Grierson argue that mass media can serve as the binding that will hold our societies together, and he finds that film is potentially the most powerful among them, at least in the 1930s before the advent of television.
Grierson wrote about the meaning of documentary and about its potential. Documentary began with the travelogues of the French, as noted, and then moved on to include a wide variety of films. Greirson says at first the documentary included all films made from natural material:
The use of natural material has been regarded as the vital distinction. Where the camera shot on the spot (whether it shot newsreel items or magazine items or discursive "interests" or dramatized "interests" or educational films or scientific films proper... was documentary. This array of species is, of course, quite unmanageable in criticism, and we shall have to do something about it. They all represent different qualities of observation, different intentions in observation, and, of course, very different powers and ambitions at the stage of organizing material. I propose, therefore, after a brief word on the lower categories, to use the documentary description exclusively of the higher. (Grierson 78)
He cites the peace-time newsreel as "just a speedy snip-snap of some utterly unimportant ceremony. Its skill is in the speed with which the babblings of a politician (gazing sternly into the camera) are transferred to fifty million relatively unwilling ears in a couple of days or so" (Grierson 78). The magazine item come once a week and represent a skill that is purely journalistic: "They describe novelties novelly" (Grierson 78). These films also have their eye on the audience and are made only for money, and "they avoid on the one hand the consideration of solid material, and escape, on the other, the solid consideration of any material. Within these limits they are often brilliantly done" (Grierson 78). However, they are boring when viewed as a group and are bassed largely on the flippant or popular touch.
Grierson says the British market in the 1930s was filled with this sort of work, showing changing "interests" virtually every week. Grierson also finds that the marketplace mitigate against these films just the same because of time, given that the average program consisted of two features and a short and a cartoon and some trailers, and he marvels at the fact that some companies have been able to distribute documentary works just the same. As he writes,
Whence my wonder at improving qualities. Consider, however, the very frequent beauty and very great skill of exposition in such Ufa shorts as Turbulent Timber, in the sports shorts from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, in the Secrets of Nature shorts from Bruce Woolfe, and the Fitzpatrick travel talks. Together they have brought the popular lecture to a pitch undreamed of, and even impossible in the days of magic lanterns. In this little we progress. (Grierson 79)
He further notes that the filmmaker might not want these films called lecture films, but he also states that this is what they are: "They do not dramatize, they do not even dramatize an episode: they describe, and even expose, but in any aesthetic sense, only rarely reveal" (Grierson 79). Grierson sees this as a formal limit preventing them from making any significant contribution to the fuller art of documentary. Their form also mitigates against such an eventuality. They are shot in silent form, and the pieces are then cut to the commentary, with shots arranged arbitrarily to point to the conclusions. Grierson sees value in this in terms of entertainment, education, and propaganda, but it remains a form that stands outside the documentary proper.
Grierson says that we have to go "beyond the newsmen and the magazine men and the lecturers" to enter the world of documentary proper, meaning "the only world in which documentary can hope to achieve the ordinary virtues of an art" (Grierson 79). The documentary goes beyond descriptions of natural material to arrangements, rearrangements, and creative shapings of natural material. In his discussion, Grierson sets up what he calls the firswt principles for the documentary, as follows:
1) We believe that the cinema's capacity for getting around, for observing and selecting from life itself, can be exploited in a new and vital art form. The studio films largely ignore this possibility of opening up the screen on the real world. They photograph acted stories against artificial backgrounds. Documentary would photograph the living scene and the living story.
2) We believe that the original (or native) actor, and the original (or native) scene, are better guides to a screen interpretation of the modern world. They give cinema a greater fund of material. They give it power over a million and one images. They give it power of interpretation over more complex and astonishing happenings in the real world than the studio mind can conjure up or the studio mechanician recreate.
3) We believe that the materials and the stories thus taken from the raw can be finer (more real in the philosophic sense) than the acted article. Spontaneous gesture has a special value on the screen. Cinema has a sensational capacity for enhancing the movement which tradition has formed or time worn smooth. Its arbitrary rectangle specially reveals movement; it gives it maximum pattern in space and time. Add to this that documentary can achieve an intimacy of knowledge and effect impossible to the shimsham mechanics of the studio, and the lily-fingered interpretations of the metropolitan actor. (Grierson 79-80)
Grierson does not divorce the documentary or the artistic possibilities of the documentary from the studios, meaning there is no requirement that the documentary be independent of the system. What prevents studio-made films from achieving art is not how they are made but the intentions of the people who run the studios and lack a vision. Grierson says he only wants to note that the use of natural material in the documentary can also be creative work and that "the choice of the documentary medium is as gravely distinct a choice as the choice of poetry instead of fiction" (Grierson 80). Different material may be involved, but also involved are different aesthetic issues from those of the studio. For Grierson, then, in spite of noting that art can be produced in the studio, also states that the young filmmaker has to make a choice between the documentary and the studio. In citing Flaherty as one who walked away from the studio in order to achieve a more realistic vision, Grierson also points out that the documentary is more than recording what happens on film. This is another reason why many of the shorts he calls "lecture films" are not documentaries in his view, for "it is important to make the primary distinction between a method which describes only the surface values of a subject, and the method which more explosively reveals the reality of it. You photograph the natural life, but you also, by your juxtaposition of detail, create an interpretation of it" (Grierson 81-92).
This also means that the documentarian may take one of several approaches. Flaherty used a story form, going from the individual to the environment. Other filmmakers may not be as interested in the individual and may see the dramatic figure as outmoded. Such a filmmaker may abandon the story form and seek a matter and method considered more satisfactory to the spirit of the time.
Grierson finds such a film in Berlin or the Symphony of a City, a film that "initiated the more modern fashion of finding documentary material on one's doorstep: in events which have no novelty of the unknown, or romance of noble savage on exotic landscape, to recommend them. It represented, slimly, the return from romance to reality" (Grierson 82). At the same time, Grierson found that this film represents what a documentary should not be because it focuses on the beautiful image. The film is structure around strong visuals showing the life of the city itself, "the story of a Berlin day" (Grierson 83). The subtitle of the film calls it a symphony, and Grierson says this is justified because it represented "a break away from the story borrowed from literature, and from the play borrowed from the stage. In Berlin cinema swung along according to its own more natural powers: creating dramatic effect from the tempo'd accumulation of its single observations" (Grierson 83).
Allan Thomas James looks back on the film from three-quarters of a century later and note the tendency to see it as a historical document, finding that the film "offers us a model of Berlin brought close and intimate, and yet viewed from across an unbridgeable gap" (James para. 1). He also notes that there is a problem in the fact that the viewer sees the beauty of the film itself before anything else and notes that theorists from John Grierson to Jean Rouch "have warned of the dangers of the beautiful image within documentary film" (James para. 2).
Indeed, Grierson makes a good deal out of this issue when writing about Berlin, as he does of the fact that the city in the film is only observed and produces nothing. Grierson also point sout how the film continues to excite the young filmmaker so that the symphony form remains their most popular persuasion. He writes,
The little daily doings, however finely symphonized, are not enough. One must pile up beyond doing or process to creation itself, before one hits the higher reaches of art. In this distinction, creation indicates not the making of things but the making of virtues. (Grierson 84)
Grierson recognizes that the filmmaker can use his or her observational powers and taste to find images, "but the real job only begins as they apply ends to their observation and their movements. The artist need not posit the ends -- for that is the work of the critic -- but the ends must be there, informing his description and giving finality (beyond space and time) to the slice of life he has chosen. For that larger effect there must be power of poetry or of prophecy. Failing either or both in the highest degree, there must be at least the sociological sense implicit in poetry and prophecy" (Grierson 84).
The real problem with the symphonists is the degree of time devoted to capturing the eye and impressing the mind with the spectacle, but in so doing, they ignore the larger creative task. They do this because of their dedication to beauty over the truth of the human condition, and Grierson explains:
For this reason I hold the symphony tradition of cinema for a danger and Berlin for the most dangerous of all film models to follow. Unfortunately, the fashion is with such avoidance as Berlin represents. The highbrows bless the symphony for its good looks and, being sheltered rich little souls for the most part, absolve it gladly from further intention. Other factors combine to obscure one's judgment regarding it. The post-1918 generation, in which all cinema intelligence resides, is apt to veil a particularly violent sense of disillusionment, and a very natural first reaction of impotence, in any smart manner of avoidance which comes to hand. The pursuit of fine form which this genre certainly represents is the safest of asylums. (Grierson 85)
Certain forms represent new beauties and new shapes but they fail to present new persuasions. Grierson refers to this approach as imagism, meaning the telling of story or illumination of theme by images, a poetic approach that has not achieved its promise in the hands of the filmmakers of the time. This is the key focus of the symphonic form.
Interestingly, he cites is own film Drifters as one simple contribution in that direction, though its subject belonged in part to Flaherty's world because it had something of the noble savage and certainly a great deal of the elements of nature in it. It also used steam and smoke and marshaled the effects of a modern industry. He find tha the film involved an integration of imagery with movement:
The ship at sea, the men casting, the men hauling, were not only seen as functionaries doing something. They were seen as functionaries in half a hundred different ways, and each tended to add something to the illumination as well as the description of them. In other words the shots were massed together, not only for description and tempo but for commentary on it. One felt impressed by the tough continuing upstanding labor involved, and the feeling shaped the images, determined the background and supplied the extra details which gave color to the whole. (Grierson 86)
Grierson writes about the documentary using the British documentary as his subject, and he notes that he does this because of familiarity and not to separate the British form from any other. He notes the ascendancy of realism in film and especially in the documentary, and he also finds that World War I and other conflicts of the time were the key reason for this. He also notes how the Russians had experienced a period of brilliance as they relived the Revolution but had greater difficulty coming to temrs with peace:
The realistic powers of Potemkin, the End of St. Petersburg, Ten Days that Shook the World and Storm Over Asia were barely matched in the General Line and a Simple Case. Conscious of the weakness, the Russians showed for a time a tendency to slip back to the old victories, and Thunder Over Mexico, the Deserter, Chapayev and We from Kronstadt were all, in this sense, epics of nostalgia. Conviction was lacking in the themes of peace. Earth was beautiful, but only managed to melodramatize the issue between peasant and kulak. The Road to Life, with its story of reformed strays, was in a Y.M.C.A. tradition of patronage. It seemed, in the middle 'thirties, that the technique of mass energies and significant symbols, suitable for the stress of revolution, only embarrassed the quieter issues of a peace-time life, which was of necessity more domesticated and personal. (Grierson 142)
Over time, though, younger filmmakers found new ways of solving this problem and of turning the documentary impetus toward peacetime subjects. Grierson cites a film like Men and Jobs and also finds that Russia "has been coming closer to the common life and, unspectacular as its new films may seem in comparison with the old days, they are nearer the mark. With the United States, the Soviet Union remains during this period the most exciting of film countries" (Grierson 142). American films had also been changing in a different way, and Grierson says that while the American industry might understand the realism of Flaherty, it was building up another realism, as seen in the tradition of the epics like the Covered Wagon, the Iron Horse, Pony Express, North of 36, in one line, and the Birth of a Nation and Isn't Life Wonderful, in another. Grierson also cited the "rise of the small-part player to a degree of vitality and importance which he does not enjoy in any other country, save Russia.
Call-boys and typists, garage hands and lorrymen are mobilized behind the star and there is a new contact with the ordinary.
With every year from 1930 the films have become braver and more real, as though the old men were out and the young men in" (Grierson 142).
Grierson also notes the new emphasis this focus on realism had brought to contemporary problems and materials on the American scene, including prison life, the plague of gangsters, the new police, unemployment, lynching and the secret societies, the New Deal, finance. And Hollywood itself.
By contrast, Grierson found the British film to have a blank outlook, with too little realism marking the era. The documentary focused on realism but was also removed in its own separate finances and too mistrustful of the commercial world to join it.
For Grierson, the real cause could be found in British society itself, and he wrote in 1937,
At the back of the scene is a weakness in contemporary English life which those who, like myself, came to it from the outside, have never ceased to feel. The social and aesthetic leadership, as perhaps befits an old, and in itself, brilliant tradition, has long lost that proud contact with simple labor which characterizes the younger countries, and particularly America. The Labor movement, from which great aesthetic influence might have been expected, has only contrived to join forces with the old leadership. Artists who, by destiny, are the solvents of such detachment, remain, on the whole, a peculiar people in England. Following social rather than aesthetic distinctions, they reflect only a distance from the reality they should serve. The significant dramatists of this period, when they are not Americans, are, not strangely, Irishmen, Scotsmen and far Northern provincials, deriving from traditions in which contact with the ordinary life has always been closer and less ashamed. (Grierson 144)
At the same time, Grierson was hopeful because of the fact that all over Britain, critics and leaders of opinion recognized the nature of the problem and were trying to change the nature of films: "With such support, and in spite of all the artifices, inhibitions, inferiorities, snobberies, censorships, alien controls and misguided party-political interventions, the British cinema may yet come, in realism, alive" (Grierson 144).
Other Elements Cited
As noted, Grierson did not develop a theory of the documentary on the basis of lengthy reflection on the issues involved but rather came to his views more from personal experience. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith notes how a new era of ethnographic film-making developed in the post-war period (meaning World War II) as university-trained anthropologists turned to motion pictures. French anthropologist Jean Rouch made ethnographic films in West Africa beginning in the late 1940s, followed by Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, who produced a series of teaching films, utilizing footage shot in the 1930s. In Childhood Rivalry in Bali and New Guinea (1952), they compare the child-rearing methods of two South Pacific cultures. The Hunters (1956), made by John Marshall with the assistance of the Peabody Museum at Harvard and anthropology graduate student Robert Gardner, told the story of a giraffe hunt among the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa; it was also constructed from footage taken over a two-year period. Canada was one country where government support contributed to a rapidly expanding documentary movement, as set up under John Grierson in 1939. By the 1960s, the "increased spontaneity of the camera work, which captured activities as they unfolded, often unexpectedly, pointed toward new kinds of documentary which a new generation of lightweight, sync-sound equipment was about to make possible" (Nowell-Smith 333). That sort of flexibility was not known to Grierson in the 1930s, but he did write about the nature of sound in the documentary film and about its importance in creating a picture of the real world.
Propaganda
The documentary film has had a long history. The early film pioneers were delighted that they could record the world in which they lived with pictures that moved, and they pointed their cameras at the active world in which they lived to startle audiences with street scenes, panoramas of the natural world, locomotives, traffic, and above all people. In France, the Lumiere brothers in particular represented this sort of recording of the world just because it was now possible to do so. In time, theoretical constructs were created to explain the impact of the non-fiction film and to prescribe the techniques, materials, and subject matter for future documentaries. Objectivity is often held out as a goal, but objectivity is not always an easy thing to assess. Some films clearly have been made with an attempt at objectivity, while others just as clearly have a strong point-of-view and impose order on the material in a way that shapes the argument in a certain direction. The use of narration in itself is not an indication of the level of objectivity, though its presence or absence can raise the issue. A film that has been narrated may seem less objective in the way such things are viewed since the creation of direct cinema by the mere fact that the filmmaker is shaping the material overtly and commenting on that shape through the narration. A non-narrated film seems more subjective because it seems to be following the verite prescription to present reality on its own terms. The filmmaker does not comment directly through narration, but of course, the material could be shaped with a very subjective eye.
Grierson's vision of documentary as promoting a national agenda and as an expression of the ideas of a people can be seen in a variety of films from around the world, though Grierson might raise objections to many for other reasons. For instance, in the 1930s the power of documentary was used by the Nazis in Germany to extol the supposed virtues of Hitler and to celebrate the supposed superiority of the German people. Leni Riefenstahl made the major examples of this. She was often less overt about the propaganda elements, hiding them in elegiac and poetic images whose effect is to elevate the Nazi party and its leader. In Triumph of the Will, the occasion was the Nuremburg rally in 1935 at which Hitler made a rousing speech that solidified his political power over the people. The film is not objective at all, and while the subject matter may be considered frightening and horrible, the techniques used by Riefenstahl in shaping the footage remain among the prime examples of documentary filmmaking. As propaganda, the film is extremely effective.
Triumph of the Will helps answer the question of how Hitler came to power and how he managed to mobilize the German people in his terrible design. The power of his voice and his speaking style is apparent even when one does not understand the language, and the way Riefenstahl shapes this documentary footage also shows how mythology was mixed with politics to generate and feed the fears of the people about their place in the world and the supposed enemies who would prevent them from rising to their true and rightful position as leaders in the world. Mythological images have great power to evoke action in people, and the masses at Nuremberg were ready to be told that their destiny was greater than the world had believed and that they could rise to the occasion. This only partially explains how so many could have become accomplices in the horrors that would come later, but it is a beginning toward seeing how it could happen.
The film helped garner support for Hitler and to make Hitler himself into a mythic leader. From our vantage point more than sixty decades later, we may believe that Hitler had already achieved all that he needed and was now only rallying the troops, as it were, but in fact, in the early 1930s there was still considerable opposition inside Germany to Hitler and to the Nazis and their program. The Nazis did not come to power in Germany without opposition, and they did not develop their war machine in an atmosphere completely devoid of resistance. There was resistance to the Nazis within German society from a number of people and groups in society, and this resistance was dealt with harshly as the Nazis tried to consolidate their own power and bring everyone into conformity with their program of belligerence toward Germany's neighbors. Yet, the Hitler myth was created and sustained by the Nazi propaganda machine, and it was an effective myth precisely because it built upon attitudes welling up from the people themselves. Hitler and his minions were masters at pressing the right buttons to get the people to move in the direction they wanted, and so Naziism must be seen as both a choice and an imposition for the German people, a people divided in spirit even if silent in expressing much opposition. Riefenstahl's film was one of the propaganda tools which made Germany as a whole seem a more unified and committed Nazi stronghold.
During the early days of the rise of the National Socialists to power, there were three characteristics of the regime: 1) a commitment to national tradition to make Germans identify with the state and its power; 2) the joining of tradition with the promise of a new order, of an historic breakthrough, and of a national revival and renewal; and 3) terror directed at enemies and at the populace at large in order to convince the people that compliance was the only way to avoid further trouble. Hitler established his absolute dictatorship within the first few weeks, and he did so by being more impressive than his predecessors:
From the beginning the Hitler government seemed to possess a dynamism and force which contrasted sharply with the paralysis of previous administrations. The vitality of the regime was reflecting in the reporting style even of newspapers not particularly well-disposed towards Nazism, contributing to a growing feeling stretching beyond existing Nazi support... (Kershaw 50)
Ian Kershaw points out that in the election of March 1933, there was considerable support for the Nazi position, indicating that the people were adopting the policy rather than having it imposed on them. Even many who voted against the Nazis were supportive of aspects of the Nazi program:
Not every vote cast for non-Nazi parties in March 1933 was a vote against everything Hitler stood for: some at least of what Nazism seemed to offer appealed to far more than hardened Nazi supporters. (Kershaw 51)
In 1933, Hitler persuaded Hindenburg to sign emergency decrees that in essence ended all civic rights that had been granted by the Weimar Constitution, and this would become the "legal" basis for the terror that was now unleashed. At first, this was directed at opponents of the regime, notably the Communists. The work of terror could now be carried out more easily because the SA (Storm Troopers) and the SS were now considered "auxiliary police." Goebbels was made minister of propaganda and imposed more stringent censorship:
Press censorship and the threat of coercion facing open expression of dissenting opinion mean effectively that from now on the only public image of Hitler remaining was that put out by Goebbels, Dietrich, and other purveyors of official propaganda. (Kershaw 57)
One of the reasons for the acceptance of Hitler by large segments of the population was the effectiveness of the Nazis at creating and sustaining the Hitler cult, making Hitler the symbol of the nation. When Hitler came to power, the perception of him and his followers was largely negative among the people. At this time, the elevation of Hitler to the position of Chancellor was a matter of imposing the Nazi party on the nation. However, this situation did not last. Ian Kershaw says that in the beginning there was a wall of apathy and skepticism regarding the Nazis as a ruling political party. However, during 1933 attitudes toward Hitler and the new government started becoming more positive, with some essentially being willing to give Hitler a chance to change things around from the situation he inherited. What might be seen from outside as harsh was seen by many of the people as acceptable given the problems they faced:
Already here there are clear signs of what became apparent, at least to some foreign observers, immediately following the Reichstag Fire: that the draconian measures adopted by the government... encountered little criticism and no small degree of favor among the majority of ordinary, middle class Germans and among the rural population. (Kershaw 52)
The German attack on the communists was applauded, and the perception on the part of some that the Nazis themselves had started the Reichstag Fire was ignored.
In creating a mythic sense of Hitler, Riefenstahl was doing precisely what the Nazis needed in order to get the country behind the leader and redirect public energies into whatever endeavor he said would benefit the nation. Hitler himself made no bones about his desire to use film as a propaganda device, as he stated in a report in the New York Times in 1933:
want to exploit the film as an instrument of propaganda in such a way that the audience will be clearly aware that on such an occasion they are going to see a political film. It nauseates me when I find political propaganda hiding under the cloak of art. Let it be either art or politics. (Infield 73)
Hitler himself asked Riefenstahl to film the 1934 Nazi party congress at Nuremberg. He knew precisely what he wanted -- a political film that would convince people in Germany and around the world that he was in complete control of a united Nazi party: "He wanted the German citizens to know that their new Fuhrer would lead them from World War I defeat to world power" (Infield 73). Infield notes that by the time Hitler asked Riefenstahl to make this film, she had seen him numerous times, had praised him in conversation with others, and had become a member of the Reich Film Association. Riefenstahl cannot hide behind ignorance of Hitler's policies, either, because they were well-known to her:
By maintaining her relationship with Hitler after the initial violence against Jews and the exclusion of Jews, many former associates, from the film industry, Riefenstahl indirectly expressed her support for him and his policies. Yet it was not until she decided to make the film of the 1934 congress that she really committed herself to the Third Reich. (Infield 74)
Riefenstahl threw herself into elevating Hitler to mythic proportions, and she often shoots Hitler so that his features appear before clouds to suggest a mythic power. Symbolism is used throughout to promote Hitler and to promote the idea of Germany as the major power in the world: "This film represents an inextricable mixture of a show simulating Germany reality and of Germany reality maneuvered into a show" (Kracauer 303).
Riefenstahl's actions in producing this film went beyond recording an event and veered into direct propaganda in support of the Nazi cause. This took place at a time after it was known that Hitler wanted to exterminate the Jews and had taken steps toward doing so. The film itself was a key element in shaping German public opinion and in marshaling public support for Nazi policies. Grierson wanted the documentary film to promote democracy, which Triumph of the Will certainly does not. Grierson recognized the propaganda possibilities in the documentary film, or at least in a film that was made with documentary techniques, and he wrote about this element.
Grierson notes how many had warned about the potential for propaganda to be produced by the British Government and that a highly organized Information Service, national and international, equipped with all modern instruments, was a necessary line of defense for the country. This was in 1930, long before Hitler came to power, and those promoting this idea continued to raise it through the decade, with only partial success. The idea was soon emphasized even more by Hitler and his use of film as propoaganda and Grierson writes,
In this particular line of defense called propaganda, we were caught bending as in so many other spheres, because peace was so much in peoples' hearts that they would not prepare the desperate weapons of war. (Grierson 167)
The Germans had no such scruples and thought of propaganda as "the very first and most vital weapon in political management and military achievement -- the very first" (Grierson 167). Greirson states that war has become a matter of getting behind the lines and confusing and dividing the enemy, with the chief way of doing so being the psychological way. The manipulation of public opinion is a key issue for the propagandist of war. Hitler himself stated, "It is not arms that decide, but the men behind them -- always." He also stated, "Why should I demoralize the enemy by military means, if I can do so better or more cheaply in other ways? " Grierson also cites Hitler as follows:
The place of artillery preparation and frontal attack by the infantry in trench warfare will in future be taken by propaganda; to break down the enemy psychologically before the armies begin to function at all... mental confusion, contradiction of feeling, indecisiveness, panic; these are our weapons. When the enemy is demoralized from within, when he stands on the brink of revolution, when social unrest threatens, that is the right moment. A single blow will destroy him. (cited by Grierson 168)
Grierson notes how the Germans, as they were about to enter Norway, arranged a special showing of their film of the Polish campaign, and this film had its effect on the peace-loving Norwegians:
It showed the mass mechanical efficiency of German warfare with brutal candor. The roaring aeroplanes, the bursting bombs, the flamethrowers, the swift unending passage of mechanized might all constituted an image of the inevitable. (Grierson 168)
Greirson says this is the strategy of terror. Germany wanted to present an image of inevitable death and destruction and did so. This did not work when it was applied in Briatin, "and it is one of the best evidences of British stamina that the new united courage of the British people was welded so soon out of these disturbed and doubtful beginnings" (Grierson 168).
The terror aspect is only one part of the propaganda offensive, and propaganda is more often more subtle than that. More insidious is the way the Germans sought to reach the disaffected in society and to divide from within by using these people as a revolutionary weapon. Propoaganda is also intended to reach the business men, those dedicated only to profits. Grierson says that this process was effective in France and that even though "they wished to crush the popular front and keep out socialism... they gave in to Hitler" (Grierson 169). Grierson notes how the German propaganda machine in America always appeared under the slogan "America first " and other banners of patriotism:
The principal point to take is that, when the Germans put propaganda on the offensive in war, their psychological opportunities were rich and widespread. They appealed to men's thwarted ambitions; they offered salvation to disappointed and disheartened minorities; they preyed on the fears of capitalist groups regarding socialism; they preached controlled capitalism and a socialist state to the socialist minded. They harped on those weaknesses of democracy of which democratic citizens are only too well aware: the verbiage of its parliamentary debates, the everlasting delays of its committees, the petty bourgeois ineffectiveness of its bureaucracy. They probed the doubts in the mind of democracy and inflamed them to skepticism. Everything was grist to their mill, so long as they divided the enemy and weakened his belief in himself. No one will say that German propaganda did not do that job brilliantly and well, as it marched its way across Europe. Grierson 169)
When used in film, this view twisted the sort of ambitions Grierson had for promoting democracy. He points out that the Germans "believed that Democracy had no genuine convictions for which people would be willing to stake their lives. They proceeded cynically on that assumption, marched on that assumption and their entire military plan depended on that assumption" (Grierson 169). Grierson took this as a challenge and wrote,
It behoves us to match conviction with greater conviction and make the psychological strength of the fighting democracies shine before the world. It behoves us to match faith with greater faith and, with every scientific knowledge and device, secure our own psychological lines. If propaganda shows a way by which we can strengthen our conviction and affirm it more aggressively against the threat of an inferior concept of life, we must use it to the full, or we shall be robbing the forces of democracy of a vital weapon for its own security and survival. This is not just an idea: it is a practical issue of modern scientific warfare. (Grierson 170)
In the hands of the Germans, propaganda was a black art "a diabolical one," but it depends for its success "on a deep study of the psychological and political divisions of the enemy and is therefore based on close and scientific analysis. Catch-as-catch-can methods in propaganda can no longer serve against an enemy so thorough.
The more pleasant side of international propaganda is the positive side, where you ingratiate yourself with other countries; where you state your cause, establish alliance in spirit and create world confidence that the issue and the outcome are with you. That was Britain's great task, particularly after the fall of France and particularly in regard to the Americas" (Grierson 170). Grierson said that Britain drew strength in this process from her great liberal tradition. Propaganda did not beceom a major tool in-Britain beasue the British believed that "telling the truth must command goodwill everywhere and, in the long run, defeat the distortions and boastings and blatancies of the enemy," in contrast to the German view that "men are essentially weak; they believe that the mainsprings of action are primarily economic and selfish; they believe that men are more interested in the elan vital than the elan moral; and they derive the principles of their propaganda accordingly" Grierson 170). For the Germans, it was indeed a matter of the triumph of the will, while for the British, it was a matter of the triumph of justice.
Grierson argues for a propaganda different from that of Germany, not one that exploits the weaknesses of men but that celebrates the virtues and elevates the discourse. Documentary for Grierson told a deeper truth and brought people together on that basis. He notes many of the arguments that had been waged in Britain about such matters and finds agreement with those who believed that the outside world needed to know more about Britain and her ideals: " the world wants to know how up-to-date and forward-looking you are. It wants to see the light of the future in your eyes as well as the strength and dignity of your past" (Grierson 171).
Grirson's view of documentary would prevail in Britain for the most part and would also match that in America. The vision in other countries might differ. Consider how the documentary is used in China today. The vital role of documentaries in China can be seen by a report in Variety in 1988 concerning the Central Newsreel and Documentary Film Studio in Beijing, which noted: "Documentaries occupy a prominent place in China's film industry, partly because television as yet has not dried up the market for newsreels in feature film theaters" (March 4, 1988, p. 476). This studio produces 300 to 350 newsreels per year, each about 10 minutes in length and primarily in color. Prints are made in both 16 and 35 mm. The studio also produces full-length documentaries and shorts. There is also a series called "New Look of the Motherland" that is produced every ten days or so, and another called "China Today" that is produced once a month and aimed at foreigners, distributed by China's embassies abroad. These documentaries are believed to have an audience that is among the better-educated in China. Among the topics addressed by this studio are economic reform, sports, and foreign countries. The studio also produces a television show called "Window on Documentary Films" which appears for 20 to 30 minutes every Sunday night on Central China TV network. Zhang Jianhua, deputy studio director of the facility, indicates that his filmmakers have a lot of freedom, though his statement also shows where they do not: "The government delegates power to us. We have a great deal of freedom. We do have limitations, of course. We can't make films against the Party or Communism" (p. 476).
The Chinese film industry developed along ideological lines early, though it would be overstating the facts to find that the Communist groups in filmmaking prior to the takeover in 1949 were that influential: "The Communist Party and progressive filmmakers did not dominate the film industry; nor did those artists who were later called 'progressive' or 'leftist' necessarily subscribe to Communist ideology or the Party leadership" (Clark 10). However, the Communists in China in the 1930s recognized the propaganda value of film and established an organization to guide progressive filmmakers in Shanghai. This was the Film Group, an important subdivision of the League of Left-Wing Writers during the period before the War of Resistance to Japan (1937-1945). The filmmakers who belonged to this group existed in an environment hostile to Communism, and yet after 1949 they would find themselves in control of that same system. Another change they experienced related to their audience. During the earlier period, the filmmakers made films for people who had much in common with themselves, meaning audiences from that segment of society inhabiting the most Westernized sections of China, notably Shanghai and the other treaty ports. These people lived very different lives from the majority of Chinese. However, after 1949 filmmakers were expected to make films for a far wider audience, films that would be accessible to the masses.
Clark connects the movements in film to the wider movements in literature and finds that new writing promulgated after 1915 was in the vernacular language. This would be taken over in literary circles by the May Fourth nexus. The movies would become a popular culture when they also used this vernacular language, but in the earlier period there was an overwhelming reliance on foreign films in the theaters, films that most Chinese needed help in understanding. Filmgoers of the time often depended on an announcer-narrator who usually sat on a platform in the rear of the theater or stood on a balcony. Locally produced documentaries were usually subtitled in both English and Chinese, but other films needed the help of a translator (Clark 7-9).
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