Part IV Alternative Film

\ PART IV THE ALTERNATIV E FILM 335 Historical Overview: The Development of the Documentary Film FROM SILENCE TO SOUND Influenced by the Industrial Revolution's emphasis on science and technology, Louis and Auguste Lumière made their first films in 1895 primarily from an urge to reproduce the everyday world, to record and document life around them. These filmed scenes from life (workers leaving the factory, a train arriving), however, could not indefinitely hold the imagination and attention of the viewing public. Although from 1895 to 1907 most films were documentary films or, perhaps more appropriately, film documents - after 1907 such films were on the decline. Audience interest in film's ability to capture the everyday world was undercut by the growing production of fake documentaries, which were often much more exciting to watch than the film record of the real thing. The narrative film in which the emergent art of film editing altered precamera activity and created drama as it manipulated time and space appealed to audiences more than films of unstructured material. Although newsreels became a regular part of the movie program in 1910 when both Pathé and Gaumont in France released the first sets of composite documentary news footage, the public's chief interest in the movies had permanently shifted to the narrative film. As a result, although many documentary films throughout the century functioned as theatrical entertainment, the history of the form has generally been allied to noncommercial enterprise and has been developed by those filmmakers, governments, and social institutions who saw in the cinema a medium with the power to move people to social and political action. After the Revolution of 1917, for instance, Lenin, seeing the need to educate people in remote areas of Russia to the purposes of the Revolution, asserted the alliance between film and the newly formed Soviet government. This educative 336 Missing Photo 1 The trolley cars in Dziga Vertov's The Man with a Movie Camera (1928) are a good example of the difficulty of categorizing this film. Frequently (as here) the trolley cars are simply a mode of transportation recorded in normal time, with a normal lens. The image is documentary. At other times, however, the speed of the trolleys is increased, mirror images are used, and the trolleys turn into abstract forms, hurtling across the opaque frame. function, along with the pressing political need to establish a sense of national unity and pride, became the basic motive for nonfiction filmmaking in the Soviet Union. Thus, the Soviet newsreel Kino-Nedelia (Film Weekly) was not only taken across the country on trains that screened films aboard for rural patrons but the films were also changed en route, as chief editor Dziga Vertov filmed additional material and, in a kind of ongoing process of documenting the world, incorporated it into subsequent screenings. Vertov, a seminal figure in Soviet filmmaking and in documentary aesthetics, called for-cinema to reject the artificiality of scripts, constructed sets, and actors in favor of its true subject: the lived world. Despite this call for cinema to avoid manipulating its subject matter before the camera, Vertov also believed it necessary that the cinematographer and the film editor illuminate unmanipulated and spontaneous life through full use of the camera's unique properties and through editing. Thus, in his own weekly newsreel, Kino-Pravda, which ran from 1922 until 1925, and in his later and highly influential The Man with a Movie Camera (1928), Vertov uses slow, fast, and reverse motion, animation, microcinematography, and multiple exposure as cinematic devices that revealed life as it was lived in ways physiologically unavailable to the viewer (Figure 1). Vertov's writings and films - though themselves limited to the period between two wars - have continued to influence both those filmmakers who wish to record life as it is lived with a minimum of mediation between that life and the camera, and also those filmmakers who wish to shape reality by participating in it during shooting and editing. 337 337 338 HISTORICAL OVERVIEW In America, after World War I, the documentary impulse manifested itself in the emergence of the feature-length travelogue. Americans were interested in seeing life as it was lived - but as it was lived elsewhere. Beginning with travelogue records of their explorations made as early as 1912, Martin and Osa Johnson pleased commercial audiences with exotic films from darkest Africa in which great white filmmakers unself- consciously patronized their native subjects. Although the Johnsons' films proved immensely popular, it was the success of Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922), a film about Eskimo life, which really initiated a concerted effort to film other cultures in other lands. Because of its artistry and its exoticism, Nanook excited a twofold interest: in what has come to be called the ethnographic film, and also in the documentary's commercial potential for dealing with real life in a dramatically satisfying cinematic structure. Flaherty dramatized as he recorded, using varying camera angles and distances that best showed the heroic qualities of a man using simple tools and great skill to survive in a beautiful but hostile landscape. The film gave rise to the term documentary. Nanook began a trend in dramatic ethnography exemplified by the efforts of explorer-filmmakers Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack in Grass (1925), which followed a mass migration of herdsmen through mountains in Turkey and Persia and in Chang (1927), a follow-up, which moved toward fiction in its dramatization of a Siamese family. These film explorers seemed bent on discovering spectacle (and finally created their own in a total fiction enlivened by documentary technique, King Kong, 1933). Flaherty himself was sent to Samoa by Paramount to make another Nanook, but returned instead with Moana (1926), a gentle film with little of the natural conflict between man and his environment found in Nanook. In commercial desperation, Paramount misguidedly advertised the film as "the love life of a South Sea siren" and the film, not delivering what was promised, proved a box-office flop. Flaherty's short association with Hollywood was terminated, but he continued making his documentaries under various nontheatrical auspices; his first sound film, Man of Aran (1934), was made in England, for example, and his Louisiana Story (1948) was sponsored by an oil company. SOUND AND SOCIAL REFORM Despite the relative success of exotic documentaries in the 1920s, it was not until the introduction of sound to the cinema in 1927 that the documentary form could begin to realize its potential as an educative, social, and political force. In America, Fox Movietone News in May of 1927 began releasing newsreels using the first optical sound system; such newsreels became part of nearly every theatrical exhibitor's programming. But, newsreel production aside, there 338 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCUMENTARY FILM 339 was little interest in developing feature-length documentaries in the United States, where film was regarded as show business and movies were a commercial product. The situation in England, however, was different. When the Depression hit Great Britain in 1929, a brash, inexperienced, self-taught student of media named John Grierson went to a governmental unit called the Empire Marketing Board and convincingly argued that film production should be one of the board's ways of informing the public about Britain's food supply. Thus, Grierson became the director of the board's Film Unit and in 1929 released the first of the only two films he ever actually made. Drifters, a classic example of the kind of film that was to exemplify British documentary's golden age, makes exciting and socially relevant the everyday dangers faced by herring fishermen in the North Sea. Filmmakers who joined Grierson's unit were instructed to make ordinary reality and peacetime as exciting and provocative on the screen as were extraordinary events like war. Grierson was intent on showing the British workingman to himself and educating him to the social realities around him. These British documentaries at first were relatively straightforward in their glorification of the British workingman, but as time went on the productions became more complex and drew on the talents of such leading artists as poet W. H. Auden and composer Benjamin Britten to explore the dynamic possibilities of sound. Night Mail (Basil Wright and Harry Watt, 1936), for example, is intended on a factual level to show the process of mail delivery by train. Aesthetically, however, the film is an aural and visual poem to humans, machines, and the work they perform. Montage editing combined with Britten's score and Auden's chanted narration demonstrates the complexity and formal beauty of the British documentary of the 1930s at the same time that it demonstrates its basis in the everyday activities of British life. Although the Film Unit was terminated as part of the Empire Marketing Board in 1932, production did not cease; the unit was taken over by the General Post Office with Grierson still at its head. The British documentary strongly influenced the emergent genre in Depression America. So, too, did a handful of documentaries made in various European countries, films that took social and political stands like Borinage (Henri Storck and Joris Ivens, 1933), which pled the cause of Belgian coal miners, or Land Without Bread (Luis Buñuel, 1932), which savagely and shockingly recorded poverty in Spain. By the early 1930s the Film and Photo League had been founded in New York City, and its various branches devoted themselves to the creation of socially significant documentaries addressed to the problems of Depression America. But it was not until 1936, when the Roosevelt Administration through its various work programs gave financial backing to filmmaking, that American social documentary had any real impact.

Load more