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THE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY PROTECTION OF AUTHOR ’S COPYRIGHT This copy has been supplied by the Library of the University of Otago on the understanding that the following conditions will be observed: 1. To comply with s56 of the Copyright Act 1994 [NZ], this thesis copy must only be used for the purposes of research or private study. 2. The author's permission must be obtained before any material in the thesis is reproduced, unless such reproduction falls within the fair dealing guidelines of the Copyright Act 1994. Due acknowledgement must be made to the author in any citation. 3. No further copies may be made without the permission of the Librarian of the University of Otago. August 2010 DECLARA1-'1ON CONCERNING THESIS PRESENTED FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF _~~~"""':'-- .-...- _ solemnly and sincerely declare, in relation to the thesis entitled: (a) That work was done by me, personally and (b) The material has not previously been accepted in whole, or in part, for any other degree or diploma John Grierson, the NZNFU and the Art of Propaganda. David Hoskins A Thesis submitted for the degree of Master of Arts At the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand 6 February, 2007. Abstract This thesis sets out to investigate the role played by the New Zealand National Film Unit documentaries in moulding perceptions of nation and culture, focussing on the period from 1900 to 1960. At its core, the thesis argues for a greater appreciation of the influence of New Zealand film documentary produced in the first sixty years of the zo" century precisely because such an appreciation uncovers films that represent a corpus of panoptic cinema. Such a panoptic cinema was fostered and used powerfully by successive governments, who utilised state-funded film production in the promotion of a surveillance culture that appropriated and represented sections of New Zealand society, such as Maori and the working class in the service of the state. Put another way, their on-screen representation was determined largely by the propagandist requirements of the state. The New Zealand documentaries, newsreels, propaganda and training films, represent an evolutionary mission to mediate a 'film truth' that, despite different ideological stances throughout the period under discussion, collectively celebrate the achievements of the state. In other words, this film corpus served to maintain state hegemony. To locate such film production and its aesthetic origins, 1have undertaken a contextual study of John Grierson and his documentary model that came to be exported to many parts of the British Empire, including New Zealand. This thesis seeks to investigate this historical and evolutionary project that sought to record, educate, manipulate, promote and illustrate New Zealand for mass audiences within the context of commercial cinema exhibition. In the absence of any major fiction film tradition of the period under discussion, the documentary film is, I wish to contend, the single most important cultural artefact remaining of the various government sponsored film projects of the 20th century. It is also a resource little recognised beyond archival diseipline and under-represented in general historieal literature. While various seetions of the New Zealand eommunity were unproblematically used on-screen by the state, such as the working class, women in the wartime economy, technologically progressive farmers, post-World War 2 immigrants from Great Britain, this thesis focuses on the manner in which images of Maori have evolved in New Zealand documentary during this period. The National Film Unit productions, despite their relatively brief time-span, lack of technical finesse and popularist tone nevertheless represent a form of panoptic einema. The origins of such a cinema are to be found in the documentary forms developed by Grierson and form a link, not only to imperial strategies but also provide evidence of the role of New Zealand film production in the post-colonial construction of national identity. 11 Acknowledgment In the researching of this thesis, great, and cheerful, assistance was rendered to me by staff at the following: The Grierson Archive, University of Stirling, Perthshire, Scotland, The Film Archive, Wellington, The Hocken Library, Dunedin, The Australian Film Archive, Melbourne, Australia, and the Parliamentary Library, Wellington. Without the expert help of these people, my research would have been fraught with the most extreme difficulties. Grateful thanks must go, also, to the staff of the Otago Settlers Museum and Dunedin Public Art Gallery for assistance with film stock and viewing facilities. I would like to take this opportunity to pay tribute to my academic supervisor, Dr. Vijay Devadas, Department of Media, Film and Communications Studies, University of Otago, for his wise counsel, extraordinarily fine editing and ever-insightful critique of my work. Finally, I would like to dedicate such work as I offer here to my late mother, Evelyn Edmundson, who died during the writing of Chapter 3. Her warm encouragement of my academic efforts was received with the deepest appreciation by her son, and now sadly missed. !ll Table of Contents Title Page Abstract 11 Acknowledgements III Table of Contents IV Introduction 1 Chapter One: Locating the Origins of Cinematic Documentary 7 Form Chapter Two: Documentary Film: From Soviet Montage to 24 British Cinematic Bureaucracy Chapter Three: John Grierson and the British Documentary Film 44 Movement, 1926-1946 Chapter Four: Grierson's Cinematic Pilgrimages 65 Chapter Five: New Zealand's National Film Unit: Showing Forth 85 the Works of the State Chapter Six: Resurrecting the Warrior: War and Beyond 116 Conclusion 143 Bibliography 147 Note on the Use of Film 157 Filmography 158 IV Introduction On December 28, 1895, August and Louis Lurniere staged the first public film screening in the basement lounge of the Grand Cafe on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris. The film, entitled L'Arrivee d'un train a La Ciotat, L' was simply a shot of one minute's duration showing a mail train arriving at the La Ciotat railway station. I Audiences at the first showing were so impressed with the realism of the film that many ran from the theatre thinking the train would enter the room. Less than twelve months later, on October 13, 1896, Professor's Hausmann and Gow introduced and presented a selection of short films during a performance of Charles Godfrey's Vaudeville Company at the Opera House, Auckland. This first public screening of motion picture film in New Zealand marks the beginning of a chronicling of the landscape, structures, peoples and events of, and in, New Zealand throughout the 20th Century. Despite the traditional suspicron of historians to equate film with an accurate, unmediated, recording process, the National Film Unit corpus remams something seldom referred to, in depth, in discussions of New Zealand film. One criticism of utilising film as a historical record is that of Dominick LaCapra who notes that film can sometimes be used as tool to historicise, but which is, 'limited to plausibly filling in the gaps in the record'< Such a questioning of film's ability to record without mediation has led to documentary film becoming an integral part of historical debate surrounding cinematic record. Scholars such as Robert Sklar (1988) and Robert Rosenstone (2006), for example, seek to utilise film resources as part of historical I L' Arrive dun train a La Ciotat. L'. (Auguste and Louis Lurniere, dirs., Lurniere Films, France, 1895, I min.). 2 LaCapra, Dominick. History and Criticism. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1985, p. 18. 1 recording.' In the context of New Zealand's recording of the zo" Century and the moulding of perceptions of nation and eulture, sueh a body of film represents a resource permitting an archival retrieval of historical information. Film as document, however, cannot be viewed merely in the isolation of 'this is the way we were', as an unmediated representation of the way in which the nation and national culture existed. Chapter One proposes to return to the context of early literary and artistic traditions of mimicry, mimesis and the later Frankfurt School's social and relational contexts of the visual for the purposes of demonstrating how such national cultures are formed through film. The New Zealand body of film - of doeumentaries, newsreels, propaganda and training films - represents an evolutionary mission to mediate a 'film truth' that, despite different ideological stances throughout the period under discussion uniformly celebrate the state. In Chapter Two the historical context of the state's role in visualising both its mission and celebration of its achievements is explored through the Soviet tradition of propagandist cinema - its technical innovation, creative use of such devices as typage and montage and appeal to popular sentiment - which all impacted on the work of John Grierson and the early British documentarists. Grierson himself is profiled in Chapter Three, as is his role in developing a film form and production method that became synonymous with the term documentary. Chapter Four discusses the complex late-imperial relationships that enabled Grierson to export his documentary-style throughout much of the British Empire, which provided a methodological impetus to the idea of a New Zealand state- funded film product that operated for much of the first half of the 20th century. 3 See: SkIar, Robert. 'Oh' Althusser! In Radical History Review 41, Spring, 1988. pp. 10-35; and Rosenstone, Robert. History on Film/Film on History. HarIow, U.K: Pearson Education Ltd., 2006. 2 The earliest known survivmg footage of New Zealand-made film is that commissioned by the New Zealand Government to record parts of a Royal Visit in 1901. From the beginning of the creation and exhibition of film in New Zealand there has been a recourse to a fictive, verdant landscape against which the state placed Maori as the exotic Other for tourist promotional purposes.