A New History of British Documentary This page intentionally left blank A New History of British Documentary James Chapman University of Leicester, UK © James Chapman 2015 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-0-230-39286-1 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-35209-8 ISBN 978-0-230-39287-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230392878 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chapman, James, 1968– A new history of British documentary / James Chapman. pages cm Includes bibliographical references. 1. Documentary films—Great Britain—History and criticism. 2. Documentary television programs—Great Britain—History and criticism. I. Title. PN1995.9.D6C4345 2015 070.18—dc23 2014037997 In memory of Stuart Hall This page intentionally left blank Contents Preface ix Acknowledgements xii List of Abbreviations xiv Introduction: Critical and Historical Perspectives on British Documentary 1 1 Documentary Before Grierson 18 Early British non-fiction film 19 Mitchell and Kenyon: ‘See yourself as others see you’ 24 Battle of the Somme (1916) and the origins of British documentary 27 British Instructional Films and the documentary reconstruction 33 Epics of exploration 37 2 Documentary in the 1930s 41 The contexts of documentary 42 Documentary and mass communications 46 Documentary and the projection of Britain 51 Drifters (1929) and the Empire Marketing Board 55 Robert Flaherty and Man of Aran (1934) 62 The GPO Film Unit: The ‘Voice of the Nation’ 64 Independent documentary units: Shell, Strand, Realist and others 75 Documentary and the trade: distribution and exhibition 82 Documentary and the public: audiences and reception 85 3DocumentaryatWar 90 The Ministry of Information and documentary film 91 The Crown Film Unit 99 Humphrey Jennings and the people’s war 103 Target for Tonight (1941) and the story documentary 107 Desert Victory (1943), the Army Film Unit and actuality documentary 111 The progressive voice of wartime documentary 114 vii viii Contents 4 Post-War Documentary 123 Documentary and the post-war British film industry 124 The Central Office of Information and documentary film 129 The Crown Film Unit after the war 133 Land of Promise (1946) and documentaries of reconstruction 138 Documentary and the Festival of Britain 144 A Queen is Crowned (1953) and the heritage documentary 147 The NCB Film Unit and British Transport Films 150 Documentary and industrial sponsorship 160 Post-war social documentary 165 5 Television and Documentary 172 Institutional contexts 173 Technological and aesthetic contexts 178 Documentary and current affairs: Panorama, This Week, World in Action 182 Cathy Come Home (1966) and the documentary drama 188 Archival documentary: The Great War (1964) and The World at War (1973) 194 Observational documentary 198 Granada and the evolution of drama documentary 201 Continuity and change: Television documentary since the 1990s 208 6 Alternative and Oppositional Documentary 216 Political documentary in the 1930s 217 Free Cinema and its contexts 224 Peter Watkins and the alternative form in documentary drama 232 Cinema Action and ‘people’s films’ 237 Regional documentary practice: Amber Films 246 The Black Audio Film Collective and Handsworth Songs (1986) 252 Conclusion: British Documentary in Context 259 Notes 266 Bibliography 298 Index 312 Preface Why do we need another history of British documentary? This is, after all, a subject on which there is already an extensive critical and his- torical literature: documentary can hardly claim to be a marginalized or neglected component of British cinema history (even if it continues to be a relatively marginal mode of film practice). In fact, the present book has been conceived to fill a gap in the existing historiography. It was while reviewing the extant literature on the British documen- tary movement of the 1930s for an undergraduate survey module on British cinema that I realized there was room for a new history of the film-making tradition that was once famously described as ‘Britain’s out- standing contribution to the film’. It struck me that there was a need for a book that offered more detail than the essay-length overviews in the standard text books on British cinema such as Charles Barr’s All Our Yesterdays (1986) and Robert Murphy’s The British Cinema Book (1997) but at the same time was broader in scope than research monographs such as Paul Swann’s The British Documentary Film Movement, 1926–1946 (1989) and Ian Aitken’s Film and Reform: John Grierson and the Docu- mentary Film Movement (1990). A New History of British Documentary is perhaps best described as a partially researched text book in the sense that it combines a synthesis of existing work on the subject with some original primary-source research. So what is ‘new’ about A New History of British Documentary?This book differs from previous histories in three main ways. First it extends beyond the films produced under the aegis of the documentary ‘move- ment’ in the 1930s. All accounts of British documentary have to contend with the figure of John Grierson, who bestrides the subject like a colos- sus. Grierson is so widely regarded as the ‘father’ of British documentary that it seems redundant to attempt even to nuance let alone challenge this status. I do not deny Grierson’s importance to the history of doc- umentary film in Britain. But one of the things I want to show is that documentary did not begin and end with Grierson. Hence, Chapter 1 explores the history of pre-Griersonian documentary, while later chap- ters map the contours of documentary through the post-war decades when Grierson’s presence, though still felt, was less central than it had been during the 1930s. The standard histories of British documen- tary have tended to see the period after the Second World War as a ix x Preface narrative of decline during which documentary lost something of its progressive social purpose. In contrast, I argue that documentary diver- sified into new forms and practices as it adapted to changing historical contexts. The second ‘new’ feature of this book is that I have looked at both film and television documentary. Hitherto these have usually been treated separately and as being distinct from one another. This was brought home to me forcefully a few years ago when a research grant application by a colleague to examine the representation of the National Health Ser- vice in British film and television was turned down on the grounds ‘that it was unusual for studies to look at both cinema and television, and as such the project was too broad’! This view reflects a wider intellectual division between the disciplines of film studies and television studies: the latter in particular often tends to see itself as a distinct subject in its own right with its own theoretical and methodological perspectives rather than as an offshoot of film studies. Yet this ignores the signifi- cant crossovers between cinema and television at both institutional and formal levels. For example, there is a historical lineage of documentary reconstructions extending from British Instructional Films in the 1920s (Ypres, The Battles of the Coronel and Falkland Islands) via the work of the GPO and Crown Film Units (North Sea, Fires Were Started) to television drama documentaries such as Hillsborough and Bloody Sunday. The third defining feature of the book is that it is not a history of doc- umentary films but a history of documentary film (and ditto television). It explores the history of documentary practice in the film and television industries but does not aim to cover every documentary of note. It is therefore a history sketched in broad strokes rather than through close analysis of individual texts. Of course the important films are discussed: it would be perverse to write a history of British documentary that did not include such landmarks as Battle of the Somme, Drifters, The Song of Ceylon, Night Mail, Fires Were Started, Desert Victory, We Are the Lambeth Boys, Every Day Except Christmas, Cathy Come Home, The War Game, The World at War and Handsworth Songs. However, it is necessary to range beyond the established canon if we are to arrive at a better understand- ing of the place of documentary in British film and television history.