Reviewers at the time raised questions about intention and ethics, particularly concerning Man of Aran. Grierson and Paul Rotha, another leader of what came to be called the British documentary, celebrated Flaherty as a great artist who elevated documentary to be beautiful art rather than a mere record. For these two filmmakers, Flaherty lacked the social conscience and commitment to adaptation to the industrial age that typified their movement. In the middle of the Great Depression, Flaherty’s work irritated left-of-center critics. “Man’s struggle with Nature is incomplete unless it embraces the struggle of man with man,” leftist British critic Ivor Montagu wrote. “No less than Hollywood, Flaherty is busy turning reality into romance. The tragedy is that, being a poet with a poet’s eye, his lie is the greater, for he can make the romance seem real.”
After Flaherty’s death, critical opinion developed into two camps, which anthropologist Jay Ruby has called “Flaherty the myth” and “Flaherty the romantic fraud.” Flaherty’s widow, Frances, an indispensable enabler of all his projects, became the guardian of the flame. She celebrated what she called “The Flaherty Way,” which she described as a special ability to “surrender to the material,” so that Flaherty could share with viewers his “innocent eye” on the subject matter. She coined the term “non-preconception” to describe his approach—which she typified as intuitive, mystical, unerring. Helen van Dongen, Flaherty’s editor for his last two projects and the person who had carved stories out of footage, rejected the mystical claims of Frances Flaherty but celebrated him as a “visionary poet,” a “genius,” and an artist whose career was sadly crippled by the needs of commerce.
The growth of anticolonial consciousness, the rise of a nationalist cultural elite in the Cold War-era Third World, and the growth of self-reflexive anthropology all fueled the “Flaherty the romantic fraud” argument. Some argue that his man-versus-nature theme deepened unhelpful assumptions about indigenous peoples; indigenous people only seem to command our sentimental concern when we can keep them at a safe distance, where they provide a mental vacation for us. The man-versus-nature conflict further fostered an understanding of indigenous people as childlike or even petlike innocents, potential victims before civilization. It led people to look skeptically on political efforts of indigenous people to lay claim to the benefits of their existing relationship with larger economies. Jay Ruby has cautioned anthropologists, however, not to judge Flaherty too harshly before looking at their own practices.
The legacy of Robert Flaherty endures. The Story of the Weeping Camel (2003) features a family in the Gobi Desert that saves the life of a camel calf whose mother rejects it by staging a public ritual in which a musician sings to the camel. The story was scripted and invented by the filmmakers, one of whom was Mongolian. They represented life in the Gobi Desert as they imagine it might have been generations ago, with the help of cheerful nonactors in a constructed nuclear family. The film’s co-director Luigi Faloni, when asked his inspiration, said confessionally, “Well, you’ll laugh at me, but it was Nanook of the North.”
John Grierson
The career of John Grierson created conflicts and contradictions in documentary practice at least as great as those of Flaherty. Born in Scotland the son of a conservative Calvinist teacher, Grierson took up filmmaking as a powerful tool to address the problem that occupied his life: how to manage social conflicts in a democratic industrial society. After serving in World War I, he saw brutal labor conflicts, taught in a slum school, preached about good works, and finally won a Rockefeller fellowship in the United States. There he was influenced by pundit Walter Lippman, who argued that our increasingly complex society required professionals who could translate issues for the masses, who otherwise would become overwhelmed by the level of expertise needed to address any particular issue. Grierson was also drawn to the budding business of public relations, which had been born with late nineteenth century labor strife. Finally, he saw in Flaherty’s Nanook a compelling example of the power of film to bring audiences into another reality, and he was captivated by the ever-charming Flaherty himself. Writing about Moana, he celebrated its “documentary” quality, definitively naming the genre.
After he returned to Britain, he was able to persuade British officials of the power of documentary. It was a propitious time for such arguments. In 1927 John Reith, another Scot, became the head of the first public service broadcast in the world—the British Broadcasting Corporation, whose mission was educating and improving the public. The Great Depression exacerbated class tensions in Britain and made the alternative of socialism and even Communism seem plausible to many. In the same period, enormous movements of social reform also blossomed, such as those spurred by the New Deal in the United States. Artists of all kinds, especially those such as photographers and filmmakers whose subject matter was reality, saw art as inextricably intertwined with political and social reform.
Grierson was hired by the Empire Marketing Board to promote the very notion of empire. His superior unambiguously stated the point: “For the State, the function of official documentary is to win the consent of this new public for the existing order.” After making the only film he would ever direct—Drifters (1928), a documentary on herring fishing cannily produced to respond to an official’s interest in that business—he hired a group of young men and very few women, including his sister Ruby, to make films both for government and for large corporations. Industrial Britain (1932) was an attempt to wean Britons from their nostalgia for a simpler past. Grierson, however, made the mistake of hiring Flaherty to shoot the film. Before getting fired, Flaherty not only overran the budget but shot footage primarily of artisanship that would indeed evoke nostalgia. Housing Problems (1935), directed by Edgar Anstey and Ruby Grierson and paid for by a gas company and a housing agency, let slum dwellers explain the misery of their lot and lent support to the project of slum clearance. Night Mail (1936), by Basil Wright and Harry Watt with contributions from poet W. H. Auden and composer Benjamin Britten, followed a letter from mailbox to delivery, mostly on a mail train (the interior of the train was a set). It awed viewers with the intricate bureaucratic and industrial complexity of the government service, burnishing the reputation of the post office and underscoring the interlinked nature of modern society.
4. John Grierson saw documentary as a tool to promote social cohesion and insight; Night Mail celebrated the union of man and machine in British postal delivery. Directed by Harry Watt and Basil Wright, 1936.
Grierson and his “boys” vigorously promoted the notion of documentary as a tool of education and social integration, in lectures and writings. In 1932 Grierson celebrated the power of documentary to observe “life itself,” using real people who could help others interpret the world and real stories. This he contrasted to the “shim-sham mechanics” and “Woolworth intentions” of Hollywood-acted films. He heralded Flaherty’s ability to let reality dictate the story, although he hoped, referring to Flaherty’s romanticism, that “the neo-Rousseauianism implicit in Flaherty’s work dies with his own exceptional self.” The real challenge, he said, was to apply creativity to the “business of ordering most present chaos” and make a statement “which is honest and lucid and deeply felt and which fulfils the best ends of citizenship.” To do this, it was important to get beyond a focus on individuals and move along to processes.
Grierson became more strident about the social function of documentary, even at the expense of the “beautiful.” In 1942 he asserted, “The documentary idea was not basically a film idea at all” but “a new idea for public education.” He saw the state as a fair and neutral body to manage social democracy; he believed that corporations could use public relations for public good, if they depended on the truth. The fact that he endorsed using some of the same techniques as Nazi propagandists did not bother him: “You can be ‘totalitarian’ for evil and you can also be ‘totalitarian’ for good.” Grierson advocated the firm separation of documentary from entertainment cinema. Believing that
Hollywood was unbeatable and unjoinable, he argued that documentary should strive for noncommercial circuits and wholly different expectations among viewers.
Grierson became a consultant both to corporations and to governments, all looking for the latest tools in public relations. His influence was wide. In Canada, where he spent the bulk of World War II, he launched the National Film Board (NFB), which continues today. He consulted with both the U.S. and the British government. His colleague helped establish the Australian National Film Board. He advised leaders of the South African government; unfortunately, as Keyan Tomaselli has documented, there he fell victim to a ploy by pro-apartheid Afrikaners and recommended their proposals in the name of national unity. Grierson’s own role as a leader in documentary film, and indeed the British social documentary movement itself, collapsed after World War II. However, his vision of documentary as a social-education project profoundly influenced later makers.
Contemporary criticism of Grierson’s work largely focused on questions of effectiveness. Were the films too radical? They featured working people, which was a shock to many in Britain’s class-bound society. Were they going to be popular enough? Were they aesthetically daring enough? In response, Paul Rotha claimed in Documentary Film that the movement was “this country’s most important contribution to the cinema as a whole,” and that declaration became accepted wisdom internationally. Grierson became a revered, almost mythic figure of British and Canadian communications history, in part through the promotional efforts of the Griersonians themselves.
Later scholarship enthusiastically took on the challenge of demolishing the myth, as both Ian Aitken and Jack Ellis have well summarized. It also located Grierson in his time and place as an early champion of public relations. Some charged that Rotha’s claim ignored competing film efforts of the time and was somewhat self-serving. Others faulted Grierson’s work for naiveté about the implications of realism, and noted the male-oriented, middle-class culture celebrated in the films.
Although Grierson sometimes took the posture of and was accused of being a left-winger, later critics noted his conservatism and his desire to maintain the status quo. Joyce Nelson, looking closely at Grierson’s performance in Canada, argued that Grierson downplayed Canadian nationalism in service to Commonwealth unity, and that he supported Hollywood’s grip on Canadian screens with his separatist strategy for documentaries.
Perhaps Grierson’s harshest critic has been British scholar and ex-broadcast journalist Brian Winston, who argued that Grierson’s project poisoned the well for the form, which avoided responsibility for its role as truth teller by taking refuge in claims to art—that “creative treatment” of actuality. It did not engage with the challenges of art, however, dodging that responsibility by claiming that it was serving a higher social purpose. It avoided responsibility for that social purpose, its propaganda function, by claiming to be simply a truth teller. Finally, Grierson ignored evidence that his documentaries were not as widely seen as even minor products of commercial cinema, and that the nontheatrical circuit was driven by educational duty rather than appreciation of the documentary form. Griersonian documentaries were in bad faith, reinforcing the interests of those who funded them and stifling creativity. Filmmakers should be free, Winston argued, to tell the stories they think are important, without the pretentious claim of social service or mystical claims to a unique access to truth.
Elizabeth Sussex, who interviewed many of the proponents of Griersonian British documentary, has contended that Grierson’s vision of a form that could make viewers aware of their social context was indeed kept alive and handed down to another generation to do differently. Remarkably for a man who had boasted of world-changing, Rotha later said, “I don’t think the films themselves are the least bit important. What is important is the sort of spirit which lay behind them.”
Later critiques have grown to such prominence because the movement Grierson set in motion and so vigorously promoted left such a large footprint on documentary filmmaking. The writings of this group became key texts for aspiring filmmakers. The institutions Grierson created or inspired, particularly the Canadian National Film Board, have been important to documentary filmmakers. The notion of documentary film as a project with a social purpose at the core, and of the documentarian as an apostle of social progress, has been extremely persuasive, for better or worse. The business model of government or corporate support with noncommercial, nontheatrical distribution became broadly accepted. Flaherty made the rendering of reality an aesthetic virtue, and Grierson made it a social mission.
Dziga Vertov
The third founding figure in documentary is the revolutionary Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov (Denis Arkadievich Kaufman). Vertov was both a filmmaker and a polemicist on behalf of what in Russia were called “unplayed” (unstaged) films. He championed the unique truth value of “life caught unaware,” the unrehearsed moment. He believed that documentary was the perfect medium for revolution, that not only should it flourish but that fiction film be extinguished as a denial of the capacities of the form. As the Russian revolution ossified into dictatorship, he became a liability to the regime, and his work was ignored within the Soviet Union. For a decade after the Russian revolution, however, Vertov was a formative figure of cinema both in Russia and internationally. Although he became a “nonperson” in his home country’s cinema history during the Communist era, he remained an enduring inspiration to avant-garde artists and to documentarians everywhere.
Vertov headily mixed claims of art and science for documentary—the essence of the film medium for him. His dream was for film industries to emphasize “the ‘unplayed’ film over the play-film, to substitute the document for mise-en-scène, to break out of the proscenium of the theatre and to enter the arena of life itself.” He saw the camera as “the mechanical I … the machine showing the world as it is, which only I am able to see.” The camera was a cybernetic extension of the weak human capacity for sight; it could see panoramic vistas from great heights, peer into second-story windows, go great distances. He believed, with many others, that Marxism was a new science of society. For him, the magnificent science of the camera was to be merged with revolutionary Marxist analysis in the editing, to make a scientific tool of revolution, what he called a “Communist decoding” of the material. Thus, the power of machine was married to the power of ideology.
Film was the ideal medium for the new communist society being born in Russia, he believed, because it captured the truths of real life, it did not lie to or distract people, and because it exemplified the wondrous machine-driven modernism of which communism was the cutting edge. He disparaged what he called “art” film, meaning fiction entertainment. Vertov was also an avant-garde artist, and that is his lasting identification.
A Jew in an anti-Semitic country, the young Denis Kaufman gave himself the whimsical name Dziga Vertov (“spinning top”) while still in college. As a medical student at one of the few places that accepted Jews in the Europe-oriented Petrograd (St. Petersburg), he imbibed the artistic culture of modernism. He encountered Futurism, an avant-garde movement that celebrated the new, the modern, and the machine. And he fell in love with the works of American poet Walt Whitman.
Revolution gave him the opportunity to work on “agit-trains,” which sent revolutionary propaganda to fronts of conflict. He worked on newsreels and edited dozens of editions (ten to twenty minutes long) of Kino-Pravda (1925), or Cinema Truth. The name echoed that of the party newspaper Pravda and also made a claim for documentary’s power. The newsreels whisked viewers to farflung parts of the new Soviet Union, brought them news of political trials, showed them czarist tanks being redeployed to build public works, sports, accidents, and—a favorite—electrification. They celebrated the wonders of the urban, the modern, and the machine. They were shown throughout the country in front of fiction features, as well as in clubs and screenings in workplaces and rural areas. Vertov saw amazement and awe in the faces of peasants who had never
seen a film before.
As he worked on the newsreels, Vertov came to see more and more exciting possibilities in the medium; he became an evangelist for the unplayed or documentary film. He, his editor Elizaveta Svilova, who later became his wife, and his brother Mikhail Kaufman formed a “Council of Three.” The Council of Three gathered around them a group of devotees, calling themselves kinoks, or cinema-eyes. They issued provocative polemics and pronouncements such as “WE: Variant of a Manifesto,” which invited viewers away “from the sweet embraces of romance,/from the poison of the psychological novel,/from the clutches of the theatre of adultery,/with our backsides to music,” into “the open, into four dimensions (three plus time)/in search of our own material, our own meter and rhythm.”
Although Vertov dogmatically asserted the scientific wonder of the camera-eye and its capacity for truth-telling beyond human dimensions, like Grierson and Flaherty he also argued that the human storyteller was critical: “[I]t is not enough to show bits of truth on the screen, separate frames of truth. These frames must be thematically organized so that the whole is also a truth.” Like Flaherty’s “innocent eye” of the artist and Grierson’s claim to “creative treatment of actuality,” Vertov’s claim to the editor’s right to organize the chaos of real life into a communist truth was permission for the filmmaker to do exactly what he wanted. Each of them made radical claims for the truth-value of their work, all the while portraying the maker of this truthful rendering as an artist who needed the freedom to create.
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