CFA: Documentary film styles – history and theory of a genre

From: Andrea Adams <[email protected]>

Dear Leo Enticknap, dear all,

thanks a lot for your email and your elaborate commentary on our CfA. You are certainly right in many of your given examples.  We tried to give a brief summary of the theory and history of documentary film to encourage further discussion about this subject. Nevertheless, a CfA is concise in nature and therefore can only present a more or less broad idea of a topic. As you might know, neither sociology nor history recognize documentary film as a research field yet. Therefore, it is our intention to further discussion between the disciplines, including the research problems you mentioned.
It seems like there are a good number of starting points for interesting articles in the aspects you mentioned in your email. We would very much look forward to a contribution by yourself or others who would like to take on one or more of these points of discussion.
Kind regards
Carsten Heinze, Guest Editor InterDisciplines
Andrea Adams, Managing Editor InterDisciplines 

Carsten Heinze
[email protected]
Universität Hamburg 
FB Sozialökonomie 
FG Soziologie 
Welckerstraße 8 
20354 Hamburg
-- 
Andrea Adams
Managing Editor InterDisciplines

Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology (BGHS)
Bielefeld University | P.O. Box 10 01 31 | 33501 Bielefeld | Germany

Room: K4-123 |Phone: 
+49 (0)521 106 6523



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From: Leo Enticknap <[email protected]>

There are some serious misconceptions and problematic assertions in
this text.

     "The documentary film is a non-fiction film genre that has
     tried to distance itself from its counterpart, the narrative 
     movie..."

So non-fiction by definition and without exception means
non-narrative?!

    " The history of film distinguishes between the early
     studio works of Georges Méliès ("A Trip to the Moon", 
    1902) and the "Actualités" of the Lumière brothers. Méliès 
    worked narratively with fictional content in an artificial studio, 
    whereas the Lumière brothers produced images from social 
    reality ("Workers leaving the factory" and "Arrival of a train 
    in La Ciotat", 1895)."

If one stopped reading histories of film after those produced by the 
Roger Manvell/Rachael Low generation, I can understand how one 
would be convinced that the dichotomy is as simple as that. There are, 
however, countless contempories of the Lumières and Méliès who 
worked interchangeably between fiction and non-fiction: Oskar Messter, 
Cecil Hepworth and Edwin S. Porter to name but three...

     "During the First World War documentary films were shown as 
     newsreels (Wochenschauen) for propaganda purposes
     and were censored strictly."

Scholarship on the newsreel (work by, for example, Raymond Fielding, 
Nicholas Pronay and Luke McKernan) has tended to distinguish it from 
other forms of non-fiction cinema, both on institutional grounds and in 
terms of the modes of production, distribution and reception (for one thing, 
in most of Europe and the US during the inter-war period, newsreels were 
the only non-fiction films to have been screened regularly in commercial 
cinemas). Not all - and arguably, not even most - can be considered 
propaganda, assuming that you define it as an attempt to promote and/or 
suppress political ideas by state agencies. And again, the nature and 
extent of newsreel censorship varied enormously from country to country 
and issue to issue.

The term 'documentary' as it was initially defined by Grierson
specifically excluded newsreels, largely for ideological reasons: G was
to all intents and purposes a communist, who regarded all commercial
cinema as inferior (except on the rare occasions when it paid his wages,
notably during the brief period he worked for March of Time's London
office in the mid-30s). There could be an argument for incorporating
them into a definition being used now, but you do need to be clear what
you mean by the word 'documentary' as a noun or adjective. The meaning
intended by its inventor is very different from the one in widespread,
colloquial use today.

    "Documentary sub-genres first developed in the 1920s"

Really? Again, if we accept your definition of documentary - in effect, a 
synonym for non-fiction - then the phantom ride, the factory gate film, 
the scientific film and many other groups of films which it could be argued 
constitute a coherent genre go back almost as far as the cinema itself.

    "Against the background of the economic crisis and the danger of 
    war, British documentary filmmaker John Grierson supported the
    maintenance and stabilization of Western democracy."

Actually, G spent the war in exile in Canada, having in effect been forced out 
of the UK just before its outbreak as the result of having back-stabbed just 
about everyone who employed him or worked with him. He played no part in 
the WWII propaganda of any of the principal combatant nations, apart from
writing long and sanctimonious letters to his former Documentary Movement 
colleagues in London telling them how he thought they ought to make their 
films (a selection of which survive in the Paul Rotha papers at UCLA, 
incidentally).

    "Der ewige Jude" ("The Eternal Jew", 1940) by Fritz Hippler is an 
    illustration of how the format documentary film was used for the 
    purpose of propaganda. This led to the crisis of the documentary 
    film after 1945."

I only really have any expert knowledge on the situation in Britain in the 
immediate post-war period (see my PhD thesis - 
http://www.enticknap.net/leo/ldge_thesis.htm), but can confidently tell you 
that in this country at least, any "crisis of documentary" had nothing 
whatsoever to do with Nazi propaganda; except, possibly, that it left an 
ideological legacy of state-sponsored filmmaking being considered 
disreputable by the public. During the war itself, Grierson's former 
colleagues persuaded the government to spend an awful lot of 
taxpayers' money making propaganda films, most of which were 
non-fiction, on the grounds of the war effort. When the war finished, a 
Labour (socialist) government was elected, and those same filmmakers 
persuaded it to continue the programme on a similar scale, largely 
because Labour liked the idea of people being made to watch films 
telling them what to do and think, and the hard core remnants of the 
Documentary Movement (which by this stage had been re-joined by
Grierson in 1948, after he was kicked out of the US, allegedly for
communist spying) (a) also liked that idea, and (b) wished to continue
working, and had alienated the commercial film industry so much that
they were unemployable anywhere else (as the decline of Rotha's and
Wright's careers dramatically demonstrates). This state of affairs
lasted until the Conservative (centre-right) Party replaced Labour at
the 1951 election, who agreed with the public that the government 
should not be in the movie business, and promptly closed down most of 
this activity. If you have had the misfortune to have to watch any of the
COI-sponsored films made during the 1945-51 period, then excepting a
tiny minority of its output, your likely response will be 'Not before time!'. 
The term "crisis of documentary" was invented in part by Documentary 
Movement writers and in part by their sympathisers among the press 
critics, who, as John Ellis's research established, sought to link the 
notions of 'realism' and 'quality', motivated mainly by anti-American 
xenophobia (i.e. their desire to put a nationalist, distinct-from-Hollywood 
spin on the idea of realism).

Leo

---
Leo
Enticknap
Institute of Communications Studies
2.35, Clothworkers'
Building North
University of Leeds
LS2 9JT
United Kingdom
My personal
website [1]
My page on the University of Leeds's website [2]
My page on
academia.edu [3]

Links:
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[1] http://www.enticknap.net
[2]
http://ics.leeds.ac.uk/staff/leo
[3]
http://leeds.academia.edu/enticknap