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or "evasive" as applied to that type of picture are preferable to the term "escapism." For "escapism" lays the emphasis on and evaluates the picture in subjective terms of the director's mind; and not as an objective sociological phenomenon.
Idyllic documentary is documentary in decay, documentary with pernicious anaemia. It is the wax moth of true documentary. It changes the nature of documentary, gives it a new quality, a new form. It may be realistic, deal with actual people and things; but realism inheres not alone in the material used but in the material plus treatment. It is the purpose to which a film dealing with natural material is put that classifies it and not the material employed.
It is necessary to define what we mean by documentary before we can solicit the agreement of readers or proceed to discuss the pictures of Flaherty. Documentary or documentary pictures may be defined as the imaginative delineation through the medium of films employing natural material of current social struggle and conflict; the word "social" is used in its widest sense, embracing political, economic and cultural aspects of modern life. This definition follows from a generally accepted dictum that if cinema is to mean anything it must serve a purpose beyond itself, have some justification other than its own very medium. If that is true, there is one purpose above all others that is of paramount importance to-day — that of making a living. But it is not man's relationship with nature and the forces of production in our modern world which is the true subject of documentary, not the Industrial Britain or Cinemagazine approach. Production to-day is adequate for our needs. The struggle is in a different sphere. It is the relationship of man with his fellow man within the existing economic structure of society, his struggle to abolish hunger and unemployment, earn a decent wage and, finally, equate distribution with production — ■ these problems are the taut sinews of modern capitalism. Man's struggle with nature to wrest from her his means of subsistence has lost importance to-day. It is his struggle for the right to divert what he has produced to the interests of humanity that is the vital question. And it is there that documentary has its justification, in truthfully depicting modern economic relationships, in rendering audiences conscious of their interests, of their economic claims, aware of their remedy. That is the true sphere of documentary if it is to serve the most urgent purpose beyond itself.
In the light of the above definition let us consider the position of Flaherty. We are accepting the excellence of his cutting, his fine photography and that superb feeling he has for cinema. These formal attributes are admitted without question. They merely make more regrettable the loss that documentary has suffered by his idyllicism.