Film Culture (1956)

In them compositional considerations seem to rival with documentary intentions; and they palpably try to round out the given incident— perhaps even by infusing fictional elements. Cavalcanti-Watt’s North Sea (1938) is a case in point. Here also, possibly, belong Potemkin and such Russian films about the Revolution, or parts of them, as re-enact actuality with the emphasis on typical individuals. (Would Flaherty have approved of the re-enactment? He mainly confined himself to actuality itself.) Films like these obviously lie in the border region that separates the documentary from the story film. Hence the difficulty of classifying them. If their story does not extend beyond the typical and is kept so subdued that we feel it serves intensely to familiarize us with the world about us, they may still fall under the title of documentaries. This is how Rotha defines North Sea; he calls it a documentary “on the verge of being a story film.” If, on the other hand, films in the border region feature a story which attains to such an autonomy that it threatens to obscure the non-story texture of shots rendering actuality (and thus to weaken audience interest in the latter) they should rather be labelled story films on the verge of being documentaries. One might enter Potemkin under the last heading. But there is no purpose in trying to achieve clear-cut distinctions in this region. For the transition between documentaries with a found story of high distinctness and the story film proper—especially the semz-documentary, this sub-genre of the episode film—is actually fluid. e) Finis Terrae Epstein’s silent Frnis Terrae (1928-29) exemplifies the difficulties that arise in the border region between documentary and feature film. Indeed, it represents a clumsy attempt to fuse into each other a documentary on Breton fishermen and a story found in the reality covered— at least found in the sense that it was drawn from the columns of a local newspaper. Epstein does not succeed in bridging the gap between the fabric of documentary shots and the narrative proper. An analysis of this interesting failure again sheds light on the cinematic merits of Flaherty’s approach; since Flaherty literally found his story by exploring, with the aid of his camera, the life of the people in whose midst he lived, his documentary account and his “slight narrative’ interpenetrate each other from the very outset. C. THE EPISODE a) Introduction 1) Definition The term “episode” is used here to define a story form essentially determined by the following feature: it emerges from and again dissolves into the “flow of life,” as suggested by camera explorations of physical reality. Whether or not the flow of life is identical with actuality and the story itself real or fictional has little bearing on the character of the episode. The episode is cinematic inasmuch as, by definition, its intrigue, whether a fragmentary incident or a contrived story, points up the flow of life, endorsing the latter’s supremacy. (The fact that many existing episode films are adapted from short stories is by no means inconsistent with the cinematically neutral nature of this literary form.) 2) Relation to the found story Any found story of higher distinctness—think of Louisiana Story and, of course, North Sea— may as well be considered an episode. Yet the reverse does not hold true. An episode need not assume the character of a found story, as is illustrated by Fiévre, Brief Encounter, Lonesome, Dead of Night and other pertinent films with a fictional flavor. Nor must it, sem-documentary fashion, be incorporated into actuality, whether genuine or reenacted, like the episodes of Pazsan, Bicycle Thief, Menschen am Sonntag, The Quiet One, The Little Fugitive, etc.; rather, the flow of life may disclaim its actuality character (silent comedy) or reflect that of a recent past (Cavalcade). Nor, finally, is the episode bound to render events or situations typical of the environmental life in which it is embedded. Episode films featuring extraordinary happenings and queer characters run true to type. (Examples: Dead of Night; the “Gigolo and Gigolette” episode with the lady high-diver in Encore; the episode of the old dancer with the youthful mask in Ophuls’ Maupassant package, Le Plaisir.) 3) Compositional varieties A film may picture one single episode (Brief Encounter) or string together several of them (Paisan; Dead of Night). In the last case the 3