Film Culture (October 1957)

DOCUMENTARY <REASSESSED I. THIS DOCUMENTARY BUSINESS THOROLD DICKINSON IN THE FIELD OF PUTTING IDEAS ON FILM, WORSHIP OF THE WORD “DOCUMENTARY” NEEDS TO BE REASSESSED. IT IS A HOPELESS CORRUPTION OF A TERM THAT HAS COME TO BE IDENTIFIED WITH “PAMPHLET FILMS” AND DULL NARRATIVES. It was Eisenstein who began it. Back in the early 1920’s when the Soviet Union was cut off from supplies of film material and manufactured none of her own, Eisenstein learned from D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance and Esther Shub’s re-editing of old bourgeois films into entertainment acceptable to the new Bolshevism. His roots were in the theater, but he was also a skilled and witty cartoonist with a strong interest in the new psychological studies of Freud. Eisenstein found that this medium for visualizing particular stories and anecdotes was also capable of generalizing in ideas. An idea could replace the hero and a conflict of ideas could bring to the screen heroism and villainy on a scale never yet attempted in the story film. The first four reels of October (known in the West as Ten Days that Shook the World and cut to ribbons by impatient Western distributors) form the best memorial to his innovation when screened in their original state. But before this, fired by the impact of Eisenstein’s earlier film, The Armoured Cruiser Potemkin, Grierson began his school of the factual film and invented the word documentary: defining its meaning as the creative imterpretation of reality. In fact to the present day singularly few films do indeed measure up to the standard of imaginative truth implied by this definition of the word documentary. Documentary as defined in the Concise Oxford dictionary means “furnishing evidence’, “alustrating human nature.” Yet documentary has come to include slippery propaganda (“oh so beautifully photographed”’), either “‘all pleasured up with happiness” or dutifully soured by angry men—no boredom is more deadly. A term that involves standards of quality is bound to run the risk of being misused. The creative element in a film is a matter of opinion, and steadily the meaning of the word documentary has been broadened indiscriminately until it has now become a label for any “‘live-action” non-fictional film. And incidentally it has become a synonym for non-popular entertainment, “box-office poison.” The film-business world knows so little about the art THOROLD DICKINSON, THE DIRECTOR OF GASLIGHT, THE QUEEN OF SPADES AND SEVERAL OTHER NOTABLE FILMS, IS AT THE PRESENT TIME THE CHIEF OF UNITED NATIONS FILM SERVICRHS, of cinema that the only way in which it can cope with this rich, wide field is to force its products arbitrarily into pigeonholes. I remember twenty-five years ago suggesting that an animation film could be made on a serious subject or as a moving diagram. The business men told me I was mad: the only purpose of a cartoon film was to be funny. Fifteen years ago, I made for the British War Office a military training film that turned out to be a tragic spy story.* Later the Ministry of Information released it for public exhibition. The film trade press was flummoxed: there was no pigeonhole for the film. Here was a realistic picture in which the leading character entered the film forty minutes after the beginning and did not appear in the climax at all. So the trade papers warned exhibitors, describing the film as a semi-documentary, a pigeonhole that contained a weird assortment of films. The film is still running in 1957. I find this forcing of films into categories ludicrous. I believe it academic to argue, for example, that Ov-the Bowery is a documentary and I do not agree with the British Film Academy’s endorsing this opinion of the film trade. On the Bowery is a realistic film, an anecdote with plenty of time to study its background. Many a background is far more cinematic than the foreground story that is worked into it. Film-makers who have the courage to take a background and distill from its typical components authentic dramatic situations deserve all the encouragement they can get. But that means practical support at the box-office—the positive ass/sfance (as the French say) of the audience. To me, then, live-action cinema is not a continuum having fiction and documentary as its opposite poles. Instead, I see at one end the cinema’s well-known ability to particularize, to “tell” a particular story or anecdote clearly, pungently, and concisely, with joy to the eye and the oblique wit of comment (rather than information) to the ear. Herein lies its separateness from theater and television. Cinema is still the most visual of the dramatic media: in true cinema, sound is for comment and allusion, not for sustaining the story. At the other end of this continuum stands the great but untapped potential of film to generalize—to explore theories and to dramatize ideas. When one reassesses the scope of cinema from this point of view, individual films begin to stand out from the crowd by reason of their quality (to the individual spectator) irrespective of their kind. A new generation may someday arise, unaware that a film which creatively interprets reality could ever have been shunned as being incapable of popularity. A good film of any kind would then be regarded as a good film. Ironically, television (to which more and more people are listening every day, as a man from steam radio loves to assert) has helped to congeal the term documentary yet more firmly in the genre of the illustrated lecture. It has accepted the challenge to generalize more wholeheartedly than the cinema, but it insists—partly from economic pressure—that sound carry the burden and the image act as a graphic comment. *Tbe Next of Kin, 1941,