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Most important, he has a greater freedom of interpretation than a story-film director, because it is the interpretation — the editing — that will bring life to his subject.
For this reason (and for the reason that documentary films are generally made on much lower budgets and therefore with smaller units) the documentary director is more completely in charge of production than is his story-film counterpart. The interpretation of a theme is so much a matter of fine personal judgments, that to spread the responsibility for writing, direction and editing between three separate individuals would be to impair the film's unity : it would, for example, be nonsensical to allot the editing of a documentary to an independently working editor — as is often done with story-films in Hollywood — for the acts of direction and editing are merely two stages of one creative process.
Thus the skill of the documentary director is essentially the skill of an editor. He must contrive to convey all the fine shades of meaning through the creative use of sound and by ensuring an eloquent flow of shot juxtapositions, for he has no actors through whom to express himself. More than with the fiction film, the editing process must begin long before the film reaches the cutting rooms.
Not until you come to cut do you realise the importance of correct analysis during camerawork and the essential need for preliminary observation. For unless your material has been understood from the inside, you cannot hope to bring it alive. No amount of cutting, short or otherwise, will give movement to shots in which movement does not already exist. No skill of cross-reference will add poetic imagery to your sequence if you have been unaware of your images during shooting. Your film is given life on the cutting-bench, but you cannot create life unless the necessary raw stuff is to hand. Cutting is not confined to the cutting-room alone. Cutting must be present all through the stages of production — script, photography and approach to natural material — finally to take concrete form as the sound is added.1
This need to obtain apt, incisive " raw stuff " before editing begins is demonstrated must forcefully in the production of the simplest form of documentary — the reportage film.
The aim of good film reportage is to convey the drama of natural events. At its simplest it is concerned solely with the presentation of natural happenings and does not set out to explore implications or to draw conclusions from its material. The method has been used in films like the monthly series of This Modern Age reviews, and is frequently applied when the aim is to spread
1 Documentary Film by Paul Rotha. Faber, 1936.
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