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202 III. COMPOSITION
gin with the films of the first group— those in which the visuals serve as the main source of communication— many among them are hardly more than straight pictorial records of this or that segment of the world around us. No doubt their "objectivity" is bought at the price of intensity. Yet impersonal as they may be— recalling the image which Proust's narrator formed of his grandmother when watching her with the eyes of a stranger —they do meet the minimum requirement of the medium.
A perfect example is the early British documentary Housing Problems, a plea for better housing done mostly by interviewing housewives of the London slums in front of the camera. Cinematically, this report is anything but exciting, for it confines itself to photographic statements which could not be plainer. [Illus. 38] Now note that their plainness is in harmony with the whole character of the film. Housing Problems visibly rests upon the conviction that you cannot get mature people interested in the issues at stake unless you show them what life in the slums is like. So Edgar Anstey and Arthur Elton, the directors of this documentary, quite sensibly confront the spectator with real slum dwellers and have him listen to their complaints about rats, broken ceilings, and plumbing.15 (The large role assigned to the verbal contributions may be discounted here for the sake of argument; this is all the more possible since much information flows from the visuals also.) The thing that matters is veracity; and it is precisely the snapshot quality of the pictures which makes them appear as authentic documents. An aesthetically more impressive depiction of the slums might indeed have interfered with the intended effect by inducing the audience to conceive of the film as a subjective comment rather than an unbiased report. The commonplace photography in Housing Problems is a product of deliberate self-restraint on the part of its directors. Significantly, Graham Greene praises Anstey for having been "superbly untroubled by the aesthetic craving."16 Perhaps the film is free from any such craving also because of its theme. Joris Ivens relates that during the shooting of Borinage, a documentary about the miners in this Belgian coal district, he and Henri Storck realized that their very subject demanded that they turn from aesthetic refinement to photographic "simplicity." [Illus. 39] "We felt it would be insulting to people in such extreme hardship to use any style of photography that would prevent the direct honest communication of their pain to every spectator."17 Human suffering, it appears, is conducive to detached reporting; the artist's conscience shows in artless photographs.
imaginative readings
However, self-restraint is not always a virtue. His preference for strict veracity notwithstanding, the documentary maker may approach the