We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
THEFILMOFFACT 209
Upon the advent of sound, documentary makers preoccupied with mental reality were in a position to resort to the spoken word, decidedly the most suitable vehicle for conceptual reasoning and ideological communications. It was the easiest way out. So pictorial symbolism by and large yields to excessive commentary— a change in style which has given rise to the misconception that the uncinematic neglect of the visuals must be laid to the dominance of speech. This is not so. Rather, the example of the silent Russian films proves conclusively that the dominance of speech itself results from the primary concern with intellectual or ideological topics and that it is essentially the absorption in the latter which accounts for that neglect.
Documentaries exploring mental reality with the aid of speech have already been discussed in chapter 9; it has also been mentioned there that they usually follow the pattern set by the March of Time.* What still remains to be considered is the sad fate of their imagery. Do the visuals at least illustrate the self-contained verbal narration which is the very backbone of these films? Take Our Russian Ally, one of the Canadian World in Action documentaries which Grierson produced or supervised during World War II in an effort to imbue topical information with propaganda appeals: it includes a passage in which a few shots of Russian soldiers and tanks moving through the snow languish on the screen while the commentator holds forth :
From the trenches of Leningrad to the gates of Rostov they stood to arms all through the bitter winter of 1941. All winter long they wrote across the bloodstained snow a chapter of heroism of which the greatest armies of history might be proud. And come what may, on this two thousand mile battlefront where the titanic forces of the swastika and the red badge of courage struggle for dominion over one-sixth of the earth's surface, Russia knows that her true war power lies not alone in arms and equipment but in the inner spirit of a people.27
This scene with the voice from the tomb is quite typical, as can be inferred from the verdict which Richard Griffith passes on many films of the World in Action series. Their visuals, says he "were slapped to the portentous, stentorian commentary in a fashion so meaningless as to leave the spectator neither knowing nor caring what he was looking at; he might as well have been at home listening to a broadcast."28 Griffith's criticism is very much to the point. The few shots of Russian soldiers and tanks in the above example have no recognizable bearing whatever on the wordy eulogy of Russian heroism with which they are synchronized. Not only does the sheer impact of the commentator's oratory automatically smother
*Scep. 119.