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Speaking Truths with Film
Evidence, Ethics, Politics in Documentary
By Bill Nichols UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2016 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-96458-7
CHAPTER 1
Documentary Film and the Modernist Avant-Garde
OVERTURE
How is it that the most formal and, often, most abstract of films and the most political, and sometimes, didactic of films arise, fruitfully intermingle, and then separate in a common historical moment? What motivated this separation and to what extent did it both succeed and fail? Our understanding of the relationship between documentary film and the modernist avant-garde requires revision. Specifically, we need to reconsider the prevalent story of documentary's "birth" in early cinema (1895–1905). How does this account, inscribed in almost all of our film histories, disguise this act of separation? What alternative account does it prevent?
Ostensibly, the origin of documentary film has long been settled. Louis Lumière's first films of 1895 demonstrated film's capacity to document the world around us. Here, at the start of cinema, is the birth of a documentary tradition. Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922) added plot development, suspense, and more fully delineated characters to recordings of the historical world. He gave the documentary impulse fresh vitality. And in 1929 John Grierson, the documentary film movement's greatest champion, used his own film portrait of North Sea fishing, Drifters, to convince the British government to establish a filmmaking unit within the Empire Marketing Board, an agency charged with the circulation of food products and the promotion of "empire" as, in Grierson's words, not the "command of peoples" but "a co-operative effort in the tilling of soil, the reaping of harvests, and the organization of a world economy." Grierson presided over an institutional base for documentary film production; thus, it was on his watch that documentary film practice reached maturity. It was not until I had the opportunity to prepare a paper comparing and contrasting the careers of Dutch avant-garde and documentary filmmaker Joris Ivens and Russian suprematist painter Kazimir Malevich that I began to wonder if this story of documentary's beginnings did not belong more to myth than to history.
The established story of documentary's beginnings continues to perpetuate a false division between the avant-garde and documentary that obscures their necessary proximity. Rather than the story of a very early birth and gradual maturation, I suggest that documentary film only takes form as an actual practice in the 1920s and early 1930s. Earlier efforts are less nascent documentaries than works organized according to different principles, both formal and social. The appearance of documentary involves the combination of three preexisting elements — photographic realism, narrative structure, and modernist fragmentation — along with a new emphasis on the rhetoric of social persuasion. This combination of elements itself became a source of contention. The most dangerous element, the one with the greatest disruptive potential — modernist fragmentation — required the most careful treatment. Grierson was greatly concerned by its linkage to the radical shifts in subjectivity promoted by the European avant-garde and to the radical shifts in political power promoted by the constructivist artists and Soviet filmmakers. He, in short, adapted film's radical potential to far less disturbing ends.
Modernist techniques of fragmentation and juxtaposition lent an artistic aura to documentary that helped distinguish it from the cruder form of early actualités or newsreels. These techniques contributed to documentary's good name, but they also threatened to distract from documentary's activist goals. The proximity and persistence of a modernist aesthetic in actual documentary film practice encouraged, most notably in the writings and speeches of John Grierson, a repression of the role of the 1920s avant-garde in the rise of documentary. Modernist elitism and textual difficulty were qualities to be avoided. The historical linkage of modernist technique and documentary oratory, evident since the early 1920s in much Soviet and some European work, failed to enter into Grierson's own writings. The same blind spot persists in subsequent histories of documentary film.
But even though the contribution of the avant-garde underwent repression in the public discourse of figures like Grierson, it returned in the actual form and style of early documentary itself. Repression conveys the force of a denial, and what documentary film history sought to deny was not simply an overly aesthetic lineage but the radically transformative potential of film pursued by a large segment of the international avant-garde. In its stead a more moderate rhetoric prevailed, tempered to the practical issues of the day. For advocates like Grierson the value of cinema lay in its capacity to document, demonstrate, or, at most, enact the proper, or improper, terms of individual citizenship and state responsibility.
My primary thesis is that a wave of documentary activity takes shape at the point when cinema comes into the direct service of various, already active, efforts to build national identity during the 1920s and 1930s. Documentary film affirms, or contests, the power of the state; that is, it addresses issues of public importance and affirms or contests the role of the state in confronting these issues. These acts of contestation, more than affirmation, were what initially drew me to the documentary tradition that ran from the work of the Film and Photo League in the 1930s to Newsreel in the 1970s. The radical potential of film to contest the state and its law, as well as to affirm it, made documentary an unruly ally of those in power. Documentary, like avant-garde film, casts the familiar in a new light, not always that desired by the existing governments. The formation of a documentary film movement required the discipline that figures like Grierson in Great Britain, Pare Lorentz in the United States, Joseph Goebbels in Germany, and Anatoly Lunacharsky and Andrei Zhdanov in the Soviet Union provided for it to serve the political and ideological agenda of the existing nation-state.
The modernist avant-garde of Man Ray, Rene Clair, Hans Richter, Louis Delluc, Jean Vigo, Alberto Cavalcanti, Luis Buñuel, Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, and the Russian constructivists, among others, exceeded the terms of this binary opposition of affirmation and contestation centered on the bourgeois-democratic state. It proposed alternative subjects and subjectivities until the consolidation of socialist realism, the rise of fascism and Stalinism, the necessities of exile, and the exigencies of the Great Depression depleted its resources. From the vantage point of the avant-garde, the state and issues of citizenship were obscured by questions of perception and consciousness, aesthetics, the unconscious, actions, and desire. These questions were more challenging imperatives than those that preoccupied the custodians of state power.
THE STORY OF ORIGINS AND A QUESTION OF MODELS
By 1930, with the adoption of sound in the cinema and the onset of a global depression, documentary had gained recognition as a distinct form of filmmaking. What brought it into being? The standard histories assume the existence of a documentary tradition, or impulse, that long precedes the formation of a documentary movement or institutional practice. This ancestral pedigree guarantees documentary's birthright, but, as we will see, it also poses a problem. If the documentary form was latent in cinema from the outset, why did it take some thirty years before Grierson would bestow the name documentary on it?
In the familiar story of documentary's ancestral origins it all begins with cinema's primal love for the surface of things, its uncanny ability to capture life as it is. Documentary represents the maturation of what was already manifest in early cinema with its immense catalogue of people, places, and things culled from around the world. British documentary filmmaker and historian Paul Rotha wrote in 1939 that documentary left the confines of fiction for "wider fields of actuality, where the spontaneity of natural behaviour has been recognized as a cinematic quality and sound is used creatively rather than reproductively. This attitude is, of course, the technical basis of the documentary film."
Film historian Jack Ellis followed a similar line some fifty years later. Documentary "could be said to have begun with the birth of film itself. The filmed recordings of actuality in the experiments of technicians at the Edison laboratory in West Orange, N.J., might qualify." Erik Barnouw, author of the most widely used history of documentary film, opens his account with a reference to the early pioneers of the 1890s, who "felt a compelling need to document some phenomenon or action, and contrived a way to do it. In their work the documentary film had prenatal stirrings."
In these origin stories Rotha, Ellis, and Barnouw associate nascent documentary film production with the photographic, or indexical, documentation of preexisting phenomena. The passage from document to documentary, then, follows an evolutionary progression. Prenatal stirrings become adult strides once we add an infusion of mature narrative stock in the form of Flaherty's Nanook of the North and Grierson's robust organizing skills. According to Thompson and Bordwell, Grierson, like a Promethean hero, animates this slumbering giant all by himself: "The burgeoning of the documentary mode resulted largely from the efforts of Scottish-born John Grierson." As Grierson himself puts it, "There is money for films which will make box-office profits, and there is money for films which will create propaganda results. These only. They are the strict limits within which cinema has had to develop and will continue to develop." Documentary film form thus brings to life the cinema's unfulfilled propagandistic (or oratorical) potential. Put differently, this origin myth begs the question: if photography and film possessed the capacity to document from the outset, why must we wait three decades after the beginnings of cinema for an actual documentary film movement to appear? Is this not necessarily a decisive historical act rather than a natural evolutionary progression?
The alternative history presented here underscores how the appearance of documentary film involves conditions peculiar to the moment of its inception after World War I rather than its purported ancestry. Well-established elements of cinema are brought into play. They only take documentary form in specific historical circumstances that function as "innovative spurs, movements that launch new energies." Apart from such circumstances, potentialities would remain dormant or contribute to quite different waves or genres. Origin myths of distant ancestors and elaborate pedigree legitimate a new genre by equipping it with a distinctive lineage traceable to the birth of cinema itself. Not coincidentally, such myths deflect scrutiny from the similarity and overlap between 1920s documentary and the avant-garde. They also rationalize the enforcement of boundaries to separate documentary from "obviously" unrelated alternatives like the avant-garde.
In fact, of the four elements that contribute to the formation of a documentary film wave, only one had been in place since 1895: the capacity of cinema to record visible phenomena with great fidelity. To this capacity we must add three elements: (1) the gradual elaboration of narrative codes and conventions distinct to cinema (1905–15) that allow any film to utilize a storytelling structure capable of inspiring belief in its representational gestures, largely through emphasis on vivid characters, linear actions, and the cinematic organization of time and space via continuity, parallel, and point-of-view editing; (2) the least acknowledged element: a wide array of modernist, avant-garde filmmaking practices that flourish throughout the 1920s; and (3) a range of techniques intended to achieve persuasive, rhetorical engagement.
None of these elements alone leads to the appearance of documentary film. Each leads elsewhere as well. Rather than tracing a line of descent for documentary, it will be more profitable to describe each element briefly and to indicate how it came to contribute to the appearance of a documentary film form in the period between the wars.
PHOTOGRAPHIC REALISM
Like scientific documentation, the "cinema of attractions," described by Tom Gunning as the prevalent pre-1906 mode of representation, relies on the authenticating effect of camera optics and photographic emulsions to generate images that bear a precise set of relations to that which they represent. Both scientific evidence and carnival-like attractions exhibit noteworthy aspects of the world with indexical precision. Such images readily serve as documents but not documentaries. In science they offer proofs or record phenomena beyond what the eye can see. As "attractions" they solicit "spectator attention, inciting visual curiosity, and supplying pleasure through an exciting spectacle — a unique event, whether fictional or documentary, that is of interest in itself."
Unfettered from narrative structure or scientific analysis, a cinema of attractions is a form of excitation, exhibitionism, or spectacle. It engenders an effect comparable to the effect of reality TV shows such as Cops or Survivor, namely, "Isn't this amazing!" We witness strange, violent, dangerous, or catastrophic events but receive only minimal analysis of them. A program on ABC in January 2000 entitled "Out of Control People" provided a latter-day Mondo Cane–like catalogue of soccer rioting, college-student rampages, prison uprisings, and other examples of its own title with small snippets of commentary from "experts" who make reference to mob behavior and group psychology. The intent of the program was clearly far more sensationalistic than educational. The sensationalism gained immeasurably from the use of "documentary" images of actual events.
As the surrealists were eager to demonstrate, the language of sensationalism could also readily insinuate itself into the protocols of science. Lisa Cartwright has carried this insight into the belly of scientific experimentation to chronicle the misuses of documentary images in work that purports to follow scientific procedure but detours toward issues of morbidity and spectacle. Such an effect underscores a sense of amazement, and sometimes outrage, rather than rational understanding. Allan Sekula notes that documentary work can amass a mountain of evidence, "and yet, in this pictorial presentation of scientific and legalistic 'fact,' the genre has simultaneously contributed much to spectacle, to retinal excitation, to voyeurism, to terror, envy and nostalgia, and only a little to the critical understanding of the social world."
In classic surrealist/dadaist form the pretensions to knowledge that allow exotic travelogues to masquerade as scientific statement became the direct target of Luis Buñuel's unsettling account of poverty in Spain's Las Hurdes region, Land without Bread (1932), itself a work with a fascinating precursor in Adrian Brunel's mock travelogue of a trek across the Sahara Desert, Crossing the Great Sagrada (1924). Buñuel's film is heavily informed by a written ethnography of a poor region of Spain published a few years earlier, but it turns science on its head to underscore the sensationalism that surrounds "attractions" concocted from elements of everyday Hurdano life. Land without Bread condemns the very procedures of fieldwork, detailed description, and objective commentary that would form the backbone for ethnographic encounter in the decades to come.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Speaking Truths with Film by Bill Nichols. Copyright © 2016 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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