IV.2. Definitions from the Historical Tradition:
Unfortunately, there is not a general
consensus among cinema historians regarding the etymology of the term documentary . However, nearly all do agree
that the early works of the French Lumiere brothers shot in 1896 are documentary
in nature‚ since they were motion picture images of daily life at the time - workers leaving a factory, a train arriving
at a station, soldiers on military drills ; there has never been any suggestion
that the Lumiere brothers staged any of these events for the camera, though
they did produce some obviously staged comic skits. In the last years of the 19th
century, Lumiere associates traveled around the world, introducing their new
camera, the cinematographe, and the
film medium to countries like Sweden, Russia, Algeria, Egypt, India, Australia
and Japan. Along the way, they shot the first documentary footage of those
countries.[1]
However, while there is little dispute
today that the Lumiere brothers were the first documentarians per se, the term documentary did not exist at the time, The film medium was in its
infancy, and was still seen by most people as a novelty.
Dutch documentary historian Erik Barnouw
states that the earliest recorded use of the term documentary was by a Polish cinematographe operator named Boleslaw Matuszewski in book published in
Paris in 1898 with the title “Une
Nouvelle Source de l’Histoire”. According to Barnouw, Matuszewski proposed
a “cinematographic museum, or depository
‘for material ‘of a documentary interest…slices of public and national life.”[2]
IV.3. Grierson and Flaherty:
Nichols
and other Anglophone cinema historians generally attribute the first use of the
term documentary to John Grierson,
the Scot who created the famous British Empire Marketing Board Film Unit;
Grierson reportedly first used the term to describe Robert Flaherty’s Moana (1926) [3]in
a review written in The New York Sun:”
Of course, Moana, being a visual account
of events in the daily life of a Polynesian youth and his family, has
documentary value.”[4]
In the Anglophone world, the evolution
of documentary aesthetics began during the Great Depression of the 1930’s, and the British documentarians, led by Grierson, soon began to express an
ambivalence towards the work of the man they had previously lionized as a
pioneer only a few years before.
In his book, “Documentary Film” (1935), the first known history of
documentary, Grierson protégé Paul Rotha set the tone when he accused
Flaherty of having romanticized the lives of his subjects:” Surely we have the right to believe that the
documentary method, the most virile of all kinds of film, should not ignore the
vital social issues of this year of grace.”[5]
Grierson himself had initially hailed
Flaherty as the father of documentary in the 1920’s, but, with the advent of
the Great Depression in the 1930S, he and his colleagues seemed to grow increasingly
disenchanted with the Flaherty.
With the advent of synchronized sound, Grierson
and his colleagues developed their own style of documentary; they began to rely
heavily on the unseen omniscient narrator – a technique Grierson called direct address narration.
Since Flaherty abhorred narration of
any kind, this reliance on Direct Address
led to even further creative schism. In 1934, Flaherty’s “Man of Aran” won a first prize at the Venice
Film Festival, and was praised by many to be Flaherty’s finest work.[6]
However, rather than acknowledge his
colleague’s achievement, Grierson rather ungraciously sniffed that he hoped
that ‘the neo-Rousseauianism implicit in
Flaherty’s work dies with his own exceptional self.”[7]
There is little question today that
John Grierson was the dominant figure in the early development of the
documentary in the Western world. His
key positions as first head of the Empire Marketing Board, and, later, as
founder of the National Film Boards of Canada, Australia and New Zealand,
provided him with a platform to define documentary
as he chose, at least in the Anglophone world. [8]
This ascendancy of the Griersonian
aesthetic over Flaherty, not to mention Soviet documentary pioneers such as
Dziga Vertov and Esther Shub was due to several factors:
First, and perhaps most important, Grierson
held positions of power at the most important government-supported institutions
in the Anglophone cinema world in the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia during
a period when film became the dominant medium for mass culture. He was also
instrumental in the establishment of the Indian government’s Films Division,
one of the world’s largest producers of documentary films, as well as United
Nations Television. In short, John Grierson managed to create a global platform
for his documentary aesthetic, with no oversight from commercial sponsors, of
whom there were none.
Indeed, for many people around the
world, a Grierson-formula film with the institutional, direct address narration, became synonymous with documentary.
The Grierson influence is still noticeable
today in former colonies of the United Kingdom and France, such as India and
most African countries. The direct address narration assures institutional
control of message, often attempting to compensate for poor visual material,
and makes life easier for government administrators, enabling them to show
their bosses they are parroting the party line, while impeding the development
of modern media communications skills among both practitioners and consumers
alike.
Since many of these same administrators appear
themselves to have no awareness or comprehension of modern media techniques, this
phenomenon is self-perpetuating, resulting in the production of mediocre
material, of interest to few other than the VIPS depicted.[9]
As a result, today the Grierson direct
address narration technique is often referred to disparagingly among
documentarians as The Voice of God; it
is hard to assess the impact of this technique when it was most prevalent, in
the 1930’s and 1940’s, and was associated with newsreels popular in England and
the United States, like “The March of
Time”.[10]
However, today, most contemporary documentarians see it as patronizing and
antiquated, and avoid it altogether, if at all possible.
While Flaherty enjoyed early commercial
success, and had many admirers, he was never able to articulate his own
aesthetic and ideology in words; he let his films speak for themselves. Flaherty
died in 1951, and his widow Frances attempted to protect his legacy through the
creation of the Flaherty Seminars in 1955, which were held yearly in upstate
New York. However, as more embarrassing facts
surrounding the shooting of “Nanook of
the North” became known, Flaherty’s stature as a documentary pioneer became
seriously tarnished.
Internationally, his reputation has yet to
recover from the withering ideological critiques during the post-Colonial era of
the 1960s, when his man-versus-nature theme was vigorously denounced as a “romantic fraud”[11]
by Third World critics and others. One
critic, Fatimah Tobing Rony, went so far as to describe Flaherty’s “Nanook of the North” as,” a cinema of romantic preservationism,
dedicated not to anthropological knowledge but to the production of indigenous
people as trophies and to the capture of their ways of life in nostalgic
fiction.”[12]
Today, one might fairly say the ethnographic documentary owes the
biggest debt to the pioneering attempts of Flaherty to document traditional
lives of indigenous peoples. However, his well-established penchant for
re-enactment, not to mention outright fabrication of non-existent events in the
lives of the peoples whose stories he was supposedly documenting, have caused
him to be regarded as something less than a role model for aspiring
documentarians today.[13]
[1]
Barnouw ( ibid)p. 27
[2]
Barnouw (ibid), p.28
[3]
Link to “ Moana”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xs0FNCp6aRM
[4]
Jack C. Ellis and Betsy A, MacLane (A New
History of Documentary Film)Continuum, 2005. P.3
[6]
Link to “Man of Aran”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXYC5Sv_fOQ
[7]
Aufderheide ( ibid), p35
[8]
Barnouw ( ibid),p99
[9]
For a striking example, please see this link to Thierry Michel’s excellent
documentary “Mobutu de Roi de Zaire”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9UfPxWwwPc
[11]
Aufderheide ( ibid),p.32
[12]
Gaines ( ibid) p.6
[13]
Link to “Nanook of the North”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZLROkFqG-k
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