Eight Presentations by James Blue

LECTURE FOUR: July 13, 1977

THE WAR YEARS: 1940-1946 – Dramatizing Reality: Film as a Call to Arms or as Grim Witness 

Recap and Elaboration of Lecture Three (0:00 – 12:08)

Last week’s class discussed Roosevelt’s New Deal, and its efforts to recast American values to question laissez-faire ideology and embrace regional planning and activist government. This required propaganda efforts to mobilize the nation with patriotic appeals that could get bombastic: “When Leo Hurwitz presented Native Land, it seemed to dovetail with what I was talking about when he said that [they were] trying to rescue the symbols of America and give them meaning again.”

Blue returns to his conflicted feelings about The River, its “tendency toward this kind of absolutism, defining things and giving a solution… I don’t want to be harsher on that picture because it’s one of my favorites. So I will also add that The River seems to me to be more than simply a propaganda piece. I think it’s a great epic poem. And I think what makes it epic is Lorentz’s feeling of great disappointment … in what the country, which had so much promise, seemed to be facing. I don’t think Pare Lorentz made that picture with any cynicism at all, perhaps with a bitter view and with a great deal of irony. Whatever its propaganda effect and whatever its directives, there is this other aspect, which is its art.”

World War Two (12:09 – 24:29)

As with the New Deal’s mobilization of citizens to fight the Great Depression, the rise of fascism would give government a reason to “propagandize the public.” 

Screens: March of Time newsreel on fascism

Blue notes the “voice of doom” and manipulative assemblage of images but feels he has to give credit to Henry Luce’s March of Time for being “one of the lone voices against Hitler in the American communications system.” Luce’s propaganda was opposing Charles Lindbergh’s popular isolationism and also paving the way for America’s global leadership and economic dominance. “And when it came time to make films, once we had entered the war, those films had a sense of the absolute in them. Margaret Mead said that you must have that to win this war. We must feel we are on the side of right. Of course, as one historian has pointed out, ultimately this absolute conviction of righteousness could also be considered a prerequisite to accepting the atomic bomb [and the internment of Japanese-Americans].” 

Why We Fight (24:30 – 56:39)

According to Blue, General Marshall was not happy with the military recruitment and training films he was seeing. American soldiers and prospective soldiers were still not sure why they were fighting, why America shouldn’t mind its own business. Marshall was persuaded that the good vs. evil melodramatizing of Frank Capra and Walt Disney in their Hollywood movies could work effectively in government-sponsored films, and so they were recruited for the Why We Fight productions. 

Screens: Why We Fight: The Battle of Britain (Frank Capra, 1943)

Blue says the film has “some of the quintessential aspects of Capraism.” The British, whom we need to defend, are like Jimmy Stewart characters “armed with nothing but moral right.” Iconographic images, as in Soviet documentaries, are deployed, “as when the “cannon comes forward at the camera and represents the whole organized armored might of Germany.” The images came from any battle, and their origins didn’t matter, only the storytelling and its dramatic effect. Also, “There was a great deal made out of the People. It had been growing through the thirties. And, as I said, it became a major element in the American myth that, at least in Frank Capra’s films, he tended to relate to middle class Christian morality. America was Christian to him.” Still, “I still find myself very moved by it. I can recall the feelings I had at the time and it chokes me up.”

For American audiences at the time “in order to be convincing and powerful, it had to look like any other fiction film; or rather, we had to make it look like fiction in order to make it believable.”

British War Documentaries (Tape 1 56:40 – Tape 2 4:25)

Screens: Target for Tonight (Harry Watt, 1941)

The British made a different kind of documentary during the period, still mostly staged, but more subtle. The attack didn’t need to be dramatized, because they were under attack. There is widespread use of an “exterior antagonist” – the threat of attack, not directly depicted, but pervasively felt. 

Screens: Fires Were Started (Humphrey Jennings, 1943)

Blue states unequivocally: “For me, this is the most important British documentary to come out of the war.”  Sure, it’s staged, but it is based in “actual goings on, it does not attempt to develop a drama of psychology….and the border lines between fiction and documentary have always been fuzzy.” He contends that “these people are for the most part, not icons. They don’t appear in the image as symbols only.” Blue continues: “Jennings, in these scenes of preparation before they go out to the fire, is working with non-actors and all the dialogue is improvised. There is still very heavy recording and picture shooting equipment that can’t be moved around a lot.  And he organizes a set of little details, minuscule goals and conflicts, played against the background of what I am calling the exterior antagonist.” Interestingly, he notes that “Jennings said that he was not able to make films in peacetime, that the only good films that could be made were in war. And that’s possibly because of this sense of the exterior antagonist, the idea that you needed that tension there, or he needed it in order to be able to deal with the kind of common courage and humanity of ordinary people.”

“Even a film without heavy bombastic effects has underlying it a myth about British culture, about the British common person and their ability to take it and keep smiling. A common criticism of this kind of film during that period was that it stereotyped the ordinary man.

You could not individualize him because if you broke down the stereotype, you began to move into psychology, away from documentary. And that kind of individualization in documentary could only come later when there was equipment available to go out and actually be with people living out their lives.”

Late War Documentaries (Tape 2 4:26 – 45:29)

Screens: The Battle of San Pietro  (John Huston, 1945)

“As the war moves on and as more action footage actually shot on location comes back, things will shift…  the camera’s relationship to the subject, the cutting and the sense of time change. What you see is the shift from a high point of absolutes, if we might call it that, to a point where it begins to break down formally, as well as in people’s concerns.”

John Huston’s first wartime documentary was The Battle of San Pietro: “The idea was first to make a picture that would show the young men in training that it wasn’t all that easy fighting. And so they would not have too many surprises when they got there. Huston did it, but went further than they wanted.”

 “It’s very interesting that this picture was made for the War Department and that it was considered too depressing to be shown until General Mark Clark made a speech at the beginning, which told the audience that everything was all right, it was worth the loss of lives…. And they cut down some of the more wearing scenes.”

“Just the way it looks on the screen tells you that it’s actual. … The camera is most often in a sheltered place trying to get what’s going on, not looking for the ideal angle that we saw in Target for Tonight… The scenes are not cut together to be exciting in The Battle of Britain sense, and the rah-rahness is gone. They’re being put together to create a sense of the endurance and the din and the grind of the thing.”

“Listen to John Huston’s narration. It’s Huston’s voice himself. It has that very strange, sad irony in it, that one hears quite often in his work.”

“Now, some of these shots were staged, but I defy you to tell which ones.”

Screens: To the Shores of Iwo Jima (Warner Bros., 1945)

This 1945 documentary short, produced by the Marines and distributed by United Artists, shook audiences. “There are two shots that had a tremendous impact on people watching these films in that period, particularly the soldier in pain, and then the event where the medics drop the stretcher and run for cover…accidental events, moments of real pain and emotion.” 

Most of the earlier war shorts “were made for the most part of ritualized processes—stuffing the motors, firing the cannons, marching, etc.” and showed very little of actual fighting. “When it shoots from underneath the bomber’s bay window or in front of the machine gun, it’s a privileged camera. And that is fiction.” 

At long last, “we’re out there in the field, we’re near the people.”  The soundtrack begins to drop the voice of Westbrook van Voorhis and all the other imitators, and “begins to be more of a person’s voice.”

With the coming of lighter weight cameras, which could shoot takes longer than 45 seconds, “life itself could take place during the time it took to start and end a shot…. We have this sense of just enduring the thing. It’s no longer rah-rah…and the form starts changing.” 

“The images start being composed differently from that moment we no longer are being hit over the head with iconographic material.”  Blue elaborates: “Actuality begins to appear when the camera, we know, is in the scene and it cannot get a good shot… We are given material (as in The Spanish Earth) coming from the best possible angle that the camera can manage within the scene.”  Helen van Dongen talked about some of the stuff she was cutting: ‘Where many editors trained in the old fiction and documentary school would cut to make an effect, I just let the shot play. I couldn’t have improved it.’” 

“This goes back to some of the things I pointed out about Lumiere, where you sense that there is a world around that camera. You see the image has depth and foreground, and a lot of random events.  Later, that began to be codified and used in fiction, such as Italian neorealism and some of the American versions of neorealism. Because this was the look that [later WWII documentary] audiences had learned of reality.”

Screens: World of Plenty  (Paul Rotha, 1943)

“During the war, there was a very interesting film … in which the problem of post-war food problems was dealt with in a very direct fashion. What’s interesting in it for me is the fact that while [director Paul Rotha] is delivering ideas, they are straightforwardly put forward as ideas… you can begin to evaluate…The film is constantly seen as a film and not as transmitted reality. As in Dziga Vertov, we are referred back to film constantly.” Recurrent cinematic wipes highlight the artifice.

“For the first time, the audience is a participant in this film asking questions and protesting against a very pompous March of Time narrator.” The narrator is brought down from the heavens and is seen as a person to be intellectually questioned, as in a Brecht play, by an audience distanced from the illusion.  “The film planted a real seed of how to deal with large abstract subjects through analysis. And without laying on the emotion and the dramatic hooker.”

Next week, the class will delve into the continuing decline of confidence and certainty in both the filmmaking and in the audience: “If after Pearl Harbor, few Americans doubted that they were on the side of right, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, few would ever again be quite so sure. Film’s responsibility to its audience’s right to think was going to become even more of a concern of filmmakers, and the forms used would be continually reevaluated.”

CONTINUE TO LECTURE FIVE: The Aftermath: 1946 – 1959