The Documentary Impulse
Eight Presentations by James Blue
LECTURE ONE: June 22, 1977
DOCUMENTARY BEGINNINGS: 1895-1929
The Peripatetic Camera: Window on the World or Intelligence of a Machine?
Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art Archives
Sound Recordings of Museum of Modern Art-Related Events, 77.40
Introduction (0:02 – 6:00)
Blue begins by calling documentary “a kind of movement.” It’s had a tradition that is passed along from the pioneers, many of whom are still living and working. Two of them, Willard Van Dyke and Leo Hurwitz, will be speaking to the class.[1]
Documentarians are driven by a “documentary impulse,” a determination to capture and transmit knowledge about the actual world, an unmythologized “real” which has “something solid to it, something moral about it,” but is hard to define.
Documentary history will show over its 80 years “the camera and the film attempting to approach people closer and closer until today, in the last decade, they have come so close that they finally turned around and gave the camera to the subject.”
Documentary today is facing the dilemma of awareness of its own interventions in cultural systems. Blue cites Edward Carpenter’s shock in hearing from a tribal chieftain that he hoped to show his film in place of performing a ceremony, so “we won’t have to go through that damn thing anymore.” Blue says “Ted was appalled because here was an act of filming that destroys culture in effect.”
Documentary and Modern Art (6:06 – 11:14)
Documentary is part of the “modern revolution against the old way of seeing.” In place of conventional Romanticist approaches, Realism and Naturalism (Courbet, Zola, etc.), inspired by scientific methods, would liberate people’s perceptions and reveal hidden layers of reality. Tolstoy even stated that the movie camera’s ability to capture reality made the need to write stories obsolete.
But today, awareness has grown that documentarians’ pretense of scientifically capturing perceptual reality is limited and inevitably suffused by ideology.
Photography versus Modernist Painting (11:15 – 19:10)
Blue displays and contrasts a self-portrait by Cezanne with a photograph of Longfellow. A photograph makes you believe you can “see into it,” making you feel you are seeing an actual person there; if we’re not careful, we attribute qualities conveyed through manipulation (lighting, framing, etc.) to the person themselves. This is “very much a part of the problem of cinema.”
The modernist painting clearly stops at the surface of the canvas, and we freely wonder if the person portrayed “is really like that.” Also, the eye is free to move around, and “there is a sense of liberation with regard to the spectator and the relationship between the spectator and the canvas.”
Eadweard Muybridge, the Lumieres, and the Documentarist’s Dilemma (19:11 – 39:36)
Screened earlier: Thom Andersen’s Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer (Thom Andersen, 1974)
Muybridge represents the combination of artist and scientist that is one of the major characteristics, and tensions, in documentary filmmaking. Muybridge saw himself as a scientist (a “zoopraxographer”), but also as an artist.
Screens: Workers Leaving the Factory (Lumiere Brothers, 1895)
Lumiere’s film captures the factory scene, and the shot does not direct the spectator’s eye to any particular place. There are “a thousand potentials” and “multiple centers” within the tableau frame for us to explore. Blue argues that this is not “naïve framing” and says that Lumiere was also a painter and may have been influenced by Cezanne’s modernist innovations.
Screens L’Arroseur Arrose (Lumiere Brothers, 1895)
This staged comedic farce that depicts a kid pranking a gardener by stepping on his garden hose, has a narrative structure and directs your eye, constraining the spectator’s freedom and “reverting back to the kind of painting and theater and literature that modernists were moving against.”
So, the documentarist’s dilemma: “How do you hold together a film, keeping an audience’s attention, and at the same time, liberate the spectator to make some of his or her own judgments … explore the internal space of the frame and to make connections of their own?”
Robert Flaherty and Dziga Vertov: Scientific and Artistic Explorations (39:37 – 1:19:26)
Two modernist currents dominated the early 20th century—to scientifically explore the real world hidden behind mythologies and preconceptions, and to address the formal materiality of the artefact itself (paint, film, etc.): “These poles are represented in my mind by Flaherty and by Dziga Vertov.”
Flaherty is “the one that I’ve been sentimentally the closest to.” Flaherty is, like Lumiere, both scientist and artist, an explorer and storyteller. After Lumiere, he represents the first major effort to deal with the problem of photographing the real in its plenitude, and put the pieces of it together to energize the audience’s attention. More than in Lumiere, time becomes an important tool.
Screens: Nanook of the North seal hunting scene by Robert J. Flaherty, 1922
This scene might have been cut down to a minute, “but what’s important is the waiting and what happens in the waiting. Flaherty was aware that he wanted this expanded time when he edited it.” The strict observation here will influence observational cinema of the Sixties: “the feeling of the camera in an actual place in reality, not simply a narrating camera” shaping the scene, and “the time allows us to see into it.” There is a use and tension of planes, and the spectator’s eye can choose between foreground (Nanook) and background (other Eskimos and dogs arriving).
Screens: Moana (Robert Flaherty, 1926) scene of making the dress from bark (23:21 – 28:44)
“First, I want you to look at the framing, how the framing begins to energize offscreen space. It never seems to be composed, and yet it’s among the most beautiful compositions, because it’s a composition that allows you freedom within it.” Notice how “the gestures, as Mrs. Flaherty has pointed out, seem to reveal a whole culture.” Flaherty works with time and suspense: “[He has] a way of framing the picture and a way of revealing the action that withholds information until a certain point, revealing increments of information. Once you understand that increment of information, you then raise the question: ‘What larger picture does this fit into?’ in which case he moves on and shows you a little more and a little more, so you finally get the whole scene.” This form of suspense is not Hitchcockian or conventional, since it “exercises your curiosity, doesn’t hold you dumbly in suspense.”
Flaherty also was ahead of his time, influencing today’s filmmakers by collaborating with his subjects. “Flaherty worked with his own imagination and his own feelings. He nevertheless went into the place and allowed the place to suggest to him what to do. For instance, Nanook would come up and say: ‘Let’s go film a seal or a walrus hunt.” He spent years making his films, “always shooting, always looking at the footage, because his point wasn’t that the camera is like a [human] eye but is another eye that sees things better than we do.”
Vertov also believed in a cinema eye, a Kino Eye, that “lives and moves in time and space perceiving and recording impressions in a way quite different, and better, than the human eye.” Vertov shares the Futurist faith in the machine and the street. Cinematic city symphonies and Cubist and Futurist painting could show “not only the movement at the instant, but where it’s been in the past and where it’s going in the future.”
Screens The Man with the Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
Vertov’s self-reflexive filmmaking encouraged spectators to be fully conscious that they were looking at impressions of the world mediated by film. They were not sucked into an illusion of unmediated reality. Vertov bombards the viewer, but “what you draw from what you see is also your own as well as his.” Blue marvels at Vertov’s rhythmic montage: “You’ll notice that he’s linking things that are just insane to put together, but he brings them together, because he cuts on a movement, and you make the association of this goes with that. And it’s up to you to figure out why, and, little by little, he’s built a picture in your mind of the entire Russian people.”
As with Flaherty’s anticipation of observational cinema and cinema verité, Vertov’s deconstructive cinema precedes and influences current radical documentary practice. The cine-trains that he participated in and Medvedkin later developed, carrying films to the cooperative farmers and soliciting their input, were “first examples of the feedback that has become popular in the sixties and seventies where the television audience sees [and comments on] itself on screen.” This determination to activate spectator participation is fundamental: “At the root of this whole documentary movement, I think, is the development of a kind of democracy and citizen participation.”
Blue turns to Joris Ivens, who is “somewhere in the middle between Flaherty and Vertov.” He says Ivens shares Flaherty’s precision and concern for depicting how things work along with Vertov’s explosion of points of view and foregrounding of cinema’s plasticity.
Screens The Bridge (Joris Ivens, 1928)
The film depicts the crossing of a bridge from many angles, like a Cubist painting: “We have a very strong feeling about the way things interrelate and function and relate to the environment. So here are my two poles of art and science coming together, so that one could almost postulate that real clarity is also real beauty.”
Conclusion: Bridging 19th Century Romanticism and 20th Century Modernism (1:19:27 – 1:57:37)
Back to Vertov, Blue sees an affinity with Walt Whitman and his Leaves of Grass, “because he sings of a nation with great enthusiasm and love.” The modern industrial societies of the US and Soviet Union needed an identity, a vision of their own unity, which Whitman and Vertov aimed to provide. Both shared the “democratic idea of letting an audience not be seduced and submissive” to narrative structure and conventions, “but to participate with their full faculties and judgment.” Blue says that Whitman’s Romantic ideal of a “poet-prophet” is paralleled by Vertov’s faith in the creative potential of the Kino-Eye. [2]
So Blue claims that documentary bridges Romanticism and Modernism: “Documentary, which was a revolt in many ways against the old conventions of looking, which it considered Romantic, still retains, as my analogy with Walt Whitman indicates, a link with Romanticism.”
John Grierson, coiner of the term “documentary,” explicitly criticized Flaherty’s Romantic vision of an ideal, natural world. For Grierson, according to Blue, “the world that Flaherty painted in Nanook and Moana was not the world that he found there, but one that he recreated in an effort to get what he thought was an essence.” Flaherty neglected the political context of Nanook’s struggles, not just brought on by hard nature, but by “the commercial trappers killing off his food supply.”
As next week’s lecture will elaborate, Grierson will aim to build a government-sponsored film program to address social issues and problems, sparking the British Documentary Film Movement.
[1] Van Dyke does not appear in these lecture tapes, since he attended only the Tuesday night screening in which his films THE CITY and VALLEY TOWN were screened, and not the Wednesday night lectures which were recorded by MOMA.
[2] In the next lecture, Blue returns briefly to Whitman, “the American romantic realist who seemed to breathe the life of the ambition that drove many of us who went into documentary,” and who reflected the bridging of the scientific and romantic in the documentary impulse. He offers as evidence this quote from Whitman: “The true use for the imaginative faculty of modern times is to give ultimate vivification to facts, to science and to common lives.”
