The Documentary Impulse
Eight Presentations by James Blue
LECTURE THREE: July 6, 1977
Continued: THE DOCUMENTARY IDEA: 1930-1942 – Holding a Hammer Up to Nature
Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art Archives
Sound Recordings of Museum of Modern Art-Related Events, 77.42-1
Recap of Last Week’s Lecture (0:00 – 12:02)
“Robert Flaherty didn’t think of his films necessarily as documentary or holding to any line. What he wanted to do was make films from life. And he allowed an interpenetration between the material that life offered and his own imagination and themes. It was Grierson who for the first time defined what he felt were the principles of documentary. And as we said, it was using film for a kind of citizenship education.”
The British films, for some, submerged their subjects in “artsy” editing heavily influenced by Soviet montage, and Housing Problems’ “anti-aesthetic” approach, featuring sync sound interviews with everyday folks speaking forthrightly about their housing issues, “was rare and not to be seen again until the sixties.” John Ferno’s 1940 American film And So They Live (screened the night before) brought sync sound equipment into the Appalachias, and “was an attempt to break through a thirties romantic vision of people.” Blue cites Raymond Durgnat’s criticism of the British documentarians’ reluctance to face up to the ugly and accept that as human too.
The Thirties (Tape 1 12:03 – Tape 2 15:22
Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art Archives
Sound Recordings of Museum of Modern Art-Related Events, 77.42-2
Thirties documentarians, before lightweight cameras made filmmaking affordable to independents, were reliant on corporate or government funding. The ones who worked for government institutions such as the British GPO and the US Farm Security Administration (FSA) understood they were serving the government’s expressed goals. Grierson was forthright about documentary as “propaganda for a national purpose,” and that was not negatively charged, when government institutions in the thirties were broadening citizen participation in democracy and in regulating big business. The thirties were an “era of planning” and big government, and a break from the country’s laissez-faire traditions. The Roosevelt administration embraced documentary film and photography “as a way of educating the masses and propagandizing them to understand, as the language went, what was going on.”
Blue projects Depression photographs by FSA photographers, including Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans: “The thirties have left quite an impression on my mind. I remember our losing our house that my dad had worked to build. And in many ways, I feel a great emotional response to the material of the thirties.” He expresses admiration for New Deal art, but conveys conflicted feelings about thirties documentarians’ service to government goals: “Have you the right to use people’s misery for the promotion of a government campaign?” He applauds James Agee’s self-reflection in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men about his implication in the exploitation of people’s suffering. This self-criticism, Agee hoped, “protected them from simply being held up as specimens,” and has been influential in leading modern documentarians to reflect on their responsibilities to their subjects.
Screens: Pare Lorentz’s The River (Pare Lorentz, 1937)
Blue reads from the dry government report on solutions to Mississippi River flooding and expresses his admiration for Lorentz’s cinematic adaptation, produced for the United States Film Service: “I find it an extremely powerful film,” although it is another “use of misery that fits a government plan.” Blue screens the first of the four trips down the river: “Did you get the feeling you were just absolutely being swept forward? And when I stopped it there, you all wanted it to keep going! Part of that is the language in those periodic sentences, which change the rhythm and begin to have this cumulative rushing effect. Notice how the beginning was short cuts, static images closer to the river. And then it gets larger and larger, and then it began cutting on the movement and everything is flowing in a kind of majestic style until it opens out and you see the sea. So there is a strong continuity line running through there, right?….And what he has done in a way is explain the problem of runoff that was in the report that was so dull to read…yet he’s dramatized it in a very poetic, intense way.”
Blue contends that a dominant theme of the picture is “man’s destructiveness.” It is “a rejection of unbridled, freewheeling individual enterprise,” showing its harmfulness, rejecting laissez-faire attitudes and extolling government planning. But here Blue conveys qualms about the film’s relentless flow and continuity: “I would like to suggest to you that the very power of this film is perhaps something to be afraid of—a statement of policy done in an emotional fashion. And I say that in spite of loving the film.” He also argues that the movie’s solution, the dam, like a happy ending, “doesn’t seem to belong to the picture…and seems to be puny next to the dark vision of the problem.” He says this is often the case in government films addressing social and environmental problems and their solutions: “There is a real problem in cinematic terms of handling solutions.”
Blue begins to raise questions about government-produced films. He recognizes Richard Dyer MacCann’s claim in The People’s Films that “it behooves the government to report to the people what it’s doing. But then we could say, should it report in such an emotional, strong fashion?” To his own surprise, “coming from a populist Democratic Oklahoman background,” he sympathizes with Republic Senator Robert Taft’s take on government filmmaking: “Senator Taft made a long reasoned argument in which he said that while it was all right for the United States to make basic scientific knowledge films, films of instruction such as how to use fertilizer or how to take care of your chickens, that documentary films are propaganda and they are the instrument of the party in power using them against the people. What happened then was that the Film Service was discontinued by 1940. Also since that time, American government films cannot be shown to the American people…The United States Information Agency makes 600 films a year. They’re all shown abroad. They are not allowed except by act of Congress to be shown to Americans. As a result, five of my films can’t be shown in this country, and we are all very regretful for that (audience laughter).”
Blue points out that many government programs were launched in a time of national recovery from the Depression, and carried over to wartime mobilization, but they were potentially more dangerous in peacetime. Blue continues: “I began to wonder about government involvement in films when the Army made a film called Why Vietnam? and showed it on television in this country, and the USIA made a film called The Night of the Dragon (the one for which they restaged a battle in Vietnam), shifted it over to another agency and then showed it to the people in this country. So now I think that there’s adequate reason to be concerned, as Mr. Taft was, when we understand that government filmmaking can only be the persuasive organization of policy in an emotional form.” Possibly, Blue conjectures, if government filmmakers pursued “an “unemotional, but interesting way” to address government policies, then they would be in tune with documentary’s higher impulse: “Documentary has sought to no longer seduce the audience, but to stimulate its reason.”
Leo Hurwitz (Tape 2 15:23 – 1:04:08)
Blue introduces a legendary documentary director of the thirties, still at work: Leo Hurwitz. He says Hurwitz’s Heart of Spain “remains one of the major efforts in the thirties to create a film of ideas.” He emphasizes the importance of Hurwitz’s Frontier Films as a pioneering independent film organization, an inspiration to filmmakers today whose independence is easier to sustain thanks to lower-cost equipment. Blue points out the obvious benefits of independence, “If you work for the corporations or government institutions, you have to placate them, they’re paying the way.”
Screens: Native Land (Leo Hurwitz, 1940-42)
Hurwitz introduces the film and conducts a Q&A afterwards. Among other things, he emphasizes the critique of capitalism in the film, explaining to one questioner that he didn’t identify specific corporations as anti-labor villains because the problems identified were more systemic. He also acknowledges that, although the film’s patriotism can feel dated now, “Yes, we have Liberty. Yes, we have pursuit of happiness. Yes. I’m free and so forth. The struggle that the film deals with is the very denial of the static permanence of those ideas… My own feeling is that the word ‘patriotism’ is difficult because it is used as a whip, as a symbol, as a bugle call to camouflage reality.”
Discussing Paul Robeson’s narration, he expands on Blue’s points about Hemingway as narrator of The Spanish Earth, noting how important it was that Robeson “believed in the ideas that the film was about,” was not an “authoritative inhuman voice of God,” and was an actor who could “express the meanings of what was said through his voice.” Another questioner wonders whether the dramatized scenes with actors were necessary because the period’s heavy equipment didn’t permit verité filming with the real workers, and Hurwitz says this is partly true: “To do this film, you had to recreate the reality as well as use documentary footage. Otherwise the event would not have been grasped cinematically.” However, he wonders, why should everything be verité now?
Suppose a new kind of paintbrush were invented. Does that mean there’s no value to the whole spectrum of brushes that a painter has? “We tend to be very fashionable in film, and that’s partly because it’s still a young and immature medium. So the invention of a new technique doesn’t in any way crowd out the validity of other techniques. I happen to have made the first cinema verité film and have made many non-cinema verité films. …. And one accepts that if one’s doing a [verité] film like Harlan County USA [1], one still has the problem of how you structure the reality that took four years to photograph, how do you structure it so that it conveys its meaning and is still real, but obviously is not the way it happened. And certainly not within those time lengths. So the problem of making a film is the problem of taking whatever material is necessary or available and creating an organic structure that carries its beliefs.”
[1] Barbara Kopple’s film, which had won the Academy Award for Best Documentary three months earlier, was mentioned a few times in the class. It was photographed by Tom Hurwitz, Leo’s son. Leo’s pioneering cinema verité film The Young Fighter will be screened during Lecture Five.
