Eight Presentations by James Blue

LECTURE TWO: June 29, 1977

THE DOCUMENTARY IDEA: 1930-1942

Holding a Hammer Up to Nature

Recap and Elaboration of Lecture One I (Tape 1: 0:00 – 22:00)

“Last week, we said that documentary is part of the modern art movement, born out of a very close relationship between art, imagination, and science.”

Documentarists face the dilemma of the film image’s plenitude of information, which has to be shaped and edited to “render that subject with meaning and also hold the audience’s attention.”  How do you do that without deforming it into a conventional realism and linearity that constrains the spectator’s activity? Overcoming this was “an idea that had informed much of modern art, a democratic idea.”

Blue returns to Robert Flaherty, defending Man of Aran against charges of its fictionalizing life on the Aran Islands. “What he wanted to do was to make films with power that had a truth using nature …He would go into an environment and lived there a couple of years… A story slowly formed out of nature as it presented itself, out of the past as it was presented to him, and out of his own dreams. And so there’s a kind of complicity between the filmmaker and the subject producing something else, which is both fiction and real.” He notes, citing the literary docu-fictions Armies of the Night and In Cold Blood: “There is something about our time that is trying to deal with that indivisible hyphen between documentary and fiction …and is abandoning the [belief] that we can record reality objectively.”

John Grierson and the British Documentary Film Movement (Tape 1 22:00 –  Tape 2 12:59)

Screens: Turksib (Turin, 1929)

Grierson studied with Walter Lippman, whose major concern was the survival of democracy and the ability of the public to stay informed, in a booming, complex world. Grierson was critical of Vertov’s fixation on machinery over people and Flaherty’s emphasis on universals over social particulars. He was inspired by Turin’s 1929 film Turksib, whose non-actor subjects had a genuineness lacking among the iconic figures in other Soviet documentaries and who were as captivating as professional actors. He saw documentary cinema’s potential to serve democracy and social change, “to hold a hammer, not a mirror up to nature.”

Grierson led Britian’s General Post Office (GPO) Film Unit, launched in 1933. He held an optimistic view of government’s ability to produce film independent of the market and geared towards public education, at a time when government intervention in the capitalist economy was also welcomed. Blue offers an aside here, “as one who made films during a ten-year period for the U.S. government, it sometimes coincides that you can be totally free making films there.”

Screens 3 GPO films: Night Mail (Basil Wright, Harry Watt, 1936)), Song of Ceylon (Basil Wright, Alberto Cavalcanti, 1934), and Housing Problems (Arthur Elton, Edgar Anstey, 1935)

Blue remains focused on the documentarian’s dilemma of “presenting material, without sacrificing it to the dramatic line.” In Song of Ceylon, we see the dissected parts of larger processes that the spectator must integrate, reminding of the freedom offered to viewers’ eyes in early Lumiere films: “So I might point out that in the 1930s, the avant-garde cinema was the documentary cinema.” In Housing Problems, people speak forthrightly about their housing and are not emblematic types; the narrator is not a voice of God, but simply a councilman with a point of view you can weigh: “You are put in a one-to-one relationship with the councilman on the soundtrack.”

There is still some domination of the spectator by the Soviet-influenced montage, Blue suggests, in Night Mail and other GPO films, necessitated in part by the 35mm equipment’s inability to shoot long takes and the rare use of synchronized sound. Housing Problems’ liberation of its subjects to express and reveal themselves in sync sound interviews evinced signs of an “anti-aesthetic” revolt against the Soviet montage influence and was ahead of its time.

Luis Bunuel and Surrealist Documentary  (Tape 2 13:00 – 44:34)

Screens: Land Without Bread  (Luis Bunuel, 1932)

In making Land Without Bread, Luis Bunuel refused the coherence of linear drama, bringing a surrealist, non-rational approach to the elaboration of meaning: “By surrealism, what I’m talking about is that elimination of the line, which allows you to regard the presence of the real in a way that you ordinarily wouldn’t see it.” Bunuel “de-dramatizes constantly,” through the emotionless narration, a lack of continuity between shots, a refusal of beautiful photography, so that “all of those things conspire to put you on a very uneasy footing with the picture.”

Joris Ivens and Helen Van Dongen (Tape 2 44:34 – 1:12:49)

Screens: The Spanish Earth by Joris Ivens and Helen Van Dongen, 1937

Blue marvels at how Joris Ivens and Helen Van Dongen made a film about the Spanish Civil War that is “not an exciting shoot-‘em-up,” but an understated “story between human beings and their land and this war that sweeps over them.” Lacking the light-weight cameras that could convey the experience of soldiers more easily, Ivens was somehow able to convey a sense of that “anaesthetized kind of neurosis” experienced in battle. Ivens also lacked the institutional financing of other Thirties documentarians, making this a rare independent film of the period. Blue adds, “There is very little tendency toward what I call ‘iconography,’ where one person represents a whole group, i.e., the strength of the Russian people.” The soldiers are simply people, not symbols or heroes.

Hemingway’s narration is rough and awkward and conveys “the sincerity of a participant.” It lacks the oppressiveness of the professional actor as narrator, which smothers the images (and Orson Welles’ narration was in fact recorded and then scrapped): “It would tie them all up in a bag, cover them with emotional icing, and everything would move towards theatrical effect.” The narration doesn’t speak in generalities, and springs off the images.

Van Dongen’s editing defied the influence of Soviet montage evident in the British documentarians’ work, as in the ending with of the water spilling onto the earth and the guy getting ready to fire: “one senses the permeation of the two, but not in the juxtapositioning style of the Russians or the early British, where the effect is smashed into you.”  Her cutting “constantly de-emphasizes dramatic build, so that the picture seems to spread out in front of you like a kind of timeless sensation of an event.”

Blue adds, “I think the history books need to be rewritten about the contribution of Helen van Dongen to the creation of documentary. She is in every instance, a co-creator equal to the director and should have director’s credits. I’ve done a great deal of investigation into that. I think that in the work she did with almost all of Ivens’ work during the thirties and with Flaherty’s work on The Land and Louisiana Story, she is immensely important.”

CONTINUE TO LECTURE THREE: The Documentary Idea (Continued)