Documentary



DEPRESSION AND THE WAR YEARS

Grierson understood the potential of documentary cinema to affect the political views of the nation and its people, a view shared by other film-producing nations such as Germany and post-Revolutionary Russia. During World War II many governments relied on the propaganda value of documentary film. Already by the late 1930s, filmmaking in both Japan and Germany had come under government control. In Great Britain, where Grierson's Film Unit had evolved into the Crown Film Unit, documentaries helped boost morale on the home front, particularly with the poetic approach of Humphrey Jennings (1907–1950) in such films as Fires Were Started (1943) and A Diary for Timothy (1945), which presented rich humanist tapestries of the British people during wartime.

In the Soviet Union, Communist Party leader Vladimir Lenin famously proclaimed that for the new Communist state cinema was the most important of the arts. Traveling trains that made and screened newsreels were a means of connecting the many republics of the

Allakariallak as Nanook hunting in Nanook of the North (Robert Flaherty, 1922).
vast Soviet Union, and even feature films such as Sergei Eisenstein's Bronenosets Potyomkin ( Battleship Potemkin , 1925), based on an actual historical event, incorporated elements of documentary. Dziga Vertov (1896–1954) brought a more formalist, experimental approach to the newsreel, and with the feature-length Chelovek s kinoapparatom ( The Man with a Movie Camera , 1929), which presents a "day-in-the-life" of a modern Soviet city, created a reflexive documentary masterpiece that, along with Walter Ruttmann's Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt ( Berlin: Symphony of a Great City , 1927), established the "city-symphony" form.

Later in Germany, after Hitler's rise to power, his National Socialist Party quickly nationalized the film industry under the leadership of Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda, which produced films promulgating Nazi ideology. The most prominent documentary filmmaker of the Nazi era was Leni Riefenstahl, a former star actress, who made Triumph des Willens ( Triumph of the Will , 1935), about the 1934 Party rally in Nuremberg, and the two-part Olympia (1938), about the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Triumph of the Will is widely considered a powerful expression of fascist ideology and aesthetics. Although sources vary on the exact number, Riefenstahl clearly had many cameras at her disposal (on occasion in the film camera operators may be glimpsed on tall elevators constructed on site). Triumph of the Will celebrates the rally's mass spectacle of fascist unity, which was staged in part precisely to be filmed, successfully turning history into theater and overwhelming viewers just as party rallies were intended to do to participants.

In the United States in the 1930s, documentary emerged as a dominant form of cultural expression in America, informing the aesthetics of all the arts, including painting, theater, literature, and the popular media. The documentary impulse also animated many Works Progress Administration (WPA) arts projects and important books of the period, like Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (begun in 1936 but not published until 1941), by James Agee (1909–1955) with photographs by Walker Evans (1903–1975). In film, beginning in 1930 a network of local Film and Photo Leagues developed in major American cities as a response to the avoidance of controversial material by mainstream theatrical newsreels.

DZIGA VERTOV
b. Denis Abramovich Kaufman, Bialystok, Poland, 2 January 1896, d. 12 February 1954

Dziga Vertov was instrumental in using the cinema for the purposes of social education after the Russian Revolution. He not only chronicled the revolution as it happened, but approached the production of newsreels in terms of interaction with the proletariat. His brother Mikhail also became an important documentary filmmaker, while a third brother, Boris, became an important cinematographer for Jean Vigo and others.

At the outbreak of World War I, the Kaufmans, an educated Jewish family, moved to Moscow. In 1916 Vertov enrolled in the Petrograd Psychoneurological Institute, where he studied human perception, particularly sound, editing bits of recorded sound in novel ways in his "Laboratory of Hearing." These experiments would influence Vertov's experiments with sound film over a decade later in Entuziazm: Simfoniya Donbassa ( Enthusiasm: The Donbass Symphony , 1931)and Tri pesni o Lenine ( Three Songs of Lenin , 1934). Changing his name to Dziga Vertov, which loosely translates as "spinning top," he began editing newsreel footage after the revolution, exploring the possibilities of montage in the context of documentary film.

In 1919 Vertov, along with his future wife, the film editor Elisaveta Svilova, and later his brother Mikhail and several other young filmmakers, established the Kinoks (from kinoki , or cinema-eyes), a group that argued for the value and superiority of documentary filmmaking. They issued an artistic manifestos and published journal articles in which they rejected fiction filmmaking, with its stars, studio shooting, and predetermined scripts, in favor of what Vertov celebrated as "life caught unawares." The camera lens (or kino eye), Vertov proclaimed, had the power to penetrate and record visible reality better than could the human eye, making documentary the preferred practice for a Marxist society based on rational and scientific principles of organization. From 1922 to 1925 Vertov directed a series of twenty-three newsreels entitled Kino-Pravda ; pravda , meaning truth, was also the name of the official Soviet party newspaper.

Vertov's masterpiece, Chelovek s kino-apparatom ( The Man with a Movie Camera , 1929), was a visionary "city symphony" documentary that reflected on its own status as both document and illusion. It presented a lyrical view of an idealized Soviet city (a combination of Moscow, Odessa, and Kiev), utilizing virtually every special effect and cinematic technique available to show life in Soviet society while encouraging viewers to consider the nature of cinematic construction and the relation between film and reality. Vertov's reflexive practice was later continued in Jean Rouch's cinéma verité (the French term deriving from Vertov's kino-pravda ) and Jean-Luc Godard's experiments in collective political filmmaking with the Dziga Vertov Group in the early 1970s. Vertov's avant-garde style challenged the constraints of official doctrine, and by the end of the 1930s Vertov found himself unable to secure funding for further projects. He spent the last two decades of his life editing newsreels, as he had begun.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Chelovek s kino-apparatom ( The Man with a Movie Camera , 1929), Entuziazm: Symfonia Donbassa ( Enthusiasm: The Donbass Symphony , 1931), Tri pesni o Lenine ( Three Songs of Lenin , 1934)

FURTHER READING

Feldman, Seth. Dziga Vertov: A Guide to References and Resources . Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979.

——. "'Peace Between Man and Machine': Dziga Vertov's The Man with a Movie Camera ." In Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video , edited by Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski, 40–54. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1998.

Petrić, Vlada. Constructivism in Film: The Man with the Movie Camera, A Cinematic Analysis . Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Vertov, Dziga. Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov . Edited by Annette Michelson, translated by Kevin O'Brien. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

Barry Keith Grant

Dziga Vertov.

Together the leagues produced a Worker's Newsreel that concentrated on documenting the intense labor activities of the early Depression period. Many important documentary filmmakers of the time were associated with the particularly active New York Film and Photo League, and later with Frontier Films, a socially committed production company that produced a series of important films about international politics beginning in 1936.

Under Franklin Roosevelt's presidency (1933–1945), the Resettlement Administration (RA) sponsored a photographic unit that included Evans, Dorothea Lange, and others. It moved into documentary film with The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1938), both by Pare Lorentz (1905–1992), about the dust bowl and the Tennessee Valley Authority, respectively. Both films effectively endorsed government policy by combining Griersonian authority with American colloquialism, reinforced by fine scores by the American composer Virgil Thomson that wove folk themes throughout. Although various government agencies had previously sponsored documentaries, Lorentz's films were the first to garner serious attention and considerable theatrical distribution. Roosevelt established the US Film Service in 1938, but it died by 1940 because Congress refused to appropriate the necessary funds, largely as a result of pressure from Hollywood studios that viewed the initiative as unfair competition and not in the spirit of free enterprise.

The popular Hollywood director Frank Capra (1897–1991) oversaw for the military the production of Why We Fight (1942–1944), a series of seven documentaries designed to provide background information about the global conflict so as to help shake Americans from their strong isolationist position. These films were widely screened at home and as part of military training for troops sent overseas. Many Hollywood professionals were involved in the various aspects of their production. The films effectively simplified the political complexities leading to the war by cleverly employing patriotic mythology and national iconography. Other important Hollywood directors who accepted military commissions and lent their filmmaking talents to documenting the war effort included John Ford (1894–1973), who made The Battle of Midway (1942), William Wyler (1902–1981), maker of The Memphis Belle (1944), and John Huston (1906–1987), who produced The Battle of San Pietro (1945) and the controversial Let There Be Light (1946), initially banned by the Armed Forces because of its candid footage of soldiers who had been traumatized by combat.

With the domestic prosperity of the postwar years, government sponsorship of documentary in the United States disappeared. In this period documentary production was sponsored largely by industry, often with pronounced ties to government interests, and so the films tended to be conventional in both style and content. Cold War paranoia also served as a strong disincentive to originality. Through the 1950s the various newsreel series ceased production, as their function was increasingly taken over by television.

The most notable exception to the new conservatism in documentary was the CBS-TV series See It Now , started in 1951 by the journalist Edward R. Murrow (1908–1965) and the producer Fred Friendly (1915–1998). Murrow's stature as a war correspondent and his high administrative position at CBS enabled him to produce the show with relative freedom. In 1953–1954 he successfully exposed the demagoguery of Senator Joseph McCarthy, a prime mover behind the Cold War blacklists and witch hunts (a historical moment vividly captured in George Clooney's feature film Good Night and Good Luck [2005]). Nevertheless, as a result of continued political pressure, by 1959 network policy declared that documentaries were the responsibility of network news departments; "independents" no longer were to be employed because their authenticity might not be verifiable. Even today, there are very few documentary filmmakers whose work is broadcast on network television; documentaries are more likely to be found on specialty cable channels such as the Documentary Channel or Biography on A&E. However, some regard so-called "reality TV" as a form of televisual documentary; and although shows such as Survivor (beginning in 2000), Fear Factor (beginning in 2001), and Trading Spaces (beginning in 2000) are highly structured and carefully edited, they do use nonprofessional actors and observe profilmic events as they unfold.



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