The great tradition?
Penelope Houston
The Rise and Fall of British Documentary Elizabeth Sussex (University of California Press £6.50) Documentary has always been a dour, sobering, power-hungry word, now perhaps hanging lazily and clammily over too many different varieties of non-fiction film. John Grierson defined documentary cinema, grandiloquently, as 'the creative treatment of actuality'; which is large enough to mean almost anything. In his corridors of power mood, he put it slightly differently : 'documentary' was a word solemn enough to impress bureaucrats, to cajole government agencies into supporting film programmes. 'An irritating word,' said Cavalcanti, the Brazilian born eminence grise of the British documentary movement of the 'thirties. 'You're an innocent,' said Grierson, with the sweeping severity appropriate in the son of a schoolmaster and grandson of a lighthouse keeper.
If any reminder is needed, Elizabeth Sussex's useful, thoughtful record of interviews with some of the notable survivors of the movement provides it : the art of British documentary was not so much that of making films as of creating a position from which sponsorship could be enlisted. Grierson was 'on to it by 1924, that film could be turned into an instrument of the working class'—which led him in the course of time not to the Labour Party or the TUC (who would have been no sort of allies) but to the Empire Marketing Board and the General Post Office. At the end of his life, the old prophet discovered India: 'I think I must be the first person to lay my finger on that point, that all the mass media together only arrived at 100,000,000 people, and 450,000,000 people [in India] were living on word of mouth. And of course, once you get into the word of mouth business, you're in very different territory. You're in with all the teachers then ...' Grierson in his seventies, out to annex an audience of 450 million Indians for the documentary movement, remained true to his faith in cloudily large concepts and unexplored territories.
Grierson believed in educating government and industry to a sense of how large social responsibilities could be expressed in film, and then educating people through film. He insisted that there were more seats outside the cinemas than inside them; but Mrs Sussex points out that at the height of the war, when film was being used most positively, the Ministry of Information only found a non-theatrical audience of 18 million a year, considerably less than the British commercial cinema then mustered in a week. Now, of course, television gets that kind of audience in a night.
What happened to the Grierson ideal ? The early years, which produced Coalface and Song of Ceylon and Night Mail and Housing Problems, are recalled in these interviews with a rare mixture of affection, awe and exasperation. Grierson demanded a strikingly monastic discipline; he kept everyone working round the clock on hopelessly antiquated equipment; untrained schoolboys were hurled into traumatic encounters with rickety projectors. Robert Flaherty was imported as an inspiration and mentor, wandered the country shooting Industrial Britain, and was fired by Grierson for over-spending during the course of dinner at the Grand Hotel, Birmingham (or, it might be, the Midland Hotel, Manchester.) Key members of the Grierson academy—Edgar Anstey, Basil Wright, Arthur Elton, Paul Rotha, Harry Watt— were all precisely of an age, being born in 1906 or 1907; and were still in their early twenties when they 'came under the influence. The naterviews recall a sense of conscious heroism (they were pioneers, and they had a lot to put up with), and some unconscionable, unresolved squabbles about such things as screen credits.
Grierson went off to Canada in 1937, to hobnob with Mackenzie King and found the Canadian National Film Board ('that was a very tidy job; the neatest operation I've ever been associated with'.) In Britain, apart from the celebrated war documentaries, and the massive infiltration of actuality into the feature film, the sheer wartime output of the stuff, even that kind of Woolton Pie cinema of exhortation about such matters as the permitted depth of bath water, achieved something like
Grierson's idea of social education through cinema. By the mid-'forties, HumphreY Jennings, the painter and Mass Observer, distrusted for waywardness by the stauncher Griersonians, had emerged as the interpreter of the moods of war. Paul Rotha, the most politically motivated of the documentarists, was hoping for sustained encouragement for public service cinema from the Labour Government (Stafford CripPs, he says, backed the idea; Bevin more powerfully killed it.) Basil Wright, a director by inclination, had become a producer of necessity, 'landlord of Pinewood Studios and longing to escape.
One of the mysteries, not cleared LIP through all the rueful, sometimes alert, reminiscences in this book, is the question of what there was in the post-war mood that let the whole thing go adrift. By the early 'fifties, the words 'sponsored film' seemed a thudding promise of tedium. Stuart Legg suggests that 'a minority movement had become a majority movement, and there Is nothing like a process of that kind for taking the wind out of sails'. Basil Wright argues that the Right provided the best sponsors: 'even during the 'thirties the nightmare was to have to make a film for the co-ops or something of that sort, because they were so hidebound'. Grierson himself characteristically complained of the lack of an 'intelligentsia' to wake up the sponsors.
More significantly, there's a faint groundswell of complaint, as though what Elizabeth Sussex finds herself calling 'the idea of a kind of purity' had been betrayed. Throughout the book, people are to be found suggesting that other people 'didn't understand what documentary was stillposed to be doing' (John Taylor, Grierson 's brother-in-law, on Cavalcanti), or lacked 'the realistic approach' (Harry Watt on Crown's producer Ian Dalrymple), or 'were a bit sort of dilettante' (Edgar Anstey on Jennings' films). At the back of their minds, some indefinable standard of 'real documentary' was perhaps fixed back in the 'thirties. The sacred flame has been blown about all over the place, but the idea has been jealously, nostalgically, guarded, through television and cinema verite and on into video.
Grierson himself, by the end of his life, was looking forward to video, which hands over the tool of basic film-making on community issues to almost anyone who can hold a camera. But Grierson, like his obstinate fellow Scot Sir John Reith, had a feeling for communication as a tool of power; and of his followers Paul Rotha, who Perhaps understood power best, never reallY got to the centre of it. The Rise and Fall of British Documentary is sparing of the reallY hard questions; it lets its subjects slide off the hook of history into reminiscence. But it's a valuable attempt to document a landscape. And, among the ironies that dog the the documentarists, it's not the least that this book, on the movement British cinema has most loudly claimed as its own. could not find a publisher in Britain.
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