Abstract
While there were important antecedents, such as the documentary reconstructions of British Instructional Films and the polar exploration epics, the emergence of British documentary as a distinct mode of film practice in its own right is generally held to have been in the 1930s when a combination of factors — including a growing awareness of the potential of film as a medium of mass communication, a progressive outlook by both the public and private sectors towards commissioning films for publicity purposes, a realist tendency in the arts in general, and the rise of an intellectual film culture that saw films as an art form rather than purely as a business — created the circumstances in which the documentary ‘movement’ took shape. All accounts of the origins and early history of the British documentary film movement privilege the role of John Grierson (1898—1972) who is widely referred to — including by himself — as its ‘founder’ or ‘leader’. In the standard historiography Grierson is seen as laying down both the sociological and the aesthetic principles of documentary film. This is despite the fact that he directed only one major film (Drifters, 1929) and that his career as a hands-on documentary producer was in fact quite short. Yet Grierson’s influence on documentary was so pervasive that the label ‘Griersonian’ is regularly attached to an entire tradition of film-making and even extends to include many productions in which he had no involvement at all.
It may therefore be worth recalling that our British documentary group began not so much in affection for film as in affection for national education. If I am to be counted as the founder and leader of the movement, its origins certainly lie in sociological rather than aesthetic aims.
John Grierson1
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Notes
John Grierson, ‘The Course of Realism’, in Charles Davy (ed.), Footnotes to the Film (London, 1937), p.153.
A. J. P. Taylor, English History 1914–1945 (Oxford, 1965), p.313.
Simon Rowson, ‘A Statistical Survey of the Cinema Industry in Great Britain in 1934’, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 99 (1936), pp.67–129.
Paul Rotha, with Richard Griffith, The Film Till Now: A Survey of World Cinema (London, rev. edn 1967 [1930]), pp. 313, 316.
BBFC Annual Report (London, 1937). On the operation and policies of the BBFC, see Nicholas Pronay, ‘The First Reality: Film Censorship in Liberal England’, in K. R. M. Short (ed.), Feature Films as History (London, 1981), pp.113–37;
Jeffrey Richards, ‘The British Board of Film Censors and Content Control in the 1930s (1): Images of Britain’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 1: 2 (1981), pp.95–119;
and James C. Robertson, The British Board of Film Censors: Film Censorship in Britain 1996–1950 (London, 1950).
Jeffrey Richards, The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in Britain, 1930–1939 (London, 1984);
Jeffrey Richards and Anthony Aldgate, Best of British: Cinema and Society 1930–1970 (Oxford, 1983), pp.29–42; and Tony Aldgate, ‘Ideological Consensus in British Feature Films, 1935–1947’, Short (ed.), Feature Films as History, pp.94–112.
‘Hitchcock, Asquith and the English Cinema’, in Forsyth Hardy (ed.), Grierson on the Movies (London, 1981), p.110.
Elizabeth Sussex, The Rise and Fall of British Documentary: The Story of the Film Movement Founded by John Grierson (Berkeley, 1975), pp.76–7.
Stuart Hood, ‘John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement’, in James Curran and Vincent Porter (eds), British Cinema History (London, 1983), pp.99–112.
See Jamie Medhurst, Alternative Film Culture in Interwar Britain (Exeter, 2008). An interesting analysis of British documentary in comparison to international avant-garde practices is offered by
Martin Stollery, Alternative Empires: European Modernist Cinemas and Cultures of Imperialism (Exeter, 2000).
Alan Lovell and Jim Hillier, Studies in Documentary (London, 1972), p.35.
Paul Swann, The British Documentary Film Movement, 1926–1946 (Cambridge, 1989), pp.33–4.
Paul Rotha, Documentary Diary: An Informal History of the British Documentary Film, 1928–1939 (New York, 1973), p.31.
Jeffrey Richards and Dorothy Sheridan (eds), Mass-Observation at the Movies (London, 1987), p.2.
Philip C. Logan, Humphrey Jennings and British Documentary Film: A Re-assessment (Farnham, 2011), p.107.
Leonard W. Doob, Propaganda: Its Psychology and Technique (New York, 1935), p.3.
For an overview of the subject, see Kevin Robins, Frank Webster and Michael Pickering, ‘Propaganda, Information and Social Control’, in Jeremy Hawthorn (ed.), Propaganda, Persuasion and Polemic (London, 1987), pp.1–17.
R. S. Lambert, Propaganda (London, 1938), p.102.
Amber Blanco White, The New Propaganda (London, 1939), p.305.
T. J. Hollins, ‘The Conservative Party and Film Propaganda Between the Wars’, English Historical Review, 96: 379 (1981), p.366.
Philip M. Taylor, British Propaganda in the Twentieth Century: Selling Democracy (Edinburgh, 1999), p.95.
On Grierson’s studies in the United States, see Ian Aitken, Film and Reform: John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement (London, 1990), pp.48–89.
A representative sample of Grierson’s writing from this period was collected together in Forsyth Hardy (ed.), Grierson on Documentary (London, 1946). Note that some minor editorial changes have been made from the originals and that the later paperback edition published by Faber and Faber (London, 1966) includes a slightly different selection of essays from the first edition published by Collins. An alternative sample of Grierson’s work, including some previously unpublished papers, can be found in Ian Aitken (ed.), The Documentary Film Movement: An Anthology (Edinburgh, 1998). For a comprehensive list of Grierson’s publications, see Jack C. Ellis, John Grierson: A Guide to References and Resources (Boston, 1986).
Nicholas Hiley, ‘“No mixed bathing”: The creation of the British Board of Film Censors in 1913’, Journal of Popular British Cinema, 3 (2000), pp.5–19. See also Robertson, The British Board of Film Censors, pp.1–18.
Stephen Tallents, The Projection of England (London, 1932), p.39.
Rachael Low, The History of the British Film 1918–1929 (London, 1971), p.156.
The passage of the Cinematograph Films Act is documented in Margaret Dickinson and Sarah Street, Cinema and State: The Film Industry and the British Government 1927–84 (London, 1985), pp.5–33.
Andrew Higson, Waving the Flag: Constructing a National Cinema in Britain (Oxford, 1995), pp.26–97.
For an account of Tallents’s career, see Scott Anthony, Public Relations and the Making of Modern Britain: Stephen Tallents and the Birth of a Progressive Media Profession (Manchester, 2012).
Stephen Constantine, ‘“Bringing the Empire alive”: The Empire Marketing Board and imperial propaganda, 1926–33’, in John M. MacKenzie (ed.), Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester, 1986), pp.192–231.
John Grierson, ‘Drifters’, in Forsyth Hardy (ed.), Grierson on Documentary (London, rev. edn 1966), p.20.
Jamie Sexton, ‘Grierson’s Machines: Drifters, the Documentary Film Movement and the Negotiation of Modernity’, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 11: 1 (2002), pp.40–59.
Michael Balcon, Michael Balcon presents … A Lifetime of Films (London, 1969), p.70.
Harry Watt, Don’t Look at the Camera (London, 1974), p.72.
Paul Rotha, with Sinclair Road and Richard Griffith, Documentary Film (New York, rev. edn 1952), pp.106–7.
André Bazin, What is Cinema? Volume 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley, 1967), p.162.
This figure is based on the filmography in Rachael Low, The History of the British Film 1929–1939: Documentary and Educational Films of the 1930s (London, 1979), pp.211–27.
Scott Anthony, Night Mail (London, 2007), p.7.
The first dedicated history of the GPO Film Unit is Scott Anthony and James G. Mansell (eds), The Projection of Britain: A History of the GPO Film Unit (London, 2011). Other accounts include: Aitken, Film and Reform, pp.127–49; Sussex, The Rise and Fall of British Documentary, pp.44–78; and Swann, The British Documentary Film Movement, pp.49–94.
Forsyth Hardy, ‘The British Documentary Film’, in Michael Balcon, Ernest Lindgren, Forsyth Hardy and Roger Manvell, Twenty Years of British Film 1925–1945 (London, 1947), p.47.
Harry Watt, Don’t Look at the Camera (London, 1974), p.80. Rotha estimated the cost of Night Mail at ‘around £1800’. Documentary Diary, p.132.
Graham Greene, The Pleasure-Dome: The Collected Film Criticism 1935–40 (London, 1972), p.25.
Arthur Vesselo, ‘Documentary Films’, Sight and Sound, 5: 17 (Spring 1936), pp.28–9.
Robert Flaherty, ‘North Sea’, Sight and Sound, 7: 26 (Summer 1938), p.62.
Alexander Wolcough, ‘Memorandum: Aims of the Shell Film Programme’ (February 1937). Quoted in Douglas Gordon, Shell Films: The First Sixty Years (London 1994), p.4.
Colin Burgess, ‘Sixty Years of Shell Film Sponsorship, 1934–94’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 7: 2 (2010), p.214.
Scott Anthony, ‘The Future’s in the Air: Imperial Airways and the British Documentary Film Movement’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 8: 3 (2011), pp.301–21;
Nicholas Stanley-Price, ‘Paul Rotha and the Making of Strand Films’ Air Outpost (1937)’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 32: 1 (2012), pp.95–111.
Richard Griffith, ‘Films at the New York World’s Fair’, Documentary News Letter, 1: 2 (February 1940), p.3.
Geoffrey Crothall, ‘Images of Regeneration: Film Propaganda and the British Slum Clearance Campaign, 1933–1938’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 19: 3 (1999), pp.339–58.
Brian Winston, Claiming the Real: The Griersonian Documentary and its Legitimations (London, 1995), p.60.
Dallas Bower, ‘Film in the Social Scene’, in Robert Herring (ed.), Cinema Survey (London, 1937), p.25.
Hector McCullie, ‘Oh! London’, Sight and Sound, 7: 26 (Summer 1938), p.73.
Leslie Halliwell, Seats in All Parts: Half a Lifetime at the Movies (London, 1985), p.48.
J. B. Holmes, ‘GPO Films’, Sight and Sound, 6: 23 (Autumn 1937), p.17.
Arts Enquiry, The Factual Film: A Survey Sponsored by the Dartington Hall Trustees (London, 1947), p.59.
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© 2015 James Chapman
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Chapman, J. (2015). Documentary in the 1930s. In: A New History of British Documentary. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230392878_3
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