DB7

In truth, beauty

They were scruffy, stroppy and barely out of school, but, as Kevin Jackson explains, the angry young men of the documentary film movement made Britain's most significant contribution to cinema history

Saturday September 1, 2007
The Guardian

The story of the British documentary film movement is crammed with odd details: it is a story of herrings and cocoa, fairies and telephones, Christmas puddings and killer rats. It is also the story of how a handful of scruffy, brainy, workaholic young malcontents somehow managed - by intention, accident, improvisation and sheer inventiveness - to create some new types of film and new ways of film-making. Though they have never been remotely as famous as, say, Hitchcock or Chaplin or David Lean, their influence has been incalculably deep and lasting. For decades, film historians all around the world have been contending that the movement's members made Britain's most significant contribution to cinema. This month they are celebrated in a welcome season at the BFI.

The centenaries in question are not strictly cinematic - the movement didn't really get started until the early 1930s - but biological. No fewer than five of its leading players were born 100 years ago, in 1907: Edgar Anstey, Marion Grierson, Paul Rotha, Basil Wright and, by general reckoning the most prodigiously talented of the quintet, Humphrey Jennings, director of Listen to Britain, Fires Were Started and A Diary for Timothy - incomparably stirring and poetic evocations of the home front during the second world war.

Other key directors in the documentary movement include the varied likes of Stuart Legg, Alberto Cavalcanti and Len Lye. The extended pool of fresh talent on which these film-makers drew includes the young WH Auden (also born in 1907) and the even younger Benjamin Britten (born 1913). Night Mail, one of the few products of the movement that many non-specialists still recall, features verses scribbled down in a corridor by Auden (who was treated with about as much deference as a snotty office boy) and music composed against the stopwatch by Britten. It also includes, briefly, the voice of a slightly older man, the man without whose tenacity and shrewdness the movement might never have come into being: Marion Grierson's big brother, John.

More feared and respected than liked, John Grierson had a sharp mind and an uncompromising sense of values - a strong brew of socialism and Calvinism. (He has often been compared to his fellow Scot John Reith, whose faith in the BBC's mission to educate and instruct had much in common with Grierson's view of documentary film.) Didacticism was the essence of his personality. After a period on minesweepers during the first world war, Grierson did a degree in moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow - it was the time of "Red Clyde" - and then went to the US, studying the sociology of mass communications and public opinion. Routine stuff now, but unusual in its day.

He also studied the techniques of cinema. Two things above all impressed him: the unprecedented achievements of Robert Flaherty, world-famous for his hugely successful (if fanciful) 1922 portrait of Inuit life, Nanook of the North; and the innovative editing techniques of early Soviet cinema, particularly those of Eisenstein in Battleship Potemkin. By the time Grierson came back to Britain in 1926, he was a man with a mission: to create a national documentary movement, more or less from scratch. But he had no production company, no equipment, no workers, no patrons and no money. What he did have was a highly persuasive manner and an unusual secret weapon: herrings.

The story goes something like this. An idea was abroad that various agencies, both public and commercial, should fund artists - including film-makers - to create various kinds of projects that might help promote products or government agencies. The policy was termed "background publicity", and at its best it allowed artists a great deal of creative freedom. One body that had established a decent track record of background publicity was the Empire Marketing Board, run by its diffident but gifted secretary, Stephen Tallents. Grierson and Tallents took to each other straight away, and Tallents was keen to commission a film from him.

Alas, there was almost no money in the EMB kitty. (Large amounts of funding had already been handed over to Rudyard Kipling, who had taken it upon himself to produce an empire-boosting feature about the making of a Christmas pudding.) Tallents hinted, however, that there might be a cunning way around this problem. The financial secretary of the Treasury, Arthur Michael Samuel, had an unusual hobby: he was a herring fanatic. Before you could say "go fish", Grierson was out at sea with a camera and a herring fleet.

The resulting film, Drifters, cost only £2,948, and it expanded the possibilities of cinema for ever. It had its first public screening on November 10 1929 at the Tivoli Theatre, home of the Film Society, at an event that also saw the UK premiere of Battleship Potemkin, previously banned in England as enemy propaganda. Drifters opened the bill; it thrilled the audience with its daring and - as far as they knew - fresh editing style. Potemkin made far less impact: it looked like watered-down Grierson. Drifters became the hit film of the season, and soon went into handsome profit.

Sitting in the audience at the Tivoli that night were some lively lads in their early 20s or younger, still at Varsity or freshly graduated: Anstey, Arthur Elton, Legg, Rotha and Wright. Within days, Wright was sitting in a dank basement cutting a four-minute instructional film about cocoa for Grierson, who had warned him that he must not exceed a budget of £7. Other bright young men soon followed; bright young women, too, though the puritanical Grierson was uncomfortable in female company, and the documentary boys had to keep the existence of girlfriends a closely guarded secret. In the words of Harry Watt, who joined the cause in 1932: "Grierson was our guru, our 'Chief', our little god, the man who gave us an aim and an ideal . . . We were adult enough to laugh at his foibles and play-acting, to joke about his verbosity and Calvinism, but, basically, we adored him."

In the 10 years between the screening of Drifters and the outbreak of the second world war - when the documentarists all lent their talents to the war effort - there was an astonishingly rapid growth in the scope and sophistication of British documentaries. Housing Problems (1934), sponsored by the Gas Light and Coke Company and directed by Anstey and Elton, presented a harrowing view of south London's slums: no one who has seen it can ever forget the sequence in which a housewife (who had never seen a film) talks about her daily battles with a malicious rat. Though most of them stayed clear of the Communist Party, the documentarists were very much to the left, and stroppy to boot. More than two decades before the Angry Young Men, here were the Angry Documentarists, as recalled by Watt: "Our uniform was appalling flannel trousers, usually much too baggy, a not-too-clean check shirt, a stained pullover and a dreadful tweed jacket, with bulging, sagging pockets and, more often than not, a tear somewhere. We were completely improvident, spending what money we had on booze or girls. We were very politically conscious, and were fiercely anti-fascist and anti-Nazi."

Outsiders have corroborated Watt's account. According to the novelist and playwright JB Priestley, who worked with them (the BFI season includes a rare screening of Priestley's collaboration of 1937, We Live in Two Worlds, about the promise of technology): "Grierson and his young men, with their contempt for easy big prizes and soft living, their taut social conscience, their rather Marxist sense of the contemporary scene, always seemed to me figures representative of a new world, at least a generation ahead of the dramatic film people."

Priestley was certainly right in picking up on an antagonism between the Grierson crew and the people involved in the much better-paid world of feature films. The feature people sneered at the documentarists as a bunch of adenoidal, unwashed, upper-class Bolshies; the documentarists regarded the feature-makers as - in the pungent words of one of Grierson's top editors - "lice".

This conflict was to ease a little, especially when war obliged the two factions to work side by side, and each camp had to admit that the other might have its virtues. In fact, it has often been suggested that the bias towards social realism, which has been seen as either the saving grace or the besetting vice of postwar British cinema, is the direct legacy of the documentary movement. The producer Michael Balcon declared that the kind of film he wanted to foster at Ealing Studios would make "use of characters and actions arising out of contemporary problems, such as were handled by the documentarists: labour problems, class problems, problems of psychology".

But the point can be overstated. Slim in terms of the number of people involved, the documentary movement was nonetheless a broad church in terms of style and subject matter. It could encompass fantasy, experimentation and even downright whimsy: William Coldstream's miniature musical, Fairy of the Phone, is a delicious, almost lunatic piece of camp. Lye, who came to the movement from New Zealand, made sparky, visually witty short films that were as close to pure abstraction as cinema has ever come. In some instances, he gave up using cameras at all and simply painted designs straight on to film stock.

Credit for much of this more light-hearted and playful side to the movement can be given to the admirable Cavalcanti. Brazilian, gay, a veteran of Parisian surrealism, he was initially brought to the movement by Grierson to help the young directors cope with the transition to sound from silence, but he imported all manner of unforeseen jollity and invention to Grierson's dour domain. Cavalcanti's Pett and Pott, an unabashedly silly comedy-drama made to promote sales of telephones, is like a miniature dictionary of cinematic tricks: slow motion, split screen, shock sound edits. What's more, it still raises a laugh.

The glory days of the documentary movement came to an end some time after 1945, though quite when is a moot point. Some of the documentarists went into television; some went overseas (Grierson became the godfather of Canadian film production); and some died young, such as Humphrey Jennings, who fell to his death at 43 while filming on a cliff in Greece. It was all something of an anti-climax, but it can also be seen as a case of "mission accomplished". Though few of the postwar films by any of these directors matches the invention and impact of their earlier work, the earlier productions came to serve as an urgent source of inspiration for rising generations, such as the "Free Cinema" movement of the 1950s: Lindsay Anderson, Tony Richardson, Karel Reisz.

Today, the legacy of their innovations can be seen and heard around the world - not only in the work of directors who have deliberately studied them, such as Kevin Macdonald, but equally among countless film-makers who, unwitting, continue to find enduring life in the conventions these directors invented when they were young and broke and burning to change the world.

· The Documentary Centenaries season is at BFI Southbank, London SE1, throughout September. Details: BFI | Home or 020 7255 1444.

penfold

Up to a point....much as I enjoy the documentary films of the thirties and forties, and of Jennings in particular, you have to remember that the people who most aggrandised the achievements of Grierson's Documentary Movement were people attached to Grierson's Documentary Movement....either actually (Paul Rotha's writings were still being republished well into the sixties, and used as standard texts) or politically, like Ivor Montagu, or indeed Lindsay Anderson and co. It's almost an extension of Fred Kite's evocation of Soviet Russia, 'All them Cornfields and Ballet in the evenings' - everything left wing had to be better, and if it wasn't, praise it to the skies anyway.
The truth of the matter is that there were plenty of documentary films made prior to Grierson, but simply not named as such, because the word had yet to be invented. 'Drifters' is a good film, but not actually much different to films of whaling fleets made in the 1910's, and the films of real life such as Housing Problems, not a million miles away from the actuality films of the Mitchell and Kenyon era. Grierson did not invent a movement....he was renaming and redirecting politically a pre-existing genre of film, and not a uniquely British one at that period.
As for the influence it had, I think that, too, is overstated continuously. Bearing in mind that Jennings was somewhat outside the movement and looked down upon by those inside it, it's interesting (but no doubt correct) that he is generally the first name mentioned - even if Night Mail is the first film quoted. Jennings had a vision, and an eye for image, less like the rest of The Movement and more like that of Michael Powell...just working in a different strand of filmmaking. I fail to see any real lasting influence of the mainstream British Documentary Movement in the cinema of today...even Ken Loach left it behind in the 80's.

Bit of a Bay Window, what??

Steve Crook

And it's questionable how much truth there was in their beauty

They often staged events deliberately for the cameras that wouldn't have normally happened. The most famous example being Flaherty's Man of Aran where he got them to fish using techniques that hadn't been in use for a few generations because it looked more picturesque. The titular "Man of Aran" wasn't even from Aran!

There is usually as much selection of what to include (and what not to include) by the director and editor for a "documentary" as there is for any drama.

Steve

Rob Compton

Very perceptive comments, Penfold.

I keep coming across little documentary gems such as Jennings' "Dim Little Island" which is a fascinating, slightly-flawed attempt to find a way forward for Britain after the war years in the late 1940's. Interesting film, though viewed from the 21st century a little naive, but it does give a clear view of what thinking was going on at that time.

Do catch it if you can, if you have any interest in history or in British documentaries. It's worth watching just for Ralph Vaughan Williams wondrous accompanying music, which I just love, and also for the interst of seeing RVW on screen.

The Dim Little Island (1949)

rgds
Rob

penfold

I have seen it....yes, a tad naive, but it follows on from A Diary For Timothy in recording the practical steps being taken, not just vague hopes for the future...of course, neither were fully realised, but that was not Jennings' fault. I find Jennings' pre-war work interesting too...beautiful films, poetical indeed.
Interesting that one of the films covered in depth last night on British Film Forever was the mighty Battle of The Somme.....which has far less recreation in it than you might expect, and certainly less than became the norm for the documentary movement, and yet a documentary feature film from 1916, 20 million tickets sold, and yet usually ignored or downplayed in historys of British documentary films because it had nothing to do with Grierson, and was probably seen as being imperialist. For instance, no mention in the index of Paul Rotha's 750 page The Film Till Now, whereas Battleship Potemkin warrants 28 citations....

Bit of a Bay Window, what??

Rob Compton

Thanks for this. I've said before on these pages that I think Jennings' "A Diary for Timothy" is the most perfect example of the documentary filmmakers art. If any film deserved to be described as "poetry" then this film does.

Regarding the Somme film, there was a piece about it on Radio 4 some time ago, which whetted my appetite. Do I recall you saying that the BFI were going - or had - released it on DVD, Mark? Or did I imagine that?

Thanks
Rob

penfold

Nearly...I believe the Imperial War Museum was planning to release the restored film with a new score or possibly the original, reconstructed score; I don't know whether that is still coming or whether that has stalled.....there is a Region 1, but I have no idea as to its quality or completeness.
I've seen the restored version, with the original score, played live a couple of times, and it's a stunning film.....as Christopher Frayling said last night, it's hard to imagine that our great grandparents were watching it seeking faces in the crowd with the war still going on. There's a montage sequence of the dead that is intensely moving....it must have been extremely traumatic viewing in 1916.

Bit of a Bay Window, what??