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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 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. 41
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Documentary in the 1930s
A New History of British Documentary
It is not the intention here to attempt to debunk the Grierson ‘myth’: there is abundant evidence that Grierson was indeed a prime mover in the initiative to establish Britain’s first publicly funded documentary film production unit and was without doubt the documentary movement’s most influential theorist and able publicist. That said, however, Grierson alone did not create the British documentary film any more than D. W. Griffith invented the art of narrative film or Charlie Chaplin was the sole pioneer of screen comedy. The origins of the documentary movement should, rather, be seen as the outcome of a set of ideological and cultural processes that came together in interwar Britain. The fact that this coincided with a period of social and economic depression is largely responsible for the association of documentary film in the 1930s with social problems – though in reality most of the films produced under the broad umbrella of the documentary movement really had little to say about ‘the burning issues of the day’. The documentary movement has variously been understood as a progressive vehicle for exploring social democratic ideals, as an instrument of state publicity and propaganda, and as a medium of national cultural projection. It was to an extent all of those things: documentary film-makers cut their cloth according to their circumstances and were to prove remarkably adept in squaring the ideological and economic demands of their sponsors with their own social and aesthetic concerns. In order to assess the achievements of the documentary movement, therefore, it is necessary in the first instance to consider the various contexts – ideological, institutional and cultural – in which it took shape.
The contexts of documentary The documentary movement was both formed within and in turn responded to the ideological contexts of interwar Britain. It is impossible to understand the nature of documentary film in the 1930s without also understanding something of the politics and society of the time. This is a period that provokes very different responses from historians and cultural commentators. On the one hand the 1930s have often been characterized as a period blighted by economic depression, mass unemployment and social distress: this was the decade of the Jarrow march and Walter Greenwood’s classic novel of the Salford slums Love on the Dole (1933). On the other hand it was also a period that saw the growth of consumerism with increasing levels of home ownership, the rise of the motor car and the advent of seaside holiday camps. As is so often the case, the historical evidence is complex and even contradictory:
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while the national picture was one of economic growth and rising living standards overall, this disguised long-term structural decline in staple industries such as textiles and shipbuilding and the consequent social problems in the regions dependent on those industries. In politics the ascendancy of the coalition National Government (1931–1940) and the failure of political extremism (neither the Communist Party of Great Britain nor the British Union of Fascists were able to mobilize much popular support) suggests that this was a period of consensus. The role of the cinema in British social life during this period was profound. The historian A. J. P. Taylor aptly described cinema as ‘the essential social habit of the age’ in interwar Britain.2 In 1934 (the first year for which reliable statistics exist) there were some 903 million cinema tickets sold and over 4,000 cinemas operating in Britain.3 The cinema was foremost an entertainment medium and what it offered its patrons was escapism: not for no reason were the Odeons and other luxury cinemas of the 1930s known as ‘dream palaces’. With a few exceptions – notably the historical epics of Alexander Korda and the polished thrillers of Alfred Hitchcock – British feature films were generally not well regarded by either critics or audiences, who viewed them as shallow and inferior imitations of the populist fare offered by Hollywood. In his influential book The Film Till Now (1930), for example, Paul Rotha averred that ‘the modern British cinema is extravagantly artificial’ and bemoaned ‘the conservative and narrow-minded outlook of the producing executives’.4 To be fair to British producers the possibility of making the type of films that the more progressive critics wanted was severely restricted by the institutional and ideological contexts in which they operated. The British Board of Film Censors actively discouraged the production of films dealing with what its president, Lord Tyrrel, called ‘the burning issues of the day’: for example, it blocked attempts to make a film of Love on the Dole during the 1930s.5 At the same time, however, the commercial imperative of the film industry meant that most British producers were themselves disinclined to provoke controversy: the film trade’s view was that audiences wanted escapism rather than social realism. Hence British cinema of the 1930s was a vehicle for the promotion of consensus: its ideological outlook was to support the status quo.6 A common charge levelled against British films was that their content was trivial: West End farces, Art Deco musicals and society melodramas proliferated at the expense of more serious and socially edifying fare. In particular the working classes – the very people who comprised the bulk of the cinema audience – were an almost invisible presence in British films, and when they were present were usually treated as comic
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Documentary in the 1930s
A New History of British Documentary
relief. It should be pointed out that this did not seem to bother the millions of working-class patrons who attended the cinema each week; but it was a bone of contention for those progressive critics who advocated a more realistic and socially responsible cinema. John Grierson, for example, damned Alfred Hitchcock with faint praise as ‘the world’s best director of unimportant pictures’. Grierson felt that Hitchcock ‘is the only English director who can put the English poor on the screen with any verisimilitude’, but wondered whether he would ever ‘give us a film of the Potteries or of Manchester or of Middlesborough – with the personals in their proper place and the life of a community instead of a benighted lady at stake?’7 In this sense documentary was an alternative to the commercial mainstream of British cinema in that it was posited on the idea of a socially purposeful and aesthetically innovative film practice. Its primary objective was the representation of the lives and experiences of ordinary people. Most of the best-known documentary films of the 1930s are those depicting groups such as factory workers (Industrial Britain), miners (Coal Face), shipbuilders (Shipyard), fishermen (North Sea) and postal workers (Night Mail), or exploring social issues such as slum housing (Housing Problems), unemployment (They Who Live) and education (Children at School). There is much truth in Harry Watt’s claim that documentary films were revolutionary because they were putting on the screen for the first time in British films – and very nearly in world films – a workingman’s face and workingman’s hands and the way the worker lived and worked . . . [Any] working-class people in British films were the comics. There was the funny taxi driver or the butler who dropped the tureen or the comic waiter or the postman who got bitten by the dog. But we, with Coal Face and little things like Housing Problems . . . and Night Mail, started to give the workingman, the real man who contributed to the country, a dignity.8 Later ideological critiques of documentary would argue that its representation of the working classes was as artificial in its own way as the comic caricatures of feature films and that the documentarists themselves – most of whom were middle-class and university-educated – could hardly claim to speak for their working-class subjects.9 However, there is no reason to doubt that the documentarists’ intentions were anything but genuine. It was not only in its content that documentary marked an alternative to mainstream British cinema. The movement has also been associated
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