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Al-Ahram Weekly 9 - 15 September 1999 Issue No. 446 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 9 - 15 September 1999 Issue No. 446
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Focus Culture Features Books Special Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters
Documentary reality
By Mohamed El-AssyoutiJust as photography at its beginnings was understood as a way to reproduce reality, so was cinema conceived as a means for documenting phenomena or actions. The earliest footage filmed by Louis Lumière was La Sortie des Usines and L'Arrivée d'un Train en Gare (Workers Leaving the Factory and Arrival of a Train, 1895). Subsequently, the Lumière cameramen travelled around the world capturing the diverse images which were to constitute the first travelogue in film history. During the following decade, the great majority of footage was of a documentary nature, yet by the 1910s the notion of a film as synonymous with one dramatic episode or more emerged and began to dominate.
To the American Robert Flaherty, we owe Nanook of the North (1922), the first documentary film finally made after several dissatisfactory attempts and the accidental burning of early footage. Nanook is a feature documentary about a hunter, named Nanook, of the Itivimuit Eskimo tribe. Flaherty's later documentaries included Maona (1926), about the inhabitants of the South Pacific island of Samoa; Man of Aran (1934), about the inhabitants of the off-Ireland islands of Aran; and Louisiana Story (1948), about the Cajun descendants of Acadian immigrants from Canada.
A Flaherty documentary is typically a feature-length, close-up portrait of a society which is remote in its location but familiar in its humanity. What he wanted to show was "the former majesty and character of primitive peoples". Not only did the said "primitive peoples" befriend and help him, but they acted out habits and customs especially for him that they knew their grandfathers had followed, but that they had themselves lost.
Both John Grierson and Paul Rotha, the British documentary pioneers, admired Flaherty's calibre but criticised his "romanticism" in their writings -- film, for them, had to assume a more profound social role. Grierson saw film as "a pulpit" and was determined to "bring the citizen's eye in from the ends of the earth to the story, his own story, of what was happening under his nose... the drama of the door step". After directing Drifters (1929), about the herring fishing industry where man and machine are in bondage together, Grierson formed a film unit for the Empire Marketing Board (EMB), and recruited many socialist activists, including Paul Rotha, Edgar Anstey, Arthur Elton, Stuart Legg, Basil Wright, Harry Watt, John Taylor and Mary Field.
Saad Zaghlul (far left), subject of the first Egyptian documentary footage shot by Mohamed Bayoumi (1923)
Grierson never had to direct a film himself afterwards: under his supervision, all these recruits became leading documentarists in no time, and the EMB film unit hired Flaherty to undertake the photography of Industrial Britain (1933), and Brazilian pioneer documentarist Alberto Cavalcanti for sound experiments. The result was documentaries with titles like Workers and Jobs (1935), Housing Problems (1935), Enough to Eat (1936), Coal Face (1936) and The Smoke Menace (1937); additionally, the Cylon Tea Propaganda Company produced Basil Wright's classic Song of Cylon in1935.
Ironically, industrial and governmental sponsorship, thanks to Grierson's efforts, were a more constant support for the socialist-inclined documentaries of the unit and its offsprings than they were for Flaherty, whose sponsor for Nanook was a French fur company and for Louisiana Story was Standard Oil of New Jersey. The impact of Grierson's movement reached the US, where the government financed Pare Lorentz's The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1937). Grierson was later to establish the National Film Boards of Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
The world's first documentary, Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922)
Adolph Hitler and Leni Riefenstahl during the shooting of her Triumph of the Will (bottom)
World of Plenty by Paul Rotha (1943)
A Diary for Timothy by Humphrey Jennings (1946)
Harlan County by Barbara Kopple (1976)
Housing Problems by Edgar Anstey and Arthur Elton (1935)
In the early 1920s, while the concept of documentary film was taking shape around Flaherty's Nanook, Russian newsreels under Dziga Vertov and Esfir Shaub -- the latter having benefited from work with both Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein -- had metamorphosed into two distinct kinds of documentary. In her Russian history trilogy The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, The Great Road and The Russia of Nicholas II and Leo Tolstoy (1927), Shaub used original footage from before 1917, reversing its pro-Tsarist significance to make her landmark in the revolution's propaganda. Dziga Vertov, futurist film theorist and documentarist, declared that he would "use the camera as a cinema-eye more perfect than the human eye for exploring [the] chaos of visual phenomena filling the universe". True enough, in the 1920s his Radio-Pravda idea for developing the medium anticipated satellite communication.
After his History of the Civil War (1921), a feature-length compilation documentary, Vertov started issuing the monthly poetic newsreel Kino-Pravda (Film Truth). Ideas and methods exercised in Kino-Pravda were to be utilised in his documentaries including Cinema-Eye (1924), Forward, Soviet! (1926), One Sixth of the World (1926) and The Eleventh Year (1928). With The Man with the Movie Camera (1929), he became the harbinger of a movement that would resonate in different places in the world throughout film history. In addition to its insistence on the truth-value attached to images, the filmmaking process itself became an implicit leitmotif.
While Vertov's reportorial documentary style was to be followed by Victor Turin, Yakov Blyokh, Mikhail Kalatozov and his brother Mikhail Kaufman, his influence, along with that of Grierson, introduced a documentary movement to the US exemplified in the works of Pare Lorentz, Ralph Steiner, Willard Van Dyke, Paul Strand, Leo Hurwitz and Joris Ivens. Much later, in France, Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin's Chronique d'un été (Chronicle of a Summer, 1961) bore self-reflexive elements similar to those of Vertov's films, and it is owing to this re-emergence of Vertov's ideas -- which also involved Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard -- that the new documentary movement was called cinéma verité.
In Britain, Free Cinema was championed by Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, and Tony Richardson, while in the US Direct Cinema flourished under Robert Drew, Richard Leacock, Albert and David Maysles and Frederick Wiseman. Both these movements were variations along the verité lines in the same way that, in eastern Europe, Black Film was a derivative. Each documentarist, of course, still retained his distinct version of that observational style. Wiseman's "reality fictions", as he calls them, focused on institutions to study the exercise of power in American society at the community level. Leading Yugoslav filmmaker Dusan Makavejev conceived of cinema as a "guerrilla operation against everything that is fixed, defined, established, dogmatic, eternal"; for him, "everything" included the Pentagon and Stalinism alike.
As documentaries propagating socialist and communist ideas were being shown all over the world, influenced by the Russian revolution and its pioneer filmmakers, another wave of documentaries originated in Germany's Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda under Joseph Goebbles and Adolph Hitler's direct supervision. The Führer mandated German superstar Leni Reifensthal to direct a documentary on the 1933 National Socialist German Workers Party rally; the result, Victory of Faith (1933), was not released publicly for political reasons. Two years later, Reifensthal boasted a 120-member caravan, including 16 leading cameramen with 30 cameras to film the six-day parade of the Third Reich in Nuremberg -- a city that was turned into a colossal stadium for the ceremony and a gigantic studio for the documentary. Hence, when Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will, 1935) was broadcast all over the world, the reality of German military aptitude was brought home with a thud.
At the same time Joris Ivens's documentaries on the Spanish Civil and the Sino-Japanese wars, The Spanish Earth (1937) -- for which Ernest Hemingway wrote and performed the poetic narration -- and The Four Hundred Million (1939) respectively, exemplified the documentarist's ideological, not personal, involvement. With World War II, the opposite was the norm: a former socialist like Walter Ruttman opted for straightforward Nazi propaganda in Deutsche Panzer (German Tanks, 1940). Nazi propaganda strategy achieved perhaps its most remarkable expression in the works of Fritz Hippler: Feuertaufe (Baptism by Fire, 1940), Feldzugin Polen (Campaign in Poland, 1940), Der Ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew, 1940) -- the only documentary among many contemporary anti-Semitic German films -- and Sieg in Westen (Victory in the West, 1941).
During the first three years of World War II, the strength of Nazi propaganda tactics was in direct proportion to the success of military invasions. The Allies' documentaries took over during the following three years. While Hippler's films occasionally used shots from fiction or Allied newsreels, the seven-documentary series produced by Frank CapraWhy We Fight (1942-5) appropriated shots from Reifensthal, Ruttman, and Hippler -- now all incarcerated and classified in the military department for security reasons -- as well as the works of Ivens, Jennings, Varlamov, Watt and others, from any available newsreels and from numerous big-budget Hollywood fiction films.
The use of the same footage by both the warring factions of World War II, each for its own ends, was not the only incident of its kind and Hitler, who never set foot on a battlefield and monitored the entire war from his film projection rooms, was an example to be followed when satellite communications came to hand.
Furthermore, leading fiction directors undertook the task of counter-propaganda, as seen in the works of American directors John Ford, William Wyler and John Huston, and those of Russian directors Alexander Dovzhenko, Sergei Yutkevitch, and Yuli Raizman. In England, Humphery Jennings' documentaries -- First Days (1939), London Can Take It (1940), Listen to Britain (1942), Fires Were Started (1943), The Silent Village (1943), The 80 Days (1944), and Diary For Timothy (1945), for which E M Forster wrote the narration -- observed human behaviour under the tremendous stress of war, establishing Jennings as the most lyrical portraitist of World War II.
The nationalistic sensationalism that aesthetically devalued most World War II documentaries until 1945 -- exceptions being the masterpieces of Reifensthal, Huston and Jennings -- continued to do so subsequently. Rare exemptions were Alain Renais's Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog, 1955) which lyrically depicts the Holocaust without any fanaticism for race or nation, despite its inclusion of original Nazi footage of the human disaster. By contrast, the Israeli-French production Shoah (Holocaust, 1986) by Claude Lanzmann is a nine-and-a-half hour documentary that interviews both surviving victims and perpetrators of the Holocaust, inevitably a traumatic viewing experience. A year after Shoah's release, Steven Spielberg offered an extravagant donation to the film archive established in 1967, and jointly administered by Avraham Harman, the Institute of Contemporary Jewry of the Hebrew University and the Central Zionist Archives. The archive was named after the popular Hollywood director, whose constant support and donations have made the Steven Spielberg Film Archive in Israel one of the top half dozen film archives in the world with respect to its collection of historic and war documentary material.
Subsequent war or anti-war propaganda shared a common stock of images, the significance of which was controlled either directly, by voice-over commentary or indirectly, by the editing style and sequence of shots. Most notoriously, during the 1960s American viewers were given only the official perspective in the documentaries that television broadcast nationwide, while the rest of the world watched a different version of Vietnam.
With silicon graphics technology, a documentary that claims a certain point and supports it with both sound and image can tackle virtually any subject. Luis Buñuel's Tierra Sin Pan or Las Hurdes (Land Without Bread, 1932), a sardonic portrayal of a Spanish village during the Civil War, parodies the documentary style itself. Much later, popular pseudo-documentaries like Woody Allen's Zelig (1983) and Rob Reiner's This is Spinal Tap (1984) followed the same lines, demonstrating that "truth" in a documentary is a matter of presentation, not representation.
In terms of style, structure and expositional strategy, the documentary is as characteristically tropic and figurative as the fiction film, argues film theorist Michael Renov. Common fictive elements include: character construction, poetic language, emotionalising narration or musical accompaniment, embedded narratives, dramatic arcs, the exaggeration of camera angles, camera distance, or editing rhythms. The difference between fiction and non-fiction films, then, depends on the combination of sobriety and imagination in the filmmaking approach. Theorist Bill Nichols gave this difference a clear definition: fiction and non-fiction are equally constructed, but the former is story-based and oriented toward a world, while the latter has argument or rhetorical fiction as its backbone, and is oriented toward the world.
From people acting out their ancestors' ways in Flaherty to Shaub's subversive use of Tsarist-era footage for revolutionary propaganda, to Grierson's use of shots from fiction films in Conquest (1930), the question addressing the degree of "authenticity" of the reality a documentary represents has never died. In some instances, the documentary itself revolved around exactly that question. With satellite communications, silicon graphics and digitally-assembled sound tracks, it is naive not to question the authenticity of the images presented as facts on our television sets.
