Documentary film and the modernist avant-garde

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 27, Issue 4, 2001, Pages 580-610

  Nichols, Bill ^a  

^a SAN FRANCISCO STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 61149257533     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/449023     Document Type: Review

References (54)

1. John Grierson, "The E.M.B. Film Unit," Grierson on Documentary, ed. Forsyth Hardy (New York, 1971), p. 165
2. See Bill Nichols, "The Documentary and the Turn from Modernism," in Joris Ivens and the Documentary Context, ed. Kees Bakker (Amsterdam, 1999), pp. 148-159
3. See Nichols, Newsreel: Documentary Filmmaking on the American Left (New York, 1980)
4. Paul Rotha, Documentary Film: The Use of the Film Medium to Interpret Creatively and in Social Terms the Life of the People as It Exists in Reality (London, 1935), p. 79; hereafter abbreviated DF
5. Jack C. Ellis, The Documentary Idea: A Critical History of English-Language Documentary Film and Video (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1989), p. 9
6. Erik Barnouw, Documentary: A History of the Non-fiction Film (New York, 1993), p. 3
7. Among other documentary histories, Richard Meran Barsam's account distinguishes travelogues, newsreels, and other nonfiction forms from documentary proper but tends to graft his own, latter-day conception of documentary back onto this history rather than provide an origin story as such. "Documentary" simply appears, once Grierson names it in 1926, as a distinct form of nonfiction, complete with American, British, Soviet, and Continental variants. See Richard Meran Barsam, Nonfiction Film: A Critical History (New York, 1973)
8. Brian Winston prefers to begin his account with a fellow Britisher, John Grierson. Although he, too, notes other forms of nonfiction that precede the documentary, it is Grierson, the early and less heralded example of Edward Curtis with his In the Land of the Headhunters (1915), and Flaherty, with his colonial baggage and insistence of making art from life, that provide the primary moment of origin. Winston does suggest somewhat deeper roots in nineteenth-century realism after Courbet: this seems to lay the groundwork for the aesthetic principles that transfer over to film in some incompletely specified way
9. See Brian Winston, Claiming the Real: The Documentary Film Revisited (London, 1995), pp. 8-10, 19-23, 26-29
10. The sense of relatively untroubled passage from photographic realism to documentary representation remains strong in all these accounts. Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell's excellent general history of the cinema, Film History: An Introduction (New York, 1994) also follows the same line but in less exaggerated from. They introduce documentary work in the 1920s thusly: "Before the 1920s, documentary filmmaking had largely been confined to newsreels and scenic shorts," an assertion that smoothes over any sharper distinction between early uses of photographic realism and the actual emergence of documentary proper in the 1920s (p. 202). They imply that the documentary tradition traces back to early cinema even though their own history tends to minimize the force of this myth
11. Thompson and Bordwell, Film History, p. 352
12. Grierson, "The E.M.B. Film Unit," p. 165
13. Abigail Solomon-Godeau points out that work such as Matthew Brady's Civil War photographs and Samuel Bourne's photographs of India and Nepal in the 1860s did not produce a documentary form or tradition directly; on the contrary, it was taken for granted that such work conformed to the basic function of the photographic image to document a preexistent reality. To label such images documentary would produce a tautology: "Because the preponderance of photographic uses previous to the term's introduction [in the 1920s] were what we would now automatically designate as documentary, it becomes clear that the documentary concept is historical, not ontological." Even Jacob Riis's photographic illustrations for How the Other Half Lives (1890), though a possible progenitor for the documentary movements of the 1930s in Solomon-Godeau's account, did not spark such a movement directly or immediately
14. It took an extended period of symbolism and aestheticism in the form of photographic pictorialism to allow documentary to escape tautology and name a distinct form (Abigail Solomon-Godeau, "Who Is Speaking Thus? Some Questions about Documentary Photography," in The Event Horizon: Essays on Hope, Sexuality, Social Space, and Media(tion) in Art, ed. Lome Falk and Barbara Fischer [Toronto, 1987], pp. 193, 195)
15. See Maureen Turim, "The Ethics of Form: Structure and Gender in Maya Deren's Challenge to the Cinema," in Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde, ed. Nichols (Berkeley, 2001)
16. The first decade of cinema produced an astonishing array of material gathered by itinerate cinematographers from around the world. To the extent that many countries, including those still yoked to Europe by colonial domination, experienced the beginnings of a motion picture industry, it was in relation to the production of actualités detailing local places and events. Early histories of cinema, and of documentary, however, such as Rotha's Documentary Film do not acknowledge any formative work from Third World countries, only work from the Soviet Union and continental Europe. Histories devoted to Third World cinema written more recently continue this neglect. Some refer to these early efforts but draw minimal implications for their significance to the development of national cinemas or documentary film practices as such. It is not entirely surprising that a history of Third World documentary film production prior to World War II is sometimes acknowledged but generally discounted. Historians tend to define the emergence of a national cinema as the appearance of a sustained feature fiction mode of production. However, Catherine Benamou, in informal conversation, has asserted that documentary did definitely exist in Mexico in the period prior to World War II, as it probably did in other countries as well. Mexican Cinema, ed. Paulo Antonio Paranaguá (London, 1995)
17. offers hints of this in an essay by Aurelio de los Eyes, "The Silent Cinema," pp. 63-78, in which he describes documentary work in the 'teens that "set out to inform . . . . had developed its own mode of representation and carefully documented, unhindered, the major national events with complete freedom" (p. 69). Much of the work appears to be documentation more than documentary, and the book's overview chronology claims that "the documentary is definitely put to rest" by 1917 (p. 23) as a film d'art, import model gains dominance, but de los Eyes's detailed account offers substantiation to Benamou's claim. It remains an area of film study in need of extended investigation
18. Documents have long been regarded as factual elements of the historical record, free of the editorializing stratagems of the orator or the interpretative leanings of the historian. Documentaries, on the other hand, are the product of a persuasive, or at least poetic, intent to have an audience see and act differently. When John Grierson praised Moana for its "documentary value" (but not its documentary form) he acknowledged its value as a document of Pacific island culture despite the fictional pretext of a coming-of-age story. The qualities of the document lurked amidst the fabrications of the fiction. In Documentary Expression and Thirties America (New York, 1973), William Stott argues convincingly that the documentary tradition "carries and communicates feeling . . . feeling comes first" (pp. 7, 8). The rhetorical tradition, of which the documentary film tradition is a specific manifestation, has always granted great importance to feeling or emotion as the means by which an audience comes to be predisposed or moved toward a set of values or course of action. The poststructural fillip that documents are themselves rhetorical constructs designed to bear greater evidentiary weight in an overall argument by dint of their apparent objectivity does not diminish the signal importance of emotion coupled to a persuasive intent that gives rhetoric, and documentary film, its social significance
19. Tom Gunning, "The Cinema of Attractions," in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker (London, 1990), p. 58
20. See my "At the Limits of Reality (TV)," Blurred Boundaries (Bloomington, Ind., 1994), pp. 43-62 for an extended discussion of reality TV programs and their relation to the documentary film tradition
21. See Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine's Visual Culture (Minneapolis, 1995). Cartwright offers a very wide-ranging catalogue of examples that demonstrate an abuse of scientific method as well as a pseudoscientific use of medical imaging
22. Allan Sekula, "Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary (Notes on the Politics of Representation)," Against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works 1973-1983 (Halifax, 1984), p. 57
23. The written ethnography is Maurice Legendre's doctoral dissertation, "Les Jurdes: Études de geographie humaine," School for Advanced Spanish Studies, 1927. Bunuel was also, according to John Baxter's biography, familiar with Miguel de Unamuno's description of the region in his 1922 book Andanzas y visiones espanolas. See John Baxter, Bunuel (New York, 1994), pp. 136-146
24. See Hayden White, "The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory," The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, 1987), pp. 26-57
25. Peter Wollen speaks of two avant-gardes in the twenties - one, artist-filmmakers from Europe who suppress the signified to explore the signifier in abstract or transcendental ways, and, two, filmmakers from the Soviet Union, who insist on the primacy of the signified - in his "The Two Avant-Gardes," Readings and Writings: Semiotic Counter-Strategies (London, 1982), pp. 92-104. He cites as an early point of direct contact Eisenstein's meeting with Richter at the avant-garde gathering at Le Sarraz in 1929, but this, for Wollen, marks "the end rather than the beginning of an epoch" (p. 94). Wollen's characterization of a European, formalist avant-garde and a Soviet, political avant-garde neglects the high degree of interplay between Soviet and European artists and filmmakers through the 1920s, overlooks the elements of photographic realism in European work, and fails to trace the development of individual careers across these tenuous boundaries. Wollen omits reference to all forms of documentary expression in the 1920s and 1930s entirely and sees categories and camps where I see strategic moves to construct such categories on top of far more permeable qualities
26. A reproduction of his graphic design and storyboard for the film exists in the catalog compiled by IVAM (Institut Valencia d'Art Moderne), László Moholy-Nagy (Valencia, 1991), pp. 167-182
27. Joris Ivens, "Reflections on the Avant-garde Documentary," in French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, ed. Richard Abel, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J., 1988), 2:80
28. Dziga Vertov, "Resolution of the Council of Three" (1923), in Film Culture Reader, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York, 1970), p. 359
29. Aleksandr Rodchenko, "Against the Synthetic Portrait, for the Snapshot" (1928), in Russian Art of the Avant-garde: Theory and Criticism, 1902-1934, trans, and ed. John Bowlt (New York, 1976), pp. 253, 251, 254
30. Dziga Vertov, "Resolution of the Council of Three," p. 358
31. Fredric Jameson, "Beyond the Cave: Demystifying the Ideology of Modernism," The Ideologies of Theory, 2 vols. (Minnesota, 1988), 2:121
32. An interestingly divergent but also Marxist assessment of modernism occurs in Arnold Hauser, Naturalism, Impressionism, the Film Age, vol.4 of The Social History of Art (New York, 1951). Hauser sees modernism or "post-impressionism" as an escape from reality. In the rejection of the qualities described by Jameson, Hauser sees the loss of hope in mutual understanding based on commonplaces and convention. He therefore labels, after Jean Paulhan, most modernists as "'terrorists,'" who fight "against all externalization and institutionalization . . . against all 'culture,'" in contrast to the "'rhetoricians,' the oratorical artists . . . who know perfectly well that commonplaces and clichés are the price of mutual understanding" (p. 232). Documentary clearly takes up this second possibility, but whether it does so in opposition to modernism or in alliance with it is what I seek to examine
33. Jameson, "Beyond the Cave," 2:122
34. Abel, preface to French Film Theory and Criticism, 2:xvi
35. James Clifford, "On Ethnographic Surrealism," The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), p. 146
36. Slavoj Žižek, "Introduction: The Spectre of Ideology," Mapping Ideology, ed. Žižek (New York, 1994), p. 26
37. Abel, "The Great Debates," in French Film Theory and Criticism, 1:331
38. Abel quotes Fernand Léger, "Peinture et cinéma," Cahiers du mois, nos. 16-17 (1925): 107-108
39. Brecht concludes his essay, "Er [der Regisseur] hat die Verpflichtung, die Versuche ständig zu erneuern, die zur Schaffung des großen epischen and dokumentarischen Theaters führen müssen, das unserer Zeit gemäß ist" ["The director has the duty to renew, through a series of steady attempts, that which will lead to the production of a great epic and documentary theater appropriate to our times"] (Bertolt Brecht, "Theatersituation 1917-1927," Schriften zum Theater, ed. Werner Hecht, 7 vols. [Frankfurt am Main, 1963-64], 1:95; my italics; my trans.)
40. See my "Strike and the Genealogy of Documentary," Blurred Boundaries, pp. 107-16 for a detailed consideration of these qualities as well as reflections on the consequences of treating Eisenstein's work as contributory to the development of narrative cinema rather as part of the remarkable fusion of narrative and nonnarrative, fact and fiction, document and rhetoric that characterizes this period of Soviet cinema, and art, so dramatically
41. Margaret Olin, "'It Is Not Going to Be Easy to Look into Their Eyes': Privilege of Perception in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," Art History 14 (Mar. 1991): 92
42. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2d ed. (Chicago, 1983), p. 109
43. Grierson, "Summary and Survey: 1935," Grierson on Documentary, pp. 181-82; hereafter abbreviated "SS."
44. Grierson, "The Documentary Idea," p. 113
45. Quoted in Peter Morris, "Re-thinking Grierson: The Ideology of John Grierson," in Dialogue: Canadian and Québec Cinema, ed. Pierre Véronneau, Michael Dorland, and Seth Feldman (Montreal, 1987), p. 46; hereafter abbreviated "RG." This essay presents a superb account of Grierson's ideological orientation; I am indebted to it for much of the information provided in this summary statement
46. Quoted in Jay Leda, Kino: The History of the Russian and Soviet Film (London, 1973), p. 161. Although Grierson named this new film form "documentary," Vertov had been making work that would later be labeled documentary for nearly a decade before Grierson. Vertov never gave his films a name denoting a genre or category of film. For him they were the only real cinema, plain and simple. All other forms of filmmaking were derivatives of literary, theatrical, or painterly traditions and, therefore, incapable of cinematic distinction
47. Peter Galassi, "Rodchenko and Photography's Revolution," Aleksandr Rodchenko, ed. Magdalena Dabrowski, Leah Dickerman, and Galassi (exhibition catalog, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 25 June-6 Oct. 1998), p. 130
48. White, "The Modernist Event," in The Persistence of History: Cinema, Televhion, and the Modern Event, ed. Vivian Sobchack (New York, 1996), p. 32
49. See William Alexander, Film on the Left: American Documentary Film from 1931-1942 (Princeton, N.J., 1981)
50. There are several books on Ivens but the most rigorous and comprehensive by far is Thomas Waugh's dissertation, "Joris Ivens and the Evolution of the Radical Documentary, 1926-1946" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1981)
51. For a more recent assessment of Ivens, see Joris Ivens and the Documentary Context. For biographic detail on his political leanings, see Hans Schoots, Living Dangerously: A Biography of Joris Ivens (Amsterdam, 2000)
52. Some historians, like Georges Sadoul, clearly saw the impetus Soviet film provided to the constitution of a documentary form: "La révélation soviétique précipita l'évolution de l'avant-garde vers le documentaire" (Georges Sadoul, Histoire du cinéma mondial, 8th ed. [Paris, 1949], p. 203); but later writers like Barsam, Barnouw, and Ellis choose a myth of origins to the reality of Soviet invention
53. Maya Deren, An Anagram of Ideas of Film, Form, and Art
54. in Vèvè A. Clark, Millicent Hodson, and Catrina Neiman, The Legend of Maya Deren: A Documentary Biography and Collected Works, 1 vol. in 2 (New York, 1988), 1:2:570