Documentary and the
Nation-State
MEDIA 315, 10/13/15
Midterm Paper, Cont’ …
“A specific purpose, such as defending a position, advancing a point of view, or
exploring an issue, endows an essay with interest.”
- Bill Nichols
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Watch more than once!!!!!!!
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After first viewing, take notes
Review vs. criticism (no need for plot summary)
Your opinions matter, but they are not enough. Need to development them
into arguments about what the film is doing, supported by evidence.
Don’t be afraid of doing additional research on the subject, the filmmaker, or
the context. Textual Studies and/vs. cultural studies.
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Making Nations into States and States into Nations
Did anyone see the article from a few days ago about GALLUP?
Nations and States
What can we take away from the recent Gallup news?
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A reminder that a phrase like “Most Americans agree that …” would have
been meaningless to most Americans before the 1930’s.
National identity and communication technologies are intertwined.
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This reality wasn’t lost on many state leaders and documentarians in the 1920’s and
1930’s.
Dziga Vertov (1896 - 1954, Russia, Soviet Union)
Social/Historical Influences:
Vertov turned 21 in 1917.
-What’s so special about that date?
portrait of the artist mid-air.
Russian Cubo-Futurist/Constructivist Art
The Knife Grinder (Malevich, 1913)
Taking in the Harvest (Malevich, 1912)
Constructivist movie poster for Man
WIth A Movie Camera (1929)
The Cyclist (Goncharova, 1913)
Dziga Vertov (1896 - 1954, Russia, Soviet Union)
Social/Historical Influences:
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Vertov turned 21 in 1917.
○ -What’s so special about that date?
Lenin: Film is the least bourgeois art form.
Much funding early on.
Recognition of cinema as a tool of propaganda
(in a non-pejorative sense of that term)
Agit-train: Connects Space and time
○ speed becomes a defining force of cinema in this mode.
Vertov’s Kino Pravda
Newsreel operated by the “Council of Three”
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Focus on Everyday life
Rejection of Drama/Theater
Kino-eye superior to the human eye, limited by time and space.
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Combination of camera (able to see at long distances, close up, slowed down, sped up)
and editing (manipulation of time and space)
As a revolutionary (or potentially revolutionary) tool, perhaps there is a parallel between
the way Vertov thought of the camera and the way social media/smart phones are often
discussed today as enabling revolutionary moments such as Tahrir Square in Egypt.
Man With A Movie Camera (1929)
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The city as economic engine.
Life Caught Unawares (social actors)
Anonymity vs. Intimacy of the city (the city is both something to be viewed AND experienced)
The Mobile/Slippery Camera
○ Distance is collapsed in modernity. Time governs space.
○ Parallel Action / Editing
Everyone Has a Role to Play
Kino Pravda = Cinema Verite
Self Reflexivity
Dziga Vertov = onomatopoeia + “spinning top”
Against socialist realism
Vertov was reviled in the USSR at the time of his death, but his work was resurrected by Cinema Verite
and others …
Perry Bard’s MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA
http://dziga.perrybard.net/
John Grierson (1898 - 1972, Great Britain)
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Founder of British Documentary
Movement, at the Empire Marketing
Board (1928 - 1934)
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Created the National Film Board
of Canada
Grierson
Influenced by Vertov & Soviets.
Also had a love/ hate relationship with Flaherty
Love:
– Credits Flaherty with creating the first documentary. (financial motivation?)
– Ability to go beneath the surface to explore deeper reality. “Creative interpretation” of
reality.
– Importance of finding story in the location, spending time with people you are filming,
letting the story emerge organically.
Also a serious interest in the working class on
screen.
Grierson
Critique of Flaherty:
– “escapist,” “sen@mental.” Impera@ve to focus on the here and now, the
“drama of the doorstep.” Return to reality from romance.
– Limitation of focus on individual heroism – no longer able to cross-section “No
spear, held however bravely by the individual, will master the crazy walrus of
international finance.”
– Grierson embraces point of view, anathema to Flaherty. “Propaganda first, art
second.” “Cinema as a Pulpit.” ”Art as a hammer, not a mirror.”
Grierson’s Mission: Social Cohesion Throughout Empire
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Marketing board’s mission was “Consolidation of British Empire through trade
and sense of unity among various parts.”
Grierson mediated between funders and filmmakers.
WATCH: HOUSING PROBLEMS (1935, Edgar Antsey)
- Sponsored by BRITISH COMMERCIAL GAS ASSOCIATION
- First on-location sync sound film.
Grierson on HOUSING PROBLEMS
“In Housing Problems, Cockney slum dwellers address the camera directly to explicate the
living conditions the film depicts. This was the first time that the working class had been
interviewed on film in situ. Giving them a voice by obtaining location sound with the bulky
studio optical recording systems of the day was an exercise in technological audacity as
great as any in the history of the cinema. Sound had come slowly. In 1934 Grierson was
promising, "If we are showing workmen at work, we get the workmen to do their own
commentary, with idiom and accent complete. It makes for intimacy and authenticity, and
nothing we could do would be half as good."
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From Winston’s “Tradition of the Victim in Griersonian Documentary”
HOUSING PROBLEMS
“If the British films could have been sponsored directly by social organizations fighting the
bad housing conditions instead of by a gas company, they would have closed in on such
dramatic reality as rent strikes and protest movements.”
“If the British films had been sponsored directly by social organisations fighting the bad
housing conditions instead of by a gas company, they would have closed in on such
dramatic reality as rent strikes and protest movements.’ The issue is not that what Housing
Problems shows isn’t true because it isn’t objective, but that what it shows is the result of
certain ideological choices. What it shows is a half-truth, and the problem with half-truths is
that they tend to show the wrong half.”
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Brian Winston
THE SONG OF CEYLON (Wright, 1934)
Sponsored by the Ceylon Tea Propaganda Board
Keys To Watching/Listening:
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expressive, non-diegetic soundtrack
What is the structure of the film?
What is the source of the filmmaker’s authority?
How would you characterize the filmmakers’ editorial point of view?
benign or malignant modernism?
THE SONG OF CEYLON (1934)
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Taboo for men to work for others
Ecstatic evocation of paradise almost lost
“coming out of darkness”
dream sequence at beginning of film? Whose dream?
portrait of a village not entirely cut off from the rest of the world.
fusion of romantic lyricism of Flaherty and synthetic brilliance of Vertov.
“I think Song of Ceylon is the work of a young man exposed for the first time to an oriental as opposed to
occidental way of life, and to a very impressive and convincing oriental religion . . . . Without any question
it’s the only film I’ve ever made that I can bear to look at.”
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Basil Wright
“Buddhism and the art of life it has to offer, set upon by a Western metropolitan civilization which, in spite
of all our skills, has no art of life to offer.”
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John Grierson