The Realist McCoy
It would be in the year 1926, that the term 'documentary' would be coined by one John Grierson (1898-1972) as his distinct way of describing Robert Flaherty's Moana, but there would be scores of films that presaged Moana, that could technically be considered documentaries.
The aspect that was unique and fresh about the
British movement that Grierson founded in 1929, was essentially the nature of its sponsorship and the publicity line that Grierson adopted as a means to attract that sponsorship. The funds for 1929's Drifters, and for constructing a new film unit - were solely from a government department called the Empire Marketing Board, thus the operation had to seem prestigious. Mr Grierson, through his writing quickly summoned such an image for it. His propaganda rather than the films enabled his unit to survive the dissolution of EMB in 1933, when it was then taken over by the General Post Office where it would begin to fully blossom.
Grierson's young recruits, John Taylor, Basil Wright, Arthur Elton, Edgar Anstey, Harry Watt and Stuart Legg, each had unprecedented opportunities for all types of experimentation and even personal expression - which is a rare situation at any time. Even given this, their creative freedom was finite and had political limits. Despite the movements left-wing sympathies, Grierson's benefactors would always be government agencies or private industry, and the British establishment, then as now, does not financially award working-class propaganda. The message had to be inferred and indirect. Consequently, a great number of the documentaries reflected another strong British tradition, that of the compromise.
The working man tended to be deified in the films of the documentary movement, which intrinsically had very little to do with the dire plight of large numbers of working-class people during the age of the Depression in the 1930s. Even during the time it was produced, the infamous Drifters, was lambasted for failing to include any mention of the price the fisherman got (and paid) for their colossal haul. But some of the later releases were bolder. It took genius to see that the gas industry could be persuaded to remit for such indictments of living conditions as Housing Problems (1935) and Enough to Eat? (1936).
Housing Problems, officially helmed by Elton and Anstey, owes its success to interviews with slum tenants in their homes. Grierson's own sibling Rudy, was actually credited as assistant on Housing Problems, is now remembered for her inimitable way of securing people's confidence, and there seems little, if any doubt that the sincerity of the interviews is due to Ruby and to cameraman, John Taylor.
In this context also, the work of Paul Rotha (1907-1984) a renegade independent, who despite the fact that his early associations with the Grierson unit was brief, was truly a credit to the movement. Rotha's powerfully gritty shots of an industrial England were intensely illustrated in The Face of Britain (1935), the tragic subject of a set of unemployed miners in the Rhondda valley in Today We Live ( produced by Rotha, Ruby Grierson and Ralph Bond as directors in 1937), depicted a profound social concern that pointed the way to Rotha's latter and wider acknowledged releases of 1943's World of Plenty, Land of Promise (1945), and The World is Rich (1947).
Grierson's interest started to wane in the regard of the aesthetic side of filmmaking during the period of the 1930s; his reputation is still prided on the experimental and unfettered works that he solely made possible ( In Britain and Canada respectively) and born from the talent he had the impetus to employ; in Britain, in addition to the American documentarian Robert Flaherty, the roster of names would include Richard Massingham and Lotte Reiniger, Len Lye and Norman McLaren. However, the one person that was crucial to the consolidation of Grierson's original visions for his unit was Alberto Cavalcanti.
Cavalcanti (1897-1982) was a professional film director who had worked with the industry and with Frances' avant-garde movement. He would collaborate with Grierson in 1934. The unit had then only just acquired its own sound recording equipment and Cavalcanti was vitally interested in experimenting with sound. Under his leadership, the collective unit all partook in the madhatter parody of a day in the life of a middle-class suburbia Pett and Pott, for which the sound would be recorded first and well outside the arena of convention, the pictures would be added in the aftermath of the process.
Cavalcanti proceeded to salvage a great deal of material that had been shot without sound. The most remarkable case of this was Coal Face (1935), which consisted of coal mining shots that had been lying around for several years, padded out the additional material shot by nearly everyone within in the unit. All this Cavalcanti edited together with an inspired soundtrack that was based on the poetry of W.H. Auden and with a score by Benjamin Britten, who were virtually unknown at the time. Auden was a close, personal friend of Basil friend, whose contribution to the success of a collaboration that continued into Night Mail (1936) is as incalculable as that of Cavalcanti himself.
Before Night Mail, Wright had already completed his stunning Song of Ceylon (1934). This film would also deeply rely on its soundtrack, and with which Wright worked with composer Walter Leigh (Concertino for harpsichord and string orchestra).
Of all the efforts of the Thirties, Night Mail was indubitably most responsible for putting the British documentary on the map. It would serve world-class entertainment out of a night's journey of a mail train from London to the mighty long way to Glasgow.
Night Mail is also perhaps the most authentic example of creative teamwork, in contrast to being the inspiration of any single auteur. Certainly Basil Wright, Harry Watt, Cavalcanti and Grierson himself all made their own signature contribution, and it only would seem fitting that is the film by which the movement would be most likely remembered.
After the release of Night Mail, the movement disbanded. In June of 1937, Grierson would resign from the GPO film unit post and would then set up Film Centre, which had a formal tie to Shell. At the same time, his interest in developing non-theatrical distributions became apparent. GPO films were already being loaned to schools and educational institutes throughout the country by mobile projection units, but it would be up until this juncture, that the main idea was to have these releases, screened at cinemas. Grierson proposed stepping right out of the entertainment business and redirecting documentaries to the respective fields of propaganda and education. The ever ambitious Grierson would now move to his next challenge following his revolutionizing of the British documentary movement - he was now the founder of the National Film Board of Canada.
Stuart Legg, Basil Wright, Arthur Elton and John Taylor were among those who followed this new wave set by Grierson. From that point on, they had sparse time for developing their own inimitable styles and in the main, became producers that had an allegiance to the idea of embellishing the field of documentary.
In the meantime, Harry Watt, Humphrey Jennings and Pat Hackson who would later direct the lauded feature documentary Western Approaches in 1944, remained with Cavalcanti at the GPO. Watt made the inspired dramatic documentary that centered on ship-to-shore radio, North Sea (1938) Jennings responded in kind with Spare Time (1939) a film that chronicled the leisure activities of every day people, while Anstey, would become British Director of Productions of the March of Time series. The group Grierson would leave behind him would catapult British documentary to its new peak of achievement during the second World War. Later, this movement would flounder as a result of a lack of leadership and a bloated sense of its own importance. that was left over from the golden years when a handful of films miraculously succeeded in living up to the expectations that were aroused for them by Grierson's own persuasive prose.
Towards the end of the decade, it would be evident that the documentary style was having some influence on Britain's feature films. It would be most notable in King Vidor's The Citadel (1938) as well as Sir Carol Reed's 1939 absorber The Stars Look Down, and Pen Tennyson's The Proud Valley which was released also in 1939. The common denominator of these were that they were all fictional films set against the abrasive world of mining communities.
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