CULTURAL HISTORIES OF CINEMA

This new book series examines the relationship between cinema and culture. It will
feature interdisciplinary scholarship that focuses on the national and transnational
trajectories of cinema as a network of institutions, representations, practices and
technologies. Of primary concern is analysing cinema’s expansive role in the complex
social, economic and political dynamics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

SERIES EDITORS
Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson

ALSO PUBLISHED
Cinema Beyond Territory: In-flight Entertainment and
Atmospheres of Globalisation, Stephen Groening
Empire and Film, edited by Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe
Film and the End of Empire, edited by Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe
Global Mexican Cinema: Its Golden Age, edited by Robert McKee Irwin and
Maricruz Castro Ricalde
Making Movies into Art: Picture Craft from the Magic Lantern to Early Hollywood,
Kaveh Askari
Shadow Economies of Cinema: Mapping Informal Film Distribution, Ramon Lobato
The Grierson Effect
Tracing Documentary’s International Movement

Edited by Zoë Druick and Deane Williams

A BFI book published by Palgrave Macmillan

For Peter Morris, in memoriam – ZD
For Ina Bertrand – DW

© British Film Institute 2014

Introduction and editorial arrangement © Zoë Druick and Deane Williams 2014
Individual essays © their respective authors 2014
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without
written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save
with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the
Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.
Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to
criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2014 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
on behalf of the
BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE
21 Stephen Street, London W1T 1LN
www.bfi.org.uk
There’s more to discover about film and television through the BFI.
Our world-renowned archive, cinemas, festivals, films, publications and learning resources are here
to inspire you.
Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in
England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave
Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and
representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the
United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
Cover design: Liron Gilenberg
Cover images: (front) Where No Vultures Fly (Harry Watt, 1951), © Ealing Studios; (back) Man of
Aran (Robert Flaherty, 1934), Gainsborough Pictures; Fires Were Started (Humphrey Jennings,
1943), Crown Film Unit; Man of Africa (Cyril Frankel, 1954), © Group 3 Limited.
Designed by couch
Set by Cambrian Typesetters, Camberley, Surrey
Printed in China
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained
forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the
environmental regulations of the country of origin.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
ISBN 978–1–84457–539–8 (pb)
ISBN 978–1–84457–540–4 (hb)
For Peter Morris, in memoriam – ZD
For Ina Bertrand – DW

© British Film Institute 2014

Introduction and editorial arrangement © Zoë Druick and Deane Williams 2014
Individual essays © their respective authors 2014
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without
written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save
with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the
Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.
Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to
criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2014 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
on behalf of the
BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE
21 Stephen Street, London W1T 1LN
www.bfi.org.uk
There’s more to discover about film and television through the BFI.
Our world-renowned archive, cinemas, festivals, films, publications and learning resources are here
to inspire you.
Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in
England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave
Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and
representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the
United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
Cover design: Liron Gilenberg
Cover images: (front) Where No Vultures Fly (Harry Watt, 1951), © Ealing Studios; (back) Man of
Aran (Robert Flaherty, 1934), Gainsborough Pictures; Fires Were Started (Humphrey Jennings,
1943), Crown Film Unit; Man of Africa (Cyril Frankel, 1954), © Group 3 Limited.
Designed by couch
Set by Cambrian Typesetters, Camberley, Surrey
Printed in China
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained
forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the
environmental regulations of the country of origin.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
ISBN 978–1–84457–539–8 (pb)
ISBN 978–1–84457–540–4 (hb)
Contents

Acknowledgments . . . vii
Notes on Contributors . . . ix

Introduction . . . 1
Zoë Druick and Deane Williams
1 John Grierson and the United States . . . 13
Stephen Charbonneau
2 John Grierson and Russian Cinema: An Uneasy Dialogue . . . 29
Julia Vassilieva
3 To Play The Part That Was in Fact His/Her Own . . . 43
Brian Winston
4 Translating Grierson: Japan . . . 59
Abé Markus Nornes
5 A Social Poetics of Documentary: Grierson and the Scandinavian
Documentary Tradition . . . 79
Ib Bondebjerg
6 The Griersonian Influence and Its Challenges: Malaya, Singapore,
Hong Kong (1939–73) . . . 93
Ian Aitken
7 Grierson in Canada . . . 105
Zoë Druick
8 Imperial Relations with Polynesian Romantics: The John Grierson
Effect in New Zealand . . . 121
Simon Sigley
9 The Grierson Cinema: Australia . . . 139
Deane Williams
10 John Grierson in India: The Films Division under the Influence? . . . 153
Camille Deprez
11 Grierson in Ireland . . . 169
Jerry White
12 White Fathers Hear Dark Voices? John Grierson and British Colonial
Africa at the End of Empire . . . 187
Martin Stollery
13 Grierson, Afrikaner Nationalism and South Africa . . . 209
Keyan G. Tomaselli
14 Grierson and Latin America: Encounters, Dialogues and Legacies . . . 223
Mariano Mestman and María Luisa Ortega

Select Bibliography . . . 239

Appendix: John Grierson Biographical Timeline . . . 245
Index . . . 249
Acknowledgments

The editors would like to acknowledge and thank the BFI Cultural Histories of
Cinema series editors, Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson, for their unstinting
support for this project, as well as everyone else at the press who helped the book
along to completion. We also wish to acknowledge the Grierson Archive, Stirling,
Scotland, where much of the primary research for this collection was undertaken.
Keyan Tomaselli’s ‘Grierson, Afrikaner Nationalism and South Africa’ and Abé Markus
Nornes’s ‘Translating Grierson: Japan’ are revised versions of articles that appeared
in a special ‘After Grierson’ issue of the online journal Screening the Past edited by Ina
Bertrand following the Breaking the Boundaries: The Stirling Documentary
Conference held in January 1999.

Acknowledgments v ii
Notes on Contributors

IAN AITKEN is Professor of Film Studies in the Academy of Film, Hong Kong Baptist
University. He is the author of Film and Reform: John Grierson and the Documentary
Film Movement (1992), The Documentary Film Movement: An Anthology (1998),
Alberto Cavalcanti (2001), European Film Theory and Cinema (2001), Realist Film
Theory and Cinema (2006) and Lukacsian Film Theory and Cinema (2013). He is also
the editor of the Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film (2006), and The Concise
Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film (2013) and Routledge Major Works: Documentary
Film (2012).

IB BONDEBJERG is Professor in the Department of Media, Cognition and Communication,

University of Copenhagen and Director of the Centre for Modern European Studies,
University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He was the co-director of the European research
project Changing Media – Changing Europe (2000–5) and the large national research
project Media and Democracy in the Network Society (2000–6). He served as chairman of
the Danish Film Institute (1997–2000). He has published more than 100 articles in
national and international journals and books. His most recent single-authored book
publications are Narratives of Reality: History of the Danish TV-Documentary (2008),
Images of Reality: The Modern Danish Film Documentary (2011) and Engaging with Reality:
Documentary and Politics (2014).

STEPHEN CHARBONNEAU is Assistant Professor in the School of Communication and

Multimedia Studies at Florida Atlantic University, where he teaches courses in
film history, theory and aesthetics. His research interests include the history of
documentary film, ethnography, cultural policy and collectivist media practices. He is
currently working on a book entitled Other Americas: Injured Identities, Participatory
Media, and the War on Poverty, a review of state-sponsored uses of film and television
as part of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. His work has been published in the
Journal of Popular Film and Television, Spectator, Challenge for Change/Société nouvelle:
The Collection and Encyclopedia of Documentary Film.

CAMILLE DEPREZ is Research Assistant Professor in the Academy of Film of Hong Kong
Baptist University. Her initial research areas were the Indian mainstream film – or
Bollywood – and television industries. Two single-authored books, La télévision
indienne: Un modèle d’appropriation culturelle (2006) and Bollywood: cinéma et

Notes on Contributors ix
mondialisation (2010), academic articles and book chapters came out of these two
long-term research projects. She is currently developing new funded research
projects on independent Indian documentary film and French colonial documentary
film in Asia. With Judith Pernin, she is the co-editor of the forthcoming book Post-
1990 Documentary: Redefining Independence.

ZOë DRUICK is Associate Professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser

University, Canada. Her books include Allan King’s A Married Couple (2010),
Programming Reality: Perspectives on English-Canadian Television (2008) and
Projecting Canada: Documentary Film and Government Policy at the National Film
Board (2007). She has also published numerous articles on reality-based and
educational media in journals such as Screen, Television and New Media, Canadian
Journal of Communication, Canadian Journal of Film Studies and Studies in
Documentary.

MARIANO MESTMAN is Researcher at the National Council of Scientific Research

(Argentina) and at the University of Buenos Aires, where he is also Professor in Latin
American Cinema. He is author of the book Del Di Tella a Tucumán Arde: Vanguardia
artística y política en el 68 argentino (2000, in collaboration with Ana Longoni). He has
published several articles on cinema and art history in New Cinemas, Journal of Latin
American Cultural Studies, Third Text, Letterature d´America, Secuencias, Film-Historia,
Cine Cubano and Kilómetro 111, among others. He was programmer of the Buenos Aires
Independent Film Festival between 2005 and 2006.

ABé MARKUS NORNES is Professor of Asian Cinema in both the Department of Screen
Arts and Cultures, the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures and the School
of Art & Design at the University of Michigan. His latest book is A Research Guide
to Japanese Cinema Studies (2009), which was co-written with Aaron Gerow. His
previous books include Cinema Babel: Translating Global Cinema (2007). He is also
the author of Forest of Pressure: Ogawa Shinsuke and Postwar Japanese Documentary
Film (2007) and Japanese Documentary Film: From the Meiji Era to Hiroshima (2003),
as well as many articles in edited volumes and journals such as Cinema
Journal and Film Quarterly.

MARíA LUISA ORTEGA is Professor of Audiovisual Communication at the Autonoma

University of Madrid (Spain). She is co-author of The Cinema of Latin America
(2003), Cine documental en América Latina (2003), Documental y vanguardia:
lenguajes fronterizos (2005), Cuba: Cinéma et Révolution (2006), De la foto al
fotograma. Fotografía y cine documental (2006), Cineastas frente al espejo (2008),
Piedra, papel, tijera: collage en el cine documental (2009), Doc. el documental en el siglo
XXI (2010); and editor of Nada es lo que parece: Falsos documentales, hibridaciones y
mestizajes del documental en España (2005), Mystère Marker: Pasajes en la obra de
Chris Marker (2006) as well as Cine directo: Reflexiones en torno a un concepto (2008);
and author of Espejos Rotos. Aproximaciones al documental norteamericano
contemporáneo (2007). She is member of the editorial board of Secuencias. Revista de
Historia del Cine and she has been programme advisor of Cines del Sur (Granada

x The Grierson Effect

International Film Festival) and Documenta Madrid (International Madrid
Documentary Festival).

SIMON SIGLEY teaches film studies and media practice in the School of Social and
Cultural Studies at Massey University, Auckland. His doctoral thesis (2004) was a
materialist history of film culture in New Zealand. His research interests are in film
and history, reception studies, film aesthetics and the cultural imaginary. He has
published on the film-society movement, Jane Campion’s reception in France and
French film culture’s influence in New Zealand. His current major research project
is a cultural history of New Zealand’s National Film Unit.

MARTIN STOLLERY works part time for the Open University in the UK. He is the author,
among other publications, of Alternative Empires: European Modernist Cinemas and
Cultures of Imperialism (2000). He is currently researching the career of the British
film-maker Ian Dalrymple.

KEYAN G. TOMASELLI is Senior Professor and Director of the Centre for Communication,
Media and Society, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban. He is author of The Cinema
of Apartheid (1988) and Encountering Modernity: 20th Century South African Cinemas
(2007), editor of Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies and co-editor of
Journal of African Cinemas. He has worked as a documentary film-maker and was co-
author of the Film White Paper (1996) and Film Strategy Document (1996) for the
South African government.

JULIA VASSILIEVA teaches in film and television studies at Monash University, Melbourne.
Her research interests include historical film theory and criticism; Russian classic
and contemporary cinema; and Russian art criticism and cultural studies. She has
published in the International Journal of the Humanities, Senses of Cinema, Rouge,
Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, Screening the Past, Film-Philosophy and
Cinema Studies. She is a co-editor of After Taste: Cultural Value and the Moving Image
(2012).

JERRY WHITE is Canada Research Chair in European Studies at Dalhousie University,

Halifax. He is the author of Revisioning Europe: The Films of John Berger and Alain Tanner
(2011), The Radio Eye: Cinema in the North Atlantic, 1958–1988 (2009) and Of This Place
and Elsewhere: The Films and Photography of Peter Mettler (2006). His most recent book is
Two Bicycles: The Work of Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville (2013).

DEANE WILLIAMS is Associate Professor in Film and Television Studies, Monash

University, Melbourne. His books include Australian Post-war Documentary Films: An
Arc of Mirrors (2008), with Brian McFarlane, Michael Winterbottom (2009) and, with
Noel King and Constantine Verevis, the three-volume Australian Film Theory and
Criticism (2013). He is also editor of the journal Studies in Documentary Film.

BRIAN WINSTON has written extensively on the documentary including several books
(including Lies, Damn Lies & Documentaries [2000] and Claiming the Real II – Documentary:

Notes on Contributors xi
Grierson and Beyond [2009]) with a focus on both film history and ethical and legal
concerns. Currently he is the Lincoln Professor at the University of Lincoln. He has
been a governor of the British Film Institute (and recently edited The BFI Documentary
Film Book for them), and a Grierson Trustee. A feature-length documentary on Robert
Flaherty – A Boatload of Wild Irishmen – which he wrote and co-produced was released
in 2011.

x ii The Grierson Effect

Introduction

Zoë Druick and Deane Williams

Documentary is cheap: it is, on all considerations of public accountancy, safe. If it fails for the
theatres it may, by manipulation, be accommodated non-theatrically in one of half a dozen
ways. Moreover, by reason of its cheapness, it permits a maximum amount of production and
a maximum amount of directorial training against the future, on a limited sum. It even
permits the building of an entire production and distribution machine for the price of a single
theatrical. These considerations are of some importance where new experiments in cinema
are concerned. With one theatrical film you hit or miss; with a machine, if it is reasonably run,
the preliminary results may not be immediately notable or important, but they tend to pile
up. Piling up they create a freedom impossible on any other policy.1
John Grierson

John Grierson (1898–1972) was a well-known Scottish film critic, theorist and
producer who, while not primarily a film-maker himself, was a central player in the
establishment of the British documentary movement. His published work on film,
education and democracy is essential reading in film history and communication
theory and his travels around the world on behalf of the British government helped
to establish a range of film production and distribution units globally. Gregarious and
charismatic, he was particularly active in the interwar period when social liberalism
attempted to negotiate a third way between planned economies and free markets,
and during the command economies of wartime.2 Grierson went away to graduate
school in Chicago on a Rockefeller scholarship in the mid-1920s and brought back
what he learned in the United States (and not just at university) about film, public
relations and sociology to a British civil service seeking to engage new media for the
kinds of public communication increasingly required of states. In many ways, Grierson
helped to forge the field of documentary as it came to be understood in the postwar
world as a technique of citizenship by helping to envision and then justify its
institutionalisation. Even more significantly, documentary, devised as a technology
for modernisation, was pressed into service for nation-building, for bolstering a
mediated public sphere and for conveying in a more compelling and immediate
manner the problems and concerns of ordinary people as they related to state
projects. It was closely connected to modern educational theories and, depending on
the context, was circulated in both theatrical and non-theatrical settings. It ended up
being a formative aspect of both classroom media and television documentaries,
mainstays of media in everyday life in many parts of the world. In short, without

Introduction 1
Grierson, today’s media culture and its discursive relationship to the public sphere
would in all likelihood not look the same.
However, Grierson was no mere functionary. He synthesised a number of
philosophical and theoretical traditions, providing a sophisticated concept of realism
(as an expression of ideals) gleaned from Immanuel Kant and other enlightenment
thinkers that helped to organise the nascent form of documentary.3 The
representational strategy of types and the use of the story-form were not, in other
words, a result of technological immaturities. They were in Grierson’s words ‘new
forms’ that stemmed from a belief in the best way to illustrate today’s social problems
and tomorrow’s solutions.4 As far as political theory went, he was a liberal inspired by
American pragmatists. Along with many of his day, Grierson believed in the role of the
expert in mediating between the complications of the political and social world and the
ordinary voter; the civically minded film-maker could be one such expert. As far as
educational theory went, Grierson was similar to many reformers of his day in
believing that film could engage students (and other audiences) beyond the cognitive
realm, making learning more vital and exciting. The particular pastiche of ideas about
technology, education and citizenship that converged on a vision of benevolent leaders
and malleable masses was understandably palatable to many different political
regimes, especially because it came wrapped up in a moral imperative: it was the
responsibility of civil servants of all kinds to convey political ideas to their wards in the
most appealing manner possible.
Grierson defined realist documentary as ‘a troubled and difficult art’ but had a
clear view of the instrumental uses it should be made to play: as early as 1933 he said,
‘I look upon the cinema as a pulpit and use it as a propagandist.’5 His enormous
influence has turned his name into an adjective commonly paired with lofty terms
such as ‘legend’, ‘legacy’ and ‘tradition’. Very often his name is discussed in
conjunction with the British documentary movement, a coterie of progressive film-
makers who gathered in the institutional spaces that Grierson helped to establish from
the late 1920s to mid-50s (the Empire Marketing Board [EMB], the General Post Office
[GPO] Film Unit, the Crown and Colonial Film Units and Group 3 being primary sites).
Often this work is connected to the history of British cinema as such. And, even
though it has become fairly common to acknowledge the overstatement of his
influence and importance, as the centenary of his introduction of the term
documentary approaches (first used as an adjective in a 1926 New York Sun review of
Robert Flaherty’s Moana), the explanatory and even utopian aspects of film culture
that Grierson introduced continue to be an evocative touchstone.6
More than the films made by the British documentary film movement, or the
crafting of a suggestive definition for documentary, the fact that Grierson affected,
through his writings (memoranda, publications and policy papers) as well as the
forging of a global network of contacts, the direction of film cultures around the world
is the focus here. Rather than contribute to the Grierson legend, then, this collection
aims to decentre it. By focusing on the dissemination of his ideas and the ways in
which they were materialised in different contexts, we hope to move beyond the
freight of the British documentary movement to the many manifestations of film,
education and official culture to which Grierson, in various ways, contributed. While
at times the focus on Grierson tends to highlight particular stories of national film

2 The Grierson Effect

successes at the expense of other production histories, it is, we maintain, still valuable
to consider the ways in which creative work operated within limitations and
constraints. It is precisely this tension between individuals and institutions that
animates the Grierson effect. This decentring will insist that work done in the colonies
and dominions was as important as that done in the imperial centre rather than
secondary to it.
To understand the Grierson effect as it has circulated and taken shape worldwide
entails reconsidering Grierson himself as a motivating factor for valorising the means
of making, circulating and watching documentary cinema. In particular, his emphasis
on the connection between film, propaganda, education and citizenship in a
democracy was enormously influential. While there have been numerous historical and
biographical accounts of Grierson and his ideas, there has been less attention to and
examination of the infinitely more intricate and multifarious Grierson effect: how
Grierson (the person) and ‘Griersonian’ (the set of ideas) interacted with local
conditions and forces to help bring about legitimising frameworks for documentary
and educational film production and circulation.7 Most fascinatingly, as this volume
attests, Griersonian justifications have been enlisted to support projects by people
and groups with radically different political orientations – from colonial agents and
nationalists to liberation film-makers. Arguably common to them all is a desire to
modernise the state and engage its citizens, or at the very least appear to do so.
Moving from imperialist to internationalist, from film to television, and maintaining
residues of an eclectic philosophical combination of public relations, New Deal
socialism, liberal imperialism and Calvinism, it is no wonder, perhaps, that the
Grierson effect has been so impressively elastic.
The British strategy to make and use film in the colonies was rooted in a logic of
local autonomy under ultimate British authority not dissimilar from other techniques
of colonial governance. Through the Empire Marketing Board and the Imperial
Relations Trust, the British pushed for a policy that increased the stock of empire films
available in every part of the British sphere of influence. Concretely, this meant the
organisation of libraries of educational films for schools and non-theatrical circuits.
They also innovated in the area of non-theatrical exhibition, both at home and
abroad.8 Nevertheless, it is important to acknowledge the Grierson effect’s particular
efficacy in creating film infrastructure – the ‘machine’ referred to in the epigraph to
this chapter, including production units and exhibition circuits – that helped to foster
spaces for training and engagement with film by locals, usually drawn from elite
classes. None of this is taken into account in usual histories of the British
documentary film movement, which in the main tend to focus on British film-making,
rarely investigating circuits of film distribution, and were certainly never concerned
with film-making in the colonies, dominions and elsewhere.9
Grierson is perhaps best known for his work with the EMB (1926–33) and the GPO
Film Unit (1933–40) in interwar Britain. This institutional and discursive imbrication
with discourses of Empire and Commonwealth has meant that his effect has been
more recently considered in light of postcolonial cultural histories and film theories.10
As contributions to this volume by Ian Aitken, Camille Deprez, Martin Stollery and
Keyan Tomaselli show, it is because of Grierson’s association with British forces of
imperialism that his effect has much to tell us about the quality of colonial encounters.

Introduction 3
Their chapters provide a nuanced and productive accounting for the multiple ways in
which Grierson was engaged in a range of colonial and nationalist formations across
the globe in the mid-twentieth century.11
As Zoë Druick, Simon Sigley and Deane Williams demonstrate in their
contributions, in white settler colonies, such as Canada, New Zealand and Australia,
Griersonian ideas were foundational for establishing institutions of film production,
archiving and exhibition on a national scale. In other contexts, such as Scandinavia,
Latin America and Ireland, contributors Ib Bondebjerg, Mariano Mestman/María
Luisa Ortega and Jerry White argue, Griersonian ideas helped to forge visions of
independent and even revolutionary cinemas. In Japan, Abé Markus Nornes argues, a
set of cultural mistranslations made Griersonian ideas, conveyed through the writings
of Paul Rotha, at once central and misunderstood in Japanese film culture.
The consideration of Grierson as, in part, the producer of a set of effects, therefore,
has something to offer not only studies of British and Commonwealth cinema, past
and present. It also aims to contribute to a new transnational vision of educational and
documentary cinema.12 In many of the cases under consideration, not least Britain,
film activity occurred before and after Grierson’s influence. It is not the purpose of
this book to downplay those other aspects of any national cinema. On the contrary,
the hope is that, in tracing a network of influence across the globe, the reader will
become more aware of the way in which transnational currents intersect with any
given national cinema history, perhaps enlivening new approaches and indicating
productive points of contact between previously unconnected national stories.
This project is informed by – and aims to contribute to – a series of recent
developments in film studies that are challenging its dominant paradigms and
considering films in postnational and extratextual ways. As cinema struggles to
recalibrate its new position as a residual medium in the digital age, a new interest has
been awakened in accounting for the emergence of the field of cinema studies and
reassessing its historically dominant foci. Volumes such as Uncharted Territory (1997),
Films of Fact (2008), Films That Work (2009), Useful Cinema (2011) and Learning with
the Lights Off (2012) have illuminated formerly marginal film texts, considering how
the discipline of film studies has systematically exscribed and ignored the vast
majority of the film material encountered in most people’s everyday lives. These
include engagements with industrial, documentary, educational, amateur, scientific
and governmental films, to name only a few. In addition, these studies have drawn our
attention to the importance of moving beyond national paradigms to consider the
international ambitions and realities of cinematic circulation. And recent re-
examinations of British cinema, such as Shadows of Progress (2010), The Projection of
Britain (2011), Empire and Film (2011) and Film and the End of Empire (2011), are
bringing much needed attention to this corpus of films.
The Grierson Effect is offered as a contribution to the project of revitalising film
studies through new approaches to film history that emphasise the material cultural
conditions of its production and circulation. As already alluded to, one of the most
significant results of the Grierson effect was the establishment of institutions
dedicated to the production and dissemination of documentary and educational film,
including film boards and other agencies, journals and festivals. However, the fact that
Grierson advocated for such institutions – or ‘machines’ – is insufficient, we maintain,

4 The Grierson Effect

to explain their foundation. Rather, a compelling case may be made that Grierson’s
ideas were taken up and mobilised by a variety of groups and constituents, from
governments and industry to film-makers and cultural nationalists. It is precisely the
details of how such forces were aggregated and sustained over time that make the
story worth investigating.
The contributions follow as closely as possible Grierson’s movements
chronologically, from the United Kingdom to the United States, back to London and
then on to the colonies and dominions, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, India, South
Africa, before returning to the UK (Ireland, Scotland) and thence to other realms, such
as Latin America. Sometimes, as with Japan, Malaya, Singapore, Hong Kong, Ghana
and Scandinavia, Griersonian ideas travelled through published material or the
exchange of interested individuals. In the case of Latin America, a context apparently
far removed from the British sphere of influence, the Grierson effect was still going
strong in the 1950s and 60s.
In this volume, Brian Winston discusses the limits of the British style of
documentary film-making. British documentary, he contends, was never really
comfortable with either storytelling or film experimentation, and its representations
of the working class are famously stilted. Nevertheless, the British documentary
movement became an essential aspect of British cinema history, giving its films an
unwarranted significance, he argues. One of the reasons we have turned our attention
away from the British documentary movement as such and towards the Grierson effect
is because of the astonishing international reach of the ideas of film production and
circulation that he inspired. If British workingmen and women were stilted on the
screen, as Winston claims, so too were the locals depicted in colonial film projects
undertaken by the Colonial Film Unit, India’s Films Division, Canada’s National Film
Board, the Hong Kong Film Unit and others. By broadening our scope to consider the
relation of all of these film-producing agencies, we are able to go beyond assessments
of the calibre of the films themselves, or their place in any one national context, to
consider the underlying logics of their production.
When looked at in this way, we see Griersonian ideas involved in a range of
projects that Stephen Charbonneau characterises in his chapter as ‘managing
modernity’; these projects were not limited to the British sphere of influence and
nor were they the purview of the British documentary movement alone. In the
extant literature, it is not uncommon to find an aesthetic and political distinction –
made by some contributors to this volume – that pits a true Griersonianism, meant
to signify a more poetically ambitious documentary, against more prosaic and
propagandistic forms of official cinema. We argue that whether or not there may be
films deemed more successful or politically apposite within this tradition we would
be remiss to dismiss the more colonial or propagandistic films out of hand. On the
contrary, by doing so we miss the ambiguity of the Grierson effect and risk enacting
a wishful revisionism. After all, Grierson himself repeatedly called for propaganda
and, at the end of his life, counted educational health films for the developing world
among his most precious accomplishments.13 Rosaleen Smyth reasons that this
distinction between poetic and prosaic amounts to one between ‘high’ and ‘low’
cultural forms, one which Grierson himself promoted, but that historians and critics
need not accept.14

Introduction 5
 As Ib Bondebjerg aptly notes in his contribution, the creative treatment of
actuality always takes place in ‘compromised conditions’. Indeed, following Abé
Markus Nornes, we might say that all translation also involves transformation. In this
way, Grierson’s ideas have been able to appeal to the entire political spectrum and have
manifested an array of aesthetic forms. In each context where the Grierson effect has
taken hold, there have been improvised practices and ‘selective readings’ (Tomaselli).
As Mariano Mestman and María Luisa Ortega write, rather than a cinema of protest,
Grierson’s was a ‘cinema with proposals’. It is precisely in attending to what the
proposals were in the various locations where his ideas were translated that we are
able to see the Grierson effect at work. The creation of networks of individuals and
organisations through journals, conferences, film festivals and associations was one
of the very concrete effects of such a ‘cinema of proposals’.
As Stephen Charbonneau traces in his chapter, in the 1920s, Grierson made a study
of American politics and film culture; he also came into contact with revolutionary
Russian cinema. In examining the Grierson effect in the United States Charbonneau
articulates an issue that is often overlooked in the insistence on Grierson as the father
of British documentary, namely the ways in which Grierson influenced and, more
importantly here, was influenced: not just by American films and film-making but by
American ideals as well. While the ways in which Grierson drew on Walter Lippmann
and the Hearst press are well known to Grierson scholars, Charbonneau extends these
factors to consider how America, in the form of the initial Rockefeller grant obtained
to study in the US, provided a model of internationalism which, as much as anything
else, may well have gone on to have a lasting influence on his orientation toward the
world.
Upon his return to the United Kingdom, Grierson fell in with the group of film-
makers and social activists who made up the London Film Society and the British
documentary movement; they became the receiving committee for Soviet cinema in
Britain. As Julia Vassilieva shows, their interest in Soviet cinema was almost as strong
as their fear of it. Vassilieva’s account reverses the notion of influence, utilising the
subtitle ‘an uneasy dialogue’ to account for the way that the Soviet cinema had a
broader effect on British documentary than can be accounted for by looking at the
influence of Sergei Eisenstein on Grierson’s directorial debut Drifters (1929). In this
way the Soviet concern for the role of cinema in general and documentary realism in
particular in shaping society inspired many who attended the lectures and screenings
at the Film Society. Grierson himself increasingly dismissed the modernist impulses of
the Soviets, paradoxically shadowing the criticisms that arose in the Soviet Union itself
that led to a more didactic and less radical role for documentary there in the 1930s.
Abé Markus Nornes traces the influence of Paul Rotha’s book, Documentary Film
(1935), in the Japanese context to invoke the issues of cultural translation often elided
in accounts of the Grierson legacy. For Nornes, Rotha’s work is the conduit through
which Grierson emerges in Japanese film studies, coinciding with particular politicised
definitions of documentary film, yet operating in very different ways for different
film-makers. Nornes shows how the historical forces at work on Rotha’s, and by
extension, therefore, Grierson’s ideas, led to a peculiar and telling effect in the
Japanese context. Ib Bondebjerg’s chapter on Scandinavian documentary utilises the
figure of Danish film enthusiast Theodor Christensen to map out the inspirational

6 The Grierson Effect

force of Griersonian ideas in the 1930s. He finds a tension between film aesthetics and
an ‘institutional production culture with very specific assignments for the theme and
content of documentaries’ in Denmark, Sweden and Norway. Bondebjerg traces this
tension between documentary journalism and documentary as a creative art form into
the postwar domain of television, a story that has resonance in many of the other
cases under examination here as well.
Turning to the colonial work that was such a major part of the Grierson effect, Ian
Aitken’s chapter argues that there was a divide between the more propagandistic work
of the Colonial Film Unit and British poetic documentary aspirations in film work
undertaken in Britain’s colonies in Southeast Asia: Malaya, Singapore and Hong Kong.
The influence of what he calls the ‘anti-Griersonian troika’ of William Sellers, Tom
Hodge and John Lawrence Murray determined the style and production methods of
official documentary film across this region until 1973. Nevertheless, in a theme that
re-emerges in several chapters, Aitken shows how ultimately compatible the Grierson
effect was with the colonial mandate.
The dominions, to which Grierson went next, offer a study in contrasts. There, it
was hoped, a countercinema could be forged to resist the Hollywood juggernaut. In her
chapter, Zoë Druick pays close attention to the Grierson effect in Canada in order to
explore the reasons for the solidity of the Canadian Film Board as the most successful
adaptation of the Grierson vision, one that would go on to serve as a model for
Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India and many other countries. Yet,
paradoxically, in many ways, the success of the Grierson effect in Canada was
somewhat stultifying and came, in some ways, at the cost of diminishing other aspects
of Canadian cinema culture and history. In a similar vein, Simon Sigley’s chapter
considers Grierson’s visit to New Zealand and furnishes an account of the Grierson
effect in that country, which included the establishment of a National Film Library.
Attending to the economic and cultural milieu into which Grierson arrived illuminates
the needs Grierson filled for New Zealand’s Labour Party, especially in the face of the
challenges of World War II.
Deane Williams’s contribution echoes Ian Aitken’s account of the contradictory
impulses of the Grierson effect. In Australia, it was a case of Griersonians, such as
Professor Alan Stout, and John Heyer, whose more expansive vision for documentary
film was challenged by the continuing influence of the stodgier work of the
Department of Information, which had maintained a film unit since the 1920s.
Williams argues that this ambivalence was smoothed over by naming the national
theatre in Melbourne the Grierson Cinema.
There was considerable activity in the colonies after the war, as national
independence became the new political ideal for the colonial world. Camille Deprez
describes the storied history of the Films Division in India, which straddled phases
of colonialism and independence in that country. The shift from British rule to the
government of Nehru saw the maintenance of Griersonian principles for governmental
film-making: in this regard, as Deprez observes, ‘the Films Division appropriated
Grierson’s notion of integration and consensus, rather than individualism, to fit in the
social context of national heterogeneity of young independent India. The nation was
to be placed before the self.’ Nevertheless, the legacy of the Films Division has
continued to be complex and contested.

Introduction 7
 In the late 1940s, Grierson lectured in Ireland, proving a surprisingly powerful
influence on Irish nationalist film-making, argues Jerry White. Despite the ‘steely
Scot’s’ association with colonial masters, and despite anger aroused by his American
colleague Robert Flaherty’s romantic rendition of Irish folk in Man of Aran (1934),
Irish film-makers, such as Liam Ó Laoghaire, Louis Marcus and Bob Quinn, were
paradoxically inspired by Grierson’s consideration of both realism and strategies for
small national cinemas. The case of Ireland highlights best, perhaps, the capacious and
contradictory aspects of the Grierson effect.
Martin Stollery’s chapter examines the case of the Grierson-produced and Cyril
Frankel-directed film Man of Africa (1953) in relation to a paper delivered by
Grierson at a UNESCO-sponsored conference in 1948, The Film in British Colonial
Development. These texts are examined in relation to the continued involvement of
the British Colonial Office in both the Gold Coast Film Unit and the transition to
Ghanaian independence. Stollery takes an insightful look at Grierson’s ambivalent
vision for film-making in the former African colonies. This theme is continued
in Keyan Tomaselli’s chapter, which provides a critical accounting of Grierson’s
engagement with emergent Afrikaner nationalism in South Africa. In 1954, Grierson
visited the country, which was undergoing deep political and cultural shifts, and wrote
a report on the extant state film services. Although his suggestions were largely
rejected by the ascendant Afrikaner nationalist forces, they did go on to establish a
state film institution that helped set the scene for the emergence of the apartheid
regime.
As the foregoing indicates, Grierson’s ideas were affected by and incorporated into
a range of political contexts. In a completely different way, the Grierson effect helped
manifest a documentary of liberation in Latin America. Mariano Mestman and María
Luisa Ortega sketch the continent’s emerging film culture in the late 1950s and early
60s, which took ‘neorealism and the Griersonian documentary as … cardinal points’.
In seeking to fashion a cinema that would represent real social conditions and
experiences, Grierson operated as a local figurehead. For the Latin Americans
Grierson’s persona, his experiences in bringing film-makers together, of promoting
alternate distribution and production systems as well as his links with cine clubs
and state bureaucracies, served as a model for thinking about the effect of local
circumstances on documentary film production and culture.
Although we are very pleased to gather the discussion of such diverse national and
regional contexts in a single volume, realistically not every country touched by the
Grierson effect could be included. There is certainly more research to be done about
this particular aspect of film culture in South Asia. And, while the British influence in
the Middle East no doubt affected film cultures there, definitive research has yet to be
published in English. The one notable exception is Iran where, through its use of film
for postcolonial nation-building, Hamid Naficy has clearly shown the Grierson effect
in operation.15 Scotland itself is also left out of this selection although, given that
Grierson’s last post was as the producer of This Wonderful World (1957–65), a
documentary series for Scottish television, his effect there was inarguably
significant.16
Despite these inevitable limitations, the volume gathers together records of the
host of ways in which the Grierson effect manifested on a global scale. As well as

8 The Grierson Effect

considering the ongoing legacy of Grierson’s encounters with a diverse array of film
communities, the book provides what we see as a much-needed critical engagement
with the multifaceted and often problematic encounters that occurred as part of the
Grierson effect. The collection assembles fourteen original essays that, together, offer
a global perspective on the Grierson effect. Individual chapters critically examine
the influence, in its many forms, of Grierson – as a figurehead, official emissary,
representative of British colonialism and British culture, and most importantly,
perhaps, as shorthand for a set of ideas – on documentary film-making culture in a
number of key countries and regions. It is our hope that this new constellation of
international scholarship will open up expanded perspectives on trans/national
cinema cultures and histories.

Notes

1. John Grierson, ‘The EMB Film Unit’, in Forsyth Hardy (ed.), Grierson on Documentary
(London: Faber and Faber, 1966), p. 50.
2. John Grierson, ‘Education and the New Order’, in Hardy, Grierson on Documentary, p. 127;
Ian Aitken, Film and Reform: John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement (London:
Routledge, 1992).
3. See John Grierson, ‘First Principles of Documentary’, in Hardy, Grierson on Documentary,
p. 37.
4. Grierson, ‘The Russian Example’, in Hardy, Grierson on Documentary, p. 23.
5. John Grierson, ‘Documentary(2): Symphonies’, Cinema Quarterly vol. 1 no. 3 (Spring 1933);
John Grierson, ‘Propaganda: A Problem for Educational Theory and for Cinema’, Sight and
Sound vol. 3 no. 8 (Winter 1933–4), p. 119.
6. Nicolas Pronay, ‘John Grierson and the Documentary – 60 Years On’, Historical Journal of
Film, Radio and Television vol. 9 no. 3 (1989), pp. 227–46.
7. Forsyth Hardy, John Grierson: A Documentary Biography (London: Faber and Faber, 1979);
Joyce Nelson, The Colonized Eye: Rethinking the Grierson Legend (Toronto: Between the Lines
Press, 1988); Peter Morris, ‘ “Praxis into Process”: John Grierson and the National Film
Board of Canada’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television vol. 3 no. 9 (1989), pp. 269–82;
Brian Winston, Claiming the Real: Documentary: Grierson and Beyond (London: BFI, 1995);
Ian Aitken, The Documentary Film Movement: An Anthology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1998); Jack C. Ellis, John Grierson: Life, Contributions, Influence
(Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000); Gary Evans, John
Grierson: Trailblazer of Documentary Film (Montreal: XYZ Publications, 2005).
8. T. J. Hollins, ‘The Conservative Party and Film Propaganda between the Wars’, English
Historical Review vol. 96 no. 379 (April 1981), pp. 359–69; Helen Foreman, ‘The Non-
theatrical Distribution of Films by the Ministry of Information’, in Nicholas Pronay and
D. W. Spring (eds), Propaganda, Politics and Film, 1918–45 (London: Macmillan, 1982), pp.
221–33; Zoë Druick, ‘Mobile Cinema in Canada in Relation to British Mobile Film Practices’,
in Wolfram R. Keller and Gene Walz (eds), Screening Canadians: Cross-cultural Perspectives on
Canadian Film (Marburg: Universitatsbibliothek, 2008), pp. 13–33.
9. Paul Swann, The British Documentary Film Movement, 1926–1946 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989); Aitken, Film and Reform.

Introduction 9
10. See Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe (eds), Empire and Film (London: BFI, 2011); and Lee
Grieveson and Colin MacCabe (eds), Film and the End of Empire (London: BFI, 2011).
11. See also Anuja Jain, ‘The Curious Case of the Films Division’, Velvet Light Trap (Spring
2013), pp. 15–26.
12. Will Higbee and Song Hwee Lim, ‘Concepts of Transnational Cinema: Towards a Critical
Transnationalism in Film Studies’, Transnational Cinemas vol. 1 no. 1 (2010), pp. 7–21.
13. Rosaleen Smyth, ‘Grierson, the British Documentary Movement, and Colonial Cinema in
British Colonial Africa’, Film History vol. 25 no. 14 (2013), p. 82.
14. Grierson, ‘First Principles of Documentary’, p. 35. See also Martin Stollery, Alternative Empires:
European Modernist Cinemas and Cultures of Imperialism (Exeter: University of Exeter Press,
2000), chapter 6; and Smyth, ‘Grierson, the British Documentary Movement, and Colonial
Cinema in British Colonial Africa’, pp. 82–113.
15. Hamid Naficy, A Social History of Iranian Cinema, Vol. 2 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2011), pp. 12–15.
16. Jo Fox, ‘From Documentary Film to Television Documentaries: John Grierson and This
Wonderful World’, Journal of British Cinema and Television vol. 10 no. 3 (2013), pp. 498–523.

RefeReNces

Aitken, Ian, Film and Reform: John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement (London:
Routledge, 1992).
Aitken, Ian, The Documentary Film Movement: An Anthology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 1998).
Druick, Zoë, ‘Mobile Cinema in Canada in Relation to British Mobile Film Practices’, in Wolfram
R. Keller and Gene Walz (eds), Screening Canadians: Cross-cultural Perspectives on Canadian
Film (Marburg: Universitatsbibliothek, 2008), pp. 13–33.
Ellis, Jack C., John Grierson: Life, Contributions, Influence (Carbondale and Edwardsville:
Southern Illinois University Press, 2000).
Evans, Gary, John Grierson: Trailblazer of Documentary Film (Montreal: XYZ Publications, 2005).
Foreman, Helen, ‘The Non-theatrical Distribution of Films by the Ministry of Information’, in
Nicholas Pronay and D. W. Spring (eds), Propaganda, Politics and Film, 1918–45 (London:
Macmillan, 1982), pp. 221–33.
Fox, Jo, ‘From Documentary Film to Television Documentaries: John Grierson and This
Wonderful World’, Journal of British Cinema and Television vol. 10 no. 3 (2013), pp. 498–523.
Grierson, John, ‘The EMB Film Unit’, in Forsyth Hardy (ed.), Grierson on Documentary (London:
Faber and Faber, 1966), pp. 47–51.
Grierson, John, ‘Education and the New Order’, in Forsyth Hardy (ed.), Grierson on Documentary
(London: Faber and Faber, 1966), pp. 122–32.
Grierson, John, ‘First Principles of Documentary’, in Forsyth Hardy (ed.), Grierson on
Documentary (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), pp. 35–46.
Grierson, John, ‘The Russian Example’, in Forsyth Hardy (ed.), Grierson on Documentary
(London: Faber and Faber, 1966), pp. 23–8.
Grierson, John, ‘Documentary(2): Symphonics’, Cinema Quarterly (Spring 1933), vol. 1 no. 3.
Grierson, John, ‘Propaganda: A Problem for Educational Theory and for Cinema,’ Sight and
Sound vol. 3 no. 8 (Winter 1933–4), pp. 119–21.

10 The Grierson Effect

Grieveson, Lee and Colin MacCabe (eds), Empire and Film (London: BFI, 2011).
Grieveson, Lee and Colin MacCabe (eds), Film and the End of Empire (London: BFI, 2011).
Hardy, Forsyth, John Grierson: A Documentary Biography (London: Faber and Faber, 1979).
Higbee, Will and Song Hwee Lim, ‘Concepts of Transnational Cinema: Towards a Critical
Transnationalism in Film Studies’, Transnational Cinemas vol. 1 no. 1 (2010), pp. 7–21.
Hollins, T. J., ‘The Conservative Party and Film Propaganda between the Wars’, English Historical
Review vol. 96 no. 379 (April 1981), pp. 359–69.
Jain, Anuja, ‘The Curious Case of the Films Division’, Velvet Light Trap (Spring 2013), pp. 15–26.
Morris, Peter, ‘ “Praxis into Process”: John Grierson and the National Film Board of Canada’,
Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television vol. 9 no. 3 (1989), pp. 269–82.
Naficy, Hamid, A Social History of Iranian Cinema, Vol. 2 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2011).
Nelson, Joyce, The Colonized Eye: Rethinking the Grierson Legend (Toronto: Between the Lines
Press, 1988).
Pronay, Nicolas, ‘John Grierson and the Documentary – 60 Years On’, Historical Journal of Film,
Radio and Television vol. 9 no. 3 (1989), pp. 227–46.
Smyth, Rosaleen, ‘Grierson, the British Documentary Movement, and Colonial Cinema in British
Colonial Africa’, Film History vol. 25 no. 14 (2013), pp. 82–113.
Stollery, Martin, Alternative Empires: European Modernist Cinemas and Cultures of Imperialism
(Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000).
Swann, Paul, The British Documentary Film Movement, 1926–1946 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989).
Winston, Brian, Claiming the Real: Documentary: Grierson and Beyond (London: BFI, 1995).

Introduction 11
1
John Grierson and the United States

Stephen Charbonneau

John Grierson’s status as a uniquely transnational historical figure is evidenced by his

synergetic relationship with the United States. Certainly, as often noted, Grierson’s
particular filmic discourse was forged by his postgraduate years in Chicago, Hollywood
and New York. As Jack C. Ellis has recognised, Grierson returned home from the US
having solidified three fundamental premises: ‘citizenship education was the broad
necessity, film the chosen medium, documentary its special form’.1 Of course, these
so-called premises were not strictly speaking the byproduct of American culture.
Grierson’s time in America afforded him the opportunity to experience contemporary
trends in global cinema that included Hollywood, but also encompassed Soviet
montage (Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin [1926]) and romantic ethnography
(Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North [1924] and Moana [1926]).
At least where the US is concerned, it is best to not speak of impact – in which
we make a clean, a priori detachment of the Griersonian tradition from American
institutions and social policies. It would be a mistake to consider this tradition as an
entity unto itself, as if it had exerted an influence on American culture from the
outside. Instead, it is much more productive to speak of relation, of an interiorisation in
which a Griersonian educational media formation is implicated, shaped and reflected
by social developments and institutions in the United States. While much has been
written about Grierson’s life – and this essay stands on the shoulders of the work of
historians and film scholars such as Ellis, Ian Aitken and many others – the hope
is that by both adopting a cultural materialist posture and setting our aperture
specifically upon the Griersonian tradition and its relationship to the US, that familiar
facets of Grierson’s legacy will appear anew, more fluid, and more relevant to our
contemporary media moment. Certainly, when looked at from this vantage point, one
of the critical institutions that moves to the fore is the Rockefeller Foundation and its
support for Grierson’s studies and work at different stages of his life. Whether the
particular type of support under discussion is the fellowship that brought Grierson to
the US in the first place, or seed money to initiate a new postwar educational film
endeavour, the Rockefeller Foundation is an important benefactor for Grierson.
In each of the three following sections – on the 1920s, 30s and 40s – the
Rockefeller Foundation is referred to as either a primary or secondary factor in the
development of particular modes of educational cinema. By doing so, our analysis
of Grierson’s US activities will hopefully support our concern with the dialectical
interconnectedness between the Griersonian tradition and broader social forces. In the

John Grierson and the United States 13

course of this chapter, I will review Grierson’s critical years at the University of Chicago
and the well-known influence of the American intellectual, Walter Lippmann; Paul
Rotha’s visit to the US in the late 1930s against the backdrop of calls for a new
educational cinema; and, in a post-World War II era, Grierson’s articulation of a
particular kind of internationalism in an array of speeches, interviews and proposed
projects. As Forsyth Hardy has noted, during the immediate postwar period, ‘it was the
international idea which dominated [Grierson’s] thinking and he felt that the big
momentum for the wider international development lay in the United States’.2 Cutting
across all three of these sections is an emphasis on the ways in which the Griersonian
tradition develops in tandem with broader modern liberal discourses hailing new
instruments of governance to cope with the realities of modernity.

Social Science, citizenShip and ‘dramatic patternS’

In 1924, John Grierson – a twenty-six-year-old lecturer from Scotland – received a

fellowship from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial to study in the US.3 This
particular event is worth noting not simply for biographical purposes, but also for the
way in which it places Grierson’s individual history within a broader social context.
The memorial was established in 1918 to honour the memory of Laura Spelman
Rockefeller, the wife of John D., Sr.4 The memorial was part of a social formation in
the 1920s whose aim was to engender new forms of governance and knowledge. In
particular, the Rockefeller Foundation’s philanthropic support for education, science
technology and the social sciences was grounded in a desire to find ‘practical
applications of the results of [subsidized] research’.5 The focus of the fellowship for
Grierson, specifically, would turn to the ‘role of communication in shaping public
opinion’.6 This instance of private philanthropy registers the influence of American
social theory on the management of modern, industrial societies. While itself the
byproduct of the concentration of wealth in capitalist society, this private endeavour
registers a large-scale, institutional interest in managing modernity.
As has been reviewed extensively, Grierson developed ties to a handful of
accomplished social scientists at the University of Chicago, such as Charles Merriam,
Robert Park and Harold Lasswell. While Grierson never received a formal degree
from the university, he performed graduate research for Merriam on the immigrant
population in Chicago. Starting with a specific focus on deviance, Grierson cast a wide
net that encompassed ‘records of the criminal courts … members of the I.W.W.
[Industrial Workers of the World], alcoholics, and drug addicts’.7 In reviewing such a
broad cross-section of what Ellis calls ‘social restiveness’ in Chicago, Grierson sought
out patterns of behaviour among personal records and biographical details.8 Ellis notes
that a ‘common characteristic was discovered – these were people who had been
driven from their homes or, at any rate, had lost contact with their families’.9 We can
recognise in this work a desire to tease out explanatory variables which would lend
themselves to greater management in this new world. And it was precisely this theme
of novelty – the sense that modernity was a ‘new’, perhaps unruly experience in need
of scientific theories and instruments for greater governance – that traversed both the
priorities of the memorial and the interests of Grierson. In Grierson’s case, novelty

14 The Grierson Effect

arose as a theme through his reduction of social restiveness down to the level of
generational differences. Specifically, he focused on the process of Americanisation and
a developing ‘strain between generations – the parents trying to hang onto the old
world; the young attempting to become part of the new …’.10 In doing so, the media –
specifically the press – came into sharper focus. The reason for this was because
Grierson noted a schism in the publics addressed by particular newspapers.11 As Ellis
summarises:

For the foreign-born there were six thousand foreign-language newspapers in the country at
the time. For the first generation there was the Hearst press, like Chicago’s Herald Examiner,
and its imitators … Grierson noted that, with their headlines and photos, their simplifications
and dramatizations, these papers served as informal but nonetheless compelling means of
leading young Lithuanians and Poles, Germans and Italians, Irish and Czechs away from their
parents and the old country and into an Americanization of one sort or another.12

The splintering of immigrant families across generational lines was – it seemed –

driven by external factors, by a particular set of social conditions. The mass media,
specifically the press, was an instance of modernity producing new subjects, whose
disposition was markedly different from their parents or those from the ‘old country’.
Grierson pushed his analysis further and addressed what he saw as a formal
characteristic that distinguished American newspapers from their European
counterparts.13 The way in which the American press organised quotidian events into
narrative patterns was – Grierson felt – unique and was an indication of how the
‘American mind worked’.14 A key element was the emphasis placed on action. Ellis
writes: ‘The active verb was the key: something does something to something;
someone does something to someone.’15 This also resonates with a subject’s sensory
experience of modernity, including a heightened encounter of kinetic intensities
around transportation, production and the mass media. This emphasis on activity,
change and the new world is deeply impressed upon the Griersonian tradition and, as
Ellis notes, imbued a new documentary practice with a ‘dramatic, active strategy’.16
The sensationalism and the reliance on narrative Grierson admired in Hearst
newspapers dovetailed with lessons learned from Walter Lippmann. Grierson, like
many of his political science colleagues at the University of Chicago, was influenced by
Lippmann’s ideas on the modern society and citizenship as articulated in his book,
Public Opinion (1922). To review, Lippmann argued that the American democratic
process was no longer practical in the wake of dramatic and traumatic changes
incurred on the country’s path to modernity. In his view, the romantic notion of
cultivated and informed voters conducting themselves rationally in the voting booth
was untenable given the pace and labyrinthine nature of modern societies, where the
application of financial instruments, foreign policy and new production apparatuses
rendered the classic democratic, educational model ineffective. What would be needed
was, from Grierson and Lippmann’s point of view, a new pedagogical framework.
Specifically, while the new educational form would address the quotidian world where
raw experience begins, it would dare to mobilise this experience into new narrative
structures that could give citizens a sense of the real, of the underlying truth to their
frenetic lives. Hearst newspapers were a model for Grierson in this regard. In them he

John Grierson and the United States 15

claimed to have discerned ‘a deeper principle’ in which a ‘complex world … could be
patterned for all to appreciate if we only got away from the servile accumulation of fact
and struck for the story which held the facts in living organic relationship together’.17
The medium of cinema, Lippmann suggested to Grierson, provided the kind of
spectacular ‘dramatic patterns’ that mass pedagogues might replicate in educational
discourses.18
Grierson’s work in New York City was as influential as his studies in Chicago. As a
film critic for the New York Sun, he witnessed and learned from film movements that
diverged from the Hollywood model. One of his most well-known reviews is of Robert
Flaherty’s second film, Moana, and it was entitled, ‘The Moviegoer’.19 It was in this
review that the term ‘documentary’ was famously coined, although its use was in
adjective form: ‘Of course, Moana being a visual account of events in the daily life of
a Polynesian youth, has documentary value.’20 But for Grierson, this documentary
quality was ‘secondary to [the film’s] value as a soft breath from a sunlit island, washed
by a marvelous sea, as warm as the balmy air’.21 As Ellis notes, the review was both
effusive in its praise for the poetic qualities of Moana and – at the same time –
somewhat restrained in its assessment of the film’s relevance to the here and now of
modernity.22 Ellis makes special mention of this comment in particular from the
review: ‘[Moana] should be placed on the idyllic shelf that includes all those poems
which sing of the loveliness of sea and land and air – and of man when he is part of
beautiful surroundings …’.23 Specifically, Ellis suggests that this quote implies a
‘relegation’ of the film, ‘as the work of the modern world was gotten on with’.24 Ellis’s
insights highlight the consolidation of a core feature of Griersonian thinking, namely
the focus on the problems and complexities of modernity and a lack of interest in what
he later derisively called ‘aestheticky’ or poetic film-making on subjects which stray
from the challenges of the modern experience.25
One of the last major influences on Grierson during this period was Soviet cinema.
Grierson actually assisted with the composition of the subtitles for Sergei Eisenstein’s
Battleship Potemkin in preparation for its American premiere in New York at the
Biltmore Theatre in 1926.26 As an indication of how important the film was to
Grierson, Ellis reminds us that Grierson later chose to marry the premiere of his
first film, Drifters, with a screening of Potemkin.27 Grierson was clearly ready to be
influenced by Eisenstein’s historic film, particularly because the essential elements of
Griersonian discourse – as they were taking shape in the late 1920s – share broad
characteristics with the writings of Soviet montage theorists. Constructivist tenets –
such as the notion that artists are akin to social engineers – underpin ideas of Soviet
montage and set up strong points of connection between the Griersonian tradition
and Soviet cinema. Whether the theory at hand is Sergei Eisenstein’s ‘Theory of
Dialectical Montage’ or Dziga Vertov’s ‘kino-pravda’, the general idea that the cinema –
especially through editing – can mobilise a new totality out of the arrangement of
individual shots dovetails with Grierson’s growing recognition that a new educational
form needs to embrace the modernist imbrication of the visceral with the cognitive
(see Julia Vassilieva’s chapter).
These experiences in the US, preceding Grierson’s seminal work with the UK’s
Empire Marketing Board and – later – the General Post Office, had a profound impact
on what became the Griersonian tradition and even go beyond Ellis’s triumvirate of

16 The Grierson Effect

citizenship education, the medium of film and the form of documentary. As stated
earlier, Grierson’s personal story is bound up with broader historical and structural
currents during the 1920s. Such currents contribute to a Western cultural formation
around the management of modernity and the governance of new subjects
experiencing a new world. Zoë Druick has written on the incorporation of
documentary film into ‘liberal internationalist education and cultural policy’ during
the 1930s and how – to a substantial degree – this can be seen as a response to
anxieties over the ascendancy of Hollywood and the global impact of commercial
cinema.28 Western governments and international organisations, such as the League
of Nations, launched initiatives to prop up a pedagogical cinema that would harness
the medium’s cultural power in order to promote citizenship. The Griersonian
tradition is both an agent and a byproduct of this vision of pedagogical cinema. The
1930s were obviously, a seminal decade for documentary film and Grierson’s
influential work during this decade was an expression of the cultural and historical
influences that enveloped him during the 20s.

paUl rotha, edUcational Film and pUblic Service

Grierson’s activity during the 1930s as head of the Empire Marketing Board Film Unit,
which later moved to the General Post Office, was both a product of and contributor to
the emergence of this particular épisteme, a formation of discourses and practices
buttressing a new educational cinema. One way in which the Griersonian tradition
impacted national cinemas beyond Great Britain during the 1930s included the travels
of those who had worked with Grierson, who made films under his supervision. One
example of such a visit included Paul Rotha’s to the US in 1937, an endeavour
underwritten by the Rockefeller Foundation. Paul Rotha was a film-maker and a
colleague of John Grierson’s at the GPO Film Unit during the mid-1930s; he had also
authored an influential work of film history, The Film till Now (1930). In his memoir,
Documentary Diary (1973), Rotha explains how Iris Barry approached him to consider
working temporarily for the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) Film Library in New
York, at which Barry was the curator.29 The hope, Barry explained, was to elicit
financial support for Rotha from the Rockefeller Foundation (which had already
contributed to the Film Library) in the form of a fellowship.30 Barry noted the
influence of Rotha’s The Film till Now in the US and suggested that Night Mail (1936)
and Today We Live (1937) represented a type of documentary film-making that had no
parallel in the US.31 From Barry’s point of view the US had ‘no counterpart’ to the
work of the Grierson production team in England.32

She saw now that my proposed visit might be given an added purpose, that of introducing the
whole documentary idea of public service using social purpose for progress, to sections of the
American public, especially those who might be concerned to promote a documentary
movement among American film-makers and imaginative educationists … . In a way, the path
had been blazed by Thomas Baird, a specialist in the non-theatrical and educational use of
films attached to Film Centre, who had made a short visit at the invitation of the Rockefeller
Foundation a little earlier and had met with an encouraging reception.33

John Grierson and the United States 17

 Paul Rotha

Rotha’s visit was seen as a chance to advance a particular vision of educational cinema
committed to the idea of citizenship and ‘service’, one that differentiated itself from
other forms of US nonfiction film at the time (for a comparison with Paul Rotha’s
influence in Japan, see Abé Markus Nornes’s chapter). Commercially produced
newsreels and the work of leftist film collectives, such as the Workers Film and Photo
League, did not represent the sort of documentary envisioned here by Barry and
Rotha. For Barry, the closest American documentary came to the kind of films made
by Grierson and his cohorts was Pare Lorentz’s The Plow That Broke the Plains (1935),
which Rotha dismisses as ‘isolated’.34 John Abbott, director of MoMA’s Film Library,
reiterated this point during an evening of documentary screenings to a Washington
audience of journalists and dignitaries on 10 May 1936.35 America, he insisted, was
falling behind other national cinemas in their embrace of the nonfiction film.36 Quite
pointedly, he maintained that ‘the new film of reality is being used today, all over the
world, to bring the new world of citizenship before the public imagination’.37
These observations indicate that Rotha’s visit was part of a broader push to
mobilise educational and even propagandistic cinema in the US in the 1930s. In a
report entitled ‘Rockefeller Support for Non-commercial Film, 1935–1939’, Gracia
Ramirez reviews the Rockefeller Foundation’s work in the 1930s to ‘use the motion
pictures to influence public taste and to improve educational and recreational films’.38
While Ramirez notes that one aspect of the foundation’s endeavour in this regard
included the promotion of film appreciation – producing more critically discerning
viewers – the emphasis on bolstering the educational film movement in the US centred
on bridging the divide between producers and educational institutions.39 Specifically,
the Rockefeller Foundation Trustees envisioned a ‘centralised agency that could direct
the efforts from the different interested parties and provide education standards for
the nation’.40
One of the key figures at the foundation during this time was John Marshall. An
assistant director of the Humanities Division from 1933, Marshall’s background was

18 The Grierson Effect

 As assistant director of the
Rockefeller Foundation
Humanities Division, John
Marshall drove the
foundation to focus on
communication (Photo
courtesy Rockefeller Archive
Center)

academic – a ‘medievalist’ – whose interests included health education.41 By 1936

Marshall was encouraging the foundation to commit funds to ‘communication-related
activities’.42 While Marshall and David Stevens (respectively assistant director and
director of the General Education Board [GEB]) set their sights on deploying radio
and film as means of dealing with public-health issues, Brett Gary notes that both
eventually broadened ‘their interest in the connections between media and
education’.43
John Marshall was influenced by some of the same debates as Grierson and, as
a result, articulated similar concerns about the condition of modern American
democracy. Echoing Walter Lippmann and John Grierson, Marshall ‘believed that
through better uses of mass communication, and in collaboration with men of serious
purpose, the Foundation could provide the missing information and insight about
public issues that modern democracy required’.44 While Grierson is historically aligned
with Lippmann and Marshall with Dewey, they both absorbed the core assumption of
the Lippmann/Dewey debate as outlined by Mark Whipple: that the present state of
American democracy is in need of ‘prescriptions’, of strategies for bolstering civic
engagement over the obstacles of modernity.45
As an ‘administrative catalyst’, Marshall drove the foundation to investigate the
role of mass communication in shaping public opinion and help project ‘academic
discipline on the inchoate field [mass communication studies] with which he had
found himself involved’.46 In addition to having established the Film Library at MoMA,
the Rockefeller Foundation’s GEB – where Marshall was also an officer – supported a
number of proposals from the American Council on Education during 1935, including
a new network of distribution for educational films in the form of the Association of
School Film Libraries, as well as the establishment of the American Film Center (AFC)
at Columbia University.47

John Grierson and the United States 19

 Rotha’s visit to the US as a fellow at the Film Library should be seen within the
above context, as part of a broader effort to instil a new documentary and pedagogical
ethos into the American film scene of the 1930s. It was clearly not the case that Rotha
would be ‘introducing the whole documentary idea of public service’ to American film-
makers, researchers and policymakers. However, Rotha’s fellowship is indicative of
the influence of Griersonian film practice on key players in the US. Rotha’s film, The
Face of Britain (1935) was, in fact, included as part of the MoMA programme of
documentary films shown to Washington insiders cited earlier. Barry acquired copies
of British documentaries through coordination with Grierson, which included Night
Mail, Granton Trawler (1934), We Live in Two Worlds (1937), Housing Problems (1935)
and The Smoke Menace (1937).48 The Film Library also acquired Song of Ceylon (1934)
and Cover to Cover (1936) through other means.49
When Rotha first arrived he met with John Marshall, whom he describes as
‘quiet in manner, soft spoken and obviously well informed on most aspects of the
educational and documentary film field’.50 As part of his responsibilities Rotha was to
give thirteen lectures at Columbia University to approximately thirty-five students51
and, in a more informal vein, host private screenings of British documentaries to
critics, curators, researchers, etc. The first of such events included the presentation of
Today We Live and Night Mail and elicited the following written response from Eric
Knight, a film critic and author.

I can’t tell you how terrifically exciting I found the films. While the excitement came partly
from the subjects, it came (I can analyse myself) even more from the remarkable and
unbeatably stirring cutting. Visually they were astounding, showing me things I had never
seen before … I swear we have never had in America before any films which, even for a second,
showed the remarkable brilliance of cutting that the films revealed throughout their entirety
… [Most notable] was this visual perfection, a hitherto unrevealed flow and contrast and
contradiction and rhythm through the cutting, staggering in the first film.52

Steeped in hyperbole, Knight’s reaction is interesting for the emphasis it places on

form, on the particular use of editing. Described as, in itself, ‘stirring’, Knight’s
assessment of the editing parallels Grierson’s endorsement of active representations,
of aggressive media representations that forge narrative structures out of what might
otherwise be isolated quotidian experiences.
Rotha went on to have meetings with Pare Lorentz (with whom he viewed an
early cut of The River [1937]) as well as with Ralph Steiner and Willard van Dyke, who
had both collaborated with Lorentz on his films.53 His lectures and screenings were,
over the duration of his fellowship, given to a wide array of educational institutions
and federal agencies that included the Metropolitan Motion Picture Council,
Progressive Education Association, ACE, the Department of Interior and Department
of Agriculture.54 By Rotha’s account the term ‘documentary’ – as a generic label for
the film of fact – was ‘unknown’ in the US until 1937–8 when the Griersonian films
were introduced and Grierson’s own writings began to circulate more widely.55 While
this grand claim should clearly be taken with a grain of salt, Rotha’s visit and the
heightened interest in the Griersonian documentary during the late 1930s was
significant in its contribution to a gathering critical mass of institutional interest in

20 The Grierson Effect

 Private screenings of British
documentaries like Today We
Live (1937) drew praise from
American critics for their
formal innovations

the shaping of public opinion and the use of mass communications. The stakes were
only raised as the shadow of a second world war loomed.

new media, internationaliSm and manaGement

Grierson’s departure from the National Film Board of Canada in 1945 (covered in Zoë
Druick’s chapter) prompted a number of American institutions and companies to
solicit his services. Forsyth Hardy notes that there were

invitations from Hollywood and New York, including the setting up of a political intelligence
service for one of the major companies, the control of the Encyclopaedia Britannica film
venture into American and international education, and the establishment of a film, radio and
television set-up for Newsweek.56

However, the primary focus for Grierson at this time was the consolidation of an
international consciousness, of a transnational documentary network that took
advantage of the nationalist communication infrastructure that had been developed
for the war. Such a vision would need to, in his words, ‘be done by functional
internationals of our own making – the documentary people of the world if they will
get together’.57
The US plays a unique role in this postwar globalist discourse for Grierson,
because – as mentioned earlier – it is perceived as the country best positioned to
initiate new international communications efforts. In an address to the International

John Grierson and the United States 21

Conference of the Junior League at Quebec, Canada on 14 May 1946, Grierson
identified the US as the site for one of the most potent ideological forces in the
postwar world. For Grierson, this ‘great ideological force’ is best described as ‘the force
of the technological revolution emanating from the American heirs of the French
Revolution and the liberal democracy of the United States’.58 And yet the managers of
this postwar superpower are, in Grierson’s words, ‘mixed up’ along with the political
leaderships of the Soviet Union, the UK and the Catholic Church.59 In the case of the
US, Grierson cites President Truman’s contradictory postwar discourse in which he
endorses the need for an expanded military while also advocating for a new ‘science of
human relationships all over the world’.60 While endorsing Truman’s call for this new
science, Grierson notes that ‘educators and organisers in local communities will need
to do what we can and must to mature the higher and not the lower conception which
Mr. Truman has articulated’.61 Ultimately, Grierson argues, the postwar moment is an
urgent one. Describing his thought process while preparing this speech, he confessed
to the audience …

I kept feeling the urgency of the moment, the urgency of basic decisions now, the urgency of
the next five years, at the most, in the troubled history of mankind. I cannot apologize for
this sense of urgency, for I tell you coldly as one who lived through the decisions that led to
Munich and the war, that the cold sweat we had in these decisive days was warm and gentle
and kind compared with the cold sweat that should now be rolling down our backs as we think
of what the next war will unleash.62

Towards the end of the speech he reiterated the five-year window (‘five years in which
to bring the public mind to a sense of the realities …’), and this discourse of the now
resonates with the Griersonian traits of the active narrative and of the motion
picture’s unique preparedness for the demands of the moment.63
Two months after this speech, Grierson spoke to the American Library Association
Conference in Buffalo, New York under the heading, ‘The Library in an International
World’. Here the urgency of the postwar moment is reiterated and channelled towards
the mass media, specifically cinema and radio. The intensity of the moment for
Grierson, however, leads him to reiterate the core principles of a Griersonian tradition,
hammered out in discourse and practice over the previous twenty years. Alongside his
emphasis on the ‘urgency of the moment’ is the ever familiar accent on the new, the
sense of a new world encroaching on the present.

With all respect, I suggest to you that the old library outlook is over and done with. It served
its day … . But the new problems involve new methods and the worldwide scale of our
problems involves new and highly dramatic methods … I do not say that the day of the books
is over, but the day of the books only is certainly over. It is not information that is needed
today; in fact, it is not information that is sought. It is enlightenment and that is a very
different thing involving as it does the dramatic process of sparking the mind and the heart
into new hope, new vision, new realization and new efforts in citizenship.64

Continuing to stake out the claim, ‘Lippmann was right’, Grierson insisted to his
audience of American librarians that the ‘cold’ nature of information was in need of

22 The Grierson Effect

being brought to life, of being dynamised by what he calls the ‘bright new media’.65
While the range of media mentioned includes television, radio and ‘traveling exhibits’,
cinema is still the privileged medium for Grierson due to its ‘dramatic nature’.66 The
postwar world, then, receives a familiar diagnosis. The dizzying pace of technological
change, political realignment and economic reconstruction reinforces the core tenets
of the Griersonian tradition as they became concretised over twenty years. A new
modern world continues to outpace our traditional educational institutions and a full
embrace of a complementary new media landscape is necessary for the attainment of
the ‘simplicity and understanding of the elemental interests which unify all men …’.67
Nevertheless, a new emphasis is placed here on a specifically international
framework. Whereas Griersonian discourses traditionally generate nationalist
associations as they are aligned with an era when documentary was seen as a means of
constituting a national imaginary, here he is bringing to the fore an internationalist
discourse that had been evolving for the previous decade.68 The statements cited above
in which Grierson characterises the US as a kind of base of operations for this new
challenge underscore some of the tensions and contradictions inherent in this new
appeal. The gravitational pull of the preeminent global superpower in the immediate
postwar period is reflected by the lure of its institutions. In fact the Rockefeller
Foundation comes to the fore again as a sponsor of one of Grierson’s major endeavours
in the late 1940s, The World Today, Inc. The foundation subsidised Grierson’s early
efforts to accumulate personnel and office space in New York City for the new
project.69 United Artists (UA) struck a four-year deal with Grierson’s new company to
distribute educational films. UA had ‘decided to develop a new policy in the matter of
short films and to use its world-wide organization to distribute films of a dramatic
nature which will describe and discuss the international scene’.70 With a production
mandate, The World Today expected to organise its documentaries into three different
series, ‘Worldwise’, ‘Wonderfact’ and ‘Venture’; these would respectively cover
international events, science/technology and athletics/outdoor recreation.71
While the organisation’s plans eventually failed due to a number of factors –
including a rising culture of red-baiting and the emergence of television – the
Griersonian legacy was far from over in the US. While Hardy notes that ‘[s]hort films on
current affairs were no longer as attractive to cinema exhibitors or audiences as they
had been during the war’, a new era of private institutional sponsorship for countless
training, health, safety, human relations, educational and mental hygiene films
resonated with the Griersonian tradition. The deployment of short pedagogical films
exhibited in non-commercial spaces such as prisons, classrooms, gymnasiums,
factories, offices and libraries registered a continuation of a modern liberal discourse
invested in managing modernity and the psychic disposition of modern subjects.
However, this postwar period also rewired this familiar discourse around new social
theories of human management and co-ordination that drew on experiences from the
recently concluded war as well as on lessons learned from the labour struggles of the
1930s. As Heide Solbrig has shown, during this time ‘corporations commissioned
[human relations training] films in the hope of shaping the emotional lives of
managers and workers for the sake of influencing their social behavior and class
identifications both in and out of the workplace’.72 The Griersonian triad of film,
documentary and citizenship education was embraced by the state during World War II

John Grierson and the United States 23

and went on to be incorporated into a new postwar corporate culture, imported under
the guise of an apolitical functional address to viewers. This discourse was steeped in
scientific modes of expression and helped turn, for instance, ‘sociological theories of
worker-management interaction [into] material practices through the narratives and
exercises of industrial media products’ (author’s emphasis).73 Such uses of pedagogical
film during the late 1940s, 50s and beyond may not have satisfied Grierson’s personal
vision of social change. However, the key point is that the Griersonian tradition is
larger than the person with whom it is associated, and it is clear – when looked at from
the vantage point of the US – that this body of thought on cultural production is an
expression of broader modern liberal currents of regulation and stabilisation.

conclUSion

By the 1960s, Grierson was able to return to the United States as the influence of
McCarthyism waned. During this time he frequently noted new trends in cinema vérité
and the value of, as he put it, ‘decentralizing the means of production, taking the myth
out of it … and making the documentary film a living tool for people at the grass
roots’.74 These statements reflected a new participatory formation, one still centrally
concerned with themes of citizenship and filmic communication, yet rewired to – in
theory – uphold the agency of oppressed subjects. New forms of observational and
participatory film production to an extent shared a critique of Griersonian form,
preferring to adopt more inductive postures in relation to subjects and viewers
(in theory). Yet Grierson’s openness to these new vérité practices suggests a more
complex relationship between them and the Griersonian tradition. For instance, the
Griersonian emphasis on citizenship, on deploying film as a means of communication
between the state and the subject was fluid and flexible enough to both enable and be
influenced by this shift to more participatory approaches. Specifically, the Griersonian
tradition possessed its own unique internal contradictions around the awkward,
unidirectional quality of cinema and an investment in the ideal of communication.
This ideal held within itself a notion of ‘voice’, of expression, that would – sooner
or later – unravel expository values, or at least retool them to accommodate a
participatory ethos in which the individualised voices of subjects would be brought
to the fore. In this sense, the Griersonian approach possessed the seeds of its own
unravelling.
Furthermore, as Aitken notes, Griersonian discourse was insistent on the
compatibility of ‘documentary naturalism and dramatic montage’.75 Grierson’s ‘neo-
Hegelian and neo-Kantian’ influences enabled his thought to accommodate both
formalist and realist impulses, recognising the limited but important value of the
‘phenomenal’ in gaining access to the ‘real’ by virtue of filmic techniques.76 With
the participatory turn, the yearning for access to the real as a totality falters. The
privileging of subject’s voices yields a more inductive and fractured whole, nudging the
documentary project that much closer to the phenomenal side of the spectrum. This
epistemic break suggests a more modest and less confident documentary endeavour
that parallels cracks in modern liberalism in the 1960s and eventually engenders
heightened reflexive sensitivities on the part of film diarists, essayists and

24 The Grierson Effect

ethnographers. And yet, while this may suggest a fading of the Griersonian tradition,
Grierson’s assertion of the synchronous relationship between formalist and realist
aesthetics is difficult to transcend or cast aside. Many contemporary documentarians
speak eloquently about the unique ways in which their films express this
complementary view of stylistic techniques and indexical purpose. Present-day
discourses of the new similarly rearticulate Grierson’s embrace of change and the allure
of ‘bright new media’, with some even echoing the refrain that the ‘day of the books
only is certainly over’.

noteS

1. Jack C. Ellis, John Grierson: Life, Contributions, Influence (Carbondale and Edwardsville:
Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), p. 21.
2. Forsyth Hardy, John Grierson: A Documentary Biography (London: Faber and Faber, 1979),
p. 150.
3. Ian Aitken, Film and Reform: John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement (London:
Routledge, 1992), p. 2.
4. ‘Rockefeller Related Organizations’, Rockefeller Archive Center, July 2011.
5. Ibid.
6. Ellis, John Grierson, p. 19.
7. Ibid., p. 20.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., pp. 20–1.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., p. 21.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Grierson quoted in ibid., p. 22.
18. Ibid.
19. Ellis, John Grierson, p. 27.
20. Grierson quoted in ibid., p. 28.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. Ellis, John Grierson, p. 28.
25. Jack C. Ellis and Betsy McLane, A New History of Documentary Film (New York: Continuum,
2006), p. 127.
26. Ellis, John Grierson, p. 29.
27. Ibid.
28. Zoë Druick, ‘ “Reaching the Multimillions”: Liberal Internationalism and the Establishment
of Documentary Film’, in Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson (eds), Inventing Film Studies
(Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2008), pp. 66–92 (69).

John Grierson and the United States 25

29. Paul Rotha, Documentary Diary: An Informal History of the British Documentary Film,
1928–1939 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1973), p. 171.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid., pp. 171–2.
34. Ibid., p. 171.
35. Peter Decherney, Hollywood and the Culture Elite: How the Movies Became American (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 134.
36. Ibid.
37. John Abbott quoted in ibid., p. 134.
38. Gracia Ramirez, ‘Rockefeller Support for Non-commercial Film, 1935–1939’, Rockefeller
Archive Center, 2009, www.rockarch.org/publications/resrep/gramirez.pdf.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid.
41. Brett Gary, ‘Communication Research, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Mobilization for the
War on Words, 1938–1944’, Journal of Communication vol. 46 no. 3 (1996), p. 130;
Decherney, Peter, Hollywood and the Culture Elite, p. 149.
42. Gary, ‘Communication Research, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Mobilization for the War
on Words, 1938–1944’, p. 130.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid., p. 131.
45. Mark Whipple, ‘The Dewey–Lippmann Debate Today: Communication Distortions, Reflective
Agency, and Participatory Democracy’, Sociological Theory vol. 23 no. 2 (2005), p. 159.
46. Gary, ‘Communication Research, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Mobilization for the War
on Words, 1938–1944’, p. 130.
47. Ramirez, ‘Rockefeller Support for Non-commercial Film, 1935–1939’, p. 8; Decherney,
Hollywood and the Culture Elite, p. 147.
48. Rotha, Documentary Diary, p. 172.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid., p. 176.
51. Ibid., p. 177.
52. Eric Knight quoted in ibid., p. 180.
53. Rotha, Documentary Diary, p. 181.
54. Ibid., p. 195.
55. Ibid., p. 184.
56. Hardy, John Grierson, p. 150.
57. Grierson quoted in ibid., pp. 150–1.
58. Grierson, John, ‘The Political, Economic and Educational Implications of the Atomic Bomb’,
14 May 1946, G5.10. 1–6, pp. 1–15, John Grierson Archive, University of Stirling, Stirling,
p. 1.
59. Ibid., p. 12.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid.
63. Ibid.

26 The Grierson Effect

64. Grierson, John, ‘The Library in an International World’, 17 June 1946, G5.10.7–10,
pp. 1–16, John Grierson Archive, University of Stirling, Stirling, p. 12.
65. Grierson, ‘The Library in an International World’, pp. 13, 16.
66. Ibid., pp. 13, 15.
67. Ibid., p. 15.
68. Ellis, John Grierson, p. 153.
69. Hardy, John Grierson, pp. 152–3.
70. Grierson quoted in ibid., p. 153.
71. Hardy, John Grierson, p. 153.
72. Heide Solbrig, ‘Henry Strauss and the Human Relations Film: Social Science Media and
Interactivity in the Workplace’, Moving Image vol. 7 no. 1 (2007), p. 28.
73. Ibid.
74. Elizabeth Sussex, The Rise and Fall of British Documentary: The Story of the Film Movement
Founded by John Grierson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), p. 196.
75. Aitken, Film and Reform, p. 12.
76. Ibid.

reFerenceS

Aitken, Ian, Film and Reform: John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement (London:
Routledge, 1992).
Decherney, Peter, Hollywood and the Culture Elite: How the Movies Became American (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2005).
Druick, Zoë, ‘ “Reaching the Multimillions”: Liberal Internationalism and the Establishment of
Documentary Film’, in Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson (eds), Inventing Film Studies
(Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2008), pp. 66–92.
Druick, Zoë and Jonathan Kahana, ‘New Deal Documentary and the North Atlantic Welfare
State’, in Brian Winston (ed.), The Documentary Film Book (London: BFI, 2013), pp. 153–8.
Ellis, Jack C., John Grierson: Life, Contributions, Influence (Carbondale and Edwardsville:
Southern Illinois University Press, 2000).
Ellis, Jack C. and Betsy McLane, A New History of Documentary Film (New York: Continuum,
2006).
Gary, Brett, ‘Communication Research, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Mobilization for the
War on Words, 1938–1944’, Journal of Communication vol. 46 no. 3 (1996), pp. 124–48.
Grierson, John, ‘The Political, Economic and Educational Implications of the Atomic Bomb’,
14 May 1946, G5.10.1–6, pp. 1–15, John Grierson Archive, University of Stirling, Stirling.
Grierson, John, ‘The Library in an International World’, 17 June 1946, G5.10.7–10, pp. 1–16,
John Grierson Archive, University of Stirling, Stirling.
Hardy, Forsyth, John Grierson: A Documentary Biography (London: Faber and Faber, 1979).
Ramirez, Gracia, ‘Rockefeller Support for Non-commercial Film, 1935–1939’, Rockefeller Archive
Center, 2009, 15 July 2011, www.rockarch.org/publications/resrep/gramirez.pdf.
‘Rockefeller Related Organizations’, Rockefeller Archive Center, n.d., 1 July 2011,
http://www.rockarch.org/collections/rockorgs/lsrmadd.php.
Rotha, Paul, Documentary Diary: An Informal History of the British Documentary Film, 1928–1939
(London: Secker & Warburg, 1973).

John Grierson and the United States 27

Solbrig, Heide, ‘Henry Strauss and the Human Relations Film: Social Science Media and
Interactivity in the Workplace’, Moving Image vol. 7 no. 1 (2007), pp. 27–50.
Sussex, Elizabeth, The Rise and Fall of British Documentary: The Story of the Film Movement
Founded by John Grierson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976).
Whipple, Mark, ‘The Dewey–Lippmann Debate Today: Communication Distortions, Reflective
Agency, and Participatory Democracy’, Sociological Theory vol. 23. no. 2 (2005), pp. 156–78.

28 The Grierson Effect

2
John Grierson and Russian Cinema:
An Uneasy Dialogue

Julia Vassilieva

John Grierson’s effect, as this volume demonstrates, emanates from his promotion of the
theory and practice of documentary cinema, his critical role in the founding of the British
and Canadian documentary movements, and his important contribution to the forging
of a realist approach in cinema. However, film historians in both Russia and the West
stress that Grierson’s earlier development as a director and as a theorist was influenced
significantly by the example of Russian cinema. The argument prominent in the 1930s
in the British film industry that ‘the British documentary movement was born from the
last reel of Potemkin’ was endorsed by Jay Leyda1 and reiterated more recently by Jack C.
Ellis2 in his biography of Grierson, while Richard Taylor and Ian Christie highlight that
Grierson’s early career ‘owed much to the fact that he happened to be working in New
York when the task of preparing an American release of Potemkin came his way in 1926’.3
However, apart from the seminal encounter of the future father of British documentary
and Sergei Eisenstein’s revolutionary classic, little scholarly attention has been directed to
unpacking the relationship between Grierson’s theoretical and practical work and that of
his Russian counterparts. This chapter examines the historical context of the dialogue
between Grierson and his collaborators on the one hand and the key masters of Russian
cinema on the other, and further traces the engagement with Grierson’s legacy by film
criticism and audiences in Russia through the twentieth and early twenty-first century.
Grierson’s first experience of Russian cinema occurred during his stay in the US
during 1924–7, while he was conducting his broad sociological research into public
educational media and began to realise the potential of the new medium of cinema,
which prompted the beginning of his film reviewing for the New York Sun (see Stephen
Charbonneau’s chapter). During this period Grierson developed a close relationship
with Robert Flaherty who, towards the end of 1926, became instrumental in launching
the first Soviet masterpiece in America, Battleship Potemkin. The print was brought by
Douglas Fairbanks from his recent trip to Russia, and Grierson and Jack Cohen, the
film critic for the New York Sun, did the titles for the film’s American release. Grierson
later described the events leading to his assignment as follows:

Douglas Fairbanks came back from a triumphant tour of the Soviet Union, and with him came
the first print of a film that was to change a good many concepts of film-making. … Somehow
the rumour of this great new experiment in the dialectics of imagery reached us in New York,
and somehow we found ourselves called upon to take it apart and put it together again for the
American market.4

John Grierson and Russian Cinema: An Uneasy Dialogue 29

These two shots – from Drifters (1929) and Battleship Potemkin (1925) – demonstrate striking similarities between
Grierson and Eisenstein’s cinematography. They also reveal a crucial difference – while Eisenstein presents the solitary
male figure as a hero of the Revolution, Grierson imbues his protagonist with more mundane working-class qualities

30 The Grierson Effect

 As a result, as Grierson claimed, he came to know the film ‘foot by foot and cut by
cut’.5 Informed by this, one of the received views is that, when Grierson came to direct
his first film Drifters, the result was a stylistic blend of Moana and Potemkin. However,
as Taylor and Christie point out, Drifters now shows little direct influence of Potemkin,
except in its maritime subject and modest emulation of montage style.6 The greater
significance of the encounter between Grierson and Russian cinema might thus lie in
the broader dialogue that was established between the British documentary movement
and early Russian cinematic theory.
The years between 1929 and 1934, when Grierson moved from sociological
research and freelance journalism to the realisation of his vision of a cinema of ‘public
affairs’ through the Empire Marketing Board and GPO film units, were also marked
by close contact between Russian film-makers and Grierson and his collaborators.
Grierson met Sergei Eisenstein personally in 1929 when Drifters premiered in a double
bill with the first English showing of Potemkin at the London Film Society, almost
exactly three years after the latter’s New York opening on 10 November 1926. Two
other Russian directors, Vsevolod Pudovkin and Dziga Vertov, had also travelled to
London to present their films at the Film Society, including The Man with the Movie
Camera (1929) and The End of St Petersburg (1927). Whereas no more than forty Soviet
features were in distribution in Britain before World War II, during the period between
1928 and 1939 the Film Society showed thirty Soviet films, an indication of the
intense interest in the Russian experiment displayed by Grierson and his followers.
The Russian film-makers’ visits provided not only opportunities for Film Society
members (who included future film-makers, independent distributors and curators,
such as Thorold Dickinson, Basil Wright, Charles Cooper, Tom Brandon, Iris Barry and
Ernest Lindgren) to discuss screenings with Russian directors, but also a stimulus to
address the broader issue of what cinema should be.
The debates regarding the role and functions of the new medium loomed large in
Russia during the decade after the Revolution of 1917, with specific attention to the
issue of how history – and indeed ‘truth’ – should be presented cinematically to the
masses. Towards the end of the 1920s a number of films dedicated to the tenth
anniversary of the Revolution were released: Dziga Vertov’s 1926 newsreel about Lenin
– one of a series which went under Vertov’s banner of Kinopravda – and his more direct
contribution to the celebrations in the form of the newsreel The Eleventh Year (1928),
while in 1927 Efsir Shub’s documentary The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty and Sergei
Eisenstein’s docudrama October followed, both also significant in this respect. These
films fuelled the debate among directors, theoreticians and Party officials as to the most
appropriate methods by which the Revolution’s course should be captured on screen,
the best way to represent ‘fact’, the construction of the argument versus ‘catching life
unaware’ and the distinction between ‘played’ and ‘unplayed’ films as means of
representing history. At stake in these debates was the issue that shaped theorisation of
documentary as a specific mode of film-making, that of the real and its representation.
It was inevitable that some echo of these debates, which so fundamentally informed the
epoch, were brought by the Russian directors to their London lectures. At the same
time, the ‘Russian example’ offered Western intellectuals committed to the idea of
social and aesthetic change a broader model of how to mobilise cinema to see the world
in a new and objective way. As Taylor and Christie note,

John Grierson and Russian Cinema: An Uneasy Dialogue 31

 Cinema as a new mode of vision, a new means of social representation, a new definition
of popular art, embodying new relations of production and consumption – all these
aspirations found confirmation in the films and declarations of Eisenstein, Pudovkin
and Vertov.7

Basil Wright recalled the powerful and challenging effect Eisenstein’s lectures
had on their audience at the Film Society in November 1929. Wright recorded the
following statements from the presentation, which addressed film as ‘a science
grounded on philosophical and higher mathematical knowledge’:

We have now reached a stage in our Theoretical and practical work at which we are in a
position to work out a Theoretical basis for film.
Only recently have we begun to feel the real type of purely filmic film which is to come. So
far films moving in this direction have been purely experimental (intellectual film). But now
the historical moment has come at which we are to find the synthesis of art and science in an
entirely new form of picturization.8

Marie Seton argues that

The impact of Eisenstein’s lecture … produced what Sergei Mikhailovich would have termed a
creative explosion in the minds of quite a number of the Film Society Study Group. They were
given a stimulus towards making of films based on real life – the realities of British life which
had not found expression in the trite story films and ponderous historical pictures made by
British studios.9

Grierson clearly saw the Russian example as an inspiration and a point of comparison
for his work, both directorial and organisational, in Britain. For example, he wrote that
‘to produce anything comparable with the Russian films’, there would need to be in
Britain ‘a similar grouping of directors … and a grouping of dramatic loyalties’, while
also acknowledging that ‘it would take a giant in such circumstances’ to achieve work
of the same calibre.10 However, despite Grierson’s deep admiration of the Russian
experiment in cinema, throughout the 1930s he grew progressively more ambiguous
towards its direction. Following the screening of The Man with the Movie Camera and
Vertov’s visit to London, Grierson commented:

The Vertov method of film-making is based on a supremely sound idea, and one which must
be a preliminary to any movie method at all. He has observed that there are things of the
every-day which achieve a new value, leap to a more vigorous life, the moment they get into a
movie camera or an intimately cut sequence. It is a point where we all begin; and, backing our
eye with the world, we try to pick the leapers. […]
Vertov, however, has pushed the argument to a point at which it becomes ridiculous. The
camera observes in its own bright way and he is prepared to give it his head. The man is with
the camera, not the camera with the man. Organization of things observed, brain control,
imagination or fancy control of all things observed: these other rather necessary activities in
the making of art are forgotten. The Man with the Movie Camera is in consequence not a film at
all: it is a snapshot album.11

32 The Grierson Effect

Grierson’s verdict on Vertov’s Enthusiasm (1930) was no less harsh, with him declaring
that ‘body of thought or body of construction it had none’.12 On the other hand,
Grierson felt compelled to admit that ‘It is so full of ingenuities that practitioners like
myself will be feeding on its carcase years from now.’13
Evidently, Grierson was more drawn to the lyricism, poetry and more pronounced
narrative organisation of Pudovkin and Dovzenko’s films. He described Earth (1930)
as ‘one of the great films’ among few ‘responsible for the same renewal of cinematic
energy’.14 He praised Pudovkin’s The End of St Petersburg and his Deserter (1933) even
more, saying of the latter: ‘no film or novel or poem or drama has sketched so largely
the essential story and the essential unhappiness of our time, or brought them so
deeply to the mind’.15 But the only truly hopeful example at the time for Grierson
was Victor A. Turin’s Turksib (1929), a documentary charting the building of the
Turkestan–Siberian railway, which Grierson prepared for its British release and
which arguably served as inspiration for Night Mail:

There is, I believe, only Turin and Turksib which, for all its patches of really bad articulation is
the single job that takes us into the future. Turksib is an affair of economics, which is the only
sort of affair worth one’s time or patience.16

Throughout the 1930s Grierson’s criticism of the Soviet modernist directors

became more punishing and rejecting. Grierson judged Eisenstein’s The General Line
(1934) to be a fundamental failure, as ‘Eisenstein does not get inside the Russian
peasants, not, with true affection, inside the problem of co-operating them’17
and argued that ‘the Russians, I know, will take my point’.18 Neither, according to
Grierson, did Pudovkin and Dovzenko rise to the challenges of the new demands of
industrialisation and collectivisation. The imperatives of revolutionary documentary,
‘the common problems of everyday life’, were only adequately addressed in the mid-
1930s in Fridrikh Ermler’s Counterplan (1932) and in Aleksandr Macheret’s Men and
Jobs (1933).19 Grierson’s criticism of Russian modernist works from the point of view
of social politics went hand in hand with his critique of their avant-garde stylistics. The
key issue in this debate was, as Bill Nichols shows, broader modernist fragmentation
that proposed alternative subjects and subjectivities, not easily conjoined for specific
government agendas. As Nichols explains:

The appearance of documentary involves the combination of three preexisting elements –

photographic realism, narrative structure, and modernist fragmentation – along with a new
emphasis on the rhetoric of social persuasion. This combination of elements itself became a
source of contention. The most dangerous element, the one with the greatest disruptive
potential – modernist fragmentation – required the most careful treatment. Grierson was
greatly concerned by its linkage to the radical shifts in subjectivity promoted by the European
avant-garde and to the radical shifts in political power promoted by the constructivist artists
and Soviet film-makers. He, in short, adapted film’s radical potential to far less disturbing
ends.20

Grierson’s final verdict on Russian experiment was that ‘the Russian talent faded’ by
1935. The reasons were explained as follows:

John Grierson and Russian Cinema: An Uneasy Dialogue 33

 Russian directors are too bound up – too aesthetically vain – in what they call their ‘play films’
to contribute to Russia’s instructional cinema. They have, indeed, suffered greatly from the
freedom given to artists in the first uncritical moment of revolutionary enthusiasm, for they
have tended to isolate themselves more and more in private impression and private
performance. […] For the future, one may safely leave them to the consideration of the
Central Committee. One’s impression is that when some of the art and all of the Bohemian
self-indulgence have been knocked out of them, the Russian cinema will fulfil its high promise
of the late twenties. […] The revolutionary will almost certainly ‘liquidate’, as they put it, this
romantic perspective.21

Similar criticism of avant-garde film-making was growing within Soviet Russia as

well, both on aesthetic and political grounds, culminating in the decisive change of
direction of Russian cinema initiated in 1935 by the Moscow Conference of Cinema
Workers. The conference adopted the new doctrine of Socialist Realism that had been
introduced a year before at the First All Union Congress of Soviet Writers:

Socialist realism demands truthfulness (pravdivost’) from the artist and an historically
concrete portrayal of reality in its revolutionary development. Under these conditions,
truthfulness and historical concreteness of artistic portrayal ought to be combined with the
task of the ideological remaking and education of laboring people in the spirit of socialism.22

It is true that the old theory of rupture or overhaul of the previous avant-garde
freedom by the Socialist Realism dogma is currently debated, with positions on the
topic ranging from Taylor and Christie’s23 modest call to acknowledge fighting
between various artistic Russian groups to Boris Groys’s24 more radical proposal that,
rather than being a mortal enemy of totalitarian aesthetics and politics, Russian
modernism set the stage for the development of Socialist Realism in art and a state
of total control in politics. Nevertheless, the fact remains that from 1934 onwards
Socialist Realism became a dominant – indeed exclusive – aesthetic for Soviet artists,
composers, cinematographers and writers.
The adoption of the doctrine of Socialist Realism was part of a ‘cultural revolution’
through which the Party would exercise tight control over cultural affairs, including
artistic expression. Socialist Realism was based on the tripartite principles of
accessibility (dostupnost’), the spirit of the people (narodnost’) and the spirit of the
Party (partiinost’). For cinema, this entailed moving away from the split between the
avant-garde and mainstream cinema evident in the late 1920s towards a film style that
would be legible to a broad audience. The montage aesthetics of Eisenstein, Kuleshov,
Vertov and Dovzenko were liable to the charge of Formalism, which was deemed a
great political as well as aesthetic mistake. Instead, the director of Soyuzkino and chief
policy officer for the film industry from 1931 to 1938, Boris Shumiatsky urged the
creation of a ‘cinema for the millions’, which would use clear, linear narration based on
the model of continuity editing.25 Various guidelines were then developed to specify
content and themes of cinematic production: narratives should feature positive
heroes to act as role models for viewers; the storylines should deliver lessons in good
citizenship for spectators to follow; and ideologically the films should be informed by
the policy decisions of the Communist Party.

34 The Grierson Effect

 Paradoxically for the development that allegedly strived for ‘realism’, the balance
between documentary and fiction cinema, which, as Taylor and Christie observe, had
already been stacked in favour of the latter, moved even further in this direction.26
Discussion in the Soviet press is indicative of this development. In February 1932
Proletarskoe kino insisted on the need ‘for a ruthless exposure of film theories that
were hostile to Marxism’.27 For the proponents of Socialist Realism, documentarism
represented one such theory, ‘illiterate, presumptuous and excessively pretentious’.28
They called for the total eradication of documentarism in Soviet cinema: ‘We stand on
the position of implacable struggle against documentarism, we have set ourselves the
task of destroying it completely.’29 Consequently, over the 1930s in the Soviet state
nonfictional production became totally subordinated to the aim of influencing attitudes
and public opinion to justify specific policies of the period within the broader Marxist
and Leninist ideological framework. This development led to, as Graham Roberts puts it
in his monograph Forward Soviet!, ‘the not so strange death of Soviet Documentary’.30
Roberts observes that, beginning in the mid-1930s, ‘Documentary cinema was
presenting a fantasy world where all was well in the Soviet bloc, and the working class,
condemned to reside in the rest of the world, craved the same Utopia.’31 Although a
massive amount of documentaries and newsreels was produced each year up until the
postwar period, the continued quantity could not disguise the utter lack of quality.
Towards the end of the 1930s, Stalin’s grip on power tightened, the national terror
became widespread, and government control over art was consolidated. This period
also saw the emergence of the themes of patriotism, Russian nationalism and
xenophobia on the ideological agenda. Dmitry and Vladimir Shlapentokh demonstrate
in their ideological analysis of Soviet cinema that ‘During this time foreigners
(regardless of their social status) […] were treated as enemies of Soviet Russia.’32
From 1931 the import of foreign films into Soviet Russia was stopped, leading to the
interruption of the interaction with the cinemas of other counties – the Iron Curtain
fell. As Taylor and Christie observe, these developments led to the general stagnation,
if not outright elimination, of aesthetic and theoretical debates on cinema:

In the shadow of Stalin’s ‘personality cult’ and the accompanying purges the atmosphere
was becoming increasingly difficult and public discussion of aesthetic issues increasingly
restricted. The film press was moving towards political exhortation rather than aesthetic
debate. Open debate was becoming more guarded and hence also more coded and
fragmented.33

The dialogue with Grierson’s theory and practice by the Soviet film-makers,
scholars and general public inevitably ground to a halt in this context. However, while
personal contacts between Soviet film-makers and Grierson and his collaborators
ceased to exist, the emergence of the doctrine of Socialist Realism brought into sharp
relief both similarities and differences between Grierson’s position and the masters of
Russian cinema both before and after 1934. These concerned political philosophy,
particularly views on Marxism, the role of the working class, the role of the state and
the functions of ideological propaganda.
The first parallel at the level of subject matter is Grierson’s dedication to ‘the
documentary of work and workers’. Grierson’s British films, and his Canadian films

John Grierson and Russian Cinema: An Uneasy Dialogue 35

after them, feature predominantly images of industrial workers involved in collective
labour processes contributing towards the common good. As Peter Morris remarks,
one is reminded that one of Grierson’s early essays was titled ‘The Worker as Hero’ and
of the way the notion of ‘hail the hero workers’ reverberates powerfully through his
work.34
Socialist Realism similarly positioned workers and peasants as primary
protagonists and privileged everyday subject matter. However, Grierson’s decisive
difference with it in this respect was that he did not understand the working class
to be the driving and most progressive force in history, as Socialist Realism did, in
accordance with Marxist historical narrative. By contrast, as Ian Aitken notes,
Grierson rejected the Marxist idea that fundamental divisions exist within society,
and particularly that class struggle and class conflict are inevitable. Instead,
Grierson understood social life as imbedded within ‘a matrix of inter-dependent
relations’ and argued that societies and institutions characterised by higher
integration were superior to those with less. As a result Grierson came to believe in
the powerful beneficial role of the state in the process of achieving and maintaining
social unity.35 A similar analysis has previously been proposed by Morris, who
supported his claims with the following quotation from Grierson’s letter written
after World War II:

My personal view is that such total planning by the state is an absolute good and not simply a
relative good … I do not myself think of the attitude I take as deriving from Marx – though
this undoubtedly will be suggested – but from Fichte and Hegel. My view of the State, as you
know, is that it is only through the State that the person and the will of the person can be
greatly expressed. Here I am in sufficiently good academic company not to have particular
qualms about attack.36

This understanding of the relationship between individual and state had two
important consequences for Grierson. One concerned the overriding framework
of unity as allowing for resolution of any contradictions, and the second related
to the formative role of art and constructivist function of artist/propagandist.
The very privileged position that Grierson accorded to documentary stemmed
from his conviction that documentary was ideally suited to representing the
interconnected nature of social relationships because it was ‘the medium of all media
born to express the living nature of inter-dependency … [it] … outlined the patterns
of interdependency more distinctly and more deliberately than any other medium
whatsoever’.37 Furthermore, while acknowledging that problems exist within this
network of interdependency, Grierson believed they are always solvable – usually
by the state but sometimes by some abstract entity of ‘collectivity’. This attitude
resonates with the emphasis that was placed within Socialist Realism’s approach on the
idea of unity and total sublation of contradictions in society. However, if for Grierson
achievement of this unity does not require change of the existing form of the neo-
liberal conservative state, the unity implied by Socialist Realism was predicated
on the assumption that Marxist ideology will eventually lead to the eradication of
contradictions between labour and capital, workers and managers, industrialisation
and nature, family and society, in the process of establishing the Communist state.

36 The Grierson Effect

 Grierson’s position with regard to the role of the state led to his view on the
function of art. He believed art should not reflect but rather shape and mould not only
a particular representation of reality but also of human consciousness and action.

They tell us that art is a mirror – a mirror held up to nature. I think this is a false image … . In
a society like ours, art is not a mirror but a hammer. It is a weapon in our hands to see and say
what is right and good and beautiful, and hammer it out as the mould and pattern of men’s
actions.38

As a corollary to this, Grierson emphasised the role of the artist as one of ‘social
constructiveness’:

The oblique paradox of propaganda is that the lie in the throat becomes, by repetition, the
truth in the heart. And, consequently, the art of propaganda or public information becomes
one of the most powerful forms of directive statesmanship. The place of the educator and the
artist in society changes entirely to one of definite social constructiveness.39

This statement resonates powerfully with the similar constructivist assumptions

prevalent among Russian avant-garde artists and expressed most clearly by Eisenstein
in his late work Method:

For me art has never represented ‘art for art’s sake’. It has never been a project to create
something dissimilar to the existing world – ‘my own world’. Just as well I have never tried
to ‘reflect’ the existing world. My aim has always been – using art’s means – to impact on
thoughts and feelings, impact on psyche and through this impact mould the viewer’s
consciousness in a desirable, needed, selected direction.40

However, while for Eisenstein this constructivist agenda had a broader meaning –
to create a new man of a new society – for Grierson it was about educating in the
direction of the ‘right and good and beautiful’. As Nichols comments:

The principle of citizenship as self-realization, frequently invoked by contructivists and film-

makers in the Soviet Union in relation to the creation of a ‘new man’, became the singular
raison d’être for Grierson’s conception of the documentary, not to foment revolution but to
preserve the status quo.41

It is in the context of these considerations that the respective positions on realism

implied by Grierson’s theory and practice and Russian cinema can be compared. The
shift from avant-garde practices to the doctrine of Socialist Realism that took place
in Russian cinema in the mid-1930s saw the reorientation of concerns from the
modernist search, articulated by the pioneers of Russian cinema, for new ways of
seeing and depicting the world, and as such grasping reality as it unfolds, to the
reinstatement of the nineteenth-century naturalist aesthetics and an overriding
preoccupation with state-produced propagandist ‘realism’. As Aitken suggests,
Grierson’s theory of realism similarly underwent a decisive change around 1936, when
his earlier focus on philosophical aesthetics was ‘replaced by a more functionalist

John Grierson and Russian Cinema: An Uneasy Dialogue 37

discourse based around issues of propaganda and instrumental “civic education” ’.42
Furthermore, in his revisionist account Morris argued that Grierson’s traditionally
celebrated organic approach was informed by authoritarian and totalitarian
tendencies, not unlike those that shaped the Russian approach to cinema under
Communism. However, from within Soviet Russia in its darkest ideological decades of
the 1930s and 40s, the differences far outweighed the similarities, with the decisive
factor being Grierson’s rejection of Marxism. Grierson’s position on the relationship
between classes, power and the role of the state contributed to partial and cautious
engagement with his output in the Soviet Union at precisely the time when he was ‘at
the peak of his influence’43 in the West.
Only after the death of Stalin in 1953 did some engagement with masters of
foreign cinema become possible again in Russian scholarship. The period known as
Khrushchev’s thaw, which brought about a reexamination and critique of Stalin’s era,
ushered in greater artistic freedom and a renewal of dialogue with the West. The
period saw some rejuvenation of documentary practices and more broad-ranging
engagement with theoretical work from around the world. Following the translation of
such important works on the history of cinema as Ernest Lindgren’s The Art of the
Film44 in 1956 and Georges Sadoul’s Histoire de l’art du cinéma des origines a nos jours45
in 1957, Soviet film criticism produced an interpretation of Grierson’s work that
reconciled his views with Soviet ideology, emphasising similarities and downplaying
differences.46 Numerous entries on Grierson from the time (such as for example that
in the Dictionary of Cinema [1966]) acknowledged him as a figure responsible for the
emergence of the British documentary movement, while stressing that he was
influenced by the work of Eisenstein and Pudovkin.47 Soviet film historians at the
time praised Grierson for ‘poetic, loving and respectful representation of ordinary
people and workers’, particularly emphasising the British documentary movement’s
attention to social problems: unemployment, housing, working conditions.48 It can
thus be seen that while the reception of Grierson’s theory and films during this period
was overwhelmingly positive, it was still extensively informed by class politics. When a
translation of Grierson’s ‘First Principles of Documentary’ was published in the edited
collection of translated essays The Truth of Cinema and Cinema-Truth in 1967, the
editors stressed in their introduction that the British documentary movement was
governed by two principles: ‘the creative treatment of actuality’ and human labour as
the primary source of poetry on the screen.49 The translator also took certain liberties
with Grierson’s original text, inserting statements that brought Grierson’s political
position more closely in line with Soviet ideology.
It would take more than thirty years for Russian scholarship and popular
perception to come to engage with Grierson’s legacy in a less politicised way. This
occurred in the wake of the broad-ranging political reforms initiated by Mikhail
Gorbachev that became known as perestroika. As a result of this, a significant change
towards a new outlook on film history as part of broader aesthetic, cultural, social and
political processes has taken place in Russia over the last twenty-five years, and it was
in this context that a renewed interest in Grierson’s heritage emerged at the beginning
of the twenty-first century, evident in new translations,50 broadcasts of his
documentaries on TV channel Culture and a continuous stream of screenings of his
films by film societies in various places in Russia. These screenings and broadcasts

38 The Grierson Effect

covered a number of important films directed by Grierson and made with his creative
involvement, specifically focusing on the early, more pronounced modernist works:
The Drifters, Night Mail, The Coming of Dial (1933), Granton Trawler, 6.30 Collection
(1934), Song of Ceylon, A Colour Box (1935), Coal Face (1935), Sixpenny Telegram (1935).
Furthermore, Grierson and the British documentary movement have come to feature
prominently in the curricula of cinema studies courses taught in Russian universities.
Overall, the critical shift in the reassessment of Grierson’s heritage during the last
twenty-five years indicates a move away from the emphasis on the ‘documentaries
of work and workers’ towards reconsideration of Grierson as a major figure in the
European modernist movement. From this point of view, Grierson’s aesthetic
strategies, such as visual composition and rhythmic structure, become the focus of
attention, while his focus on industrialisation is reinterpreted as a more general
modernist fascination with mechanisation as a distinct feature of the twentieth
century.51
Recent years have also seen the reinvigoration of broad public interest in Grierson’s
output.52 While films made by Grierson and the British documentary movement have
never appeared in a VHS or DVD format with Russian subtitles, cine buffs circulate
these films with amateur subtitles on the internet. The vivid exchange in the Russian
cinephile blogosphere attests to the interest on the part of the wider community in all
aspects of Grierson’s documentaries – from their empirical content to aesthetics and
historical context. As such, this movement mobilises the potential of documentary to
forge a connection between ‘history and (social) memory’, as pointed out by Michael
Chanan. Chanan writes,

the film as such becomes a strange new form of historical past embedded in what is always
already a partial perspective on it: a veridical social and historical world as interpreted by the
film-maker just a moment before it becomes historical.53

As such, for the present generation of Russians, Grierson’s theory and practice of
documentary became an important fragment in the rich tapestry of political,
philosophical and aesthetic movements of the twentieth century, contributing to a
vision of the past as a more sophisticated and at the same time nuanced totality.

Notes

1. Jay Leyda, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1983), p. 195.
2. Jack C. Ellis, John Grierson: Life, Contributions, Influences (Carbondale and Edwardsville:
Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), p. 29.
3. Richard Taylor and Ian Christie, The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 7–8.
4. John Grierson, Eisenstein, 1898–1948, Publication of a spoken tribute following Eisenstein’s
death given on 2 May 1948, by Grierson, Paul Rotha, Ivor Montagu, Marie Seton and
Herbert Marshall (London: Film Section of the Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR,
1948).

John Grierson and Russian Cinema: An Uneasy Dialogue 39

 5. Taylor and Christie, The Film Factory, p. 8.
6. Ibid., p. 410.
7. Ibid., p. 8.
8. Sergei Eisenstein, London Lectures on Film Theory, Précis Notes Taken by Basil Wright,
November–December 1929, in Marie Seton, Sergei M. Eisenstein: A Biography, rev. edn
(London: Dobson, 1978), pp. 482–5.
9. Seton, Sergei M. Eisenstein, p. 144.
10. Forsyth Hardy (ed.), Grierson on Documentary (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), p. 123.
11. Ibid., p. 127.
12. Forsyth Hardy (ed.), Grierson on the Movies (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), p. 141.
13. Ibid., p. 142.
14. Hardy, Grierson on Documentary, p. 123.
15. Ibid., p. 130.
16. Ibid., p. 122.
17. Co-operating’ refers to the process of creation of collective economy as an antithesis to
individual or family farming by the Soviet government in the 1920s. A collective farm, or
kolkhoz, was legally organised as a production co-operative.
18. Hardy, Grierson on Documentary, p. 122.
19. Ibid., p. 183.
20. Bill Nichols, ‘Documentary Film and the Modernist Avant-garde’, Critical Inquiry vol. 27
no. 4 (2001), p. 582.
21. Hardy, Grierson on Documentary, pp. 183–4.
22. Pravda, 5 June 1934.
23. Taylor and Christie, The Film Factory.
24. Boris Groys, Iskusstvo Utopii/The Art of Utopia (Moskva: Znak, 1993).
25. Boris Shumiatsky, Cinematography Millionov/Cinema for the Millions (Moscow:
Kinofotoizdat, 1935).
26. Taylor and Christie, The Film Factory, p. 8.
27. Ibid., p. 321.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid., pp. 321–2.
30. Graham Roberts, Forward Soviet! History and Non-fiction Film in the USSR (London and New
York: I. B.Tauris, 1999), p. 139.
31. Ibid.
32. Dmitry Shlapentokh and Vladimir Shlapentokh, Soviet Cinematography 1918–1991:
Ideological Conflicts and Social Reality (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1993), p. 98.
33. Taylor and Christie, The Film Factory, p. 371.
34. Peter Morris, in Pierre Veronneau, Michael Dorland and Seth Feldman (eds), ‘Rethinking
Grierson: The Ideology of John Grierson’, Dialogue: Canadian and Quebec Cinema, Canadian
Film Studies, vol. 3 (1987), pp. 21–56.
35. Ian Aitken, European Film Theory and Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2001).
36. Quoted in Peter Morris, ‘ “Praxis into Process”: John Grierson and the National Film Board
of Canada’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television vol. 9 no. 3 (1989), p. 274.
37. Quoted in Aitken, European Film Theory and Cinema, p. 165.
38. Quoted in Morris, ‘Re-thinking Grierson’, pp. 21–56.

40 The Grierson Effect

39. Ibid.
40. Sergei M. Eisenstein, Method (Moscow: Museum of Cinema, Eisenstein-Centre, 2002), p. 46.
41. Nichols, ‘Documentary Film and the Modernist Avant-garde’, p. 600.
42. Aitken, European Film Theory and Cinema, p. 167.
43. Morris, ‘Re-thinking Grierson’, p. 26.
44. Ernest Lindgren, The Art of the Film (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1956).
45. Georges Sadoul, Histoire de l’art du cinéma des origines à nos jours (Moscow: Izdatelstvo
Inostrannoi Literatury, 1957).
46. Sergei Drobashenko (ed.), The Screen and Life [Ekran i jizn] (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1962).
47. Dictionary of Cinema, vol. 1 (Moscow: Sovetskay Encyclopedia, 1966), p. 390.
48. Sergei Drobashenko (ed.), The Truth of Cinema and Cinema-Truth [Pravda kino ikinopravda]
(Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1967), p. 12.
49. John Grierson, ‘First Principles of Documentary’, trans. B. Dvorman, in Drobashenko, The
Truth of Cinema and Cinema-Truth, pp. 305–15.
50. See, for example, selected translations from Grierson’s American period of film journalism
in Kinovedcheskie Zapiski, the leading journal of film history and theory in Russia, vol. 84,
2007.
51. See, for example, an entry in the online Encyclopedia of Culture and Education ‘Krugosvet’:
http://www.krugosvet.ru/enc/kultura_i_obrazovanie/teatr_i_kino/DOKUMENTALNOE_
KINO.html?page=0,3.
52. See, for example, a discussion of a screening of Grierson’s films at the Moscow Club of
Documentary Cinema: http://doc-kino-club.livejournal.com/97579.html.
53. Michael Chanan, ‘Documentary, History, Social Memory’, Journal of British Cinema and
Television vol. 1. no. 1 (2004), p. 62.

RefeReNCes

Aitken, Ian, European Film Theory and Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001).
Chanan, Michael, ‘Documentary, History, Social Memory’, Journal of British Cinema and
Television vol. 1 no. 1 (2004), pp. 61–77.
Dictionary of Cinema, vol. 1 (Moscow: Sovetskay Encyclopedia, 1966).
Drobashenko, Sergei, Ekran i jizn/The Screen and Life (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1962).
Drobashenko, Sergei (ed.), Pravda kino ikinopravda/The Truth of Cinema and Cinema-Truth
(Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1967).
Eisenstein, Sergei M., ‘London Lectures on Film Theory, Précis Notes Taken by Basil Wright,
November–December 1929’, in Marie Seton, Sergei M. Eisenstein: A Biography, rev. edn
(London: Dobson, 1978), pp. 482–5.
Eisenstein, Sergei M., Method (Moscow: Museum of Cinema, Eisenstein-Centre, 2002).
Ellis, Jack C., John Grierson: Life, Contributions, Influences (Carbondale and Edwardsville:
Southern Illinois University Press, 2000).
Grierson, John, Eisenstein, 1898–1948, Publication of a spoken tribute following Eisenstein’s
death given on 2 May 1948, by Grierson, Paul Rotha, Ivor Montagu, Marie Seton and
Herbert Marshall (London: Film Section of the Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR,
1948).
Groys, Boris, Iskusstvo Utopii/The Art of Utopia (Moskva: Znak, 1993).

John Grierson and Russian Cinema: An Uneasy Dialogue 41

Hardy, Forsyth (ed.), Grierson on Documentary (London: Faber and Faber, 1966).
Hardy, Forsyth (ed.), Grierson on the Movies (London: Faber and Faber, 1981).
Leyda, Jay, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1983).
Lindgren, Ernest, The Art of the Film (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1956).
Morris, Peter, ‘Rethinking Grierson: The Ideology of John Grierson’, in Pierre Veronneau,
Michael Dorland and Seth Feldman (eds), Dialogue: Canadian and Quebec Cinema, Canadian
Film Studies, Montreal: Médiatexte Publications and La Cinémathèque Québécoise, vol. 3
(1987), pp. 21–56.
Morris, Peter, ‘ “Praxis into Process”: John Grierson and the National Film Board of Canada’,
Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television vol. 9 no. 3 (1989), pp. 269–82.
Nichols, Bill, ‘Documentary Film and the Modernist Avant-garde’, Critical Inquiry vol. 27 no. 4
(2001), pp. 580–610.
Pravda, 5 June 1934.
Roberts, Graham, Forward Soviet! History and Non-fiction Film in the USSR (London and New
York: I. B. Tauris, 1999).
Sadoul, Georges, Histoire de l’art du cinéma des origines à nos jours (Moscow: Izdatelstvo
Inostrannoi Literatury, 1957).
Seton, Marie, Sergei M. Eisenstein: A Biography (rev. edn) (London: Dobson, 1978).
Shlapentokh, Dmitry and Vladimir Shlapentokh, Soviet Cinematography 1918–1991: Ideological
Conflicts and Social Reality (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1993).
Shumiatsky, Boris, Cinematography Millionov/Cinema for the Millions (Moscow: Kinofotoizdat,
1935).
Taylor, Richard and Ian Christie, The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).

42 The Grierson Effect

3
To Play The Part That Was in Fact His/Her Own

Brian Winston

In The Savings of Bill Blewitt – a proto-drama documentary directed by Harry Watt in 1936 –
there is scarcely a frame which suggests that anything of ordinary behaviour has been captured by
the camera. The film was made to sell Post Office savings accounts. In it, Bill Blewitt, a somewhat
feckless Cornish fisherman, looses his smack because of a degree of carelessness which makes his
name peculiarly apposite. A crucial scene has Bill asking his wife to look up how much he has
managed to put by in the Post Office. Clearly embarrassed by being on camera, she fishes the savings
book out of her bag and announces: ‘£24/14/9d’. Bill wants to know because a replacement boat
might be on the market but it is likely to be sold to some wealthier stranger, much to Bill’s distress.
All he can manage to indicate this emotion is a muttered laconic aside describing his rival as ‘some
yachtsman fellah’. A neighbour pops her head round the door with more news, a message delivered in
a sing-song Cornish burr with all the human conviction of an animated puppet. She leaves, bobbing:
‘No, can’t stay, me dears. Gotta go. Gotta go.’

One of the more paradoxical aspects of Grierson’s legacy is a certain tolerance, to be

found in the reception of the classic films produced by the documentary movement,
for stilted, ‘unnatural’ (as it might be) performances by the people featured on the
screen. The quality of the ‘acting’, especially in the synch sequences of the 1930s films,
was almost unremarked upon at the time and has scarcely figured in any discussion of
the authenticity of the Griersonian archive since.
That we now understand all (off-screen) behaviour as a species of ‘performance of a
social role’1 does not remove the question of the authenticity of the performances of
such roles on screen in the context of documentary. In this context, ‘performativity’
speaks to the ‘distinct tension between performance and document’ noted by Bill
Nichols in his initial application of that term to documentary film; that is, the tension
‘between the personal and the typical, the embodied and the disembodied, between, in
short, history and science’.2 This ‘tension’ can – and, I will argue in the case of the
Griersonian archive, does – produce inauthentic performances in the older sense of
theatricality: in other words, of ‘acting’ – in fact, poor acting, as conventionally judged.
Performativity is not a synonym for performance and treating it so obfuscates the
significance of Grierson’s legacy in this regard. In the case of documentary, to claim
automatic authenticity because all behaviour is ‘performative’ does not remove
consideration of it as performance. The claim on the real demands that performance in
the documentary in the older sense of ‘acting’ be judged against the representational
codes reflecting such behaviour as ‘real’ or ‘natural’ on the screen.

To Play the Part That Was in Fact His/Her Own 43

 In Erving Goffman’s locus classicus for considering all behaviour as performance
(The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 1959), the essential objective for any
individual is held to be to ‘stage a character’ successfully in the public sphere. The
reception of this ‘staging’ – social interaction – teeters, Goffman suggested, between
‘cynicism and sincerity’;3 and it is this that conditions what Jane Roscoe has called the
‘flicker of authenticity’ in the audience’s reception of such presentations made by the
documentary ‘actor’.4 This flicker acts not unlike a miners’ safety lamp. It indicates
when the ‘gas’, as it might be – the ‘gas’ of acting in the specific thespic sense – is
present.
Annette Hill, in her contemporary audience research on reality TV, has found that
the question of ‘acting’ does contribute to what she calls ‘the chain of distrust’ in the
minds of her interviewees, the audience.5 The ‘chain’ runs from news and current
affairs to the formatted documentary shows. The audience distrust these last most
when they think that the participants are acting as in a play – ‘acting up’ is how they
characterise it. For them, this clearly vitiates any claim on the real such programming
makes.6 To say of a documentary subject that they were ‘acting’, then as now, is to
dispute the documentary value of the image, if not to discard that value altogether.
Acting, then, extinguishes the ‘flicker’. It speaks to the heart of what Annette Hill has
called (borrowing from data science) documentary’s ‘referential integrity’.7 What is
endangered here when the flicker goes out, according to John Corner’s analysis, is the
pleasure which he suggests we derive from documentary footage as we attempt ‘to
establish people’s “real” character from the clues and the slips provided by the on-
screen performance of speech and action’ – a process he calls ‘selving’.8
My contention is that this ‘selving’ can only be limited when watching the people
filmed by the Griersonians. This is not only true for today’s audience encountering the
archive, wherein the people filmed are figures from the other country we call the
historic past; it was also true at the time. And, moreover, one could suggest that this
extinguished authenticity in performances, exacerbated as it was by documentary’s
claim on the real, contributed to the limited audience success the films enjoyed in their
day. This does more than impact on the films’ reception. The process of ‘selving’ is not
only potentially pleasurable. It also involves the audience mechanism for testing for
authenticity – for evaluating the claim on the real. ‘Selving’ is of a piece, as a concept,
with Umberto Eco’s image of the metaphorical ‘inferential walk’, which must be taken
to decode any text.9 Specifically, without taking such a walk, the truth claims of any
text – a realist documentary, say – cannot be established by the audience. The quality
of the acting as a reflection of quotidian behaviour is thus tested and is central to the
acceptance of the authenticity of what is being presented on the screen. The silence
about it in the debates on classic documentary is therefore more than curious.
After all, the Griersonian project was in no ways at odds with the Vertovian
ambition to ‘show us [authentically] life’. As with Vertov, that was Grierson’s central
purpose – revealing society to the audience for the purposes of public enlightenment
and education. This agenda suggested that what the films provided was an enhanced
understanding of society, giving the citizenry an improved grasp of what was to be
done about its problems. Hence the ‘preacher’ Grierson’s view: ‘I look upon cinema as a
pulpit, and use it as a propagandist.’10 Within this project, as Harry Watt explained to
Elizabeth Sussex, the films’ claim to being ‘revolutionary’ depended on the fact that

44 The Grierson Effect

‘they were putting on the screen for the first time in British films – and very nearly in
world films – a workingman’s face and a workingman’s hands and the way the worker
lived and worked’.11 Leave aside the firstism, the authenticity of the ‘way’ of the
workers presented on screen in the Griersonian films, especially whenever shot in
synch, can be easily disputed. This is critical since such representation – ‘the way the
worker lived’ – is central. In the Auerbachian vision of mimesis realism is exactly
this.12 It ‘is the artistic form that takes the life of the common people with supreme
seriousness’.13 The Griersonian project is a prime example, therefore, of the realist
project. It is the realist aesthetic that demands the classic Anglophone documentary be
a ‘discourse of sobriety’.14
That the performances in the films reveal far more self-conscious, artificial
behaviour than much of this claimed reality runs counter to Griersonian ambition.
It seriously undercuts the project’s ‘documentary value’. This is no small matter, for
all that Grierson’s public relations genius marginalised the issue. Clearly, any such
discussion would have implicitly queried documentary’s fundamental legitimacy, and
not just at the level of aesthetic theory. In the event, however, the possibility that the
acting on the screen might in any way cast doubt on the classic documentary’s claim
on the real was virtually ignored. It is part of Grierson’s PR legacy that this has never
really happened since either.
Watt’s work as a director of actors – that is, of the people who appeared before his
camera – was exemplified by The Savings of Bill Blewitt. In any subset of documentary
production, apart from our contemporary understanding of dramadocs (docudramas),
this necessarily means people who are anything other than professional actors –
unless, of course, the topic of the film is their work as performers.15 For a
documentary, in all other circumstances, to make any sort of claim on the real meant
using a non-professional performer who needed to be, in effect (in a phrase of the
novelist Anthony Powell), an ‘infinitely accomplished actor got up to play the part that
was in fact his [or her] own’.16
Watt believed such a directorial feat could be accomplished. In fact, he felt that
his ‘real people’ could be ‘far better’ than professional film actors at authentically
representing their reality on the screen.17 He came to this realisation when directing
his first major GPO film, Night Mail, in 1936 (with Basil Wright). It required effort to
achieve, though. When casting, he said: ‘You look for the extraverts, the bullshit
merchants, the boring life and soul of the party boys’. But even that was not the end
of the matter. He knew that these lively souls were ‘natural hams’ but not necessarily
convincingly realistic before the lens. However: ‘if you wheedle and bully them down
to some sort of naturalness, they’re actors’.18 In this he was (unwittingly, probably)
echoing Oliver Goldsmith’s witty view of the great actor David Garrick who had
revolutionised eighteenth-century English acting with his supposedly realistic
performances:

On the stage he was natural, simple, affecting;

’Twas only that when he was off he was acting.19

In the eighteenth-century debate about the nature of acting, a state of ‘war’ was held
to exist between ‘sentiment’, which today might be called intuition, and ‘calculation’.

To Play the Part That Was in Fact His/Her Own 45

The professional business of acting, then as now, was/is to turn the later, at will, into
the appearance of the former. Tom King, playing ‘Fool’ to Garrick’s ‘Lear’, remembered
him one night reducing the entire Drury Lane house to tears during the storm scene
and, turning upstage, cynically remarking, sotto voce: ‘Damme, Tom, it’ll do.’ This was
calculation pretending to be sentiment in action.20 Acting in the Western tradition
is thus a species of confidence trick, a simulation of behaviour. In documentaries,
though, there should be no trickery; but with all performance it is unavoidable. ‘What’s
Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba that he should weep for her?’ is the ever-present, never
answered question as to the authenticity of acting.
This does not, of itself, vitiate the possibility of documentary. Not all the
paradoxes involved in acting are in play. On the stage, there is a continuum from the
duplication of quotidian observed behaviour to overtly formalised presentations in the
declaratory mode.21 The intuitive re-presentation, the quotidian (which requires the
application of a complex performance code by professional actors seeking to do it)
comes – or ought to come – authentically and automatically for performers in
documentaries. There is no need for the theatrical search for inner psychological
realism or any other Stanislavskian technique for the ‘creation of the living world’,
primarily by reflecting inner emotional truths and capturing imagined realities behind
the behaviour.22 For the documentary actor, all this is already to hand because they
are themselves and, as realism demands, their behaviour reflects quotidian realities.
However, the matter of authenticity remains. Credibility is critical because the filmed
behaviour must be mimetic, if ‘a’ story about the ‘real’ world – rather than a story
about a fictional world (to use Nichols’s definitional distinction between documentary
and fiction) – is to be told.23
Watt’s ‘actors’ were like Garrick in that in everyday life, off stage (screen), they
were extravert, OTT, etc. Unfortunately, though, on screen, they were no Garricks and
their acting was far from ‘natural’, quotidian. For the most part they were stiff, stilted
and awkward. Nevertheless, Watt claimed that they were ‘simple and affecting’ –
authentic. As Swann puts it, Watt believed that: ‘their very awkwardness in front of
the camera was perhaps their greatest asset. It was proof of their bona fides as real
people.’24
Authenticity in such a context requires that intuition be all. The documentary
actors’ intuition under the baleful eye of the camera was then to be, authentically,
awkward. Watt, in making his claim for this being desirable, was following his master,
John Grierson’s basic PR approach to sidelining real problems. Just as Grierson
developed a rhetoric to justify the limited appeal of the films themselves (as against
the attractions of Hollywood) as ignoring and obscuring their greater impact on the
few who saw them, so Watt here attempts to turn the inauthenticity of the
performances he obtained into an advantage over culturally acceptable (aka
‘Hollywood’, as it might be) performance norms.
Herein is the clue to the problem. At one level, the authenticity of awkwardness
must mean that the behaviour inauthentically represents the reality of the situation
when cameras are not present – unless it is also being suggested that people were, in
general, awkward in everyday life. If they were not (which is surely the case), then the
claim on the real is undercut. On the other hand, if it is accepted that the awkward
behaviour is a consequence of the filming, then, again, the claim on the real is

46 The Grierson Effect

The Savings of Bill Blewitt (1936): Bill Blewitt as ‘Bill Blewitt’

undercut. Swann acknowledges this implicitly when he writes that the very term
‘performance’ is itself ‘problematic’ in this context.25 Indeed it is. A work’s
‘documentary value’ crucially depends on there being no person appearing in it who
‘performs’ in the sense of ‘to play (a part or character)’ (1613, OED); or even more
specifically ‘to act in a play; to play or sing’ (1836, OED). They must all be playing parts
– with compelling transparency – that were, in fact, their own. But with these films we
do not seem to learn anything of what the player’s off-camera behaviour might have
been like. The process of ‘selving’ is thus limited to an empathetic understanding that
being filmed is embarrassing if you are not trained up to it.
When he has done with wheedling and bullying, Watt extracts from Bill Blewitt the
characterisation of a taciturn, laconic workingman, stoical to the point of paralysis in
the face of financial disaster. Other references to Blewitt, though, suggest a different
personality altogether. Pat Jackson, who was assistant director on the film, says that
Blewitt had the ‘mesmeric gift of the gab, glorious Cornish accent, twinkling blue eyes,
grin as broad as Popeye and the charismatic charm of the Celt’.26 Clearly, the Blewitt of
The Savings of Bill Blewitt was not playing a part that ‘was in fact his own’; calculation
not intuition was involved. However badly, he was pretending to be somebody else: in
short, he was acting, albeit under his own given name. He had not been rechristened

To Play the Part That Was in Fact His/Her Own 47

by Watt – as might be thought to have been the case, given the appositeness of this
name to the character in the film. That Blewitt was no Allakarialluk (rechristened
as ‘Nanook’ by Flaherty) was the truest thing about him in the film. Otherwise,
assumptions of truth about ‘the’ world – that is, ‘a’ truth of some kind – are hard to
discern in it.
This is not to expect Stanislavsky’s truth of the ‘scenic type’ which applies
imagination to observed reality.27 Players in documentary need no such truth because
the roles are ‘in fact their own’; but they do need to bring a sense of observed reality,
drawn from what Stanislavsky terms ‘the plane of actual fact’. This is where Watt and
Blewitt fall short – in their engagement with ‘the plane of actual fact’. The result
is an archetypical example of the limitations of performance in the Griersonian
documentary.
Nevertheless, Watt used Blewitt again – transported in an unlikely fashion from
Cornwall to Aberdeen – on North Sea (1938), a documentary about ship-to-shore radio
which was the movement’s most commercially successful film of the 1930s (albeit that
it is still replete with stilted performances). In fact, Blewitt went on to appear in two
more documentaries (narrating one) and to have roles in four wartime features. The
only substantial difference in his on-screen work between the documentaries and the
fictions was that in the former he was either uncredited or appeared under his own
name; but in the features his parts were given character names – ‘Dick Trehiddle’, for
example, in Johnny Frenchman (1945).
It can, of course, be argued that The Savings of Bill Blewitt is a fictional publicity
film and its claim to be a documentary rests on the fact that it was produced by
the GPO Film Unit and used ‘real people’ as its actors. Nevertheless, Paul Swann
situates this film as marking a crucial advance in documentary, engineered by the
augmentation of Grierson’s initial vision with Alberto Cavalcanti’s dramatic
sensitivities when he took over the running of the GPO unit. Given the next three-
quarters of a century of documentary development, it is hard to deny that this view
holds a certain truth. The advance, though, initially merely highlighted the question of
performance in the documentary. This had been there from the start but certainly the
arrival of synch filming in 1934/5 exacerbated it. The problem exists even with more
purely observational material made in the initial Griersonian mode. Very little in the
movement’s work treats the main news tropes of the 1930s directly. Neither the rise of
fascism nor the economic travails of the Depression figure centrally. The film that
comes closest to dealing directly with the unemployed millions of the time, Arthur
Elton’s 1934 Workers and Jobs about the labour exchanges, says nothing to the reality
of worklessness – the ‘way’ of the workers who have no work.

In one scene, an Exchange manager interacts with a patient group of smartly dressed unemployed.
He calls men forward one-by-one to be dispatched to enterprises which might have work for them.
A group rises to take tentative steps forward occasioning a testy: ‘Do step back now. Give me a
chance’; and this is the closest the film (and, indeed, the movement) get to reflecting the stress of
unemployment during the Great Depression.

In 1934, a third of all miners, two-thirds of shipbuilders, a quarter of cotton workers,

etc., etc. – 3 million insured workers in all – were unemployed. But I am not drawing

48 The Grierson Effect

attention here to the glaring lack of context of this film. Rather am I asking: what
picture of behaviour reflecting this stretched social fabric does Workers and Jobs
provide? ‘Do step back now. Give me a chance’: this barely registered seconds-long
‘surge’ towards the exchange manager’s counter is the nearest the documentary
movement got to filming the despair and anguish of unemployment. I suppose one
could say that this almost absurdist representation of the reality of 1930s jobseeking
accurately illustrates the hopelessness of the cowed men and the formal coldness
of the manager. What it cannot be said to show is any sign of individual human
response. Even allowing for the culturally determined reticence of the English in
public, all the figures are more like automata than people – never mind desperate
people.
The plummy-voiced narrator (let us not forget all the connotations of class that go
with accent in Britain) begins by mentioning that there are some 50,000 different
types of jobs – not that there are millions on the dole. How could it be otherwise given
the realities of sponsorship? (The film was made, by Arthur Elton, for the Ministry
of Labour.) The point is that, although documentaries were being presented as
uncompromisingly realistic (e.g., see Watt, above), the presentation of self within
them worked to support their less-than-realistic, ideologically conditioned reformist,
placatory social meaning. After all, running from ‘social meaning’ (as David Schrire
noted in commenting on Grierson’s own Drifters28 is central to Grierson’s legacy to
documentary. The acting in the films of the 1930s and 40s – the ways in which
subjects are seen to behave – exactly reflects this flight from social meaning – the basic
Griersonian failing. The population is presented as more embarrassed, quiescent and
cowed than other evidence suggests it actually was. For the official sponsors who paid
for these films, this cannot have been unwelcome. ‘Poor’ acting (as conventionally
judged) and the concomitant concentration on surface appearances without analysis
serve their agendas. It is what Grierson bequeathed to the documentary into the era of
Direct Cinema and beyond.
So these are not one-off examples, although it must be acknowledged that not all
Grierson’s ‘boys’ were equally inept at directing the people they cast. Evelyn Spice (the
documentary movement’s first – and virtually only – established female director)29
and Humphrey Jennings (who was never quite one of the ‘boys’ anyway) made a better
fist of directing subjects in their films than did Watt and the others. But even they
were not always successful. For example, Spice brilliantly handles the cockney lads
apprenticed to the Post Office in Job in a Million (1937) but the authority figures –
the adult headmaster and a teacher (who sounds like Queen Mary) come over as
constipated as ever: ‘Truman is not working quite hard enough.’ (Quite so.)
Among all the movement’s directors, Humphrey Jennings could also sometimes do
better than the general run, a significant factor in his enhanced reputation. When he
obtained convincing performances, it would seem to have been the result of deploying
Wattian wheedling and bullying to a high degree. A major factor involved inducing
exhaustion. Fires Were Started (1943), the feature-length documentary on the work of
the Auxiliary Fire Service (AFS), is where, perhaps, his efforts can be seen to best
advantage. He worked fourteen-hour days and ‘everybody was frightened of him’; but
he was also charming and charismatic, involving cast and crew in the filming process,
encouraging informality on the set.30

To Play the Part That Was in Fact His/Her Own 49

 Jennings had a treatment/script containing a lot of dialogue, devised by himself
and Maurice Richardson, a novelist who was also at the time an AFS volunteer.
Jennings kept this from his actors, though, encouraging them to improvise. However,
with his hints and help, in the film on occasion they finished up saying, more or less
exactly, the words he and Richardson had heard and noted down during the research
phase. Jennings nevertheless somehow convinced them that they had come up with
the dialogue themselves.
The assignment was, in propaganda terms, complex – a need to demonstrate that
civilian deaths could be expected in the Blitz but that this should not prevent people
from staying calm and carrying on. Perhaps this was why a measure of authentic
language – not previously permitted – was allowed. The propaganda task was a hard
one and to sell it needed as many nuggets of authenticity as possible. This sugaring
of the propaganda pill by admitting realistic negatives, such as bad language, can be
traced to Shakespeare. In Henry V, on the eve of Agincourt, the cockney soldier Bates
wishes (to Henry in disguise) that the King ‘were in Thames up to his neck and I
by him’ rather than where they both are – in France waiting for the dawn and the
mayhem of battle. Against the King’s praying in of patriotism – Wilfred Owen’s ‘old
lie’, i.e., dulce et decorum est pro patria mori – Bates speaks to a more readily understood
and therefore realer emotion. This draws the sting of the lie for the next scene with its
great paean of patriotic fervour, Henry’s ‘St Crispin’s Day’ speech.
In the same way, the firemen in Fires Were Started are allowed ‘bloody’, ‘windy
bastards’, ‘hell’, ‘Gor blimey’ to aid their credibility. Previously swearing, even at this
mild level, had not been heard in these images of ‘the way the worker lived and
worked’. Language had been totally constrained by the mores of the day. All that Watt,
for example, could get away with in North Sea were distinctly unsalty trawlermen
muttering about ‘blather’. No wonder that the Documentary News Letter thought that
in Fires Were Started – ‘Maybe for the first time we have proper working class dialogue
on the screen’.31
Although the term ‘proper’ might be a little strong, propagandists find the
admission of negativity almost impossible to sanction, so the sophistications of
allowing even this limited degree of realistic dialogue must be admired. Also to be
praised is the fact that there is other realistically less-than-perfect behaviour to be
seen in Fires Were Started:

One of the firemen, named B.A. for the film, is shown trying to flog a pair of braces. The
significance of this is not spelled out – he wants no clothing coupons so the braces are black-
market. This would have been fully understood by the original audiences. Elsewhere, people
complain about AFS pay-levels undercutting the London Brigade firemen’s pay scale; or the
firemen are revealed as less than enthusiastic workers. B.A. again: ‘We mustn’t work too hard,
my friends. This job must last till 1.’ Hoses get pointed in the wrong direction, sewer covers are
mistaken for hydrants, firemen go missing.

All these elements make Fires Were Started an exception that proves the rule. One
has to look hard to find images of disaffection in the movement’s films in the
1930s otherwise. A sorter’s fleeting look of faint disdain, given to the back of his
supervisor in Night Mail, is the only one that comes to mind. Obviously the

50 The Grierson Effect

 Fires Were Started (1943):
Fred Griffiths as ‘Johnny
Daniels’ and William Sanson
as ‘Mike Barratt’

negativities helped the credibility of the firemen’s performances in Fires Were Started
– but Jennings’s ‘exhaustion technique’ (as it might be) was the crucial factor in
obtaining them.
Take the scene where the crew gather around the piano prior to the air-raid singing
‘One Man Went to Mow’. Jennings had heard people singing the song in a public
shelter on a research trip to Liverpool in October 1941 and this was the source for the
scene in the film. One of the firemen, Fred Griffiths, recalled the director’s working
method in a BBC interview in 1970:

I’ve started at half past eight in the morning and we go on singing all the way through.
A break – half an hour, forty minutes for lunch. Start again, at 5 o’clock – cut! He [Jennings]
comes over to me and says ‘I think your voice is going’. I’d been singing for nine hours and he
said ‘Your voice is going’! 32

Unlikely though it seems on face value, the sequence works perfectly in the film.
Fred, who was a London taxi driver before volunteering for the AFS, turned out to be
exactly the sort of extravert Watt thought essential for synch documentary shooting.
As with Blewitt, he was used again. Watt cast him himself as a support player in Nine
Men (1943), one of the fictional features in which Blewitt also appeared. But Griffiths
was far more successful than Blewitt in the long run and his film appearances did not
cease at war’s end as Bill’s did. Fred went on playing loveable cockneys into the late
1970s. The ‘actor’ became an actor, demonstrating that appearing before the camera
could be life-transforming decades before the arrival of reality television. He died, aged
eighty-two, in 1994. Even Jennings, though, could put wooden performance moments
on the screen.

To Play the Part That Was in Fact His/Her Own 51

 In the film, to meet the propaganda brief, one of the firemen, S. A. Horton, renamed in a more
stereotypical cockney fashion ‘Jacko’ for the film,33 dies on duty. The unit’s cockney comic and wide-
boy, B. A. (T. P. Smith) relayed the news (after all, untrue as the death was staged) but this required
an emotional intensity beyond him: ‘He’s copped it, I tell you’ is not convincing as a reflection of grief.
The only domestic scene, between Jacko and his wife, is stilted. Nor is the young woman auxiliary at
work in ‘14 Control’ convincing when the building was (supposedly) thrown into chaos by a nearby
exploding bomb. (It was actually a studio set.) All the staff dive for cover. The WAFS woman, in the
midst of relaying information by phone to District Control, disappears under her desk. She emerges,
unruffled –appearing not so much brushed by death as distracted by, say, birdsong: ‘Control …
Control … Control … . Oh, yes. I am sorry for the interruption, we have another message … .’ She is
the epitome of staying calm but the incident is deeply unconvincing, not least because when she
reappears she has a blatantly fake gash in her forehead.

I am not here, though, concerned with the unprofessional make-up. The Griersonians
always complained about their shoestring budgets: no rocker-set for Night Mail train
interiors at the Beaconsfield studios in 1936, for example. No effective make-up artist
on set in Denham in 1943. Rather, the question is the overall authenticity of the
behaviour on the screen. In this case, her actions and speech are authentic as they are
vouchsafed by Jennings’s own witness. He recorded an incident like this in his research
notes as actually having happened; but it requires convincing re-presentation in the
film and this is not quite what is on the screen. Indeed, it would take a practised
professional to convey suppressed fear and contained discombobulation underlying
apparently emotionless ‘professional’ calm behaviour. This was an acting task beyond
the WAFS volunteer.
These limited performances, though, did not affect the claims made for the film
at the time or subsequently. Fires Were Started – was said by movement insiders to
be ‘the best handling of people on and off the job that we’ve seen in any British
film’.34 There is no reason to reject this view. It does, though, speak to the
movement’s general level of skill at ‘handling’ people over the previous decade.
The failings I am noting here might well have been primarily a consequence of the
realities of class. Left-wing the movement’s leading lights might well have been but
their ability to do this ‘handling’ of the working class appeared to be somewhat
attenuated. The fact is that the best-known Griersonian directors were all privately
educated, and – all but Rotha – graduates of Britain’s oldest universities. Jennings,
for example, was held to have been oblivious to the lower orders until war broke
out. Grierson always thought him condescending even then: ‘Let’s go down’ he once
said to Denis Forman inviting a visit to the cutting rooms, ‘and see Humphrey
being nice to the poor people.’35 And Grierson’s sister Ruby’s critical role, as a
woman and a Scot, in getting the interviews in Housing Problems, by assuaging the
slum-dwellers’ inhibitions in the presence of the gentlemen from the film unit,
is well known. Arthur Elton was the film’s director. His socialist politics were
impeccable but, let us not forget, he was in line to inherit a seventeenth-century
baronetcy, which he duly did.
It is no wonder that Fires Were Started’s appearance did not herald a
breakthrough. Even Jennings seemed capable of tolerating the false, jarring
performance.

52 The Grierson Effect

 Flight Lieutenant Peter Roper, the wounded airman in a later major Jennings film, Diary for
Timothy (1944–5) sounds so forced that a viewer can be forgiven for not believing him to have
actually been wounded. One close-up, though, reveals that his calf has been shot away. The hospital
sister in the film is dispassionate to the point of caricature. In fact, synch is usually disastrous if any
sort of emotion is on display. In Diary for Timothy, Goronwy the miner, delivers an impassioned
political speech convincingly but the doctor, a fellow miner and his daughter are frozen with
embarrassment for their lines. Jennings, wisely no doubt, cuts the scene when news is brought
to the house that ‘Goronwy has met with an accident’ before his wife is required to react.

There is a general point about the inevitable distortions, that are part and parcel
of all documentaries, which can be made; but omissions at this time were obviously
necessary. There was a war on and truth is ever its first casualty. In Fires Were Started,
Jennings says nothing of the inefficiencies of having independent fire brigades or of
the role of women as frontline firefighters. Nor does he show any explicit images
of death. There was, of course, an understandable bilderverbot on this because of
considerations of wartime morale, reinforced by prewar cultural inhibitions. Jacko’s
end is indicated by flames rising over his boot. Overall, instead of any domestic
destruction, we have, say, surreal images of frightened horses being led to safety or
a man on crutches hobbling past the fire. Instead of serious indications of wartime
stresses and tensions – reported crime, for example, increased by 57 per cent between
1939 and 1945 and 1944 saw the highest number of recorded strikes since records
began – we have with what we still live: an uninterrogated myth of miraculously
maintained social order. It is a mark of Jennings’s genius that he was able to get any
whiff of negativity onto the screen.
And it is a mark of Grierson’s PR genius – his legacy – that the quality of acting
in the documentaries was, and continues to be, overlooked, with possible negative
impacts on a film’s truth claim being discounted. The movement’s tendency to run
from ‘social meaning’ was much reinforced by the general passionless, quiescent
stoicism and awkwardness of the ‘workingman’ on the screen; yet an examination
of this remains of minor import in discussions of the films’ value.
However, after the war, although some persisted in presenting wooden
performances in their films,36 tolerance for the inauthentic dissipated, albeit slowly.
The transference of more authentic records of off-screen behaviour onto film became,
in the 1950s, a prime objective. This was embodied by a new level of observationalism
which was reflected in an expanded range of topics (‘youth’, for example) and a fresh
tone (journalistic and oppositional). As documentary migrated to television (and
society began moving towards the social relaxations of the 1960s), it did not take the
stilted with it. Nor did independent film: combating constrained performances was
implicit in the rhetoric of the Free Cinema group (i.e., initially, Lindsay Anderson,
Tony Richardson, Karel Reisz, Lorenza Mazzetti). Anderson at the time thought
(Jennings apart) that: ‘British documentaries rarely give the impression of having
been made by human beings’; ‘the genteel British documentary cinema’, the critic
Dilys Powell called it.37 Nor was dissatisfaction limited to Britain. By this time, in
America too film-makers were unhappy with the tradition, especially as the fictional
techniques of The Savings of Bill Blewitt came to be the dominant template for the
sponsored synch documentary. ‘Real people’, Richard Leacock felt, ‘were lousy at

To Play the Part That Was in Fact His/Her Own 53

repeating scripted lines of dialogue’ but that had come more and more to be
required.38
In the UK, the Committee for Free Cinema (with Anderson as its spokesperson)
announced that its purpose was to reflect (rather than exclude as the movement, in its
view, persisted in doing) ‘the rich diversity of tradition and personality’ (Committee
for Free Cinema, 1957). The result can be seen, say, in Reisz’s 1959 We Are the Lambeth
Boys, an early example of documentary location synch shooting. Reisz filmed in a
youth club, capturing a new level of authentic, unstilted talk. For television, Dennis
Mitchell – following radio documentarists such as Charles Parker – could essay whole
films which depended on recording relaxed talk, e.g., the vivid Liverpudlian voices in
his Morning in the Street (1959).39
Such topics and techniques – and outcomes on the screen – were all new extensions
of the documentary tradition. The changes were aided by technological advance.
Battery-driven 1/4 inch magnetic tape recorders were available from the early 1950s;
flexible 16mm cameras were on hand, their use previously inhibited by their spurious
positioning as ‘amateur’ equipment; and, escaping from the tyranny of artificial
‘professional standards’, some film-makers were reducing the need for augmented
lighting by choosing high-speed Ilford film. At the National Film Board of Canada, in
1958, Michel Brault and Gilles Groul shot Les Raquetteurs/Snowshoers exuberantly
handholding a specially developed 16mm synch rig. Direct Cinema was waiting to be
identified and named. Two years later it was recognised as a distinctive advance and it
rapidly acquired a set of production protocols – a dogme. Events were to always be more
important than was the filming of them. Now the equipment was on hand to enable
‘real people’ in fact to play the parts that were in fact their own with the film-making
so unobtrusive as to not impact on – contaminate (?) – their behaviour. Authenticity of
behaviour was guaranteed, vouchsafed by the handheld camera and available sound
and the like. ‘We don’t cheat’, Leacock claimed: ‘The story, the situation … is more
important than our presence.’40 He insisted that documentary value could not be
obtained in any other way.
With a PR efficiency of the sort previously displayed by Grierson himself, Leacock
and the other Direct Cinema practitioners won the argument. They made the
expectation of non- or minimal intervention a necessary condition of documentary
validity. So much so that within a generation, it was the case that audiences expected
that the events seen on the screen ‘would have happened, as they happened, even if
the filmmaker had not been present’.41 Zero tolerance developed for traditional
methods of documentary film-making. The public – or, better, journalists – became
convinced that anything other than the most dogmatic direct cinema was dishonest –
never mind that Direct Cinema did not actually deliver on its promises. The impact of
this rhetoric on the films in the Griersonian archive has been considerable. Not just
dramatised works such as The Savings of Bill Blewitt and Fires Were Started but even the
less reconstructed, more observational films are widely no longer perceived as
documentaries at all. (Talk to any teacher of documentary film about the perceptions
of their students.)
But, nevertheless, it is part of Grierson’s legacy that the possibility of authenticity
in performance remains central to the realist documentary’s claim on the real. There
is still little debate about performances. There is even less examination of the

54 The Grierson Effect

documentary director’s skill in obtaining them. The modern observational film-
maker’s ability to win the trust of the people before her lens (a Kim Longinotto, for
example) is as little remarked on as the directorial techniques of her predecessors in
the classic sound period (e.g., Humphrey Jennings). That this is so is a persisting
consequence of Grierson’s conditioning of documentary’s reception in the first place.
It still seems positively transgressive to raise the matter of the inauthenticity of the
performances in those films even now. This is despite the fact that, on its face, the
acting (however self-conscious or not) in, say, the Jennings films so perfectly reflects a
central propaganda thrust – making the myth of one nation (stiff-upper lip and all)
manifest on the screen – their authenticity surely can be queried? But it is hard to do
this – to question whether or not, really: ‘This is what it was like. This is what we were
like – the best of us’ (as Lindsay Anderson famously claimed of the Jennings oeuvre
in 1954.42 It is part of Grierson’s legacy that Anderson’s assertion is not instantly
dismissible.

NOTes

1. I am grateful to Patricia Holland for alerting me to this aspect of the topic in hand and for
this formulation.
2. Bill Nichols, Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 97. Stella Bruzzi has pointed out that Nichols’s
application of the word ‘ “performativity” complicates terminology slightly (considering the
familiarity of the term “performative” since Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble was published
in 1990’, in Stella Bruzzi, ‘The Performing Filmmaker and the Acting Subject’, in Brian
Winston (ed.), The Documentary Film, London: BFI/Palgrave, 2013). He does, en passant,
cite Butler (Nichols, Blurred Boundaries, p. 168) but he does not reference Austin, who
furnished Butler with the term in the first place. However useful their conceptualisations,
neither Butler nor Nichols is concerned with the ‘performative’ only in J. L. Austin’s
discrete linguistic sense of ‘doing things with words’. (J. L. Austin, Philosophical Papers
[Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970], p. 235); e.g. the moment in the British House of
Lords when the utterance of the Norman-French phrase ‘la Reine le veult’ transforms a
parliamentary bill into a legal Act; or the fact that, spoken in a specific context, ‘I do’ will
transform a spinster into a wife. Any current confusing synonymy of ‘performance’ and
‘performative’ cannot, of course, be laid at Nichols’s door.
3. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday, 1959),
pp. 203, 31.
4. Jane Roscoe, Big Brother Australia: Performing the “Real” Twenty-four-seven’, International
Journal of Cultural Studies vol. 4 no. 1 (2001), p. 473.
5. Annette Hill, Reality TV Audiences and Popular Factual Television (London: Routledge, 2005),
p. 144.
6. Ibid. and Annette Hill, Restyling Factual TV: Audiences and News, Documentary and Reality
Genres (London: Routledge, 2007).
7. Hill, Restyling Factual TV, p. 139.
8. John Corner, ‘A Fiction (Un)like Any Other’, Critical Studies in Television vol. 1 no. 1 (2006),
p. 94.

To Play the Part That Was in Fact His/Her Own 55

 9. Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1979), p. 33.
10. Paul Rotha, Documentary Diary: An Informal History of the British Documentary Film,
1928–1939 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1973), p. 42.
11. Elizabeth Sussex, The Rise and Fall of British Documentary: The Story of the Film Movement
Founded by John Grierson (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975),
p. 76.
12. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2003).
13. Terry Eagleton, ‘Pork Chops and Pineapples’, London Review of Books vol. 25 no. 20
(23 October 2003), p. 18.
14. Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1991), p. 3.
15. For the purposes of this discussion, the term ‘documentary’ shall therefore be deemed to
exclude dramadocs.
16. Anthony Powell, At Lady Molly’s (London: Heinemann, 1957), p. 71.
17. Harry Watt, Don’t Look at the Camera (London: Paul Elek, 1974), p. 55.
18. Ibid., p. 83.
19. Oliver Goldsmith, Retaliation: A Poem (London: G. Kearsly, 1774), p. 12.
20. Anon, ‘Miscellany’, The Mirror of Taste and Dramatic Censor Vol II (Philadelphia, PA: Branford
and Inskeep, 1810), p. 56.
21. Garrick’s revolution was, exactly, to reduce the dominant declamatory element in the stage
acting of his day; but no doubt what was left would still seem to us formalistic and false.
After all, he had to create ‘a living world’ before a couple of thousand people in candlelight.
He needed to be seen from the gods. The declaratory seems to change slowly over time.
Gestural acting’s repertoire is culturally determined, limited and time-honoured but the
representation of the quotidian is, by contrast, rather dynamic. It marches in reflective
lockstep with changes in behaviour in society. Thus, acting to represent the quotidian,
or rather what is received as the simulation of realistic quotidian behaviour in any one
generation can easily be thought artificial by the next. Even with the intrusive intimacy of
the camera this dynamic persists. Think Method: James Dean and Marlon Brando, say,
whose representation of everyday behaviour once seemed to be the acme of realistic acting,
now seem to have offered codified and dated, calculating and mannered performances.
22. Constantin Stanislavsky, An Actor Prepares, trans. Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood (New York:
Theatre Arts Books, 1948).
23. Nichols, Representing Reality, p. 109.
24. Swann, The British Documentary Film Movement, 1926–1946 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989), p. 88.
25. Ibid.
26. Pat Jackson, A Retake Please: Night Mail to Western Approaches (Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press, 1999), p. 40.
27. Stanislavsky, An Actor Prepares, pp. 121–2.
28. Rotha, Documentary Diary, p. 30.
29. Spice was a Canadian (who married her fellow Canadian and GPO film-maker Lawrence
Cherry). Returning to Canada, she played a pioneering role in the development of the
National Film Board. Ruby Grierson, one of John’s sisters, was the other important woman

56 The Grierson Effect

 involved in the GPO. It was she who found the subjects of Housing Problems and coaxed the
interviews in that film. Like her sister Marion (there were eight Grierson children), she
became a director but was lost at sea during World War II. By 1936, Marion, a journalist,
having earned one director’s credit, had withdrawn from production.
30. Brian Winston, Fires Were Started (London: BFI, 1999), pp. 17–18.
31. Anon, ‘Fires Were Started …’, Documentary News Letter, April 1943.
32. ‘The Heart of Britain’, Omnibus (Robert Vas, t/x 20.9.1970 BBC).
33. He did have an off-screen nickname – ‘Johnny’ – but that had been assigned to Fred
Griffiths, another of the firemen, for the film.
34. Anon, ‘Fires Were Started’.
35. Dai Vaughan, Portrait of an Invisible Man: The Working Life of Stewart McAllister, Film Editor
(London: BFI, 1983), p. 38.
36. Paul Dickson, for example, in David (1951) or The Film That Never Was (1957).
37. Christopher Dupin, Free Cinema (London: BFI, 2006) (booklet to accompany boxed DVD set
of same name).
38. Richard Leacock, The Feeling of Being There (Paris: Seqeïon, 2011).
39. T/x 25.3.1959 BBC North.
40. André Labarthe and Louis Marcorelles, ‘Entretien avec Robert Drew et Richard Leacock’,
Cahiers du cinéma vol. 24 no. 140 (February 1963), p. 26.
41. Jane Roscoe and Craig Hight, Faking It: Mock-Documentary and the Subversion of Factuality
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002).
42. Lindsay Anderson, ‘ “Only Connect”: Some Aspects of the Work of Humphrey Jennings’,
Sight and Sound vol. 23 no. 4 (Spring 1954), pp. 5–8. Reprinted in Winston, Fires Were
Started, pp. 70–5.

ReFeReNces

Anderson, Lindsay, ‘“Only Connect”: Some Aspects of the Work of Humphrey Jennings’, Sight and
Sound vol. 23 no. 4 (Spring 1954), pp. 5–8.
Anon, ‘Miscellany’, The Mirror of Taste and Dramatic Censor Vol II (Philadelphia, PA: Branford and
Inskeep, 1810).
Anon, ‘Fires Were Started …’, Documentary News Letter (April 1943).
Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2003).
Austin, J. L., Philosophical Papers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970).
Bruzzi, Stella, ‘The Performing Filmmaker and the Acting Subject’, in Brian Winston (ed.),
The Documentary Film Book (London: BFI/Palgrave, 2013), pp. 48–58.
Corner, John, ‘A Fiction (Un)like Any Other’, Critical Studies in Television vol. 1 no. 1 (2006),
pp. 89–96.
Dupin, Christopher, Free Cinema (London: BFI, 2006) (booklet to accompany boxed DVD set of
same name).
Eagleton, Terry, ‘Pork Chops and Pineapples’, London Review of Books vol. 25 no. 20 (23 October
2003), pp. 17–19.
Eco, Umberto, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1979).

To Play the Part That Was in Fact His/Her Own 57

Goffman, Erving, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday, 1959).
Goldsmith, Oliver, Retaliation: A Poem (London: G. Kearsly, 1774).
Hill, Annette, Reality TV Audiences and Popular Factual Television (London: Routledge, 2005).
Hill, Annette, Restyling Factual TV: Audiences and News, Documentary and Reality Genres (London:
Routledge, 2007).
Jackson, Pat, A Retake Please: Night Mail to Western Approaches (Liverpool: Liverpool University
Press, 1999).
Labarthe, André and Louis Marcorelles, ‘Entretien avec Robert Drew et Richard Leacock’,
Cahiers du cinéma vol. 24 no. 140 (February 1963), pp. 18–27.
Leacock, Richard, The Feeling of Being There (Paris: Seqeïon, 2011).
Nichols, Bill, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1991).
Nichols, Bill, Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1994).
Powell, Anthony, At Lady Molly’s (London: Heinemann, 1957).
Roscoe, Jane, ‘Big Brother Australia: Performing the “Real” Twenty-Four-Seven’, International
Journal of Cultural Studies vol. 4 no. 1 (2001), pp. 473–88.
Roscoe, Jane and Craig Hight, Faking It: Mock-Documentary and the Subversion of Factuality
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002).
Rotha, Paul, Documentary Diary: An Informal History of the British Documentary Film, 1928–1939
(New York: Hill & Wang, 1973).
Stanislavsky, Constantin, An Actor Prepares, trans. Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood (New York:
Theatre Arts Books, 1948).
Sussex, Elizabeth, The Rise and Fall of British Documentary: The Story of the Film Movement
Founded by John Grierson (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975).
Swann, Paul, The British Documentary Film Movement, 1926–1946 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989).
Vaughan, Dai, Portrait of an Invisible Man: The Working Life of Stewart McAllister, Film Editor
(London: BFI, 1983).
Watt, Harry, Don’t Look at the Camera (London: Paul Elek, 1974).
Winston, Brian, Fires Were Started (London: BFI, 1999).

58 The Grierson Effect

4
Translating Grierson: Japan

Abé Markus Nornes

The conception of documentary we associate with John Grierson is arguably, along

with Hollywood continuity style, one of the most powerful and fecund approaches to
cinema in history. Its global spread from the 1930s on is striking for its speed and
eventual ubiquity. Clearly, there are massive forces behind this. The most obvious is,
of course, the (pedagogical and military) muscle of the British Empire, with which
Grierson’s practice was so intimately tied. At the same time, one could argue that
Grierson proposed a documentary style that assumed a universal truth that subsumed,
sometimes violently, all particularities. This is to say, it was so closely aligned to the
epistemology of enlightenment thought that its global proliferation was inevitable.
While Griersonian documentary does appear to have engulfed the world by the late
1930s, I would like to point out how it came to mean very different things everywhere
it went. That is because, despite its universalist pose, Griersonian thought demanded
translation in most of the world and any such translingual practice involved
transformation as well.
This chapter is devoted to a case study of misprision in the largely monoglottal
world of Japan. It tracks the Griersonian idea from England to Japan in the 1930s.
Only a privileged few spoke or read English back then, and the translator who seized
upon this idea seemed to possess a rather shaky hold on the language. Her translation
suffered from many mistakes, which initially remained invisible to her readership.
Although the author’s idea transformed upon its insertion into the Japanese film
world, this did not stop it from inspiring film-makers. Indeed, the latter’s inability
to access the original actually amplified the translation’s transformative power. Its
example demonstrates what close analysis of translation practices can reveal about an
influential instance of ‘cultural translation’.

Poru ruTa/Paul roTha and The ProducTiviTy of MisPrision

Open any Japanese book on documentary, and the ‘theory’ of Paul Rotha will be
singled out as one of the most influential bodies of thought in the history of Japanese
cinema. While there were translations of all the major Western film theorists, from
Münsterberg to Eisenstein, it is safe to say that none of their writing was as fiercely
contested and discussed as that by Rotha. No other theorist or critic had more impact
on actual film practice or underwent as much ‘processing’.

Translating Grierson: Japan 59

 Rotha’s influence in Japan may astonish the Western film scholar, and the reader
may find this essay surprising in a volume dedicated to John Grierson. On its release
Rotha’s Documentary Film (1935) was widely read throughout Europe and America,
particularly within the educational film movement. However, it was seen largely as a
promotion of British documentary at the time – hardly a theoretical ‘Bible’.1 His
place in (our) history is basically as one of the central film-makers of the British
school, as a writer and as occasional antagonist of Grierson. Despite Euro-American
film studies’ renewed interest in documentary, one rarely if ever hears Rotha’s name
invoked. Even book-length histories of the British documentary movement note
Documentary Film only in passing. This would undoubtedly alarm Japanese film-
makers and scholars, as Japanese books about film theory and history mention
Rotha’s name in the same breath as Eisenstein, Balazs, Pudovkin, Arnheim,
Münsterberg, Moholy-Nagy and Vertov. They rarely cite Grierson. It is through
Rotha’s adaptation and elaboration of Grierson’s approach that documentary was
discovered and ‘understood’.
Imamura Taihei’s 1952 overview of film theory puts Rotha in the privileged
position of his final chapter – the author posed with Documentary Film for his portrait
– and Rotha’s prestige has hardly diminished in the intervening years.2 Thus, in 1960
translator Atsugi Taka offered a completely revised translation of Rotha’s 1952
expanded version. This in turn was reprinted in 1976 and 1995.3 Ironically enough,
judging from his papers, Rotha himself appears to have had no idea how powerful he
was in Japan. This indicates that while we may speak of Rotha’s ‘influence’, something
was happening in Japan that was quite disconnected from larger traffic in film
theorisation.4
This apparent imbalance may be partially explained by returning to the time when
Rotha’s book arrived in Japan in the latter half of the 1930s, an opportune moment if
ever there was one. Japan was escalating its invasion of China, especially with the
1937 China Incident. On the home front, the government ensured the war reached
into the daily lives of citizens everywhere, drawing on young men for cannon fodder
and increasingly controlling ‘appropriate’ behaviour. Police pressure, including mass
arrests, imprisonment and occasional torture, had shut down the noisy left by mid-
decade. Many progressive intellectuals underwent ideological conversion to a rabid
nationalism and an often racist nativism. Those who refused this course quietly
retreated underground or disguised their thoughts in carefully chosen language when
in public. At the very same time, the government placed elaborate strictures on film-
making, ranging from intricate censorship mechanisms to nationalising entire sectors
of the industry. This culminated with the 1939 Film Law which mandated the forced
screening of nonfiction films, or the so-called bunka eiga [culture film].
Along with the pressures of continental warfare, this legislation propelled
documentary to a level of prestige comparable to the fiction film. Film journals were
filled with articles attempting to theorise a documentary practice appropriate for the
times, and included essays by intellectuals as disparate as Hasegawa Nyozekan, Tosaka
Jun, Kamei Katsuichiro and Nakai Masakazu. In this atmosphere, the appearance of
Rotha’s Documentary Film – especially its 1938 translation – electrified the film world,
and was greeted with the respect afforded the most authoritative of theoretical
systems. This intense interest eventually filtered into film-making itself, allowing

60 The Grierson Effect

Rotha to leave a mark on the history of Japanese cinema that few theorists ever
achieve anywhere, any time.
But why Rotha? And by extension, what did his writing mean in wartime Japan? A
hint at the answer lies in the title itself – ‘Documentary Film’. The manner in which this
was translated immediately alerts us to the political ramifications of the translation
act, and suggests the exceeding complexity of these questions. A variety of words were
circulating in the Japanese film world to designate nonfiction film-making: jissha eiga,
kiroku eiga, nyusu eiga, dokyumentarii eiga and the like. However, the 1938 edition
appeared with language on the cover that may or may not be a mistranslation: ‘Bunka
Eiga-ron’, or ‘On Culture Film’. First, the suffix ron [argument, discourse] appended to
the title could also render a reverse translation as Documentary Film Theory. This may
have given Rotha’s thought a heft we do not feel when reading the original English
text. Second, an intertext for the bunka eiga is the kulturfilm of Universal
Filmaktiengesellschaft (UFA) in Germany. These were primarily science films but,
upon their successful Japanese release, some critics began using the term for a variety
of nonfiction films by Japanese film-makers. The word begins to appear in Japanese
texts as early as 1933, and all documentary came under the rubric of bunka eiga with
the 1939 Film Law. Although most readers knew the term dokyumentarii eiga
[documentary film], the translator chose to use ubunka eiga, which was strongly
connected to propaganda film-making by the time Rotha’s book appeared. Many of
Rotha’s contemporary critics pointed out the ambiguity of the film genre to which this
title points. Few, however, noted that it firmly inserted Rotha’s thought into the
discourse raging around the terms of the new Film Law. The translation of Rotha
roughly coincided with the announcement of plans for these detailed government
regulations over the film industry and, amid the fervent discussion about the new
meaning and direction for nonfiction film, Rotha’s cheerleading for the documentary
found an enthusiastic audience. In one sense, this would appear to sell Rotha out to a
radically opposed politics; however, I argue it could also be seen as an attempt on the
part of the translator to quietly shift the terms of the Japanese documentary debate in
a certain direction. Thus, the short answer to the question above is that Rotha’s book
meant many things indeed.
The long answer is that because of this slipperiness, a curious situation arose in
which Rotha’s book appealed equally to the entire political spectrum, with all debate
participants claiming Rotha’s thought to different ends. The rest of this chapter will
examine precisely this struggle over meaning at multiple levels. However, to root out
the most important issues underlying this discourse we must look to an arena less
obvious than the film magazines, that is, the media through which Rotha’s thought
came to be known: translation.
Consider this relatively obvious example: the 1938 edition mistranslates ‘workers’
revolution’ with the more innocuous ‘rodosha katsudo’, or ‘workers’ activities’ to return
the term to English.5 Only in the postwar revision did the proper translation appear:
‘rodosha kakumei’.6 The reason is unambiguous; this was a dangerous term in 1939, and
a text containing it would never pass censorship review. Authors, translators and
publishers had been deflecting such trouble with authorities for nearly a decade by
printing obvious synonyms and even substituting problematic words with XX’s (called
fuseji). Readers knew the protocol; when they came across fuseji or ambiguous words,

Translating Grierson: Japan 61

they could read past them to the original meanings. The first edition of Documentary
Film is sprinkled with many examples such as this, but analysis of such simple
instances of intentional mistranslation will only get us so far. This is because, first,
as the example above suggests, there were entire communities of readers who were
forced to conceal their true relationship to the book, and second, everyone knew the
translator’s command of English was dubious at best because it became one of the
issues raised in the debates.7
We must dig far deeper into the issue of translation to appreciate the complexity of
the highly politicised discourses circulating around Rotha’s original text upon its
insertion into the Japanese linguistic world. After all, this is the medium through
which Rotha came to be known in Japan; very few film-makers and critics could read
English well enough to follow the original. Furthermore, shifting our analysis from
simplistic notions of (one-way) ‘influence’ to the site of translation brings an array of
larger issues into focus. For example, as suggested above, looking at the sheer volume
of translation reveals much about the relationship between cultures (it follows that a
lack of translation activity indicates a discourse stuck in an unhealthy short-circuit of
desire). When changing texts from one language to another the translator’s approach
to language and meaning is inseparable from larger historical and ideological currents
in the target language. This new linguistic and cultural context often impinges upon
the translation, while having little to do with the original text itself. In this situation,
where competing translations circulated among overlapping readerships, a struggle
over authority occurs – after all, can there be a more powerful position over cross-
cultural discourse than that of the translator? We must look at the qualities of a given
translation, and ask who the translator is, what her relationship is with the original
text, the author and the larger communities of readers. These are all key factors in the
relationship to the other. From this perspective the difference between translation
theory and documentary film theory is very slim indeed, as both fields involve
representations weighed by a debt to an ‘original’, whether it be the source text or the
world.

docuMenTary filM enTers The (JaPanese lanGuaGe) filM World

Originally, Rotha’s book was read by Japan’s preeminent prewar film theorist,
Imamura Taihei, who passed it on to Domei Tsushin’s Kuwano Shigeru. From there,
the book surged into the film community.8 At one point, it came into the hands of
Atsugi Taka, one of the first female film-makers in Japanese cinema. Atsugi originally
came to film-making as a leading member of the Nippon Puroretaria Eiga Domei
[Proletarian Film League of Japan], or Prokino for short. After the breakup of Prokino
under police pressure in 1934, Atsugi began writing film criticism and translating
foreign film theory. She was also one of the members of a collective producing the
early film theory journal Eiga Sozo, along with other former Prokino members. This
gave her concrete links to Yuibutsu Kenkyukai [Materialism Study Society, or Yuiken],
a group of leftist intellectuals organised by philosopher Tosaka Jun.9
Atsugi even wrote a review article of Rotha’s book in their Yuibutsuron Kenkyu,
probably the first mention of Documentary Film in print. In the late 1930s, Atsugi

62 The Grierson Effect

 Imamura Taihei posing with
an original copy of Rotha’s
book

began a long career in documentary screenwriting, working for PCL, Toho and
Geijutsu Eigasha [Art Film Company, or GES]. This afforded her the chance to bring
Rotha’s theory into practice. Above and beyond her own film-making activities,
Atsugi’s most influential project was a translation of Paul Rotha’s Documentary Film,
which she took on at the request of her PCL supervisor; he was moving to JO Studios
to become head of production, and wanted the work as a textbook for study groups.
Atsugi had been reading the English original, and was glad to use the translation as an
excuse to finish the book. She published the first edition in the fall of 1938.10
The translation had an enormous impact, and went into second and third printings
within a year.11 The book’s influence spread in the late 1930s as critics debated Rotha’s
terms and their implications for documentary film-making, often offering their own
translations of the original in their quotations. Soon an alternative translation by
Ueno Ichiro appeared in Eiga Kenkyu, a film studies series put out by the magazine
Eiga Hyoron.12 There were study groups devoted to Rotha’s book in the production
companies and film studios. Toho’s staff called it the documentary film-maker’s ‘Bible’,
and their Kyoto studio actually circulated its own handwritten, mimeographed
translation within the company.13 Before Atsugi’s translation appeared the original
English-language book was even used for English practice at JO Studios.14
About the same time, the original text reached Omura Einosuke and Ishimoto
Tokichi, and their reading of the book had a great impact on the formation of GES.
Thanks to Rotha’s ideas, the company’s early films, such as Yukiguni/Snow Country
(1939) and Kikansha C57/Train C57 (1940), strove to surpass the usual public-relations
film and bring documentary to a new, independent level.15 Geijutsu Eigasha’s own film

Translating Grierson: Japan 63

journal, Bunka Eiga, published enthusiastic debates about Rotha’s book, as did most of
the other serious film publications.
One of the major responses to the Rotha translation involved a knee-jerk reaction
to his disdain for the ‘story-film’, which ‘threatens to stifle all other methods of
cinema’ and ‘tends to become an anesthetic instead of a stimulant’.16 The most
vociferous of these critics displayed a near uncontrollable anger. For example, in his
book-length, bibliographic survey of film literature, Okuda Shinkichi passes Rotha off
with a flourish:

I – and others – can only recognize [The Documentary Film] as a little like drawing water for
one’s own field [i.e., self-serving]. Above all, his rejection of the feature film, and explanation
making documentary the main path for cinema is clearly ridiculous; even as a theory of art,
it never exceeds shallow abstraction.17

The most scathing attack on Rotha came from Tsumura Hideo, who sarcastically
wrote,

Put a different way, Rotha’s book is extremely heroic and vigorous. He praises documentary
based on materialist socialism as the most valuable cinema of tomorrow. In contrast to that,
it pulverizes the fiction film into dust, with writing like vicious gossip. The way it attacked
fiction film was extremely rough with ideological tricks. I confess that this is one of the
reasons I had the courage to criticize Paul Rotha.18

This now famous attack provoked a response from Takagiba Tsutomu, who ran
Toho’s Shinjuku News Film Theatre and was a frequent essayist on documentary film.
Takagiba humorously rewrote Tsumura’s article, substituting ‘Tsumura’ for ‘Rotha’ to
turn the attack back on the Japanese critic.19
However well this strategy neutralised Tsumura’s critique, it did not address the
key issues: that Rotha’s definition of ‘fiction’ in documentary was less than clear, and
that the book was less a theory of documentary film than a specious promotion of
government cultural policy. There is a grain of truth to the charges against Rotha – his
arrogance, his self-promotion of the English documentary and faith in government
sponsorship – but the critical debate that actually affected Japanese film-making
practice revolved around the problem of ‘fiction’ in documentary.
The most tempered discussion of this issue was offered by Kubota Tatsuo in Bunka
Eiga no Hohoron/The Methodology of the Culture Film (1940). This was one of the more
serious attempts to explore the phenomenon of the bunka eiga. Although he came out
of production (Shochiku’s Kyoto studios), Kubota was very well read. He draws on the
writings of Münsterberg, Arnheim, Balazs, Eisenstein and most other major theorists.
But the book is ultimately a disappointment. Kubota’s aesthetic agenda centred on
expunging any influence of the avant-garde from documentary, positioning the bunka
eiga with a hard and fast opposition between fiction film/‘sensitivity’/kansai versus
science film/‘intellect’/chisei.20 Unfortunately, this colours his discussion of Rotha
as well. Kubota had originally intended to structure his entire book around
Documentary Film, a measure of Rotha’s prestige and influence over the very
conception of nonfiction film-making. In the end, he wisely saved the discussion

64 The Grierson Effect

of Rotha for the final chapter. After his careful discussion of the avant-garde,
Kubota warns readers that, while Rotha has his good points, his vague definition
of ‘dramatization’, bolstered as it is by questionable examples such as Pabst’s
Kameradschaft/Friendship (1931), could lead documentary to stray too completely
into the world of fiction.
This represents one typical brand of discussion that was occurring in all sectors of
the Japanese documentary world. In actuality, the relatively innocent-looking debates
about Rotha’s conceptions of ‘fictionality’ and ‘actuality’ veiled struggles over
documentary’s function in Japanese society. The written record on this score is
decidedly one-sided. Rotha proposed a nationally sponsored documentary film
committed to the enlightenment and unification of the citizenry, precisely the kind of
cinema necessary for a country deeply imbricated in foreign warfare. However, under
the restrictive circumstances of 1930s Japan, many other important perspectives went
unrecorded. This aspect of Rotha’s appeal – especially his apparent sympathies for
socialism – necessarily had to be concealed from the public sphere; restricted to private
discussion, this body of discourse never appeared in the written record, posing a
battery of problems for the historian. There are, however, traces remaining which
provide access to these hidden spaces, and in the remaining sections of this chapter
we will explore their furthest reaches.

BaTTle of The TranslaTors

Like many other (underground) leftists in the documentary film world, Atsugi found
Rotha’s writing inspirational. Here was a film-maker committed to social change,
someone who saw cinema as a medium for critiquing everything from class
discrimination to totalitarian political systems. Having spent the last decade immersed
in Marxism and committing her life to demonstrating its relevance to film-making,
criticism and translation, Atsugi found a true compatriot in Paul Rotha. Documentary
Film became the ‘hidden sacred book’ of film-makers like Atsugi who opposed the
direction their nation and film industry were taking. Only after the war was over,
however, could they reveal their views publicly.
One can feel Atsugi’s intense relationship with Rotha’s book by scanning her
personal copies, which she donated to the National Film Centre of Japan just before
her death. Opening their pages provides both a thrill and challenge to the historian.
Her 1976 Miraisha version appeared brand new and unopened. Her 1960 Misuzu copy
contained only a few pencilled-in notes and an inscription inside the cover: ‘To
Takeshi, the husband I love.’
Her first editions – Rotha’s and her own translation – are far more intriguing. One
can quickly detect a pattern in the highlighted sections. For example, in this time of
stricture, she singled out the following sentence with a scratch of a pencil: ‘There is
little within reason and little within the limits of censorship that documentary cannot
bring before an audience to state an argument.’21 While there can be no doubt why she
liked such a sentence, the pages are also filled with more obscure checks, question
marks, circles and exclamation points. Strange symbols and many ‘M.B.’s lie mute in
the margins. Bookmarks sit in curious passages – did she leave them there? We will

Translating Grierson: Japan 65

never know their significance, but three marks stand out among them all for their
powerful evocation of what this book meant at the height of the China War.
Apparently, Atsugi read her own translation over the space of several weeks in 1939,
because she left dates next to three paragraphs. Scratched on the pages at a time when
the government was taking steps to convert all documentary into propaganda in
support of the emperor’s war, a time when brilliant film-makers were subverting these
efforts with clever editing and when open resistance meant persecution (Kamei
Fumio’s Tatakau heitai/Fighting Soldiers [1939] had just been suppressed and he would
be in prison within a matter of months), these three passages make Atsugi’s cathexis
with Rotha’s text palpable. For this they are worth quoting in full, with Atsugi Taka’s
notes rendered in bold:

Relative freedom of expression for the views of the documentalist [sic] will obviously vary
with the production forces he serves and the political system in power. In countries still
maintaining a parliamentary system, discussion and projection of his beliefs within certain
limits will be permitted only so long as they do not seriously oppose powerful vested
interests, which most often happen to be the forces controlling production. Under an
authoritarian system, freedom is permissible provided his opinions are in accord with those of
the State for social and political advance, until presumably such a time shall arrive when the
foundations of the State are strong enough to withstand criticism. Ultimately, of course, you
will appreciate that you can neither make films on themes of your own choice, nor apply
treatments to accepted themes, unless they are in sympathy with the aims of the dominant
system. And in view of the mechanical and hence expensive materials of cinema, it will be
foolish of the documentalist if his sympathies do not lie, or at least appear to lie, with those
who can make production a possibility.22 [6.28.1939]

The following is a critque of Flaherty’s apolitical approach:

In every location which he has chosen there have existed social problems that demanded
expression. Exploitation of native labour, the practises of the white man against the native,
the landlords of Aran, these have been the vital stories, but from them Flaherty has turned
away … . Idyllic documentary is documentary without significant purpose. It takes
romanticism as its banner. It ignores social analysis. It takes ideas instead of facts. It marks a
reactionary return to the worship of the heroic, to an admiration of the barbaric, to a setting
up of ‘The Leader’. 23 [7.6.1939]

Finally, there is a Pudovkin quote on the power of montage:

I found the way to build up a dialogue in which the transition of the actor from one emotional
state to another … had never taken place in actuality before the camera. I shot the actor at
different times, glum and then smiling, and only on my editing table did these two separate
moods co-ordinate with the third – the man who made the joke.24 [7.20.1939]

Atsugi’s handwritten dates – these curt pencil scratches – convert this translation
from the public domain to something quite new and contradictory. They act as
conduits allowing those resistant discourses retained safely in hidden spaces to leak

66 The Grierson Effect

from between the lines. But this is only half the story, because the criticism and debate
surrounding Paul Rotha’s Documentary Film is an instance of oppositional discourses
being coded into public view, camouflaged to deflect the threat of reprisals. To render
this complicated discourse visible, we must return to the problem of translation. On
the one hand, Atsugi weaved her point of view into the very fabric of her translation,
both in conscious and unconscious ways. At the very same time, intellectuals with far
different perspectives engaged her in a veritable battle of the translators.
In the course of researching the subject of prewar Japanese documentary for a
previous book, I occasionally ran across copies of Atsugi’s translation in secondhand
bookstores. Taking one of these volumes in hand, one can come to a material
appreciation for the respect with which Rotha was viewed through the high quality of
the printing, binding and paper, as well as the book’s beautiful slipcase adorned with
elegant handmade rice paper. Every time I found a copy of the Rotha translation, I
pulled it off the shelf to take a peek inside and see if it belonged to anyone I knew from
my research. One of these dusty first editions contained quite a surprise: every single
page carried detailed annotations. Between every single line of the book – cover to
cover – someone had diligently scrawled corrections to Atsugi’s translation in pencil.
Inside the cover, this anonymous editor wrote a message:

This is a surprising book. She can’t understand English. Japanese is pretty bad. Even Ms.
Atsugi cannot argue with this. I don’t understand how this person had the guts to translate it.
This caused the chaos in this country’s bunka eiga discourse. I’m sorry these corrections are a
year late.

The original owner who requested this involved translation check was unclear; apart
from this message, there was only an illegible scrawl across the page. (Hereafter, I will
refer to this copy of Documentary Film as the teiseiban [corrected version].)25
The first edition of the Atsugi translation came out in September 1938, and
whoever pored over Atsugi’s work left us only with the message that the translation
was so bad that its revision took the better part of a year. Actually, the existence of this
teiseiban slipped quietly into public view in January 1940 – fourteen months after the
original publication of the book – in a programme passed out at Takagiba Tsutomu’s
Shinjuku News Film Theatre. In addition to flashy advertising for the week’s film slate,
these pamphlets often turned grey with in-depth essays printed in tiny type. The
18 January 1940 issue contained an article by Sekino Yoshio asserting that the
controversies over Rotha spring primarily from the inexperience of the person who
had translated him. Sekino wrote, ‘Below, let us pick out two or three parts of interest
from a corrected text pretty much black with corrections.’26 He proceeded to compare
passages from Atsugi’s translation with corrections from the teiseiban. (With this in
mind the cryptic pencil slash inside the cover clearly reads ‘Seki’ in hiragana with a
long tail.) In the following months, Sekino drew on the teiseiban for a series of lengthy
articles in which he attempted to clear up the controversy surrounding Rotha’s book.27
These also became the basis for a book entitled Eiga Kyoiku no Riron/Theory of Film
Education (1942).28
The main issues for Sekino revolved around the translation of words like ‘story-
film’ and ‘the dramatization of actuality’. He attempted to contextualise Rotha’s

Translating Grierson: Japan 67

thoughts on documentary in terms of his development as a critic – the differences
between The Film till Now and Documentary Film – as well as the vast changes in
English society itself. His success in reorienting the debate is difficult to judge,
although it appears to have mostly influenced Sekino’s reputation as an authority over
the topic. There is a good reason for this. In this series of high-profile articles, Sekino
positioned himself less as a critic than as the translator. He gives a discreet nod to the
help of the teiseiban, but the substance of his articles is unusual. Rather than provide
his own interpretation of Documentary Film, Sekino all but retranslates the book!
These articles were basically strings of extended quotes from the teiseiban with short
passages of paraphrase inserted in-between. Thanks to the corrections by Sekino’s
anonymous colleague, the new translations are quite good – for the most part, they are
better than Ueno’s or Toho’s, and certainly better than Atsugi’s. The teiseiban itself,
with its rows of exclamation-point annotations, remains by far the best translation.
However, Sekino ultimately does not offer an actual translation as such, because
significant portions of the book are paraphrased or deleted. To be more specific, they
are suppressed. Here is a typical, and relatively innocuous, example from Rotha with
Sekino’s deletions scored through:

Art, like religion or morals, cannot be considered apart from the materialist orderings of
society. Hence it is surely fatal for an artist to attempt to divorce himself from the community
and retire into a private world where he can create merely for his own pleasure or for that of a
limited minority. He is, after all, as much a member of the common herd as a riveter or a
glass-blower, and of necessity must recognize his obligations to the community into which he
is born. His peculiar powers of creation must be used to greater purpose than mere personal
satisfaction.29

Sekino’s reading, or more properly his selective translation, evacuates Rotha’s left-
leaning politics and aligns Documentary Film with the dominant ideology of wartime
Japan. He effortlessly converts the passage above into an attack on individualism and
a call for artists to serve the mission of the national polity. Elsewhere, extremely long
series of extended quotations often skip a sentence or two in the middle when Rotha
brings in the subject of class or Marxism. The segment of Rotha’s audience to which
Sekino belonged was probably enthralled with the Englishman’s high moral tone and
sense of ‘mission’.
Sekino himself was far more than a film critic. After studying art at Tokyo
University, he worked in the social education section of the Tokyo metropolitan
government. In this capacity he promoted the use of film for education through
publications, lectures, study groups like STS30 and regular Jido Eigahi [children’s film
days].31 In the latter stages of World War II, Sekino worked at Nichiei as the vice
president in charge of bunka eiga production. Through the sum of these activities,
Sekino became a prominent theorist in the education film movement throughout the
war; ‘theorist’ in this context meant that the writer was not in the classroom trenches
where the real teaching was going on. With his articles on the Rotha controversy,
Sekino moved beyond pedagogical issues of the educational front and claimed a
position of authority over the Rotha text, and therefore over Japanese documentary
film.

68 The Grierson Effect

 A page from the teiseiban,
with corrections to nearly
every sentence

The Rotha we encounter through Sekino’s articles speaks of responsible citizenship

and the central role of cinema in educating the nation’s populace. Sekino’s Rotha
heightens the stakes of these ideas by drawing the readers’ attention to the worldwide
sense of crisis – that theme so central to pre-Pearl Harbor Japan – but the English
film-maker’s calls for peaceful settlement of conflict, disarmament and intelligent
social critique are suppressed from Sekino’s blow-by-blow ‘translation=correction’ of
Rotha’s book. With these themes purged from the text, one is left with a discourse
on propaganda and the necessity for state support of documentary to the end of
enlightening its citizenry. It is no wonder that Rotha was attractive to Sekino and
the new leadership emerging with the Film Law. A further example of this political
reinscription of Rotha is Eiga Kokusaku no Zenshin/The Progress of National Film Policy,
a 1940 book outlining the national film policies of all the major Western nations.
The latter half of this book covers the situation in Japan, and offers essays on the
implications of the new Film Law for various segments of the film industry. Its chapter
on the deployment of film as an instrument of state propaganda cites Rotha as the
international authority, proposing the English film-maker’s innovations as the proper
course for a nationalised film industry.32
While Sekino performed an intentional mistranslation of Documentary Film in a
manner analogous to Atsugi before him, the differences between their actual texts
are even more revealing. Documentary Film inhabited the space between publicly
acceptable discourses and those kept hidden for fear of retaliation. The multiplicity

Translating Grierson: Japan 69

of readings implied by this position was built into all of the published translations. The
following example reveals how the differences between Atsugi and Sekino play out in
their translations. This is one of Rotha’s numerous digs at the powers that be, followed
by its extant translations (for the relevant page from the teiseiban, see the photograph
on p. 69; I will only translate back the key phrases, which are italicised and discussed
below):

Rotha: Every day I come across persons who manifest increasing anxiety not only at
the growing complexity of political and social problems, but at the patent inability of
those in power to find adequate solutions.33
Atsugi: Mainichi ni sakuso suru seijiteki, shakaiteki mondai ya, sore ni tekito na
kaiketsu o miidashi enai jiko no munosa ni kokkoku fuan o kanjite iru hitobito ni deatte
iru.34
Ueno: Mainichi watashi no au hitobito ga seijimondai ya shakai mondai no
shinkokuka suru fukuzatsusa ni tsuite fuan o kataru bakari de wa naku, jibunra ni
tadashii kaiketsu o miidasu noryoku no nai koto o gaitan suru no de aru.35
Sekino: Taezu watashi wa, seijiteki, shakaiteki na jyaku mondai ga masumasu
fukuzatsusa o mashite kuru koto ni taishite nominarazu, toro no hitobito ga sore e no
tekito na kaiketsu o miidashi enai to iu meihaku na muryokuburi ni taishite mo, fuan
ga kuwaete iku bakari da to tansaku suru hitotachi ni ikiatte iru.36
Teiseiban: Mainichi watashi wa, seijiteki, shakaiteki mondai ga masumasu sakuso
suru shite kuru koto ni tai shite bakari de naku, kenryoku no chii ni aru mono ga, sore ni
taishite tekito na kaiketsu o miidashi enai to iu akiraka ni munoryokusa ni taishite
masu bakari da to tansaku suru hitobito ni deatte iru.

Rotha’s original text sets up a relatively straightforward contrast between, on the

one hand, common people who find themselves bewildered by the complexity of the
world on the verge of war and, on the other hand, those in power who seem too
incompetent to deal with the situation. Here Rotha’s critical spirit comes out in force,
but he is writing things that landed Japanese in prison in 1939. All of the translators
seem to deal with this problem of potential censorship or reprisals in their own ways;
everything from vocabulary choices to mistakes reveal the ideological undergirding of
their respective translations. The teiseiban provides the best, most straightforward,
translation of the quotation’s most problematic phrase, ‘those in power’: kenryoku no
chii ni aru mono [people in positions of (political) power]. However, Sekino strays from
the guidance of his teiseiban and substitutes this with the rather vague toro no hitobito
[authorities, intellectuals], deflecting the criticism into ambiguous territory. His other
decisions further weaken Rotha’s criticism, as a rendering of this phrase back into
English reveals: ‘but at the clear powerlessness of authorities/intellectuals in finding
appropriate solutions’.
Both Atsugi and Ueno completely erase ‘those in power’ from the sentence. The
effect is to create a single group of common people who feel anxiety about the world’s
complexity and their inability to affect change. We might assume that the translators
expunged Rotha’s attack on the powerful to preempt punishment by their own
authorities. Without more documentation, the case of Ueno is difficult to judge;
however, Atsugi produced a postwar version of Documentary Film when threats of

70 The Grierson Effect

reprisal were no longer an issue. In the 1960 translation she significantly revises the
text with the help of two young scholars37 and, while this sentence was completely
rewritten, Atsugi retains the mistake. Even the 1995 ‘refurbished edition’ [shinsoban]
remains unchanged. In other words, Atsugi simply did not understand the meaning in
the first place.38
At the same time, Atsugi’s word choice is still significant. Ueno’s exasperated,
anonymous masses are literally the people Rotha has met on the street (‘jibunra ni
tadashii kaiketsu o miidasu noryoku no nai koto o gaitan suru no de aru’), but the Marxist
Atsugi does not shirk social responsibility and opts for the much stronger language of
‘jiko no munosa’, which places the burden of history on herself and the reader – it is the
difference between ‘their own inability’ and ‘our own incompetence’. Atsugi’s
misprision circulates in a grey area between Rotha’s original English text and its dim
representation in Japanese – the latter reflects a conception of documentary
combining Rotha’s thinking with that of Atsugi’s own film-making community of
leftist film-makers who restrict their politics to hidden spaces in the teeth of power.39
Rotha himself said, ‘I came nearest to becoming a Socialist in my Documentary
Book.’40 This was not lost on the film-makers who found themselves subject to
censorship and the whims of political power. Many of them had recently spent time in
the so-called ‘pig box’ (butabako or ‘slammer’) for their film-making activities in
Prokino. For some film-makers, Rotha’s book simply confirmed the direction they were
already taking nonfiction film in in the late 1930s, and knowing that someone outside
Japan thought the same way gave them a measure of confidence.41 However, many
others had a far deeper, hidden relationship to Documentary Film. Kuwano Shigeru
worked at Domei Tsushin’s film unit before becoming the section head in charge of
Nippon News at Nichiei. He was probably the second person in Japan to read
Documentary Film, having received it from Imamura Taihei, himself a Marxist critic.
In a 1973 book on documentary, he reminisced about his own wartime encounter
with Rotha:

This book, for me, was a shock. He was choosing his words extremely carefully, but this is
clearly what Paul Rotha was saying: The duty of documentary filmmakers was to somehow
replace today’s rotting capitalist society and construct a new socialist society, and indicate the
clear, social scientific analysis of it (capitalist society) by the emergent classes – the proletariat
and the farmers. There was no question that the so-called documentary, which started out as
the news film, would become a strong weapon of the movement for social revolution. This
has been evidenced by the Soviets. Even in Japan, which was under the violent oppression
of a militarist government, each and every cut of the news film preserved a fragmentary
‘truth’. Therefore, if we consciously shoot that at the location, and if we edit these scenes
purposefully, the ‘truth’ of modern-day Japanese society – the anguish of the people, the
necessity of collapse because of those contradictions – we could precisely indicate this to the
people of the emergent classes of Japanese society. However, even though we can do this,
what are we Japanese documentary film producers – no, what am I doing right now?!42

As a film-maker working in what were basically semi-governmental agencies (Domei

Tsushin and Nichiei), Kuwano was extremely limited by the form of the newsreel. He
did try to include subversive moments in his films to influence spectatorial readings in

Translating Grierson: Japan 71

directions against the grain. For example, he recalls inserting a funeral pyre of some
fallen soldiers with melodramatic narration such as ‘Even now, the soldiers’ souls
return to their hometowns, where wives and children quietly wait.’ However, this
was inevitably snipped by the censors, leaving Kuwano clinging to the hope that his
documentary images of the fighting retained some grain of truth.43
Film-makers in the budding field of bunka eiga had far more latitude in coding
multiple readings into their films. This is the issue running quietly behind many of the
debates over the fictive qualities of nonfiction film between 1939 and 1942. Film-
makers were working out the nature of this new brand of fictionality. Rotha was, in the
end, exceedingly vague on this point; Japanese film-makers, on the other hand, were
looking for prescription. Shirai Shigeru spoke of Rotha’s influence on documentary
production, but had he not seen six or seven of the British school films at the
Education Ministry (including Drifters and Night Mail) he would have had no idea
what Rotha meant by ‘dramatization of actuality’.44
Certainly the film-makers who did not attend those screenings were handicapped
in their reading of Documentary Film and the massive discourse it generated. Many
articles discussed the definitions of Rotha’s terminology and its translation,45 but the
bulk of the writing was a continuation (and vulgarisation) of earlier Yuiken debates
concerning the epistemology of cinema – ‘Documentary as art’ or ‘Documentary as
science’.46 This itself, as Ueno Kozo has suggested, was a structural continuation of
earlier struggles over whether film was art; the aesthetic domain simply migrated from
‘Cinema as art’ to ‘Talkie as art’ to ‘Documentary as art’.47 However, in one of Atsugi’s
best articles responding to her critics, we find the best hint at the core issue:

In order for documentary film to have a meaningful existence as art, we must correctly
recognize the essential meaning of this ‘fiction’. This is what I want to state over and over
again. To this same end . . . filmmakers’ efforts must be more than the turning of the camera
as it has been up to today. There needs to be more care for ‘working’ on works, more intensity,
more like throwing one’s entire soul into the hardships of a novelist.

‘Poetry is more philosophical than history.’ – Aristotle.

Today we can find the meaning of this saying if, while native born to the turbulent breath of
history, we seek in documentary film the possibility of finding poetry (fiction) in the very
center of that history (actuality).48

In the midst of the spectacular war films of the day, a new kind of documentary
emerged from this group. While other film-makers were locating their practice at the
sites of greatest power – the military, the bureaucracy – these film-makers were
endeavouring to produce a new documentary film that (indirectly) pointed to the
backwardness of the nation, and to the sheer poverty and suffering in everyday
life.49 For their producers, these films were the finest examples of documentary
being made. Ishimoto Tokichi set the pattern with Snow Country, spending nearly
three years recording the fight between Yamagata villagers and their fierce winters.
Snow Country was unusual for its long-term study, foreshadowing the Yamagata
films by the most important postwar documentarist, Ogawa Shinsuke; historian

72 The Grierson Effect

Tanikawa Yoshio goes so far as to say that it marked the start of Japanese
documentary film.50
Other films include Atsumi Teruo’s Sumiyaku hitobito/People Burning Coal (1940/1)
and Ishi no inai mura/Village without a Doctor (1939). The latter, Ito Sueo’s first film,
highlights the terrible conditions in village Japan, and the government’s obvious
inability to provide adequate health care for all its people. Kyogoku Takahide’s Ishi no
mura/Village of Stone (1941) shows the severe manual labour at a rock quarry, and his
Homensen/Field Diagnosis Boat (1939) follows a medical group travelling the Sumida
river to treat river workers. Imaizumi Yoshitama turned his camera to the rough life
of train workers in Train C57. Ueno Kozo’s Wagu no ama/The Ama of Wagu (1941)
contrasts the hardships of life for female shell divers (including steep pay inequities in
comparison to men) with stunning underwater sequences that aestheticise the work
itself. Atsugi’s Aru hobo no kiroku/Record of a Nursery (1942) shows the co-operative
efforts between working mothers and nursery schoolteachers to raise healthy,
educated children. This impressive body of work arose from the competing claims over
the significance of Paul Rotha’s Documentary Film.
Although Rotha inspired them all, these film-makers took varying positions vis-
à-vis the use of reenactment and screenwriting in documentary. What they hold in
common is a striking exclusion of the war hysteria and its rhetoric and a focus on the
difficult life of Japanese citizens, a socially conscious documentary that resisted the
temptations of explosions and exotic locales. In this way, the film-makers encode to
various degrees the discontent usually restricted to hidden spaces into their very
public media. The film-makers perceived their efforts to be interconnected and
raising documentary to an unprecedented level of excellence. While they never gave
themselves a collective name or identity, they did consider their combined efforts to be
akin to a ‘documentary movement’.51 Their films constitute the finest of the prewar
documentary cinema, and an instance of ‘cultural translation’ where theory and
practice were finely tuned and brought into thorough interaction through the
mediation of translators – even incompetent, if enthusiastic, translators.

noTes

1. See Iris Barry, ‘Review of Documentary Film’, Saturday Review, 12 August 1939, which
discusses people’s anxieties about Rotha’s politics and his immodest pontification; also
Frank Evans, ‘How the Film Can Help Democracy’, Evening Chronicle (Newcastle on Tyne),
12 May 1939, a book review that examines only documentary’s social function (nothing on
style); Elizabeth Laine, ‘About Documentary Films’, Transcript (Boston), 10 June 1939;
‘Documentary Film’, The Times, 11 August 1939; ‘Documentary Film’, Lady, 3 August 1939.
2. Imamura’s postwar Introduction to Film Theory contains the best Japanese overview of
Rotha. In contrast to the wartime debates, its reasoned critique reveals how narrowly the
discussion was focused in 1940. This suggests how other issues were at stake besides the
one explicitly on the table in 1938. See Imamura Taihei, Eiga Riron Nyumon (Tokyo: Itagaki
Shoten, 1952), p. 184.
3. Paul Rotha, Dokyumentarii Eiga, revised and expanded edn, trans. Atsugi Taka (Tokyo:
Misuzu Shobo, 1960); Paul Rotha, Dokyumentarii Eiga, revised and expanded edn, trans.

Translating Grierson: Japan 73

 Atsugi Taka (Tokyo: Misuzu Shobo, 1976); Paul Rotha, Dokyumentarii Eiga, rev edn,
trans. Atsugi Taka (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1995). The 1960 edition involved a fairly extensive
revision of the translation itself, although this translation has its own problems. The 1995
outing is billed as a ‘refurbished edition’ [shinsoban], but the only apparent difference is a
new colour on the jacket.
4. Nothing in his personal files suggests he knew what the Japanese thought of his work.
Quite the opposite, he clearly shared fears about the menace Japan posed to the West. In a
letter to Eric Knight written at the height of his prestige in Japan, Rotha wrote:

I agree that the sooner America sees her immediate danger the better and that now more
than ever is the time to come into this business . . . . She actually [is] (it sounds) trying to
appease the Japs which seems odd after all the examples of appeasement she’s had before
her [sic]. I agree with all your beliefs about the cementing of the English speaking peoples
– at least that would be a beginning basis for reconstruction.
Letter, Paul Rotha to Eric Knight, 28 August 1941, 2001 Box 26,
Paul Rotha Collection, UCLA)

After the war (in the 1960s, from the look of the paper and adjacent documents), in a
statement to someone in Japan Rotha wrote, ‘One day, perhaps, if I am still alive, I will
come to visit the land of Hokusai and Kurosawa and Ozu.’ (No mention of any Japanese
documentarists, let alone his translation by Atsugi.) See Letter, Paul Rotha to unspecified
recipient in Japan, ND, 2001 Box 82, Folder 3, Paul Rotha Collection, UCLA.
5. Paul Rotha, Bunka Eiga-ron, 1st Japanese edn, trans. Atsugi Taka (Tokyo: Dai’ichi
Geibunsha, 1938), p. 108.
6. Rotha, Dokyumentarii Eiga (1960), p. 68.
7. In her postwar autobiography, her embarrassment at rushing the translation to print
prematurely is clear. See Atsugi Taka, Josei Dokyumentarisuto no Kaiso (Tokyo: Domesu
Shuppan, 1991), pp. 103–5.
8. Okamoto Masao, Bunka Eiga Jidai + Jujiya Eigabu no Hitobito (Tokyo: Unitsushin, 1996),
pp. 62–3.
9. Atsugi also married Yuiken philosopher Mori Koichi.
10. Rotha, Bunka Eigaron (1938). The original volume is Paul Rotha, Documentary Film (London:
Faber and Faber, 1935).
11. Paul Rotha, Bunka Eigaron, 3rd Japanese edn, trans. Atsugi Taka (Kyoto: Dai’ichi Geibunsha,
1939).
12. Paul Rotha, ‘Bunka Eigaron Josetsu’, trans. Ueno Ichiro, Eiga Kenkyu vol. 1 (1939),
pp. 54–84 (covers Chapter I in Rotha’s Documentary Film); Paul Rotha, ‘Dokyumentarii
no Jyakuha to Sono Shiteki Kosatsu’, trans. Ueno Ichiro, Eiga Kenkyu vol. 2 (1939),
pp. 50–85 (covers Rotha’s Chapter II). While there were many reports on the British
documentary movement, Ueno probably wrote the best; this study certainly contributed
to his translation: Ueno Ichiro, ‘Eikoku no Bunka Eiga’, Eiga Kenkyu vol. 1 (1939),
pp. 146–61.
13. Paul Rotha, ‘Bunka Eiga-ron’, Chosa Shiryo vol. 4 (Kyoto: Toho Kyoto Satsueijo, undated)
(Makino Mamoru collection). This mimeographed publication completes the Ueno
translation, covering the final Chapter IV.
14. Makino Mamoru, ‘Kiroku Eiga no Rironteki Doko o Otte 41’, Unitsushin, 19 June 1978.

74 The Grierson Effect

15. Tanikawa Yoshio, Dokyumentarii Eiga no Genten – Sono Shiso to Hoho, 3rd edn (Tokyo:
Futosha, 1990), pp. 194–5.
16. Rotha, Documentary Film (1935), p. 70.
17. Okuda Shinkichi, Eiga Bunkenshi (Tokyo: Dai Nippon Eiga Kyokai, 1943), p. 39.
18. Tsumura Hideo, ‘Poru Ruta no Eigaron Hihan – Sono Cho “Documentary Film” ni Tsuite’,
Shineiga vol. 9 no. 12 (November 1939), p. 17.
19. Takagiba Tsutomu, ‘Kyoko no Riron – Tsumura Hideo-shi no “Poru Ruta Hihan” o Yomu’,
Bunka Eiga Kenkyu vol. 3 no. 1 (January 1940), pp. 525–8.
20. Kubota Tatsuo, Bunka Eiga no Hohoron (Kyoto: Dai’ichi Geibunsha, 1940).
21. Rotha, Documentary Film (1935), p. 156.
22. Atsugi Taka’s personal copy of Rotha, Bunka Eiga-ron (1938), pp. 150–2, Atsugi Taka
Collection, National Film Centre of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. Original
text is Rotha, Documentary Film (1935), pp. 135–6.
23. Ibid., p. 132. Original text is Rotha, Documentary Film (1935), p. 108.
24. Ibid., p. 198. Original text is Rotha, Documentary Film (1935), p. 143.
25. I have deposited this book in the Makino Collection.
26. Sekino Yoshio, ‘Tadashiki “Documentary” Riron no Ninshiki no Tame Ni’, Bunka Nyusu
Weekly vol. 110 (18 January 1940), p. 1 (Makino Collection).
27. Sekino Yoshio, ‘Kyo Made no Eiga to Ashita no Eiga (1)’, Bunka Eiga Kenkyu vol. 3 no. 2
(February 1940), pp. 8–11; Sekino Yoshio, ‘Kyo Made no Eiga to Ashita no Eiga (2)’, Bunka
Eiga Kenkyu vol. 3 no. 3 (March 1940), pp. 58–60; Sekino Yoshio, ‘Kyo Made no Eiga to Ashita
no Eiga (3)’, Bunka Eiga Kenkyu vol. 3 no. 4 (April 1940), pp. 109–12; Sekino Yoshio, ‘Kyo
Made no Eiga to Ashita no Eiga (4)’, Bunka Eiga Kenkyu vol. 3 no. 5 (May 1940), pp. 176–9;
Sekino Yoshio, ‘Dokyumentariiron Kento no Tame Ni (1)’, Bunka Eiga Kenkyu vol. 3 no. 6
(June 1940), pp. 236–9; Sekino Yoshio, ‘Dokyumentariiron Kento no Tame Ni (2)’, Bunka
Eiga Kenkyu vol. 3 no. 7 (July 1940), pp. 304–7; Sekino Yoshio, ‘Dokyumentariiron Kento no
Tame Ni (3)’, Bunka Eiga Kenkyu vol. 3 no. 10 (October 1940), pp. 563–7. The other major
series of articles by Sekino is Sekino Yoshio, ‘Poru Rosa: Dokyumentarii Eiga no Sonogo no
Shinten 1’, Nihon Eiga vol. 5 no. 7 (July 1940), pp. 22–9; Sekino Yoshio, ‘Poru Rosa:
Dokyumentarii Eiga no Sonogo no Shinten 2’, Nihon Eiga vol. 5. no. 8 (August 1940), pp.
68–73, 120; Sekino Yoshio, ‘Poru Rosa: Dokyumentarii Eiga no Sonogo no Shinten 3’, Nihon
Eiga vol. 5 no. 10 (October 1940), pp. 72–7, 14.
28. Sekino Yoshio, Eiga Kyoiku no Riron (Tokyo: Shogakkan, 1942).
29. Rotha, Documentary Film (1935), p. 66; Sekino, Eiga Kyoiku no Riron, p. 163. By way of
contrast, Ueno Ichiro’s translation is complete and correct in Rotha, ‘Bunka Eigaron Josetsu’,
trans. Ueno, p. 79.
30. STS, or the ‘Square Table Society’, was an influential study group composed of a variety of
intellectuals interested in film education. They published their own independent journal:
Eiga Zehi and Eiga Dai-issen. For a history, see Makino Mamoru’s column in Unitsushin
between 26 September and 21 November 1977.
31. For an extensive discussion of Sekino’s children’s film days, see Gonda Yasunosuke,
Minshugorakuron (Tokyo: Ganshodo Shoten, 1931), especially pp. 309–28.
32. Yamada Hideyoshi, Eiga Kokusaku no Zenshin (Tokyo: Koseisho, 1940), p. 216.
33. Rotha, Documentary Film (1935), p. 48.
34. Rotha, Bunka Eigaron, trans. Atsugi (1938), p. 34.
35. Rotha, ‘Bunka Eigaron Josetsu’, trans. Ueno, p. 56.

Translating Grierson: Japan 75

36. Sekino, Eiga Kyoiku no Riron, p. 136.
37. One was Asanuma Keiji, who is Japan’s best-known film semiotician.
38. Further evidence that Atsugi did not recognise the mistranslation may be found in the
various copies she deposited at the Film Centre. None of them contains any corrections
here, although she did underline the adjacent sentence in her 1960 edition.
39. This is not the only place where Atsugi’s misprision reveals the nature of her (mis)reading of
Rotha. Her translation provides many examples. Most critics refer only to how ‘bad’ it is.
For example, in the afterward to his Eiga Riron Nyumon, Imamura Taihei points out how
thankful we should be for the work of translators like Iijima Tadashi, Sasaki Norio and
Atsugi Taka. He also warns the readers to be cautious when it comes to trusting translation;
ultimately, they must refer to the original, as Imamura has. He cites one example of
misprision, and he singles out Atsugi: Rotha refers to some ‘modern authorities’ who call
dialectical materialism ‘out-of-date’, but Atsugi translates this saishin/‘latest’ or ‘newest’.
While Imamura picks a good example of mistranslation he – like everyone else – does not
ask what factors led to this particular misreading. It does seem rather obvious. See Rotha,
Documentary Film (1935), p. 182; Rotha, Documentary Film, trans. Atsugi (1938), p. 270;
Imamura, Eiga Riron Nyumon, p. 184.
40. Letter, Paul Rotha to Eric Knight, 8 November 1938, Paul Rotha Collection, 2001 Box 26;
UCLA.
41. This is how the great documentarist Kamei Fumio described his own relationship to Rotha’s
book. Various people had criticised Fighting Soldiers by claiming that Kamei was Rotha’s
disciple. However, Akimoto Takeshi introduced the original book to Toho studios when
Kamei was in China shooting the film. Rotha was less a guidebook than simple inspiration,
especially for the second half of the book on practical matters (this was the section
translated and circulated within Toho). See Kamei Fumio, Akimoto Takeshi, Ueno Kozo,
Ishimoto Tokichi, Tanaka Yoshiji, ‘Nihon Bunka Eiga no Shoki Kara Kyo o Kataru Zadankai’,
Bunka Eiga Kenkyu vol. 3 no. 2 (February 1940), pp. 16–27.
42. Kuwano Shigeru, Dokyumentarii no Sekai – Sozoryoku to Hohoron (Tokyo: Simul Shuppankai,
1973), pp. 201–2.
43. Ibid., p. 201.
44. Shirai Shigeru and Kano Ryuichi, ‘Kameraman Jinsei’, in Iwamoto Kenji and Saiki Tomonori
(eds), Kinema Seishun (Tokyo: Libroport, 1988), p. 73.
45. See Takagiba Tsutomu, ‘Dokyumentarii Firumu no Oboegaki’, Bunka Eiga Kenkyu vol. 3 no. 4
(April 1940), pp. 112–13; Atsugi Taka, ‘Story-film no Yakugo ni Tsuite’, Bunka Eiga Kenkyu
vol. 3 no. 4 (April 1940), pp. 118–19; Takagiba Tsutomu, ‘Eiga no Honshitsu ni Kan Suru
Ronmo’, Bunka Eiga Kenkyu vol. 3 no. 10 (October 1940), pp. 577–80; Kubota Tatsuo,
‘Gekiteki Yoso to Kirokuteki Yoso’, Bunka Eiga Kenkyu vol. 3 no. 10 (October 1940),
pp. 575–6.
46. See, for example, Ueno Kozo, ‘Eiga ni Okeru Geijutsu to Kagaku – Bunka Eigaron no
Kisoteki Mondai 1’, Nihon Eiga vol. 5 no. 2 (February 1940), pp. 24–35; Ueno Kozo, ‘Eiga ni
Okeru Geijutsu to Kagaku – Bunka Eigaron no Kisoteki Mondai 2’, Nihon Eiga vol. 5 no. 3
(March 1940), pp. 25–35.
47. Ueno Kozo, ‘Eiga ni Okeru Geijutsu to Kagaku – Bunka Eigaron no Kisoteki Mondai 1’,
Nihon Eiga vol. 5 no. 2 (February 1940), p. 33.
48. Atsugi Taka, ‘Kiroku Eiga no Kyoko – “Jijitsu” wa Sono Mama “Shinjitsu” de wa Nai’, Nihon
Eiga vol. 5 no. 2 (November 1940), p. 82.

76 The Grierson Effect

49. Atsugi discusses this phenomenon in her translator’s afterward to the 1960 edition of
Documentary Film: Atsugi Taka, ‘Yakusha no Atogaki’, in Rotha, Dokyumentarii Eiga, trans.
Atsugi (1960), pp. 329–34.
50. Tanikawa, Dokyumentarii Eiga no Genten, p. 195.
51. See Kamei Fumio, ‘Bunka Eiga Geppyo’,’ Nihon Eiga vol. 5 no. 12 (December 1940), pp. 24–6;
Kamei et al., ‘Nihon Bunka Eiga no Shoki Kara Kyo o Kataru Zadankai’, pp. 16–27.

references

Atsugi Taka, ‘Story-film no Yakugo ni Tsuite’, Bunka Eiga Kenkyu vol. 3 no. 4 (April 1940),
pp. 118–19.
Atsugi Taka, ‘Kiroku Eiga no Kyoko – “Jijitsu” wa Sono Mama “Shinjitsu” de wa Nai’, Nihon Eiga
vol. 5 no. 2 (November 1940), p. 82.
Atsugi Taka, ‘Yakusha no Atogaki’, in Paul Rotha, Dokyumentarii Eiga, trans. Atsugi, 1960,
pp. 329–34.
Atsugi Taka, Josei Dokyumentarisuto no Kaiso (Tokyo: Domesu Shuppan, 1991).
Barry, Iris, ‘Review of Documentary Film’, Saturday Review, 12 August 1939.
‘Documentary Film’, The Times, 11 August 1939.
‘Documentary Film’, Lady, 3 August 1939.
Evans, Frank, ‘How the Film Can Help Democracy’, Evening Chronicle (Newcastle on Tyne),
12 May 1939.
Gonda Yasunosuke, Minshugorakuron (Tokyo: Ganshodo Shoten, 1931).
Imamura Taihei, Eiga Riron Nyumon (Tokyo: Itagaki Shoten, 1952).
Kamei Fumio, ‘Bunka Eiga Geppyo’, Nihon Eiga vol. 5 no. 12 (December 1940), pp. 24–6.
Kamei Fumio, Akimoto Takeshi, Ueno Kozo, Ishimoto Tokichi, Tanaka Yoshiji, ‘Nihon Bunka
Eiga no Shoki Kara Kyo o Kataru Zadankai’, Bunka Eiga Kenkyu vol. 3 no. 2 (February 1940),
pp. 16–27.
Kubota Tatsuo, Bunka Eiga no Hohoron (Kyoto: Dai’ichi Geibunsha, 1940).
Kubota Tatsuo, ‘Gekiteki Yoso to Kirokuteki Yoso’, Bunka Eiga Kenkyu vol. 3 no. 10
(October 1940), pp. 575–6.
Kuwano Shigeru, Dokyumentarii no Sekai – Sozoryoku to Hohoron (Tokyo: Simul Shuppankai,
1973).
Laine, Elizabeth, ‘About Documentary Films’, Transcript (Boston), 10 June 1939.
Makino Mamoru, ‘Kiroku Eiga no Rironteki Doko o Otte 41’, Unitsushin, 19 June 1978, n p.
Okamoto Masao, Bunka Eiga Jidai + Jujiya Eigabu no Hitobito (Tokyo: Unitsushin, 1996).
Okuda Shinkichi, Eiga Bunkenshi (Tokyo: Dai Nippon Eiga Kyokai, 1943).
Rotha, Paul, ‘Bunka Eiga-ron’, Chosa Shiryo vol. 4 (Kyoto: Toho Kyoto Satsueijo, undated)
(Makino Mamoru collection).
Rotha, Paul, Letter to unspecified recipient in Japan, ND (2001 Box 82, Folder 3; Paul Rotha
Collection, UCLA).
Rotha, Paul, Documentary Film (London: Faber and Faber, 1935).
Rotha, Paul, ‘Letter to Eric Knight, 8 November, 1938 (2001 Box 26; Paul Rotha Collection,
UCLA).
Rotha, Paul, Bunka Eiga-ron, 1st Japanese edn, trans. Atsugi Taka (Tokyo: Dai’ichi Geibunsha,
1938).

Translating Grierson: Japan 77

Rotha, Paul, Bunka Eigaron, 3rd Japanese edn, trans. Atsugi Taka (Kyoto: Dai’ichi Geibunsha, 1939).
Rotha, Paul, Letter to Eric Knight, 28 August 1941 (2001 Box 26; Paul Rotha Collection, UCLA).
Rotha, Paul, Dokyumentarii Eiga, revised and expanded edn, trans. Atsugi Taka (Tokyo: Misuzu
Shobo, 1960).
Rotha, Paul, Dokyumentarii Eiga, revised and expanded edn, trans. Atsugi Taka (Tokyo: Misuzu
Shobo, 1976).
Rotha, Paul, Dokyumentarii Eiga, refurbished edn, trans. Atsugi Taka (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1995).
Sekino Yoshio, ‘Tadashiki “Documentary” Riron no Ninshiki no Tame Ni’, Bunka Nyusu Weekly
vol. 110 (18 January 1940), p. 1 (Makino collection).
Sekino Yoshio, ‘Kyo Made no Eiga to Ashita no Eiga (1)’, Bunka Eiga Kenkyu vol. 3 no. 2
(February 1940), pp. 8–11.
Sekino Yoshio, ‘Kyo Made no Eiga to Ashita no Eiga (2)’, Bunka Eiga Kenkyu vol. 3 no. 2
(March 1940), pp. 58–60.
Sekino Yoshio, ‘Kyo Made no Eiga to Ashita no Eiga (3)’, Bunka Eiga Kenkyu vol 3. no. 4
(April 1940), pp. 109–12.
Sekino Yoshio, ‘Kyo Made no Eiga to Ashita no Eiga (4)’, Bunka Eiga Kenkyu vol. 3 no. 5
(May 1940), pp. 176–9.
Sekino Yoshio, ‘Dokyumentariiron Kento no Tame Ni (1)’, Bunka Eiga Kenkyu vol. 3 no. 6
(June 1940), pp. 236–9.
Sekino Yoshio, ‘Dokyumentariiron Kento no Tame Ni (2)’, Bunka Eiga Kenkyu vol. 3 no. 7
(July 1940), pp. 304–7.
Sekino Yoshio, ‘Dokyumentariiron Kento no Tame Ni (3)’, Bunka Eiga Kenkyu vol. 3 no. 10
(October 1940), pp. 563–7.
Sekino Yoshio, ‘Poru Rosa: Dokyumentarii Eiga no Sonogo no Shinten 1’, Nihon Eiga vol. 5 no 7
(July 1940), pp. 22–9.
Sekino Yoshio, ‘Poru Rosa: Dokyumentarii Eiga no Sonogo no Shinten 2’, Nihon Eiga vol. 5 no 8
(August 1940), pp. 68–73, 120.
Sekino Yoshio, ‘Poru Rosa: Dokyumentarii Eiga no Sonogo no Shinten 3’, Nihon Eiga vol. 5 no. 10
(October 1940), pp. 72–7, 14.
Sekino Yoshio, Eiga Kyoiku no Riron (Tokyo: Shogakkan, 1942).
Shirai Shigeru and Kano Ryuichi, ‘Kameraman Jinsei’, in Iwamoto Kenji and Saiki Tomonori
(eds), Kinema Seishun (Tokyo: Libroport, 1988), p. 73.
Takagiba Tsutomu, ‘Kyoko no Riron – Tsumura Hideo-shi no “Poru Ruta Hihan” o Yomu’, Bunka
Eiga Kenkyu vol. 3 no. 1 (January 1940), pp. 525–8.
Takagiba Tsutomu, ‘Dokyumentarii Firumu no Oboegaki’, Bunka Eiga Kenkyu vol. 3 no. 4
(April 1940), pp. 112–13.
Takagiba Tsutomu, ‘Eiga no Honshitsu ni Kan Suru Ronmo’, Bunka Eiga Kenkyu vol. 3 no. 10
(October 1940), pp. 577–80.
Tanikawa Yoshio, Dokyumentarii Eiga no Genten – Sono Shiso to Hoho, 3rd edn (Tokyo: Futosha,
1990).
Tsumura Hideo, ‘Poru Ruta no Eigaron Hihan – Sono Cho “Documentary Film” ni Tsuite’,
Shineiga vol. 9 no. 12 (November 1939), p. 17.
Ueno Ichiro, ‘Eikoku no Bunka Eiga’, Eiga Kenkyu vol. 1 (1939), pp. 146–61.
Ueno Kozo, ‘Eiga ni Okeru Geijutsu to Kagaku – Bunka Eigaron no Kisoteki Mondai 1’, Nihon
Eiga vol. 5 no. 2 (February 1940), pp. 24–35.
Yamada Hideyoshi, Eiga Kokusaku no Zenshin (Tokyo: Koseisho, 1940).

78 The Grierson Effect

5
A Social Poetics of Documentary: Grierson and
the Scandinavian Documentary Tradition

Ib Bondebjerg

We know for certain that the Grierson influence on Scandinavian documentary was not
just the result of inspiration from a distance, but of direct contact. In Denmark the main
theoretician and director of documentary film, Theodor Christensen (1914–67), found
inspiration both in the Russian montage theories and film traditions and in the British
documentary movement, paying tribute to both traditions in his more theoretical
writings. But a piece of historical film footage from around 1935 also shows some of the
leading Danish documentary directors waving goodbye to Christensen as he departs on a
mission to London to seek inspiration and bring back films from the British documentary
movement.1 In an interview after the war, Christensen explains how carefully he studied
the films, the style and editing, and how he shared the grand social vision of films to
promote civic and democratic ideals, transmit information and build opinion.2
Grierson’s influence on the Danish documentary movement of the 1930s and
onward is repeated in the other Scandinavian countries, all sharing an early pre-
television public-service philosophy of documentary film production and distribution.
Whereas the years before 1930 were dominated by very actuality-oriented
documentary formats or the anthropological travel documentary, from the 1930s on
the actuality tradition merged with more dramatic and poetic styles. But even though
similarities can be found between the British and Scandinavian development in the
years 1930–60, the Danish connection seems to be the most direct. The social
dimension of Danish documentary was perhaps more in line with the Grierson
tradition than the Norwegian and Swedish, where the travel films and Flaherty’s
influence are stronger.3
But the institutionalisation of the early documentary film tradition in Scandinavia
and in the UK has strong similarities, just as both countries later developed a strong
public-service ethos, which clearly continued many of the tendencies and genres
initiated in the film movement. In Denmark the support for documentary film was
rooted in two institutional frameworks: on the one hand, the public education system
and a public–private interest in cultural and informational films; on the other, a direct
interest from both private companies and the government in dispensing information
to citizens and consumers. The inauguration of Dansk Kulturfilm [Danish Cultural
Film Board] in 1932 and Statens Filmcentral [the National Film Board] in 1938 falls
within the first framework, whereas the formation of ministerial film boards in the
1940s lies in the other category. But, as in the UK, documentary film-makers in this
period had to rely on private or government financing for ventures with very specific

A Social Poetics of Documentary: Grierson and the Scandinavian Documentary Tradition 79

 Camera used in the late
1930s and 40s by the leading
Danish production company
for documentary film
(Den levende virkelighed 1–3
[Jørgen Roos, 1989], Jørgen
Roos Film/Statens
Filmcentral)

themes and missions, whereas in the modern period after 1960, film-makers had a
better chance of defining their project more freely. The institutional trends in Danish
documentary film culture can also be seen in both Norway and Sweden, although
with a different time schedule and slight national variations. In Norway, for instance,
a public system did not develop until the late 1940s (National Film Board, 1948; Norsk
Kulturfilm, 1946), with private institutions and social movements playing a strong
role before that.4

A PoeTic AnD A SociAl viSion

In one of his first articles from 1938, Theodor Christensen defines the mission of
the Danish documentary film movement in terms inspired by Grierson: ‘a realism,
dramatizing modern life … symbolic sounds, acoustic realism, contrasts between music
and images … reality, creatively arranged reality, reality in images, words, sound,
music, creating together a narrative, a drama’.5 Just as Grierson’s phrase, ‘creative
treatment of actuality’ points towards a poetics of documentary in direct opposition
to the dominant tendency of the educational and informational film of those days,
Christensen is clearly rejecting the established, dominant concept of documentary as
a transparent representation of reality or an objective, factual film. The creative
dramatisation of reality with a strong anchoring of the film in a modern world and
with a clear civic mission are the key words. But in actuality the documentary genre
until around 1960 was still very much dominated by films commissioned by public
authorities or private companies, making poetic freedom and critical distance difficult.
Also Scandinavian documentary film-makers between 1930 and 1960 were caught
between a rock and a hard place when it came to artistic freedom, but they used the
little space they had with great creativity. Short films with seemingly very dull content
and themes from everyday life were vibrant with poetry, irony, creative montage and
use of sound and music.

80 The Grierson Effect

 In Denmark and the rest of Scandinavia we see similar patterns of inspiration and
controversies, and the creative treatment of actuality defined by Grierson certainly
had its limits. The history and aesthetics of early Scandinavian documentary is
inscribed in this context and the conflict between, on the one hand, a certain
aesthetic, creative freedom and, on the other hand, an institutional production culture
with very specific assignments for theme and content. In the late 1950s documentary
film production gradually became much more independent, and the establishment of
public funding for film enabled the development of both new film genres and a much
stronger critical tradition, just as the breakthrough of public-service television created
a new platform for documentaries with instant access to a mass audience.
When Danish television started in 1951 one of the key figures was the later first
Minister for Culture, the Labour politician, Julius Bomholt, and in the Yearbook of
Television from 1953, he pointed to the documentary genre as a building stone for
modern democracy:

The visual reportage can contribute to the development of our Danish democracy. Pictures
from the reality of our whole working society, the industry, crafts, commerce, agriculture, etc.,
the social life, life in parliament and common national events and social reportage can create a
much more intimate connection between the elite and the general public.6

We know from Ian Aitken’s thorough study of Grierson’s ideological background that
he was inspired by early theories of public opinion, of the public sphere and of
montage and visual communication.7 The quotations from Christensen and Bomholt
point towards a similar line of thought in Denmark, where documentary genres play a
crucial role in forming this public space, debate and imagination.
The arrival of television in Scandinavia (Denmark, 1951; Sweden ,1956; and
Norway, 1960) was both a challenge and a boost for documentary film-making, and
the relation between TV documentaries and more independent film documentaries
created conflict from time to time. In the 1950s the film documentary was beginning
to free itself from the more restricted and commissioned forms of documentary, but
the strong factual and journalistic demands of television could be seen as a new kind of
restriction. On the other hand, the distribution patterns of early documentary film
through cinema, the educational system and private and public organisations were not
nearly as efficient as television. The vision of civic education through poetic, social
documentaries in the Grierson tradition seemed almost made for television. But the
relationship between documentary film and television historically developed very
differently in the three Scandinavian countries.
In Denmark the managing directors of TV did not see film directors as natural
coalition partners and, even though a number of documentary films were shown
on television, the people developing TV documentary forms did not come from film
but were either radio or newspaper journalists. A certain tension between film
documentaries and journalism was thus established and can still be identified in
the contemporary Danish media culture.8 In Sweden relations were the complete
opposite: people from radio and press did have an important impact on early TV
documentary production, but the establishment of a documentary film section on
SVT in 1956 headed by the open-minded Lennart Ehrenborg made all the difference.

A Social Poetics of Documentary: Grierson and the Scandinavian Documentary Tradition 81

He intentionally worked on a profile for SVT where independent documentary film
directors and journalists worked within the same framework.9 Institutionally this
meant that SVT continued and expanded the Grierson heritage into the new media
culture in the sense that the merging of creativity, factuality and journalism was
encouraged. Already in the late 1950s we find a strong blend of different documentary
genres on SVT and we find people with very different backgrounds working for
television. The Grierson tradition is taken to a new critical level in Karl-Axel Sjöblom
and Lars Ag’s famous documentary series Strövtåg/Ramble (1958), a social reportage
about ordinary people caught up in the system. Here are the early roots of what later
became the investigative television documentary, in form very far from the Grierson
tradition, but nevertheless thematically and ideologically related.

The TenSion beTween creATiviTy AnD fAcTuAl journAliSm

The historical tension between film and television documentary found in different
forms in Scandinavia can hardly be connected to Grierson, since, according to his
biographer Forsyth Hardy, Grierson himself saw the British Broadcasting Corporation
(BBC) as a natural heir to his film movement.10 The connecting line from film to
television was furthermore in reality and symbolically confirmed by the fact that
Grierson was actually offered a post at the BBC as head of documentary, a post then
given to one of his collaborators, Paul Rotha. In 1954 Rotha clearly stated that, despite
the controversies within the BBC between different strands of documentary and
between journalism and film, he saw television as the modern platform for Grierson’s
documentary idea: ‘To those who still believe that documentary has a specific social job
to do, this mass access to audiences and quick answer is of paramount importance. It is
something new in the documentary experience.’11 The fact that Rotha saw modern
television as the social medium for documentary, a fact soon proven by developments,
did not minimise the tension within the documentary movement between factual
journalism and the more independent, creative documentary, which Grierson had
pioneered.
The strong institutional tension we see in Denmark and the more open
collaboration in Sweden takes a slightly different form in Norway, where television
was established much later than in the UK and the other two Scandinavian countries.
As Jan Anders Diesen has pointed out in his book on the Norwegian television
documentary,12 Norwegian television (as was the case in the rest of Scandinavia) was
directly inspired by and built on principles from the BBC, but it benefited from
drawing on a longer experience. The Norwegian channel, Norsk rikskringkasting AS
(NRK), very much wanted its documentary profile to build on the independent film
production. However, it soon had to develop its own inhouse production. Key to this
transformation from film to television documentary in Norway was Carsten E. Munch,
who made TV films with a combination of aesthetic creativity and factual social
documentation.13 As Diesen points out, the first ten years of NRK documentary
production allowed for a certain artistic freedom, a freedom that was gradually
restricted with the later professionalisation and commercialisation of public-service
television. One might say that the combination of paternalistic information and

82 The Grierson Effect

creative documentary found in the early Grierson film movement was to a large degree
reproduced in the first long period of public-service broadcasting in Norway.
But behind the institutional tensions and the actual collaboration between film
and television or the lack thereof, the uneasy conflict between documentary as
journalism and documentary as more creative art was just as important. In his book on
the Swedish television documentary Leif Furhammer quotes both Lennart Ehrenborg’s
and Ivar Ivres’s (both leading characters in factual and documentary programming)
distinction between journalistic reportage with its more objective and less aesthetic
approach and the more personal and aesthetic approach of documentary.14 In
Ehrenborg’s case the distinction was made to open up for both types of factual
programming, whereas Ivres was more normative in his tendency to reject the creative
documentary on television. One might argue, with reference to the Grierson legacy,
that documentaries in general, film or television, all pay tribute to the notion of public
information in the broadest sense of the term. But public information comes in many
forms, from the most direct factual statements to the more poetic social forms.
However, it is clear that the historical tension between film and television exists
despite this common ground and historical heritage.
There is no reason to distinguish between film and television when it comes to the
basic formats of documentary genres. The four most basic forms, authoritative,
observational, dramatised and poetic15 are independent of media platforms. The
special combination of the authoritative and the poetic of the original Grierson
tradition can be found in both modern film and television. But around 1950, when
Scandinavian cinema and television began their twisted collaboration on the
development of documentary films and programmes, with the Grierson legacy a strong
influence on both, the partly separate development of support systems for film and
television created not just a natural competition and tension, but also a certain
division of labour. Many of the factual and informational functions of documentary
were taken over by a journalistic tradition in television, and the documentary film
movement became stronger and more focused on the other formats.

The DAniSh GrierSon: TheoDor chriSTenSen

As already indicated, Theodor Christensen is a key figure in the classical period of

Danish documentary film, a kind of Danish Grierson and both a theoretician of film
and a productive film director. In 1936 he wrote, together with another important
Danish documentary film director, Karl Roos, the first serious theoretical book in
Denmark on film, Film, a book with references to many of the leading European
theorists on film, among them Grierson, Balazs, Arnheim, Spottiswoode, Pudovkin
and Eisenstein. Christensen, like Grierson, clearly combines a sociological and
aesthetic approach, and his background in a socialist political position very much
defines his notion of documentary. The discussion in Film of documentary
film refers to both Grierson and Spottiswoode. Christensen does not define
documentary as a specific form and style, instead pointing to the distinction
between fiction and documentary as a difference in ‘the way in which the raw
material is selected’.16

A Social Poetics of Documentary: Grierson and the Scandinavian Documentary Tradition 83

 Theodor Christensen
(1914–67), the leading
theoretician, organiser and
director of documentary film
in Denmark from the 1930s.
Here filmed around 1963
(Den levende virkelighed 1–3
[Jørgen Roos, 1989], Jørgen
Roos Film/Statens
Filmcentral)

Following modern cognitive film theory,17 Christensen and Roos thus actually point
towards the film’s relation to reality and the way it positions the spectator as the crucial
distinctive element in documentary film. In their discussion of documentary genres
Christensen and Roos quote Grierson’s concept of the creative treatment of actuality,
which they deem important but somewhat vague, and then move on to a Spottiswoode
quote: ‘The documentary film is in subject and approach a dramatised presentation
of man’s relation to his institutional life, whether industrial, social or political; and
in technique a subordination of form to content.’18 But in their discussion of this
definition of documentary they judge this to be a bit too much a reflection of just the
British, Grierson tradition, rejecting the notion that form can be subordinated to
content. They support the idea of dramatisation and Grierson’s creativity dimension
as a critical distancing of the new documentary from the traditional educational and
informational film, but arrive at the conclusion that form is just as important for the
sociological mission of documentary as the reality content presented.
Grierson’s lasting contribution to the documentary tradition is among other things
a historical transformation of the traditional notion of documentary as a kind of
transparent, objective and factual representation of reality. Christensen’s theory and
practice points in the same direction, and they both stressed the creative dimensions
of the treatment of the real world. In one of his early articles on documentary, Er
det muligt i Danmark?/Is This Possible in Denmark? (1937) he argues that the true
documentary film is much more than the traditional factual and informational film,
that it is about activating the imagination of the spectator through dramatisation,
montage and narration, but with a strong anchoring in live, contemporary reality.19
One of his examples is Paul Rotha and his film Shipyard (1935), which is praised for
telling the story of the building of a concrete ship with a form and approach that
activated the audience and had a wider relevance than the mere incident of
construction: a universalistic human approach to social reality.20
Christensen’s status as the Danish Grierson is reinforced by his important article,
‘Documentary – hvad er det?’/‘Documentary – What Is That?’ (1938), in which

84 The Grierson Effect

Grierson’s notion of the creative treatment of actuality is fleshed out as a
programmatic statement about documentary. He takes us from the influence of
Russian montage, past the German realism of modernity (Walter Ruttmann) to the
crucial breakthrough of the British documentary:

the best (British documentaries) are the most representative documentaries of our time …
they can take credit for having discovered and practised a more creative style … exactly
because a documentary film is naturalistic it must use the creative possibilities of film art.
Reality is its material, but the role of modern documentary is to present it in an authentic and
convincing way.21

Interestingly enough in this article Christensen also argues that documentary should
use the narrative techniques of the fiction film, situating characters in a narrative
flow, as long as a fundamental respect for the documentary material is maintained.
Christensen’s viewpoint on documentary here is not just completely in line with the
Grierson tradition but also extremely modern.
As already indicated, the Grierson era in Scandinavian documentary was
challenged in the postwar period, especially from around 1948 on, partly due to the
advent of television and to other institutional changes in the documentary film culture
itself. In 1948 Christensen wrote an article, ‘Dokumentarfilmens krise’/‘The Crisis of
Documentary Film’, where he reflects on the situation both nationally and
internationally. His starting point is again the leading role of British documentary and
Grierson: ‘Without Grierson the rise to fame of documentary film would not have been
possible. With inspiring slogans, hundreds of articles, analytical and critical work on
actual directors, with personal advice and influence he inspired the breakthrough of
documentary.’22 But Christensen sees a certain waning of the Grierson movement
internationally and a need for further experiments and new developments.
In 1948 no one could foresee the breakthrough of Free Cinema in the UK in the
late 1950s or similar more observational documentary forms in which the voice and
form of the Grierson cinema were dramatically changed, while the relation between
documentary and contemporary social life continued. But Christensen’s critical
questioning of the documentary of the 1930s and 40s, a tradition in many ways
heavily handicapped by the fact that films were commissioned by the state or
corporations, was reflected in the world community of documentary film-makers. The
debate was not least about the issue of creative freedom, a strong desire emerging to
make not just commissioned films but also those whose topics and ideas were decided
more freely by the director. Eventually this led to new forms of support for more
independent films, thus paving the way for the new documentary of the late 1950s and
60s. Christensen again played an important role in this transition, not just through his
own films, but by formulating doctrines for documentary freedom that were
successfully negotiated with SFC – the National Film Board – in 1949. His ‘Resolution
on Film Freedom’ (1948) defined this freedom as: freedom of topic, speech and work
method, as well as economic freedom.23
These freedoms were however, not secured in terms of public funding and film
legislation until the mid-1960s in Denmark. Film laws of 1964 and 1972 based
support systems for documentary films on Christensen’s four types of freedom, with

A Social Poetics of Documentary: Grierson and the Scandinavian Documentary Tradition 85

funding no longer tied to specific topics. Documentary films finally became both
creative and informational in ways decided by the director, who got final cut. But
the fight for this freedom waged all through the 1950s and the Cold War and the
continued domination of commissioned films often created problems. A key example
were the so-called Marshall films made in 1950–1, financed partly by the American
Marshall money given to Denmark after the war. The idea behind these was completely
in line with the Grierson heritage: the films were meant to promote to the general
public creative images of the rebuilding and development of modern Denmark and its
most important industries. But the films were often made under heavy public scrutiny
with debate and interference from the government, along with certain reservations
about some of the directors reputed to have left-wing sympathies and critical
attitudes. But six films were made, among them Theodor Christensen’s own fifteen-
minute-long Alle mine skibe/All My Ships (1951), demonstrating creative use of the
little mermaid and the welder, Christensen’s work in building Danish ships after the
war and his experiences of the war and postwar period.

GenreS AnD The ScAnDinAviAn SociAl DocumenTAry

It would be wrong to pigeonhole the British Grierson tradition and the films it
produced in a particular genre. All belonged to the more authoritative form of
documentary with an informational intention and a rhetorical structure based on a
lecturing kind of voiceover, far from the later observational forms based in reality
where characters speak out of their own world. But the Grierson tradition was clearly
inspired by forms of cinema with a more poetic, dramatic tone and institutionalised a
new form of montage with use of sound and images from a much more experimental
vein than usual for informational documentaries. The early European and American
forms of poetic documentary incorporated a committed social agenda, which was also
deeply embedded in the Scandinavian tradition from 1930 on, a tradition connected to
the establishment of a welfare state. The Scandinavian documentary film movement
was heavily dominated by films with a social agenda, throwing the spotlight on the
lower classes and social inequality. But, as already indicated in connection with the
Danish Grierson, Theodor Christensen, this social agenda was directly connected to an
aesthetic understanding of documentary opposed to the traditional forms of factual
films.
In Norway there was a particularly strong travel and nature emphasis in the early
period of documentary, but we also see the growth of two important traditions with
links to similar trends in the UK. On the one hand, we have the Norway films and later
on the so-called Oslo films and on the other hand, we have the workers’ films.24 Both
the Norway and the Oslo films, initiated by Norsk Kulturfilm (established 1946)
display a mixture of realism and national romanticism in the depiction of places,
people and everyday life in Norway. The Norway films in particular feature a mixture
of this nationalist view of the country’s wonders alongside a more neutral portrayal of
modern everyday life. But there is a link to the Grierson films in the sense that they
deal with the building of a common, national identity, a link in much stronger evidence
in the Oslo documentaries. The key person behind the Oslo films in the 1940s,

86 The Grierson Effect

Kristoffer Aamot, had a vision of one film or a series of films portraying everyday
life in contemporary Norway. He saw the series as both an educational film project
treating culture and knowledge in all aspects of modern life, from an Oslo perspective,
but he also envisioned it as a historical archive, documenting life, which could be
updated every twenty-five years.25
Although with a clear national leaning, both these two Norwegian traditions have
strong similarities with the Grierson films. But perhaps the so-called workers’ films
produced by the Norwegian working-class movement between 1928–40 are even closer
to forms and rhetorical elements in the Grierson vein. The difference is of course that
propaganda films promote a particular political and social movement while public-
information documentaries carry an embedded social message. But some of these
films clearly experimented with montage and dramatic and rhetorical structures, often
also present in social documentaries without the same very specific ideological and
political propaganda purpose. In Norway, as in the rest of Scandinavia, a new freer,
social documentary did not develop until the 1960s, a key film in this regard being
Erik Borge’s Nedfall/Fall-out (1964), dealing with environmental problems. Free from
the informational and educational tone of earlier social documentaries, the film
demonstrated how a social critique and agenda could be set, with a much more
understated and indirect argument in images and sounds.26
In Sweden the influence of Grierson and Flaherty, both poetic and social, was also
clearly present in the work of one of the earliest and most internationally famous of
the early documentary directors, Arne Sucksdorff. Sucksdorff did not subscribe to the
romantic notion of nature and people outside civilisation, so that his films both on
modern life in the cities and on nature were more realistic. A poetic observer of
everyday life, Sucksdorff did not have the social agenda of the Grierson tradition either
and we find strong links to the European city symphonies and poetic film tradition.27
In one of his most famous early films Människor i stad/People in the City (1947), which
won an Oscar, the realism and social focus involved in its careful portrait of Stockholm
and its different people are evident. The film has the classical voiceover of the
authoritative documentary and the Grierson tradition, while the poetic use of images,
the montage of situations and sequences build an imaginative picture of reality. A
much earlier film featuring a quite Griersonian social focus, along with experimental
montage is Stig Almquist’s (and others) Gamla Stan (1931), also on Stockholm. The
poetic realism in Sucksdorff’s films is even more pronounced in the more nature-
oriented Augustirapsodi/August Rhapsody (1940) or Vinden och floden/The Wind and the
River (1950). Even though Grierson’s influence can be seen in Sucksdorff’s films, they
also clearly resemble the early Joris Ivens films.28
As already indicated, the early start of television in Sweden, and the rather open
collaboration between the documentary film culture and that of television meant
that the social documentary was more common on television. But, as in the rest of
Scandinavia and Europe, the ‘free’ documentary and the observational format changed
the generic scene in the late 1950s. Two of the most prolific documentary film-makers
in Sweden in this period were Peter Weiss and Stefan Jarl. Both take the social
documentary in Sweden to a whole new level, and completely transform the Grierson
legacy and dominance in this genre. Very early on Weiss develops a pre-Direct Cinema
format in his films dealing with social groups on the margins of society, films like

A Social Poetics of Documentary: Grierson and the Scandinavian Documentary Tradition 87

Ansikten i skugga/Faces in Shadow (1956), about the social outcasts in Stockholm or
Enligt lag/According to the Law (1957) on young criminals or Bag de ens facader/Behind
the Monotonous Facades (1960), looking at life in modern housing areas. Weiss’s films
were a great inspiration for Stefan Jarl in his youth sociology documentaries, for
instance, his Modstrilogi (Dom kallar oss mods/They Call Us Misfits (1968), Ett
anständigt liv/A Respectable Life (1979) and Det sociala arvet/From Misfits to Yuppies
(1993). Here the social documentary moves from authoritative, poetic propaganda to
an extended documentation and narrative of lives as they unfold.

A criTicAl DAniSh TrADiTion

Left-wing views were dominant among many writers, artists and film-makers in
Denmark in the 1930s. In 1930 the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and a group of
industrial representatives decided to commission a film about Denmark to represent
the country to foreigners. Strangely enough they chose one of the most controversial
cultural luminaries, Poul Henningsen, to make the film. Henningsen had a very
modern and international outlook, was clearly inspired by Grierson and Russian
montage, and certainly not inclined to reproduce the traditional image of the nation.
Basically, he made a road movie to swinging jazz rhythms, and his montage of images
from all over Denmark were meant to present an updated version of a modern nation
on its way forward, often with a slightly ironic tone. Focusing on modern technology
rather than tourist sites, he stressed communication, collaboration and industrial
elements, with Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale image of the nation nowhere to be
seen. Public outcry at the premiere in 1935 led to the film – now considered a classical
masterpiece in the Danish Grierson tradition – being banned until 1960, when it
finally re-premiered.29
This example shows how controversial a modern film form can be and just how
tightly the dominant discourse is tied to a certain national hegemony. But the
historical dilemma is, just as with Grierson in the UK, that it was the state and private
enterprises that first used film for information and propaganda purposes, thus also
encouraging the development of a more social and critical tone. Between 1930–60 the
hands of documentary film-makers may have been tied to a large degree, but they still
tried to speak up and develop a creative and critical space within their confined and
defined territory. A number of films in this period featured a creative use of style and
technique, increasingly so from the 1940s on, but establishing an independent, critical
voice and treating social issues were more problematic. Many of the films made even
during the occupation of Denmark largely consisted of information from the
authorities or the companies for the general public. Such films could, however, have a
social agenda, as we see in Carl Th. Dreyer’s Mødrehjælpen/Maternal Help (1942), a
film clearly made in the Grierson tradition, engaging a case story to help people
identify with young mothers and prevent prejudice against children born outside
marriage, a very sensitive issue in those days. But critical films could be stopped, as
happened to another Dreyer documentary, Vandet på landet/The Water in the
Countryside (1946). Centring on the problems of getting clean water in the
countryside, the film identifies the agricultural sector as one of the main culprits.

88 The Grierson Effect

 Danish film director Jørgen
Roos filming Støj/Noise in
1967. Production: Minerva
Film & Statens Film Central
(Den levende virkelighed 1–3
[Jørgen Roos, 1989], Jørgen
Roos Film/Statens
Filmcentral)

Following opposition from those criticised, the film was shelved and has never been
shown in public.30
Despite the many restrictions in early documentary production, many of the
official films grew out of a social agenda, which in itself had a certain democratic
dimension. At the same time some different films, with a much more outspoken
critical voice, began to develop by the 1940s. One very famous example during the
occupation of Denmark was Theodor Christensen’s and a collective of directors’
film Det gælder din frihed/It Concerns Your Freedom (1946), shot illegally by people
belonging to the resistance movement and made in direct opposition to the official
collaboration with the German occupation force, which held sway until 1943. The
subject of intense debate in 1946 after its first public screening, the film in many
ways heralds a new independent documentary. Not until 1955, when an expanded
version was made based on the same original with some additional material, was the
film finally accepted as an authentic documentation of Denmark from the resistance
movement perspective.
So from the 1950s on film in Denmark and in the rest of Scandinavia began to
move in more independent and critical directions from those in the Grierson tradition.
Both Theodor Christensen and another important director, Jørgen Roos, continued a
double track of social films in this period. On the one hand, they made films on social
issues with a more neutral informational discourse, but often in a creative style. Two
examples are Jørgen Roos’s Sølv/Silver (1956), made for the famous Danish company
Georg Jensen, its subject portrayed in a very elegant and creative way, or Theodor
Christensen’s Her er banerne/Here Are the Railroads (1948), a presentation showcasing
the public Danish railway company but with imaginative use of montage, sound and
music, clearly inspired by the Grierson tradition.
But a much more critical, social agenda can be found in work by both Roos and
Christensen at this time, either in the form of films addressing more general social
problems and challenges, as in Jørgen Roos’s Slum (1952), concerning slum districts in
the big cities, or in Theodor Christensen’s even more impressive and much earlier
Mennesker i et hus/People in a House (1943) on the same theme, with its progressive use

A Social Poetics of Documentary: Grierson and the Scandinavian Documentary Tradition 89

of case studies and witnesses telling their own stories. In many ways the films of Roos
and Christensen in the 1950s and early 60s clearly represented and gave voice to the
lower social classes, to the young generations trying to find a place in the new society
after the war and to women in their quest for equality. Christensen’s
I kø foran livet/In Queue for Life (1958) or Bare en pige/Just a Girl (1959) are both
examples of this.
But a decisive move towards a more general social critique of the newly affluent
society and tendencies within it comes in the early 1960s, at the same time as a freer
and more observational cinema emerges. Christensen’s Enden på legen/The End of the
Game (1960) criticises the way society is developing by focusing on the rise of
professional sport and entertainment, engaging a rapid and aggressive montage
format. In a similar vein, Jørgen Roos’s Vi hænger i en tråd/We’re Hanging by a Thread
(1961) represents one of the first films criticising overproduction, pollution and
exploitation of people both in the national domain and the third world. The style and
form are dominated by the ironic, critical voiceover, the aggressive montage of images
contrasting the affluence of Danish society with global problems that pose a threat to
this way of life, unless some kind of solidarity in action is achieved.
Although a line can be traced back to the social documentaries started by Grierson
in the UK in the 1930s, which advocated social cohesion and solidarity, there is a wide
gap between these more official and informational films, and the aggressive and
critical voice of modern documentaries.31 By 1960 Scandinavian documentary film
moves in new directions and the Grierson heritage is consigned to history.

noTeS

1. See Jørgen Roos, Den levende virkelighed – historien om dansk dokumentarfilm 1–3/Living
Reality – The History of Danish Documentary Film, film series made for DR and SFC, 1989.
2. Roos, Den levende virkelighed.
3. Søren Birkvad and Jan Anders Diesen, Autentiske inntrykk. Møte med ni skandinaviske
dokumentarfilmskaparar/Authentic Impressions: Meeting with Nine Scandinavian Documentary
Film Directors (Oslo: Samlaget, 1994), pp. 21ff.
4. Sara Brinch and Gunnar Iversen, Virkelighetsbilder. Norsk dokumentarfilm gjenom hundre år/
Reality Images: One Hundred Years of Documentary Film (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 2001).
5. Christensen, 1938, quoted in John Ernst (ed.), Theodor Christensen – en handling af
billeder/Theodor Christensen – and Action in Images (Copenhagen: Rhodos, 1974), pp. 80f
(my translation).
6. Julius Bomholt, ‘Foran fjernsynet’/‘In Front of Television’, Danmarks Radios Årbog (1953–4),
pp. 1–3 (my translation)
7. Ian Aitken, Film and Reform: John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement (London:
Routledge, 1990).
8. See Ib Bondebjerg, Virkelighedens fortællinger. Den danske tv-dokumentarismes historie/
Narratives of Reality: History of the Danish TV-Documentary (Frederiksberg: Forlaget
Samfundslitteratur, 2008); and Ib Bondebjerg, Virkelighedsbilleder. Den moderne danske
dokumentarfilm/Reality Images: The Modern Danish Documentary Film (Frederiksberg:
Forlaget Samfundslitteratur, 2012).

90 The Grierson Effect

 9. Leif Furhammer, Med TV i verkligheten. SVT och de dokumentära genrerna/With TV in Reality:
SVT and the Documentary Genres (Stockholm: Stiftelsen Etermedierna i Sverige, 1995),
pp. 18ff.
10. Forsyth Hardy (ed.), Grierson on Documentary (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), p. 258.
11. Paul Rotha, 1954, cited in Elaine Bell, ‘The Origins of British Television Documentary’, in
John Corner (ed.), Documentary and the Mass Media (London: Edward Arnold, 1986), p. 71.
12. Jan Anders Diesen, Fakta i forandring. Fjernsynsdokumentaren i NRK 1960–2000/Factual
Genres in Transition: TV-Documentaries in NRK 1960–2000 (Kristianssand: Ij-forlaget, 2005),
pp. 42ff.
13. Ibid., pp. 53f.
14. Furhammer, Med TV i verkligheten, pp. 7f.
15. See Carl Plantinga, Rhetoric and Representation in Non-fiction Film (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997); Bondebjerg, Virkelighedens fortællinger; and Bondebjerg, Engaging
with Reality: Documentary and Globalization (Bristol/Chicago, IL: Intellect/Chicago
University Press, 2013).
16. Christensen and Roos, 1936, quoted in Ernst, Theodor Christensen, p. 48.
17. Plantinga, Rhetoric and Representation in Non-fiction Film; and Bondebjerg, Virkelighedens
fortællinger.
18. Christensen and Roos, 1936, quoted in Ernst, Theodor Christensen, p. 48.
19. Christensen, 1937, Er det muligt i Danmark?/Is This Possible in Denmark?, quoted in Ernst,
Theodor Christensen, pp. 74f
20. Ibid., p. 75.
21. Christensen, 1938, quoted in ibid., pp. 80–1 (my translation).
22. Chistensen, 1948, quoted in ibid., p. 90.
23. Christensen, 1948a, quoted in Carl Nørrested and Christian Alsted (eds), Kortfilmen og
staten/The Short Film and the State) (Copenhagen: Forlaget Eventus, 1987).
24. Brinch and Iversen, Virkelighetsbilder, pp. 51ff.
25. Ibid., pp. 79f.
26. Ibid., p. 96.
27. Ingrid Esping, Dokumentärfilmen som tidsresa – Modstrilogien/The Documentary as Time
Travel – The Mods Trilogy, Dissertation: Lunds University, 2007, pp. 53f; and Bjørn
Sørensen, Å fange virkeligheten. Dokumentarfilmens århundre/To Catch Reality: A Century of
Documentary (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 2001), p. 173.
28. Ibid., p. 174.
29. See Bondebjerg, Virkelighedens fortellinger; and Sørensen, Å fange virkeligheten.
30. Nørrested and Alsted, Kortfilmen og staten, p. 271.
31. Ib Bondebjerg, ‘Between War and Welfare: Danish Documentaries in the 1950s,’ Aura vol. 2
no. 3 (1996), pp. 30–56.

referenceS

Aitken, Ian, Film and Reform: John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement (London:
Routledge, 1990).
Bell, Elaine, ‘The Origins of British Television Documentary’, in John Corner (ed.), Documentary
and the Mass Media (London: Edward Arnold, 1986).

A Social Poetics of Documentary: Grierson and the Scandinavian Documentary Tradition 91

Birkvad, Søren and Jan Anders Diesen, Autentiske inntrykk. Møte med ni skandinaviske
dokumentarfilmskaparar/Authentic Impressions: Meeting with Nine Scandinavian Documentary
Film Directors (Oslo: Samlaget, 1994).
Bomholt, Julius, ‘Foran fjernsynet’/‘In Front of television’, Danmarks Radios Årbog (1953–4),
pp. 1–3.
Bondebjerg, Ib, ‘Narratives of Reality: Documentary Film and Television in a Cognitive and
Pragmatic Perspective’, Nordicom Review vol. 1 (1994), pp. 65–87.
Bondebjerg, Ib, ‘Between War and Welfare: Danish Documentaries in the 1950s’, Aura vol. II
no. 3 (1996), pp. 30–56.
Bondebjerg, Ib, Virkelighedens fortællinger. Den danske tv-dokumentarismes historie/Narratives of
Reality: History of the Danish TV-Documentary (Frederiksberg: Forlaget Samfundslitteratur,
2008.
Bondebjerg, Ib, Virkelighedsbilleder. Den moderne danske dokumentarfilm/Reality Images:
The Modern Danish Documentary Film) (Frederiksberg: Forlaget Samfundslitteratur, 2012).
Bondebjerg, Ib, Engaging with Reality: Documentary and Globalization (Bristol/Chicago, IL:
Intellect/Chicago University Press, 2013).
Brinch, Sara and Gunnar Iversen, Virkelighetsbilder. Norsk dokumentarfilm gjenom hundre år/
Reality Images: One Hundred Years of Documentary Film (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 2001).
Diesen, Jan Anders, Fakta i forandring. Fjernsynsdokumentaren i NRK 1960–2000/Factual Genres
in Transition: TV-Documentaries in NRK 1960–2000 (Kristianssand: Ij-forlaget, 2005).
Ernst, John, Theodor Christensen – en handling af billeder/Theodor Christensen – and Action in
Images (Copenhagen: Rhodos, 1974).
Esping, Ingrid, Dokumentärfilmen som tidsresa – Modstrilogien/The Documentary as Time Travel –
The Mods Trilogy, Dissertation: Lunds University, 2007.
Furhammer, Leif, Med TV i verkligheten. SVT och de dokumentära genrerna/With TV in Reality:
SVT and the Documentary Genres (Stockholm: Stiftelsen Etermedierna i Sverige, 1995).
Furhammer, Leif, ‘From Affluence to Poverty: The Early Swedish TV Documentary’, in Monica
Djerf-Pierre and Mats Ekström (eds), Swedish Broadcasting: Communicative Ethos, Genres and
Institutional Change (Göteborg: Nordicom, 2013), pp. 241–61.
Hardy, Forsyth (ed.), Grierson on Documentary (London: Faber and Faber, 1966).
Nørrested, Carl and Christian Alsted (eds), Kortfilmen og staten/The Short Film and the State
(Copenhagen: Forlaget Eventus, 1987).
Plantinga, Carl, Rhetoric and Representation in Non-fiction Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997).
Roos, Jørgen, Den levende virkelighed – historien om dansk dokumentarfilm 1–3/Living Reality – The
History of Danish Documentary Film, film series made for DR and SFC, 1989.
Sørensen, Bjørn, Å fange virkeligheten. Dokumentarfilmens århundre/To Catch Reality: A Century of
Documentary (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 2001).
Sørensen, Jørgen, Danmarksfilmen og Danske billeder/The Denmark Film and Danish Images
(Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1980).

92 The Grierson Effect

6
The Griersonian Influence and Its Challenges:
Malaya, Singapore, Hong Kong (1939–73)

Ian Aitken

The development of official British film-making in Malaysia, Singapore and Hong

Kong after 1939 was influenced by a division which emerged between a ‘Colonial
Office’ (CO) and a ‘Griersonian’ approach to such endeavours. The phrase ‘CO
approach’ refers to a practice of official film-making adopted by civil servants within
the CO and Foreign Office (FO); while the phrase ‘Griersonian approach’ indicates that
developed by individuals associated with the British documentary film movement. I
am not, therefore, employing the latter phrase in a narrow way, to denote ideas or
individuals especially closely associated with the figure of John Grierson, but in this
more expansive sense. For present, introductory purposes, the ‘Griersonian approach’
to official film-making can be defined here as far-reaching in aspiration, scope and
authorial intervention, while the ‘CO approach’ can be characterised as quite the
contrary.
On 20 September 1939 the then British government inaugurated a Ministry of
Information (MoI) charged with overseeing the production of wartime propaganda.
However, the CO was uncomfortable with the MoI because the latter organisation was
staffed to a considerable extent by personnel from outside the traditional civil service.
This was also particularly the case for the Films Division of the MoI, which, in addition
to employing a ‘glittering array of intellectuals’, also eventually housed the Crown Film
Unit, staffed by Griersonians (some close to Grierson, others less so) long mistrusted
by civil servants.1 Shortly after the MoI came into being the CO, in reflexive response,
also sought to establish a Colonial Film Unit (CFU), with a mandate to promote Britain
and the war effort within the colonies. However, because the MoI was the sovereign
body charged with overseeing wartime propaganda production, and against the
innermost wishes of the CO, the CFU had to be established within the MoI rather than
the CO. Thereafter, the CFU worked under the twofold command of Films Division
and the CO, an awkward arrangement which led to difficulties; difficulties which
became heightened when the Griersonians within the GPO Film Unit became more
actively involved within the MoI, and, in particular, when the GPO Film Unit was
transformed into the Crown Film Unit in December 1940. As the central government
official film unit, Crown now had, or was perceived to have, the upper hand.
More rifts now developed within Films Division, between Griersonians and their
allies, and more conservative figures associated with the CO and CFU. Differences
came to the fore, and, at meetings of Films Division, arguments between these two
camps broke out recurrently. The picture which emerges here is one of sizeable

The Griersonian Influence and Its Challenges: Malaya, Singapore, Hong Kong (1939–73) 93
 antipathy.2 Typically, that antipathy
was, as mentioned earlier, centred
upon the different types of film the
Griersonians and the CO-CFU wished
to make. The frequently posited
‘conservative’ position – exemplified by
the films of the CFU – was that MoI
films should be cost-efficient, and have
limited, directly achievable objectives.
However, more ambitious members
of the documentary film movement
believed that such an approach
was insufficient. So, for example,
Paul Rotha complained that the
conservative policy of producing
‘5-minute shorts’, ‘just so many crumbs
at the table’, was a betrayal of the
‘documentary idea’.3 This conflict
between the two camps continued
after the war, and influenced the
diffusion of the British official film
into the colonies and dominions of the
British Commonwealth up to the late
1960s. As part of that diffusion, and
for a variety of reasons, the Griersonians tended to end up in the larger territories,
the CO-CFU in the smaller. While, therefore, the Griersonian ‘documentary idea’
nourished substantial ‘growing points’ in the dominions of Canada, Australia and New
Zealand, no such strong and long-lasting Griersonian sustenance took root in the
colonies of Hong Kong, Malaya and Singapore, within which, and in contrast, it was
the CO-CFU tradition which prevailed.4 However, that is not to say that no Griersonian
encroachment occurred in these colonies. That was not the case, and this chapter will
seek to set out what incursion did occur; how that intrusion was challenged by
conservative forces, including those of the CO-CFU; and how Griersonism somehow
managed to endure within the unpropitious colonial waters of the region.
That endurance was, initially at least, strongest in the colony of Malaya, a colony
whose natural resources were of crucial importance for the ailing British economy
during the postwar period. However, that very importance was also eventually to deal
an ultimate blow to the Griersonian presence there. Malaya was simply too imperative
a place for control of official film-making to be left in the hands of idealistic, but also
unrealistic, Griersonians. However, the Griersonians were certainly there at the
beginning of things, and in number. The Malayan Film Unit (MFU) was established in
October 1946, and was the most important official film unit in the southeast Asia
region, operating in Malaya, Singapore, British North Borneo and Sarawak; and with
links to Hong Kong. There is a straight line to the Crown Film Unit and Griersonian
tradition here. In 1938, Alexander Shaw, Ralph Keene and George Noble, then working
for the Strand Film Unit, led by Paul Rotha, made Five Faces of Malaya for the Malayan

94 The Grierson Effect

Five Faces of Malaya (1938)

government. In 1945 a group of film-makers from the Crown Film Unit also entered
Malaya as part of the British Army Film Unit, remaining there until October 1946.5
Over this period of around one year these film-makers, headed by the Griersonian
Ralph Elton, trained up to nine locals in the hope that a permanent film unit could
eventually be established. In what would also become the model of choice adopted
in Singapore and Hong Kong, Elton hoped that a ‘European’ film-maker, a ‘single
knowledgeable man’, would preside over such locals.6 When the Army Film Unit
disbanded in October 1946, and the Crown film-makers returned home, the group
trained by Elton and the others formed the nucleus of the MFU. The unit was,
therefore, initially staffed by people schooled in the documentary film movement
ideal. However, this was not to last for long, as, to quote Max Weber, the ‘iron cage of
modernity’ and ‘instrumental rationality’ quickly took hold in the colony, under the
pressure of sectarian, and anticolonial Cold War conflict.
It was the ‘Malayan Emergency’ of 1948–60 which largely put paid to the
Griersonian influence in the MFU. This was a period in which Cold War conflict with
the Communist world was being fought throughout Southeast Asia, and, in Malaya,
this clash took the form of a struggle between the colonial Malayan government and
Chinese Communist insurgents. As mentioned earlier, the Malayan economy was
extremely important to postwar Britain, and, because of this, Britain committed
significant security resources in order to protect it. As part of this, official film-making

The Griersonian Influence and Its Challenges: Malaya, Singapore, Hong Kong (1939–73) 95
was also turned into a weapon of the state. In March 1950 Stanley Hawes, then
producer-in-chief of the Australian National Film Board, was commissioned to write a
report on the future ‘purpose and role’ of the MFU in the context of the deteriorating
military situation. Hawes had Griersonian connections, having worked with Paul
Rotha at the Strand Film Unit during the 1930s, and with John Grierson himself
at the National Film Board of Canada, between 1940 and 1946. However, Hawes
certainly did not adopt a ‘liberal’ Griersonian approach in his report on the future of
official film-making in Malaya. His view, similar, admittedly, to that adopted by
Grierson in Canada during the war years, was that the official film now had to play a
more effective and directive role. Production at the MFU would have to be greatly
increased, and the remit of the films produced become more functional. Broad-based
authorial articulations of the democratic ‘documentary idea’ were no longer considered
appropriate.7
In September 1950, five months after the appearance of the Hawes Report,
Hugh Carleton Greene arrived in Malaya to head the newly established Emergency
Information Services (EIS), a body focusing on the production and dissemination of
anti-Communist propaganda.8 Although the MFU was not directly under the control
of EIS, but part of the less instrumental Department of Information, Greene
nevertheless intervened directly in the affairs of the unit from the off, insisting that it
take on a more purposive role.9 Neither Greene, nor other senior figures within the
colonial government, liked what they saw coming out of the early ‘Griersonian’ MFU.
The first head of the unit, H. W. Govan, had been a combat cameraman with the Army
Film and Photographic Unit. He had also had substantial contact with Elton and the
Crown film-makers during the early days of the unit. Govan displayed a propensity for
making ‘social-realist’ films with a liberal edge. The colonial government disapproved
of this, and his contract was cancelled in late 1950.10 However, Govan’s replacement,
B. H. Hipkins, continued in the same vein, and he too was eventually sacked, in 1952.
Hipkins was personally removed by Sir Gerald Templer, who arrived in Malaya
in February 1952, having been appointed by Winston Churchill as both high
commissioner and director of operations under the Emergency, an unusual dual
civilian-military command in a British colony, and one which reflected the felt
severity of the crisis.11 Like Greene, Templer also felt that the information services
required rationalisation, and, in August 1952, he received a report from an A. D. C.
Peterson, in which it was argued that what was needed was ‘an extremely vigorous
propaganda effort, carried out in accordance with a coherent plan, by all departments
and levels of Government’.12 In October 1952 Peterson was appointed director-
general information services, and one of his first acts was to amalgamate the EIS
and Department of Information, thus also bringing the MFU into the systematic
campaigns of propaganda soon to be unleashed.13 It is also at this point that an
important figure for this chapter arrives on the scene. In the same month that the
Peterson Report appeared Templer both sacked Hipkins, and appointed a Tom Hodge
to the posts of director of Films Division and film advisor to the MFU. When he
arrived in September, Hodge’s primary responsibility was to ensure that, thereafter,
official film-making would play a more focused role in helping shape ‘the information
services of this country into a single and more effective weapon against
communism’.14 Hodge went on to develop a reputation as a thoroughly pragmatic

96 The Grierson Effect

leader-producer, and, also one of the key players in the development of the British
colonial official film in Malaya, Singapore and Hong Kong.
What effectively happened in Malaya between 1950 and 1957, when Malaysian
personnel took over the MFU against the context of Malayan independence, was that a
CO tradition replaced a Griersonian one. The key agent in this changeover, Hodge, had
virtually no contact with the Griersonian tradition, but considerable contact with the
CO-CFU tradition. Hodge joined the FO in 1939, and was part of the wave of new
appointments at the beginning of the war to support the war effort. He first worked
at the MoI between 1939 and 1942, helping to make unspecified ‘educational films’.
From 1942 to 1943 he was at the MoI in Chicago, and, between 1944 and December
1951, was director of films and publications at the British Information Service in New
York, where he co-ordinated the making of ‘public information’ films aimed at the
US audience.15 After 1942, therefore, Hodge worked completely outside of any
Griersonian tradition at all. His first appointment in Southeast Asia was as film
advisor to the Commissioner General’s Office Singapore in December 1951, on the
basis of his background as a film propaganda co-ordinator, and against the context of
further deteriorating military situations in Singapore and Malaya.
While all these events were taking place in Southeast Asia, back in London the CFU
was struggling to survive against a context of budget cuts, and an expected cessation
of all funding in 1955. The head of the CFU, from 1939 until the unit’s demise in 1955,
was William Sellers, an individual who had suffered at the hands of the Griersonians
during the war, and who, consequently, bore them no great love during the postwar
period. Hodge became close to Sellers from at least as early as 1950, and corresponded
with him frequently over the 1951–60 period. As a consequence of this, and also his
background in the FO, Hodge came to both associate himself with the CO-CFU stance
on official film-making, and distance himself from the early ‘Griersonian’ camp
that he had found at the MFU when appointed in Singapore in 1951. However, the
Sellers–Hodge alliance was also to be reinforced by a third major player, at more or less
the same time, when a John Lawrence Murray was appointed head of the Hong Kong
Public Relations Office, in September 1950. From 1950 to the mid-60s Hodge would
come to dominate the development of the official film in Malaya/Malaysia and
Singapore, with Murray doing the same in Hong Kong. And behind both figures was
Sellers, as a constant reference point and mentor. This exceptionally anti-Griersonian
troika then proceeded to shape the progress of the British official film in the region up
till at least the mid-1960s.
Murray had been a Fleet Street journalist who, like Hodge, joined the Foreign
Office around the outbreak of the war. Murray went on to work as an FO press
attaché in China. In 1944–5 he was stationed in Chongqing, central China, where
the Chinese government had relocated following the Japanese invasion of 1937.
In Chongqing Murray ran a ‘largish film strip production unit’.16 He did, therefore,
have some experience with basic forms of official film-making. However, he was not
overly sensitive towards the medium, being essentially a newspaperman. The film
strips he would have made at that time – on the frontline of the Sino-Japanese
conflict – would also have been highly tendentious and functional in character.
Between 1945 and 1949–50 Murray was situated at the FO’s Guangdong office,
on the southern Chinese border with Hong Kong. He then became acting public

The Griersonian Influence and Its Challenges: Malaya, Singapore, Hong Kong (1939–73) 97
relations officer in Hong Kong following the resignation of the permanent officer in
the summer of 1950.
Once this position was made permanent in September, Murray immediately looked
into the possibility of starting up an official film-making unit in Hong Kong. However,
he did not seek the MFU’s guidance in this because he had already fallen under the
influence of Sellers. Even before he gained this post, civil servants at the CO in London
had been in touch with Murray about how to develop the official film in Hong Kong;
and, from late 1950 onwards, Sellers himself was in regular contact with him
concerning this issue. Initially, Murray had thought that Hong Kong might look to the
MFU for help. However, he was strongly persuaded against such a course of action by
Sellers and the CO. As far as the latter was concerned, the MFU had been established
completely outside the CO-CFU system, and by Griersonians; and, in 1950, neither the
CO, nor Sellers, wanted official film-making in Hong Kong to fall into Griersonian
hands. Murray quickly fell in with this point of view, writing, in 1951, that he now
accepted the ‘CO dictum’ that involvement with the MFU would be a mistake.17
Murray went on to correspond with Sellers and others at the CO throughout 1951, and
what becomes clear from this correspondence is that Sellers and the CO tried hard to
direct Murray away from the MFU, and towards the CO-CFU. However, Murray did not
require much persuasion. In February 1952 Murray also came into contact with Hodge
for the first time. While he was still in Singapore, and just weeks before taking over
control of the Griersonian MFU, Hodge visited Murray in Hong Kong. At this meeting
Hodge indicated that he had considerable respect for Sellers and the CFU.18 Hodge
and Murray struck up an immediate rapport, Murray finding Hodge ‘refreshingly
realistic’.19 The term ‘realistic’ is significant here, and Murray’s understanding of
Hodge’s position as ‘realistic’, would come to shape the development of the official film
in Hong Kong. Hodge’s ‘refreshing realism’ came with a health warning:

His warning was in effect: Beware that you don’t employ some bright young director or
producer who is more interested in making a name for himself than in producing the kind of
film that you want in Hong Kong … who will want to produce one prize-winning documentary
once a year in preference to a number of little films, none of them perhaps in the great cinema
class, but which will do the job you want done … . Hodge was full of praise for Sellers and
the integrity of the CFU, but discouraging about the likelihood of recruiting an expert –
particularly from the defunct Crown – who would put the job before his own career.20

So, Hodge warned Murray against appointing someone from Crown, and this
reinforced the messages which Murray had been receiving from Sellers, and others at
the CO since 1950. Murray now fully agreed that official film-making in Hong Kong
should take the form of ‘little films … which will do the job’. Beyond this, though,
Hodge’s denigration of ‘bright young directors’ and Crown also led the bureaucratic
Murray to the conviction that, unlike Crown and the MFU, film-making in Hong Kong
should be controllably small in scale. In March 1952 Murray was offered a large sum of
money by the World Health Organisation (WHO) to establish Hong Kong as a regional
hub for health-based documentary film-making. But, by then, and under the influence
of Sellers, Hodge and the CO, Murray had come to the firm conclusion that such a
large-scale enterprise, which might come to resemble Crown and the MFU, was to be

98 The Grierson Effect

avoided. Writing in March 1952, shortly after meeting Hodge, Murray expostulated
that he ‘could see us being saddled with a young Crown Film Unit (or, perhaps worse
still, Malayan F.U.) of our own … . So I dug my heels in more firmly than ever.’21
Murray did not want a large film unit staffed by experienced film-makers – possibly
even recruited from Crown. By 1952, when it was disbanded, the Crown Film Unit had
established a strong reputation among liberal-progressive circles, and many within
those circles disapproved of its abolition. However, Crown had always been viewed
with suspicion by the generality of civil servants. The tribulations which Sellers had
encountered at the hands of Crown personnel during the war would also have been
communicated to Murray. Because of all this, Murray turned down the WHO, and the
opportunity to develop Hong Kong into a major international centre of documentary
film-making was lost.
From 1952 onwards Murray continued to keep in close touch with both Hodge and
Sellers. In 1955 he also noted the closure of the CFU and broached the idea of whether
someone might be seconded from the unit to start up official film-making in Hong
Kong, perhaps even ‘Sellers himself’.22 However, Sellers was re-employed within the
CO as advisor on overseas film production, and Murray’s chance to align himself
formally with his mentor had passed.23 Despite this setback, Murray continued his
efforts to establish a film unit in Hong Kong, with these finally coming to fruition
in 1959, when a small-scale Hong Kong Film Unit (HKFU) was eventually formed.
However, it was a unit very much in the image of the Murray–Sellers–Hodge troika,
and the CO-CFU tradition. This is made clear by Murray, writing to the CO in January
1955, reasserting views on the type of person required as films officer, views
indistinguishable from those expressed by Hodge in 1952:

I don’t, above all, want a bright young arty Director who thinks he is going to make a little
annual gem for the Venice or Edinburgh Festivals and lets the rest go hang. I want a real
worker interested in films as a medium of propaganda and teaching who is prepared to make
simple straight-forward documentary and educational films. And plenty of them! 24

That ‘real worker’ turned out to be Ben Hart, who had previously worked as a film
director with the Federal Information Service Film Unit in Lagos. Sellers had initially
pointed Hart out to Murray, and, true to his guru, Murray also came to the conclusion
that Hart ‘was ideally suited for our particular job’.25
Murray’s original vision for the HKFU had involved, among the making of many
‘little films’, the occasional production of what he termed ‘prestige’ projects. These
would ‘promote’ Hong Kong in a more general way, and would be aimed at an
international, as well as Hong Kong audience. Murray also imagined that these films
would be outsourced, rather than made by his small-scale unit. In 1961 Murray had
the opportunity to put this strategy into effect when the first of the unit’s prestige
films: This Is Hong Kong (1961), appeared. This Is Hong Kong was made in Hong Kong
by the Hong Kong branch of Cathay Film Services, whose base was in Singapore; and
the producer of the film was Hodge. Hodge had left the MFU in June 1957 in some
acrimony as the unit ‘Malayanised’, and, later that year, he took up employment in the
Cathay organisation, where he was appointed as director of both the feature-film arm
Cathay-Keris and the documentary film arm Cathay Film Services. It was, perhaps,

The Griersonian Influence and Its Challenges: Malaya, Singapore, Hong Kong (1939–73) 99
inevitable, then, that, in 1960, Murray would turn to Hodge, now ensconced in this
senior commercial position, in order to initiate discussions about This Is Hong Kong.
This Is Hong Kong, does, however, suffer from the fact that it was outsourced.
Largely made by people from outside Hong Kong, the film relies on a number of
well-worn stereotypes of the city (the mix of ancient and modern, East and West,
etc.). While one of the film’s main themes is that of the fast-growing population,
remarkably, no mention is made of the cause of that problem: refugees escaping from
Communist China. Neither Murray nor Hodge had any desire to include such a
controversial political subject in their film. The outsourcing also leads to a certain
distance between the filmic narrative and the ordinary Chinese people depicted. In
other parts of the film a rather condescending, superior attitude to the locals also
comes through. However, the film does manage to attain a degree of human focus
sometimes, and this may be put down to the intervention of its scriptwriter and
director, Noni Wright. Wright (no relation to Basil Wright) was a New Zealander who
had worked at the BBC in London during the war. She joined the MFU in 1953, shortly
after Hodge, and left the MFU shortly after him, in 1958, to continue working under
him at Cathay Film Services and Cathay-Keris. She died prematurely in a plane crash
in 1964. This Is Hong Kong was probably Wright’s most important film. However,
and despite her input, the resulting film clearly bears the overall imprint of the
Hodge–Murray model. This Is Hong Kong marked the apotheosis of that model within
the HKFU, but an apotheosis which quickly faded away.
When Murray retired in 1963 he was replaced by Nigel Watt, a civil servant of
whom little is known, other than that he had been Murray’s deputy since at least 1960.
Few developments of note happened over the next few years. However, in 1965 a
potentially Griersonian space opened up when Ben Hart left the HKFU, and was
replaced by Brian Salt. Salt had a much wider background in film than Hart, and had
been connected to Gaumont British Instructional Film in the early 1950s, directing
two films shot in Singapore: Citizen of Singapore (1950) and Study of a Port (1951).
These films were shot in indirect association with the MFU during a period in which
the unit still retained a Griersonian character. In the early to mid-1950s Salt was also
appointed at the National Film Board (NFB) of Canada, in an attempt to improve
technical standards there, particularly in the field of animation.26 However, while
there appears to be a Griersonian connection here, it seems that Salt was not
particularly close to the Griersonians who then worked in the NFB.27 All of this
indicates familiarity with the nonfiction film, and, also, a potential Griersonian
affiliation. However, this was not borne out in practice later, in Hong Kong. Salt also
seems to have turned more towards fiction film-making as his career developed. In
1958, for example, he made the drama-documentary children’s film Toto and the
Poachers, which won a prize at the Venice Film Festival of that year; and, just before
coming to Hong Kong, he was employed as a director on the British television Scotland
Yard police series Gideon’s Way (1964).
Salt’s first major production at the HKFU, The Magic Stone: A Legend from Hong Kong
(1965), was an exercise in drama-documentary. Designed to be another HKFU ‘prestige’
film, Magic Stone was a twenty-four-minute colour film which could be compared in style
to some of the ‘story documentaries’ produced by the GPO Film Unit and Crown Film Unit
during the 1930s and 40s. However, the comparison ends there and, with its use of quaint

1 00 The Grierson Effect

local legends, the film had no social, and very little aesthetic significance. Salt only stayed
at the HKFU until 1968, and his departure may have been hastened by the furore that
broke out over Magic Stone, which was not only panned by local critics as a ‘flop’ and an
‘embarrassment’, but also managed to recoup only $5,000 of its $400,000 production
cost.28 This was a huge loss for a British colonial official film, and created a considerable
scandal, leading to both Watt and Salt coming under substantial criticism.29 Nevertheless,
during his period in charge of the HKFU, Salt did manage to steer the style of the HKFU
significantly away from Murray’s Hodge-influenced approach.
After Salt left, local cameraman Charles Wang became head of the HKFU, though
he stayed for only a few months more, before leaving to work in the private sector.
Despite this, though, Wang was an important figure and his cinematography
distinguishes some of the most affecting films to emerge from the HKFU. A case
in point here is the 1965 A Race against People, which deals with the problems of
population growth, and house construction. While the narrative is relatively prosaic,
the quality of the photography in A Race against People is of a high order, and many
individual shots seem to have the detailed organised quality associated with still
photographs. Clearly, given the fact that none of the scenes were rehearsed, Wang
must have waited a while to obtain the image he wanted. A particular kind of
compositional structure also emerges in these shots and sequences. The shot and
sequence are often divided (by the wall of a building, or such), and have close-ups in
the extreme foreground, and lines of direction leading to small areas of light and sky at
the very back of the image. In addition to such composed photography, Wang is also
able to capture the rhythms of movement well, as he waits for striking rhythms to
emerge from people passing before the camera, rhythms which generate effective
pictorial patterns. All of this is also reinforced by Wang’s use of colour, which is both
subtle and organised. At the level of narrative and plot, A Race against People may have
been about what the commentary refers to as the ‘gigantic project’ of the rehousing
scheme, but Wang also focuses on the lesser, more human-oriented details of the
Cantonese culture. Many shots, for example, show children, playing or sleeping; and
many others show women caring for these children, while carrying out everyday tasks.
Here, it could also be argued, the imagery does not really support the narrative in the
way that the film’s sponsors would have expected. Wang is clearly an individual whose
work merits closer study, and, in many ways, A Race against People could be said to be
superior to the supposed flagship signature film of the HKFU, This Is Hong Kong.
The final period of the HKFU dates from the point that Wang’s successor, Albert
Young, took over its leadership in late 1968, to its demise, some time in 1973. It also
seems that it was in this period, when the unit went into decline, that Griersonian
moments become more evident. It is almost as though, as television loomed on the
horizon, the unit became simultaneously less important to government officials, and
more autonomous in terms of its film-making practice. Much praise here has to go to
Nigel Watt, who both protected his film-makers when they were criticised, and gave
them a longish leash. This was very different from the Murray era. During this final
period a few more significant films were made, and, like Wang, Albert Young also
figures as perhaps one of the most important film-makers to emerge from the HKFU.
This was not the view of government officials at the time, however, who felt that
Young had played his part in the unit’s failure.30 However, looking at the films

The Griersonian Influence and Its Challenges: Malaya, Singapore, Hong Kong (1939–73) 101
produced under Young reveals that it was their Griersonian qualities that these
officials disliked most, as becomes clear when a comparison is made between two of
the last films to emerge from the HKFU: the outsourced Port of Hong Kong (1972), and
the more ‘Griersonian’, and film unit-produced, The Sea and the Sky (1972).
Port of Hong Kong suffers from many of the problems which afflict outsourced
official films. Made by a London-based company with no intimate understanding of
Hong Kong, it is forced to rely on stereotypical conceptions of the colony. The result is
verbose generalisation about ‘British pragmatism’, ‘Chinese common sense’, etc. Lack
of a close knowledge of the subject also forces the film to rely heavily on statistics,
while the jarring soundtrack, which can only be described as a sort of ‘rock-Chinese’, is
generally inappropriate. The Sea and the Sky, however, is another matter. The original
press briefing suggests that the film was expected to delineate ‘the changes that have
taken place in the fishing industry in Hong Kong since the end of the Second World
War’.31 What comes to mind here, in terms of this expectation, is John Grierson’s
1929 film Drifters, and the comparison with Drifters is also apposite in other respects
too. As with Drifters, the officials who commissioned The Sea and the Sky were
expecting a standard account. In both cases, those officials got nothing of the kind.
The Sea and the Sky is, actually, strongly reminiscent of Drifters, and follows the same
narrative model of Grierson’s iconic film. As in Drifters, the focus is not on the fishing
industry, but on one trawler. We also see the various stages of the process of fishing,
from catching, to selling at market, and later distribution of the product. Like Drifters,
The Sea and the Sky also concentrates on a few individuals, in this case, one family, and
its montage sequences of the ship’s engines and machinery are similar to those in
Drifters. The Sea and the Sky is definitely not an example of ‘decline’, though it is
obvious why it would have disappointed government officials. Young’s film does not
really ‘promote’ anything very clearly, and is actually an exercise in film-making, rather
than promotion, and one which drifts well away from its remit. This is an intimate
study, showing a sensitivity for the fishermen and the natural environment. These
film-makers are clearly familiar with Hong Kong, and this makes a difference. The Sea
and the Sky was a considerable achievement for the HKFU as late as 1972, only a year
before it ceased operations.
This chapter clearly shows that the development of the official film in Malaya,
Singapore and Hong Kong was directly affected by the rivalry which broke out between
the Griersonian and CO-CFU traditions during World War II. It is equally evident
that, in these colonies, it was the CO-CFU tradition which prevailed. As Malaya and
Singapore gained independence in the late 1950s and early 60s, the British official film
also faded away from these places, as decolonisation ushered in a localisation which
affected production. However, as Britain’s ‘last colony’, the British official film
continued in Hong Kong long after it disappeared from Malaya and Singapore.
Ironically, though, it was not the expatriates who finally introduced an effective
Griersonian element into the HKFU, but the locals: Wang and Young. As the HKFU
faded away, that element was also carried on into the field of the television
documentaries produced by the Hong Kong public broadcasting organisations which
appeared in the late 1960s and early 70s. Here, Rotha’s ‘documentary idea’ finally took
root, as critical, investigative documentary films began to appear on subjects such as
poverty, drug-taking and social inequality.

1 02 The Grierson Effect

NoTeS

1. Nicholas Pronay and Jeremy Croft, ‘British Film Censorship and Propaganda Policy during
the Second World War’, in James Curran and Vincent Porter (eds), British Cinema History
(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983), p. 153.
2. Jo Fox, ‘John Grierson, His “Documentary Boys” and the British Ministry of Information,
1939–42’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television vol. 25 no. 3 (2005), p. 357.
3. Ibid., p. 360.
4. Ibid., p. 364.
5. Hassan Abdul Muthalib, ‘End of Empire: The Films of the Malayan Film Unit in 1950s
British Malaya’, in Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe (eds), Film and the End of Empire
(London: BFI, 2011), p. 178.
6. Ralph Elton, Letter to Basil Wright, January 1946 (BFI Special Collections, London).
Quoted in Tom Rice, ‘Voices of Malaya’, February 2010, Colonial Film Website,
www.colonialfilm.org.uk.
7. Muthalib, ‘End of Empire’, p. 181.
8. Hugh Carleton Greene, brother of novelist Graham Greene, was associated with the British
documentary film movement during the 1930s and 40s. An ex-journalist, he was appointed
head of the BBC German Service in 1940, dealing with political propaganda and covert
intelligence. In 1945, he became head of the BBC East European Service. He arrived in Malaya
in September 1950 as head of the Emergency information services before returning to Britain
and the BBC in the mid-1950s. He was appointed director-general of the BBC in 1960.
9. Muthalib, ‘End of Empire’, p. 184.
10. Ibid.
11. Peter Lowe, Contending with Nationalism and Communism: British Policy towards South-East
Asia (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 48.
12. A. D. C. Peterson, quoted in Kumar Ramakrishna, ‘“Transmogrifying” Malaya: The Impact of
Sir Gerald Templer (1952–4)’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies vol. 32 no. 1 (2001), p. 87.
13. Ramakrishna, ‘ “Transmogrifying” Malaya’, p. 86.
14. ‘Child-Prodigy Gets an Expert’, Straits Times vol. 6 no. 10 (6 October 1952), p. 9.
15. Editorial commentary for Tom Hodge, ‘Eleven Years of the Malayan Film Unit: A Record of
Solid Achievement’, Educational Screen and Audio Visual Guide vol. 36 no. 10 (1957), p. 538.
16. Hong Kong Records Service (HKRS) PRO/204, Murray, Letter to Carstairs, 19 March 1952,
para. 12.
17. HKRS IS 8/576/51, Murray, Memo to Hon. Colonial Secretary, 19 March 1951, para. 2.
18. HKRS PRO 204, 6/516/52, Murray, Letter to Carstairs, 19 March 1952, para. 15.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid., paras 16–17.
21. Ibid., para. 7.
22. HKRS 160/1/23, Reorganisation of the Public Relations Office, PRO 1/2, Murray, Letter to
S. H. Evans, CO, London, 19 March 1955, paras 10–11.
23. Rosaleen Smyth, ‘The Post-war Career of the Colonial Film Unit in Africa, 1946–1955’,
Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television vol. 12 no. 2 (1992), p. 175.
24. HKRS 160/1/23, para. 9.
25. Ibid.; ‘Post of Film and Photographic Officer’, PRO 5/7/30, Memo, Murray to Hon. Colonial
Secretary, 21 August 1957, para. 8.

The Griersonian Influence and Its Challenges: Malaya, Singapore, Hong Kong (1939–73) 103
26. Gerald G. Graham, Canadian Film Technology 1896–1986 (Newark, NJ: University of
Delaware Press, 1989), p. 114.
27. Ibid.
28. China Mail, 28 April 1969.
29. Peter Moss, No Babylon: A Hong Kong Scrapbook (Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2006), p. 38.
30. Ibid., p. 41.
31. HKRS 70–6–580 (1) 1961–73, Government Information Services Press Briefing on The Sea
and the Sky (1972), 30 September 1971.

RefeReNCeS

‘Child-Prodigy Gets an Expert’, Straits Times, 6 October 1952, p. 9.

China Mail, 28 April 1969.
Elton, Ralph, Letter to Basil Wright, January 1946 (BFI Special Collections, London). Quoted in
Tom Rice, ‘Voices of Malaya’, February 2010, Colonial Film Website, www.colonialfilm.org.uk.
Fox, Jo, ‘John Grierson, His “Documentary Boys” and the British Ministry of Information,
1939–42’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television vol. 25 no. 3 (2005), pp. 345–69.
Graham, Gerald G., Canadian Film Technology 1896–1986 (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware
Press, 1989).
HKRS PRO 204, 6/516/52, Murray, Letter to Carstairs, 19 March 1952.
HKRS 160/1/23, Reorganisation of the Public Relations Office, PRO 1/2, Murray, Letter to
S. H. Evans, CO, London, 19 January 1955.
HKRS 160/1/2/3, Reorganisation of the Public Relations Office, ‘Post of Film and Photographic
Officer’, PRO 5/7/30, Memo, Murray to Hon. Colonial Secretary, 21 August 1957.
HKRS 70–6–580 (1) 1961–73, Government Information Services Press Briefing on The Sea and
the Sky (1972), 30 September 1971.
Hodge, Tom, ‘Eleven Years of the Malayan Film Unit: A Record of Solid Achievement’,
Educational Screen and Audio Visual Guide vol. 6 no. 10 (1957), pp. 538–9.
Hong Kong Records Service [HKRS] IS 8/576/51, Murray, Memo to Hon. Colonial Secretary,
19 March 1951.
Lowe, Peter, Contending with Nationalism and Communism: British Policy towards South-East Asia
(London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
Moss, Peter, No Babylon: A Hong Kong Scrapbook (Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2006).
Muthalib, Hassan Abdul, ‘End of Empire: The Films of the Malayan Film Unit in 1950s British
Malaya’, in Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe (eds), Film and the End of Empire (London:
BFI, 2011), pp. 177–98.
Peterson, A. D. C., quoted in Kumar Ramakrishna (2001), ‘ “Transmogrifying” Malaya: The
Impact of Sir Gerald Templer (1952–54)’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies vol. 32 no. 1
(2001), pp. 79–92.
Pronay, Nicholas and Croft, Jeremy, ‘British Film Censorship and Propaganda Policy during the
Second World War’, in James Curran and Vincent Porter (eds), British Cinema History
(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983), pp. 144–63.
Smyth, Rosaleen, ‘The Post-war Career of the Colonial Film Unit in Africa, 1946–1955’,
Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television vol. 12 no. 2 (1992), p. 175.

1 04 The Grierson Effect

7
Grierson in Canada

Zoë Druick

There are special reasons why the national use of films should have fitted so quickly and
progressively into the Canadian scene. The need to achieve unity in a country of many
geographical and psychological distances is only one of them and not the most important. More
vital, I think, is the fact that Canada is waking up to her place in the world and is conscious, as
few English-speaking countries seem to be, that it is a new sort of place in the world. A medium
which tries to explain the shape of events and create loyalties in relation to the developing
scene is welcome. I cannot otherwise explain the measure of support we have been given, nor
the long-range hopes that have been placed in this school of projection we have set up.1
John Grierson

John Grierson’s influence on Canada is perhaps the best known of all the stories of the
film producer’s international work through his long career, although the breadth of
the case is rarely considered. Although his time in Britain was plagued by political
frustrations, and his influence in other places was piecemeal and spotty, in Canada one
may trace a compelling and unequivocal line of influence. From his drafting of the Film
Act in 1938 that established the National Film Board (NFB) of Canada the following
year, through his serving as the inaugural head of the NFB for the duration of the war
(1939–45), to his return as a professor in the late 1960s, in time to influence a new
generation of media makers and educators, Grierson’s legacy in Canada is both
extensive and irrefutable.
But of course the story is not quite so simple. The logics that established
documentary as a tool of empire in Britain were congruent with the liberal imperialist
perspectives of the ruling elites in Canada and Grierson was accepted into the
Canadian fold to do particular kinds of work under clear constraints. If production
studies teaches us to consider the structures that organise the creation of media
institutions and texts, we might consider Grierson in Canada in such a light: as
one actor in a network of relationships that included the new medium of state
documentary itself and new communicative infrastructures.2 Film, especially
educational film, was seen to be an expedient way to express international
relationships and create national bonds in the tenuously forming new welfare state.
The creation of the genre of documentary was an attempt to harness new media to
social reorganisation, using technology to support and enhance new models of
governance. The new managerial state required publicity, branding and information
services. On all three counts, documentary fit the bill.3 As James Beveridge so aptly
put it: ‘the time in Canada was ripe for Grierson’s idea’.4

Grierson in Canada 105

 This chapter on Grierson’s effect in Canada is thus subdivided into three sections
corresponding to Canadian cinema before, during and after Grierson’s involvement. In
this way, I hope to emphasise Grierson’s role, while also placing it into a larger national
and international context.

Canadian Cinema Before Grierson

If Grierson had not existed, Canada, it seems, would have had to invent him. Before
Grierson’s visits in 1931 and 1938, Canada had already developed one of the most
impressive government film services in the world.5 While the Soviet Union outdid
Canada perhaps in terms of the quality of its state-sponsored film-making, the
Canadian Government Motion Picture Bureau (CGMPB) holds claim to being the first
national film production unit in the world, and was easily the most impressive in the
British empire. Established in the final year of World War I (1918), formalising the
multifarious strands of government film production that had emerged in different
departments during the conflict, thousands of short films and newsreels were
produced under the auspices of the CGMPB during its quarter-century lifespan,
mainly for international distribution and on topics pertaining to trade, tourism and
immigration.6 However, despite its precocious establishment, the CGMPB was not
the first government film organisation in Canada. That honour goes to the Ontario
Motion Picture Bureau (1917), carrying out ‘educational work for farmers, school
children, factory workers, and other classes’ in Canada’s most populous province.7
As provinces vied for control of visual education with the federal government and
American film suppliers, a number of other provinces followed Ontario’s lead.8
The CGMPB attempted to make the story a national one in a country defined by
its regions. Its most ambitious film project was the seventy-minute feature, Canada,
from Coast to Coast, made for the Imperial Economic Conference in Ottawa in 1932,
representing the apotheosis of a type of film-making developed in relation to national
self-presentation at international trade exhibitions.9 Canada had discovered
earlier than most that government-funded film-making was a necessary form of
communication in a fledgling modern state, especially one where education was a
provincial responsibility. But after 1929, the bureau struggled with the expensive
conversion to sound equipment during the austere days of the Depression. More than
that, it had lost its vision. By the mid-1930s, Canada’s government film production
decidedly needed reinvigoration and new rationales for funding.
Beginnings in fiction feature film-making in Canada were thwarted in part by the
establishment of a British policy: the screen quota of 1928. According to the terms of
this quota, 15 per cent of films shown in British cinema theatres had to be made in
Britain or elsewhere in the British empire. This spawned a gold rush of mainly
American production companies seeeking to make films in Canada that would qualify.
These so-called quota quickies were known for their cheap production values and their
often salacious B-movie storylines. More often than not they were produced by
companies with very short lifespans of only a film or two. Victoria, BC-based Central
Films was one of the exceptions, producing twelve films between 1935 and 1937.10
Although the quota law, which lasted until 1937, failed to produce a thriving

1 06 The Grierson Effect

Commonwealth film industry, it did succeed in facilitating a service-oriented Canadian
commercial film industry. As with all service-based industries, when the foreign
market dried up, so too did the production.
In the mid-1930s, a young film enthusiast named Ross McLean was working as
secretary to the Canadian high commissioner Vincent Massey in London. There he
heard of the film work being sponsored by Britain’s government at the General Post
Office, and saw first hand the purposive group that met at the London Film Society.
He happened to hear a presentation by John Grierson and was inspired to write a
report to Massey, recommending a government film service for Canada that would
take into account the documentary work being done in Britain. Massey, a strong
supporter of the Canadian arts, forwarded McLean’s recommendations on to Ottawa,
advocating:

there should be an independent and exhaustive survey made of our present film publicity
activities: the nature of the existing films, the method of their distribution, and suggestions
for improvement and extension. I think [for] such a survey to be worth while [it] should be
made by an experienced and qualified film expert. There is no one whom I know who could do
this better than Mr. John Grierson, probably the leading documentary film producer in the
United Kingdom.11

Yet, even before this influential report, Grierson had visited Canada and other
British dominions in 1931 on behalf of the British government in order to determine
how film might be used to cement imperial preference. Britain’s Empire Marketing
Board, founded in 1926, was tasked with the job of creating imperial sentiment in the
colonies and dominions, and had been the first government home of the documentary
film movement. Canada, fragmented into regions, sparsely populated for its great size
and poised on the border of the US, provided a particularly pressing instance of a
nation in need of a healthy mass-media presence that might act as a national cultural
bond in the way that the railway had been an attempt to forge an economic one.12
Two interests were converging in this area: just as Britain was interested in the
strength of Canada’s empire sentiments, Canada was interested in the British imperial
model because it answered some of the problems facing the federal government. A
national film board might be an effective policy instrument to bind together a
fragmented, multilingual, multicultural federation in much the same way that the
British empire was attempting to overcome its own internal contradictions and
divisions, using new media to rebrand itself as the Commonwealth.13 Moreover
Canada was well placed – literally next door to the United States – to open a front in
the information war against the US film and newsreel industries for the hearts and
minds of British subjects everywhere.
These two forces converged in the pairing of Grierson and Canada. Grierson’s own
version of the story was as follows:

In June 1938, I was invited by the Film Committee of the Imperial Relations Trust to make a
survey of film developments in Canada. The Imperial Relations Trust had allocated certain
limited funds for the encouragement of educational and cultural film services between Great
Britain and the Dominions. Its Film Committee required further information on which to

Grierson in Canada 107

 base its recommendations. At the same time, I was invited by the Canadian Government to
make a survey of the film activities of the various Government departments and particularly
of the operations of the Canadian Government Motion Picture Bureau, with a view to
developing the supply of Canadian films to Great Britain and improving the distribution
machinery at Canada House.14

The emphasis on distribution and exhibition of films in London is noteworthy.

Before the film board, the vast majority of Canadian government film production had
been for international screens. By the late 1930s, civil servants in the Department of
Trade and Commerce were concerned that both South Africa and Australia were
producing better film propaganda for distribution in the UK. Upon arriving in Canada
in May 1938, Grierson met with representatives of the Department of Trade and
Commerce, as well as of Mines and Resources, Fisheries, Post Office, Agriculture,
Transport, National Defence, External Affairs, Finance, Justice, Labour, National
Revenue, and Pensions and National Health. After assessing the state of Canadian
government film production, Grierson pressed for centralisation in a single agency.
With his recommendation of the establishment of the film board, Grierson neatly
combined the needs of both interested parties. As a convenient panacea to Canada’s
political problems that also served the needs of imperial cohesion, Grierson
recommended ‘a central organization which would co-ordinate demands and through
which the Canadian Government and British and Dominion film interests could work’.
This vision, combining technological efficiency with Canadian nationalism and liberal
imperialism was the background to the formation of the National Film Board of
Canada by the Department of Trade and Commerce in 1939. In the event, the film
board was given the following structure: a dominion film commissioner as CEO, two
ministers of the federal government, three senior civil servants and three private
individuals with interests in film. Notably, no provincial representatives were officially
included. Although both organisations operated simultaneously for a while, in 1941
the NFB successfully absorbed the CGMPB.
With the founding of the film board, Canada’s previous attempts at government
film-making, as well as its role as a location for British and American narrative feature
films, not to mention many forms of amateur, industrial, educational and other forms
of non-theatrical film-making, distribution and exhibition, were seemingly struck
from the story of national cinema history. For instance, at the moment of the NFB’s
formation the two largest distributors of non-theatrical film in Canada were General
Films Ltd and Associated Screen News, neither of which have yet received the historical
analysis they deserve. On the international scene, national cinema had come to mean
distinctive commercial feature films or a state film project and, once Canada had
adopted the latter, the histories of diverse cinema production and circulation in Canada
were submerged, some unable to re-emerge into view for many decades to come.15

The Grierson Years

By all accounts Grierson did not particularly wish to become stuck in Canada for six
years during the war. However, with no competing offers from Britain, he didn’t have

1 08 The Grierson Effect

many options.16 He brought with him to Canada for varying lengths of time a number
of well-known British and international film-makers, including Arthur Elton, Stanley
Hawes (who went on to head the film production unit in Australia), Stuart Legg and
Norman McLaren. Luminaries Robert Flaherty, Joris Ivens, Boris Kaufman and Basil
Wright all made brief appearances. Along with additional local film-makers hastily
hired, Grierson proceeded to establish a thriving, bilingual film organisation,
producing two theatrical newsreels, Canada Carries On (1940–59) and World in Action
(1942–5), as well as hundreds of stand-alone short films.17 A producer of mainly short
subject documentaries and animations, the NFB quickly became a force on Canadian
and international film screens, both theatrical and non-theatrical.18 (Remarkably,
during the war, Grierson was able to negotiate space in American-owned theatre
chains, a feat never accomplished in Canada before or since.) Although war became a
dominant topic in NFB films, many others aimed to ‘show Canada to Canadians’, in the
words of the Film Act, highlighting stories about Canadians and government agencies
in different parts of the country. As early as 1943, a plan to prepare Canada for the
reconstruction of peacetime meant numerous films emphasising cultural cohesion and
good citizenship in the face of Canada’s different languages, religions and regions.
Prior to national broadcasting, national media distribution was one of Canada’s
great challenges. Most Canadians lived close to the American border and were
receiving broadcast signals from their southern neighbours. It was one thing to reach
Canadians through cinemas, but how could the majority of the population who lived in
rural locations be included in a national project? Grierson’s answer was to develop non-
theatrical distribution infrastructure. Travelling cinemas were not new to Canada. The
earliest commercial cinema distribution in Canada had been accomplished by cinema
entrepreneurs tracing geographically manageable circuits at the turn of the century.19
And educational film circuits were established in the early twentieth century by the
extension departments of universities. One early adopter, the University of Alberta,
established its division of visual instruction in 1914 and within a decade its reach had
become so extensive that by 1926, over 50 per cent of the province, approximately
300,000 people, was being reached in this way.20 These large audiences were brought
into contact with films at screenings held in farming associations, churches and
schools. In addition, the department ran a number of film circuits in the mid-1920s,
predating by two decades the National Film Board circuits. The Film Board
nationalised this pre-existing regional infrastructure, relying heavily on the model
developed by the university extension programmes.21 Donald Buchanan, a founder of
the National Film Society, designed the distribution plan for the NFB with direct
reference to the University of Alberta.22
A relevant sidebar to this story concerns the assignment of the position of film
commissioner. Edward (Ned) Corbett, director of the University of Alberta’s wide-
reaching extension programme from 1928–36 and executive member of the National
Film Society, was lured away from Alberta in 1935 to become the inaugural head of
the Canadian Association of Adult Education, an important lobby group that would
go on to forge an alliance with the NFB. When Grierson and others suggested that a
Canadian be offered the inaugural post of film commissioner, the consensus was that
it should be Corbett. Only when he declined was the position actually offered to John
Grierson.

Grierson in Canada 109

Grierson during his stint as Canadian government film commissioner, 1943 (Visual and Sound Archives film stills/Library
and Archives Canada/PA-169782)

Under Grierson, the NFB adopted non-theatrical methods used in Alberta and
elsewhere in the British empire, travelling with government films and electricity
generators to remote locations.23 Scaling up the provincial experiments, between 1942
and 1946, the NFB ran an impressive slate of film forums targeting immigrants in
rural schools, churches, community centres as well as workers at factories and trade-
union halls. Itinerant projectionists, known as field men, drove film equipment and
electric generators around circuits in each of the provinces. In January 1942, thirty
rural circuits, each consisting of twenty rural communities, began monthly screenings
reaching approximately 250,000 Canadians.24 Films were employed to stimulate and
monitor political discussion and to inform citizens about modernisation projects, such
as new agricultural methods and the electrification of farms. Just as they were in other
parts of the British empire, film programmes were composed of a set of short films
about agricultural improvement, profiles of various ‘peoples of Canada’, propaganda
and amusing morality tales. Sometimes the educational films preceded a Hollywood
narrative feature. As with colonial film circuits, projectionists sent monthly reports
back to the film board detailing the screenings.25
Midway through 1942, the NFB began trade-union circuits, sponsored in part by
the Workers’ Education Association and Labour Congresses of Canada, which were

1 10 The Grierson Effect

accompanied by trailers meant to spark debate on issues such as absenteeism at the
workplace and the role of the worker in wartime production.26 Discussion trailers were
included with all the trade-union circuits as well. Customised for the purpose of
engaging viewers with government policies were a series of fifteen trailers made under
the series title, ‘Getting the Most out of a Film’. Tailored for each programme and
social issue with which they dealt, and only a few minutes long, the trailers showed
audiences at film screenings debating the ideas presented in the films with a panel of
experts. At the end, the moderator turned to the camera in order to address the
viewing audience with the injunction to continue the discussion after the screening.
These trailers were notable attempts to provide audiences with examples of how
engaged audiences might begin discussing the issues posed by a film.
Starting in 1943, the same year that, under Grierson’s leadership, the National
Film Board combined forces with the Wartime Information Board, the NFB instituted
industrial circuits. Established to reach people working in munitions plants and
other industrial settings, by 1944 there were 385,000 viewers per month with 3,000
screenings.27 Statistics for 1944, at the height of the circuits, show that there were
thirty-seven full-time NFB operators. Over a quarter of a million people were reached
by 1,574 shows in January of that year alone.28 Worker screenings were carefully
managed to try to offset unrest and channel it into patriotic productivity. Screenings
were also the site of observation and surveillance, with audience tastes and reactions
monitored and reported upon.
In sum, making newsreels from a Canadian perspective and films about Canada
and its role in the conflict of World War II was an important addition to the nation’s
cinema culture. But no less important was the mode of circulation. Bringing films to
Canadians in their workplaces, churches and community centres across the country
was a concerted effort to consolidate a national infrastructure for non-theatrical
distribution, in many ways as important as screenings in cinemas. This commitment
was successful in bringing Canadian content to Canadian screens (not always the case
in provincial film circuits), and a triumphant way to overcome provincial powers in the
regulation of education and cinema screens alike.
But, despite the energetic output, the Grierson years were in some ways an
ambivalent time for Canadian film-makers. As a rule, wartime NFB films contained no
credits. The corporate identity of the board and the public service it was providing
were thought by Grierson to be of more importance than individual recognition
(although he himself received a great deal). This means that many film-makers who
worked at the board have been left out of stories about Canadian cinema: in many
cases, it requires dedicated archival work to discover who actually worked on particular
films. One compelling perspective on this conundrum comes from Graham McInnes
(1912–70), who wrote a memoir of his stint at the wartime film board. McInnes’s
account holds some surprises, which challenge the value of non-theatrical cinema
promoted by Grierson. Take, for example, this admission of ambivalence about
Grierson’s watchword, non-theatrical documentary film:

Though Grierson was himself a born teacher and evangelist, and though it was an article of
faith with him that film, documentary film, was the great teaching and information medium
of the future, he could never get us really excited over non-t[heatrical].29

Grierson in Canada 111

The film-makers at the board often wished to make theatrical films, and contained
their ambitions within officially sanctioned parameters.30 Some exceptional film-
makers, like Norman McLaren, were able to leave an authorial mark on government
work. Many others laboured in relative obscurity.

afTer Grierson

Perhaps because of his passion for state propaganda and his involvement with trade-
union and immigrant education, not to mention his implication in international
networks, after the war Grierson was swept up in a wave of anti-Communist hysteria
and was forced out of Canada under a cloud of political paranoia. In 1945, Soviet
cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko went to Canadian police with evidence of spying in Ottawa.
Among papers examined by the investigators was the cryptic message, ‘Freda to the
Professor through Grierson’. The professor was thought to be Dr Raymond Boyer, the
chair of the Canadian Association of Scientific Workers (CAScW) and Freda was the
name of Grierson’s secretary at the NFB. Prime Minister Mackenzie King declared the
War Measures Act, suspending civil rights, and appointed a royal commission to
investigate the many people accused of being Communist agents or sympathisers.31
In the aftermath, the film board’s supposed access to sensitive government
information rendered it a ‘vulnerable agency,’ a surprising categorisation which put the
board in the same security category as the Prime Minister’s Office, the Privy Council,
External Affairs, Defence and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP); every
employee was required to pass security clearance.32 After being called up in front of a
tribunal, Grierson’s contract was not renewed and over the next few years, until the
official RCMP investigation began, untold numbers of NFB employees, most on
temporary three-month contracts, were quietly let go. Personal gatherings were
infiltrated and monitored; some NFB employees were placed under surveillance.33
The Gouzenko Affair has the distinction of being the first Communist witch hunt
of the Cold War. The paranoia and surveillance it provoked would not exhaust itself
until Grierson’s successor, Ross McLean (a supporter since prewar London), was
unceremoniously replaced by Maclean’s editor Arthur Irwin in 1950. The NFB was
subjected to a management review, and then thoroughly investigated and exonerated
by a multi-party parliamentary committee in 1952.34
This political intrigue coincided with striking of the Royal Commission on National
Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences in 1949 and its two years of hearings.
This commission was chaired by the same Vincent Massey who had played a part in the
early history of the NFB. Many thought that this assessment of the arts in Canada
would sound the death knell for the board, but even before the commission reported, a
revised Film Act was passed in 1950. Over the previous decade, the NFB had done
valuable work consolidating Canadian nonfiction film production and circulation and
to lose it now would mean relinquishing a significant aspect of cinema culture in the
nation. For the short term at least, Canada had sunk all its ambitions for cinema into
its state projects.
In part the NFB was saved because its initiatives in film and citizenship melded
well with the postwar institutionalisation of citizenship education as advocated by the

1 12 The Grierson Effect

UN through its cultural agency UNESCO. Film was given exemplary status in UNESCO
discussions as its educational applications extended from demonstrations of practical
skills through the circulation of information about national ways of life to the
documentation of national cultural production. In this way, we can see that Grierson
was just one actor in the complex field in which the National Film Board took shape.
Even the discrediting of its leader and the board’s subsequent vulnerability did not
spell its demise.35
With the rural, school, industrial and trade-union circuits of the war period,
the NFB had centralised and institutionalised the concept of non-theatrical film
screenings. At the end of the war, as film circuit funding dried up, local film councils
were established across Canada with the sponsorship and participation of the National
Film Board, the bulk of their showings comprised of NFB films. Prints of film board
films also circulated widely through public and school lending libraries.36 While before
the war there had been fifteen film libraries in Canada, mostly run by provincial
departments of education and university extension programmes; by war’s end the
number had increased more than fourfold to seventy-three, with more than a third in
public libraries.37
After being let go from the film board (and put on a US blacklist), Grierson
decamped for Paris, where he was invited to become UNESCO’s director of mass
communications and public information.38 At the first UNESCO meeting on mass
media and international culture, Grierson gave an address in which he linked strong
mass-media infrastructure to national reconstruction and development.39 Echoing and
updating the strategy of empire communication for non-commercial and non-
theatrical film, the film subcommission recommended that UNESCO should act as an
international clearing house of information: ‘UNESCO could only act efficiently as an
International Clearing House if each country has a national film information centre or
national film committee.’40 The exemplar of this kind of instrumental national film
organisation had been achieved in Canada and, even as it served as an example for the
rest of the world, Canada continued to build its national film policy around regional
cohesion and its international film policy around international understanding.

ConClusions

In the last years of his life, from 1969–71, Grierson gave classes at McGill University
(sometimes held in his hotel room). His popular classes on film and mass
communication ranged widely from discussions about classical philosophies of
knowledge to the social responsibility of media-producers.41 This teaching coincided
with the establishment of a new programme at the NFB headed by American George
Stoney, the Challenge for Change/Societé nouvelle (1967–80). Associated with media
activism of the student and civil rights movements, the programme emphasised the
use of process-based film-making to help bring about progressive social change.
Perhaps its best-known productions were associated with the conflict surrounding a
government plan to relocate a small community of Newfoundlanders from their home
on Fogo Island. The Fogo process, as it came to be known, has become a well-regarded
approach to using cameras in communities to help participants develop consensus on

Grierson in Canada 113

solutions to collective problems (and harking back to pre-NFB film circuits, it was
connected with Newfoundland’s Memorial University extension programme). Other
films addressed issues of poverty and social inequality in cities and towns across
Canada.42 And, although the programme itself stressed its connection with the
Grierson legacy, Grierson himself reportedly had a ‘love–hate relationship’ with it.43
In a screening of one of the Fogo films to Grierson’s class at McGill, Colin Low
recalls Grierson’s condemnation:

So the film-maker is nothing but a tool, a camera operator or projectionist in the formulation
of these problems and solutions. What about the intelligence, world experience, expensive
education that could be brought to these people? If you have no opinions, no ideas, no
commitments, nothing to say, why further burden these poor folks, whose lives are difficult
enough, with manipulative nonsense?44

However, with a typical eye to posterity, in a published assessment Grierson was

kinder to the programme, lauding its grassroots sensibilities. ‘Its local portraits are
better than any I know, and its use of the film to ease and give order to local discussion
is important.’45
It is perhaps no coincidence that Grierson ended his career in Montreal, near to the
NFB headquarters, which are also based in that city. Indeed, the invitation had been
initiated by Hugo McPherson, NFB film commissioner at the time. This is consistent
with Jack Ellis’s observation that the NFB chairmen continued to reach out to
Grierson for advice and consultation in the decades after he had left the country.46
And, indeed, while in Montreal, he was sought out by others as well, such as the newly
formed Canadian Radio and Television Commission, for his views on information and
by McGill University, for his views on technology in the university.47 Grierson’s ideas
continued to shape Canadian perspectives and policies on technology and society.
It is a paradox of the Grierson effect that perhaps only in a marginal nation
and former dominion was Grierson able to establish the British vision for liberal
imperialism, albeit with local inflections. Not only were its films widely distributed
and admired, the Canadian Film Board example was used extensively throughout first
British and later UNESCO film information to show how film could be engaged for
public service. For instance, The Factual Film, a British report from 1947, carries an
appendix on the National Film Board of Canada which includes the Canadian Film Act
in its entirety, as well as a concise history of the institution and its programmes of
theatrical and non-theatrical films.48 Until at least the 1960s, numerous UNESCO
mission reports on film in developing countries took the Canadian film board as their
model. In an interview with James Beveridge, Grierson pointed this out:

the greatest export of the Film Board has been the Film Act itself. It’s been translated into
many languages, it’s become the model of serious intention by the cinema in the service of
government, all over the world. The success of the Film Board has been in its helping [the
Department of] External Affairs to present the Canadian capabilities. The Film Board has
been important in saying to countries of very different kinds, all over the world, that
the film is an instrument of great importance in establishing the patterns of the national
imagination.49

1 14 The Grierson Effect

 Yet the very prominence and prestige of the National Film Board has had the
paradoxical effect of sidelining other film activity undertaken in Canada before, during
and after the heyday of the NFB, an oversight only just beginning to be addressed
more than seven decades after Grierson’s arrival in Ottawa. Although successful
feature films have been few and far between, industrial and educational film
production thrived in Canada, as did a range of experimental, amateur, small-gauge
and other kinds of non-theatrical production. Other documentary traditions, some
born of the broadcasting model, some more experimental, blossomed.50 Indeed, part
of the film board’s legacy was the training of hundreds of aspiring film-makers in
public service and the idiom of state documentary, even if they would go on to inflect
it in different ways. Grierson’s legacy is so bound up with accomplishments in
Canadian cinema, particularly those of a documentary and educational nature, that to
tease them apart is all but impossible. Yet the field of production studies teaches us to
consider the structural aspects of media production, beyond the famous individuals.
Media institutions and texts alike are created in complex semantic and material fields,
where co-operating and competing interests vie to create logics of emergence and
sustenance. If Grierson himself had a somewhat rocky experience in Canada (albeit
with a triumphant ending), his ideas about mass communication took root at a pivotal
time in Canadian policy formation and have made themselves into an inextricable part
of the evolution of Canadian national cinema and its histories.

noTes

1. John Grierson, ‘The Documentary Idea: 1942’, in Forsyth Hardy (ed.), Grierson on
Documentary (London: Faber and Faber, 1979), p. 248.
2. Vicki Mayer, Miranda Banks and John Caldwell, ‘Introduction: Production Studies: Roots
and Routes’, in Vicki Mayer, Miranda Banks and John Caldwell (eds), Production Studies:
Cultural Studies of Media Industries (New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 1–12.
3. See Zoë Druick, Projecting Canada: Government Policy and Documentary Film at the National
Film Board (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007); Scott Anthony
and James Mansell (eds), The Projection of Britain: A History of the GPO Film Unit (London:
BFI, 2011).
4. James Beveridge, ‘Grierson and Distribution’, in John Grierson and the NFB, proceedings of a
conference held at McGill University, 29–31 October 1981 (Toronto: ECW Press, 1984), p. 29.
5. Other British delegates had visited Canada in the 1920s, although details are murky. See
Beveridge, ‘Grierson and Distribution’, 30.
6. Charles Backhouse, Canadian Government Motion Picture Bureau, 1917–1941 (Ottawa:
Canadian Film Institute, 1974); Peter Morris, Embattled Shadows: A History of Canadian
Cinema 1895–1939 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1978), p. 133.
7. Ibid., p. 138.
8. Other active provinces were BC, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia. The Ontario
Film Bureau was closed in 1934. See Morris, Embattled Shadows, pp. 149, 152.
9. Ibid., p. 167.
10. Peter Morris and Andrew McIntosh, ‘Quota Quickies’, in The Canadian Film Encyclopedia,
http://tiff.net/CANADIANFILMENCYCLOPEDIA/Browse/bysubject/quota-quickies.

Grierson in Canada 115

11. Library Archives Canada RG 20, Vol. 578, p. 169, A-581 pt 1, Vincent Massey to Secretary of
State for External Affairs, 18 November 1937, p. 2.
12. Maurice Charland, ‘Technological Nationalism’, Canadian Journal of Political and Social
Theory vol. 10 no. 1 (1986), pp. 196–220.
13. Lee Grieveson and Colin McCabe (eds), Empire and Film (London: BFI, 2011).
14. John Grierson Archive, G4:4:10, ‘Canadian Film Activities’, 3 July 1939, p. 1.
15. The exception is Peter Morris’s indispensable Embattled Shadows. Inspired by the Orphan
Film Symposium, a new collection addresses these missing stories in Canadian cinema
history. See Zoë Druick and Gerda Cammaer (eds), Cinephemera: Archives, Ephemeral Cinema
and New Screen Histories in Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014). See
also the Canadian Educational, Sponsored and Industrial Film Archive,
screenculture.org/cesif.
16. He did visit the UK at least twice, in 1941 and 1944, as well as convalescing in Florida after
a heart attack in 1942. See Jack Ellis, ‘John Grierson’s Relation with British Documentary
during World War Two’, in John Grierson and the NFB, pp. 63–4; H. Forsyth Hardy,
‘Democracy as a Fighting Faith’, in John Grierson and the NFB, pp. 89–90. See also Nicholas
Pronay, ‘John Grierson and the Documentary – 60 Years On’, Historical Journal of Film,
Radio and Television vol. 9 no. 3 (1989), pp. 227–46; and Jo Fox, ‘John Grierson, His
“Documentary Boys” and the British Ministry of Information, 1939–1942’, Historical
Journal of Film, Radio and Television vol. 25 no. 3 (August 2005), pp. 345–69.
17. World in Action films were shown in India, South Africa, Latin America and the US, fulfilling
to some degree the empire dream of decentralised information services to rival American
news. See D. B. Jones, Movies and Memoranda: An Interpretive History of the National Film
Board of Canada (Ottawa: Canadian Film Institute, 1981), p. 36.
18. Graham McInnes, One Man’s Documentary: A Memoir of the Early Days of the National Film
Board (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2004).
19. Paul Moore, ‘Mapping the Mass Circulation of Early Cinema: Film Debuts Coast-to-Coast in
Canada in 1896 and 1897’, Canadian Journal of Film Studies vol. 21 no. 1 (Spring 2012),
pp. 58–80.
20. Ralph Clark, A History of the Department of Extension at the University of Alberta, 1912–1956,
Dissertation, University of Toronto, 1985, p. 100.
21. Involved universities included the University of British Columbia, Alberta, Manitoba, Prince
Edward Island, New Brunswick and Laval. See also C. W. Gray, Movies for the People: The
Story of the National Film Board’s Unique Distribution System (Ottawa: National Film Board of
Canada, 1977), p. 219.
22. Beveridge, ‘Grierson and Distribution’, p. 34.
23. It had been concluded at the Imperial Conference of 1926 that non-theatrical distribution
was the way around American dominance of the cinemas of the world. For more see Zoë
Druick, ‘Mobile Cinema in Canada in Relation to British Mobile Film Practices’, in Wolfram
R. Keller and Gene Walz (eds), Screening Canadians: Cross-cultural Perspectives on Canadian
Film (Marburg: Universitatsbibliothek, 2008), pp. 13–33.
24. Dorothy Annesley, ‘Films and Canadian Public Libraries’, ALA Bulletin vol. 40 no. 6 (June
1940), p. 195.
25. There were similarities with the contemporaneous British Mass Observation project. See
Michael Pickering and David Chaney, ‘Democracy and Communication: Mass Observation
1937–1943’,’ Journal of Communication vol. 36 no. 1 (Winter 1986), pp. 41–56; Jeffrey

1 16 The Grierson Effect

 Richards and Dorothy Sheridan (eds), Mass-Observation at the Movies (London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1987); John Baxendale and Chris Pawling, ‘Representing the People:
The Documentary Film Movement and Mass Observation in the Thirties’, in Narrating the
Thirties (London: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 17–45.
26. Gray, Movies for the People, p. 52.
27. Yvette Hackett claims 1942, but the NFB Annual Report for 1944–5 states that the
circuits were launched in 1943. See Y. Hackett, ‘The National Film Society of Canada,
1935–1951: Its Origins and Development’, in Gene Walz (ed.), Flashback: People and
Institutions in Canadian Film History (Montreal: Mediatexte Publications Inc., 1986),
p. 149.
28. Library Archives Canada, Ottawa, RG 28 A, Vol. 1/2, file 3-C2-1-3, ‘Industrial and Trade
Union Circuits Report for January 1944’, p. 3.
29. McInnes, One Man’s Documentary, p. 48, italics in original.
30. See also Zoë Druick, ‘ “Non-theatrical with Dreams of Theatrical”: Paradoxes of a Canadian
Semi-documentary Film Noir’, Canadian Journal of Film Studies vol. 12 no. 2 (2004),
pp. 46–63.
31. Paul Dufour, ‘ “Eggheads” and Espionage: The Gouzenko Affair in Canada’, Journal of
Canadian Studies vol. 16 (Fall–Winter 1981), p. 190.
32. Reg Whitaker and Gary Marcuse, Cold War Canada: The Making of a National Insecurity State,
1945–1957 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), p. 252.
33. Ibid., p. 248.
34. National Film Board: Survey of Organization and Business Administration (Parliamentary
Papers, 1950); Special Committee on the National Film Board, Minutes of Proceedings and
Evidence (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1952). Aside from Grierson, known victims of the chill
and purge included film-makers Evelyn [Spice] Cherry and Lawrence Cherry and activist
Stan Rands, who was attempting to unionise NFB employees; most of the victims never
came forward with their stories. See Whitaker and Marcuse, Cold War Canada, p. 253; Len
Scher, The Un-Canadians: True Stories of the Blacklist Era (Toronto: Lester Publishing Ltd,
1992), p. 85. See also Amy Knight, How the Cold War Began: The Gouzenko Affair and the Hunt
for Soviet Spies (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2005).
35. At time of writing, the board still exists, although its role has largely shifted from a film
producer to a film archive. See Zoë Druick ‘Sampling Heritage: The NFB’s Digital Archive’,
in Druick and Cammaer, Cinephemera.
36. Massey Archives, Toronto, B1987-0082/345 file 04, 2, Ruth Cameron, ‘Submission from
the Federation of British Columbia Film Councils’, n.d. See also Charles Acland, ‘Patterns
of Cultural Authority: The National Film Society of Canada, 1938–1941’, in Canadian
Journal of Film Studies vol. 10 (Spring 2001), pp. 2–27; James Beveridge, ‘Grierson and
Distribution’, p. 35.
37. Annesley, ‘Films and Canadian Public Libraries’, p. 195.
38. See Gary Evans, John Grierson and the National Film Board: The Politics of Wartime Propaganda
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), pp. 224–68; Jack Ellis, John Grierson: Life,
Contributions, Influence (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press,
2000), pp. 229–39.
39. Ibid., p. 229.
40. UNESCO, Report of the Commission on Technical Needs in Press, Radio, Film, Following the
Survey in Twelve War-devastated Countries (Paris: UNESCO, 1947), p. 38.

Grierson in Canada 117

41. Colin Low, ‘Grierson and “Challenge for Change” ’, in John Grierson and the NFB, p. 96.
42. See Thomas Waugh, Michael Brendan Baker and Ezra Winton (eds), Challenge for Change:
Activist Documentary at the National Film Board of Canada (Montreal and Kingston:
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010).
43. Low, ‘Grierson and “Challenge for Change” ’, p. 95.
44. Ibid., p. 99.
45. John Grierson, ‘Memo to Michelle about Decentralizing the Means of Production’, in Waugh
et al. (eds), Challenge for Change, p. 63.
46. Ellis, John Grierson, p. 321.
47. Ibid., p. 324.
48. Arts Enquiry, The Factual Film (London: Oxford University Press, 1947), pp. 228–37.
49. Cited in ‘John Grierson’, in John Grierson and the NFB, p. ix.
50. David Hogarth, Documentary Television in Canada: From National Public Service to Global
Marketplace (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002); Zoë Druick,
Allan King’s A Married Couple (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010).

referenCes

Acland, Charles, ‘Patterns of Cultural Authority: The National Film Society of Canada,
1938–1941’, Canadian Journal of Film Studies vol. 10 (Spring 2001), pp. 2–27.
Annesley, Dorothy, ‘Films and Canadian Public Libraries’, ALA Bulletin vol. 40 no. 6 (June 1940),
pp. 195–8.
Anthony, Scott and James Mansell (eds), The Projection of Britain: A History of the GPO Film Unit
(London: BFI, 2011).
Arts Enquiry, The Factual Film (London: Oxford University Press, 1947).
Backhouse, Charles, Canadian Government Motion Picture Bureau, 1917–1941 (Ottawa: Canadian
Film Institute, 1974).
Baxendale, John and Chris Pawling, ‘Representing the People: The Documentary Film
Movement and Mass Observation in the Thirties’, in Narrating the Thirties (London:
Macmillan, 1996), pp. 17–45.
Beveridge, James, ‘Grierson and Distribution’, in John Grierson and the NFB, proceedings of a
conference held at McGill University, 29–31 October 1981 (Toronto: ECW Press, 1984),
pp. 29–41.
Charland, Maurice, ‘Technological Nationalism’, Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory.
vol. 10 no. 1 (1986), pp. 196–220.
Clark, Ralph, A History of the Department of Extension at the University of Alberta, 1912–1956,
Dissertation, University of Toronto, 1985.
Druick, Zoë, ‘ “Non-theatrical with Dreams of Theatrical”: Paradoxes of a Canadian
Semi-documentary Film Noir’, Canadian Journal of Film Studies vol. 12 no. 2 (2004),
pp. 46–63.
Druick, Zoë, Projecting Canada: Government Policy and Documentary Film at the National Film
Board (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007).
Druick, Zoë, ‘Mobile Cinema in Canada in Relation to British Mobile Film Practices’, in Wolfram
R. Keller and Gene Walz (eds), Screening Canadians: Cross-cultural Perspectives on Canadian
Film (Marburg: Universitatsbibliothek, 2008), pp. 13–33.

1 18 The Grierson Effect

Druick, Zoë, Allan King’s A Married Couple (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010).
Druick, Zoë, ‘Sampling Heritage: The NFB’s Digital Archive’, in Zoë Druick and Gerda Cammaer
(eds), Cinephemera: Archives, Ephemeral Cinema and New Screen Histories in Canada (Montreal:
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014).
Druick, Zoë and Gerda Cammaer (eds), Cinephemera: Archives, Ephemeral Cinema and New Screen
Histories in Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014).
Dufour, Paul, ‘ “Eggheads” and Espionage: The Gouzenko Affair in Canada’, Journal of Canadian
Studies vol. 16 (Fall–Winter 1981), pp. 188–98.
Ellis, Jack, ‘John Grierson’s Relation with British Documentary during World War Two’, in John
Grierson and the NFB, proceedings of a conference held at McGill University, 29–31 October
1981 (Toronto: ECW Press, 1984), pp. 62–76.
Ellis, Jack, John Grierson: Life, Contributions, Influence (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern
Illinois University Press, 2000).
Evans, Gary, John Grierson and the National Film Board: The Politics of Wartime Propaganda
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984).
Fox, Jo, ‘John Grierson, His “Documentary Boys” and the British Ministry of Information,
1939–1942’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television vol. 25 no. 3 (August 2005),
pp. 345–69.
Gray, C. W., Movies for the People: The Story of the National Film Board’s Unique Distribution System
(Ottawa: National Film Board of Canada, 1977).
Grierson, John, ‘The Documentary Idea: 1942’, in Forsyth Hardy (ed.), Grierson on Documentary
(London: Faber and Faber, 1979), pp. 248–58.
Grierson, John, ‘Memo to Michelle about Decentralizing the Means of Production’, in Thomas
Waugh, Michael Brendan Baker and Ezra Winton (eds), Challenge for Change: Activist
Documentary at the National Film Board of Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s
University Press, 2010), pp. 61–5.
Grieveson, Lee and Colin McCabe (eds), Empire and Film (London: BFI, 2011).
Hackett, Yvette, ‘The National Film Society of Canada, 1935–1951: Its Origins and
Development’, in Gene Walz (ed.), Flashback: People and Institutions in Canadian Film History
(Montreal: Mediatexte Publications Inc., 1986), pp. 135–68.
Hardy, Forsyth, ‘Democracy as a Fighting Faith’, in John Grierson and the NFB, proceedings of a
conference held at McGill University, 29–31 October 1981 (Toronto: ECW Press, 1984),
pp. 86–94.
Hogarth, David, Documentary Television in Canada: From National Public Service to Global
Marketplace (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002).
Jones, D. B., Movies and Memoranda: An Interpretive History of the National Film Board of Canada
(Ottawa: Canadian Film Institute, 1981).
Knight, Amy, How the Cold War Began: The Gouzenko Affair and the Hunt for Soviet Spies (Toronto:
McClelland & Stewart, 2005).
Library Archives Canada RG 20, Vol. 578, p. 169, A-581 pt 1, Vincent Massey to Secretary of
State for External Affairs, 18 November 1937, p. 2.
Library Archives Canada, Ottawa, RG 28 A, Vol. 1/2, file 3-C2-1-3, ‘Industrial and Trade Union
Circuits Report for January 1944’, p. 3.
Low, Colin. ‘Grierson and “Challenge for Change”’, in John Grierson and the NFB, proceedings of a
conference held at McGill University, 29–31 October 1981 (Toronto: ECW Press, 1984),
pp. 95–103.

Grierson in Canada 119

Massey Archives, Toronto, B1987-0082/345 file 04, 2, Ruth Cameron, ‘Submission from the
Federation of British Columbia Film Councils’, n.d.
Mayer, Vicki, Miranda Banks and John Caldwell, ‘Introduction: Production Studies: Roots and
Routes’, in Vicki Mayer, Miranda Banks and John Caldwell (eds), Production Studies: Cultural
Studies of Media Industries (New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 1–12.
McInnes, Graham, One Man’s Documentary: A Memoir of the Early Days of the National Film Board
(Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2004).
Moore, Paul, ‘Mapping the Mass Circulation of Early Cinema: Film Debuts Coast-to-Coast in
Canada in 1896 and 1897’, Canadian Journal of Film Studies vol. 21 no. 1 (2012), pp. 58–80.
Morris, Peter, Embattled Shadows: A History of Canadian Cinema 1895–1939 (Montreal: McGill-
Queen’s University Press, 1978).
Morris, Peter and Andrew McIntosh, ‘Quota Quickies’, in The Canadian Film Encyclopedia,
http://tiff.net/CANADIANFILMENCYCLOPEDIA/Browse/bysubject/quota-quickies.
National Film Board: Survey of Organization and Business Administration. Canadian Parliamentary
Papers, 1950.
Pickering, Michael and David Chaney, ‘Democracy and Communication: Mass Observation
1937–1943’, Journal of Communication vol. 36 no. 1 (Winter 1986), pp. 41–56.
Pronay, Nicholas, ‘John Grierson and the Documentary – 60 Years On’, Historical Journal of Film,
Radio and Television vol. 9 no. 3 (1989), pp. 227–46.
Richards, Jeffrey and Dorothy Sheridan (eds), Mass-Observation at the Movies (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987).
Scher, Len, The Un-Canadians: True Stories of the Blacklist Era (Toronto: Lester Publishing Ltd,
1992).
Special Committee on the National Film Board, Minutes of Proceedings and Evidence (Ottawa:
Queen’s Printer, 1952).
UNESCO, Report of the Commission on Technical Needs in Press, Radio, Film, Following the Survey in
Twelve War-devastated Countries (Paris: UNESCO, 1947).
Waugh, Thomas, Michael Brendan Baker and Ezra Winton (eds), Challenge for Change: Activist
Documentary at the National Film Board of Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s
University Press, 2010).
Whitaker, Reg and Gary Marcuse, Cold War Canada: The Making of a National Insecurity State,
1945–1957 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994).

1 20 The Grierson Effect

8
Imperial Relations with Polynesian Romantics:
The John Grierson Effect in New Zealand

Simon Sigley

When Gordon Mirams described New Zealand on the March (1938) as ‘an excellently
photographed survey of the progress made on public works in New Zealand’,1 he
seemed to be giving substance to a flattering assertion that New Zealand ‘led the way
in the documentary film movement’, inspiring the work of the Empire Marketing
Board.2 New Zealand on the March was undoubtedly ‘good propaganda for Labour’ but
it was also ‘a very creditable piece of documentary film of real intrinsic interest. The
huge modern machines now being used on public works in this country will, I have no
doubt, come as a revelation to many people.’3
Like the film, this chapter aims to reveal. In the sketchy accounts of John
Grierson’s visit to New Zealand in early 1940, it is typically assumed that his presence
and the report he submitted to the government led straightforwardly to the
establishment of the National Film Unit (NFU) in 1941; from which a distinctive
documentary tradition developed, informed by concepts of nationhood, democratic
citizenship and a progressive political agenda. But Grierson’s role in the establishment
of the NFU cannot be so neatly packaged; for one thing, the need to inform New
Zealanders about World War II and the nation’s role both on the battlefield and the
home front had already led to changes at the government film studios in Miramar. For
another, senior ministers in the Labour administration were not convinced of the need
to commit scarce material resources to regular film production in wartime; nor did
they properly appreciate what the ‘creative treatment of actuality’ meant in terms
of documentary film. Furthermore, alongside this ‘nationalist’ agenda, there were
unspoken imperial aspects to Grierson’s mission in New Zealand.
While Grierson certainly impressed some people, the nature and extent of his
influence on public policy, government ministers, high-ranking civil servants and film-
makers are not well known. What little we do know draws on unreliable memory, old
research and assumed wisdom rather than on evidence.4 In fact, the mundane, yet
significant, details of Grierson’s visit, such as when he arrived, whom he saw and what
he set out to achieve have not been clearly established in the several brief recycled
accounts of his sojourn among those he later affectionately dubbed ‘Polynesian
romantics’.5
Drawing on hitherto undiscovered archival material in New Zealand and Scotland,
this chapter documents Grierson’s New Zealand visit and the impact he had on his
contemporaries; establishes his role in the creation, organisation and production of the
NFU; and highlights a neglected component of British ‘soft power’: the non-theatrical

Imperial Relations with Polynesian Romantics: The John Grierson Effect in New Zealand 121
distribution and exhibition of inter-empire documentary films and newsreels – a
vital element in maintaining British interests in its former colonies, colonies whose
allegiances were being steadily diluted and disputed by the US. While not typically
associated with Grierson’s visit, the organisation of a network for the non-theatrical
distribution and exhibition of British films led to the creation of the National Film
Library (NFL) in 1942, a necessary institution in shoring up and extending imperial
relations; Grierson knew there was little point in making British films if imperial
audiences could not see them.
The notion that New Zealand had once been at the forefront of documentary
practice was a discursive gambit probably made by Grierson when he had lunch on 21
April 1939 with Gilbert McAllister, then general manager of the New Zealand Public
Relations Council in London.6 Grierson’s introduction to McAllister resulted from a
higher-level meeting earlier in April between Sir Stephen Tallents and William Jordan,
the New Zealand high commissioner to the UK. Both Tallents and Grierson were
working for the Imperial Relations Trust, a body set up in 1937 to strengthen
economic, political and cultural connections between the UK, its colonies and the
dominions of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa. According to Grierson,
the film committee of the IRT existed primarily ‘to aid the flow of films between Great
Britain and the Dominions’ and disposed of ‘certain limited funds’ to facilitate the
creation of such a network.7 Securing audiences for British propaganda was thus a
primary object of Grierson’s work.
Grierson’s complimentary gambit was swiftly followed by a more sober assessment
of current New Zealand government film in the light of British practice, which had
seen ‘the documentary film [make] enormous advances both technically and from the
propagandist point of view’.8 It was no longer sufficient to make films that simply
highlighted natural splendours or promoted New Zealand butter as ‘solid sunshine’. A
more directive approach was called for in projecting the nation and its goods overseas,
especially in British cinemas. McAllister concurred; he could not recall seeing a New
Zealand film in ‘a first-class cinema, while the references to New Zealand in newsreels,
such as British Movietone News, are most infrequent, and do not begin to compare in
number with references to Australia for example’.9 Grierson also assured McAllister
that there were even larger audiences in non-theatrical circuits, comprising various
libraries, roadshows run by large corporations, Workers’ Educational and Travel
Associations, official exhibitions, film societies and schools.
Such an array of publics available for publicity purposes excited the appetites of New
Zealand officials, ministers and civil servants, looking for ways to increase sales and
boost the country’s image. Frank Langstone, Minister of Trade and Publicity, and Walter
Nash, Minister of Finance, were both in London in June 1939, with the latter engaged in
arduous talks with the British about an urgently needed £16 million loan.10 Both men
were in strong sympathy with the IRT proposal to send Grierson. Indeed, prior to his
departure for the UK in April, Nash had talked with J. H. Mason, the general manager of
New Zealand Theatres, about increasing the production and distribution of New Zealand
films locally and in the UK.11 Langstone assured McAllister of his department’s intention
‘to associate itself [with Grierson] in every possible way’. As far as he was concerned,
Grierson could ‘arrange anything he cared to with “Imperial Relations Trust” which I
understand is ready and willing to help in work of this character’.12

1 22 The Grierson Effect

 Prime ministerial sanction for Grierson’s visit was given in May 193913 but the
degree to which this constitutes an ‘invitation’ by the New Zealand government is
moot. Certainly, it was not a local initiative. At best, the New Zealand government
accepted an IRT initiative because it saw the need to modernise its use of film as
publicity material; at worst, it simply complied with imperial wishes. There were
compelling material reasons for such compliance, one of the most pressing being an
urgent need to borrow a lot of money from a reluctant British Exchequer so as to avoid
a debt crisis and pay for the government’s considerable investment in public works and
social welfare. British responses to Labour’s ‘social experiments’, e.g., the Social
Security Act 1938, ranged from ‘impatience to scorn to outright hostility’.14

ThE AdvENT of GRIERsoN

Grierson’s month-long sojourn began in Auckland on 16 February 1940.15 He then

travelled by rail to Wellington in the company of the acting manager of the government
film studios, A. A. Mackenzie, who apprised him of the facilities he later visited,
galvanising the much reduced staff and their ‘sometimes drooping souls’ with his
enthusiasm for their work.16 A ministerial welcome party allowed him to meet many of
Wellington’s political and cultural elite, most particularly Peter Fraser (deputy prime
minister, inter alia, and soon to become prime minister upon the death of Michael Savage
on 27 March 1940), Sir Thomas Hunter (psychology professor at Victoria University and
vice chancellor of the University of New Zealand), J. T. Paul, director of publicity in the
prime minister’s office, Dr C. E. Beeby (then assistant director of education), and L. J.
Schmitt, general manager tourist and publicity.
Grierson was hardly a household name, even in progressive circles, so it was
incumbent upon the ‘happy few’ to advertise his imminent coming along with his
views on documentary. In July 1939, National Education reprinted a condensed version
of Grierson’s text on ‘The Dramatic Factor in Education’, in which the need to engage
the viewer’s cognitive and affective responses was argued as indispensable in any
effective pedagogical practice involving documentary film. ‘Films in Schools’ took up
an emergent nationalist baton by arguing that decolonisation required an attention
to the specificities of place and time: ‘The Dominion Museum’s photographs of New
Zealand’s Railways, Post Office, waterfronts and productive industries should all be on
films.’17 The widely read New Zealand Listener published ‘Documentaries for the
Dominions: John Grierson, Noted Film Producer, in New Zealand’, a week after his
arrival. The article explained what documentaries were, why Grierson was there and
what he had already recently achieved in Canada with government film (see Zoë
Druick’s chapter).18 On 8 March, the same weekly magazine published the transcript
of ‘Drama on Your Doorstep’, Grierson’s landmark radio talk, given on 28 February
1940. Strategically, the talk addressed the civic importance of the mass media,
specifically radio and documentary, in modernity where it had become impossible for
any one person to properly comprehend how complex societies functioned; whence
the need for communication intermediaries of the sort Grierson had become. His
flattering introduction to the programme (for New Zealand audiences) recalled the
advice he had received from Mollie Chilcott of Strand Films in London, who had

Imperial Relations with Polynesian Romantics: The John Grierson Effect in New Zealand 123
spoken with Nash and Langstone in 1939: ‘I think the best angle from which to
approach them is that of putting their [social] experiment on record, encouraging the
English working man and generally telling the world the story of their own particular
social development.’19
Grierson obliged: ‘You have done things of tremendous international importance
in this country with your social experiments. There are audiences all over the world
who would want to see and hear about these things.’20 Topics of interest to other
countries included ‘the work of Sir Truby King, your grassland research, your Plunket
system, your schools, your housing, your approach to economic problems’.21 Appealing
to his listeners’ progressive tendencies and proselytising urges, Grierson’s introduction
summoned them to act: ‘it is your right and your duty – and your urgent need – to
show democracy in action by bringing these things to life’.22 Radio and films offered a
method of doing that. ‘Both had dramatic quality; both were able to bring things to life
quickly; both were able to give people a living sense of the giant organisations which
served them.’23 This was a topic that the Labour government had a particular
sensitivity to, given that it was responsible for the creation of ‘the most comprehensive
system of public health, pensions, and superannuation in the world’.24
Grierson’s workload during the twenty-eight days he spent in New Zealand was
extensive and included long discussions with senior ministers. He wrote a twenty-
nine-page report covering the state’s varied use of documentary film production,
distribution and exhibition, and added a four-page personal memo to Peter Fraser, the
real power of the Labour administration: ‘National Information Services: Special
Problems’.25 This action plan accentuated three points:

1 Marketing involved constructing a series of positive images of the country so that

‘New Zealand’s contribution to the living whole of the Commonwealth should be
brought into the imagination of the United Kingdom’;
2 State managerialism led to large departments staffed by civil servant ‘lifers’ who
worked lazily. Offsetting this perception involved ‘bringing alive to the public the
problems and achievements of the organisation’, as well as drawing attention to ‘the
dramatic part communications as a whole … played in modern life’;
3 Nationalism: films could create a national consciousness of issues that rose above the
narrowness of domestic ‘bread and butter’ politics.

Such considerations may have seemed rather distant with the world at war and, in any
case, insofar as selling New Zealand produce to the UK was concerned, there was little
urgency, as the British government had already offered on the declaration of war in
early September 1939 to buy the country’s entire exportable surplus of meat and dairy
products.26 As far as speaking to the nation was concerned, radio was already under
government control, having been nationalised in 193527 and emergency regulations
introduced in September 1939 gave the government great powers of censorship,
control of all property, persons and institutions. Moreover, this ‘constitutional
autocracy’ elicited a strong national consensus.28
With Fraser’s attention captured by more pressing matters (a cancer-ridden prime
minister soon to die, ructions among the left-wing of the party and an impending
Easter conference), the report produced no immediate action plan for either of

1 24 The Grierson Effect

Grierson’s twin objectives: government film production and the efficient non-
theatrical circulation of inter-empire documentary; but he was hardly expecting
one. His longer-term vision anticipated progressive implementation of his
recommendations. In a letter to Tom Baird, a British distribution specialist and
colleague from his GPO period, Grierson wrote that New Zealand was ‘on its way to co-
ordinating and developing its Government film activities and producing a really quite
creative policy’, and forecast that the country would be heard from ‘quite effectively in
about three years time’.29 In a letter to his patron, Sir Stephen Tallents, he anticipated
that: ‘With five years to follow up, periodically, the development of production and
distribution services in each Dominion, we can make a living reality of it.’30
Moreover, while the spirit in government circles was apparently willing, the
necessary ‘flesh’ (in the form of suitable staff) was not; a very real shortage of
competent personnel at the senior executive and administrative levels plagued
the civil service. Very careful and detailed planning was required to implement the
government’s relatively vast (for New Zealand) programme, but ‘the public servants
(like the ministers) were not, in general, very well educated nor experienced in
sophisticated administration’.31 For Grierson, there was no one who combined the
necessary civil-service qualities with effective (far less imaginative) film knowledge.32
In a lengthy memo penned on the eve of his departure from New Zealand for Australia,
he pointed out that he had

strongly urged that they take the brightest young civil servant they can spare and let me give
him an intensive training for six months in Canada, England and the United States. It will be
fatal if they take a second rater who has not the necessary imagination, or bring in a technical
film man who has not the necessary vision of film as an instrument of the new public
information.33

In other letters sent to superiors and colleagues in the immediate wake of his New
Zealand sojourn, Grierson expressed his confidence that the tasks he had been given
by the IRT were well on the way to realisation; this was especially the case with regards
to the Advisory Film Council that he expected Sir Thomas Hunter to lead. The council
was to administer the non-theatrical circuit of films. Its importance in the overall
British scheme of strengthening imperial ties was such that Grierson provided seeding
money for the venture, some £1,250, with £500 earmarked for the purchase of
hundreds of British films, and £750 held in reserve for future developments.34
While finding a suitable film controller was problematic (Grierson’s strong
preference was for W. B. Sutch, an influential economist and senior policy advisor, but
neither Fraser nor Nash were convinced),35 the situation seemed more promising with
regards to the executive officer for the film council. Both Hunter and Beeby were keen
for Stanhope Andrews to be appointed. An ‘effective choice’, Andrews had already
‘absorbed much of our theories of education and public information’.36 Strategically,
this position was crucial to the IRT, as the Film Council was the organisation through
which

the New Zealand Government, the United Kingdom and other Empire Governments – reach
out to the non-theatrical public of New Zealand. It will tell us what the audiences like or want.

Imperial Relations with Polynesian Romantics: The John Grierson Effect in New Zealand 125
 It will use all existing technical agencies for actual exhibition, e.g., Schools, Universities,
Museums, Institutes, Educational Sound Films, etc., to secure its national result.37

Non-theatrical distribution of British and dominion films was all the more pressing
because the usual theatrical release was so haphazard and subject to commercial
rather than cultural or political exigencies. There was also the problem that British
authorities tended to sign exclusive distribution deals with particular commercial
interests. In New Zealand, the deal with British Empire Films meant that British
government films were unavailable for other outlets. The celebrated film Night Mail
was a cause of special regret, as it had

not been properly promoted in New Zealand and accordingly has only had the most partial
distribution. Like all the others tied up in this ineffectual system of circulation, it represents a
film wasted, which might have been most valuable to British interests, if more knowledgeably
and systematically handled.38

Not only would a national non-theatrical distribution and exhibition circuit partially
compensate for the screening lacunae already noted in commercial theatres, Grierson
insisted on its ‘primary importance and influence’. One was ‘assured of audiences
everywhere, of the greatest value for prestige purposes, so long as circulation is
systematized and built up by such agencies as the proposed Advisory Film Council and
so long as you have material to give free’.39 The real battle lay with shaping public
perception positively to British interests through building ‘an approach to the public
which, with all the great National Organizations behind it, gives us the emphasis we
seek’.40
In his letter to Lord Clarendon, chairman of the IRT, Grierson praised Sir Henry
Batterbee’s achievements in raising local awareness of British documentary through
the many private screenings he hosted in his house, where the cream of Wellington
society regularly gathered. In a sign of increasing British concern about its influence,
the post of high commissioner to New Zealand was created in July 1938, with
Batterbee its first appointment. He was expected to develop ‘the system of
communication and consultation between His Majesty’s Governments’, which had
been emphasised at successive imperial conferences.41 To facilitate his mission, Queen
Mary had given him a 16mm projector and with

a none too rich supply of films from England, he has kept the flag flying very effectively at
his dinner parties. … I found that the leaders of most sections of Wellington’s ministerial,
educational and civic groups already knew a good deal about our work and were very
appreciative of the sight of England our films were giving.42

The strategic propaganda importance of non-theatrical distribution in developing

imperial sentiment was such that Grierson raised the matter again with Peter Fraser
(now PM) in a letter sent from Pago Pago in early May 1940 as Grierson steamed from
Australia to Canada. He reminded Fraser of the action plan for ‘mobilising as much
screen space as is reasonable’ and the dividend the government could earn both
nationally and internationally if the Advisory Film Council was established. Nationally,

1 26 The Grierson Effect

it facilitated ‘an opportunity for local leadership of opinion, as theatre audiences do
not’, while internationally it opened up ‘large non-theatrical audiences in educational
and civic circles: particularly in the Dominions and the United States’.43

IN GRIERsoN’s WAkE

New Zealand had been a ‘good experience’, described by Grierson as ‘a gracious

country’, where

the model of manners provided by a hand-picked British stock on the one hand and by the
native Maori, not less, on the other, makes for a very distinctive people. The blessings of
Polynesia and the South Seas are on it.44

Despite the graciousness of the country, the potential cloying quality of angels was
apparent in his letter to Tallents, where he noted a more

intensive interest there in good works than anywhere I ever saw and for a moment I am
almost thankful for the change of Sydney, where good works, if any, are a strict second to
horse racing, brilliant beaches, good looks and political manoeuvre.45

Grierson did not enjoy the same enthusiastic welcome in Australia as he had in New
Zealand. Certainly, the minority-led Menzies government was of a more conservative
hue than the Labour government across the Tasman Sea. In his Pago Pago letter to
Fraser, Grierson confessed as much, admitting that he found Australia ‘difficult to
bring into focus on this question of films’.46
However, Grierson had good reason to believe in the success of his New Zealand
mission. Not only had powerful ‘progressive-minded’ ministers listened to him, but his
zest and zeal also impressed senior civil servants, whose administrative knowledge and
control was of paramount importance in furthering the scheme hatched by the IRT
and given shape by Grierson. Moreover, his fondness for the New Zealanders was a
reciprocal affair, as an anonymous government official writing to the New Zealand
high commission in London confirmed:

Whoever was initially responsible for sending Grierson to this country deserves a high place
in heaven. He made a great impression on the town [of Wellington] and I think everyone
wished that he could stay and live here forever … . What we would like to see is the realisation
of his and our aim for this country.47

Although some people in Wellington energetically fanned the fire he lit, its light and
warmth were experienced fitfully. Of those he influenced, the most important here
were Paul (director of publicity in the PM’s office, and, in effect, chief censor); Schmitt
(general manager tourist and publicity); Beeby (director of education); and Andrews
(editor National Education).
In a handwritten letter of thanks to Schmitt, Grierson wrote that he could have
done little without his ‘progressive spirit and co-operation’; provided direction with

Imperial Relations with Polynesian Romantics: The John Grierson Effect in New Zealand 127
regards to seeking ‘creative leadership’; and advised against any hasty action in
acquiring more film production equipment and staff, as this would ‘cause distrust in
Treasury’ and jeopardise ‘the scheme as a whole’.48 A few weeks later, Schmitt wrote
back having spent ‘the last 24 hours or so with you in spirit’ as a result of reading Paul
Rotha’s seminal Documentary Film. The letter reveals a man fully in sympathy with the
objectives proposed in Grierson’s report and the underlying ideological orientation
informing them. They had a ‘great job of work’ to do.

My enthusiasm and keenness has been fired by yours and also by Rotha’s last chapter ‘Policies
and Purposes’ in so far as it appeals for action by means of documentary to show to those
millions – who unthinkingly enjoy liberty under democratic governments – the reasons why
they do enjoy it and to enable them to understand why the democratic policy is best.49

Schmitt had evidently ‘caught the spirit of documentary properly’ and assured
Grierson that he would do all he could ‘to assist in the production and distribution of
this class of film’.50
Another zealous disciple was Stanhope Andrews whose editorship of National
Education gave him a platform from which to proselytise. As part of the media
campaign he later orchestrated in his drive to see the government adopt more of
Grierson’s suggestions, he published ‘Home Is What You See in It’, an essay by W. B.
Sutch, whose several provocations may have cost him the position of national film
controller.51 Sutch argued in favour of making the country better known to New
Zealanders by developing a sense of place, one communicated through various media
(theatre, film, radio, literature): ‘In not one of these fields have the possibilities been
exploited of showing New Zealand to itself.’52 As an emergent cultural nationalist,
Sutch may have overstated his case for strategic reasons, as some New Zealand-born
writers were already producing a locally grounded literature in the 1930s.
A fortuitous event that reinforced the value of film in promoting the war effort was
the return of HMS Achilles in February 1940. In the Battle of the River Plate (13
December 1939), the Achilles became the first New Zealand unit to fire on the enemy
when it engaged the German ‘pocket battleship’ the Admiral Graf Spee in the South
Atlantic. Huge crowds turned out in Auckland and Wellington to greet the returning
‘heroes’ and international newsreel coverage was extensive. Grierson appreciated the
felicitous timing of this event. It neatly underpinned a vital component of his scheme
– the orderly distribution of British, Canadian and Australian government propaganda
films, as well as those (few) made by the New Zealand government’s own film studios
in Miramar.
The person most likely to advance this strand of Grierson’s scheme was Beeby. His
ambitions in this regard, however, suffered a setback following his meeting with the
prime minister on 16 April. As reported by Grierson, Fraser’s initial response to the
development of non-theatrical distribution had been enthusiastic, but Fraser made it
clear to Beeby ‘that he had not given the scheme the full and final approval which Mr.
Grierson seemed to imagine’.53 Ostensibly, Fraser had two main objections: the first
was that the government should not provide funding to an organisation (Council of
Adult Education) it did not directly control; the second was that the voices of other
government departments might not be heard by the council.

1 28 The Grierson Effect

 These objections were overcome when the education department assumed
responsibility for establishing a national organisation for the distribution and
exhibition of non-theatrical films. A ‘workaround’ suited to local conditions had been
created. Two events were fundamental: the first was the appointment of Walter Harris
to the newly minted position of ‘supervisor of teaching aids’ – principally visual – in
April 1941.54 The second was the creation of the National Film Library a year later
with Harris in charge. Foreign governments now had an official repository and clearing
house for their films. More fully convinced of the cultural and educative use of film,
the government provided a service that articulated the demand of its diverse non-
theatrical audiences, secured the supply of appropriate films and co-ordinated their
distribution and exhibition. Grierson’s ‘advisory film council’ was now a fledgling state
institution; but what of documentary film production?

MAINTAINING ThE fIRE hE LIT

From various quarters, both internally and internationally, the pressure to do

something bold with regards to government production of documentary film steadily
accrued. Resorting to a congenial strategy, Andrews launched the New Zealand Film
Letter, published by the Wellington Film Unit (more an expression of hope than a
reality at this stage). Its first issue appeared in November 1940. Announcing that
‘more people in New Zealand are influenced by films than by books’, but that there had
been no film equivalent to literary periodicals, the Film Letter clearly signalled change.
Andrews’s advocacy of government film production was a priority: ‘After a year of war,
the New Zealand Government’s film publicity adds up on the production side to 14
poster films and the release of some first class material about the Achilles in the
international Fox Newsreel.’55 Unsurprisingly, however,

Our lone Government film unit has not yet produced anything of the quality of Harry
Watt’s GPO film Squadron 992, which was made within a few weeks of the first raid on the
Forth Bridge, and has just arrived in New Zealand through the United Kingdom High
Commissioner, Sir Harry Batterbee. But as policy becomes more clearly defined, and
organisation is geared up from the production of scenics to that of documentaries, the
Miramar people will be able to give a good account of themselves. There is ample talent and
technical skill in this country to produce first-rate film documents of ourselves just as soon as
we get round to making use of it.56

A polemical piece entitled ‘Films for Democracy’ asserted the value and importance of
using film as a communication medium and recycled Grierson’s argument that modern
societies were complex, impersonal conglomerations requiring specialists to mediate
between state institutions and citizens.

Some restoration of that person-to-person contact is essential to democracy … it can be done

with the aid of modern machinery of communication if it is used imaginatively. Above all it
can be done by the use of films … . That’s ourselves wanting to know each other [and]
wondering then why, in the name of democracy, they are still fiddling while London burns.57

Imperial Relations with Polynesian Romantics: The John Grierson Effect in New Zealand 129
‘They’ refers obliquely yet pungently to the two primary government leaders, Fraser
and Nash, who together amassed considerable power during the war; the latter found
delegation of authority notoriously difficult, which did nothing to make decision
making more timely.58 ‘Films for Democracy’ was republished by the nationally
circulated New Zealand Listener on 6 December and may have further indisposed Nash
towards Andrews whom he already suspected of engaging more in self-aggrandisement
than in advancing the general interest.59
The campaign to raise awareness and stimulate action about the value of
documentary film continued among the educated when the official bulletin of the New
Zealand Library Association devoted the major part of its May 1941 issue of New
Zealand Libraries to the topic of ‘Books and Film’. The Wellington Film Unit had
contributed an article entitled ‘Film in the Community’s Service: Films about
Ourselves’, which drew comparisons between the cultural value and social influence of
books and films, and sought to establish parallels insofar as their distribution was
concerned: highly organised with books via the library system; in need of similar
institutional treatment with regards to non-commercial films.60

A dREAM CoMEs TRuE

With Andrews and his associates mounting an effective media campaign and the
government in trouble over an ill-considered verbal provocation, the chance to ‘walk
the talk’ was finally given to the small working and production subcommittee of the
government film studios. The result was Country Lads, a nine and a half-minute film
about the departure of New Zealand soldiers, screened to ministers and invited guests
in June 1941.
To understand the government’s new willingness to engage with the ‘maturer
processes of film-making’61 (a documentary mode that arranges, shapes and interprets
‘reality’), it is necessary to provide the backstory – the immediate wartime context and
its effect on the government’s decision making with regards to national information
services used to publicise the war effort.
When the Germans took control of Greece in April 1941, the island of Crete
became a secondary target; as part of their evacuation from the Greek mainland, the
Second New Zealand Expeditionary Force fought a ten-day battle and suffered heavy
casualties: there were 671 deaths, 1,455 wounded and 1,692 prisoners on Crete, which
was on top of the losses in Greece – 291 killed, 599 wounded and 1,614 prisoners
of war.62 For a small nation like New Zealand, Greece and Crete were military
catastrophes.
With Peter Fraser overseas, explaining the losses to the people back home became
Walter Nash’s thankless task. In a provocative radio talk, broadcast in the first days
of June 1941, he complained that fewer than 5 per cent of the New Zealand people
understood the seriousness of the war. The following day, an editorial in the Press,
entitled ‘Publicity and the War Effort’, took issue with Nash, attributing this colossal
ignorance to the government’s own unfocused efforts. The censorship and publicity
branch in the PM’s office had ‘the responsibility of seeing that the New Zealand people
are kept adequately and correctly informed about the war situation and fully conscious

1 30 The Grierson Effect

of their own obligation to participate in the war effort to the limits of their ability’.63
Clearly, the information was not getting through.
In the harsh light of this public-relations mess of its own making, the government
gave ‘gadfly’ Andrews the opportunity he sought. Country Lads was the result.
Put together to show what film could do to promote the war effort and pull the nation
together, it combined footage of New Zealand troops parading around Wellington with
footage of them leaving for the Middle East in January, April and August 1940, and
wove these images around a narration that pulled the disparate regions of the country
into an imagined national community of common endeavour. Very real socioeconomic
and ethnic divisions that structured relationships between such formations as
employers and workers, Pakeha and Maori, urban and rural, men and women, were
healed in the edit, with a commentary that also emphasised the reasons for going to
war – the defence of democratic freedoms and common values: ‘Canoes and ships
brought the New Zealanders here long ago. Fighting New Zealanders. Pioneers looking
for elbow room. Men and women who couldn’t be shut in against their wish.’64
Andrews’s narration also made the visual communication task and dramatic potential
of the medium clear: ‘Until now only a handful of us have known what troop
departures looked like; how it feels to say au revoir to soldier friends and relations at
the ship’s side; the sorrow and the pride of it.’65 Here was an instance of documentary
‘drama on your doorstep’, as discussed by Grierson during his February 1940 radio
talk.
Many of the ideas Andrews had developed in his twenty-two-page memo, ‘National
Publicity and Adult Education in War Time’,66 were on display in the film: the close
integration of civilian and soldier, the sight of marching troops, the ordinary
associated with the extraordinary, the clear-sighted democratic conviction of the need
to fight so far from home and, importantly, the faces of New Zealand men and women
that filled the screen in tight midshots and close-ups. It was well received by the
assembled audience of ministers, MPs, senior civil servants and wives; tears were said
to have pearled down glistening cheeks. A chapter in a recent book still claims that
Prime Minister Fraser was present, also teary-eyed, at the screening of Country Lads
in July [sic] 1941, but this was impossible as he was overseas at the time.67 A short
newspaper review of the screening consecrated the endeavour and called for its
continuation:

Country Lads expresses the national spirit of the times … [it] is a simple little film, but it
pictures a great moment in the history of this young country, and pictures it competently.
More could be done on these lines. Often easily obtainable newsreel shots could be used in
a film of emotional force that would bring the screens of New Zealand theatres into their
place as a medium of national self-expression.68

In late October 1941, ‘A Dream Comes True: New Zealand Films for the People by the
People’, appeared in the New Zealand Listener. On either side of the title are headshots
of Andrews and Grierson, visually underscoring the close connection between the new
entity and its mentor. The text described the origins of documentary film and the
intentions of the NFU; the nationalists had carried the day: ‘Putting Ourselves on the
Screen. Real events, real people’, was to be the main business of the NFU.

Imperial Relations with Polynesian Romantics: The John Grierson Effect in New Zealand 131
The establishment of the NFU in 1941 and the less heralded NFL a year later was, indeed, a dream come true for both
cultural nationalists (such as Andrews) and imperial propagandists (such as Grierson) (New Zealand Listener, 24 October,
1941, p. 6)

A year later, ‘Propagandists with Good Consciences: National Film Unit’s First Year’
appeared. Andrews’s text celebrated its achievements, described its productions and its
relationship with government. The ‘propaganda’ in the title refers to the interpretive
function of documentary practice, as distinct from newsreels, which might describe
and expose events but did not ‘cut under the merely photogenic surface to the
fundamentals of social and economic change, and across national barriers to
international understanding’.69 Here, documentary’s deeper purpose was to reveal the
suprasensible ‘real’ that lay beyond or beneath the phenomenal. Simply recording the
material world was not the ‘maturer form of documentary’ in any Griersonian sense.
Shaping the phenomenal world was a matter of comprehending underlying ‘generative
forces’; it took ‘artistry’ to articulate these using the material world as a kind of dumb
matter.

It was this belief which caused [Grierson] to reject the idea of film as mimesis … . [He]
believed that the cinema articulated contemporary reality through material aesthetic
processes intrinsic to itself, and he rejected the view, which was prevalent at the time, that
cinema could reproduce external reality.70

Andrews understood the selective and interpretive processes that construct the
‘truth’ of cinematic realism, and would have concurred with Grierson’s rejection of
a mimetic cinema: ‘the movie-camera … does not show a battlefield, but compels
attention upon that small portion of it within the fairly narrow angle of view of the
lens’.71

1 32 The Grierson Effect

CoNCLusIoNs

Although most versions of Grierson’s sojourn in New Zealand describe the

establishment of the NFU in terms that recall Julius Caesar’s pithy veni, vidi, vici, and
ignore his role in setting up the NFL, this account has sought to demonstrate that
the events leading to their formation were more complex. Single-factor explanations
based on light research are unable to describe events with complex causations. For
example, to simply reprise the notion that the economist and policy advisor W. B.
Sutch was a ‘key instigator’ of Grierson’s visit is not enough; such an assertion
requires proof.72 The only evidence adduced for this appears to be a handwritten
note by Andrews: ‘Don’t forget that it was Bill Sutch who persuaded Frank Langstone
to get Grierson to New Zealand in the first place. … It was my report that persuaded
PF [Peter Fraser] to set up the Unit.’73 However, the account of the NFU’s genesis
described here demonstrates that Andrews’s report had no such clearly suasive
force. Furthermore, there is no material evidence in the papers that document
Grierson’s trip (sponsored by the IRT on recommendations emerging from imperial
conferences) that show any involvement by Sutch, let alone credit him with being
‘a key instigator’.
The establishment of the NFU arose from wartime contingencies beyond Grierson’s
(and his acolyte Andrews’s) control. Having said that, it is clear that Grierson’s
influence concerning the state bureaucracy’s managerial use of film was considerable
and enduring. Furthermore, his energy and zeal were inspirational, his contacts
multiple and his administrative acumen valuable in negotiating potential pitfalls,
e.g., with regard to Treasury’s typical objections to increases in government spending.
It is also clear that a fundamental component of Grierson’s mission has hitherto been
ignored in accounts of his stay in New Zealand, namely the founding of the NFL – an
institution that not only distributed non-theatrical films but also materially assisted
in the creation of audiences for propaganda (as well as ‘educative’ and cultural)
purposes. It was of vital British interest that inter-empire relations be strengthened
using various forms of ‘soft power’ and films were powerful propaganda weapons.74
It is in this light that Grierson’s surprising four-page letter to Fraser from Pago Pago
in early May (1940) should be seen. Beeby’s meeting with the PM in mid-April taught
Grierson that Fraser had reservations concerning the imperial scheme.75 The letter
reminded Fraser of their conversation and Grierson’s recommendations for ‘mobilising
screen space’ and the dividend the government could earn if the Advisory Film Council
were established.76
The so-called ‘delay’ in developing documentary film production and non-theatrical
distribution should not be attributed to personal antipathy (another single-factor
explanation);77 rather there were more mundanely complex reasons, including a
shortage of appropriately qualified people, wartime exigencies, central control (Fraser
and Nash) and internal political struggle within the Labour Party (suppression of the
left wing). It is also worth reiterating that Grierson himself expected no extreme
‘makeover’ of national publicity services but a gradual development over three to five
years (the British were in it for the long haul in their efforts to dilute American
economic and cultural power, as well as nascent nationalist sentiment, in what was
‘their’ sphere of influence). On that time scale, the New Zealanders’ ability to establish

Imperial Relations with Polynesian Romantics: The John Grierson Effect in New Zealand 133
both the NFU in 1941 and NFL in 1942 was ahead of schedule, albeit slightly askew of
empire when national circumstances are factored in.
Entering a land of ‘progressive’ political ambition, Grierson encountered largely
congenial conditions for the reception of his documentary ideals among the Polynesian
romantics he assiduously courted. Like some latter-day incarnation of Duncan Gray
seducing Maggie, he may have heard Robert Burns’s refrain ringing in his ears as he
left: ‘Ha ha, the wooing o’t!’78

ACkNoWLEdGMENTs

I am grateful to Russell Campbell and film historian and archivist Clive Sowry for
reading an earlier version of this chapter and helping to improve its accuracy and
structure.

NoTEs

1. G. Mirams, ‘Propaganda in News Films’, National Education, 1 July 1938, p. 239. The
original title is New Zealand Marches On. (My thanks to Clive Sowry for pointing this out.)
Mirams was developing a reputation as an independent film critic, a position he
consolidated when he became subeditor for the New Zealand Listener in 1939.
2. Archives NZ, TO 1 49/11/1 Part 1, ‘Memo on Films’, 21 April 1939, Gilbert McAllister,
New Zealand Public Relations Council.
3. Mirams, ‘Propaganda in News Films’, p. 239.
4. The following texts construct the standard version of Grierson’s New Zealand visit:
Jonathan Dennis and Jan Bieringa (eds), Film in Aotearoa New Zealand (Wellington: Victoria
University Press, 1992, 1996); Margot Fry, ‘A Servant of Many Masters: A History of the
NFU, 1941 to 1976’, MA thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, 1995; John O’Shea, Don’t
Let It Get You (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1999); Geraldene Peters, ‘Political and
Alternative Film Making: 1940 to 1950’, in New Zealand Film: An Illustrated History
(Wellington: Te Papa Press, 2011).
5. The expression is in Jack C. Ellis, John Grierson: Life, Contributions, Influence (Carbondale
and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), p. 138.
6. ‘New Zealander Had Varied Career in British Film Work’, Dominion, 31 July 1947 – an
interview with Margaret Thomson.
7. Letter from Grierson to McAllister, John Grierson Archive, University of Stirling, G4/5/8
(hereafter Grierson Archive).
8. Ibid. Grierson had already made a similar assessment of Canadian government film.
9. Archives NZ, ‘Memo on Films’.
10. Keith Sinclair, Walter Nash (Dunedin: Oxford University and Auckland University Presses,
1976), p. 186; and Nancy M. Taylor, The New Zealand People at War: The Home Front, volume 1
(Wellington: V. R. Ward, 1986), p. 35.
11. G3/15/6, Grierson Archive.
12. G3/15/16, Grierson Archive.
13. Archives NZ, TO 1 49/11/1 Part 1, Letter: Savage to Jordan, 18 May 1939.

1 34 The Grierson Effect

14. This was one of the most important single pieces of legislation in New Zealand history.
Nash got the loan on very harsh terms, with some UK newspapers calling them ‘impossibly
onerous; indeed blackmailing’. See Sinclair, Walter Nash, p. 176.
15. Grierson travelled first class aboard the Matson liner, Mariposa, from San Francisco, and
was accompanied by his wife. When he left New Zealand, he was aboard the Monterey,
another Matson liner, which sailed from Auckland on Friday 15 March 1940, for Sydney.
Interestingly, the length of time he spent in New Zealand was influenced by steamship
timetables. (My thanks to Clive Sowry for this information.)
16. G4/24/35, Grierson Archive.
17. National Education, 2 October 1939, p. 353.
18. New Zealand Listener, 23 February 1940.
19. G3/15/44, Grierson Archive.
20. New Zealand Listener, 23 February 1940.
21. G4/33/1, Grierson Archive. Truby King was an important health reformer (notably of the
mentally ill) and founder of the Plunket Society, credited with significantly reducing infant
mortality.
22. Ibid.
23. New Zealand Listener, 23 February 1940.
24. Sinclair, Walter Nash, p. 166.
25. Archives NZ, TO 1 49/11/1 Part 1.
26. Sinclair, Walter Nash, p. 189.
27. Patrick Day, The Radio Years: A History of Broadcasting in New Zealand (Auckland: Auckland
University Press, 1994), p. 4.
28. Ibid., p. 208.
29. G4/24/71, Grierson Archive.
30. G4/24/66, Grierson Archive.
31. Sinclair, Walter Nash, p. 154.
32. G4/5/6, Grierson Archive, Memo to Sir Henry Batterbee.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. G4/5/5, Grierson Archive.
36. G4/5/6, Grierson Archive.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid.
41. Gazette, 13 March 1939, p. 1, http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1946&dat=
19390313&id=V4wjAAAAIBAJ&sjid=p5gFAAAAIBAJ&pg=4193,2263959.
42. G4/24/63, Grierson Archive.
43. Archives NZ, TO 1 49/11/1 Part 1.
44. Ibid.
45. G4/24/66, Grierson Archive.
46. Archives NZ, TO 1 49/11/1 Part 1.
47. Ibid., 22 April 1940. An unsigned letter to R. M. Campbell (then official secretary to the
New Zealand high commissioner in London). The anonymous writer has an insider’s
political knowledge; one candidate is W. B. Sutch, then working for the Minister of Finance.

Imperial Relations with Polynesian Romantics: The John Grierson Effect in New Zealand 135
 If it were he, this would mean Sutch could have had nothing to do with organising
Grierson’s visit.
48. Archives NZ, TO 1 49/11/1 Part 1, Letter: Grierson to Schmitt, 13 March 1940.
49. Ibid., Letter: Schmitt to Grierson, 1 April 1940.
50. Ibid.
51. W. B. Sutch, National Education, 8 March 1941, p. 61. Grierson discussed Sutch with Nash,
who harboured doubts about his suitability for the position. He had been suspected of
leaking documents from the Committee of Imperial Defence to a Communist newspaper
while in London with Nash in 1937 (Sinclair, Walter Nash, p. 148); written a ‘Marxist history
of the working class’ while commissioned to write a survey of New Zealand social services
for the 1940 centenary (ibid., p. 208); and made himself unpopular in other ways, notably in
a speech that incensed many Roman Catholics because of its strongly anti-papal theme
(ibid., p. 209).
52. Sutch, National Education, p. 61.
53. Archives NZ, TO 1 49/11/1 Part 1, Letter: Beeby to Minister of Education, 8 August 1940.
54. Harris was a close friend of Beeby’s from their university days in Christchurch.
55. N.Z. Film Letter vol. 1 no. 1 (November 1940).
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid., p. 2.
58. Sinclair, Walter Nash, pp. 258–62. For Michael Bassett, Fraser assumed more decision-
making responsibility because his ‘Cabinet was light on talent … .’ See Michael Bassett and
Michael King, Tomorrow Comes the Song: A Life of Peter Fraser (Wellington: Penguin, 2000),
p. 204.
59. Nash had apparently annotated Andrews’s memo on ‘National Publicity’ with the word
‘nebulous’ and thought he was primarily self-seeking. Cited in Fry, ‘A Servant of Many
Masters’, p. 27. Although there are many errors in this chapter of the MS, citing of sources
seems reliable.
60. New Zealand Libraries vol. IV no. 10 (May 1941), p. 113.
61. The expression is Grierson’s and excerpted from the letter he wrote to Clarendon
(G4/24/63, Grierson Archive).
62. Bassett and King, Tomorrow Comes the Song, p. 215.
63. Press, 3 June 1941.
64. From part 2 of commentary in Country Lads (1941).
65. From opening paragraph in commentary of Country Lads.
66. National Education, May 1940. The main burden of the memorandum was the construction
of a national spirit to further the war effort. In MS-0982/501, Papers relating to War
Publicity and Information Services including minutes of the War Publicity Committee, J. T.
Paul papers, Hocken Collections Archives and Manuscripts, p. 8.
67. Geraldene Peters, ‘Political and Alternative Film Making: 1940 to 1950’, in New Zealand
Film: An Illustrated History (Wellington: Te Papa Press, 2011), p. 105.
68. Dominion, 28 June 1941.
69. Ibid.
70. Ian Aitken, Film and Reform: John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement (London and
New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 69.
71. MS-0982/487, 21 May 1941. Hocken Collections Archives and Manuscripts.
72. Peters, ‘Political and Alternative Film Making’, p. 105.

1 36 The Grierson Effect

73. Cited in Fry, ‘A Servant of Many Masters’, p. 18, and reprised by Peters, ‘Political and
Alternative Film Making’, p. 105.
74. The Empire Marketing Board’s film unit, set up by Grierson, was one result of the 1926
Imperial Conference. The British government was exploring the cinematic possibilities of
using ‘film propaganda for peacetime and commercial purposes’. For more on the EMB film
unit’s propaganda, see Gary Evans, John Grierson and the National Film Board (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1984), p. 27.
75. I am speculating that Beeby communicated the gist of the meeting to Grierson, which then
prompted him to write while in transit.
76. Archives NZ, TO 1 49/11/1 Part 1.
77. This account relies on the uncorroborated personal memory of E. S. Andrews, interviewed
informally in 1989, almost fifty years after the events described. In this tale, it is claimed
that ‘Grierson’s directness irritated Prime Minister Peter Fraser, who interpreted his
manner in terms of a misplaced sense of superiority.’ In Peters, ‘Political and Alternative
Film Making’, p. 104.
78. Robert Burns, ‘Duncan Gray’, 1792.

REfERENCEs

Aitken, Ian, Film and Reform: John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement (London and
New York: Routledge, 1990).
Archives NZ, TO 1 49/11/1 Part 1, ‘Memo on Films’, 21 April 1939, Gilbert McAllister, New
Zealand Public Relations Council.
Archives NZ, TO 1 49/11/1 Part 1, Letter: Savage to Jordan, 18 May 1939.
Archives NZ, TO 1 49/11/1 Part 1, Letter: Grierson to Schmitt, 13 March 1940.
Archives NZ, TO 1 49/11/1 Part 1, Letter: Schmitt to Grierson, 1 April 1940.
Archives NZ, TO 1 49/11/1 Part 1, Letter: Beeby to Minister of Education, 8 August 1940.
Bassett, Michael and Michael King, Tomorrow Comes the Song: A Life of Peter Fraser (Wellington:
Penguin, 2000).
Burns, Robert, ‘Duncan Gray’ (1792), http://www.robertburns.org/works/387.shtml.
Day, Patrick, The Radio Years: A History of Broadcasting in New Zealand (Auckland: Auckland
University Press, 1994).
Dennis, Jonathan and Jan Bieringa (eds), Film in Aotearoa New Zealand (Wellington: Victoria
University Press, 1992, 1996).
Ellis, Jack C., John Grierson: Life, Contributions, Influence (Carbondale and Edwardsville:
Southern Illinois University Press, 2000).
Evans, Gary, John Grierson and the National Film Board (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1984).
Fry, Margot, ‘A Servant of Many Masters: A History of the NFU, 1941 to 1976’, MA thesis,
Victoria University of Wellington, 1995.
Gazette [Montreal], 13 March 1939, p. 1, http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1946&
dat=19390313&id=V4wjAAAAIBAJ&sjid=p5gFAAAAIBAJ&pg=4193,2263959.
G3/15/6, John Grierson Archive (JGA).
G3/15/44, JGA.
G4/5/5, JGA.

Imperial Relations with Polynesian Romantics: The John Grierson Effect in New Zealand 137
G4/5/6, JGA, Memo to Sir Henry Batterbee.
G4/24/35, JGA.
G4/24/63, JGA.
G4/24/66, JGA.
G4/24/71, JGA.
G4/33/1, JGA.
Grierson, John, ‘Letter from Grierson to McAllister’, ibid., University of Stirling, G4/5/8.
Mirams, G., ‘Propaganda in News Films’, National Education, 1 July 1938, p. 239.
MS-0982/487, 21 May 1941, Hocken Collections Archives and Manuscripts.
National Education, 2 October 1939, p. 353.
National Education, 8 March 1940, p. 61.
National Education, May 1940.
New Zealand Libraries vol. IV no. 10 (May 1941), p. 113.
New Zealand Listener, 23 February 1940.
‘New Zealander Had Varied Career in British Film Work’, Dominion, 31 July 1947, Clippings from
New Zealand Film Archive, NZ Personality, Vertical Files, Thomson, Margaret.
N.Z. Film Letter vol. 1 no. 1 (November 1940), p. 1
O’Shea, John, Don’t Let It Get You (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1999).
Peters, Geraldene, ‘Political and Alternative Film Making: 1940 to 1950’, in New Zealand Film:
An Illustrated History (Wellington: Te Papa Press, 2011), pp. 103–27.
Press, 3 June 1941.
Sinclair, Keith, Walter Nash (Dunedin: Oxford University and Auckland University Presses,
1976).
Sutch, W. B. National Education, 8 March 1941, p. 61.
Taylor, Nancy M., The New Zealand People at War: The Home Front, volume 1 (Wellington:
V. R. Ward, 1986).

1 38 The Grierson Effect

9
The Grierson Cinema: Australia

Deane Williams

In Australia documentary film history, much has been made of ‘the Grierson effect’,
with the Father of Documentary’s visit to this country and Aotearoa/New Zealand
(see Simon Sigley’s chapter in this book) in 1940 on behalf of the Imperial
Relations Trust the originary moment of much scholarship. Elsewhere I have
written about the ways in which Grierson’s visit has functioned as a ‘foundation
upon which the discourse of documentary film in this country has been built’.1
Much of this notion of influence has been connected to the establishment of the
Australian National Film Board (ANFB) in 1945, in a mirror image of the Canadian
institution similarly attributed to Grierson and his ideals (see Zoë Druick’s chapter
in this book). At the same time, the establishment of the ANFB has been
understood as a key component of the federal government’s social reform
programme in the immediate postwar years. Yet, the establishment of ANFB, while
understood as a landmark initiative, eventuated in an institution that, from its
inception, not only failed to live up to the vision for documentary film that
Grierson proposed, it also failed to live up to the ‘documentary hopes’ held by a
considerable network of on-the-ground individuals and their institutions who had
been agitating for government support for documentary film since the 1930s.2
To better provide some sense of how Australian documentary film culture was
positioned around the time of Grierson’s visit and, following this, the manner in
which the Grierson discourse was utilised, this chapter will first, indicate how the
emblematic Australian National Film Board failed to live up to Grierson’s vision.
Second, it will demonstrate how the figure of Grierson and his proposals were relied
upon, emblematised in Melbourne’s Grierson Cinema, to reinforce the already
extant agitation for nationwide co-ordination of documentary film-making; and
third, it will indicate how at the state level, using the example of the Melbourne
State Film Centre, institutions formed the intricate network which constituted a
documentary film culture in immediate postwar Australia.3
In Australia, as Ina Bertrand and Diane Collins tell us, ‘most States, and several
Commonwealth Government departments, had their own production facilities before
the First World War’, the primary unit being the federal government’s Cinema and
Photographic Branch which was established as early as 1921 and continued until
World War II.4 With the commencement of the war, most film-making activity in
Australia was pressed into war service, in particular the Department of Information’s
Film Division established in 1940 as an administrative institution for co-ordinating

The Grierson Cinema: Australia 139

film production in the war effort.5 The division had a small, experienced film unit,
its members dispatched to the Middle East more as war correspondents, whose image
and sounds were then passed on to the newsreel companies Cinesound and
Movietone, the former emphasising the Australian war effort, the latter the
international effort.6
It is important to understand that the industrial landscape for film production had
been cleared during the war years due to the near cessation of narrative feature film
production, with most personnel, equipment and facilities enlisted in the production of
documentary, newsreel and informational films for the war effort. This brought about
what Stuart Cunningham and William D. Routt have described as a ‘documentary
boom’ with ‘nearly a hundred films produced for the Department of Information in
1940–45 as well as the weekly newsreels turned out by Cinesound and Movietone’.7
Albert Moran and Tom O’Regan go further, delineating between two discourses of
Australian film, the documentary and the narrative feature. In their distinguishing
between these discursive moments, Moran and O’ Regan posit that this ‘documentary
boom’ was displaced as ‘the quintessential Australian film’ by the narrative feature in
the 1970s when a groundswell of activism led to government support for the 1970s
film revival, and another kind of Australian film industry. By 1943, the Australian
government began planning for postwar life. The Department of Post-war
Reconstruction was set up, as Albert Moran tells us, in order to

give expression to a vision of post-War Australia as an improved and reconstructed society.

During and immediately after the War, Post-War Reconstruction undertook a series
of broad initiatives towards that goal. In the process it established a series of different
instrumentalities such as the Commonwealth Universities Commission, the Australian
National University, the Snowy Mountains Authority and the Australian Broadcasting
Control Board. The ANFB was such an initiative.8

The Australian National Film Board is best understood as an administrative

institution, initially envisaged as a manifestation of this new ‘vision of post-war
Australia’ in material terms; as an Australian film industry supported by the federal
government. Initially, formulated by important figures such as Dr H. C. Coombs,
director-general of Post-War Reconstruction, Colin Dean, secretary to the Minister
for Post-War Reconstruction, Professor Alan Stout and esteemed film-maker and
film- society activist John Heyer,9 the ideal ANFB was envisaged as a government
institution that was to provide a system for documentary, educational and
instructional film production based on the Canadian National Film Board and at
variance to the commercial feature film industry.10 In the war and immediate postwar
years, documentary film was envisaged as a key proponent of the vision for postwar
reconstruction. Moran and O’Regan tell us:

It was felt that such a film should help to construct a unified nation by showing one part of
the country to other parts. It was to focus on the kinds of social problems facing a particular
part of the nation and would show how these were being overcome. It needed to get away
from the cliches of ‘kangaroos, koala bears and fields of waving wheat’ and had instead, to
focus on elements of Australia and the national experience not usually seen. Such a film was

1 40 The Grierson Effect

Alan Stout (1900–83), Professor of Moral and Political Philosophy, University of Sydney, Member of the New South Wales
Documentary Films Council, Prime Minister’s Committee on National Morale and a Griersonian (Pix vol. 19 no. 9, 1 March
1947)

not to be imitative of British or American films and if it were to be dramatised, then actors
rather than stars were to be used. In any case, the film should not have been studio bound but
rather, it was to be shot on location, and of course, had to be documentary.11

These distinctly nationalist sentiments are what drove the likes of Coombs, Stout,
Heyer and Dean in their imagining and agitation for documentary film in Australia.
A key activist and disseminator of the discourse of documentary in this period was
Alan Stout. Stout was an Englishman who taught at the University of Edinburgh before
taking up a Professor in Moral and Political Philosophy at the University of Sydney in
1939 and establishing a reputation as a public intellectual.12 Stout was a member of
many government committees including the Prime Minister’s Committee on National
Morale during World War II, founding president (1963–7) of the New South Wales
Council for Civil Liberties, the Council of the Australian Consumers’ Association13 and
the New South Wales Documentary Films Committee.14 In Stout’s membership of the

The Grierson Cinema: Australia 141

Committee on National Morale, it is possible to see some congruence between his roles
in political and moral philosophy, education, documentary film and the role ascribed to
it by Grierson. Stout wrote, in words that complement Grierson’s ideals, that ‘the
essence of democracy is “the free activity of all its members co-operating in a wide
variety of different and sometimes competing voluntary organizations, independent of
the state, for the active furtherance of interests common to their members”’.15 From
the late 1930s Stout was involved with the emerging international film-society
movement alongside film-maker John Heyer. In fact Stout had brought to Australia an
interest in grassroots film culture through his membership of the Edinburgh Film
Guild ‘for the 5 years preceding the war’.16 Both Heyer and Stout were concerned with
building audiences for non-Hollywood films of the period, not just documentary,
something that they felt could be achieved through state structures for distribution.
Stout wrote of his hopes for building documentary audiences in Australia:

It was the film societies springing up in the 1930s which ensured them faithful and
enthusiastic audiences. These societies, which are now even more flourishing than before the
war, are composed of ordinary persons drawn from every class and occupation, who are not
content with the fare offered by the commercial theatres. … The film societies also arrange
discussions on films, and lectures by well known documentary directors and film critics. The
documentary movement in Britain has owed a great deal to these societies. … I was
disappointed to find when I came to Sydney a few months before the war that there was no
similar society here, especially as I had read in Rotha’s book on documentary film that the
Film Society movement had spread to the dominions, including Australia. I should like to see
established after the war a Commonwealth-wide Society with branches in the capital cities
and larger country towns, drawing on a common stock of films.17

In his role Stout was careful to promote a particular kind of documentary film, in
distinction to the newsreels and instructional films which dominated Australian
screens during the war. Clearly influenced by Grierson’s writings, as well as Paul
Rotha’s, Stout, like Heyer, sought to promote ‘the creative treatment of actuality’ as
the repository of both hope and education for postwar Australia.

We have seen that documentary films deal with living facts and real life, and that they are not
just prosaic descriptions, but dramatic interpretations. That is why neither the newsreel nor
the scenic and travel film are documentary, for they merely depict surface events, without
going below the surface to explain and interpret. Thus the newsreel shows you the race; but
the documentary would get behind it to racing as a social force in the lives of the people. The
newsreel shows you the opening of a new reservoir or a dam in a hydro-electric scheme; the
documentary goes behind the event to the problems of water-supply and electricity, and our
dependence on both.18 (emphasis in original)

Similarly, John Heyer saw the importance of distribution systems, including

audience cultivation as key to building an Australian cinema, especially if it were to
compete with the might of Hollywood. Drawing on similar sources to Stout, Heyer saw
the film-society movement in tandem with government support for documentary film
as the best response to commercial cinema. From the early 1930s, Heyer, along with

1 42 The Grierson Effect

his friend cameraman Damien Parer, was an autodidact in film theory and history,
importing and reading Experimental Cinema and Close Up while attending art-house
screenings of films imported into Australia by embassies and the likes of Friends of the
Soviet Union.19 This education encompassed a sound understanding of the importance
to an alternative or documentary film culture of film societies such as New York’s
Film and Photo League in the US and the networks established in the UK such as the
[London] Film Society, initiatives he would have been aware of from his reading and
from Alan Stout’s experiences in Edinburgh. However this vision and the hopes that
motivated Coombs, Dean, Stout and Heyer were diminished from the outset.
The ambitious vision for a federally funded and structured system for the
production, distribution and exhibition of documentary and educational films was
immediately stymied by the perceived threat felt by commercial producers and
exhibitors.20 At the same time the intergovernmental power-plays of the time, fuelled
by the territories established during wartime, remained intractable. The Films
Division, as John Hughes tells us, was widely criticised by ‘some sections of the press
and from within other branches of the government and army’.21 The strongest
criticisms, within the confines of government, emanated from the Prime Minister’s
Committee on National Morale, which included Alan Stout as a key member as well as
Alfred Conlon, who headed up the committee.22 These included ‘the DOI’s use of
American advertising agencies, their lack of strategic thinking, their lack of
engagement with modern technologies of public opinion, and the quality of their
propaganda efforts’.23 At the same time John Heyer, although not an official member
of the committee, wrote reports disparaging the Film Division’s productions and
distribution structure, as well as lamenting its approach to documentary as ‘being
unaware of the potential of the documentary … something they still regard as dry …
that the audience has to sit out, instead of the vital absorbing documentary it can
be’.24 It is possible to see a groundswell of criticism of the DOI’s Film Division aligning
with the Grierson-inspired documentary vision embraced by Stout, Heyer and others
meant that the Department of Information saw the emergence of agitation for a new
kind of administrative structure for governmental film-making, the Australian
National Film Board, as threatening, and sought to hold onto the reins.
As John Hughes tells us, in May 1944 Coombs describes his vision for the film
authority ‘dealing with documentary, educational and instructional films as a
preliminary step in any film production and distribution’, utilising Great Britain and
Canada as models, and opines that this authority should be a departure from the
roles played by the Department of Information. Fuelled by the criticisms from Heyer
and from sections of the armed services, Coombs sought to reconceptualise
government propaganda ‘in a post-war world in dire need of information and
morale-building’.25 Eventually, the director-general of information under the
leadership of E. G. Bonney, outmanoeuvred Coombs to retain control of film
production and distribution.
As Bertrand and Collins point out, the fledgling movement for a federal
government-supported documentary film industry faced, in the main, two primary
obstacles. First, the attempts to delineate documentary, based on the notion of a
classical, creative conception of the form, from newsreel, instructional and educational
film, led to a difficulty in conveying the importance of these films to morale without

The Grierson Cinema: Australia 143

straying into the realms of ‘enjoyment’ or ‘popularity’, traditionally the territory of
commercial film interests.26 Second, the difficulty in distinguishing documentary
from these associated nonfiction forms meant that the status quo in film
production, carefully guarded by the Department of Information, was always going
to be difficult to alter. This second obstacle was further complicated by the
involvement of the Department of Information, which already had its own Films
Division and the Department of Post-war Reconstruction, which sought to engage
documentary film in promoting its vision for Australia. Coombs, supported by Dean,
Stout and Heyer, looked to the Canadian National Film Board for a model of a
government institution that was a departure from the existing arrangements.
Important to this discussion is a conference of all interested parties in June 1944 to
reach a consensus on the new film authority. While Coombs saw this conference as an
opportunity to build consensus and to consolidate his vision for governmental film-
making, Bonney, the DOI’s director-general, carefully manoeuvred to maintain his
department’s control over all aspects of documentary film production, signalling issues
such as DOI experience, personnel and equipment built up over the war years as well
as containing the language of documentary to that already defined by his department;
newsreel, educational and instructional film. While it is true that all this led to the
formation of the ANFB, it was a lost opportunity and engendered a remarkable
division that to some extent remains in place today. Nevertheless, the impetus
provided by the likes of Coombs, Stout and Heyer also continued into a particular
thread in film-making by Heyer himself, whose directorial efforts in the 1940s and 50s
are even today understood as some of the most creative of the period and belonging to
a documentary tradition exemplified by the best of the British documentary
movement and Robert Flaherty’s films, as well as Australian documentary film-makers
Colin Dean, R. Maslyn Williams and Catherine Duncan.27
In 1948 famed Modernist architect and Chief of the Public Works, Percy Edgar
Everett, saw the realisation of his design for the Department of Agriculture Annex at
17 St Andrews Place, Melbourne. As its name suggests, the annex was an extension of
the state government’s Department of Agriculture after World War II during postwar
reconstruction, benefiting from the increased technical support for agriculture. The
building incorporated facilities for making films and radio programmes and included,
in the basement, the Grierson Cinema. This cinema was, according to Heritage
Victoria, ‘architecturally notable as the most intact and as one of the most stylish
Moderne cinemas’ in Victoria with ‘its egg-shaped plan, etched ceiling lights, curved
stage and intimate scale’.28 The cinema was initially created for the viewing of inhouse
department productions but, in time came to be associated with the Victorian
government’s State Film Centre.
The State Film Centre was set up in 1946 and housed at 110 Victoria Street,
Carlton with screenings held at the Radio School of what was then Melbourne
Technical College, now RMITU and at Nicholas Hall, part of the then Methodist
Church grounds of the Wesley Church, Lonsdale Street in Melbourne’s centre. In late
1969 the State Film Theatre in the same precinct was completed, with screenings
commencing in 1970. In the 1970s and 80s the State Film Theatre and the Grierson
Cinema became twin premises for public, that is government-funded screenings, often
in the form of mini-festivals or events rather than ongoing commercial screenings and

1 44 The Grierson Effect

the administration of the State Film Centre, including its library, was moved to
premises adjacent to the theatre.
The State Film Centre emerged about the same time as John Grierson visited
Australia in 1940 on behalf of the Imperial Relations Trust. Grierson, in fact, claims at
once to have been responsible for the setting up of the committees as well as reporting
that his visit had propelled the formation of the centres in numerous capital cities,
writing in his ‘Memorandum to the Prime Minister’,

As a result of my recent visits to Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Brisbane, State Film
Committees are in process of formation for the specific purpose of developing the use of films
in all branches of State education and discussion. No doubt similar committees could easily be
initiated in Tasmania and Western Australia. In New South Wales this development has the
energetic backing of Mr. Drummond [that State’s Minister for Education]. His Committee will
represent School, University, University Extension and Agricultural Education, primary and
secondary producers, women’s organisations, etc. In Melbourne the initiative has been taken
by [University of Melbourne] Vice Chancellor Medley with the co-operation of the Director
of Education; and similar interests will be represented on his Committee. In Adelaide and
Brisbane the proposal is to extend, under the guidance of State Committees, the existing
Visual Education services to schools and provide wider film service for all educational and
social groups throughout the States. In Adelaide, this development has the backing of Mr.
Jeffreys, the Minister of Education, Dr. Fenner and Dr. Portus; in Brisbane of Mr. Cooper,
the Treasurer, and the Director of Public Instruction.29

As we can glean from the memorandum, in contrast to his experiences with the
federal government where he was met with a measured indifference, at the state
level Grierson was better received. Bertrand and Collins put this down to a possible
‘personal incompatibility of Menzies and Grierson, to lack of interest in the Imperial
Relations Trust, and to fear of trespassing on private enterprise’.30 It may also have
been that the just established Films Division, Department of Information was
understood by the wartime Menzies government as already performing its role in
the production of propaganda for the war effort and didn’t appreciate Grierson
proposing an ambitious model of federal and state-based production and
distribution.31
However, Grierson did make successful representations to state governments. As
Bertrand and Collins point out, the New South Wales state government responded
immediately to Grierson’s April 1940 suggestion and within six weeks had established
the New South Wales Documentary Films Committee including a £2,000 grant.
Grierson himself granted £300 from the Imperial Relations Trust to both the New
South Wales Documentary Films Committee and to the University of Melbourne
Extension Board, a precursor of the Victorian State Film Centre and £200 to the
Canberra Films Council.32
Of course it was no surprise that New South Wales took up the mantle Grierson
handed them, given the prominence of the figures of Stout and Heyer there. By March
1941 with pressure from the NSW committee, a conference was convened to address
the problems faced by the states whose Departments of Education, up until this point,
had taken carriage of the use of non-theatrical film. Bertrand and Collins:

The Grierson Cinema: Australia 145

 The problems which were facing the State bodies were again discussed, particularly the
sources of film and the supply of projectors. The thorny issues – the definition of
documentary film and hence the selection criteria, the overlapping needs of schools and
communities and hence the overlapping functions of State education departments and the
new State film councils – were also raised and again left unresolved. However, it was decided
that a new Commonwealth Documentary Films Council should be established, as a
coordinating body for the State Films Council.33

This council meant that Grierson’s proposal of a ‘single authority with multiple
functions’ was divided into two with the Documentary Films Council taking carriage
of non-theatrical film distribution while a body known as the National Films Council
was to liaise between commercial film interests and the Department of
Information.34
As Grierson suggests, and as we have seen, Victoria’s State Film Centre emerged
among a host of federal and state government initiatives under the banner of nation-
building yet the local Australian imperatives identified by Coombs, Stout, Heyer and
others, of a federal system that could serve the states as well, jarred with the imperialist
mission represented by Grierson. In Australia, as with most countries, postwar
reconstruction was a nationalist affair, at once a retreat from internationalism brought
to the fore during the war as well as a concern with desperate, immediate concerns.35
Like these initiatives and the increased support for technological assistance for
agriculture, the federal government’s Department of Post-war Reconstruction was
mirrored at a state level with a focus on social reform including housing, social welfare,
education and, at the time, its close cousin, the arts. The State Film Centre was at the
time just one component in an incredibly complicated system of film acquisition,
distribution, screening, production, criticism and reviewing that accumulated over
this period yet provided a state-based nexus for these activities.36
An instructive link between the State Film Centre and the National Film Board was
the Victorian Documentary Film Council, which was the initial advisory board for the
State Film Centre and had representation on the Commonwealth Documentary Films
Council established in 1941. The Victorian State Film Centre also enjoyed close
working connections with a myriad of community groups such as the Federation
of Victorian Film Societies, Children’s Cinema Council, Community Movement,
Australian Teachers’ Federation, Police Association, Marriage Guidance Association,
Rotary Clubs, the Australian Religious Film Society, Victorian Education Department,
Soldier Settlement Commission, as well as RSL branches, parents and teachers
associations, church groups and on. The State Film Centre had links with overseas
distribution companies, film journals and film critics like Penelope Houston and Roger
Manvell. It is in this period that film societies also began to emerge. As Cunningham
and Routt tell us,

In 1944 the Sydney Workers’ Educational Association formed a Documentary Film Study
Group, and the Australian Film Society (Victorian division) was organized for the same
purpose in the same year. The following year film societies in Canberra and Sydney were
created, and in successive years after that the Melbourne University Film Society (MUFS) and
the Sydney University Film Group.37

1 46 The Grierson Effect

These initiatives eventuated in the Australian Council of Film Societies (1950), still in
existence today and in 1954 gave rise to Australia’s first film festival at Olinda, just
outside Melbourne, resulting in what is now the Melbourne International Film
Festival.
The Grierson Cinema and the State Film Centre were twin institutions
engendered by the close alignment of education and the postwar renewal of interest
in cinema, with a strong reliance on realist, and mostly documentary, film as their
mainstay. The role of the Victorian Documentary Film Council in advising, really
overseeing, the State Film Centre and its reporting line to the Minister for Education
is instructive in this. When the National Film Board came into being in May 1945, the
Victorian government along with other states was invited to form a State Advisory
Committee for consultation on film acquisition and production. This occurred in
December 1945. This committee’s chairman A. H. Ramsay reported to the Victorian
government on the establishment of the State Film Centre. It wasn’t until 1949 that
this State Advisory Committee decided to change its name to the Victorian
Documentary Film Council in line with similar names for these committees in South
Australia (Documentary Films Committee) and New South Wales (Documentary and
Educational Films Council).38 In New South Wales, as Shirley and Adams tell us,
work towards the setting up of a national, government-co-ordinated documentary
movement had been begun as early as the 1930s by people such as David Henry
Drummond, Alan Stout, John Heyer and Newman Rosenthal, all of this before and
around Grierson’s visit.
Of course, Alan Stout and John Heyer weren’t the only people thinking about
documentary’s role in postwar Australia. Newman Rosenthal was director of
Melbourne University’s visual aids department, later TV research programme
1955–66.39 He was the person mainly responsible for securing the £300 grant from
Grierson’s Imperial Relations Trust, in order to set up the Victorian counterpart in the
state-based film distribution system, the Victorian Documentary Film Council. In
1949 Newman Rosenthal wrote an article for Meanjin entitled ‘Has the Documentary
Film a Future?’, in which he called for a continuation of the wartime governmental
support for documentary film. Weighing documentary film against both
entertainment and propaganda, Rosenthal writes that ‘documentary has a future only
if governments can be made to appreciate the wider implications and so to finance
productions which have no other purpose than the intangibles of information,
education and morale’.40 This ‘Has the Documentary Film a Future?’ was a published
version of the Victorian Documentary Film Council-initiated First Annual John
Grierson Lecture delivered by Rosenthal.41 Rosenthal’s article is an example of two
things: (1) the close alignment of film and education in this period, where the national
good had well and truly turned to documentary film since World War II, in numerous
ways, at the same time as John Grierson visited Australia on behalf of the Imperial
Relations Trust. This alignment worked its way into the state-level structures of
government film administration through the likes of the Victorian Documentary Film
Council, running the State Film Centre (with, as we have seen, comparative
arrangements in South Australia and NSW) and on to the National Film Board. In
other directions the State Film Centre worked out in networks across the state. (2) It
is possible in this nascent period to see another factor in Australia’s insistence on

The Grierson Cinema: Australia 147

documentary realism. While Adrian Martin, Ross Gibson and others have addressed
the issue of the cultural aesthetics of realism, it may be that in these locations, these
structures, these figures, it is possible to see the emergence of the institutional
support for the continuation of the moral imperatives documentary film offered, at a
local level, at a tangent, yet engaged, with Grierson’s ideas. Rosenthal writes:

The attitude of the democratic governments (in varying degree according as their ideas of
freedom varied) seems to have been that a democracy was a community of people who not
only had the right, but also the responsibility to think for themselves, that problems had a
better chance of solution if the nature of those problems were the more clearly understood;
and that, through factual representation which film could give and the wide discussion which
it could stimulate, there would come that confidence in communal institutions and communal
leadership which was so basic to communal morale and communal stability.42

ConClusion

Yet in all this sits the Grierson Cinema, an overarching notion redolent of this
country’s reliance on an authorising model to understand the structures which
resulted from the wartime embracing of newsreel, instructional and educational film
for propaganda purposes. Part of this myth is the association of the Australian
National Film Board with the agitation for an Australian film industry based on
Griersonian principles, and locally, the Grierson Cinema, ‘one of the most stylish
Moderne cinemas’, a figure of both empire and of nascent postwar governmental
institutionalisation with the very same principles. In Australia in the postwar period,
the Grierson Cinema is not only an authorised centring of film culture, a ‘Grierson
effect’, it is also an anomaly, a misrepresentation of the ongoing groundswell, of the
on-the-ground intricate and shifting associations between individuals and their
groupings, between creative documentary and newsreel and instructional film,
between wartime and postwar reconstruction that constitute Australian postwar film
culture.

noTes

1. Deane Williams, ‘Between Empire and Nation: Grierson in Australia’, Screening the Past
(1991), http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/firstrelease/fr0799/dwfr7e.htm.
2. The snapshot of documentary film culture of this period that Shirley and Adams provide is
entitled ‘Documentary Hopes’ – see Graham Shirley and Brian Adams, Australian Cinema:
The First Eighty Years (Sydney: Angus and Robinson/Currency Press, 1983), pp. 174–9.
3. In Australia, there are three levels of government, the federal or commonwealth government
resulting from the ‘federation’ of six independent British colonies and two territories. These
colonies have also maintained individual state governments: New South Wales (NSW),
Queensland (Qld), South Australia (SA), Tasmania (Tas.) Victoria (Vic.) and Western
Australia (WA) and two mainland territories, the Northern Territory (NT) and the Australian
Capital Territory (ACT). See http://australia.gov.au/about-australia/our-government.

1 48 The Grierson Effect

 4. Ina Bertrand and Diane Collins, Government and Film in Australia (Sydney: Currency
Press/Australian Film Institute, 1981), p. 94.
5. Albert Moran, Projecting Australia: Government Film since 1945 (Sydney: Currency Press,
1991), p. 2.
6. Shirley and Adams, Australian Cinema, p. 166.
7. Stuart Cunningham and William D. Routt, ‘“Fillums Became Films” (1940–56)’, in Ina
Bertrand (ed.), Cinema in Australia: A Documentary History (Kensington: University of New
South Wales Press, 1989), p. 181.
8. Moran, Projecting Australia, p. 3.
9. John Heyer is, to this day, one of Australia’s most highly regarded film-makers. His The Back
of Beyond (1954) won the 1956 Grand Prix Assoluto at the Venice Biennale Film Festival and
is known to generations of Australians. See Deane Williams, ‘John Heyer’s International
Perspective: The Overlanders, The Valley Is Ours, The Back of Beyond’, in Australian Post-war
Documentary Films: An Arc of Mirrors (Bristol and Chicago, IL: Intellect, 2008), pp. 83–112.
10. John Hughes, ‘After Indonesia Calling’, PhD (Project) Exegesis, School of Media and
Communications, College of Design and Social Context, RMIT University, Melbourne, 2012,
pp. 107–9. As Hughes suggests, Coombs uses the term ‘Australian film industry’ in his
strategy for setting up the ANFB, in line with the vision embraced by the Department
of Post-war Reconstruction, and against the forces of the Department of Information
marshalling to retain control over government film-making.
11. Albert Moran and Tom O’Regan, ‘Two Discourses of Australian Film’, Australian Journal of
Screen Theory vol. 15 no. 16 (1983), p. 166.
12. ‘Alan Ker Stout’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/stout-
alan-ker-15921.
13. Ibid.
14. Shirley and Adams, Australian Cinema, p. 176.
15. Stout quoted in D. H. Monro, ‘Obituary: Alan Ker Stout, 1900–1983’, Australasian Journal of
Philosophy vol. 61 no. 3 (1983), p. 338.
16. A. K. Stout, ‘Documentary Films’, n.d., p. 14. This document has a subheading –

revised script of four talks given over the National Network of the A.B.C. [Australian
Broadcasting Commission] in December 1943, and January and February 1944. The first
three form a connected series under the general title ‘Documentary Films in Adult
Education’. The fourth is a very brief outline of the historical development of
Documentary Films.

17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., p. 5–6.
19. See my Australian Post-war Documentary Films, pp. 95–6.
20. Bertrand and Collins, Government and Film in Australia, p. 102.
21. Hughes, ‘After Indonesia Calling’, p. 104.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. John Heyer, quoted in ibid., p. 106.
25. Bertrand and Collins, Government and Film in Australia, p. 103.
26. Ibid., p. 102.

The Grierson Cinema: Australia 149

27. See Williams, ‘John Heyer’s International Perspective’ , pp. 83–112.
28. ‘Department of Agriculture Annex’, Victorian Heritage Database, http://vhd.heritage.
vic.gov.au/vhd/heritagevic?timeout=yes#detail_places;65614.
29. John Grierson, ‘Copy of Memorandum from Mr. John Grierson. Memorandum to the Prime
Minister’, After Grierson, ed. Ina Bertrand. Special edition of Screening the Past: An
International Electronic Journal of Visual Media and History (uploaded 1 July 1999),
http://tlweb.latrobe.edu.au/humanities/screeningthepast/classics/cl0799/jg2cl7a.htm.
30. Bertrand and Collins, Government and Film in Australia, p. 98.
31. See Williams, ‘Between Empire and Nation’.
32. Bertrand and Collins, Government and Film in Australia, p. 98.
33. Ibid., p. 101.
34. Ibid.
35. See Williams, ‘Between Empire and Nation’.
36. The State Film Centre evolved into the current Australian Centre for the Moving Image,
a large, multi-venue exhibition space at Melbourne’s Federation Square, http://www.
fedsquare.com/.
37. Cunningham and Routt, ‘ “Fillums Became Films” (1940–1956)’, p. 182.
38. A. H. Ramsay, ‘Letter to the Hon. T. T. Hollway M.L.A. Premier of Victoria’, 31 March 1949.
39. Newman Hirsch Rosenthal also wrote many books including Films in Our Lives: An Approach
to Film Appreciation (Melbourne: Cheshire, 1953) and Film in Instruction (Melbourne:
Robertson and Mullers, 1945–7).
40. Newman Rosenthal, ‘Has the Documentary Film a Future?’, Meanjin vol. 8 no. 2 (Winter
1949), p. 110.
41. Other Grierson Lectures include Patricia Edgar, ‘Children’s Television: The Past, the Present
and the Future’, 1979; Brian McFarlane, ‘From Page to Screen’, 1983; Peter Watkins, ‘Broken
Mirror: The Role of the Audio-visual Media in Today’s Society’, 1985.
42. Rosenthal, ‘Has the Documentary Film a Future?’.

RefeRenCes

‘Alan Ker Stout’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/stout-alan-

ker-15921.
Bertrand, Ina and Diane Collins, Government and Film in Australia (Sydney: Currency
Press/Australian Film Institute, 1981).
Cunningham, Stuart and William D. Routt, ‘ “Fillums Became Films” (1940–1956)’, in Ina
Bertrand (ed.), Cinema in Australia: A Documentary History (Kensington: University of New
South Wales Press, 1989), pp. 179–87.
‘Department of Agriculture Annex’, Victorian Heritage Database, http://vhd.heritage.vic.
gov.au/vhd/heritagevic?timeout=yes#detail_places;65614.
Gibson, Ross, ‘Formative Landscapes’, in Scott Murray (ed.), Back of Beyond: Discovering
Australian Film and Television (Sydney: Australian Film Commission, 1988), pp. 20–32.
Hardy, Forsyth (ed.), Grierson on Documentary (London: Faber and Faber, 1966).
Hughes, John, ‘After Indonesia Calling’, PhD (Project) Exegesis, School of Media and
Communications, College of Design and Social Context, RMIT University, Melbourne, 2012.
Jacobs, Lewis (ed.), The Documentary Tradition, 2nd edn (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1979).

1 50 The Grierson Effect

Martin, Adrian, ‘Nurturing the Next Wave: What Is Cinema?’ in Scott Murray (ed.), Back of
Beyond: Discovering Australian Film and Television (Sydney: Australian Film Commission,
1988), pp. 90–101.
Martin, Adrian, ‘Melbourne Journal: Adrian Martin Measures the Distance of Australia’s
Rootlessness in Search of a Native Cinema’, Film Comment vol. 38 no. 4 (July–August 2002),
pp. 12–13.
Monro, D. H.,. ‘Obituary: Alan Ker Stout, 1900–1983’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy vol. 61
no. 3 (1983), p. 338.
Moran, Albert, Projecting Australia: Government Film since 1945 (Sydney: Currency Press, 1991).
Moran, Albert and Tom O’Regan, ‘Two Discourses of Australian Film’, Australian Journal of
Screen Theory vol. 15 no. 16 (1983), pp. 163–73.
Ramsay, A. H. ‘Letter to the Hon. T. T. Hollway M.L.A. Premier of Victoria’, 31 March 1949.
Rosenthal, Newman, ‘Has the Documentary Film a Future?’, Meanjin vol. 8 no. 2 (Winter 1949),
p. 110.
Shirley, Graham and Brian Adams, Australian Cinema: The First Eighty Years (Sydney: Angus and
Robinson/Currency, 1983).
Stout, A. K., ‘Documentary Films’, n.d., p. 14.
Williams, Deane, ‘Between Empire and Nation: Grierson in Australia’, Screening the Past (1991),
http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/firstrelease/fr0799/dwfr7e.htm.
Williams, Deane, Australian Post-war Documentary Films: An Arc of Mirrors (Bristol and Chicago,
IL: Intellect, 2008).

The Grierson Cinema: Australia 151

10
John Grierson in India:
The Films Division under the Influence?

Camille Deprez

InTroDucTIon

This chapter will investigate the influence of the Griersonian documentary film
tradition on the origins, objectives and developments of the Films Division of India
against the political, economic and social background of the period 1948–64. This
timeframe corresponds to the early but crucial years of India’s independence and
covers the period of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s leadership, from his creation
of Films Division in 1948 until his death in 1964. First, this chapter will determine
the exact connections between the British documentary film movement and Films
Division of India, in order to better comprehend why, how and the extent to which the
latter both overlapped and diverged from the former. Then, it will argue that, despite
the strong relations between the Indian official documentary film service and the
British movement, and despite the strong British belief in the continuing reality of
imperial links somehow or other after India’s independence, Films Division of India
was more significantly concerned with its national independence and the invention of
a national identity in postcolonial times. So, beyond Films Division’s role in
reinventing India’s identity after decades of British colonial rule, this chapter will focus
on the limits to the British influence on the Indian public documentary film service,
emphasising the divergences between the two traditions.

The InFluence oF The BrITIsh aDmInIsTraTIve moDel anD

DocumenTary FIlm movemenT

The British legacy to Films Division of India is significant in several respects. In the early
1940s, the British colonial administration, or Raj, contributed to the establishment of an
Indian documentary and newsreels institution, by setting up the Indian Films of India,
the Indian News Parade and the Army Film Centre, at a time when it knew that Indian
independence was inevitable. These propaganda films were designed to show that the
empire did not fail and that the handover was not won by Indian nationalists, but planned
by the British themselves. In his article on these films, Philip Woods states:

Indians needed to be portrayed in positions of authority … working for the war effort
spontaneously and on a self-organizing basis. British officials felt that these views confirmed

John Grierson in India: The Films Division under the Influence? 153
 The logo of the Films
Division of India

their own optimism about the demand for films about modern India, which could, of course,
reflect well on the British contribution to that modernity.1

However, Indian nationalist leaders and the local audience appropriated this original
objective to serve their own nation-building function. Woods adds that

The demise of the FAB [Film Advisory Board] in 1943 and its replacement by Information
Films of India [IFI], under direct government control, marked a novel phase in the use of film
for propaganda in British India. This and the use of compulsory viewing of newsreel and
government shorts marked a new level of state intervention in the cinema industry in India.
IFI was a much larger production unit than its predecessor and the amount of government
expenditure on film production rose dramatically.2

Thus, IFI had developed the idea of a public documentary film service before India
gained independence. These British film units prepared the foundation for Films
Division. In her book on Nehru, Judith M. Brown remarks that the first prime minister
of independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru, had inherited the Raj and its instruments of
governance – with all their limitations – as part of the transfer of power. This smooth
transition was also secured by the fact that Nehru shared a number of values with the
British rulers, including a belief in the vital role of the state in managing a nation’s
economic, social and political life, as well as a similar elitist political style. This continuity
of style and attitudes enabled him to become a bridge figure between the older colonial
world and a new order emerging out of the destruction of the old European empires.3
Maintaining these instruments and style of governance was also considered a necessity
for the stability of the new government and institutions. However, Richard Osborne
points out the complex case of India within the British empire:

In Britain, the Ministry of Information (MOI) was formed as the department responsible
for publicity and propaganda […]; [that] in most empire countries, the MOI assumed

1 54 The Grierson Effect

 responsibility for the factual films that were destined for overseas audiences, but [that] in
India a more complicated situation evolved […]. [Local] organisations were affiliated to the
Government of India, and were responsible for producing films aimed at both domestic and
overseas audiences. [However, the MOI] part funded some of the films and was responsible
for their distribution in other Allied countries.4

This complex situation, mixing some level of local autonomy with British imperial
intervention, aroused suspicion among Indian nationalists, causing Information Films
of India and the Indian News Parade to cease production of documentaries and
newsreels in 1946, after the Indian Legislative Assembly passed a motion to cut the
budgetary grant. In 1948, after two years void of official documentary film-making,
Nehru created the Films Division of the Ministry of Information to lead the
production and distribution of Indian information films. Its set-up and objectives
clearly originated from the British colonial film units and Grierson’s government-
service approach. The objective of this chapter is not to critically assess the
achievements of the British documentary film movement – as it is accepted that it did
produce variegated works in both the poetic and realist traditions of film-making and
used varied methods depending on the local context of the British ruled countries;5
but to summarise what it stood for in order to better comprehend why, how and the
extent to which Films Division of India overlapped and diverged from its British
counterparts. In London, the Empire Marketing Board (1926–33), the General Post
Office (1933–40) and the Crown (1940–52) film units made films for government
departments – the latter was even included within the Ministry of Information – in
order to promote British state agencies and empire, and to guarantee national unity,
social progress and stability.6 In this context, these units worked as training schools, in
which the collective always took the precedence over individual voices and creativity.
Film was perceived as an efficient medium of communication between the state and
the general public, and was more specifically used as a means of passing down
social and political messages from the elite to the people, thus maintaining a clear
hierarchical conception of society. For instance, the Crown Film Unit was created
during World War II in order to broadcast official statements about the war and
encourage patriotism. The films were crafted to publicise and promote the policies
and point of view of the state, in informative, expositional and educational ways.
Conceived as tools of social persuasion, they served propagandist and civic educational
purposes. British documentaries and newsreels were made to encourage social
wholeness, that is to say the unified and interdependent character of society. They also
promoted new economic and social developments, and thus regularly featured symbols
of modernity, such as trains and other means of transport, and national unity, such as
the Post Office services or the infrastructure of the market economy. They tended to
be concerned with the content and expressive richness of the actuality image; the
interpretive potential of the editing; and the representation of social relationships.
This chapter argues that, in the early years of independence, Films Division of India
was intended to sustain the new nation’s spirit, using similar tools and references.
The British documentary film developed at a time when realism was considered an
alternative to the success of the illusionary and artificial fiction film, best exemplified
by Hollywood, and thus observed people in a mix of real and recreated environments.

John Grierson in India: The Films Division under the Influence? 155
Although Films Division emerged two decades later, it also provided an alternative to the
flourishing escapist Bollywood formula. Films on industries and goods were projected
on foreign screens, following the 1930s model of the British Empire Marketing Board,
whose films were meant to promote trade. Despite this influence, Films Division also
established a distance from several aspects of the British tradition. Indian documentaries
and newsreels of the late 1940s–early 60s neither specifically focused on the difficult
living conditions of the working class, nor did they criticise the position and actions
of the state. British documentaries were of two kinds: either promoting government
services, official procedures and private industrial activities, or experimenting with the
film medium, via new sound, visual, narrative and editing techniques. But this chapter
will further demonstrate that Films Division was dominated by public agencies, that
in its early days, most of the production served official purposes and that formal
experimentation remained occasional. Finally, FD adopted the British tactic of reaching
out by dispatching projection vans to India’s scattered rural majority. However, unlike
the British distribution model, films were mainly shown theatrically, and this chapter
will show that this had a contrasting impact on their reception.
So, Nehru adapted the initial war propaganda purpose of information films to the
new times of peace and independence, and enlisted documentary cinema for his larger
project of nation-building, integration and development. While IFI and INP had
functioned as separate units, Films Division was comprised of both units, namely the
Documentary Films of India and the Indian Newsreel Review.7 The new independent
government of India maintained the Rule 44A of the Defence of Indian Rules, passed
by the British in 1944, whereby exhibitors were compelled to include in every one
of their programmes a maximum of 2,000 feet of film approved by the government
and for which they had to pay a rental fee. Since Films Division supplied over 6,000
cinemas in the country, this compulsory exhibition assured FD a stable market
and regular incomes. FD’s administrative apparatus followed to a large extent the
organisational model established by John Grierson and the British documentary film
movement. In many cases, the personnel recruited for Films Division had previously
worked for the British film units of India. So, Ravi Vasudevan notices

a line of continuity rather than discontinuity at the time of decolonisation. While some key
institutions, state-run film-making and newsreel units were disbanded, key people and
policies continued when the new institutions, such as the Films Division, came into being.8

In 1942–3, the British government appointed Alexander Shaw, a disciple of

John Grierson, to set up the first Indian film unit. He had trained a small team of
technicians and film-makers, who later worked for FD, including Ezra Mir, P. V. Pathy,
Bhaskar Rao, Clement Baptista, Hom Sethna and Krishna Gopal. Other new recruits
had mainly worked in the Indian feature film industry before joining FD. As in Great
Britain in the late 1920s–early 30s, they knew little about documentary film-making at
first and were mainly trained by their peers, who themselves had been trained by the
British. This situation perpetuated the influence of the British film tradition on FD
production. Films Division also shared Grierson’s idea of coexistence and collaboration
between the public and private sectors, with the public sector being always at the
commanding heights. In India, Films Division dominated the documentary scene due

1 56 The Grierson Effect

to its centralised set-up, established infrastructure, monopoly over the cinemas and
weekly film releases. The private sector was represented by ‘outside producers’, which
included various individuals, private companies and partnerships. Some of these, like
James Beveridge, were clearly influenced by the British film tradition. Trained by John
Grierson in the late 1930s and 40s, Beveridge had left the National Film Board of
Canada in 1954 to come to India and work for the private oil company Burma-Shell.
Between 1954 and 1958, when the film unit was closed down, Beveridge produced
forty films, some of which were purchased by Films Division. This situation helped to
infuse the institution with the Griersonian tradition. Beveridge had, for instance,
sponsored the documentary Village in Travancore (1956), directed by Fali Billimoria,
a film-maker trained by Alexander Shaw during World War II. Furthermore, Films
Division subscribed to the British top-down administrative system, according to which
elite advisers knew what was best for the common people. During the period 1948–64,
chief producers Mohan Bhavnani (1948–54), V. Shantaram (1954), Jean Bhownagary
(1954–6), Ezra Mir (1956–61) and K. L. Khandpur (1962–8), as well as the film-
makers, all belonged to the Indian educated social elite and were closely acquainted
with the British culture and style. The new independent government of India also
followed the British model by consolidating state control over Films Division in order
to develop a strong public documentary service for the country. In her book on Indian
postcolonial nationalism, Srirupa Roy analyses the role played by Films Division in
shaping the nation-state for the Indian population and argues that ‘Films Division
enabled the constitution of a distinct identity for the state as an authoritative
representative of the Indian nation, an identity that could be recognized both by non-
state audiences and by state elites themselves.’9
The subjects of the films were in most cases recommended by the various
ministries of the government of India and by state governments before the beginning
of each financial year. The completed films had to be approved by the Film Advisory
Board, which had been appointed by the government in 1949 and consisted mainly of
civil servants, and also certified by the Board of Films Censors. These two elitist
boards kept a watchful eye on the value of the films for the general public.
Philip Woods asserts that during the colonial era, the Indian film audience was
divided into three social groups, which partly overlapped: the Western-educated and
English-speaking urban elite; the city audience, which mixed the middle with the
working classes; and the rural audiences, who were mainly accessed through mobile
vans touring the villages. Films would be made differently according to the target
audience, with an assumption, for instance, that films for Indian rural districts would
have to be slower in tempo, explain modern things and be adapted to the local culture,
a rather tall order in practice.10 After independence, Films Division continued to
target the same groups. Mohan Bhavnani, chief producer of the documentary film
section from the creation of FD in 1948 until 1954, later stated that

Modern documentary techniques were more suited to educated audiences, who could
understand devices like ‘wipes’, ‘flash backs’, ‘dissolves’, and fast tempo. But the same
techniques would rather confuse village and illiterate audiences, the film being still new and
rare to many of them. Therefore, technical devices were avoided, the tempo slowed down, and
sometimes shots were repeated to stress the main idea of the theme.11

John Grierson in India: The Films Division under the Influence? 157
This statement confirms the fact that the Indian elite in charge of Films Division
reproduced the vision developed by the British to a large extent. This state-sponsored
institution also shared the main objectives set by John Grierson for the British
documentary film movement.

The posITIve socIal FuncTIon oF arT

John Grierson’s ideological stance was mainly influenced by idealist and positivist
philosophy.12 He believed in the need for social reform and for an efficient modern
society, in which elites govern the majority. The context of confused public identities,
widespread illiteracy and other problems of underdevelopment, which characterised
India during Nehru’s leadership, was quite different from that of Great Britain.
However, the range of political, social and economic reforms planned for new
independent India confirms that Jawaharlal Nehru was both committed to social
reform and an idealist. At the instigation of Nehru, Films Division appropriated
Grierson’s notion of integration and consensus, rather than individualism, to fit in the
social context of national heterogeneity of young independent India. The nation was
to be placed before the self. Grierson’s idea that films should not try to teach the public
to ‘know everything about everything all the time’, but ‘instil an understanding of the
significant generative forces in society’,13 applies to early Films Division films. These
generative forces were mainly of two orders: shaping a common consciousness and
establishing an allegiance through nonfiction films about the national project of
integration and development. FD productions were not only meant to educate the
Indian populace, but also to bring hope to these millions of people who had recently
achieved independence and to motivate them to work for a better future. The meaning
of that ‘better future’ was defined by the local elite, as reforms were never initiated by
the people they concerned. Grierson’s ideas and statements can be found in official
documents published by the Indian Ministry of Information from the creation of Films
Division to the present day, and these support the conclusion that Grierson had a
significant influence on the purpose and objectives of the Indian public documentary
film service. For instance, the following quote appears in one of Films Division’s
publications:

The film is a creative medium of information, education, persuasion and inspiration. It has a
special importance, therefore, as a contributor to the community life of today. It has therefore
a very special role in creating the better shapes of the community of tomorrow.14

The 1951 Report of the Film Enquiry Committee mentions that the ‘documentary
section [was] concerned with the production of short films of instructional, cultural
and educational value’.15 This Griersonian concept was adapted to the Indian context
and needs, with other official publications mentioning that films were meant to
‘establish rapport between the rulers and the ruled, to inform the masses about the
meaning of Independence, to acquaint them about the plans and projects being
launched, to present them a balance-sheet of progress’; and add that the documentary
film was the ideal medium for illiterate people, a majority of the Indian population at

1 58 The Grierson Effect

 A still from the Films Division
documentary Rivers in
Harness (1949)

that time, and that it ‘could weld the people of different castes, communities, religions,
regions and languages into a nation’.16
Following the model developed by the British movement, FD films emphasised the
interrelation of social practices within Indian society. Documentaries on the building
of dams such as Rivers in Harness (1949) or Golden River (1954), illustrated how the
resultant infrastructures could improve cultivation (via irrigation) and the comfort of
Indian homes, thanks to the installation of electric lighting and appliances. By the
same token, films about education programmes such as Basic Education (1950)
demonstrated how they benefited entire communities and contributed to the nation’s
economic self-sufficiency. The films also supported the idea of a social elite governing
the average people for their own good, a situation that was presented as social
consensus. Films always presented political leaders and various experts, like engineers,
doctors or teachers, in a positive light and the larger population as obedient
contributors to the reforms planned for them by the ruling class. This harmonious
picture of the social organisation of India was meant to both reinforce national
cohesion and validate state reforms.
The purpose of the films was to stimulate enthusiasm among the Indian general
audience in the context of independence and nation-building. Films Division was
particularly influenced by Grierson’s idea of the positive and negative social function
of art, and that the positive representation should always dominate the negative one.
This explains why FD film narratives often progressed from a problematic situation
(the poor irrigation system, the lack of electricity, the unsatisfactory legal system,
etc.) to its resolution. This narrative structure conveyed the notion that the Indian
people were always taking action and that India was constantly moving forward
and improving negative circumstances. According to Grierson, the positive social
function of art involved grabbing the power and energy of modern life, to represent
the essence and spirit of things.17 FD film-makers took this on board, filming
engineers and other technical experts at work, but also planes, trains and cars, which
they considered symbolic visual representations of modernity. In the same vein as

John Grierson in India: The Films Division under the Influence? 159
 A still from Films Division
documentary Vigil on Wheels
(1955)

the realist actuality footage of the railway network in the British documentary Night
Mail, Films Division produced works such as The Vital Link (1951) and Vigil on Wheels
(1955) to illustrate the state’s capacity to conduct large-scale projects for the
economic development of India. These films showed the various stages of the
construction of new railway tracks and the efficient organisation and training of
railway personnel. Dynamic montages of men at work, clocks ticking, racing train
wheels, steaming locomotives, powerful sound effects of drums and whistles all
conveyed the positive energy of modern change. Each obstacle, be it a train accident
or a fallen bridge, was inevitably overcome. The railway network was presented as an
unstoppable work in progress, connecting the entire population of India together and
contributing to its development by transporting goods and passengers. In order to
stimulate audience enthusiasm, films elaborated on the dynamic drive of change by
featuring dramatic visuals, such as the raging forces of nature or impressive aerial
shots of the country, accompanied by expressive or sometimes lyrical commentaries;
and by resonant post-synchronised soundtracks, using instruments such as drums,
cymbals or conches, or even the sound of loud crowds. In many cases, commentaries
emphasised the race against time, which India would eventually win. This ineluctable
move forward would often be visually conveyed through superimposed images of
continuous calendar pages. These visual and sound elements were reinforced by fast-
paced montage editing, with few transition effects. This combination of various
cinematic tools was meant to represent the positive power and energy of change. But
unlike Night Mail, a sequence which matched the recitation of W. H. Auden’s poem
with the pace of the train’s wheels, breaking new formal ground for the documentary
medium, the Indian films avoided any experiments that were too innovative or
intellectual. As mentioned earlier, different films would target different audiences.
For rural spectators, the focus would be on how to grow potatoes and cotton, on dry
farming methods or kitchen gardens. The whys and wherefores would be explained in
a straightforward manner, again following the British colonial vision according to
which villagers could only understand basic facts and ideas filmed in a simplistic and

1 60 The Grierson Effect

direct manner. Former film-maker and controller of Films Division, K. L. Khandpur,
recalled:

Usually one central idea [was] emphasized, supported by just a few relevant points. The job
of the filmmaker [was] to facilitate the audience in understanding the subject. Films should
appeal more to the emotions of the audience than to their intellect.18

Thus, FD personnel subscribed to Grierson’s vision of the positive and idealist

function of art, as well as his call for social consensus, but adapted these concepts
to the needs of the new independent India. Therefore, unlike British films, FD
documentaries seldom made any critical comment or raised any doubt about state
policies, so contributing to the loss of credibility of both Nehru’s government and
Films Division. This chapter will later demonstrate that FD films of the period
1948–64 failed to serve their social purpose efficiently, since they never established
the distance necessary to allow scriptwriters and film-makers to accurately describe
and analyse the social issues depicted. Besides, the strong connection between FD
films and the Griersonion tradition also engendered ambiguities and restrictions.

amBIGuITIes anD lImITs To The BrITIsh InFluence

Over the period 1948–64, and even later, India held an ambivalent position toward
the British, inherited from a history of colonial resistance to this imperial power. The
country’s recent colonial past meant that Great Britain was the obvious model for
building the political and administrative system of the new Indian nation, including a
public documentary film service. However, India also needed to separate itself from
the British rulers, in order to create its own independent national identity. This
ambiguous position was already noticeable before independence and led to
contradictory decisions. For instance, during World War II, the Indian film-maker
V. Shantaram, despite his loyalty to the Indian nationalist movement, cooperated with
the British rulers to become head of Information Films of India, because he wanted to
oppose fascism. And in 1946, Indian nationalists had cut the budget of the IFI,
bringing the production activity to a full stop, because the institution was considered a
symbol of colonial oppression in times of struggle for independence. But this halt also
deprived the Indian people of locally produced official moving images of the birth of
independent India, including the handover ceremonies and Nehru’s first speech to his
free nation.
So, despite the fact that the origins and objectives of Films Division were
significantly influenced by John Grierson and the British movement, the Indian public
documentary service sought to establish its own identity and thus presented several
specificities and differences from its British counterparts. Documentary film-maker
and historian B. D. Garga mentions that, in comparison with the British documentary,
Films Division started with better technical and financial resources. It had six units for
the production of documentaries and a newsreel organisation with ten cameramen
posted at important centres. At first, it produced thirty-six documentaries and fifty-
two newsreels per year, which were distributed through centres established in the

John Grierson in India: The Films Division under the Influence? 161
main cities of Bombay, Madras, Calcutta, Lucknow and Nagpur. The compulsory
exhibition of their films in every cinema in the country guaranteed a stable market and
an assured income.19 This situation marked a difference with that of Great Britain,
where documentary film distribution was not compulsory and mainly non-theatrical.
With a production of over 2,700 films in the first twenty years after the creation of
Films Division and a weekly paying audience of 20 million, the reach of these official
documentaries marked the unique situation of India. The films produced by Films
Division had to adapt to India’s specific context, and in particular to its largely
illiterate and heterogeneous audience, its linguistic diversity and to the challenges of
national integration and development. Influenced by the British social elite, English
remained the dominant language within FD, at both administrative and production
levels. However, in order to reach out to a wider audience, films were quickly dubbed in
up to thirteen local languages.
This ambiguous attitude toward the British also led to some inner contradictions.
The control of the production and distribution of documentaries by government
agencies, including their approval by the Film Advisory Board and the Film Censor
Board, was unique among democratic nations and seems quite at odds with democratic
processes. The private sector, and more precisely private exhibitors, started to oppose
the compulsory exhibition rule very early on. They compared it to the Hollywood blind
and block booking strategy and criticised it for restricting their right to free enterprise,
which was perceived as undemocratic. Besides, private producers were reluctant to
make documentaries, knowing that Films Division would only pay a low rate to
purchase what they called ‘outside productions’. In addition, the films did not always
fulfil the social function claimed by Films Division. The 1951 Report of the Film Enquiry
Committee remarks that documentaries were often criticised by film professionals and
by the general audience for ‘being mere travelogues, and those which aimed to instruct
were either considered pompous in their approach or too timid to force the obvious
conclusion’.20
By the late 1950s and early 60s, all commentators agreed upon the fact that FD
films had begun to look like one another, despite fresh approaches by some in-house
and independent film-makers, including Jean Bhownagary, P. V. Pathy, A. Bhaskar
Rao, James Beveridge and Paul Zils. The press and the parliament criticised the
documentary film for failing to fulfil its social obligations. With the objective of
producing up to 150 documentaries annually, as well as a weekly newsreel in thirteen
languages, quantity soon surpassed quality. This was a period of expansion for FD, as
various ministries required more and more films as part of their integrated-plan
publicity programmes. Although FD’s budget and earnings kept increasing over the
1950s and 60s, directors gradually lost the momentum afforded by independence.
Their films made no profound and realistic study of the people or situations. Indeed,
scripts were written at desks in Delhi and Bombay offices rather than on location.
Most film-makers knew only English and Hindi and were unfamiliar with other Indian
languages, regions and cultures; and this affected the relevance of the films. A large
number of documentaries focused on the common heritage of all Indians and
presented different places of interest, monuments, arts, crafts and religious festivals,
in order to consolidate India’s national identity and highlight its grandeur. This
extensive list included Festival Time (1950), Handicrafts of Travancore (1950), Our

1 62 The Grierson Effect

Original Inhabitants (1953), Ancient Weavers Today (1957), Mandu – The City of Joy
(1959), Indian Art through the Ages (1959), A Century of Indian Archeology (1960),
Kathakali (1960), Folk Dances of India (1961) and Dances of Assam (1963), but all tended
to generalise about Indian history and traditions. Also, this objective of national
integration generated films like Festival Time, in which more importance is given to
Hindu festivals compared to other religious traditions, misleading the audience into
believing that everyone in India faithfully follows Hindu rituals. The limited duration
of the films, often around ten minutes, and the haste in which most were produced,
were partly responsible for this lack of accuracy and relevance. Despite an urgent need
to create an independent national identity for India, Films Division didn’t have the
personnel and resources to make radical changes in the structure of the organisation
and in the style of the films, reducing its ability to deliver pertinent films.
Most of FD production still referred to the various aspects of the social and
economic development of India in positive terms. Srirupa Roy characterises FD films
by their ‘ponderous and heavy-handed style’ and adds that ‘for the most part, they
lend themselves all too readily to charges of clumsy propaganda and bureaucratic
ineptitude’.21 According to her, ‘More than a third of the total output of documentary
films in the first two decades after independence, were those that addressed the themes
of planned development and various aspects of social and economic modernization.’22
Indeed, most FD product continued to deliver official messages of success and
control to the mass audience, while giving the impression of an objective report, a
strategy inherited from the British documentary film movement. Various cinematic
and narrative tools were employed in order to achieve this objective. An affirmative
and authoritative voiceover always explained the images, leaving little space for
synchronous sound – a technical limitation which helped FD to manipulate real facts –
alternative views and thus dissenting audience interpretation. Film-makers preferred
straightforward images and few transition effects, in order to give the impression that
these recorded images were the exact reproduction of real situations and events. The
recurrent pans and static cameras were both the result of the technical limitations of
the times and useful tools. Indeed, pans allowed vast areas to be framed and almost
matched the human gaze; while static shots allowed people to move around, enter and
leave the frame, giving the visual impression that genuine and unstaged situations,
places and people were being recorded. Drawings of maps of India were regularly
deployed to convey the idea of an objective report of situations and events, although
maps can easily be manipulated to support the official point of view on various issues,
such as controversial borders with Pakistan, the progress of railway tracks or dam
projects. Staged sequences were also common, because they delivered official messages
more efficiently than newsreel footage.
However, Roy’s remark also suggests that one-third of FD production did not
perfectly match official statements and plans for reform. By the mid-1960s, film
directors and the general audience were largely disillusioned with Nehru’s policies and
with his failure to achieve national unity, economic progress and social change. These
policies were indeed seriously challenged by political, social and economic unrest,
encompassing peacekeeping on the borders with China and Pakistan, rising Hindu
extremism, Marxist movements and tribal activism, a persistent caste system, a
religious and community-based society, agricultural and industrial failures (including

John Grierson in India: The Films Division under the Influence? 163
food shortages and delayed construction works), as well as financial difficulties
resulting from the Indian rupee currency crisis. So, from the mid-1950s and early 60s
on, film-makers including T. A. Abraham, Mohan Whadwani, Clement Baptista, A.
Bhaskar Rao, Fali Billimoria and Jean Bhownagary started to raise more independent
voices. Their creativity was acknowledged, entitling them to choose their subjects,
and as a result they diverged from official themes and statements to venture into
experimental explorations. For instance, T. A. Abraham’s Symphony of Life (1954)
offered a lyrical representation of human and natural life in India, by replacing the
usual voiceover commentary with music, and by editing sound and image creatively in
order to emotionally involve the spectators. This expressive editing reinforced the
impact of actual shots of villagers and tribal communities’ daily routines, as well as
that of images of rivers, waterfalls, monsoon rains and dams, by adding S. V. Shirali’s
poetic original soundtrack. Some films also started to address persisting problems and
obstacles to India’s development and modernisation. Some took conventional form,
such as Dry Leaves (1961), which presents the dowry system as a plague to a
harmonious society and makes a straightforward pledge for its abolition. Others were
more innovative, such as Debaki Kumar Bose’s series of four films, including Arghya
(1961), on the endurance of the caste system and untouchability, and how to break
down caste barriers at community level. Having made several films on Indian
literature, Bose based two on poems by Rabindranath Tagore, with a lyrical use of
music and literary references to convey his very down-to-earth message. These
forerunners, who leaned towards the poetic tradition of the British documentary film
movement, contributed to shaping more personal and critical approaches to the
documentary film medium within FD’s centralised production set-up. Finally, a gap
developed between the initial project of Films Division to make socially purposive
films and the reality of the films produced. The first documentary chief producer,
Mohan Bhavnani, was dismissed from his post in 1954 for clashing with the
bureaucrats. His agenda had been to make films cheaply and quickly to reach a
heterogeneous audience.23 But his practical and utilitarian approach interfered with
the procedural stance of the state administration. In 1960, Bhavnani declared that:

Above all, the making of a pure documentary requires a man of vision and idealism, who can
dare to face the revealing truths of his subject, no matter how unpalatable these may be to the
various sections of society.24

However, Films Division could not proceed with this approach, since the central
government and state ministries commissioned documentaries to support their
official policies, plans and statements. For instance, Nehru believed in decentralising
administrative functions to the local level, as a way to encourage self-reliance, and
inaugurated the system of panchayati raj – or rule of the village council of five – in
1959. Films like Our Panchayats (1950) were produced to support this reform and to
convince the population that decentralisation was the best option. This entirely staged
documentary is presented to the viewers as if the record of real events, mediated by a
voice-of-God narration. The film first focuses on village life before the panchayati raj
was implemented. It shows how villagers struggled to settle their disputes in front of a
court and how the process was time- and money-consuming. The film highlighted the

1 64 The Grierson Effect

villagers’ laziness and helplessness, mocking their quarrelsome behaviour by
introducing the sound of cackling chickens. In the second part, panchayat members
are elected; quarrelsome villagers are happily reconciled; and local problems of road
infrastructure, health, food supplies and the like are resolved. This is yet another
example of a socially purposive film that demonstrates how the negative aspects of the
existent local political and legal systems can be overthrown by the positive reform of
the panchayats, unifying social relationships, in a typical Griersonian way. However,
this initial objective of democratic political change effectively failed to come into
practice, a situation not reflected in the films. In 1966, the Chanda Committee for
broadcasting and information media pointed out the loss of public interest in official
documentaries and newsreels:

because of organisational defects, the documentaries [were] produced mechanically and

disinterestedly, making them dull and uninteresting. Their treatment [was] often superficial
and the absence of humour and satire [was] a contributory factor. Also, the pattern of
documentaries [had] now become so stereotyped […] it [was] easy to anticipate sequences and
conclusions.25

In most cases, documentaries clearly deviating from the official state position would
not be approved by the Film Advisory Board and Film Censor Board. This consensual
position revealed the limitations of Films Division as a production centre for socially
purposive documentary films, and this explained why the general audience began to
view these films with growing scepticism.

conclusIons

Films Division’s documentary production of the late 1940s–mid-60s remains an

underresearched topic and further archival research is needed to comprehensively
understand this period of official documentary film-making. The influence of John
Grierson and the British documentary film movement on Films Division of India was
crucial in several respects – including that of administrative style and personnel, as
well as themes, purpose and aesthetic features – but the historical context in which
these documentaries were produced differed from that of Great Britain. India adapted
the exercise in national projection, for which the British documentary film movement
had first been initiated, to counter the influence of Hollywood, to define and support
its own national identity in a largely illiterate, poor and diversified social context.
However, important discrepancies started to appear between the ideal project pursued
by Nehru’s government and reality on the ground. Official FD films did circulate a
progressive and reformist opinion but failed to reflect on economic setbacks, social
conservatism and rising political opposition. In depicting too positive a picture of
India’s situation, they failed to confront problems, and therefore could not help to
overcome them.
So, once the general post-independence exaltation had passed, film-makers
and audiences slowly started to reconsider the status and value of Films Division
documentaries. Disenchantment with Films Division came when people realised that

John Grierson in India: The Films Division under the Influence? 165
the promises made by Nehru had not been fulfilled. Official films lost credibility and
became associated with propaganda. Since the late 1960s, and more significantly from
the 70s and 80s onwards, counter-documentary practices have developed within and
outside Films Division, and its monopoly status has been increasingly challenged. This
also created new opportunities for film-makers to develop their own style and distance
themselves more clearly from the British documentary film tradition.

noTes

1. Philip Woods, ‘From Shaw to Shantaram: The Film Advisory Board and the Making of
British Propaganda Films in India, 1940–1943’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and
Television vol. 21 no. 3 (2001), p. 300.
2. Ibid., pp. 304–5.
3. Judith M. Brown, Nehru, Profiles in Power (Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 1999),
pp. 90, 185.
4. Richard Osborne, ‘India on Film, 1939–1947’, in Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe (eds),
Film and the End of Empire (London: BFI, 2011), p. 120.
5. For a critical assessment of the British documentary film movement, and more specifically
of its imperial ideology and reception, see Martin Stollery, Alternative Empires: European
Modernist Cinemas and Cultures of Imperialism (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2000),
pp. 140–202.
6. See the entries ‘Empire Marketing Board’, ‘General Post Office’, ‘Crown Film Unit’ and
‘John Grierson’ in Ian Aitken (ed.), The Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film, volume 1
(London: Routledge, 2006).
7. Report of the Film Enquiry Committee (New Delhi: Ministry of Information, Government of
India Press, 1951), pp. 51–2.
8. Ravi Vasudevan, ‘Official and Amateur: Exploring Information Film in India’, in Grieveson
and MacCabe, Film and the End of Empire, p. 74.
9. Srirupa Roy, Beyond Belief: India and the Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2007), p. 34.
10. Woods, ‘From Shaw to Shantaram’, p. 299.
11. Mohan Bhavnani, ‘The Background of the Short Film in India and Future of Documentary’,
Marg vol. 13 no. 3 (1960), p. 5.
12. See Ian Aitken, ‘John Grierson, Idealism and the Inter-war Period’, Historical Journal of Film,
Radio and Television vol. 9 no. 3 (1989), pp. 247–58; Ian Aitken, Film and Reform: John
Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 37–47,
184–95; and Ian Aitken (ed.), The Documentary Film Movement: An Anthology (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 1998), pp. 35–44, 76–7.
13. Aitken, Film and Reform, p. 191.
14. John Grierson, ‘O These Problems, These Priorities’, in Jag Mohan (ed.), Four Times Five
(Bombay: Films Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1969), p. 7. References
to Grierson also appear in Jag Mohan (ed.), Two Decades of the Films Division (Bombay:
Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1969); Jag Mohan (ed.), Documentary Films and
Indian Awakening (New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and
Broadcasting, 1990); and ‘60 Years of Films Division’, Documentary Today vol. 1 no. 4 (2008).

1 66 The Grierson Effect

15. Report of the Film Enquiry Committee, p. 52.
16. Mohan, Two Decades of the Films Division, p. 11.
17. Aitken, Film and Reform, p. 60.
18. K. L. Khandpur, ‘The Technique of Documentary Making in India: Approach to Factual
Films’, Marg vol. 13 no. 3 (1960), pp. 44–5.
19. B. D. Garga, From Raj to Swaraj: The Non-fiction Film in India (New Delhi: Penguin Books,
2007), p. 134.
20. Report of the Film Enquiry Committee, p. 54.
21. Roy, Beyond Belief, p. 34.
22. Ibid., p. 47.
23. Garga, From Raj to Swaraj, p. 133.
24. Bhavnani, ‘The Background of the Short Film in India’, p. 6.
25. Ashok K. Chanda, Committee Report on Broadcasting and Information Media (Delhi: Ministry
of Information and Broadcasting, 1966).

reFerences

‘60 Years of Films Division’, Documentary Today vol. 1 no. 4 (2008).

Aitken, Ian, ‘John Grierson, Idealism and the Inter-war Period’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio
and Television vol. 9 no. 3 (1989), pp. 247–58.
Aitken, Ian, Film and Reform: John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement (London:
Routledge, 1990).
Aitken, Ian (ed.), The Documentary Film Movement: An Anthology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1998).
Aitken, Ian (ed.), The Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film, volume 1 (London: Routledge, 2006).
Bhavnani, Mohan, ‘The Background of the Short Film in India and Future of Documentary’,
Marg vol. 13 no. 3 (1960), pp. 4–8.
Brown, Judith M., Nehru, Profiles in Power (Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 1999).
Chanda, Ashok K., Committee Report on Broadcasting and Information Media (Delhi: Ministry of
Information and Broadcasting, 1966).
Garga, B. D., From Raj to Swaraj: The Non-fiction Film in India (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2007).
Grierson, John, ‘O These Problems, These Priorities’, in Jag Mohan (ed.), Four Times Five
(Bombay: Films Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1969), pp. 7–8.
Khandpur, K. L., ‘The Technique of Documentary Making in India: Approach to Factual Films’,
Marg vol. 13 no. 3 (1960), pp. 44–5.
Mohan, Jag (ed.), Two Decades of the Films Division (Bombay: Ministry of Information and
Broadcasting, 1969).
Mohan, Jag (ed.), Documentary Films and Indian Awakening (New Delhi: Publications Division,
Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1990).
Osborne, Richard, ‘India on Film, 1939–1947’, in Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe (eds), Film
and the End of Empire (London: BFI, 2011), pp. 118–49
Report of the Film Enquiry Committee (New Delhi: Ministry of Information, Government of India
Press, 1951), pp. 9–65.
Roy, Srirupa, Beyond Belief: India and the Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2007).

John Grierson in India: The Films Division under the Influence? 167
Stollery, Martin, Alternative Empires: European Modernist Cinemas and Cultures of Imperialism
(Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2000), pp. 140–202.
Vasudevan, Ravi, ‘Official and Amateur: Exploring Information Film in India’, in Lee Grieveson
and Colin MacCabe (eds), Film and the End of Empire (London: BFI, 2011), pp. 73–94.
Woods, Philip, ‘From Shaw to Shantaram: The Film Advisory Board and the Making of British
Propaganda Films in India, 1940–1943’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television vol. 21
no. 3 (2001), pp. 293–308.

1 68 The Grierson Effect

11
Grierson in Ireland

Jerry White

Ireland is not isolated, but belongs to an internationale. It belongs to the great and powerful
internationale of the Catholic church; it belongs to the green internationale of rural countries
developing progressive rural cultures; it has common interests on a dozen and one fronts. All
this should be considered as Ireland makes its film plans. It means power to exchange films; it
means power to produce films co-operatively with other nations; it means power to create,
from the films of small nations with similar interests, a common film front to the larger
world.1
John Grierson

We tend in this country to look to the British Documentary movement as our model, but
having seen a great number of British, American and Continental documentary films over a
number of years, I feel strongly that our documentary style, if such ever develops, will be
much closer to the continental than the British.2
Colm Ó Laoghaire

John Grierson’s impact in Ireland is, on the one hand, minimal. He gave at talk at a
Dublin hotel in 1948, and a Jesuit review published the text of it a few months later. Et
puis, voilà. It is thus not entirely unreasonable to dismiss his importance, given that
Grierson never came back to the Republic of Ireland and showed very little interest in
the North during his stints at the EMB, the GPO or the Central Office of Information
(COI). And yet, I think the more compelling reading of Irish film history has Grierson
as the man in the shadows, the steely Scot offering an example to his cousins across
the Irish Sea. This can be seen in Irish cinema’s very early days, with Man of Aran in
1934. That was made by the most famous Griersonian of them all, Robert Flaherty,
and putting Grierson back into the history of that film can actually help us come to
a more nuanced view of the conventional wisdom that it is not quite an Irish film.
During his 1948 visit to Dublin Grierson was, to some extent, speaking to Irish
cinephiles, the most prominent of whom was Liam Ó Laoghaire, a model Griersonian
in that he took a great interest in world cinema and worked as a documentary film-
maker, making films about ‘social or civic or educational interest’, to borrow a phrase
from Grierson’s ‘A Film Policy for Canada’.3 Those were also the kinds of films made by
Gael Linn in the 1950s and 60s, and that was just about the only form of genuinely
indigenous film-making in the Republic during this era. Gael Linn paved the way for
the films of Louis Marcus, one of the only Irish documentarians to be nominated for

Grierson in Ireland 169

The most famous Griersonian of them all, Robert Flaherty, off the west coast of Ireland filming Man of Aran (1934)

an Oscar and Griersonian to the core. Bob Quinn, who came out of the 1960s and 70s
Irish-language counterculture is today the closest thing Irish documentary has to a
chief dissident, and he is just as Griersonian as Louis Marcus, if not more so. Harvey
O’Brien, author of the very comprehensive The Real Ireland: The Evolution of Ireland in
Documentary Film, is quite sceptical of positions like mine, writing that ‘The extent to
which Grierson’s pronouncements directly affected documentary practice in Ireland is
debatable.’4 I take his point there, and there’s no doubt that the explicit influence of
the grey eminence is not comparable to his impact on the cinema of Britain, Canada or
even New Zealand. But that should not obscure the degree to which Irish film-makers
and institutions have sought to direct and mark the national cinema in ways that are
defined by a civic/rhetorical rather than commercial/narrative vision of cinema’s
vocation, in ways that show the unmistakeable impact of the Grierson effect.

RobeRt FlaheRty and Man of aran

Although there had been sporadic film-making efforts in Ireland since the birth of the
medium, the production of Flaherty’s Man of Aran represents a landmark. The film’s

1 70 The Grierson Effect

Tiger King, playing the titular role, faces a very serious wave in Flaherty’s Man of Aran

reception upon its release and its representational legacy is central to the discourse
around Irish cinema, and there is no sense in rehearsing that here.5 The aspect of this
history that it is useful to excavate in this context is Flaherty’s sometimes difficult
connection to Grierson, largely because it illustrates the degree to which Irish film was
defined, from the very early days, by the fundamental tension of Griersonianism:
between well-thought-out technocratic institutions and the unpredictable actions of
individual film-makers.
Grierson’s connection to Flaherty is, again, basically canonical; the importance of
this for Ireland, though, has relatively little to do with the popularisation of the term
‘documentary’ via Grierson’s review of Flaherty’s 1926 film Moana. Rather, it has to
do with Flaherty’s interest in cinema as an escape from modernity, and Grierson’s
scepticism towards that. O’Brien sees the genesis of Man of Aran in terms of his
relation to Grierson, writing that ‘Man of Aran was probably the most Rousseauian of
all the director’s films and was proof of his continuing distance from those whose work
he had inspired, including John Grierson.’6 What O’Brien is alluding to there is the
film that Flaherty had made right before Man of Aran, Industrial Britain (1931), from
which Flaherty was famously fired by Grierson because he was unable to keep to a
budget (the film was finished by Grierson and Edgar Anstey),7 but also because he was
more interested in small-scale handcrafts than industry. Martin McLoone writes of
Man of Aran that ‘In Ireland, the film arrived just as the de Valera government was

Grierson in Ireland 171

reinvigorating the ideals of cultural nationalism and it provided an almost perfect
cinematic expression of the ascetic romanticism that lay behind this whole project.’8
Man of Aran thus represents Flaherty turning his back on the British documentary
movement and its ideology of technocratic progressivism in favour of something more
Rousseauian, in O’Brien’s formulation. In so doing, he ended up synchronising with
what would become the prevailing forces of Irish cultural politics. The de Valera to whom
McLoone alludes is Éamon de Valera, one of the few surviving leaders of the 1916 Easter
Rising and prominent figure in the War of Independence, leader of the anti-treaty side
during the Civil War, and in 1926 founder of Fianna Fáil, the centre-right party that
would go on to dominate Irish politics during the twentieth century. Part of the
representational legacy of Man of Aran is that it has come to serve as something of a
negative example for a later generation of Irish film-makers who have sought to
correct its outsider-romanticism with a more detailed and nuanced set of images
produced from the inside. But one benefit of looking at Irish cinema through the
‘Grierson effect’ is to show us that the film-maker Irish radicals (such as Bob Quinn,
about whom more later) have reacted against most strongly is also the one whose
most celebrated film marked his complete break with the flinty godfather of
documentary.

eaRly CInephIles, FIRst doCumentaRIes

The early history of film culture in Ireland should sound very familiar to readers of
this anthology. The Irish Film Society was founded in 1936, and in 1945, the most
cinephilic of its founders, Liam Ó Laoghaire, published a history of world cinema called
Invitation to the Film. Kevin Rockett writes that with this book, ‘he placed himself
firmly in the Griersonian context of seeing documentary as a social tool showing
people how the democratic system and its institutions operate’.9 He probably has in
mind passages like the one where Ó Laoghaire marvelled how ‘The brilliant Scot, John
Grierson, made Drifters in 1929 and persuaded civil servants into accepting the film
as a medium of national propaganda.’10 But it wouldn’t be long before Ó Laoghaire
showed himself to be a Griersonian in more than his approach to film history.
A few years after the founding of the Irish Film Society, an ostensibly quite
different group came into being, one whose political position seemed dissimilar but
whose didactic, nonprofit vision of cinema was actually quite close to that of the Irish
Film Society. Harvey O’Brien recounts that the initial government grant to the
National Film Institute of £2,000 (awarded in 1943) was to be directed towards

establishing a library of ‘suitable’ educational films, including films in Irish, and [the society]
was granted a further £250 by the archbishop towards the cost of purchasing three film
projectors which would be used to set up mobile exhibition units which would tour parish
halls and other approved venues to show them.11

What we can see here, I believe, is the emergence in Ireland of a kind of ‘Griersonian
consensus’, a widespread sense that cinema in Ireland is basically a nonprofit affair
where both government and documentary would play an important role. Despite the

1 72 The Grierson Effect

clear political differences between the animators of the Irish Film Society and the
National Film Institute, the development of an Irish film industry fails to excite
the imagination of either. When people attached to these groups turned to film
production, the Griersonian quality of Irish film-making became even clearer.
This conflict between the Irish Film Society and National Film Institute views of
both Ireland and cinema is embodied by two films: Brendan Stafford’s A Nation Once
Again (1946) and Ó Laoghaire’s Our Country (1948). A Nation Once Again was
ostensibly meant to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the death of Thomas
Davis, founder of the Nation and a hero of the Young Ireland movement. The eighteen-
minute film basically tried to show the degree to which many of Davis’s hopes for
an independent Ireland were now being realised, and it has generally been seen as
boisterous propaganda for the ruling party Fianna Fáil (the sense of it being somewhat
obnoxiously nationalist is probably fed by the recurring images of Irish military
parades and fly-overs). That is the case not only with historians such as Rockett and
O’Brien, but also with the film’s contemporaries, most importantly Liam Ó Laoghaire.
The film he made two years later, the six-minute Our Country, could not have seemed
more different. This film is dominated by images of children living in urban squalor,
and is narrated throughout by an impossibly awkward voiceover relating facts about
Ireland’s economic underdevelopment, currency devaluation and so on. The film
featured three members of Clann na Poblachta, an upstart political party that, having
won two seats in a pair of 1947 by-elections, seemed to be the next big thing in Irish
politics when Our Country was being made. That was indeed the case, as the party
ended up as a junior coalition partner when Fianna Fáil lost the 1948 election to rival
Fine Gael; O’Brien speculates that ‘Our Country may have given them an additional
edge.’12 What is more important for our purposes here, though, is the degree to which
the conflict between these two parties was being played out, in miniature, as a conflict
between two didactic, nation-building films with various kinds of connections to the
state apparatus. Even when the ruling Fianna Fáil and the insurgent Clann na
Poblachta squared off against one another, they were doing so under basically
Griersonian conditions.

a FIlm polICy FoR IReland

That election where Fianna Fáil was ejected and Clann na Poblachta entered into
coalition took place on 4 February 1948, three months before Grierson’s only actual
appearance in Ireland, which he made in his capacity as film controller of the Central
Office of Information. What he left behind was a manifesto of sorts, an address given
at the Gresham Hotel and published in the September 1948 issue of the Jesuit review
Studies, called ‘A Film Policy for Ireland’. The degree to which this affected film-making
in Ireland, both North and South, is indeed debatable.
Although their work was supposed to encompass the entire empire, and at the
very least the entire United Kingdom, neither the EMB nor the GPO film units were
very active in Northern Ireland.13 Proinsias Ó Conluain’s Scéal na Scannán/Story
of Cinema, a kind of Irish-language counterpoint to Ó Laoghaire’s Invitation to the
Film, writes as rapturously about Grierson as Ó Laoghaire does but also notes that

Grierson in Ireland 173

‘Grierson only worked with one Irishman at that time.’14 That was Norris Davidson,
who in addition to working for Flaherty on Man of Aran (he produced a short film
called Dancers of Aran in 1934), worked on two films in County Down (part of
Northern Ireland) for the EMB: Hen Woman (n.d.) and Meat for Millions (n.d.).15 The
situation didn’t change much when Grierson returned from Canada to head up the
film unit of the UK’s Central Office of Information. John Hill recounts the difficulties
that seemed inevitable to COI-led film production in the North, some of which
had to do with a fear of Irish nationalism and an associated sensitivity about what
constituted the regional specificity of Northern Ireland, in his comprehensive survey
of film-making there.16 Indeed, it is striking that Northern Ireland does not come up
at all in ‘A Film Policy for Ireland’, which shows a great deal of enthusiasm for and
idealism about what Ireland could do with cinema if its energies were focused in
certain ways.
Grierson returns frequently to the example of Canada, which is hardly surprising
given that only three years earlier he had resigned as commissioner of the National
Film Board there. Only four years earlier, Grierson had published an essay called ‘A Film
Policy for Canada’ in the 15 June 1944 issue of Canadian Affairs, and so it is easy to
see this as something of a sequel. That essay has a central place in the history of
Canadian cinema, if for no other reason than that it advocates Canada focus more
attention on non-commercial uses of film, especially documentary, and essentially
abandon all hope of competing with Hollywood films. After recounting the difficulties
of building a national film industry, Grierson asks (in a section called ‘If You Can’t
Fight Them, Join Them’): ‘Are there not other possibilities for the development of
Canadian film production? I think there are and far more practical and possible than
this dream of a Canadian Hollywood.’17 In Canada this vision has been the subject of
a number of frontal attacks, most famously from Peter Morris and Joyce Nelson,18
both of whom anticipated Brian Winston’s book-length critique of the Griersonian
tradition. No comparable influence, either positive or negative, has accrued to ‘A Film
Policy for Ireland’. I rather suspect that this has to do less with Canada than with the
other recurring reference for Grierson, the other job that he had recently departed:
UNESCO.
Grierson left Canada in 1945 for New York and, after getting caught up in the
investigation of an Ottawa-based spy ring (a secretary at the NFB had been named by
the Soviet defector Igor Gouzenko), he decamped to Paris to serve as an advisor to
UNESCO during 1947. This was the year before his ‘A Film Policy for Ireland’ talk, and
so it’s no wonder that it comes up so much, fresh in his mind as it was. But Grierson
was taking the opportunity here not simply to argue for film as a tool of educational,
scientific or cultural development, although he was certainly doing that. Rather, he
was trying to argue that Ireland needed to start thinking of itself as a ‘small country’.
Both Morris and Nelson, however, critique Grierson’s legacy in no small part because
of its implicit hostility towards Canadian self-determination. Nelson, for instance,
writes that ‘Grierson, ever the Empire man, felt that the film aspirations of a country
like Canada were simply muddying the picture, whereas Britain was obviously entitled
to “a truly national film industry”.’19 Morris, in his ‘Backwards to the Future’ essay,
slams what he sees as Grierson’s circular logic on the desirability of a small-country
film industry:

1 74 The Grierson Effect

 Lost … is any suggestion that other nations did not regard Hollywood’s hegemony over their
film industries as an inevitable benefit of the new internationalism and that there were
indeed policy options – well-known and applied in Europe and Latin America – that might
counteract that control.20

But when he was speaking in Ireland, rather than speaking in terms of the inevitable
defeat that is the lot of small countries living next to big and powerful ones, he tries
to rally the troops. Grierson writes in ‘A Film Policy for Ireland’ that his sense as a
Scotsman is that

our problems as small nations in close proximity to a larger and richer nation have been
in many ways similar. A great part of the struggle has been: not to maintain economic
independence, but to preserve what we had of our own traditions, our own culture, our own
way of looking at things.21

Here the ‘new internationalism’ that Morris derided has taken a very different form,
one closer to what critics such as himself, or Joyce Nelson, would seem to be desiring:
co-operation among countries in the name of decentralising power. But only four
years had passed between ‘A Film Policy for Canada’ (which, you will recall, has a
section called ‘If You Can’t Fight Them, Join Them’) and ‘A Film Policy for Ireland’.
What could have happened to Grierson in such a short time to change his rhetoric so
radically?
The answer, of course, is that UNESCO happened. Grierson’s year at the UN-
sponsored organisation was mostly devoted to beginning the work of building a series
of international coalitions of film boards and film-makers, some of which was directly
related to the work of post-World War II small-state reconstruction. This was very
different from what he had been doing at the EMB, GPO or the NFB, in no small part
because he was no longer ‘the Empire man’, to use Joyce Nelson’s formulation. He
seems to have taken to this new supranational affiliation with zeal, if ‘A Film Policy for
Ireland’ is to be taken as any indication. Recalling his experience at the United Nations
Conference on Freedom of Information at Geneva, he writes:

The deep issues there were not, and are not, the issues between the Western Bloc and the
Eastern Bloc, between the big issues of the big countries. They are the issues which arise from
a real fear on the part of the smaller countries that the big fellows, on both sides, are only too
insensitive to the special cultural interests of their smaller neighbours and, in certain cases,
are inclined to ignore their quality … . Unesco can, and should be, a powerful ally to the small
country developing its film services.22

Note that Grierson does not say ‘the small country developing its film industry’. The
overall suggestions that he was making in Dublin are actually not at all far off what he
had to say in the pages of Canadian Affairs. In Ireland as in Canada, his sense of film
policy was that it should support film as a government-sponsored public service, not
as an industry.
In Canada this has led to Grierson being seen as a patronising outsider whose
indifference to the plight of a small country was a major impediment to building its

Grierson in Ireland 175

own film industry; that is the line of both Nelson’s The Colonized Eye and Morris’s
‘Backwards to the Future’. His Irish experience, though, gives the opposite sense, that
his calls for greater internationalism were simply ignored, despite the interest of a
number of key cultural figures writing in both Irish and English. Writing three years
before Grierson’s Dublin talk, Liam Ó Laoghaire argued that they needed to resist a
cinema defined by cheap commercialism and that ‘the way to do so seems to me to lie
with a National Film Board which would see that cheap sentimental scripts would
never reach the production stage, and that a high standard of work would be aimed
at’.23 Proinsias Ó Conluain concludes his 1954 booklet Ár Scannáin Féin/Our Own
Films with a list of twenty-eight proposals for a national institution that would
support film-making in Irish. Number twelve begins: ‘That the body have a Director
or Controller to manage the production and so on, as John Grierson did, say, with
the National Film Board of Canada, or as the head of the state body Cinecittà does
in Italy’.24 I thus have no real argument with Harvey O’Brien’s scepticism about
Grierson’s influence in Ireland; if one is taking the macro-view, it seems clear that the
national cinema, including its documentary cinema, evolved along different lines. But
the Griersonian model did provide an alternate path for Irish cinema to follow, and
those who chose to follow it were by no means marginal parts of that country’s
cinematic history.

Gael lInn

Gael Linn is a language-revival organisation, founded in 1953, and is well known for
being the most progressive and forward-looking of its kind. Part of this has to do with
its embrace of mass media. Its traditional-music label is of long standing, and shortly
after its foundation it presented a series of proposals for the then-nascent Irish
television service RTÉ.25 It has also produced a number of documentary films: the best
known of these are the weekly newsreel series Amharc Éireann/A View of Ireland
(1955–64)26 and George Morrison’s historical compilation films Mise Éire/I Am
Ireland (1959) and Saoirse?/Freedom? (1960). All of these films are narrated in Irish
Gaelic and, like all of Gael Linn’s films, they were initially distributed in unsubtitled
prints (recent DVD issue versions all carry English subtitles). In addition to language
what they share is a basically Griersonian sense of cinema, both in terms of aesthetics
and institutions. Gael Linn and its film-makers saw their task not as building an Irish
film industry, but as using film to both bolster the Irish language and present a
renewed vision of Ireland’s present and its past. The task was basically pedagogical,
and quite consistent with Grierson’s sense that ‘It is worth recalling that the British
documentary group began not so much in affection for film per se as in affection for
national education.’27
Amharc Éireann’s producer, Colm Ó Laoghaire, was something of a ‘reluctant
Griersonian’, inasmuch as the films clearly have some pedagogical function, and
certainly have a nation-building one via the normalisation of the Irish language. But Ó
Laoghaire’s reluctance is even more explicit in his 1957 essay about the series, where
he argues that the Grierson school is, essentially, too humanist and progressive for
Ireland. He writes of the British documentary movement:

1 76 The Grierson Effect

 All those working in the School were people with definite theories of social progress and
looked on documentary as a means of propagating these. Now anyone who is familiar with
the films and writings of these people and their circles will know that they tend to be Liberal
and Humanist in their outlook.28

The suspicion here to my mind, isn’t really political; in terms of the function that these
films had in the life of the nation, as well as their relationship to the state (Gael Linn
was not a state body but has always been state-subsidised), the closeness to a
Griersonian sensibility seems to me transparent. The hostility is, just as Ó Laoghaire
says, ideological. There is clearly something of the worldly, rationalist Brit to Grierson,
a type that would have aroused strong suspicion on the part of the Irish Catholic
middle class. In Ireland that ‘rationalist Brit’ perspective is widely associated with
Trinity College Dublin, historically a stronghold of the Protestant elite which Irish
Catholics needed a special dispensation from their bishop to attend until the 1970s.29
British rationalism may have seemed a foreign imposition, and Ó Laoghaire’s longing
for a continental connection is far from surprising in that context. But I hope the
two epigraphs to this essay show, that longing is, ironically, further indication of the
Griersonian influence in Ireland; Grierson, following his UNESCO experience, thought
Ireland needed to think in more continental terms as well.
George Morrison, director of Mise Éire and Saoirse?, had a slightly different
relationship to that Griersonian influence. Morrison’s internationalism had little to
do with documentary film-making as such. Instead, he was active in the Fédération
International des Archives du Film (FIAF) and wrote an article calling on Ireland to
establish an international-standard archive in 1966.30 What brought him to that cause
was the process of making Mise Éire and Saoirse?, both of which are made up entirely of
archival footage. Mise Éire narrates the period from 1896 to 1918 (basically up to the
outbreak of the War of Independence), and Saoirse? takes us to 1922 (basically up to
the outbreak of the Civil War); Morrison planned to make a third film, about the Civil
War (1922–3), but it never materialised. Mise Éire and Saoirse? have been controversial
in Ireland because of the sometimes strident nationalism of their voiceovers. Both
films are ‘assembly films’ about the fall of one regime and the painful emergence of
another and, as O’Brien among others has pointed out, their closest cinematic relation
would seem to be Esfir Shub’s Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927). But O’Brien is not
convinced, writing that ‘The films do not evince a dialectical mode of interpretation or
offer cross-correlations between the social strata as Shub did in Fall of the Romanov
Dynasty.’31 Of course, that is not far off the way in which Grierson-era films embraced
many aspects of the Soviets’ approach to editing while also ‘softening’ their agit-
prop qualities and doing so, essentially, in the service of the state. The fragmented
jumpiness of Turksib (1929) became the gentler and sometimes pastoral rhythms of
Night Mail in a way very similar to how the fist-raised coup-o-philia of Fall of the
Romanov Dynasty became the sometimes romantically tragic but basically heroic
nationalism of Mise Éire and Saoirse?. Like his Gael Linn colleague Colm Ó Laoghaire,
George Morrision was a kind of unconscious Griersonian, another example of the way
in which the effect that gives this collection its title was part of a political consensus
about the proper role of documentary, even in places where the dominant ideology
may have seemed very different indeed.

Grierson in Ireland 177

louIs maRCus

Although the number of film-makers involved in work sponsored by Gael Linn was
relatively small, their influence was significant. That was especially true of Louis
Marcus, who got his start as an assistant editor on Mise Éire and Saoirse?; spent time
in Israel studying both the nascent film industry and the revival of Hebrew (Marcus
is Jewish and a very fluent Irish speaker); and went on to produce some of the
country’s most widely circulated documentaries, such as the Oscar-nominated shorts
Fleá/Festival (1967) and Páistí ag Obair/Children at Work (1973). In addition to his
films, though, Marcus’s Griersonian sensibilities can be seen in a series of polemical
articles that he published in the Irish Times in 1967. To continue with this dialectical
motif, there is a sense in which the proposals for an indigenous film culture advanced
by Liam Ó Laoghaire and Proinsias Ó Conluain were colliding with the nation-building
documentary production of Gael Linn to synthesise a kind of ‘complete Griersonian’ in
the form of Louis Marcus.
The late 1960s seemed to be a grim time for Irish film production. Although the
fairly wide release accorded to Mise Éire and Saoirse? had generated some excitement,
the cinematic infrastructure in the country remained either underdeveloped or
inaccessible. The latter tendency seemed to be embodied by Ardmore Studios, a
Wicklow-based facility set up by the Seán Lemass government in 1958 meant to lead
to the emergence of a local industry but in fact far too expensive for anyone but British
and Hollywood productions to actually use. What he saw as a ‘record of neglect’ on the
part of the government towards Irish cinema led him to write a five-part series of
articles for the Irish Times, published between 27 March and 1 April 1967; the second
in the series bore the title ‘The Irrelevance of Ardmore Studios’. Summarising the
perspective of those pieces, O’Brien writes that ‘Marcus argued, using points
startlingly similar to those made by Grierson two decades earlier … that documentary
was uniquely placed to advance the representation of Ireland as a medium of self-
exploration as well as self-promotion …’.32
That was especially true of the fourth instalment, titled ‘A Dearth of
Documentary’. He opened that salvo with a veritable précis of Grierson’s position in
‘A Film Policy for Canada’, insisting that small countries should recognise the need
to ensure that ‘Specialised films are made on 16mm for showing as educational and
promotional aids everywhere from classrooms to conference halls.’33 Here is Grierson
in ‘A Film Policy for Canada’:

When you think of this nation’s organizations you will readily see how big this new 16mm
audience can be … . Wherever people are gathered together in the name of a specialized
professional or social or civic or educational interest, there you have a ready made audience
for films which are devoted to their interest.34

Indeed, in the last instalment of the series, ‘The Way Ahead’, Marcus identifies Canada
and Holland as the countries to emulate. Although he praises the festival and critical
acclaim of the NFB’s films, it’s the social cohesion by which he is most impressed: ‘But
the Board’s main activities are directed to developing a homogenous and dynamic
community out of the many diverse elements in Canadian life – a function which could

1 78 The Grierson Effect

 Transporting a cow to a ship waiting offshore …

A priest hears a boy’s confession at the top of Croagh Patrick …

Pilgrims have some lunch at the top of Croagh Patrick in Louis Marcus’s Pobal (1970)

Grierson in Ireland 179

not be more relevant to Ireland.’35 To return to his previously quoted formulation, it’s
worth recalling here that Grierson’s affection for film was really an affection for what he
called ‘national education’. So it was, at least in the pages of the Irish Times, for Marcus.
This is not to dismiss the importance of the films that Marcus made. Indeed, there
is a real sense in which Marcus’s film-making embodies the evolution of a Griersonian
sensibility, the way in which it changed over time. So while he is probably better known
for films like Fleá and Páistí ag Obair, his most relevant film for our purposes here is
Pobal/People (1970). This is a twenty-three-minute exploration of the daily life of
Ireland, with sections observing a busy Dublin open-air market; taking us into a farming
community just outside the city; cutting between Protestant and Catholic religious
services; following pilgrims as they climb Croagh Patrick; watching Aran Islanders as
they load cows onto a large ship from their tiny curraghs; and finally at a crowded, noisy
hurling match, all connected by an Irish-language voiceover. What Marcus is doing,
essentially, is trying to visualise a homogenous and dynamic community (one that is
connected by the presence of a single language in the soundtrack: Irish) out of the
many diverse elements in Irish life: urbanites, villagers and islanders; Catholics and
Protestants; markets and sporting events. The longest section in the film is the one
devoted to climbing Croagh Patrick, a very popular religious site in County Mayo with
a particularly demanding ascent. Marcus includes footage of priests saying mass and
hearing confessions at the summit, but he lingers the longest on images of the pilgrims,
with the voiceover saying ‘Against the mountain, they resemble a human rosary, all
focussed on the summit’ (that is over a medium long shot of a single old woman making
her way up and an extreme long shot of many pilgrims walking in the same direction
with the mountain visible in the distance). The film is very close indeed to the magnum
opus of the second generation of Canadian Griersonians, the Labyrinth (1967) project.
This was a multi-screen installation made for Expo 67 in Montreal by the film-makers
attached to the National Film Board of Canada’s Unit B. Its single-screen version is
called In the Labyrinth, and among other topics it moves between images of horses in
southern Alberta, an Orthodox wedding in Greece, Soviet cosmonauts in training,
Buddhist religious practice and Winston Churchill’s state funeral. The work is defined
overall by a broad, progressive humanism, a philosophy that does indeed derive from
the ideology of which Colm Ó Laoghaire was so suspicious. Today the work is a seminal
example of the emergence of a technologically sophisticated, outward-looking and
multicultural conceptualisation of Canadian nationalism. Pobal is defined by a
comparably broad-minded attempt to bring together diverse strands of experience
into some shared sense both of the human condition and of Irishness.

bob QuInn

Today Louis Marcus is a kind of establishment figure for Irish documentary and for
the Irish language. Bob Quinn, on the other hand, has become the country’s senior
dissident, having also built a career making films in Irish but having done it in
the Connemara Gaeltacht, on the western coast where Irish still functions as a
community language. Most histories of Irish cinema include some discussion of his
work, but generally focus on his feature films such as Poitín (1974), which was the

1 80 The Grierson Effect

first feature to be made entirely in Irish. This obscures the fact that the bulk of his
oeuvre is in documentary cinema (and O’Brien’s book The Real Ireland is an exception
there, devoting significant discussion to Quinn’s three-part 1983 essay film
Atlantean), and also obscures the fact that he is just as much of a Griersonian as
his long-time friend Marcus. When he gave the keynote address to the Canadian
Association for Irish Studies in 2000 (held in Edmonton), he opened by recounting a
slight variation on a well-worn tale about Grierson and, to bring this essay full circle,
Robert Flaherty:

The man who knew most about Flaherty and his work was John Grierson. This Scot founded
the National Film Board of Canada, drank copiously and ended up presenting (on Scottish
TV) This Wonderful World, which, along with Godard’s Breathless, first suggested to me the
possibilities of film. In the Thirties, Grierson and Flaherty made the documentary Industrial
Britain, but his natural inclination was for the exotic. He informed Grierson that he was
leaving. Why? I want to film the savages in Samoa, he explained. Grierson responded: Go
ahead. I’ll stay and film the savages in Birmingham. That’s how I felt about staying and
filming in Connemara, the most bleakly beautiful part of the west of Ireland.36

Quinn began his media work in the area when he bought a portable video rig and
began filming local events and then showing those videos in community halls. He
called his production company Cinegael, and recalled in Edmonton how ‘The NFB’s
Challenge for Change programme inspired me to set up the first closed-circuit
community TV service in Ireland – perhaps in Europe.’
Challenge for Change was a programme set up by the NFB that had two basic goals:
regionalisation and collaboration.37 The second one was probably more of a priority,
and the basic principle of Challenge for Change was that film-makers needed to learn
to make films with people and communities, rather than merely make films about
them. Challenge for Change’s flagship initiative was in a community very much
like Connemara: Fogo Island, off the northeastern coast of Newfoundland. The
‘Newfoundland Project’ ended up being thirty-two films altogether, and gave rise to
the ‘Fogo Process’, wherein rushes were shown at community gatherings and everyone
present was empowered to have footage removed from a final cut.38 This means of
participatory film-making was enormously influential on Quinn. He encountered it
in a serious way when he went to Montreal in 1975 to make a film that eventually
showed on RTÉ called A Film Board for Ireland?. This is a documentary portrait
of the National Film Board of Canada; Challenge for Change, and specifically the
Newfoundland Project, have a central place in the film. Quinn features images from
Roger Hart’s A Memo from Fogo (1972), a kind of ‘résumé film’ that summarised the
Fogo experience a few years after the completion of shooting there. He also includes an
interview with Dorothy Hénaut (an NFB veteran involved in both Challenge for
Change and its French-language sister programme Société nouvelle) where she states
that Grierson wanted the board to be ‘an inch to the left of the government’ and
that Challenge for Change represented a return to this goal after a period of ‘soft’
documentaries in the 1950s.
Those familiar with the literature on Challenge for Change will recall that Grierson
was famously sceptical of the programme; one important effect of Quinn’s A Film

Grierson in Ireland 181

Board for Ireland? is to remind us that this is more complicated than some historians
have presented it. Colin Low, the director of the Fogo films, has recalled in somewhat
traumatised tones the dressing-down that Grierson gave him during a screening of his
work at McGill University. He remembers him saying

So the filmmaker is nothing but a tool, a camera operator or projectionist in the formulation
of these problems and solutions. What about the intelligence, world experience, expensive
education that could be brought to these people? If you have nothing to say, why further
burden these people with manipulative nonsense?39

But a few years later Grierson would write a memo about what he saw as the possibility
of Challenge for Change, and of the changes brought by new technologies such as 8mm
film. The memo is fascinating reading. He is his grouchy self in some places – ‘I am all
for the 8mm revolution, as long as the 8mm mind doesn’t go with it’40 – but elsewhere
he is gently open-minded about the possibilities of grassroots engagement offered by
Challenge for Change. The key passage that links his lingering scepticism about these
possibilities to Quinn’s work comes about two-thirds of the way through the memo,
when he laments:

there is not yet a real decentralizing of production. The cinéastes may make their films with
the people and in the villages, but they are soon off and away from the people and the villages
to their normal metropolitan milieu.41

The work of Bob Quinn, especially his Challenge-for-Change-influenced video work,

is exactly what Grierson seemed to be longing for. Quinn had left the metropolitan
centre before embarking on any of this film-making, never to return to it again (he
came to Connemara after quitting RTÉ television in a huff over the station’s creeping
technocratic organisation). He has made films all over the world, but almost all
of them, in one way or another, bring his arguments back to the culture of the
Connemara Gaeltacht. His efforts at decentralisation, however modest, were
substantial inasmuch as he was making films as a part of a production company
incorporated in An Cheathrú Rua, Co. Galway and so bringing his world experience
and expensive education to Connemara, having permanently relocated and become a
fully functioning citizen of that village. Quinn began as a certain kind of Griersonian
film-maker: invested in documentary, in search of a form of mass communication
that would be genuinely public, etc. He became a very different kind of Griersonian,
someone keenly aware of the need to use cinema to redefine the relationship between
centre and periphery. Like Marcus, his ideological approach evolved in ways that were,
no doubt unwittingly, quite consistent with the evolution of Griersonianism itself.

ConClusIon

My effort here has not been to show that the thought of John Grierson has had a
clearly visible role in the development of Irish cinema, especially given the relatively
superficial engagement that he had with the place. One way to summarise ‘the

1 82 The Grierson Effect

Grierson effect’ in Ireland would be to say ‘he gave a talk about policy at a hotel in the
late 1940s. None of the government people paid his proposals much mind.’ And that
would be basically correct. Indeed, part of Harvey O’Brien’s arguments about Grierson
not being very influential have to do with the fact that in some cases ‘an alternative
(and less demanding) infrastructure already existed’.42 But much of the infrastructure
that did exist in the late 1940s bore the mark of Grierson’s sense that cinema,
especially cinema in small countries, needed to embrace a civic, non-commercial and
non-narrative vocation. Colm Ó Laoghaire’s sense that Irish film-makers tended to
look to the British model seems to me basically correct, and that tendency has led to a
very wide variety of deviations from a capitalist, consumption-driven model of cinema.
Seeing Irish cinema through the Grierson effect allows us to see Flaherty finding
Rousseau on the Aran Islands and the Frenchman turning out to be closer to Irish
political perspectives than most have heretofore thought; Ó Laoghaire and Ó Conluain,
Ó Laoghaire and Morrison struggling in widely different ways to link Irish cinema to
broader trends in world cinema; Marcus and Quinn embracing the most ambitious of
humanist projects and the most detailed of localist ones. The Grierson connection
forces us to see Irish cinema as diverse, both aesthetically and politically. Seeing that
kind of diversity may sometimes seem a stretch and it is never less than a struggle,
but it does allow us to see Ireland’s cinema not as a pale shadow of British cinema
isolated by its failure to sustain a substantial film industry, but rather as part of the
internationale of small countries, struggling with some of the fundamental tensions of
globalisation.

notes

1. John Grierson, ‘A Film Policy for Ireland’, Studies, September 1948, p. 286.
2. Colm Ó Laoghaire, ‘Gael Linn “Vest Pocket” Documentaries’, National Film Quarterly vol. 1
no. 1 (1957), p. 10.
3. John Grierson, ‘A Film Policy for Canada’, in Douglas Fetherling (ed.), Documents in
Canadian Film (Peterborough: Broadview, 1988), pp. 62–3.
4. Harvey O’Brien, The Real Ireland: The Evolution of Ireland in Documentary Film (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2004), p. 57.
5. On the production and legacy of Man of Aran, see O’Brien, The Real Ireland, pp. 44–51 and
Martin McLoone, Irish Film: The Emergence of a Contemporary Cinema (London: BFI, 1999),
pp. 38–44. On the film’s 1930s reception, see Kevin Rockett, Luke Gibbons and John Hill,
Cinema and Ireland (London: Routledge, 1987), pp. 71–3, 201–3; Lance Pettitt, Screening
Ireland: Film and Television Representation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000),
pp. 77–81; and Ruth Barton, Irish National Cinema (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 47–9.
6. O’Brien, The Real Ireland, p. 48.
7. For a summary, see Ian Aitken, Film and Reform: John Grierson and the Documentary Film
Movement (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 120–1.
8. McLoone, Irish Film, p. 38.
9. Rockett et al., Cinema and Ireland, p. 76.
10. Liam Ó Laoghaire, Invitation to the Film (Tralee: The Kerryman, 1945), p. 87.
11. O’Brien, The Real Ireland, p. 62.

Grierson in Ireland 183

12. Ibid., p. 67.
13. Oddly, that’s not true of either the EMB as a whole or the island of Ireland as a whole. For a
discussion of the relationship between the EMB and the Irish Free State (which existed from
1922–37), see Mike Cronin, ‘Selling Irish Bacon: The Empire Marketing Board and Artists of
the Free State’, Éire-Ireland vol. 39 nos 3–4 (2004), pp. 132–43.
14. Proinsias Ó Conluain, Scéal na Scannán (Dublin: Stationery Office, 1953), p. 98.
15. Ó Conluain does not give the dates for either film. Rachel Low’s History of British Film,
volume 5 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1979) lists Hen Woman as 1933, and specifies that it was
unfinished (p. 217). In his essay ‘The EMB Film Unit’, however, Grierson writes that ‘J.N.G.
Davidson made Hen Woman, the unit’s only story documentary.’ See Forsyth Hardy (ed.),
Grierson on Documentary (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1947), p. 123.
16. See John Hill, Cinema and Northern Ireland (London: BFI, 2006), pp. 114–20.
17. Grierson, ‘A Film Policy for Canada’, p. 59.
18. See Joyce Nelson, The Colonized Eye: Rethinking the Grierson Legend (Toronto: Between the
Lines, 1988) and Peter Morris, ‘Backwards to the Future: John Grierson’s Film Policy for
Canada’, in Gene Walz (ed.), Flashback: People and Institutions in Canadian Film History
(Montreal: Médiatexte, 1986), pp. 17–35. See also Peter Morris, ‘Re-thinking Grierson: The
Ideology of John Grierson’, in Pierre Vérnonneau, Michael Dorland and Seth Feldman (eds),
Dialogue: Cinéma canadien et québécois/Canadian and Quebec Cinema (Montreal: Médiatexte,
1987), pp. 21–56 and Brian Winston, Claiming the Real: The Documentary Film Revisited
(London: BFI, 1995).
19. Nelson, The Colonized Eye, p. 161.
20. Morris, ‘Backwards to the Future’, p. 20.
21. Grierson, ‘A Film Policy for Ireland’, p. 285.
22. Ibid.
23. Ó Laoghaire, Invitation to the Film, p. 171.
24. Ó Conluain, Ár Scannáin Féin (Dublin: Foilseacháin Náisiúnta Teoranta, 1954), p. 26.
25. See Robert Savage, Irish Television: The Political and Social Origins (Cork: Cork University
Press, 1996), pp. 181–90, 193–210. RTÉ stands for Raidió Teilfiís Éireann, which is Ireland’s
state-owned broadcaster, responsible for both television and radio services. Despite its
name it broadcasts mostly in English; the Irish-language television service TG4 and radio
service Raidió na Gaeltchta are separate entities but are under RTÉ’s institutional umbrella.
26. For a highly detailed discussion of film-making in Irish generally and the work of Gael Linn
specifically, see Heather Macdougall, ‘Finding a Voice: The Role of Irish-language Film in
Irish National Cinema’, PhD dissertation, Concordia University, 2012. A very thorough
discussion can also be found in B. Mairéad Pratschke, ‘A Look at Irish-Ireland: Gael Linn’s
Amharc Éireann Films 1956–64’, New Hibernia Review vol. 9 no. 3 (2005), pp. 17–38.
27. Hardy, Grierson on Documentary, p. 169.
28. Ó Laoghaire, ‘Gael Linn “Vest Pocket” Documentaries’, p. 9.
29. A good analogy here is the place of the Anglophone and elite McGill University in the life
of the majority-francophone city of Montreal. Grierson, of course, was a kind of grey-
eminence-in-residence at McGill during the 1960s and 70s, and Quebec film-makers viewed
him with a very similar kind of suspicion (even if they were not writing about it in terms
like Ó Laoghaire’s).
30. See George Morrison, ‘An Irish National Film Archive’, Éire-Ireland vol. 1 no. 4 (1965),
pp. 39–62.

1 84 The Grierson Effect

31. Harvey O’Brien, ‘Projecting the Past: Historical Documentary in Ireland’, Historical Journal
of Film, Radio and Television vol. 20 no. 3 (2000), p. 341.
32. O’Brien, The Real Ireland, p. 166.
33. Louis Marcus, ‘The Irish Film Industry 4 – A Dearth of Documentary’, Irish Times, 30 March
1967, p. 10.
34. Grierson, ‘A Film Policy for Canada’, pp. 61–2.
35. Louis Marcus, ‘The Irish Film Industry 6 – The Way Ahead’, Irish Times, 1 April 1967, p. 9 .
36. This address was eventually published as Bob Quinn, ‘Recycled Rants’, Film West vol. 42
(2002), pp. 26–30. Here I am quoting the transcript of Quinn’s talk in Edmonton, as the
published version doesn’t include the bit about Grierson and Flaherty. That likely-
apocryphal chat between them is also recounted in Gary Evans, John Grierson: Trailblazer of
Documentary Film (Montreal: XYZ, 2005), p. 24.
37. See Thomas Waugh, Michael Brendan Baker and Ezra Winton (eds), Challenge for Change:
Activist Documentary at the National Film Board of Canada (Montreal/Kingston: McGill-
Queen’s University Press, 2010) for an incomparably comprehensive survey of the effort,
both in English and in French (its sister programme was known as Société nouvelle).
38. For a précis of Challenge for Change and the Fogo Process, see Zoë Druick, Projecting
Canada: Government Policy and Documentary Film at the National Film Board of Canada
(Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007), pp. 144–6.
39. Colin Low, ‘Grierson and the Challenge for Change’, in Waugh et al., Challenge for Change,
p. 20.
40. John Grierson, ‘Memo to Michelle about Decentralizing the Means of Production’, in Waugh
et al., Challenge for Change, p. 62.
41. Ibid., p. 63.
42. O’Brien, The Real Ireland, p. 57.

ReFeRenCes

Aitken, Ian, Film and Reform: John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement (London:
Routledge, 1990).
Barton, Ruth, Irish National Cinema (London: Routledge, 2004).
Cronin, Mike, ‘Selling Irish Bacon: The Empire Marketing Board and Artists of the Free State’,
Éire-Ireland vol. 39 nos 3–4 (2004), pp. 132–43.
Druick, Zoë, Projecting Canada: Government Policy and Documentary Film at the National Film
Board of Canada (Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007).
Evans, Gary, John Grierson: Trailblazer of Documentary Film (Montreal: XYZ, 2005).
Grierson, John, ‘A Film Policy for Ireland’, Studies, September 1948, pp. 283–91.
Grierson, John, ‘A Film Policy for Canada’, in Douglas Fetherling (ed.), Documents in Canadian
Film (Peterborough: Broadview, 1988), pp. 51–67.
Grierson, John, ‘Memo to Michelle about Decentralizing the Means of Production’, in Thomas
Waugh, Michael Brendon Barker and Ezra Winton (eds), Challenge for Change: Activist
Documentary at the National Film Board of Canada (Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queen’s
University Press, 2010), pp. 61–5.
Hardy, Forsyth (ed.), Grierson on Documentary (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1947).
Hill, John, Cinema and Northern Ireland (London: BFI, 2006).

Grierson in Ireland 185

Low, Colin, ‘Grierson and the Challenge for Change’, in Thomas Waugh, Michael Brendan Baker
and Ezra Winton (eds), Challenge for Change: Activist Documentary at the National Film Board
of Canada (Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), pp. 16–23.
Macdougall, Heather, ‘Finding a Voice: The Role of Irish-language Film in Irish National Cinema’,
PhD dissertation, Concordia University, 2012.
Marcus, Louis, ‘The Irish Film Industry 4 – A Dearth of Documentary’, Irish Times, 30 March
1967, p. 10.
Marcus, Louis, ‘The Irish Film Industry 6 – The Way Ahead’, Irish Times, 1 April 1967, p. 9.
McLoone, Martin, Irish Film: The Emergence of a Contemporary Cinema (London: BFI, 1999).
Morris, Peter, ‘Backwards to the Future: John Grierson’s Film Policy for Canada’, in Gene Walz
(ed.), Flashback: People and Institutions in Canadian Film History (Montreal: Médiatexte,
1986), pp. 17–35.
Morris, Peter, ‘Re-thinking Grierson: The Ideology of John Grierson’, in Pierre Vérnonneau,
Michael Dorland and Seth Feldman (eds), Dialogue: Cinéma canadienne et québécois/Canadian
and Quebec Cinema (Montreal: Médiatexte, 1987), pp. 21–56.
Morrison, George, ‘An Irish National Film Archive’, Éire-Ireland vol. 1 no. 4 (1965), pp. 39–62.
Nelson, Joyce, The Colonized Eye: Rethinking the Grierson Legend (Toronto: Between the Lines,
1988).
O’Brien, Harvey, ‘Projecting the Past: Historical Documentary in Ireland’, Historical Journal of
Film, Radio and Television vol. 20 no. 3 (2000), pp. 335–50.
O’Brien, Harvey, The Real Ireland: The Evolution of Ireland in Documentary Film (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2004).
Ó Conluain, Proinsias, Scéal na Scannán (Dublin: Stationery Office, 1953).
Ó Conluain, Ár Scannáin Féin (Dublin: Foilseacháin Náisiúnta Teoranta, 1954).
Ó Laoghaire, Liam, Invitation to the Film (Tralee: The Kerryman, 1945).
Ó Laoghaire, Colm, ‘Gael Linn “Vest Pocket” Documentaries’, National Film Quarterly vol. 1 no. 1
(1957), pp. 9–10.
Pettitt, Lance, Screening Ireland: Film and Television Representation (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2000).
Pratschke, B. Mairéad, ‘A Look at Irish-Ireland: Gael Linn’s Amharc Éireann Films 1956–64’, New
Hibernia Review vol. 9 no. 3 (2005), pp. 17–38.
Quinn, Bob, ‘Recycled Rants’, Film West vol. 42 (2002), pp. 26–30.
Rockett, Kevin, Luke Gibbons and John Hill, Cinema and Ireland (London: Routledge, 1987).
Savage, Robert, Irish Television: The Political and Social Origins (Cork: Cork University Press,
1996).
Waugh, Thomas, Michael Brendan Baker and Ezra Winton (eds), Challenge for Change: Activist
Documentary at the National Film Board of Canada (Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queen’s
University Press, 2010).
Winston, Brian, Claiming the Real: The Documentary Film Revisited (London: BFI, 1995).

1 86 The Grierson Effect

12
White Fathers Hear Dark Voices? John Grierson and
British Colonial Africa at the End of Empire

Martin Stollery

An enduring claim made about pioneering British documentaries such as Drifters and
Housing Problems is that they extended the scope of realist representation within
British cinema by eschewing middle-class protagonists and making the working class
their primary focus. In the 1950s Grierson and his protégés operated in a very
different context, where the British documentary impulse was considered by certain
commentators, including some of its original proponents, to be in decline. One
continuity between the two periods, however, was a commitment to representing
hitherto overlooked or inadequately represented social groups. As Raymond Williams
has pointed out, ‘social extension’ is a common feature of nineteenth- and twentieth-
century realist representations.1 The new frontier for the documentary movement in
the 1950s was an international one. For Grierson, British colonial Africa became a
privileged site, at least in theory, for extending realist representation during this
period.
The immediate impact of John Grierson’s initiatives and concepts, like those of
other similarly influential figures, was to an extent determined by the degree to which
they meshed with or challenged existing or emergent practices and ideas within
pertinent fields. For example, Ian Aitken has emphasised the broader context of what
historians have described as British ‘middle opinion’ in the 1930s as an important
element in the documentary movement’s emergence and acceptance during that
decade.2 This helped to sustain the movement in the face of hostility from the film
trade. These general considerations also apply to other phases of Grierson’s career and
later stages of the movement’s development. Two projects arising from or related to
Grierson’s thinking about film and British colonial Africa during the late 1940s and
early 50s provide contrasting examples of acceptance and viability on one side, and
rejection on the other. There was a neat fit between some of Grierson’s ideas in this
area and the emergent work of the Gold Coast Film Unit (GCFU) during the 1950s. By
contrast, Grierson’s attempt to put some of his ideas into practice within the British
feature-film industry revealed a definite incompatibility within that arena,
notwithstanding Colonial Office support.
The African projects most closely associated with Grierson were designed to move
beyond mainstream British feature films set in contemporary Africa in the 1950s, such
as Where No Vultures Fly (1951) and Simba (1955). These tended to centre on liberal
white protagonists. One precedent for these feature films was the Crown Film Unit
documentary, Daybreak in Udi (1949), which celebrated the progressive leadership of

White Fathers Hear Dark Voices? John Grierson and British Colonial Africa at the End of Empire 187
E. R. Chadwick, a white District Officer in Eastern Nigeria.3 Grierson was working for
the Central Office of Information, which encompassed Crown, when Daybreak in Udi
was released, but he was not closely involved in its production, and considered ‘it ha[d]
the curse of talking down upon it’.4 Grierson’s preference during this period was for
documentary and feature films about Africa which, as he put it, apparently minimised
or eliminated the involvement of the ‘White Father’, and instead supposedly enabled
black Africans to find their own voice.5
The pursuit of this aspiration can best be explored by considering Grierson’s
direct and indirect impact upon two distinct film projects: the GCFU and his Group
3 production Man of Africa (1953).6 Both related to British colonial Africa during a
transitional period. Immediately after World War II some British politicians and
commentators still believed that, even if India was ‘lost’, colonies in Africa could play
an increasingly vital role within the British imperial economy for the indefinite future.
By the mid-1950s decolonisation in British colonial Africa was well advanced, and the
Gold Coast/Ghana became the first African colony to gain independence from Britain
in 1957. During this period Grierson elaborated his views on films for and about Africa
in a paper delivered at a conference on ‘The Film in British Colonial Development’,
convened by the British Film Institute (BFI) and the Colonial Office in January 1948.
Grierson’s biographers have paid scant attention to this episode in his career, but
this paper, later published in Sight and Sound, assumes importance for any historian
interested in locating his work within imperial, international and transnational as
well as national contexts.7 Grierson’s January 1948 paper was a further stage in a
development within his thinking that Jo Fox has identified as beginning in earnest
during World War II. This involved

a deeper desire to understand and represent the Dominions and the Empire, integrating
them into the British experience, bringing the portrait of imperial life back home and
indeed depicting nations in the process of defining their own national identities outside of
their ‘role’ as British ‘subjects’.8

Fox is correct about this general shift of emphasis in Grierson’s thinking, but the
extent to which he was willing to envisage African nations as fully independent
entities is open to debate.
As Andrew Higson has argued, historians should avoid assuming that Grierson’s
ideas were automatically or straightforwardly carried through into the film practices of
his colleagues, or that he was necessarily the primary influence upon them.9 GCFU
productions may have been consistent with the broad framework of Grierson’s ideas
about postwar film-making in Africa, but they were shaped by other local factors as well.
Similarly, fellow Group 3 executive Michael Balcon was almost as influential as Grierson
upon the production of Man of Africa, albeit in a constraining as well as enabling capacity.
Additionally, as I have argued in more detail elsewhere, Grierson’s writing was often
crafted to address diverse or even divergent readerships, with deliberate ambiguities or
evasions, and the connotations of certain words and phrases mobilised to this effect.10
Grierson’s speeches and writings can therefore be seen as nodal points for contemporary
discourses, combining and expressing them with particular acuity, promoting
documentary while attempt to negotiate the concerns of different interest groups.

1 88 The Grierson Effect

 Sean Graham (left) in Ghana
in the 1950s (With thanks to
Emma Sandon and Catherine
Graham)

With these caveats in mind, Grierson’s paper on ‘The Film in British Colonial
Development’ can be related to several significant films and film-making projects he
was directly or indirectly associated with during the first half of the 1950s. Grierson
was coming to the end of his tenure as director of mass communication and public
information at UNESCO when he delivered the paper at the beginning of 1948. Its
first part focused upon UNESCO’s fundamental education projects, which had been
formulated with assistance from the Colonial Office, a leading COI client.11 Later
that year Grierson was appointed controller of films at the COI, a post he held until
the end of 1950. His last major role within British cinema was as a producer of
feature films at Group 3 between 1951 and 1955. The arguments he put forward in
‘The Film in British Colonial Development’ were therefore attuned to prospective
clients and employers and soon carried weight as far as actual film production was
concerned.
The same year that he delivered and published ‘The Film in British Colonial
Development’, Grierson appointed Sean Graham to head the newly established GCFU.
Grierson was involved in this appointment because the COI was responsible for the
Colonial Film Unit (CFU), of which the GCFU was nominally a part, until control of the
CFU was transferred to the Colonial Office in 1950. Once Graham was in the Gold
Coast/Ghana, other more immediate factors contributed to his development as a
director and the nature of the films he directed there. These included Graham’s wish to
distinguish his work from the primarily educational films produced by the CFU’s
William Sellers. Graham saw himself, by contrast, as a professional film-maker, whose
vocation was to be a ‘storyteller’. Yet he also considered himself one of Grierson’s
followers.12 Graham periodically returned to London, and worked with Grierson’s close
colleague Basil Wright. Wright produced Graham’s The Boy Kumasenu (1952), arguably
the GCFU’s most accomplished film.13 At the very least, the ideas Grierson articulated
in ‘The Film in British Colonial Development’ constitute one historically proximate
intellectual context for GCFU productions.

White Fathers Hear Dark Voices? John Grierson and British Colonial Africa at the End of Empire 189
Man of Africa (1954): ‘the first ambitious, dramatic all-negro film’

Man of Africa, produced by Grierson, who worked closely with director Cyril
Frankel on what was his first feature film, provided an opportunity to try to achieve
an innovative representation of Africa within mainstream, commercial British
cinema. Initially conceived as a Crown Film Unit documentary, Grierson and Frankel
expanded the project into a feature film for Group 3 after Crown was disbanded in
1952. The film that eventually emerged was fairly ambitious by documentary
standards, with a £40,000 production budget, but modest compared to British
features. Rank, by comparison, worked to a model of approximately
£150,000–200,000 for a feature film around this time.14 Man of Africa dealt with the
migration of a group of Bakiga people in Kigezi, Uganda, from overpopulated, soil-
eroded highlands to new homes in the lowlands inhabited by Batwa pygmies. The
African actors in the film were all non-professionals, from the region in which the
film was set, many of whom did not speak English. Like The Boy Kumasenu, described
in The Times as ‘the first feature film to be made in Africa … with an entirely African
cast’, Man of Africa was promoted by Grierson as ‘the first ambitious, dramatic all-
negro film’.15 The accuracy of such claims in relation to either film is not the most
pertinent issue. More significant is that such claims were being made at this time
about films that bore traces of Grierson’s influence. The Africanisation of film
production was a major preoccupation in ‘The Film in British Colonial Development’.

1 90 The Grierson Effect

This played out in different ways in the GCFU’s film-making practices and in Man of
Africa’s ‘all-negro’ narrative.

A ‘truly DECEntrAlisED … GEnuinE AFriCAn unit’16

For Grierson in his 1948 paper the ‘first necessity’ in addressing ‘the problem of
development on the economic, technological, social and cultural levels’ was to ‘create a
body of men who live and work with the African problem, who are the African problem
in its creative aspect, knowing it and living with it’.17 Grierson contrasted this
decentralised model to the CFU’s practice during World War II of producing films for
African audiences from a London base. By 1948, however, Grierson was endorsing an
existing trend rather than advocating a new one. Decentralisation had already begun
within the CFU, which by 1946 had embedded units in some parts of British colonial
Africa.18 The commitment to decentralisation should be seen within the broader
context of nationalist political agitation for independence, and the transfer of financial
responsibility for film production from the imperial centre to colonial governments.
Africanisation also carried a financial benefit; Africans were cheaper to employ than
Europeans. Grierson therefore provided an inspirational gloss to the more prosaic
declaration of K. W. Blackburne, the director of information services at the Colonial
Office, also a delegate at the 1948 conference, who said his department was ‘trying to
teach the people of the Colonies to run the show themselves and doing precisely that
thing in the film world as in every other field’.19
As Tom Rice has argued, Grierson’s proposal in ‘The Film in British Colonial
Development’ was ‘ambiguous and tentative’.20 Grierson did not specify the exact
nature, extent or timescale of the further Africanisation of film production. He also
followed the Colonial Office’s line in maintaining a measure of centralisation, for
example in postproduction and film processing. None of the speeches published from
the conference explicitly advocated Africans being trained up to become film unit
heads, producers and directors as soon as possible. A lone, partial exception was
A. R. Baëta, an African delegate from the Gold Coast/Ghana, who modestly suggested
‘that it will save a lot of labour and uncertainty about the suitability of educational
films if Africans were trained to write the script’.21 Baëta’s was the only published
contribution to the conference which explicitly referred, with due deference to the
‘very great help English people are giving us’, to Africans’ ‘development towards
nationhood’.22 Compared to this, Grierson’s formulation was less specific and more
gradualist. He recommended ‘sending out experts to teach natives, help natives in the
technical processes involved’.23 Baëta’s piece politely echoed elements of Ghanaian
nationalist rhetoric, which Grierson neither endorsed nor rejected. Grierson’s phrasing
at the 1948 conference was more consonant with assumptions prevalent at that time
within the Colonial Office that internal self-government or full independence for
Ghana was some time away, and not, as it turned out, respectively three years and less
than a decade in the future.
A similar vagueness about whether or when black Africans could assume greater
degrees of authority and responsibility pervaded the GCFU’s production practice.
White director Graham and cinematographer George Noble formed the GCFU’s

White Fathers Hear Dark Voices? John Grierson and British Colonial Africa at the End of Empire 191
nucleus, with writers such as Montgomery Tully and Jerrard Tickell contributing to
individual films. By contrast, the historian of African cinema, Manthia Diawara,
concludes that Africans within the unit ‘remained in the background’.24 Rice notes that
Graham saw the GCFU as a local rather than a colonial unit, but that ‘local’ does not
necessarily equate to what we might understand as ‘African’, but rather to an
administration run by Europeans working and living in the colonies’.25 Certainly,
unlike the Indian Film Unit in the years leading up to independence, no African was
given the opportunity to direct in nearly ten years of the GCFU’s existence. However,
the relationships between background and foreground are worth exploring in more
detail.
Despite the ambiguities of the ‘local’, African recruits such as Sam Aryeetey and
R. O. Fenuku were eventually given screen credits on some of the unit’s later productions,
for example as editor and camera operator respectively on Mr Mensah Builds a House
(1955).26 More broadly, Peter Bloom and Kate Skinner have hypothesised about the
consequences of Graham’s practice of ‘loose scripting’, his relative openness to creative
contributions and improvisation from the African crew and the incorporation of
dialogue in different African languages. They conclude that in productions such as The
Boy Kumasenu, this practice ‘generated a dense layering of references and associations,
some of which were either obscure, or wholly invisible, to the expatriates who
commissioned the film’.27 One example is the orphan motif in The Boy Kumasenu,
strongly resonant in Ghanaian popular fiction and theatre. Bloom and Skinner reason
on this basis that ‘audiences in the Gold Coast, in particular, may have been attracted
to features of which the film maker and producer were only partially aware’.28
Jennifer Blaylock has also highlighted the fact that African members of the unit
sometimes challenged cinematographer Noble. They insisted that women in rural
areas, in Noble’s words, ‘wore three times the clothing they usually did’, and that
children ‘with their lovely glistening skins’ were fully clothed before he could film
them.29 These interventions by some of the African crew can be seen as part of a
broader cultural trend that peaked in the Ghanaian ‘anti-nudity’ campaigns of the late
1950s and 60s. These campaigns sought to encourage women, especially in certain
northern areas of the country, to dress in ways defined by activists as more
appropriate to the newly independent, modern Ghanaian nation. One key concern
throughout these campaigns was to project a suitably modern image of Ghana to the
rest of the world, although in some instances the very existence of the campaigns was
seen as potentially drawing negative attention to the ‘problem’ of nudity.30 Some
GCFU productions such as Amenu’s Child (1950) and The Boy Kumasenu were exhibited
in Britain and elsewhere, as well as in the Gold Coast/Ghana. The unit’s work therefore
raised the same issue of foreign perceptions and the alleged sartorial ‘backwardness’
of some parts of the country. Discreet intervention by some African crew members
during production could resolve this without viewers of the finished films being any
the wiser, although this ran the risk of frustrating Noble’s search for photogenic black
bodies.
Grierson’s strategic silence about whether white expatriates or black Africans
should lead film-making projects within British colonial Africa, so long as they knew
and lived with the African ‘problem’, raises questions pertinent to Graham’s career.
Graham was recently described by one former member of the GCFU, Chris Hesse, as a

1 92 The Grierson Effect

‘rebel’ in relation to his immediate employer, the Gold Coast Information Services
Department, partly because he ‘fell in love with [Ghanaian] culture’ and ‘created an
awareness that oh, our stories could be moulded into film’.31 The omniscient narrator
in Graham’s 1964 novel A Surfeit of Sun says at one point that ‘talk about colour
became idiotically irrelevant when you lived in a multi-racial community … . You liked
people, or you did not. Barriers of class, of education and background remained. One
ignored pigmentation’.32 It is tempting to attribute these liberal humanist sentiments
to Graham himself during his GCFU period. Conversely, it would be reductive to
consider the junior members of the GCFU simply as undifferentiated ‘Africans’ or
Ghanaians. Graham recalls recruiting several of them from Achimota School, an elite
institution run along British public-school lines which educated many of the emergent
Ghanaian nationalist elite.33 Educational and other considerations, such as the
exclusively male composition of the group, their class and regional identities, would be
relevant to any closer analysis of the production of GCFU films.
Historians of colonial film-making in Africa often tend to end their narratives at
independence. Yet as Brian Larkin has recently argued in relation to nonfiction film
production in Nigeria, continuities between the pre- and post-independence periods
also require attention.34 This is the case with the GCFU, whose impact extended
beyond independence in 1957. Graham recalls being offered a post by Kwame
Nkrumah, but he declined and returned to Britain in the hope of furthering his career
as a film director there. Several African members of the unit, such as Aryeetey and
Hesse, later rose to senior positions within the Ghanaian film industry. Some GCFU
films also continued to circulate after independence. Cinema-van commentator James
Amuah has recalled Ghanaian audiences enjoying screenings of Progress in Kojokrom
(1953) and Mr Mensah Builds a House on mobile projectors long after Ghanaian
independence.35 One reason why some GCFU films remained in circulation is that the
specific development objectives they were designed to achieve were approved by post-
independence Ghanaian governments. Yet their longevity must also relate to a
continuing appeal to post-independence audience sensibilities. After 1957 the GCFU
films that remained in circulation entered a new discursive framework located between
post-independence government priorities and the local sensibilities of audiences in
different parts of Ghana, often mediated by cinema-van commentators.36
Grierson’s ‘main proposition’ in ‘The Film in British Colonial Development’ was
that ‘it is not a question of films coming from outside but of films being created from
the inside by and for the colonial peoples themselves’.37 The inside/outside opposition
is not however a particularly useful distinction in this instance. The GCFU films which
endured in Ghana after independence can be better understood as products of what
Mary Louise Pratt calls a ‘contact zone’, a concept which draws attention to the
‘interactive, improvisational dimensions of colonial encounters’, without losing sight
of the fact that these typically occur within ‘radically asymmetrical relations of
power’.38 Although it is important to recognise the interactivity and improvisation
that occurred during the production of GCFU films, it is also worth reiterating the
obvious point that this could never have extended to any fundamental critique of
British rule, or explicit support for full political independence. Celebrations of the
latter were recorded as a fait accompli in one of the last Ghanaian productions in which
Graham was involved: Freedom for Ghana (1957). The political struggle that led to this

White Fathers Hear Dark Voices? John Grierson and British Colonial Africa at the End of Empire 193
outcome could not be explicitly represented in GCFU films. Yet at the same time
British colonial authority was barely visible in many of them. As Rice says of The Boy
Kumasenu, ‘the film promotes gradual change’, but ‘does not promote continued
British involvement’ in African social issues.39 Kumasenu finds a foster parent and
mentor in an educated African doctor, the type of moderate African leader the British
were keen to endorse at that time. The virtual invisibility of British colonial authority
is highly pertinent to Man of Africa as well.

‘timE For tHE AFriCAn to spEAk For HimsElF’

Grierson forcefully expressed the conviction that ‘it was time for the African to speak
for himself’ during the late 1940s and early 50s.40 In a neat rhetorical move he
attempted to exemplify this in his paper on ‘The Film in British Colonial Development’
by concluding with two extended quotations ‘in the dark voice of [African-American
writer] Richard Wright, and not in my own white one’.41 In the early 1930s Grierson
had been equally insistent that white British ‘workmen on the job’ should ‘do their
own commentary’ in documentary films, ‘with idiom and accent complete’, although
this proved difficult to achieve in practice.42 The Boy Kumasenu and Progress at
Kojokrom featured voiceover commentaries by white English speakers, but there is
evidence that the amount of commentary was reduced during the latter’s production.43
GCFU films were, to a certain extent, able to incorporate black African voices, and
languages such as Fante and Twi, partly because of their primary orientation towards
Gold Coast/Ghanaian audiences. The most important factor, as far as language is
concerned, is that these films were often exhibited with live commentary in the
African languages with which particular audiences in the Gold Coast/Ghana were
most familiar.
Man of Africa, on the other hand, involved negotiating a different set of
opportunities, constraints and challenges. Group 3, its production company, was
formally established in 1951 through very modest loan funding from the National
Film Finance Corporation (NFFC), with the intention of supporting and co-ordinating
independent film production, and developing new features directors. This formed part
of the postwar Labour government’s larger strategy of moving, partly in response to
financial crisis, towards a more mixed economy within the film industry, and
counterbalancing the dominance of the ‘duopoly’ of Rank and the Associated British
Picture Corporation (ABPC). Grierson was initially an executive producer at Group 3,
but illness and a divergence of views between him and production controller John
Baxter led to a realignment after August 1952.44 Grierson concentrated after that time
on what Sue Harper and Vincent Porter describe as a small number of ‘pet projects’,
such as Man of Africa, and Baxter assumed the new title of managing director.45 Yet
even Grierson’s pet projects were pursued within a context where, as Simon Popple
points out, Group 3 was ‘divorced from other major companies in terms of its
production capabilities’ but remained ‘reliant on established distribution and
exhibition networks’.46
Grierson had nurtured the idea of an African film project for some time. He tried
to involve Richard Wright, writing to him in October 1950: ‘I propose to do a film in

1 94 The Grierson Effect

Africa next year. I want you with me if you can manage.’47 This proposed collaboration
might have produced interesting results. In addition to evading the question of African
independence, which Wright supported, Grierson tended to conflate African-American
and African experiences and identities in ‘The Film in British Colonial Development’.
His paper showed little sensitivity to the complex relationships between the African
diaspora and Africa that Wright explored in his 1954 book on Ghana, Black Power.
Montagu Slater, an old colleague of Grierson’s, was eventually employed as Man of
Africa’s scriptwriter. Although a Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) member,
Slater was a safer choice than Wright, who also had Communist affiliations, but little
film experience. Slater had worked on Coal Face, scripted Daybreak in Udi, and recently
garnered critical acclaim for Group 3 with his script for The Brave Don’t Cry (1952).
As far as other members of the production team were concerned, the ideal of
training African technicians that Grierson articulated in ‘The Film in British Colonial
Development’ was not applied to Man of Africa. The crew of film-makers who shot the
documentary in Uganda were predominantly white Britons. The only black Africans
involved on the production side were porters and the interpreter and adviser Seperiera
Mpambara, who received a production assistant credit on the opening titles.48 The
claims made about Man of Africa representing black Africans ‘with warmth from
within’ and enabling them to speak for themselves therefore rested primarily upon its
exclusively black African cast and use of language.49 Not only were no white people
seen or heard in the finished film, director Frankel also deliberately avoided filming
any of the Asian traders who populated the district in which it was set.50
Although Slater’s track record as Daybreak in Udi’s scriptwriter would have helped
him to secure the job, Frankel denied that Man of Africa was in any way modelled upon
this earlier Oscar-winning film.51 Production documents support this claim; Slater’s
script notes initially envisaged a somewhat experimental approach to Man of Africa.
His first draft of the script echoes certain aspects of Soviet film-maker Sergei
Eisenstein’s theorising, which in turn was influenced by the anthropologist Lucien
Lévy-Bruhl. The pertinent Eisenstein concepts were ‘image-sensual thinking’ and
accessing the ‘primitive’ levels of spectators’ psyches. These concepts were by then
available in English translation in the books The Film Sense (1942) and Film Form
(1949). Slater wrote in early March 1952:

There are two special problems, that of native actors and the problem of language. In a sense
both are aspects of one problem. It seems likely that the best solution may turn out to be a
combination of several methods. Sometimes the story will be told in terms of symbol, mime,
action and atmosphere, using native speech often like a sound effect. The native speech will
increase the feeling of strangeness: but almost at once we shall want to reverse this process
and persuade the audience to become identified with the people in the story. There will be
scenes in which we hear both English and native speech, sometimes by the use of an
interpreter: sometimes we shall simply dub in English (but not very often): and, finally, we
may attempt the novelist’s device of interior monologue, though this last device will have to
be used sparingly, the language reproducing the directness and simplicity of native thinking,
its habit of thinking in images and emotions, always intuitively, not in a logical but an
emotional form. Since this is how English audiences think too, the problems, though difficult,
ought not to be invincible.52

White Fathers Hear Dark Voices? John Grierson and British Colonial Africa at the End of Empire 195
Slater’s comments belong to a long tradition, especially prevalent in the silent era, of
theorising cinema’s potential to perform what Rachel O. Moore describes as ‘modern
magic’, where linguistic boundaries are transcended and powerful, primal emotions are
experienced by spectators.53 Yet invocations of this ‘modern magic’ frequently involve
representations of or assumptions about ‘primitives’, in this case the ‘natives’ in Man
of Africa, who are considered to exist in closer proximity to it than other social
groups.54
In the world of film practice, rather than theory, African voices became one of the
sticking points that eventually convinced Grierson’s fellow Group 3 executive, Michael
Balcon, that Man of Africa was not a viable commercial proposition. Sound recording
on location in Kigezi proved challenging, but these technical difficulties were
intertwined with and preceded by underlying concerns about the comprehensibility of
African voices for British audiences.55 Even during the script-development phase, one
undated memorandum noted that the production team

welcome and accept the warning of depending too much on dialogue and the danger of
indistinct African voices. We aim in the shooting script to … [use] dialogue only when
necessary … the suggestion of some limited form of narration is at the front of our minds
and will be used if necessary.56

A further undated memorandum conceded that ‘recorded African voices are terribly
difficult to understand’.57 On 1 September 1953, after a screening of the first colour
print of the film, Frankel noted that Balcon ‘found the dialogue of the African voices
lacking in rhythm. He felt … that we should possibly have an English voice as a
narrator.’58 This comment suggests that at this stage of the production process African
voices featured more prominently, albeit speaking dialogue scripted by British film-
makers, and within the context of performances directed by Frankel (with Mpambara’s
assistance). This earlier version might well have been an intriguing historical precursor
to later films produced by African film-makers after independence, marked by
distinctive modes of orality.59
The compromise arrived at in Man of Africa involved the African-American actor
Gordon Heath voicing some of the African characters’ dialogue, as well as interior
monologues and commentary on the narrative action. In some respects this was a
canny solution; it faintly echoed Slater’s initial thoughts about the use of language in
Man of Africa, and it kept the film ‘all-negro’. Heath’s voice would have been familiar to
some British audiences from his work in British theatre and television, including his
lead role in Kenneth Tynan’s touring production of Othello in 1950, and the BBC
television broadcast of the play Deep Are the Roots (tx. 7 May 1950). The recourse to
Heath parallels Grierson’s use of Richard Wright quotations in his paper on ‘The Film
in British Colonial Development’. In both cases relatively familiar African-Americans
were mobilised to speak for anonymous Africans. Yet Heath’s casting was contrary to
the intention expressed in one of the Man of Africa production memoranda, which said
that the film would differ from those ‘where Africans … required for leading roles …
have usually been introduced from abroad’.60 This trend in British feature production
can be traced as far back as the 1930s films set in Africa starring Paul Robeson. It
continued in two British films produced around the same time as Man of Africa that

1 96 The Grierson Effect

included reasonably substantial roles for black African characters: Cry, the Beloved
Country (1951) and The Heart of the Matter (1953). The former provided an early role
for Sidney Poitier as a South African priest. The latter, set in Sierra Leone, featured the
Bermudan actor Earl Cameron.61

DEVElopmEnt

In addition to the emphasis upon building up a ‘genuine’ African unit, and the related
conviction that it was ‘time for the African to speak for himself’, the other key
concept in Grierson’s paper ‘The Film in British Colonial Development’ was
development itself. This term of course had wider ramifications beyond cinema.
Frederick Cooper has argued that in British government circles at that time
‘development’ referred simultaneously to ‘increased output and to increased welfare’,
and thus was a term that could serve ‘multiple political purposes’.62 The key words
‘development’, ‘develop’ and ‘developing’ featured prominently in Grierson’s 1948
paper, in which he described Africa as representing ‘an economic potential which is
enormous’ as well as a location where the ‘social progress’ achieved over the last
twenty-five years in Britain had to be extended.63 Yet although the dual objectives of
increased economic output and increased welfare for ‘natives’ could be acknowledged
in intellectual exchanges, such as those which took place at the Colonial Office/BFI
conference in January 1948, it was tempting to emphasise the latter rather than the
former when representing colonial development to wider audiences. For example
Ernest Bevin, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, stated a few months before Grierson
delivered his paper

we must be careful that our plans for the development of our Colonial Dependencies cannot
in any way be represented as springing solely from our selfish interests. It is above all
important that in their presentation there is no possible suggestion of exploitation of the
colonial populations.64

This stance resonated in Man of Africa. Grierson noted in his feedback on an

early version of the script that the motivation for the resettlement scheme needed
to be made clear. Various options for achieving greater clarity were explored as the
script was developed.65 Yet even in those versions of the script where the colonial
administration’s initiation of the scheme was acknowledged, there was never any
suggestion that increased economic productivity resulting from the resettlement of
the Bakiga people might also be of benefit to the British authorities. All the options
considered posited the British colonial authorities as unseen, benign, selfless agents of
the state, in accordance with Grierson’s philosophical view of the (colonial) state as an
essentially neutral entity.66
The opening sequence in the extant version of the film briefly signals the official
context before moving into the narrative proper. A written title dedicates the film ‘to
the imaginative colonial servants who organised the original Kigezi trek, gave us the
freedom of Uganda and encouraged the making of a picture which does not even
mention them’. In the opening shots, an African character reads from a newspaper

White Fathers Hear Dark Voices? John Grierson and British Colonial Africa at the End of Empire 197
about the ‘local’ government’s preparation for the scheme. After this brief diegetic
reference to colonial governance, subsumed again under the term ‘local’, the personal
narrative focusing exclusively on African characters begins. Two objectives are
achieved here. As Tom Rice has argued, the opening dedication ‘contextualises the
film’s action within a rhetoric of colonial development’.67 In addition, as Grierson
explained in a short promotional piece on Man of Africa, the Colonial Office
supported the project, so some acknowledgment of British officials’ role in Uganda
was necessary.68 Dedications, as Gérard Genette points out, implicate a ‘person or a
thing as a kind of ideal inspirer’, which in this case is British colonial authority.69 The
import of this was evident to the American film historian Richard Griffith, who
described Man of Africa, non-pejoratively, as ‘an apology for British colonial
administration’.70 Yet limiting the explicit reference to colonial governance to the
opening title enabled Grierson to claim Man of Africa as ‘the first ambitious, dramatic
all-negro film’.
In fact, the resettlement programme in Kigezi was a rather unusual case. Unlike
some other resettlement schemes pursued elsewhere in British colonial Africa, the
one in Kigezi, for which John Purseglove, district agricultural officer, was officially
responsible, could be judged a success. It is therefore unsurprising that the Colonial
Office was willing to support a film about it. The Kigezi programme became a
showpiece development project because, in this instance, there was little resistance
from the Africans involved and it met the objectives defined by the British colonial
authorities. A significant factor was that the resettlement scheme closely followed
existing migratory patterns within the region.71 This particular scheme in Kigezi
therefore provided ideal material for a film intended to foreground African characters
and experiences while nevertheless dovetailing with colonial economic imperatives.
Changes to the film’s title, however, obscured this particularity and implied the film
had a paradigmatic status it was problematic to claim.
Ian Aitken has demonstrated that Grierson’s epistemology assumed that ‘the
abstract and the general (the real) was of greater significance than the empirical
and particular (the phenomenal), but … the empirical and particular constituted
the best means of comphrehending the abstract and general’.72 This striving for the
general over the particular can be discerned in deliberations about what to call the
film. By May 1953 Grierson was considering abandoning the working title, The
Kigezi Story, in favour of The African, because in his view ‘it’s maybe the first time
anyone ever really saw an African’.73 By July 1953 James Lawrie and Balcon at
Group 3 were informing Grierson that Kigezi should not feature in the title because
‘no one ever recommends anyone to go and see a picture if he isn’t sure how to
pronounce the title’.74 Grierson apparently suggested Jonathan the African and Song
of Africa as alternatives. Frankel says he eventually settled on Man of Africa in the
hope of achieving the ‘direct communication’ with British and American audiences
The Kigezi Story might preclude.75 The film’s title, initially promising a regionally
specific narrative, was aggrandised to a more generalised one. To call a film
Man of Africa implies that its representation of social progress and development,
ostensibly led by Africans yet discreetly credited to colonial officials, is applicable to
Africa as a whole.

1 98 The Grierson Effect

‘norA’, trAVEloGuEs AnD tElEVision

A final, instructive contrast can be made between The Boy Kumasenu, and Man of
Africa. The former deals with journeys and connections between the country and the
city, and between Ghana and the African diaspora, in a relatively complex manner.
Kumasenu (Nortey Engmann) follows his cousin Agboh (Frank Tamakloe) from a small
fishing village to the capital, Accra, with the help of his uncle, who gets him a job
working for a friend who runs a store just outside the city. The sequence detailing
Kumasenu’s work in the story includes a telling detail that may have resonated more
with the Ghanaians involved in the production of The Boy Kumasenu, and with
Ghanaian audiences, than with the white members of the GCFU. A lorry driver, who
the commentator describes as speaking a ‘blend of many languages’, asks to hear the
famed Trinidadian calypsonian Lord Kitchener’s song ‘Nora’ (1950). This was a major
hit of the time in West Africa and Ghana.76 African experience and cultural traffic
therefore extends across the country and the city in this film, as well as beyond
national boundaries, rather than being reductively fixed in place. Within The Boy
Kumasenu’s overarching narrative of confronting juvenile delinquency, the pleasures
and dangers of modern African city life, including alcohol, the lure of crime, casual
sexual relationships, popular music and dance, are represented or alluded to. All of
these factors would most likely have contributed to the film’s popularity in the Gold
Coast/Ghana, with 40,000 people reportedly seeing it in the first three weeks of its
release.77
In Man of Africa Grierson and his collaborators aspired to produce a film in which
the typical African was not represented as a stereotypical ‘tribesman with a weird way
of life’.78 Grierson reiterated this point in the early 1960s, challenging viewers’
assumptions by stating that after their migration ‘the Bakiga didn’t really know how to
live on this new land on the Congo. Strange as you might think, they didn’t even know
a thing about wild animals because they had never seen them.’79 Nevertheless, Man of
Africa followed a well-established tradition in British films about Africa by unfolding
within a predominantly rural setting populated by spectacular wildlife. In British
cinema of the 1950s, as Wendy Webster puts it, ‘urban African settings were thin on
the ground’.80 Where No Vultures Fly, the most commercially successful British film set
in Africa prior to Man of Africa, was shot in Technicolor. It combined a white liberal
protagonist in the Daybreak in Udi mould with the travelogue pleasures of an African
game-park setting. The liberality of the white colonial protagonist was a relatively new,
emergent phenomenon within British film-making; colour cinematography of African
wildlife and landscapes was not. Man of Africa went beyond this emergent trend in its
‘all-negro’ casting. As Frankel later put it, films such as Where No Vultures Fly ‘were not
about Africans, but featured British actors with Africans in the background’.81 Yet Man
of Africa did not break with precedent as far as visual pleasures were concerned.
Frankel said its exotic African rural setting was one reason for shooting the film in
Ferraniacolor, a cheaper, more mobile colour technology than Technicolor, but still
more expensive than the black-and-white cinematography employed in the majority
of low-budget Group 3 productions.82
Man of Africa’s spectacular aspects were further accentuated when, even after
Balcon’s concerns about African voices had been addressed, it failed to achieve

White Fathers Hear Dark Voices? John Grierson and British Colonial Africa at the End of Empire 199
distribution. Balcon persisted in his view that the film was not suitable for general
release. Frankel believed that as a result of this Man of Africa was deliberately sidelined
during the transition between Associated British Film Distributors (ABFD) and British
Lion as Group 3’s distributors.83 The only version of Man of Africa to eventually secure
commercial distribution in British cinemas in the 1950s was a drastically shortened
one, marketed as a travelogue. The trade journal To-Day’s Cinema approved this
version’s ‘handy length’ as a supporting item, and its wildlife sequences involving ‘a
raiding herd of elephants, and the depredations of baboons’, captured by ‘visually
impressive colour photography’.84 The Monthly Film Bulletin concluded that in its
reduced state ‘any assessment of the film’s original intentions’ became ‘difficult’.85
Grierson, Frankel and Slater insisted their names be taken off this version. For the film
historian, this outcome serves as a rather brutal reminder of two things. The first is
the pressure to conform often exerted upon film projects seen during production as
departing too radically, even if only in certain respects, from established or emergent
norms. The second is that the boundary between films of empire associated with the
British documentary movement, and the travelogue, described by Grierson as one of
the ‘lower categories’ of nonfiction film, was not always clear cut.86
Grierson was able to contextualise Man of Africa on his own terms when he
screened an extract on his television series This Wonderful World (episode 141, tx. 26
January 1961). His epistemology of moving from the empirical and particular through
to the abstract and general to comprehend an idealist notion of ‘the real’ can be seen at
work here. To invest the extract with topicality, while at the same time divesting it of
specificity, Grierson referred to the ‘news from the Congo’, and the fact that Man of
Africa was shot ‘on the borders of all the present agonies and tribulations’. Grierson
continued, more abstractly: ‘In a way we foresaw them. We wanted to make a film
about the racial and human differences in Africa – but not just between black and
white.’87 The extract showcased what he had previously praised as ‘the most poignant
moment in the film, when a negro baby is dying and a little pygmy foster-mother is
brought in to save its life’.88 For Grierson this recognition of a common bond of
humanity between the Bakiga people and the Batwa pygmies epitomised the
transcendence of ‘the old trible [sic] prejudices and vanities’ which threatened to ‘cut
across all the high hopes for the future’.89
Colonialism’s continued presence or legacy in African societies was pushed to
the margins of Grierson’s remarks, just faintly audible in the passing reference to
differences ‘between black and white’. This parallels the way that colonial authority
is virtually invisible within Man of Africa, despite its role as a primary instigator of
narrative events. Grierson’s ‘high hopes’ for the African future were a humane
alternative to much media coverage of the Congo crisis at that time, which represented
a chaotic situation in which African atavism and tribal discord threatened European
lives and interests. Yet it is also instructive to compare Grierson’s comments with the
now famous inaugural speech made by the first Congolese prime minister, Patrice
Lumumba, six months earlier. Lumumba articulated a powerful alternative narrative
of Congolese identity and high hopes for the future whose circulation was initially
restricted, or adversely interpreted, in North American and Western European
contexts.90 Lumumba, like Grierson, urged his compatriots to forget ‘hazardous tribal
quarrels’, but most centrally he envisaged a dynamic new national identity forged out

2 00 The Grierson Effect

of a shared experience of resistance to colonialism: ‘no Congolese worthy of the name
will ever forget that independence has been won in struggle’.91 This was one ‘dark
voice’ Grierson seems not to have heard.

ACknoWlEDGmEnts

I am grateful to Patrick Russell at the BFI for helping me to access both Man of Africa
and its director, and to Cyril Frankel for kindly agreeing to be interviewed. Karl Magee,
curator of the John Grierson papers at the University of Stirling, and Nathalie Morris,
at BFI Special Collections, provided access to archival material. Emma Sandon, Peter
Bloom, Kate Skinner and Tom Rice generously shared their unpublished interview
material. Emma Sandon also kindly offered helpful feedback on an earlier draft of this
essay. Jo Fox furnished valuable information about This Wonderful World.

notEs

1. Raymond Williams, ‘A Lecture on Realism’, Screen vol. 18 no. 1 (Spring 1977).

2. Ian Aitken, Film and Reform: John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement (London:
Routledge, 1990).
3. This film is available to view at colonialfilm.org.uk.
4. John Grierson, ‘Progress and Prospect [1949]’, in Forsyth Hardy (ed.), Grierson on
Documentary (London: Faber and Faber, 1979), p. 199.
5. John Grierson, ‘Making Man of Africa’, Films and Filming vol. 1 no. 2 (October 1954), p. 14.
6. The BFI National Archive holds a viewing copy of Man of Africa.
7. Forsyth Hardy, John Grierson: A Documentary Biography (London: Faber and Faber, 1979) does
not mention the paper or conference at all. Jack Ellis, John Grierson: Life, Contributions,
Influence (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), briefly
refers to it (p. 236). For further discussion of the British documentary movement,
imperialism, internationalism, nationalism and transnationalism, see Martin Stollery,
Alternative Empires: European Modernist Cinemas and Cultures of Imperialism (Exeter and
Chicago, IL: Exeter University Press, 2000); Martin Stollery, ‘From Storm over Asia to Dawn
over Africa: Transnationalism and Imperialism in British Intellectual Film Culture of the Late
1920s and 1930s’, Transnational Cinemas vol. 2 no. 1 (2011); Martin Stollery, ‘The Last Roll of
the Dice: Morning, Noon and Night, Empire and the Historiography of the Crown Film Unit’, in
Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe (eds), Film and the End of Empire (London: BFI, 2011).
8. Jo Fox, ‘John Grierson, His “Documentary Boys” and the British Ministry of Information,
1939–1942’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television vol. 25 no. 3 (2005), p. 363.
9. Andrew Higson, ‘Review of Ian Aitken, Film and Reform and Paul Swann, The British
Documentary Film Movement, 1926–1946’, Screen vol. 32 no. 3 (Autumn 1991).
10. Stollery, Alternative Empires, pp. 147–8, 154–7, 178–80.
11. See Phillip W. Jones with David Coleman, The United Nations and Education (London:
Routledge, 2005), p. 30.
12. Emma Sandon, Tom Rice and Peter Bloom, ‘Changing the World: Sean Graham’, Journal of
British Cinema and Television vol. 10 no. 3 (2013), p. 526.

White Fathers Hear Dark Voices? John Grierson and British Colonial Africa at the End of Empire 201
13. This film is available to view online at colonialfilm.org.uk.
14. Sue Harper and Vincent Porter, British Cinema of the 1950s: The Decline of Deference (London
and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 266.
15. Anon, ‘Feature Film from the Gold Coast’, The Times, 3 January 1952, p. 8; Grierson,
‘Making Man of Africa’, p. 14.
16. John Grierson, ‘The Film in British Colonial Development’, Sight and Sound vol. 17 no. 65
(Spring 1948), p. 4.
17. Ibid., pp. 3–4.
18. See Rosaleen Smyth, ‘The Post-war Career of the Colonial Film Unit in Africa; 1946–1955’,
Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television vol. 12 no. 2 (1992); Tom Rice, ‘From the
Inside: The Colonial Film Unit and the Beginning of the End’, in Grieveson and MacCabe,
Film and the End of Empire.
19. K. W. Blackburne, ‘Financial Problems and Future Policy in British Colonies’, The Film in
Colonial Development: A Report of a Conference (London, 1948), p. 35.
20. Rice, ‘From the Inside’, p. 145.
21. A. R. Baëta, ‘The Two Worlds’, Sight and Sound vol. 17 no. 65 (Spring 1948), p. 6. Rice, ‘From
the Inside’, correctly points out of the conference that there were ‘no “colonials” among its
seven invited speakers’ (p. 145). However, Baëta’s comments were subsequently published
in Sight and Sound, whereas some of the invited speakers’ papers were not.
22. Baëta, ‘The Two Worlds’, p. 7.
23. Grierson, ‘The Film in British Colonial Development’, p. 4.
24. Manthia Diawara, African Cinema: Politics and Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1992), p. 6.
25. Rice, ‘From the Inside’, p. 147.
26. This film is available to view online at colonialfilm.org.uk.
27. Peter Bloom and Kate Skinner, ‘Modernity and Danger: The Boy Kumasenu and the Work of
the Gold Coast Film Unit’, Ghana Studies no. 12 (2009), p. 2.
28. Ibid., p. 17.
29. George Noble, ‘Cameraman on the Gold Coast’, Colonial Cinema vol. 10 no. 2 (1952), quoted in
Jennifer Blaylock, African Agency in the Gold Coast Film Unit, posted 27 October 2010, https://
cinemaintransit.wordpress.com/2010/10/27/african-agency-in-the-gold-coast-film-unit/.
30. See Jean Allman, ‘“Let Your Fashion Be in Line with Our Ghanaian Costume”: Nation,
Gender, and the Politics of Clothing in Nkrumah’s Ghana’, in Jean Allman (ed.), Fashioning
Africa: Power and the Politics of Dress (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004).
31. Chris Hesse, ‘Personal Interview with Chris Hesse’, conducted by Kate Skinner, Accra,
23 June 2010.
32. Sean Graham, A Surfeit of Sun [1964] (London: Panther, 1967), pp. 51–2.
33. Sandon et al., ‘Changing the World’, p. 532.
34. Brian Larkin, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2008), pp. 102–3, 119–20.
35. Jennifer Blaylock, ‘An Interview with a Former Cinema Van Commentator’, posted 26
January 2011, https://cinemaintransit.wordpress.com/2011/01/26/an-interview-with-a-
former-cinema-van-commentator/. See also the GCFU titles listed in Catalogue of Films:
Ghana Central Film Library 1971–72 (Accra, n.d), http://archive.org/details/
CatalogueOfFilmsGhanaCentralFilmLibrary1971-72. Progress in Kojokrom and Mr Mensah
Builds a House are available to view at colonialfilm.org.uk.

2 02 The Grierson Effect

36. Rice, ‘From the Inside’, emphasises the potential for commentators to move ‘away from the
script and from the official line’ (p. 149).
37. Grierson, ‘The Film in British Colonial Development’, p. 3.
38. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge,
1992), p. 7.
39. Tom Rice, The Boy Kumasenu, May 2008, http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/node/332.
40. Grierson, ‘Making Man of Africa’, p. 14.
41. Grierson, ‘The Film in British Colonial Development’, p. 4.
42. John Grierson, ‘The GPO Gets Sound’, Cinema Quarterly vol. 2 (1934), p. 216; Martin
Stollery, ‘Voiceover/Commentary’, in Scott Anthony and James Mansell (eds), The Projection
of Britain: A History of the GPO Film Unit (London: BFI, 2011), pp. 171–2.
43. See Tom Rice, Progress at Kojokrom, April 2008, http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/node/
2566.
44. Richard Dyer MacCann, ‘Subsidy for the Screen: Grierson and Group 3/1951–1955’, Sight
and Sound vol. 46 no. 3 (1977), p. 168.
45. Harper and Porter, British Cinema of the 1950s, p. 188.
46. Simon Popple, ‘Group 3: A Lesson in State Intervention’, Film History vol. 8 no. 2 (1996),
p. 138.
47. John Grierson, ‘Letter to Richard Wright’, 2 October 1950, quoted in Hazel Rowley, Richard
Wright: The Life and Times (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2008), p. 579.
48. Cyril Frankel, ‘Personal Interview with Cyril Frankel’, conducted by Martin Stollery, London,
16 August 2008.
49. Anon, ‘Memorandum 1: Attitude to the African in The Kigezi Story’, John Grierson Papers,
Special Collections, University of Stirling (hereafter GP), G6:21:6, undated.
50. Ibid.
51. Frankel, ‘Personal Interview with Cyril Frankel’.
52. Montagu Slater, This Way to the New Country/The Kigezi Story (script) 2/5 March 1952,
BFI Special Collections.
53. Rachel O. Moore, Savage Theory: Cinema as Modern Magic (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2000).
54. Even Grierson’s paper at the January 1948 conference, replete as it was with reference to
colonial development, was initially entitled ‘The Film and Primitive Peoples’.
55. For the technical difficulties involved, see Isobel Pargiter, ‘Letter to John Baxter’,
GP G6:21:5, 27 November 1952.
56. Anon, ‘Memorandum 2: The Use of the Flashback Technique in The Kigezi Story’,
GP G6:21:7, undated.
57. Anon, ‘Untitled document relating to Man of Africa’, GP G6:21:8, undated.
58. Cyril Frankel to John Baxter, GP G6:36:227, 1 September 1953.
59. The pioneering text in these debates is Manthia Diawara, ‘Oral Literature and African Film:
Narratology in Wend Kuuni’, in Jim Pines and Paul Willemen (eds), Questions of Third Cinema
(London: BFI, 1989).
60. Anon, ‘Memorandum 1’, GP G6:21:6.
61. For a discussion of Cameron’s casting in this film, see Martin Stollery, ‘ “Scarred by a
Cheated Ending”/“Not Suitable for Audiences in This Colony”: The Film Adaptation of
Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter in Metropolitan and Colonial Contexts’,
Literature/Film Quarterly vol. 40 no. 3 (July 2012).

White Fathers Hear Dark Voices? John Grierson and British Colonial Africa at the End of Empire 203
62. Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British
Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 205, 206.
63. Grierson, ‘The Film in British Colonial Development’, p. 3.
64. Ernest Bevin, ‘4 October 1947 Memorandum’, quoted in Cooper, Decolonization and African
Society, p. 205.
65. Slater, This Way to the New Country, revisions following discussion of 16 December 1952,
19 December 1952; Anon, Untitled document relating to Man of Africa, GP G6:21:8.
66. Aitken, Film and Reform.
67. Tom Rice, Man of Africa, October 2009, http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/node/237.
68. Grierson, ‘Making Man of Africa’, p. 14.
69. Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997), p. 136.
70. Richard Griffith, ‘Letter to John Grierson’, GP G6:21:14, undated.
71. See Grace Carswell, Cultivating Success in Uganda: Kigezi Farmers and Colonial Policies (Oxford:
James Currey, 2007).
72. Aitken, Film and Reform, p. 7.
73. John Grierson, ‘Letter to Charles Crandall’, GP G6:36:33, 20 May 1953.
74. James Lawrie, ‘Letter to to John Grierson’, GP G6:36:160, 21 July 1953.
75. Frankel, ‘Personal Interview with Cyril Frankel’.
76. Simon Featherstone, Postcolonial Cultures (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005),
p. 53. Despite the lorry driver’s request, ‘Nora’ is not actually played in The Boy Kumasenu,
presumably due to the cost of securing the rights.
77. Henry Swanzy, ‘Quarterly Notes’, African Affairs vol. 51 no. 205 (October 1952), p. 279;
Rice, The Boy Kumasenu.
78. Anon, ‘Memorandum 1’.
79. This Wonderful World script, GP G8:21:14, (episode 141, tx. 26 January 1961).
80. Wendy Webster, ‘Mumbo-jumbo, Magic and Modernity: Africa in British Cinema, 1946–65’,
in Grieveson and MacCabe, Film and the End of Empire, p. 239.
81. Cyril Frankel, Eye to Eye: A Memoir (London: Bank House Books, 2010), p. 58.
82. Frankel, ‘Personal Interview with Cyril Frankel’.
83. Marjorie Bilbow, ‘End of Exile for Frankel’s Man of Africa’, Screen International, 15 November
1986, p. 21.
84. M.M.W., Man of Africa, To-Day’s Cinema vol. 85 no. 7404 (25 November 1955), p. 6.
85. John Grierson, ‘Man of Africa’, Monthly Film Bulletin vol. 23 no. 264 (January 1956), p. 3.
86. John Grierson, ‘First Principles of Documentary [1932]’, in Hardy, Grierson on Documentary,
p. 35.
87. This Wonderful World script.
88. Grierson, ‘Making Man of Africa’, p. 14.
89. This Wonderful World script.
90. Kevin C. Dunn, Imagining the Congo: The International Relations of Identity (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 102.
91. Patrice Lumumba, Speech at the Proclamation of Congolese Independence, 30th June
1960’, in Alan P. Merriam (ed.), Congo, Background of Conflict (Chicago, IL: Northwestern
University Press, 1961), pp. 354, 352.

2 04 The Grierson Effect

rEFErEnCEs

Aitken, Ian, Film and Reform: John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement (London:
Routledge, 1990).
Allman, Jean, ‘ “Let Your Fashion Be in Line with Our Ghanaian Costume”: Nation, Gender, and
the Politics of Clothing in Nkrumah’s Ghana’, in Jean Allman (ed.), Fashioning Africa: Power
and the Politics of Dress (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004).
Anon, ‘Memorandum 1: Attitude to the African in The Kigezi Story’, John Grierson Papers,
Special Collections, University of Stirling (hereafter GP), G6:21:6, undated.
Anon, ‘Memorandum 2: The Use of the Flashback Technique in The Kigezi Story’, GP G6:21:7,
undated.
Anon, Untitled document relating to Man of Africa, GP G6:21:8, undated.
Anon, ‘Feature Film from the Gold Coast’, The Times, 3 January 1952.
Baëta, A. R., ‘The Two Worlds’, Sight and Sound vol. 17 no. 65 (Spring 1948), pp. 5–7.
Bilbow, Marjorie, ‘End of Exile for Frankel’s Man of Africa’, Screen International, 15 November
1986, p. 21.
Blackburne, K. W., ‘Financial Problems and Future Policy in British Colonies’, The Film in Colonial
Development: A Report of a Conference (London, 1948), pp. 33–7.
Blaylock, Jennifer, ‘An Interview with a Former Cinema Van Commentator’, posted 26 January
2011, https://cinemaintransit.wordpress.com/2011/01/26/an-interview-with-a-former-
cinema-van-commentator/.
Bloom, Peter and Kate Skinner, ‘Modernity and Danger: The Boy Kumasenu and the Work of the
Gold Coast Film Unit’, Ghana Studies no. 12 (2009), pp. 121–53.
Carswell, Grace, Cultivating Success in Uganda: Kigezi Farmers and Colonial Policies (Oxford: James
Currey, 2007).
Catalogue of Films: Ghana Central Film Library 1971–72 (Accra, n.d), http://archive.org/details/
CatalogueOfFilmsGhanaCentralFilmLibrary1971-72.
Cooper, Frederick, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British
Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
Diawara, Manthia, African Cinema: Politics and Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1992).
Diawara, Manthia, ‘Oral Literature and African Film: Narratology in Wend Kuuni’,
in Jim Pines and Paul Willemen (eds), Questions of Third Cinema (London: BFI, 1989),
pp. 199–211.
Dunn, Kevin C., Imagining the Congo: The International Relations of Identity (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2003).
Ellis, Jack C., John Grierson: Life, Contributions, Influence (Carbondale and Edwardsville:
Southern Illinois University Press, 2000).
Featherstone, Simon, Postcolonial Cultures (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005).
Fox, Jo, ‘John Grierson, His “Documentary Boys” and the British Ministry of Information,
1939–1942’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television vol. 25 no. 3 (2005), pp. 345–6.
Frankel, Cyril, ‘Personal Interview with Cyril Frankel’, conducted by Martin Stollery, London,
16 August 2008.
Frankel, Cyril, Eye to Eye: A Memoir (London: Bank House Books, 2010).
Genette, Gérard, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997).

White Fathers Hear Dark Voices? John Grierson and British Colonial Africa at the End of Empire 205
Graham, Sean, A Surfeit of Sun [1964] (London: Panther, 1967).
Grierson, John, ‘First Principles of Documentary [1932]’, in Forsyth Hardy (ed.), Grierson on
Documentary (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), pp. 39–42.
Grierson, John, ‘The GPO Gets Sound’, Cinema Quarterly vol. 2 (1934), p. 216.
Grierson, John, ‘The Film in British Colonial Development’, Sight and Sound vol. 17 no. 65
(Spring 1948), pp. 2–4.
Grierson, John, ‘Progress and Prospect’ [1949], in Forsyth Hardy (ed.), Grierson on Documentary
(London: Faber and Faber, 1966), pp. 349–57.
Grierson, John, ‘Letter to Charles Crandall’, 20 May 1953, GP G6: 36:33.
Grierson, John, ‘Making Man of Africa’, Films and Filming vol. 1 no. 2 (October 1954), p. 14.
Grierson, John, ‘Man of Africa’, Monthly Film Bulletin vol. 23 no. 264 (January 1956), p. 3.
Griffith, Richard, ‘Letter to John Grierson’, GP G6:21:14, undated.
Hardy, Forsyth, John Grierson: A Documentary Biography (London: Faber and Faber, 1979).
Harper, Sue and Vincent Porter, British Cinema of the 1950s: The Decline of Deference (London and
New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
Hesse, Chris, ‘Personal Interview with Chris Hesse’, conducted by Kate Skinner, Accra, 23 June
2010.
Higson, Andrew, ‘Review of Ian Aitken, Film and Reform and Paul Swann, The British
Documentary Film Movement, 1926–1946’, Screen vol. 32 no. 3 (Autumn 1991), pp. 350–6.
Jones, Phillip W. with David Coleman, The United Nations and Education (London: Routledge,
2005).
Larkin, Brian, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2008).
Lawrie, James, ‘Letter to John Grierson’, GP G6:36:160, 21 July 1953.
Lumumba, Patrice, ‘Speech at the Proclamation of Congolese Independence, 30th June 1960’, in
Alan P. Merriam (ed.), Congo, Background of Conflict (Chicago, IL: Northwestern University
Press, 1961), pp. 352–4.
MacCann, Richard Dyer, ‘Subsidy for the Screen: Grierson and Group 3/1951–1955’, Sight and
Sound vol. 46 no. 3 (1977), pp. 168–73.
M.M.W., ‘Man of Africa’, To-Day’s Cinema vol. 85 no. 7404 (25 November 1955), p. 6.
Moore, Rachel O., Savage Theory: Cinema as Modern Magic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2000).
Noble, George, ‘Cameraman on the Gold Coast’, Colonial Cinema vol. 10 no. 2 (1952), quoted in
Jennifer Blaylock, ‘African Agency in the Gold Coast Film Unit’, posted 27 October 2010,
https://cinemaintransit.wordpress.com/2010/10/27/african-agency-in-the-gold-coast-film-
unit/.
Pargiter, Isobel, ‘Letter to John Baxter’, GP G6:21:5, 27 November 1952.
Popple, Simon, ‘Group 3: A Lesson in State Intervention’, Film History vol. 8 no. 2 (1996),
pp. 131–42.
Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992).
Rice, Tom, Progress at Kojokrom, April 2008, http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/node/2566.
Rice, Tom, The Boy Kumasenu, May 2008, http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/node/332.
Rice, Tom, ‘From the Inside: The Colonial Film Unit and the Beginning of the End’, in Lee
Grieveson and Colin MacCabe (eds), Film and the End of Empire (London: BFI, 2011),
pp. 135–53.
Rice, Tom, Man of Africa, October 2009, http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/node/237.

2 06 The Grierson Effect

Rowley, Hazel, Richard Wright: The Life and Times (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,
2008).
Sandon, Emma, Tom Rice and Peter Bloom, ‘Changing the World: Sean Graham’, Journal of
British Cinema and Television vol. 10 no. 3 (2013), pp. 524–36.
Slater, Montagu, This Way to the New Country/The Kigezi Story (script) 2/5 March 1952
(BFI Special Collections).
Smyth, Rosaleen, ‘The Post-war Career of the Colonial Film Unit in Africa; 1946–1955’,
Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television vol. 12 no. 2 (1992), pp. 163–77.
Stollery, Martin, Alternative Empires: European Modernist Cinemas and Cultures of Imperialism
(Exeter and Chicago, IL: Exeter University Press, 2000).
Stollery, Martin, ‘From Storm over Asia to Dawn over Africa: Transnationalism and Imperialism in
British Intellectual Film Culture of the Late 1920s and 1930s’, Transnational Cinemas vol. 2
no. 1 (2011), pp. 93–111.
Stollery, Martin, ‘Voiceover/Commentary’, in Scott Anthony and James Mansell (eds),
The Projection of Britain: A History of the GPO Film Unit (London: BFI, 2011), pp. 168–78.
Stollery, Martin, ‘The Last Roll of the Dice: Morning, Noon and Night, Empire and the
Historiography of the Crown Film Unit’, in Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe (eds), Film and
the End of Empire (London: BFI, 2011), pp. 35–54.
Stollery, Martin, ‘ “Scarred by a Cheated Ending”/“Not Suitable for Audiences in This Colony”:
The Film Adaptation of Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter in Metropolitan and
Colonial Contexts’, Literature/Film Quarterly vol. 40 no. 3 (July 2012), pp. 216–32.
Swanzy, Henry, ‘Quarterly Notes’, African Affairs vol. 51 no. 205 (October 1952), pp. 267–305.
This Wonderful World script (episode 141, tx. 26 January 1961), GP G8:21:14.
Webster, Wendy, ‘Mumbo-jumbo, Magic and Modernity: Africa in British Cinema, 1946–65’,
in Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe (eds), Film and the End of Empire (London: BFI, 2011),
pp. 237–50.
Williams, Raymond, ‘A Lecture on Realism’, Screen vol. 18 no. 1 (Spring 1977), pp. 61–74.

White Fathers Hear Dark Voices? John Grierson and British Colonial Africa at the End of Empire 207
13
Grierson, Afrikaner Nationalism and South Africa

Keyan G. Tomaselli

South Africa’s greatest immediate concern is the misunderstanding of it on the part of other
nations … no one in his senses will expect, by simple formula, to liquidate the host of
misunderstandings and prejudices which, coming from the depths of 19th Century political
formulae, now surround the considerations of South African problems. Much can, of course,
be done by direct attack; for the major facets of South African development in all the spheres
of technical and sociological achievement have not yet been commandingly presented.1

Though his and the apartheid government’s political philosophies were very different,
Grierson was impressed with the development he observed in South Africa, especially
in comparison to other African territories. Grierson shared with Afrikaners a sense
of historical loss at the hands of the English. In the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC)
he found familiar Calvinist doctrines taught it by the Church of Scotland. Grierson
identified English expatriates as ‘pampered Whites’: these ‘lost and conceited children’
of the empire embodied ‘a sort of decadent evaluation of the imperial idea in which
privilege is accepted without any appropriate sense of leadership and guidance’.
Afrikaners, he admitted, had wrested from them the nettle of political leadership.
Where Afrikaner means ‘of Africa’, Grierson wrote that English speakers’ ‘only basic
bond with Africa is in the escape it offered from British taxation and the cutting down
of their class privileges’.2 Liberalism, he indicated, had little or no role to play in
South Africa. Grierson’s proposal for the establishment of a national film board was
nevertheless predicated upon liberal ideals.
Grierson had arrived in South Africa in the wake of another influential Scotsman,
Lord John Reith. Reith’s3 proposals had formed the basis in 1936 of the South African
Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), modelled on the British Broadcasting Corporation
(BBC). Both men stressed the idea of public-service media. Both however mistakenly
assumed a linguistically, ideologically and culturally homogeneous society; and both
fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the South African political economy.4
Their respective media proposals thus neglected the black majority. However,
Grierson was careful to note that a state film service should, in contrast to radio
as an entertainment medium, be restricted to public observation and information.
Co-operation with the trade, cinemas, was his suggestion.5
South Africa was divided by language – English and Afrikaans, spoken by the white
and coloured descendants of the original Dutch, British and European colonisers.
The National Party (NP) government understood ‘culture’ to be race-, language- and

Grierson, Afrikaner Nationalism and South Africa 209

 Lord John Reith

location-specific, and was the prime mechanism used by the NP to legitimise

apartheid. Afrikaner cultural organisations and the DRC argued that film offered a
key channel for the shaping of social and racial relations. The historical connections
between the state and capital, cultural production and ideology, thus should have
provided Grierson the terrain for an analysis of cultural protectionism. The
deliberations of this discursive field were available in two reports, both issued
well before Grierson’s (1954) report.

INItIAl DelIberAtIoNS

The Cilliers Film Committee (1943), aimed to stimulate the growth of a specifically
white Afrikaans cinema, by requiring exhibitors to screen Afrikaans-language shorts
at every performance (Cilliers Film Committee, 1943). English-speakers demonised
Cilliers as ‘a lifelong nationalist’ educated in Germany.6 A growing Afrikaner
nationalism found resonance in statements like ‘rich national life’, ‘spread of national
Culture’, ‘spiritual content’, bilingualism, ‘cultural protection’ and so on. Cultural and
amateur film-making organisations aimed to appropriate the English-dominated
economy and transform it into a volkskapitalisme (an [Afrikaner] capitalism).
The Cilliers report was not enacted, but it did legitimise Afrikaner cultural
affirmations. Individuals, argued the committee, formed the ‘foundation’ of culture,
while the emergence and maintenance of ‘a high standard of culture’ is conditional
upon ‘the supplementation and augmentation of individual effort by the organised
and organising power of the whole – … the state’. The state, in turn, is responsible
for ‘cultural functions’ that are ‘beyond the powers of private initiative, whether
individual or collective’. In other words, the state was directed to manage the social
organisation of discourse.
Grierson envisaged a ‘vivid machinery’, a strong central direction of the state, in
administering co-ordination and production. State control was not his intention.
Public debate, for him, was the prime condition for democracy.7 Cilliers argued that
cinema offers a ‘healing and formative influence’ to mediating cultural and language
barriers that divided English- and Afrikaans-speakers. While aware that the private
industry would resist state attempts at intervention, the committee hoped that

2 10 The Grierson Effect

capitalist common sense would persuade the industry – totally owned by English
South African capital – ‘to agree in the national interest’.
Cilliers recommended the establishment of a national film board to produce
documentaries aimed ‘at presenting essential industries, ways of living and
environment of normal people in such a way that the appeal is no less dramatic than
that of the fiction film, in which life is often reconstructed in an exaggerated way’.8
The board was to provide an ideological portrayal of life in terms of the reciprocal
relationship between ‘national culture’ and the economy, since white documentary
film-makers were seen as ‘trustees of the native and other non-European races’, who
needed ‘to make the public aware of the world it lives in, to show up the romance and
dramatic quality of reality, and thus make the real experience of one the imaginary
experience of all’.9
Against the background of the Voortrekker Centenary Celebrations held in 1838,
the Cilliers report was explosive. This was a period when a neo-fascist interpretation
of South African history by a number of films in the 1930s had been made directly or
indirectly with state involvement. It also coincided with the internment by the British-
supporting United Party (UP) government of many Afrikaner Nazi sympathisers
during World War II, some of whom were aspiring film-makers, and some of whom
were politicians with whom Grierson may have interacted during 1949.10
The UP government then appointed the Smith Committee.11 Its proposals
suggested a consolidation of the various government film units into a board concerned
with the ‘production, distribution and exhibition of educational, instructional,
informative and publicity films which were not normally intended for exhibition in
commercial cinemas’. Smith’s recommendations were less sectional than the Cilliers
report and served the needs of the national economy rather than merely the Afrikaner
cultural constituency. The UP government, however, failed to enact Smith’s
recommendations.

the GrIerSoN report

In May 1949, less than a year after the NP had won parliament from the UP, the
cabinet invited Grierson to conduct an enquiry into the scope and adequacy of the
state’s film services. A National Film Advisory Committee framed the terms of
reference. Grierson was to report to the state information officer.12 Grierson met
editors, film executives, officials of state-owned enterprises and private companies,
captains of industry, members of the Natal Indian Congress and both black and white
academics.
Grierson aimed to open up ‘the screen on the real world’ where ‘Documentary
would photograph the living scene and the living story.’13 Afrikaans-speaking film-
makers and cultural theorists had fine-tuned their techniques through a technicist
reading of Eisenstein’s theory of film, which they mistakingly assumed was similar to
that of Grierson. KARFO, the Afrikaner Calvinist Film-making Organisation, in
particular, believed cinema had a duty to enable the urban socialisation of hundreds
of thousands of displaced Afrikaners who had migrated to the cities between
1903–40. This migration was caused by the British army wrecking Boer farms in the

Grierson, Afrikaner Nationalism and South Africa 211

Transvaal during the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902). The defeated, known as `poor
whites’, now laboured for the enemy – British imperialism – in unskilled mining jobs
under skilled black supervisors. This humiliation was a defining moment in the
postwar Afrikaner struggle. Apartheid became the mechanism by which Afrikaners
almost half a century later successfully turned the tables on their class, cultural and
language subordination.
Both Grierson and KARFO substituted fantasy for reality. However, neither was
aware that the realities they wished to depict were constituted by very specific
ideological discourses. Grierson’s idea of realism was to provide the individual with
information which s/he could use to more effectively participate in democratic social
processes. This view implies choice, but choice is relative to what the state will allow.
Thus, both KARFO and Grierson wanted to use film. KARFO’s more literal
interpretation, although appearing to offer choice, does not in fact do so. For it,
realism was a simple correspondence between prescription – socialisation of Afrikaner
into a Christian urban society – and the image that Afrikaner nationalism was. In this
regard, the KARFO report to Grierson stated:

The … cinema should adhere to the conditions of real life. If the ‘variety of situations’ which it
depicts digresses from reality to any extent it will become clear that it may be more confusing
than helpful to whoever may look upon the cinema as a source of information through which
he can come to a better understanding of his own environment. The types of problems and
situations dramatized must be more or less the same type of problem and situation for which
modes of conduct and behaviour are sought … otherwise we can only expect the cinema to
add to the confusion and bewilderment which we face in life today.14

KARFO promulgated a strategy of adaptation, while also providing support to those

members of the (white Afrikaner) volk who were succumbing to English cultural
imperialism. KARFO thus aimed to mediate the interests of Afrikaner-dominated
capital as it sought to prepare the depastoralising society for its role in the city, the
new site for the struggle against a now English South African-controlled economy.
That KARFO took its twin theoretical cues from a Briton, Grierson, and the
Communist, Eisenstein, both from enemy nations, is explained by its selective reading,
which highlighting only what would be useful to its own project. It never occurred to
KARFO that Grierson’s propositions were very different to Eisenstein’s dialectic. The
difference lies in Grierson’s remark that ‘Cinema has a sensational capacity for
enhancing movement which tradition has formed or time worn smooth.’15 Eisenstein,
in contrast, never ‘enhanced’; he displaced and manipulated in the name of realism.
Eisenstein’s ‘nature’, corresponded to Grierson’s ‘real world’. Technical resources,
particularly editing, fundamental to Eisenstein’s theories of montage, removed film
from the ‘real’ world, reordering it through cutting. Grierson criticised Eisenstein for
this. However, the Marxist base of Eisenstein’s approach demanded a displacement of
the ‘real’ world, itself a construction of bourgeois ideology. It was, of course, the
bourgeois class to which Afrikaners were aspiring. A further implication – though not
then clearly articulated – was the need to subordinate non-whites (blacks, coloureds,
Asians).
Grierson remarked that key NP politicians are:

2 12 The Grierson Effect

 worth hearing, even when their solutions are desperate, and to have a full sense of their case
one has to appreciate, too, a background of hurt in relation to both political and economic
developments of the past. Theirs has been a battle of the have-nots.16

Proposing a film board structure designed to counter international criticism of South

Africa’s racial policies, Grierson argued:

Its problems, seen in closeup, may seem frustrating, are the best earnest of dramas (sic) in the
making and a destiny to be revealed. Its vistas, both technological and human, are not only
national-wide but also Africa-wide and, in many respects, world-wide. South Africa, moreover,
has the eyes of the world upon it. It has, therefore, everything to gain by giving them reality
to look upon.17

Grierson asserted that South Africa’s high political profile needed to be complemented
by more than ‘one of the poorest places in the distribution channels of the world’. The
strategy that he suggested was:

a) a conviction in high quarters that the film can and ought to be developed as an instrument
of national policy;
b) an objective appreciation – free from mere film interest and film enthusiasm – of the
relationship of the film to the larger and deeper processes of public information;
c) a plan of action which will, (i) serve departments in an orderly and long-term fashion;
(ii) serve to inculcate patriotism, unity and drive in the Nation as a whole; (iii) present
South Africa abroad in the most powerful and penetrating way and on all valuable levels
of interest, and provide a direct service to the officers of External Affairs; (iv) bring into
the service of the union and co-ordinate in common interest, all possible forces, other than
governmental, which can contribute to the articulate presentation of the national image;
not least the forces in the film industry; of the churches, and of the public relations
departments of industry and commerce, with, of course, all due regard for the preservation
of their free and independent initiation and development; (v) mobilize and encourage
creative, technical and administrative talents to these ends.18

Grierson’s plan exhibits little sense of the ideology or economic process which ‘the
articulate presentation of the national image’ would seek to obscure. A potential result
of these recommendations was that film would help to mystify the emergent apartheid
base of the ‘Nation’ in which ‘patriotism’, ‘unity’ and ‘drive’ would need to be inculcated.
Grierson’s ‘Instrument’ misunderstood the nature of emergent Afrikaner national
socialism. This was because Grierson never considered the state as part of the class
system. Rather, he understood the state as ‘the machinery by which the best interests of
the people are secured’.19 For Grierson, politics and economics were dependent upon
the policies of the party in power, rather than a structural process condoned by the
hegemonic socio-economic bloc. He therefore falsely distinguishes between the state
and the government. Due weight was not given to the consideration that the party in
power is, in fact, part of the mechanism of the state. Grierson assumed a benign and
non-partisan nature of the state in the constitution and execution of its policies. He
thus imbues the liberal view of the state as a neutral institution external to class.

Grierson, Afrikaner Nationalism and South Africa 213

 Grierson’s strategy served Afrikaner nationalists well, notwithstanding his
realisation that blacks would ultimately impose the ‘whip hand’.20 Nevertheless,
Grierson separated the ‘real world’ from state propaganda. The latter, or in Grierson’s
words, the ‘seeping powers as (sic) the media possesses’ were to be tempered by a
‘progressively knowledgeable review on Ministerial level and subject to parliamentary
discussion’.21 This faith in the Westminster system is at the core of Grierson’s
uncritical acceptance of the NP’s position. (The few representatives of colour in
parliament in the late 1940s were removed by the NP after 1948). The starting point
for Grierson stemmed from Walter Lippmann’s (1922) pessimism about democracy
(see Stephen Charbonneau’s chapter in this book). In contrast, Grierson argued that
ordinary voters could make informed judgments given relevant information. Grierson
wanted to shock the average citizen out of blissful ignorance.22
Unlike KARFO, Grierson wanted to involve everyone in the democratic process. He
lauded the fast progress of Africans in South Africa, and the higher expenditure on
black education than any other country in Africa, while also lamenting the ‘tragic
pictures’ of shanty towns and the ‘emptyness’ of the ‘tribal code’. Grierson accepted
the Colonial Service’s ‘splendid and liberal and realistic concern for the future of
Africa’, as he did white custodianship of a people not yet ready for full citizenship.
Industrialisation, argued Grierson, would in time bring blacks to political maturity, a
fact accepted, he revealed, by ‘a not unimportant Nationalist’.23
The South African report clears up Williams’s indecision as to Grierson’s
perception of the relationship between ‘social purposes’ and ‘aesthetic questions’.24
Of the South African context, Grierson argued that ‘Effective distribution results are
the proper measure of justified production; and no double talk – aesthetic or other –
should be allowed to confuse the issue.’25 However, Grierson does reveal confidence in
imaginative talent. Experimentation was expected to act as checks and balances in
helping South African film-makers under the auspices of the board to destroy, as in the
case of Canada, a culture ‘rotted with spiritual colonialism; measuring itself at every
turn against the examples of Europe and the United States’.26 The angry and heated
political and racial arguments that were rife with English and Afrikaner pitted as
antagonists, again deceived Grierson into believing that an intrinsic social value of
benefit to all in South Africa would emerge from these conflicts:

The deflated and deflational atmosphere of many countries today is not only lacking in the
spirit of ‘audace’; and it is the presence of this quality in South African political discussion
which is so striking and refreshing to the observer. South Africa can lose nothing and can only
gain if it comes to invest the wider field of national expression. If South Africa has a message,
this is probably it.27

The remainder of Grierson’s report is devoted to ‘Shaping a South African Film

Instrument’. This was aimed at stimulating an informed public participation in the
process of democracy. Grierson proposed a board accountable to parliament chaired by
cabinet ministers. His recommendations were geared to maintaining the maximum
flexibility and operational independence for the board. His dual experience as film-
maker and administrator had clearly alerted him to the dangers of allowing the
institution to become clogged by bureaucracy, excessive equipment and, as a result of

2 14 The Grierson Effect

these, an ever expanding staff. The hallmark of his programme was that documentary
encoded the ideas of intellectuals which coincided with the interests of some state and
large-scale private organisations, a convergence which sprang from the common belief
of the need for some form of rationalised mass society.28
The report revealed Grierson’s scepticism for ‘self-appointed experts’ and ‘medium
enthusiasts’, whether amateur or professional. He argued that ‘no forces have hurt and
frustrated the national use of films as much as those who have brought it into discredit
by irresponsibility in the use of public funds’. Furthermore, these individuals ‘get in
the way of the purpose of the Information Service’.29 He insisted that film-makers:

were primarily civil servants; routineers with periodical raises and a pension to come; efficient
enough no doubt but within the limits of theme and story determined by men who were not
film makers, not artists and would, to do them justice, make no claim to creative power over
events.30

Grierson’s visit had been motivated by KARFO, which had hoped thereby to secure
state assistance. Ironically, the medium enthusiasts to which Grierson was referring
comprised KARFO itself. Admitting KARFO’s ‘especial position’, Grierson recognised
its access to large numbers of halls, their availability for cultural and social purposes,
and its access to capital. He therefore suggested that KARFO facilitate distribution of
the proposed board’s films. He suggested that KARFO’s distribution infrastructure be
government-subsidised, rather than its production facilities.31
Grierson viewed KARFO members as ‘ordinary citizens’ making ‘amateur judgements’.
These kinds of judgments were considered by Grierson to be the responsibility of the
State.32 KARFO’s close relationship with the NP, the NP-administered state and the DRC,
however, would have led it to believe that it had purchase on state funding. Grierson,
however, was adamant that funds be administered by the proposed board and not
compete with the trade. KARFO responded by dismantling its production unit.
Nothing came of Grierson’s 1954 proposals. The NP was able to enforce its
hegemony through state and other agencies, applying a host of other economic,
repressive and political policies.

After GrIerSoN

A National Film Board (NFB) was established in 1964, but its structure differed in
crucial ways from Grierson’s original proposals. As constituted, the NFB subverted
Grierson’s democratic assumptions and, until its dissolution in 1979, functioned as a
production and distribution facility for NP propaganda. In 1955, the Minister of
Finance appointed another commission of enquiry to report on the production and
distribution of films for state departments.33 Chairman of the NFB De Villiers
concentrated on films produced and distributed by state departments. This
commission’s recommendations, rather than Grierson’s, were finally accepted.
The idea that one of the NFB’s aims was ‘the promotion of the development of the
cinematograph film industry’ was to prove contentious, along with proposals that the
NFB be given a censorship role as well as the administration of film subsidies.34

Grierson, Afrikaner Nationalism and South Africa 215

 De Villiers specified two problems: the one internal (national), the other external
(international). First, state departments were either replicating production facilities or
were approaching the State Information Office to make films on their behalf, though
the office lacked a production unit.35 Second, the NP’s racial policies were drawing
adverse criticism internationally, driven by international television exposure.36 Where
Grierson promoted film as part of a detached, self-conscious and ‘democratic’ debate
on political principles, De Villiers was more interested in producing films to justify the
government’s race policies, both at home and abroad.37 De Villiers’s assumption was
that it was the ‘representation’ of ‘population removals’ that caused the PR damage
rather than the actual removals.
Where Grierson had argued that national interest would best be served by a
National Film Board, De Villiers proposed a ‘South African Film Corporation’
(modelled on SABC). Both reports recognised the need for effective distribution. Here,
however, their proposals differed radically: Grierson had posited that parliament
appropriate funds annually to the board, thus enabling wide-ranging non-commercial
distribution of the state’s titles. This confirmed the practice at the time whereby the
budget of the Department of Education, Arts and Science (DEAC) included an annual
provision for the making of films by its Film Service, supplied at no charge to other
state departments. De Villiers, conversely, argued that while the corporation should be
subsidised for the first five years, it should become self-sustaining through charges for
services rendered. Each department would budget for its requirements separately and
negotiate with independent producers, if necessary, via the SAFC.38 This procedure
was instituted (without the subsidy). This arrangement was, however, contested by the
industry and led to the collapse of the NFB in 1979.
The trade would provide additional distribution channels in exchange for access to
some of the board’s technical services. The formulation of the De Villiers Report in this
regard was incorporated almost verbatim into the National Film Board Act (1963),
which reads:

The objects for which the board is established are (a) the co-ordination of the activities of the
State relating to cinematograph films and photographs; and (b) the promotion of the
development of the cinematograph film industry and of photography in the Republic.39

These two aims appeared entirely worthy ones but proved, in fact, to be irreconcilable
and led to some of the most acrimonious debates on the NFB.
In view of the NFB’s later history, two areas of disagreement in the respective
reports warrant discussion. The first concerns Grierson’s insistence that the board be
attached to the Minister of the Interior rather than the DEAC. It is worth quoting
Grierson’s comments in full:

In particular, it is the strong view of those closer to the development of Public Information
that the logical portfolio in a modern state is not the Ministry of Education, because of its
lack of functional contact with the larger processes of technological, economic and public
development outside the sphere of formal education. With this view I concur. It may even be
that the scholastic or schoolman’s point of view is an obstacle to the larger development of
the mass media in the highly complex and informal world in which they are bound to operate.

2 16 The Grierson Effect

 The key to the matter is that the film in the service of the Nation is something more than an
instrument of instruction and something more than an instrument of culture and art. It is
not just a mirror held up to nature; it is a hammer helping to shape the future. We are dealing,
to be plain, with a process which reaches out beyond the schools and the academies to the
whole life of the nation and neither the pedagogic nor the aesthetic aspect of its work
represents the more effective reaches of its influence.40

Grierson is possibly thinking here of his distinction between ‘propaganda with a

political meaning’ and ‘propaganda as social information’, a distinction he made in
Paul Rotha’s (1936) book, where he attempts to distinguish between propaganda as a
public service and as a political and ideological tool as well as expressing his belief that
documentary film is an exploratory and formative medium. For De Villiers, however,
‘political meaning’ and ‘social information’ were virtually synonymous, although
he was aware of the dangers of ‘mere propaganda films’. De Villiers implies that
‘education’ comes down to grasping and promoting the ‘official version’ of the
condition of one’s culture.41
Grierson had suggested that the board work under the Minister of the Interior. The
De Villiers Report does not specify a portfolio; it merely states that production cannot
be left in the hands of private enterprise as this will expose the country to the risks of
serious misrepresentation both locally and abroad and that the cabinet should appoint
a minister to act as a link between parliament and the SAFC.42 An anonymous
memorandum on the Grierson Report, however, put a strong case for making the NFB
the responsibility of the Minister of Education. This was effected in 1963, though the
minister had earlier mentioned, when the matter of the relationship between the state
archives and film board was raised, that the Minister of Information could be
responsible.43
An incidental disagreement in the two reports was to flare in the 1970s; the
expansion of the NFB’s microfilm operation was to affect its structure and operations
dramatically. Grierson proposed that the scope of the board’s work should not include
microfilm as such services could be best dealt with by the State Information
Department and State Archives; the De Villiers Report specifies that SAFC should
confine its microfilm operations to state departments.44 Microfilming did not seem
a major issue in the 1950s, but both Grierson and De Villiers took it for granted (as
did the NFB) that the eventual introduction of television services to South Africa
would provide a tremendous impetus for the state’s film services. Contrary to all
expectations, the board did not become a major supplier to SABC-TV when it
started broadcasting in January 1976.
The legislation introduced by DEAC was based on the De Villiers Report, with the
exclusion of the clauses on censorship and subsidy, but with the addition of a clause
empowering the NFB to undertake archival activities.45 It would be the NFB’s task to
co-ordinate the purchase, production, exhibition and distribution of state films ‘of an
informative nature’,46 which would contribute to the development of the industry by
passing on some of the board’s work to the trade rather than offering the film industry
direct financial assistance.
At no stage of the NFB’s sixteen-year existence, however, did industry accept the
board. The board was unable to allocate work externally as it was not financed by a

Grierson, Afrikaner Nationalism and South Africa 217

parliamentary appropriation (Grierson’s proposal) or an initial five-year subsidy (De
Villiers) but by interest-bearing loans from the state. This made the NFB the only
statutory body to receive no government subsidy; the Film Institute (i.e. archives),
however, did receive a grant from 1969 onwards.

leGItImAtIoN

The board’s administrative structure differed in two significant ways from Grierson’s
original proposals. The first was that the Minister of the Interior was the chairman
rather than the Minister of Education. The Department of the Interior, however, was
unsuited to the task. Its administrative function was to regulate and register people,
their race classifications, group areas, movements, births, deaths, domicile – a sort of
human book-keeping function. The board was consequently placed under Education.
From the state’s point of view, this department offered an ideal home as the
educational institution is the foremost apparatus through which ideological discourse
is disseminated. This agency was not interested in the democratic assumptions
permeating Grierson’s thesis but in socialising individuals into accepting as natural
and desirable apartheid-based practices. (Indeed, future prime minister Hendrik
Verwoerd’s infamous statement that: ‘There is no place for [the Bantu] in the
European community above the level of certain forms of labour’,47 was made in the
same year that Grierson submitted his final report to the government.)
The second recommendation not enacted was the Experimental Production Fund.
Grierson had argued that: ‘In the case of a young country, this special measure of
latitude encourages the discovery of new talent in a medium which is not yet highly
developed from a professional point of view.’48 Despite representations, the state
remained unyielding, for experimentation tend to articulate counter-ideological
discourses.
Apart from co-ordinating state activities in film-making, the NFB was entrusted
with the ‘acquisition, production, exhibition, distribution’ of films and photographs
‘intended for dissemination, in the Republic or elsewhere, of information regarding
Southern Africa, its peoples, their way of life, culture, traditions, economic conditions
and problems’. It was also to give ‘information regarding the problems of and social
evils present in the Republic and the services available and developments taking place
in the Republic’. Clearly framed within the apartheid doubletalk, the NFB’s function
was to legitimise the government’s racial policies. In the absence of broadcast
television, the NFB had to assume a direct responsibility for cultural production as far
as short and documentary films were concerned. The board was eventually to enter
production on a large scale, competing with the ‘trade’ as Grierson called it – earning
the wrath of commercial producers. Whereas until 1966 about 60 per cent of the
private documentary market consisted of government-commissioned films, by 1972
the proportion had dropped to 30 per cent. The introduction of television in 1976,
however, heralded the dissolution of the board in 1978, for many of its propaganda
tasks could now be carried out much more effectively by the national broadcast
television services.

2 18 The Grierson Effect

CoNCluSIoN

Grierson had little impact on South Africa. He himself remarked on the lack of debate
over aesthetics. The fact that no university film courses existed until the early 1970s
contributed to this neglect. When Grierson was discussed, usually by the odd
cinephile, and usually in the context of European film theory, his visit to South Africa
was never mentioned. These anecdotes reveal something about the isolation of South
Africa from international influences during the apartheid years.

ACkNowleDGmeNtS

This chapter acknowledges ‘The National Film Board of South Africa: A Short History’
by Edwin Hees, in Annale no. 1 (1991), University of Stellenbosch, Stellenbosch, South
Africa.

NoteS

1. John Grierson, ‘Union of South Africa: The Grierson Report’, second draft, 1954. Although a
third draft was written, its whereabouts are unknown. Reprinted in Screening the Past no. 7
(1999), p. 2, http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/classics/cl0799/JG1cl7a.pdf.
2. John Grierson, ‘In the Heart of the Country’, unpublished, undated notes held in the
Grierson Archives, Mimeo. G:4:19:21, Grierson Archives, Stirling University, pp. 19, 21.
3. The role of Reith in South Africa is discussed more fully in R. E. Tomaselli and G. Hayman,
Broadcasting in South Africa (London: James Currey, 1989).
4. Ibid.
5. Grierson Report, ‘Arguments’, Item 9 (G5:6:35), incomplete version held at the Grierson
Archives (see Grierson Report 1954).
6. Union Review, ‘Let’s Go to the Cinema … and See a Government Film (in Afrikaans)’,
August 1944, p. 38.
7. John Grierson, ‘The Artist in Public Service’, in I. Lockerbie (ed.), Eyes of Documentary
(Stirling: John Grierson Archives, 1990), p. 12.
8. Cilliers Film Committee Union of South Africa (July 1943) ‘The Cilliers Film Committee’,
unpublished (and unlisted) report.
9. Cilliers Film Committee Union of South Africa, p. 84.
10. K. G. Tomaselli and M. Eckhardt, ‘Brown-red Shadows: The Influence of Third Reich and
Soviet Cinema on Afrikaans Film, 1940–45’, in R. van Winkel and D. Welsh (eds), Cinema and
the Swastika: The International Expansion of Third Reich Cinema (London: Palgrave, 2011).
11. Union of South Africa, Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee Appointed to Consider the
Reports of the Committee on State Publicity and the Film Committee and Other Relevant Matters
14 December 1944, Government Printer, 1954, p. 9.
12. Memorandum to the Minister of the Interior from the National Film Advisory Committee
attached to copy of Final Draft of Grierson Report at National Film Archives in Pretoria.
13. C. Williams (ed.), Realism and the Cinema (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980),
p. 27.

Grierson, Afrikaner Nationalism and South Africa 219

14. H. Du Preez, KARFO Report to John Grierson, Mimeo, undated, c. 1954.
15. Williams, Realism and the Cinema, p. 17.
16. Grierson, ‘In the Heart of the Country’.
17. Grierson, ‘Union of South Africa’.
18. Ibid.
19. A. Lovell and J. Hillier, Studies in Documentary (London: Secker and Warburg, 1972), p. 19.
20. Grierson, ‘In the Heart of the Country’.
21. Grierson, ‘Union of South Africa’, p. 7.
22. Grierson, ‘In the Heart of the Country’.
23. Grierson, ‘Union of South Africa’.
24. Williams, Realism and the Cinema, pp. 17–18.
25. Grierson, ‘Union of South Africa.’, p. 3.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid., p. 4.
28. Lovell and Hillier, Studies in Documentary, p. 31.
29. Grierson, ‘Union of South Africa’, p. 4.
30. Grierson, ‘The Artist in Public Service’, pp. 12, 38, 39–40.
31. Grierson Report, ‘Arguments’.
32. Grierson, ‘The Artist in Public Service’, p. 14.
33. De Villiers Report (1956), Union of South Africa, unpublished, National Film, Video and
Sound Archives, Pretoria, 1956.
34. Ibid., pp. 24–5.
35. Ibid., p. 10.
36. Ibid., p. 4.
37. Ibid., pp. 7–8.
38. Ibid., pp. 20–2.
39. National Film Board Act, 1963.
40. Grierson, ‘Union of South Africa’, pp. 16–17.
41. De Villiers Report, pp. 5, 8.
42. Ibid., pp. 23–4.
43. Hansard, 1962.
44. Grierson, ‘Union of South Africa’; De Villiers Report, p. 20.
45. National Film Board Bill, n/d.
46. Hansard, 1963.
47. Grierson, ‘Union of South Africa’, pp. 2595–622.
48. Ibid., p. 15.

refereNCeS

Althusser, Louis, Lenin, Philosophy and Other Essays (London: New Left Books, 1971).
Cilliers Film Committee Union of South Africa (July 1943) The Cilliers Film Committee.
Unpublished (and unlisted) report.
De Villiers Report, Union of South Africa, unpublished, National Film, Video and Sound
Archives, Pretoria, 1976, pp. 24–5
Du Preez, H., KARFO Report to John Grierson, Mimeo, undated, c. 1954.

2 20 The Grierson Effect

Grierson, John, ‘The Artist in Public Service’, in I. Lockerbie (ed.), Eyes of Documentary (Stirling:
John Grierson Archives, 1941, reprinted in 1990), pp. 12, 38, 39–40.
Grierson, John (1954), ‘Union of South Africa. The Grierson Report’, second draft. Reprinted in
Screening the Past no. 7 (1999), http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/classics/cl0799/
JG1cl7a.pdf.
Grierson Report, ‘Arguments’, Item 9, incomplete version held in the Grierson Archives
(G5:6:35) (see Grierson Report 1954).
Grierson, John, ‘In the Heart of the Country’, unpublished, undated notes, Mimeo, G:4:19:21,
Stirling: Grierson Archives, undated).
Hansard, col. 5186, 8 May 1962.
Hansard, col. 70623, 3 June 1963.
Hayman, G. and R. E. Tomaselli, ‘Ideology and Technology in the Growth of South African
Broadcasting, 1924–1971’, in R. E. Tomaselli, K. G. Tomaselli and J. Muller (eds),
Broadcasting in South Africa (London: James Currey, 1989).
Hees, E., ‘The National Film Board of South Africa: A Short History’, Annale no. 1 (1991),
University of Stellenbosch, Stellenbosch, South Africa.
Lippmann, W., ‘Public Opinion’, in D. A. Graber (ed.), Mass Media and American Politics, 5th edn
(Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, 1997).
Lockerbie, I. (ed.), John Grierson: Eyes of Democracy (Stirling: John Grierson Archive, 1941),
reprinted in 1990.
Lovell, A. and J. Hillier, Studies in Documentary (London: Secker and Warburg, 1972).
National Film Board Act No. 73 of 1963, Section 9……….1963
National Film Board Bill (As adopted at Report Stage), Clause 9(e). n/d
Rotha, P., Movie Parade (London: Studio, ld./New York: Studio Publications, 1936).
Smith Committee, Union of South Africa, 14 December 1944: Report of the Inter-Departmental
Committee Appointed to Consider the Reports of the Committee on State Publicity and the Film
Committee and Other Relevant Matters. Government Printer, 3pp.
Tomaselli, K.G. ‘Grierson in South Africa: Culture, State and Nationalist Ideology in the South
African Film Industry: 1940–1981,’ Cinema Canada no. 122 (1985), pp. 24–7.
Tomaselli, K.G., Ideology and Cultural Production in South African Cinema, unpublished PhD thesis,
University of Witwatersrand, 1984.
Tomaselli, K.G. and M. Eckhardt, ‘Brown-red Shadows: The Influence of Third Reich and Soviet
Cinema on Afrikaans Film, 1940–45’, in R. van Winkel and D. Welsh (eds), Cinema and the
Swastika: The International Expansion of Third Reich Cinema (London: Palgrave, 2011).
Tomaselli, K.G. and E. Hees, ‘John Grierson in South Africa: Afrikaner Nationalism and the
National Film Board’, Screening the Past no. 7 (1999), latrobe.edu.au/www/screeningthepast/
index.
Tomaselli, R.E. and G. Hayman, Broadcasting in South Africa (London: James Currey, 1989).
Union Review, ‘Let’s Go to the Cinema … and See a Government Film (in Afrikaans)’, August
1944, p. 38.
Union of South Africa, Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee Appointed to Consider the
Reports of the Committee on State Publicity and the Film Committee and Other Relevant Matters,
14 December 1944, Government Printer.
Union of South Africa, Senate Debates, Second Session, 7–11 June 1954, cols 2595–622.
Williams, C. (ed.), Realism and the Cinema (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980).

Grierson, Afrikaner Nationalism and South Africa 221

14
Grierson and Latin America: Encounters,
Dialogues and Legacies

Mariano Mestman and María Luisa Ortega

I will never forget the moment when John Grierson saw the films by Manuel Chambi at the
First Meeting of Latin American Filmmakers in Montevideo in 1958. The documentary
master’s surprise and fascination with the images brought in from the altiplano celebrations
in Peru led Grierson to travel there on a meticulous expedition, though unfortunately,
without a camera.
Nelson Pereira dos Santos

In May 1958, Montevideo (Uruguay) hosted the third International Documentary and
Experimental Film Festival. Organised by SODRE (Uruguay’s national broadcast radio
station), it was the first film festival in Latin America to specialise in documentaries.
In terms of the way cinema developed in the region, the 1958 festival is considered a
turning point. Two important and oft-mentioned facts about these editions reveal its
interest: the presence of John Grierson, invited that year as the honorary president,
and the First Latin American Meeting of Independent Film-makers, held in
conjunction with the festival. The convergence of these events helped film-makers
become aware of the shared problems they were facing and assisted them in mapping
out the future for a cinema that could help Latin America take on ‘the inevitable task
of protecting its education, culture, history, tradition and working for the spiritual
elevation of the population’, as stated in the resolutions adopted by the ‘delegates’
from different countries. These delegates, who also founded the Asociación
Latinoamericana de Cineístas Independientes (ALACI), included Simón Feldman,
Leopoldo Torres Nilsson and Fernando Birri (Argentina), Jorge Ruiz (Bolivia), Nelson
Pereira dos Santos (Brazil), Patricio Kaulen (Chile), Manuel Chambi (Peru) and Danilo
Trelles and Roberto Gardiol (Uruguay), among others.
It is possible, as Julianne Burton noted, that Grierson’s visit had a ‘largely
ceremonial function’1 but it was an opportune moment for the encounter and dialogue
with the Scottish master. Latin American cinema found itself in a period marked by
explorations and definitions, in which there was a need to direct the winds of renewal
that had begun to blow and to channel the film-makers’ desires for action and creation.
In this regard, the documentary emerged as an important mechanism in changing the
course and development of the new national cinemas. As Paulo Antonio Paranaguá
has noted, these independent documentaries which began to be produced in Latin
America in the 1950s were a radical novelty in the region, one that marked the break
with classic cinema and a transition towards the independent films of the 60s.2 That

Grierson and Latin America: Encounters, Dialogues and Legacies 223

Hugo Rocha, John Grierson and Danilo Trelles, at the Documentary and Experimental Film Festival of the SODRE,
Montevideo, 1958 (Courtesy Juan José Mugni, Archivo Nacional de la Imagen, Montevideo)

transition was based on a broad set of experiences and influences, with neo-realism
and the Griersonian documentary as their cardinal points.
These experiences and influences were assisted by a proliferation of film clubs and
societies across Latin America at the beginning of the 1950s, featuring some of the
most renowned film-makers of the period. Young film enthusiasts enjoyed diverse
programmes thanks to the involvement of consulates and embassies, organisms such
as UNESCO and SODRE itself. Films from different eras and from all across the world
were shown, from institutional documentaries to some of the masterpieces of world
cinema, many of which had previously been difficult to access in the region. This is
how films from the British documentary movement and from the National Film Board
of Canada reached the young people at the sessions organised by the cinema club Gente
de Cine (in Argentina), the Montevideo film societies and the Cinema Club of the
Chilean Student Federation, founded by Pedro Chaskel. In some cases, as the film-
maker Mario Handler recalls, the cinema clubs were also places where the Uruguayans
of the time tried their hand at amateur film-making as part of ‘lightning contests’
occasionally sponsored by the film societies, a kind of movie-making marathon.3 In
this context, several new film-making schools were born and nurtured by universities.
Two of these schools explicitly acknowledged John Grierson as a source of inspiration:
the Documentary Film-making School of Santa Fe at the Universidad del Litoral

2 24 The Grierson Effect

(Argentina, founded by Fernando Birri) and the Centre of Experimental Cinema at the
Universidad de Chile (founded by Sergio Bravo). During his visit, Grierson entered into
dialogue with film-makers from both of these schools.
In the work of the film-makers who made documentaries at that time, it is difficult
to identify specific international influences (at least, not in their ‘pure’ state). These
directors’ views – as with the programmes of the film societies – were influenced
by a variety of factors, such as the Griersonian documentary, and film-makers like
Eisenstein, Flaherty and Zavattini. In all of these experiences and in the desire for
renewal, however, a network of mimetic and original expressions gave way to a peculiar
exchange of gestures between Grierson and the Latin American film-makers in 1958.
Without a doubt, the South American film-makers who gathered in Montevideo
were proud to be recognised by John Grierson, an internationally prestigious figure.
However, they also sought out the guidance and advice of the man who had shown an
extraordinary gift for promoting films that expressed national identity by depicting
a social and cultural reality that had eluded commercial cinema. If the film-makers
who gathered for this 1958 conference had one thing in common, it was the will to
create a truly national cinema to counter film-making which was no more than an
imitation of Hollywood models. This new cinema would represent and rethink the
social, historical and cultural reality of Latin America for the first time, with
documentary films one of the major avenues in this regard. At the 1958 SODRE
festival, the film-makers discovered that their documentaries, made on their own and
with little contact between each other, expressed a common search, revealing facets of
a shared Latin American social reality never before captured on screen.
For Grierson, the trip to Uruguay may have been just one of his many incursions to
regions across the planet in search of material for This Wonderful World, a programme
which had aired for the first time on Scottish television on 11 October 1957. Grierson
had a tight travel agenda which led him to Paris and Brussels in May 1958 for the
Experimental Film Festival and then to Montevideo on 25 May. His meeting with the
pioneers who would go on to create the New Latin American Cinema was not limited
to his days at the SODRE, because he went on to visit Argentina, Chile, Bolivia and
Peru; he remembered the trips to the latter two countries as a ‘great journey and in a
way, the most beautiful I had ever made’.4 The trip led to encounters that have not
received enough attention from researchers, but which reveal a dialogue with South
America that is interesting to explore, which we attempt to do in this chapter.

ExchAnGinG ViEws in thE ‘switzErLAnD of AmEricA’

The history of the SODRE, the institution which hosted the meeting, can explain how
it became a centre of attraction and a meeting point for film-makers in a country that
was considered the Switzerland of America, as it was as advanced culturally as in other
spheres of life. Many elements connect the identity of the festival’s project with the
Griersonian concept of cinema
The art-cinema department of the SODRE, founded at the end of 1943 by Danilo
Trelles, would expand after the inauguration of the festival. During the first edition
(in 1954), 112 films from eighteen countries were screened. Held every two years until

Grierson and Latin America: Encounters, Dialogues and Legacies 225

1962 (and later in 1965, 1967 and 1971), a selection of the films featured would go on
to be screened in the country’s cinema clubs after each festival.
From the beginning, the festival presented itself as a supporter of the
documentary as the main battering ram of active cinema, one with social and
educational aims: ‘There is no doubt’, states the catalogue of the first edition,

that filmic document allows us to get to know, understand and assess the degree of culture
and serve as a coming attraction of the world surrounding us … . Thanks to the power of
suggestion and its infinite possibilities, documentary cinema sows rich, fertile images, and
will surely be the best way to educate the men of the future.

The first festival had included a selection of films by Norman McLaren and
productions by the National Film Board; and midway through 1954, during the tenth
season of SODRE cinema, films such as North Sea, Song of Ceylon and Night Mail would
be shown. Two years later, in the presentation of the 1956 festival catalogue, the
Scottish master would be mentioned as the guiding light of the project and of the
fields of interest of the SODRE. In fact, the national cinema competitions organised by
the SODRE before the festivals have been considered, in retrospect, in line with ‘the
best British documentary school’, particularly because they ‘created a collective
awareness of how cinema collaborated with citizens and countries’.5
In this way, Grierson’s arrival confirmed that he had become a reference point
within the SODRE, revealing an almost programmatic orientation based on
Griersonian principles. However, the 1958 edition was exceptional in terms of the
quantity and quality of the Latin American films presented; over time, some of these
films went on to become historical milestones within the new national cinemas of the
region and raised the profile of their directors correspondingly.
The Montevideo press concurred with Grierson on the best films and Latin
American film-makers. In a long article assessing the festival, the works of the
Peruvian film-maker Manuel Chambi, the Bolivian Jorge Ruiz and the Brazilian Nelson
Pereira dos Santos were all praised for authentically expressing national character
through folklore, tradition, religion and landscape.6
The attendance of these directors and other ‘celebrities’ at the film-makers meeting
was promising indeed, claimed the same source. The debates at the event emphasise
the importance of cinema as a cultural medium for expression, insisting that Latin
Americans had a right to their own cinematographic production and eschewing the
‘desire for profits’ as an incentive. Within this framework, the difficulties of producing
and distributing independent films were discussed, along with obstacles to regional
exchange and co-operation, the ties with the still emerging medium of television, as
well as issues such as legislation, unions and training. Those in attendance demanded
measures such as the incorporation of cinema into a common Latin American market
as a ‘true medium for mutual knowledge and understanding’. The market would
involve a customs policy without obstacles and, if possible, a preferential one; the
necessary government support and protection, particularly for independent cinema;
special assistance for short films, in order for them to be seen both nationally and
regionally; and support for schools that would provide professional training for cinema
technicians and grants for exchanges.

2 26 The Grierson Effect

 The affinity between these ideas and the Griersonian ideology was evident to those
who heard Grierson speak at the press conferences or at the informal talks he gave at
the Boston café in Montevideo. It was also clear to those who accompanied him on his
excursions throughout the city, on his visit to the port and in his talks with people.
Grierson was always carrying a small notebook that he consulted or jotted notes down
in from time to time. In his feverish day-to-day activities, in both public and private,
Grierson expressed his opinions on the urban architecture, his interest in steaks and
soccer, his astonishment at the talent of the boys and young men playing soccer on
the streets, his curiosity about different types of cheese or about the types of cattle or
bulls that Uruguay had once imported from Scotland, and other subjects. He was
remarkably vital for his age, according to the locals, and his unremitting interest in
all things local during his sojourn made him popular with all.
Hugo Alfaro, in the pages of the legendary weekly Marcha, for example, emphasised
how Grierson

took by storm the press conferences, the ministry offices, the receptions, the café-music bars,
the street corners and even the stadium locker rooms … . With his passionate words, a
mixture of humor, feeling and imagination, he shook people free of their boredom or their
curtness as if he himself were a source of work and life, as if he were a 35-millimeter prophet.7

The well-known critic Homero Alsina Thevenet published an ‘interminable series’ (as
he himself called it) of articles on the visit, including coverage of Grierson’s public and
daily activities along with long texts on his career and his ‘extraordinary’ personality.
The admiration and fondness for Grierson expressed by this critic in the pages of the
daily El país are also reflected in other media sources, like the weekly Marcha (cited
above) and in the daily La mañana. The press identified with Grierson in the same way
as the film-makers and audiences packing auditoriums to hear him speak; it was the
same recognition granted in the homages organised by the groups Cine Club [Cinema
Club] and Cine Universitario [University Cinema], which screened films by Grierson
(or his collaborators) and published lengthy screeds about the film-maker and his
work.
Grierson’s pronouncements during his days in Montevideo may have included
some ‘capricious opinions’ or ‘hurried statements’ – according to certain media
sources8 – that could have been accused of pintoresquismo or ‘exoticism’ in some cases.9
However, from the beginning it was clear that the Scotsman would not waste his time
doing the tourist circuit or gathering images ‘for export’; instead, he took a critical
viewpoint that belied an interest in the everyday, such as the severe contrasts between
the city’s rich and poor. It was a respectful dialogue, one based on a commitment and a
desire to collaborate with Uruguayan film-making.
In this regard, with a language ‘caustic and filled with naivety’ or with his ‘strength
of character’ or ‘stimulating insolence’ – to quote the Montevideo press – the Scotsman
conveyed a series of ideas and even made reference to a possible ‘plan’.10 He spoke
of how the Uruguayan film sector needed protection – a protection he considered
‘essential’ in a country as small as Uruguay – and of the creation of a film bank
(or a national film board) to finance movies. In Grierson’s view, this entity would
distribute a percentage of ticket sales of the most popular national films to finance

Grierson and Latin America: Encounters, Dialogues and Legacies 227

Homage organised by the group Cine Universitario Homage and screening organised by the group Cine
(University Cinema) during Grierson visit to Montevideo Club during Grierson’s visit to Montevideo (Drawing by
(Courtesy Eduardo Correa, Centro de Documentación Antonio Pezzino, member of the Taller Joaquín Torres
Cinematográfica, Cinemateca Uruguaya) García. Courtesy Eduardo Correa, Centro de
Documentación Cinematográfica, Cinemateca Uruguaya)

documentaries (six per year initially) and initiate a small fund for experimental films
‘without regard for their immediate usefulness’. He added that documentaries and
newsreels produced nationally – for which television would become an extraordinary
field11 – should be screened at every cinema (ten minutes of each programme). This
plan also reflected other ideas that arose from the film-makers meeting, such as team
work, co-operation between countries in terms of production and distribution; a
common agreement to acquire the rights to international films; and support for film
schools.
Although Grierson supported a programme that would combine active
government policies with protection for the expressive and creative freedom of
film-makers, the idea of ‘independence’ supported by the film-makers meeting and
the interests of public or private support did create some conflicts.12 At El país,
Thevenet underlined what the paper considered a ‘complex debate’, since in practice,
government used film productions for political ends while companies opted for
‘direct advertising’, to promote their own goals through film. And when confronted
with these requirements, ‘(Latin)American filmmakers may differ socially with
industries that could be deemed oppressive or imperialist’, in the critic’s view.
But at the same time, Thevenet referred to Grierson’s words in recalling his own
experience, pointing out that ‘during the height of the British documentary,
Flaherty, Cavalcanti, Auden and he himself [Grierson] had been trustworthy public

2 28 The Grierson Effect

servants without ever abandoning their role as filmmakers’. Grierson’s experience in
the 1930s could also be applied to his 1958 Montevideo proposal of ‘reducing the
issues between the state and the artist’, a goal that could be achieved by creating
an ‘intermediate entity that makes governments understand the issues related to
artistic creation while allowing artists to understand the real needs of the state.
The struggle will continue as long as necessary.’ It was a struggle that could only be
resolved by striking a certain balance.
At one of his last events in Montevideo, the closing ceremony of the festival,
Grierson gave a talk. The Argentine film-maker Fernando Birri would later remember
that at a certain point Grierson pointed to the exhibition of photo-documentaries of
Birri’s Institute as exemplary work, referring to the ‘photo-documentaries’13 made at
the Santa Fe Documentary School. These photo-documentaries would later give way
to the middle-length documentary Tire-dié (1958–60), one of the founding works
of the New Latin American Cinema. Founded by Birri in 1956 after returning from
his studies in Rome at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, the Santa Fe
Documentary School (Argentina) explicitly acknowledged its roots in both Italian neo-
realism and the British documentary movement. In Escuela documental inglesa/The
British Documentary School, the first book published by the Santa Fe School, the author
Manuel Horacio Giménez provides an overview of British and Canadian documentary
film-making and the Griersonian principles (with quotes from the classic work by
Hardy). The book’s backcover showed a photo of the master engrossed in the photo-
documentaries presented in Montevideo.14 It was a true sign of the Grierson effect and
of the meaning attributed to his visit.
Although Grierson did not travel to the city of Santa Fe, he did cross Río de la
Plata after his stay in Montevideo to visit Buenos Aires, as the invited guest of
Argentina’s National Institute of Cinematography. According to El Heraldo, it was
rumoured that the institute could offer Grierson a position ‘as the director or
organizer of the Experimental Filmmaking Center (for training)’ to be created under
the new film-making law. What can be said with certainty about Grierson’s visit
is that on the day he arrived (9 June), he gave a press conference at the Claridge
Hotel, attended by well-known members of Argentina’s film-making community.
‘Vivacious, dynamic, quick, perceptive’, were the terms used by the daily La Prensa to
refer to his interventions; ‘likeable’, ‘sure of himself’ and ‘precise and clear’ in his
dialogues, noted the film critic of the newspaper La Nación. During his time in
Buenos Aires, Grierson returned to the same themes he had brought up in
Montevideo: state support for cultural cinema and a concern for authenticity when
depicting national and Latin American realities. In addition, the Scotsman had taken
the time to read the new law of Argentine film-making – a law which he considered
‘very precise’ – and he mentioned the intention to legislate on the quality of films.
The last part of his address dealt with his wish to see cinema incorporated into
television and the differences and similarities between the two mediums. Although
some criticised his approach to this topic, he noted the importance of both mediums
in terms of developing educational cinema and disseminating cultural expression,
in comments clearly informed by the programme he was directing for Scottish
television at the time.15

Grierson and Latin America: Encounters, Dialogues and Legacies 229

A PArALLEL storyLinE: cAVALcAnti AnD BrAziLiAn cinEmA

Two of the best films at SODRE ’58 were Rio, 40 gráus/Rio, 100 Degres F. (1955) and
Rio Zona Norte/Rio, Northern Zone (1957), the first feature-length films by Nelson
Pereira dos Santos, the spiritual father of the Brazilian Cinema Novo movement that
would burst out in the following decade. They were also paradigmatic films in terms
of appropriating Italian neo-realism along the path towards true national cinema.
However, any work on Brazilian cinema must make reference to Alberto Cavalcanti,
a man who returned to his country in 1950 after being asked to head the recently
founded Companhia Cinematográfica Vera Cruz in San Pablo, Brazil. The company
had accepted the proposal of Grierson’s old collaborator to produce two
documentaries for every feature film it released, an ambitious objective, for which
Cavalcanti had hired Henry E. ‘Chick’ Fowle, Rex Endsleigh and John Waterhouse.
However, the project fell through because the company failed to fulfil its side of the
agreement: this – in addition to the firm’s financial crisis – led Cavalcanti to abandon
the scheme and Vera Cruz closed its doors in 1953.16 Had the project not failed, it
could have proved an exceptional laboratory for documentary creation during the
period, one where the experiences of the core members of the British documentary
movement would have converged with the Brazilian cinematographic tradition. It
would have been fruitful ground for developing the concept of ‘neo-realism’ that
the Brazilian had favoured over the label ‘documentary’ in his early debates with
Grierson.17
However, Brazil found its ‘Grierson’ in the figure of Humberto Mauro,18 who would
not be discovered by the Latin American film-makers of this generation until later,
when Glauber Rocha called him the precursor of Cinema Novo, in a family tree in which
Mauro’s name was associated with the likes of Jean Vigo and Robert Flaherty. Rocha
put Mauro on a map of international cinema in the 1930s in which Grierson and the
British documentary movement that attracted Cavalcanti played an important role.19
In an independent, contemporary way, Humberto Mauro had designed and partially
completed, in his series Brasilianas (1945–54), a programme for national film
development in which the documentary was considered the cinema of the future due
to its artistic possibilities and low cost: it did not imitate foreign models yet had the
potential to be commercialised abroad. In addition, the project’s platform was a state
entity, the National Institute of Educational Cinema (INCE), founded in 1936. Thus
Mauro came up with an idea for propaganda cinema that reflected the international
context of his time. It would be a cinema supported by the state, one with its own
language and artistic expression, though its projects and films would not become
known until some time later. By that time, the model – like perhaps the similar
Griersonian one – had become obsolete in terms of the new challenges of Latin
American cinema.20

GriErson AnD thE AnDEAn worLD

Grierson’s intelligent and perceptive perspective during the days of the SODRE led him
to the documentaries whose cameras had focused on one previously invisible reality,

2 30 The Grierson Effect

that of the indigenous populations. The films by the Peruvian film-maker Manuel
Chambi and the Bolivian Jorge Ruiz sparked the master’s interest in the Andean region
and its ‘creative energy’. Grierson praised these films while vehemently criticising the
paternalist, condescending viewpoint of other foreign productions about these
countries.
In 1957, José María Arguedas, then the director of the Contemporary Art
Institute of Lima, had become enthralled with the short documentary films being
made in the Cuzco region. He went on to ‘discover’ them for the audiences in the
Peruvian capital. The news of these films reached the SODRE organisers and Manuel
Chambi was invited to present the films seen by Grierson at the festival: Corpus del
Cuzco/Body of Cuzco (1955), Corrida de toros y cóndores/Bullfighters and condors (1956),
Las piedras/The Stones (1956), Carnaval de Kanas/Carnival of Kanas (1956) and Lucero
de nieve/Light of Snow (1957). After studying architecture in Buenos Aires, where
he had his first contact with cinema, Chambi founded the Cusco Cine Club after
returning to Peru in 1955. Chambi made these first films with his brother Victor
and the photographer Eulogio Nishiyama; later, Luis Figueroa would join the
collaboration. This formed the core of the ‘École de Cuzco’, as Georges Sadoul called
the group at the Karlovy Vary Festival in 1964 after the ‘discovery’ of the first feature
film made in this context, Kukuli (1960), directed by César Villanueva, Eulogio
Mishiyama and Luis Figueroa.21
As in the black-and-white photographs by the renowned Martin Chambi, Manuel’s
father, Nishiyama’s colour cinematography in these films eludes the use of an artistic
construction that artificially extols the dignity of the indigenous people, an emphasis
common in the indigenist artistic expressions of the period. As opposed to calculated
staging, these films opted for a direct record capitalising on the visual strength of
filmed reality. Similarly, the documentaries depart from the educational exposition
of ethnographic cinema: most of the first films forego the support of a guiding
commentary to make the Andean rural dweller and indigenous culture (mixed with
colonial culture) the unquestionable stars. These films present the complexity and
richness of the rites and festivals of the Quechua communities with naturalistic beauty
and simplicity.
For this reason, it is likely that Grierson found in these films extraordinary raw
material for his programme This Wonderful World; they were images freed from
exoticising, paternalistic viewpoints and did not attempt to hide the poverty of
the residents. ‘These people of the Alto Plano’, said Grierson on the programme,

however poor, have created in their fiestas such spectaculars of mask and dance that I doubt if
there has been the like at any time, anywhere, from a peasant people. I don’t suppose that will
disappear, but what will certainly disappear, and perhaps better so, is the bitter irony of one of
the poorest and saddest peoples of the world, putting up for compensation the very richest
and most joyous demonstration of their innate pride.22

These words closely reflect the tone of Chambi’s documentaries, far from the salvage
ethnography and the threat of a culture in danger of extinction; these films speak
in terms that reveal no signs of accusation or the tension between tradition and
modernity (or modernisation) so common in other documentaries.

Grierson and Latin America: Encounters, Dialogues and Legacies 231

 In Bolivia, Grierson discovered a reality quite different from that of the rites and
festivals of Peru. He established a much more intense and productive relationship
with Jorge Ruiz; the two would make a ten-day trip by jeep from La Paz to the
altiplano.23 Jorge Ruiz24 was the South American film-maker most in touch with the
Anglo-American documentary-makers through collaboration on different projects,
mainly documentaries sponsored by entities like the United Nations, International
Development Agency or British and North American television networks. In 1956, for
example, Ruiz was responsible for the cinematography for Renace un pueblo/The
Forgotten Indians (Bolivia–Great Britain, 1956–7), directed by Anthony de Lothbiniere,
with commentary by Paul Rotha. The programme was produced by the BBC in
collaboration with Telecine, a small Bolivian production film company where Ruiz
worked. In 1956, he co-directed Miles como María/People like Maria (1958) with Harry
Watt, a documentary for the World Health Organisation that would win the television
film award at the 1959 Venice Film Festival.
These projects were clearly aligned with the work that Ruiz had done since 1957
as a film-maker and director at the Bolivian Cinematographic Institute (ICB).
Founded by the new government that took power after the 1952 revolution – an
administration that would be the first to stake a claim for including the indigenous
element in the construction of national identity – the ICB was a symbol of the
country’s modernisation and a model in the use of cinema as an instrument to
promote state programmes of reform.25
The propaganda documentaries produced at the ICB by Waldo Cerruto (the
institute’s first director, 1953–7) and Jorge Ruiz reveal a rich and extensive repertoire
of film resources (narrative, rhetorical and expository), where the construction of a
visual and discursive imagery of the rural indigenous world is combined without
apparent tension with images associated with modernisation and programmes for
economic development and infrastructure (the majority financed and sponsored
by the US). However, it was the film Vuelve Sebastiana/Come Back, Sebastiana (1953,
a prizewinner at the 1956 SODRE) that witnessed Jorge Ruiz finding his own voice as
a film-maker representing the Andean world. ‘This is one of the six most important
documentary filmmakers in the world’, said Grierson after seeing the film.26 The other
Ruiz films shown during the 1958 SODRE festival would also represent the type of
film that the Scotsman liked. While Voces de la tierra/Voices of the Earth (1956) – a
‘continuous visual delight’, to quote the press – presented the cultural world of the
altiplano, La vertiente/The Source (1958),27 an epic about community work, was
reflective of the Griersonian tradition.

othEr DiALoGuEs with thE LAtin AmEricAn DocumEntAry

in thE 1950s

The cinematographic and institutional career developed by Ruiz exemplifies how

certain South American film-makers met and dialogued with Grierson. He promoted
the creation of institutional spheres where documentaries could be developed to
construct national identity and serve as a tool for promoting political, modernising
reforms. But his career also reveals the breadth of documentary modes of

2 32 The Grierson Effect

representation, encompassing storytelling, dramatisation and the use of native actors.
Vuelve Sebastiana is one of the best examples of this.
However, the documentaries of Jorge Ruiz also reveal how other dialogues and
influences converged in the modes and aesthetics of representation. Ruiz himself
stated that he ‘felt like a disciple of Robert Flaherty and John Grierson’ when he made
Virgen India/Virgin India (1947), one of his first documentaries. When asked about his
influences, he did mention the British school and the American Willard Van Dyke, but
he also pointed out the pleasant impact of a Mexican, El Indio Fernández, director of
Flor Silvestre/Wildflower (1943) and La candelaria/María Candelaria (1943).28
Ruiz had mentioned the first two films resulting from the intense, productive
collaboration between director Emilio Fernández and photographer Gabriel Figueroa,
two Mexicans who would play critical roles in configuring the national cinema of the
period. Together they constructed powerful narrative and visual imagery in the
idealised, hieratic, sculptural representation of the ‘Indian’ and the indigenous world,
the product of a conscious appropriation and reinvention in a nationalistic tone of the
legacy left by Sergei M. Eisentein during his visit to Mexico in 1931. The Soviet master
had left without completing the project that had taken him to Mexico, Qué viva
México/Thunder over Mexico, a film cited by John Grierson in ‘First Principles of
Documentary’. According to the Scotsman, the ‘posturing or contemplative symbolic
figures’ of the film are a feature of one of the three methods of documentary film-
making, which tended to be contemplative and poetic.29 Footage from the Soviet’s
film, edited on different occasions and by different hands, would leave an indelible
mark on Latin American cinema in the 1940s and 50s, a mark that would be
especially visible in the artistic composition of the poetic documentary. In addition
to Eisenstein’s influence, Paul Strand also had an effect on regional cinema after
serving as the director of photography on another mythic film for Latin American
cinematography, Redes/Fisherman’s Nets (1934). Redes was a realist drama filmed with
native actors whose revolutionary calling was perfectly clear. Sponsored by the Fine
Arts Department at the Secretary of Education, Redes would become a model for a
cinema that attempted to serve as more than spectacle and entertainment, one based
on state sponsorship aimed at establishing a national cinema and in which the borders
between propaganda and the education of citizens often become blurred. Redes was
also a model in terms of its aesthetic and discursive forms, with Flaherty and
Eisenstein merging with Strand’s characteristic stamp and that of his fellows at the
Workers’ Film and Photo League and Nykino.
In a film like Láminas de Almahue/Sheets of Almahue (1962), the most experimental
of the works by Chilean film-maker Sergio Bravo, we can find hints of the
cinematography of Strand, Ralph Steiner and Leo Hurwitz, though Bravo is one of the
documentary film-makers who explicitly acknowledged Grierson’s influence and who
had met the Scotsman in person during his 1958 visit. After his stay in Montevideo
that year, Grierson had also travelled to Chile where, as in the Uruguayan capital, ‘he
appeared right from the first as the Apostle of a resurgence of the national industry’.
Once again, Grierson put together an intense agenda in Chile and continued his
incisive discourse in support of an authentic regard for everyday reality and
institutional support for cinema.30 At the Experimental Cinema Centre founded
by Bravo in Santiago in 1957, Grierson became excited after seeing the Chilean

Grierson and Latin America: Encounters, Dialogues and Legacies 233

documentary-maker’s first films, Trilla/Threshing (1957) and Mimbre/Wicker (1958),
two paradigmatic examples of the poetic Latin American documentary during the
period.31 In works such as these, Grierson may have noted a model different from the
ethnographic naturalism of Chambi or Ruiz’s narrative. We can assume that he viewed
Bravo’s work as a singular development, one culturally rooted in the path he had
sketched out in ‘First Principles of Documentary’, where dramatic construction gave
way to a visual, lyrical and poetic treatment. This model would reach its apotheosis in
Latin American production a short time later with Margot Benacerraf’s Araya (1959).
Eisenstein’s shadow was once again visible, while the film also had recourse to postwar
European documentaries for source material. In addition, Benacerraf’s work reveals a
new connection to the British documentary movement: the Shell Film Unit, founded
in 1952 under the direction of Lionel Cole, collaborated on the production of Araya.
Although film historians acknowledge Araya as a milestone in Venezuelan cinema, it
was to have few repercussions on Latin American film-making at the time. This is
probably owing to the fact that it was a swan song of an aesthetic-discursive model
that would soon become obsolete.

concLusions

Jorge Ruiz would later reflect on what the film-makers he cited as influential
(Grierson, Watt, Van Dyke, Fernandez) had actually given him:

They convinced me that cinema could go hand in hand with social development. And I am
not put off by the idea of being considered a propagandist. I have always been in favor of
audiovisual persuasion. The influential figures to whom I am indebted made a true discovery:
a cinema with proposals can be more useful than a cinema of protest.32

During the transition from the 1950s to the 60s, Latin American documentary
film-makers were convinced of the power of audiovisual persuasion. The proposals
would soon give way to protest, to open sociopolitical denunciation, and propaganda
was thus necessarily conceived of in terms of counter-information and agitation.
Perhaps the time had passed for documentaries imbued with the will to reform and
transform society within the parameters of modernity and democracy (the bases of the
programme drafted by John Grierson during the interwar period).33 The call to arms
was now aimed at overthrowing dictatorships in the region or fighting imperialism,
and the film language, as expressed in the naturalist, dramatic and poetic modes of the
Latin American documentary, would prove insufficient and soon be replaced by other
aesthetics and other more radical politics.
Grierson’s visit to South America in 1958 took place at an opportune time for
dialogue and exchange, and it was important for the consolidation of previous
influences and the creation of legacies for the future. Although it would be shortlived,
the inspiration provided by his programme of social intervention through
documentary – in a way perhaps similar to what occurred with Italian neo-realism in
Latin America – can be seen both before and after his visit, in the propagandistic and
creative trends of documentary cinema. These trends can be seen to some extent in

2 34 The Grierson Effect

certain types of cinema newsreels and documentaries from the 1940s and 50s; they are
also present in certain manifestos and projects from the 60s where, although the
languages were undergoing a full transformation (among other reasons, due to the
arrival of Direct Cinema), the Griersonian legacy, in some cases, persisted.

notEs

1. Julianne Burton, The Social Documentary in Latin America (Pittsburgh, PA: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 1990), p. 18.
2. Paulo Antonio Paranaguá, ‘Orígenes, evolución y problemas’, in Paulo Antonio Paranaguá
(ed.), El cine documental en América Latina (Madrid: Cátedra, 2003), pp. 39–45. The memory
of the Brazilian film-maker Pereira dos Santos cited in the epigraph come from his preface
to this book. See also Paranaguá, Tradición y modernidad en el cine de América Latina
(Madrid: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2003), pp. 200–20.
3. The context was evocative of the European cinema clubs at the end of the 1920s, such as
the London Film Society, where Grierson had recruited a few of the members who would
participate in the British documentary movement. See Mario Handler, ‘Starting from
Scratch: Artisanship and Agritprop’, in Julianne Burton (ed.), Cinema and Social Change in
Latin America: Conversations with Filmmakers (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), p. 16.
4. He would discuss his experiences in the altiplano in his programme This Wonderful World
on 29 January 1959, 9 February 1959 and 16 December 1966. See Forsyth Hardy, John
Grierson: A Documentary Biography (London: Faber and Faber, 1979), pp. 209–10. Hardy’s
work is the only book on Grierson that focuses at length on his trip to Latin America.
5. Juan José Mugni and Mario Raimondo, ‘El Archivo Nacional de la Imagen’, in SODRE:
70 ANIVERSARIO (Montevideo: SODRE, 2000), pp. 155–67. See also the important
dossier edited by Mariana Amieva, ‘Volver a las fuentes: El Festival Internacional de Cine
Documental y Experimental, 1954–1971’, in 33 Cines vol. 2 (2010), pp. 6–47. We would
like to express our sincere thanks to Juan José Mugni (Director of the Archivo Nacional
de la Imagen-Sodre, Montevideo) and to Eduardo Correa (Centro de Documentación
Cinematográfica, Cinemateca Uruguaya) who let us view important documents for this
research. We are also grateful to Adrián Muoyo, Octavio Morelli, Alejandro Intrieri and Julio
Artucio (Biblioteca, Centro de Documentación y Archivo, INCAA, Buenos Aires).
6. Hugo R. Alfaro (member of the jury of the international section of the festival), in Marcha,
27 June 1958, p. 19. According to the Uruguayan press, Grierson also expressed interest
in other films made in the same country such as Makiritare, by Roberto Gardiol and
Cantegriles, by Alberto Miller.
7. Ibid.
8. La mañana, 6 June 1958.
9. La mañana, 6 June 1958; Marcha, 30 May and 6 June 1958.
10. Homero Alsina Thevenet, ‘Grierson explica cosas’, El país, 7 June 1958.
11. On 19 May, Grierson gave a talk entitled ‘Perspectives for Cinematographic Art with the
Advance of Television’.
12. See La mañana, 28 May 1958; El país, 28 May 1958; Marcha, 30 May 1958.
13. Photo reports, generally on social problems, made with a camera and tape recorder and then
exhibited with captions.

Grierson and Latin America: Encounters, Dialogues and Legacies 235

14. Manuel Horacio Giménez, Escuela documental inglesa (Santa Fe: Editorial Documento del
Instituto de Cinematografía de la Universidad del Litoral, 1961). Besides the photograph,
the backcover featured an excerpt from the letter sent by the Scotsman to the school’s
students:

I want to tell you how highly I thought of your exhibition in Montevideo. It is a splendid
and exemplary teaching method and it is the first I have seen that contributes so simply
and so well to learning how to make a film. You get to the very root of this matter,
capturing the essential images and obliging them to hand over their content through
the captions. This is a notably simple but profound contribution, and I would like to
congratulate you and wish you further success.

15. El Heraldo, 18 June 1958; La prensa, 10 June 1958; La Nación, 10 June 1958.
16. It also discussed his project to create a National Cinema Institute in Brazil that would give
priority to documentaries. See Paranaguá, ‘Orígenes, evolución y problemas’, p. 39.
17. Elizabeth Sussex, ‘Cavalcanti in England’, Sight and Sound, Autumn 1975. Reprinted in
Kevin Macdonald and Mark Cousins (eds), Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary
(London: Faber and Faber, 1996), pp. 116–17.
18. Amir Labaki would give the following title to a section of his book on Brazilian documentary
focused on Mauro: ‘Grierson à la brasileria’, Labaki, Introduçao ao documentário brasileiro
(Sao Paulo: Editora Francis, 2006).
19. Glauber Rocha, Revisión crítica del cine brasileño (Madrid: Editorial Fundamento, 1971),
p. 26.
20. On the projects of Humberto Mauro, see the analyses in Paranaguá, El cine documental en
América Latina and Tradición y modernidad en el cine de América Latina.
21. Carlos Bedoya, 100 años de cine en el Perú: una historia crítica (Lima: Universidad de Lima/ICI,
1995), pp. 181 and 143. See also the interviews with the members of the group in Giancarlo
Carbone (ed.), El cine en el Perú: 1950–1972. Testimonios (Lima: Universidad de Lima, 1993).
22. This Wonderful World, 16 December 1966, quoted in Hardy, John Grierson, p. 221.
23. As Ruiz himself recalls in José Antonio Valdivia, Testigo de la realidad. Jorge Ruiz: memorias
del cine documental boliviano (Huelva: Festival de Cine Iberoamericano de Huelva, 1998,
2nd edn, 2003), pp. 67–8.
24. On the trajectory of Ruiz, see also Alfonso Gumucio-Dagron, ‘Jorge Ruiz’, in Paranaguá,
El cine documental en América Latina, pp. 141–9.
25. A post he would hold until 1964. On the the productions of the ICB, see Mikel Luis
Rodríguez, ‘ICB: el primer organismo institucional en Bolivia (1952–1967)’, Secuencias.
Revista de Historia del Cine vol. 10 (1999), pp. 23–37.
26. Ruiz would do an English-language version of the film for Grierson to screen at Edinburgh.
See Valdivia, Testigo de la realidad, p. 59.
27. A fictional full-length feature that used local residents as actors, this film recounted the
collective efforts of the village of Rurenabaque (Beni) to construct a pipeline for drinking
water.
28. Valdivia, Testigo de la realidad, p. 37.
29. John Grierson, ‘First Principles of Documentary’ (1932), in Ian Aitken (ed.), The
Documentary Film Movement: An Anthology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998),
pp. 81–93.

2 36 The Grierson Effect

30. Raúl Aicardi, ‘John Grierson, el sorprendente’, Pomaire vol. 13 (1958), p. 16, quoted in
Claudio Salinas Muñoz and Hans Stange Marcus, Historia del Cine Experimental en la
Universidad de Chile, 1957–1973 (Santiago de Chile: Uqbar editores, 2008), pp. 70–1.
Also the magazine Ecran vol. 1430 (24 May 1958), quoted in Alicia Vega, Itinerario del cine
documental chileno, 1900–1990 (Santiago de Chile: Universidad Alberto Hurtado, 2006),
pp. 165–6.
31. Alicia Vega remembers that the three films that Bravo did between 1956 and 1958 (Mimbre,
Imágenes antárticas and Trilla) were analysed in a seminar scheduled as part of Grierson’s
visit. (See Vega, Itinerario del cine documental chileno, 1900–1990, p. 165.) Grierson was so
enthusiastic about these films that he recommended Bravo and his group to the Cultural
Outreach Department at the University of Chile, thus forging institutional relations
between the centre and the university (Muñoz and Marcus, Historia del Cine Experimental en
la Universidad de Chile, 1957–1973, p. 35). On this period of Chilean cinema, see also the
classical works of Jacqueline Mouesca and the recent book by Pablo Corro et al., Teorías del
cine documental chileno 1957–1973 (Santiago de Chile: Pontificia Universidad Católica de
Chile, 2007).
32. Valdivia, Testigo de la realidad, p. 37.
33. See Ian Aitken, Film and Reform: John Grierson and the British Documentary Film Movement
(London: Routledge, 1990).

rEfErEncEs

Aicardi, Raúl, ‘John Grierson, el sorprendente’, Pomaire vol. 13 (1958), p. 16.

Aitken, Ian, Film and Reform: John Grierson and the British Documentary Film Movement
(London: Routledge, 1990).
Alfaro, Hugo R., ‘La vuelta al mundo en 40 días. Festival Cinematográfico del SODRE memorias
de un jurado’, Marcha, 27 June 1958, p. 19.
Amieva, Mariana, ‘Volver a las fuentes: El Festival Internacional de Cine Documental y
Experimental, 1954–1971’, 33 Cines vol. 2 (2010), pp. 6–47.
Bedoya, Carlos, 100 años de cine en el Perú: una historia crítica (Lima: Universidad de Lima/ICI,
1995).
Burton, Julianne, The Social Documentary in Latin America (Pittsburgh, PA: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 1990).
Carbone, Giancarlo (ed.), El cine en el Perú: 1950–1972. Testimonios (Lima: Universidad de Lima,
1993).
Corro, Pablo et al., Teorías del cine documental chileno 1957–1973 (Santiago de Chile: Pontificia
Universidad Católica de Chile, 2007).
‘De Problemas de Cine habla J. Grierson’, La prensa, 10 June 1958.
Giménez, Manuel Horacio, Escuela documental inglesa (Santa Fe: Editorial Documento del
Instituto de Cinematografía de la Universidad del Litoral, 1961).
‘Grierson se va y el Festival sigue’, La mañana, 6 June 1958.
Grierson, John, ‘First Principles of Documentary’ (1932), in Ian Aitken (ed.), The Documentary
Film Movement: An Anthology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), pp. 81–93.
Grierson, John, ‘Perspectives for Cinematographic Art with the Advance of Television’, Sodre
International Festival, Montevideo, 19 May 1958.

Grierson and Latin America: Encounters, Dialogues and Legacies 237

Gumucio-Dagron, Alfonso, ‘Jorge Ruiz’, in Paulo Antonio Paranaguá (ed.), El cine documental en
América Latina (Madrid: Cátedra, 2003), pp. 141–9.
Handler, Mario, ‘Starting from Scratch: Artisanship and Agritprop’, in Julianne Burton (ed.),
Cinema and Social Change in Latin America. Conversations with Filmmakers (Austin: University
of Texas Press, 1986), pp. 13–24.
Hardy, Forsyth, John Grierson: A Documentary Biography (London: Faber and Faber, 1979).
J.G.F., ‘Con humorismo Grierson supo decir importantes verdades’, La manana, 28 May 1958.
‘John Grierson in Bs.As. ¿Oferta del Instituto?’ El Heraldo, 18 June 1958.
Labaki, Amir, ‘Grierson à la brasileria’, in Introduçao ao documentário brasileiro (Sao Paulo: Editora
Francis, 2006), pp. 37–57.
Mouesca, Jacqueline, Plano secuencia de la memoria en Chile (Madrid: Editorial del Litoral, 1988).
Mouesca, Jacqueline, El documental chileno (Santiago de Chile: LOM Ediciones, 2005).
Mugni, Juan José and Mario Raimondo, ‘El Archivo Nacional de la Imagen’, in SODRE:
70 ANIVERSARIO (Montevideo: SODRE, 2000), pp. 155–67.
Muñoz, Claudio Salinas and Hans Stange Marcus, Historia del Cine Experimental en la Universidad
de Chile, 1957–1973 (Santiago de Chile: Uqbar editores, 2008).
M.T., ‘Algo más que un cineísta: John Grierson vino, vió y ojalá venza’, Marcha, 30 May 1958.
Paranaguá, Paulo Antonio (ed.), El cine documental en América Latina (Madrid: Cátedra, 2003).
Paranaguá, Paulo Antonio, Tradición y modernidad en el cine de América Latina (Madrid: Fondo de
Cultura Económica, 2003).
‘Presencia de Grierson’, La Nación, 10 June 1958.
Rocha, Glauber, Revisión crítica del cine brasileño (Madrid: Editorial Fundamento, 1971).
Rodríguez, Mikel Luis, ‘ICB: el primer organismo institucional en Bolivia (1952–1967)’,
Secuencias. Revista de Historia del Cine vol. 10 (1999), pp. 23–37.
Sussex, Elizabeth, ‘Cavalcanti in England’, Sight and Sound, Autumn 1975. Reprinted in Kevin
Macdonald and Mark Cousins (eds), Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary
(London: Faber and Faber, 1996), pp. 116–17.
Thevenet, Homero Alsina, ‘Le hablan, Señor Ministro’, El país, 28 May 1958.
Thevenet, Homero Alsina, ‘Grierson explica cosas’, El país, 7 June 1958.
Valdivia, José Antonio, Testigo de la realidad. Jorge Ruiz: memorias del cine documental boliviano
(Huelva: Festival de Cine Iberoamericano de Huelva, 1998), second edition 2003.
Vega, Alicia, Itinerario del cine documental chileno, 1900–1990 (Santiago de Chile: Universidad
Alberto Hurtado, 2006).

2 38 The Grierson Effect

Select Bibliography

Aitken, Ian, ‘John Grierson, Idealism and the Inter-war Period’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio
and Television vol. 9 no. 3 (1989), pp. 247–58.
Aitken, Ian, Film and Reform: John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement (London:
Routledge, 1990).
Aitken, Ian, (ed.), The Documentary Film Movement: An Anthology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1998).
Aitken, Ian, ‘The Development of Official Film-Making in Hong-Kong’, Historical Journal of Film,
Radio and Television vol. 2 no. 4 (2012), pp. 589–609.
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Experimental, 1954–1971’, 33 Cines vol. 2 (2010), pp. 6–47.
Anstey, Edgar, ‘The Early Days of Documentary’, Cine-Technician vol. 7 (September–October
1941), pp. 102–4.
Anstey, Edgar, ‘The Living Story: E.M.B.-G.P.O.’, Sight and Sound vol. 21 no. 4 (April–June 1952),
p. 176.
Anstey, Edgar, Stuart Hood, Claire Johnston and Ivor Montagu, ‘The Grierson Influence’,
Undercut vol. 9 (Summer 1983), p. 17.
Anthony, Scott and James Mansell (eds), The Projection of Britain: A History of the GPO Film Unit
(London: BFI, 2011).
Bertrand, Ina, ‘Theory into Practice: Stanley Hawes and the Commonwealth Film Unit’,
Screening the Past, special issue: ‘After Grierson’, edited by Ina Bertrand, 1999,
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Bertrand, Ina and Diane Collins, Government and Film in Australia (Sydney: Currency Press/
Australian Film Institute, 1981).
Beveridge, James, John Grierson: Film Master (New York: Macmillan, 1978).
Beveridge, James, ‘Grierson and Distribution’, in John Grierson and the NFB, proceedings of a
conference held at McGill University, 29–31 October 1981 (Toronto: ECW Press, 1984),
pp. 29–41.
Chittock, John (ed.), Researchers Guide to John Grierson: Films, Reference Sources, Collections, Data
(London: Grierson Memorial Trust, 1990).
Cinéma d’aujourd’hui, issue devoted to the British documentary, vol. 11 (February–March 1977).
Colls, Robert and Philip Dodd, ‘Representing the Nation – British Documentary Film,
1930–1945’, Screen vol. 26 no. 1 (1985), pp. 21–33.
Cronin, Mike, ‘Selling Irish Bacon: The Empire Marketing Board and Artists of the Free State’,
Éire-Ireland vol. 39 nos 3–4 (2004), pp. 132–43.

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Dahl, Rasmus, ‘A National, Historical Perspective on Documentary in Denmark’, Screening
the Past, special issue: ‘After Grierson’, http://tlweb.latrobe.edu.au/humanities/
screeningthepast/firstrelease/fr0799/rdfr7c.htm.
Dawson, Jonathan, ‘The Grierson Tradition’, in Ross Lansell and Peter Beilby (eds),
The Documentary Film in Australia (Melbourne: Cinema Papers/Film Victoria, 1981).
Druick, Zoë, Projecting Canada: Government Policy and Documentary Film at the National Film
Board (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007).
Druick, Zoë, ‘Visualising the World: The British Documentary at UNESCO’, in Scott Anthony
and James G. Mansell (eds), The Projection of Britain: A History of the GPO Film Unit (London:
BFI, 2011), pp. 272–80.
Ellis, Jack, ‘The Young Grierson in America, 1924–1927’, Cinema Journal vol. 8 (Fall 1968),
pp. 12–21.
Ellis, Jack, ‘John Grierson’s First Years at the National Film Board’, Cinema Journal vol. 10
(Fall 1970), pp. 2–14.
Ellis, Jack, ‘John Grierson’s Relation with British Documentary during World War Two’, in John
Grierson and the NFB, proceedings of a conference held at McGill University, 29–31 October
1981 (Toronto: ECW Press, 1984), pp. 62–76.
Ellis, Jack, ‘The Final Years of the British Documentary Movement as the Grierson Movement’,
Journal of Film and Video vol. 36 (Fall 1984), pp. 41–9.
Ellis, Jack, John Grierson: Life, Contributions, Influence (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern
Illinois University Press, 2000).
Evans, Gary, John Grierson and the National Film Board: The Politics of Wartime Propaganda
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984).
Evans, Gary, In the National Interest: A Chronicle of the National Film Board of Canada from 1949 to
1989 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991).
Evans, Gary, John Grierson: Trailblazer of Documentary (Montreal: XYZ Publishing, 2005).
‘The Film in Colonial Development Conference’, London, British Film Institute, 1948.
Film Enquiry Committee, Report of the Film Enquiry Committee (New Delhi: Government of India
Press, 1951).
Fox, Jo, ‘John Grierson, His “Documentary Boys” and the British Ministry of Information,
1939–42’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television vol. 25 no. 3 (2005), pp. 345–6.
Grierson, John, ‘Flaherty’s Poetic Moana’, New York Sun, 8 February 1926. Reprinted in Lewis Jacobs
(ed.), The Documentary Tradition, 2nd edn (New York: Norton and Co., 1979), pp. 25–6.
Grierson, John, ‘The Film in British Colonial Development’, Sight and Sound vol. 17 no. 65
(Spring 1948).
Grierson, John, ‘Union of South Africa: The Grierson Report’, 2nd draft, 1954. Reprinted in
Screening the Past no. 7 (1999), http://tlweb.latrobe.edu.au/humanities/screeningthepast/
classics/cl0799/JG1cl7a.pdf.
Grierson, John, ‘O These Problems, These Priorities’, in Jag Mohan (ed.), Four Times Five
(Bombay: Films Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1969), pp. 7–8.
Grierson, John, ‘Memorandum to the Right Honourable, the Prime Minister’, in Albert Moran
and Tom O’Regan (eds), An Australian Film Reader (Sydney: Currency Press, 1985), pp. 72–8.
Grierson, John, ‘A Film Policy for Canada’, in Douglas Fetherling (ed.), Documents in Canadian
Film (Peterborough: Broadview, 1988), pp. 51–67.
Grieveson, Lee and Colin MacCabe (eds), Film and the End of Empire (London: BFI, 2011).
Hardy, Forsyth, John Grierson: A Documentary Biography (London: Faber and Faber, 1979).

2 40 The Grierson Effect

Hardy, Forsyth (ed. and comp.), Grierson on Documentary (London: Faber and Faber, 1966).
Hardy, Forsyth (ed.), Grierson on the Movies (London: Faber and Faber, 1981).
Hardy, H. Forsyth, ‘Democracy as a Fighting Faith’, in John Grierson and the NFB, proceedings
of a conference held at McGill University, 29–31 October 1981 (Toronto: ECW Press, 1984),
pp. 86–94.
Hawes, Stanley, ‘Grierson in Australia’, in Albert Moran and Tom O’Regan (eds), Australian Film
Reader (Sydney: Currency Press, 1985), pp. 79–84.
Hees, E., The National Film Board of South Africa: A Short History, University of Stellenbosch
Annale, no. 1 (1991).
Higson, Andrew, ‘Britain’s Outstanding Contribution to Film’, in Charles Barr (ed.), All Our
Yesterdays: Ninety Years of British Cinema (London: BFI, 1986), pp. 72–97.
Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television vol. 9 no. 3 (1989), special issue: ‘John Grierson:
A Critical Retrospective’, edited by Ian Jarvie and Nicholas Pronay.
Hogenkamp, Bert, ‘The British Documentary Movement in Perspective’, in Willem De Greef and
Willem Hesling (eds), Image, Reality, Spectator: Essays on Documentary Film and Television
(Louvain: Acco, 1989).
Hood, Stuart, ‘John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement’, Sight and Sound vol. 17
no. 65 (Spring 1948), pp. 44–5.
Jarvie, Ian and Robert L. Macmillan, ‘John Grierson on Hollywood’s Success’, Historical Journal
of Film, Radio and Television vol. 9 no. 3 (1989), pp. 309–26.
‘John Grierson Archive’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television vol. 9 no. 3 (1989), p. 327.
John Grierson and the NFB, proceedings of a conference held at McGill University, 29–31 October
1981 (Toronto: ECW Press, 1984).
Jones, D. B., Movies and Memoranda: An Interpretive History of the National Film Board of Canada
(Ottawa: Canadian Film Institute, 1981).
Jones, D. B., ‘Assessing the National Film Board, Crediting Grierson’, Historical Journal of Film,
Radio and Television vol. 9 no. 3 (1989), pp. 301–8.
Lee, Rohama, Master of the Film Medium: John Grierson Pioneered the Documentary Film in Britain
and Canada (Ames: American Archives of Factual Film, Iowa State University, 1984).
Lockerbie, Ian, ‘Grierson and Realism’, in John Grierson and the NFB, proceedings of a conference
held at McGill University, 29–31 October 1981 (Toronto: ECW Press, 1984), pp. 86–101.
Lockerbie, Ian (ed.), John Grierson: Eyes of Democracy (Stirling: John Grierson Archive, 1990).
Lovell, A. and Hillier, J., Studies in Documentary (London: Secker and Warburg, 1972).
Low, Colin, ‘Grierson and “Challenge for Change” ’, in John Grierson and the NFB, proceedings
of a conference held at McGill University, 29–31 October 1981 (Toronto: ECW Press, 1984),
pp. 95–103.
MacDonald, Richard, ‘Evasive Enlightenment: World without End and the Internationalism of
Postwar Documentary’, Journal of British Cinema and Television vol. 10 no. 3 (2013), pp. 452–74.
MacPherson, Don and Paul Willemen (eds), Traditions of Independence: British Cinema in the
Thirties (London: BFI, 1979).
McInnes, Graham, One Man’s Documentary: A Memoir of the Early Days of the National Film Board
(Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2004).
Mohan, Jag (ed.), Two Decades of the Films Division (Bombay: Ministry of Information and
Broadcasting, 1969).
Mohan, Jag (ed.), Documentary Films and Indian Awakening (New Delhi: Publications Division,
Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1990).

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Moran, Albert, Projecting Australia: Government Film since 1945 (Sydney: Currency Press, 1991).
Moran, Albert and Tom O’Regan, ‘Two Discourses of Australian Film’, Australian Journal of
Screen Theory vol. 15 no. 16 (1983), pp. 163–73.
Morris, Peter, ‘Backwards to the Future: John Grierson’s Film Policy for Canada’, in Gene Walz
(ed.), Flashback: People and Institutions in Canadian Film History (Montreal: Médiatexte,
1986), pp. 17–35.
Morris, Peter, ‘Re-thinking Grierson: The Ideology of John Grierson’, in Pierre Vérnonneau,
Michael Dorland and Seth Feldman (eds), Dialogue: Cinéma canadienne et québécois / Canadian
and Quebec Cinema (Montreal: Médiatexte, 1987), pp. 21–56.
Morris, Peter, ‘ “Praxis into process”: John Grierson and the National Film Board of Canada’,
Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television vol. 9 no. 3 (1989), pp. 269–82.
Mugni, Juan José and Mario Raimondo, ‘El Archivo Nacional de la Imagen’, in SODRE:
70 ANIVERSARIO (Montevideo: SODRE, 2000), pp. 155–67.
National Film Board: Survey of Organization and Business Administration, Canadian Parliamentary
Papers, 1950.
Nelson, Joyce, The Colonized Eye: Rethinking the Grierson Legend (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1988).
Nichols, Bill, ‘Documentary Film and the Modernist Avant-Garde’, Critical Inquiry vol. 27 no. 4
(2001), pp. 580–610.
Pronay, Nicholas, ‘John Grierson and the Documentary – 60 Years On’, Historical Journal of Film,
Radio and Television vol. 9 no. 3 (1989), pp. 227–46.
Rice, Tom, ‘Distant Voices of Malaya, Still Colonial Lives’, Journal of British Cinema and Television
vol. 10 no. 3 (2013), pp. 430–51.
Roger, Andrew, ‘Some Factors Contributing to the Formation of the National Film Board of
Canada’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television vol. 9 no. 3 (1989), pp. 259–68.
Rotha, Paul, Documentary Film (London: Faber and Faber, 1935).
Rotha, Paul, Documentary Diary: An Informal History of the British Documentary Film, 1928–1939
(New York: Hill & Wang, 1973).
Screening the Past, special issue: ‘After Grierson’, edited by Ina Bertrand (1999), http://tlweb.
latrobe.edu.au/humanities/screeningthepast/current/cc47.html.
Sellars, William, ‘Making Films in and for the Colonies’, Journal of the Royal Society of the Arts
vol. 1-1 no. 4910 (16 October 1953), pp. 828–37.
Smyth, Rosaleen, ‘The Central African Film Unit’s Images of Empire, 1948–1963’, Historical
Journal of Film, Radio and Television vol. 3 no. 2 (1983), pp. 131–47.
Smyth, Rosaleen, ‘The Post-war Career of the Colonial Film Unit in Africa; 1946–1955’,
Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television vol. 12 no. 2 (1992), pp. 163–77.
Smyth, Rosaleen, ‘Grierson, the British Documentary Movement, and Colonial Cinema in British
Colonial Africa’, Film History: An International Journal vol. 25 no. 2 (2013), pp. 82–113.
Stollery, Martin, Alternative Empires: European Modernist Cinemas and Cultures of Imperialism
(Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2000).
Stollery, Martin, ‘From Storm over Asia to Dawn over Africa: Transnationalism and Imperialism in
British Intellectual Film Culture of the late 1920s and 1930s’, Transnational Cinemas vol. 2
no. 1 (2011), pp. 93–111.
Sussex, Elizabeth, ‘The Golden Years of Grierson’, Sight and Sound vol. 41 no. 3 (Summer 1972),
pp. 1449–53.
Sussex, Elizabeth, The Rise and Fall of British Documentary: The Story of the Film Movement
Founded by John Grierson (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975).

2 42 The Grierson Effect

Swann, Paul, ‘John Grierson and the G.P.O. Film Unit 1933–1939’, Historical Journal of Film,
Radio and Television vol. 1 no. 1 (1983), pp. 19–32.
Swann, Paul, ‘The Selling of the Empire: The EMB Film Unit’, Studies in Visual Communication
vol. 9 no. 3 (1983), pp. 15–24.
Swann, Paul, The British Documentary Film Movement, 1926–1946 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989).
Tallents, Sir Stephen, ‘The First Days of Documentary’, Documentary News Letter vol. 6 no. 55
(January–February 1947), pp. 76–7.
Tallents, Sir Stephen, British Documentary (London: Film Centre, 1968).
Tallents, Sir Stephen, ‘The Birth of British Documentary’, Journal of the University Film
Association vol. 20 nos 1–3 (1968), n.p.
Tomaselli, K. G, ‘Grierson in South Africa: Culture, State and Nationalist Ideology in the South
African Film Industry: 1940–1981’, Cinema Canada vol. 122 (1985), pp. 24–7.
Tomaselli, K. G. and Hees, E. ‘John Grierson in South Africa: Afrikaner Nationalism and the
National Film Board’, Screening the Past vol. 7 (1999), latrobe.edu.au/www/screeningthepast/
index.
Tudor, Andrew, ‘The Problem of Context: John Grierson’, in Theories of Film (New York: Viking,
1974), pp. 59–76.
UNESCO, Report of the Commission on Technical Needs in Press, Radio, Film, Following the Survey in
Twelve War-devastated Countries (Paris: UNESCO, 1947).
Waugh, Thomas, Michael Brendan Baker and Ezra Winton (eds), Challenge for Change: Activist
Documentary at the National Film Board of Canada (Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queen’s
University Press, 2010).
Williams, Deane, ‘Between Empire and Nation: Grierson in Australia’, Screening the Past,
special issue: ‘After Grierson’, edited by Ina Bertrand (1999), http://tlweb.latrobe.edu.au/
humanities/screeningthepast/current/cc47.html.
Williams, Deane, Australian Post-war Documentary Films: An Arc of Mirrors (Bristol and Chicago,
IL: Intellect, 2008).
Winston, Brian, ‘Great Artist or Fly on the Wall: Accommodation and Its Destruction?’, in Jay
Ruby and Martin Taureg (eds), Visual Explorations of the World: Selected Papers from the
International Conference on Visual Communication (Aachen: Herodet in Rader Verlag, 1987),
pp. 190–204.
Winston, Brian, Claiming the Real: The Griersonian Documentary and Its Legitimations (London:
BFI, 1995).
Woods, D. L., ‘John Grierson: Documentary Film Pioneer’, Quarterly Journal of Speech vol. 57
(1971), pp. 221–8.
Woods, Philip, ‘From Shaw to Shantaram: The Film Advisory Board and the Making of British
Propaganda Films in India, 1940–1943’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television vol. 21
no. 3 (2001), pp. 293–308.
Wright, Basil, ‘The Progress of the Factual Film: 1. Grierson the Pioneer’, in Public’s Progress
(London: Contact, 1948), pp. 64–71.
Wright, Basil, ‘Documentary To-day’, Penguin Film Review vol. 2 (January 1947), pp. 37–44.
Wright, Basil, ‘Documentary: Flesh, Fowl or …?’, Sight and Sound vol. 19 (March 1950), pp. 43–7.
Wright, Basil, The Long View (London: Secker & Warburg, 1974).

Select Bibliography 243

Appendix: John Grierson Biographical Timeline

• 26 April 1898
John Grierson born, Deanston, Scotland.
• 1915
Grierson attends Glasgow University.
• 1917
Enlists in Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve.
• 1919
Returns to Glasgow University.
• 1923
Receives an MA from Glasgow University with distinctions in English and Moral
Philosophy.
• 1924
Takes up post at University of Chicago as a visiting postgraduate scholar on a
Rockefeller Research Fellowship in Social Science. This where Grierson’s interest in
film and in theories of public opinion, such as expressed by Walter Lippmann,
commenced. Spends time in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles. During this period
also becomes film reviewer for newspapers such as New York Sun, where the term
‘documentary’ was first used in a review of Robert Flaherty’s Moana published 8
February 1926 under the pseudonym ‘the Moviegoer’. Helps John S. Cohen Jr compile
the titles for the US premiere of Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin.
• 1926
Researches Famous Players–Lasky records in Hollywood and publishes findings in
Motion Picture News in November and December. Also meets directors such as Erich
von Stroheim, Harry Landon, Charles Chaplin, King Vidor, F. W. Murnau and Ernst
Lubitsch.
• 1927
Leaves the US and joins Stephen Tallents at the Empire Marketing Board in proposing
that film study, screening and production could ‘bring the Empire alive’ to its peoples
and could be ‘a medium of education and persuasion’.1
• 1929
Completes Drifters, his first film for the EMB.
• 1929–30
Hires J. D. Davison, Basil Wright, John Taylor, Paul Rotha, Evelyn Spice, Donald Taylor,
Arthur Elton, Edgar Anstey and Stuart Legg for the EMB Film Unit.

Appendix 245
• 1933
Industrial Britan released as part of the Imperial Six. Other films in this package were
Basil Wright’s The Country Come to Town, Arthur Elton’s Upstream, Wright’s O’er Hill
and Dale, Elton’s Shadow on the Mountain and Wright’s Lumber.
• 1933
EMB Film Unit and Stephen Tallents move to the General Post Office Film Unit and
are joined, for various periods of time, by Alberto Cavalcanti, Harry Watt, Raymond
Spottiswoode, Humphrey Jennings, Alan Shaw, Len Lye, Benjamin Britten, and W. H.
Auden.
Some of the most famous films of the British documentary movement were made
by the GPO Film Unit, including Song of Ceylon, Pett and Pott (1934), Night Mail, The
Savings of Bill Blewitt, Housing Problems, North Sea and Target for Tonight (1941).
• 1934
Grierson continued speaking and writing on documentary film. His engagements
included a series of ten lectures at the University of Leicester entitled ‘The Arts of
Cinema and Its Social Relationships’ as well as lectures to the Glasgow Film Society
and the Scottish Educational Cinema Society, Independent Film-makers Association,
Manchester Film Institute, British Film Institute.
• 1937
Established Film Centre, ‘not to produce or distribute films … but to advise sponsors,
supervise production, make arrangements for distribution, undertake scenarios
work and research, open up new markets, and in general stimulate and guide the
development of the [documentary] movement in general’.2
• May 1938
Visits Canada as film consultant on behalf of the Imperial Relations Trust.
• 14 October 1939
Appointed Canadian Government Film Commissioner.
• January 1940
Leaves Canada to visit Australia and New Zealand as a continuation of his role as film
consultant for the IRT.
• December 1940
Returns to Ottawa and Canadian NFB.
• August 1945
Resigns from Canadian NFB.
• 1945
Establishes International Film Associates, a documentary production and distribution
network alongside Robert Flaherty, Stuart Legg, Raymond Spottiswoode, Jena Benoit-
Lévy and Margaret Ann Adamson.
• May 1946
Sets up The World Today, to produce shorts for theatrical release.
• February 1947
Appointed advisor to UNESCO.
• 1948
Joined Films Division of the Central Office of Information, which included the Crown
Film Unit and the Colonial Film Unit as well as commercial units such as Basic Films,
Greenpark Productions, Paul Rotha Productions and Realist Film Unit.

2 46 The Grierson Effect

• 1949
Visits South Africa to advise the government on setting up of a national film board.
• 1950
Appointed executive producer of Group 3, a government-backed studio intended to
produce feature films for the purpose of training film-makers.
• October 1957
This Wonderful Life, produced and presented by Grierson, is aired on Scottish television
and runs for nine years.
• January 1969
Visiting Lecturer at McGill University, Montreal.
• April 1970
Visits India with the Canadian International Development Agency to advise on
methods of communication and education pertaining to birth control. Later invited to
review the production of the government’s Films Division.
• 19 February 1972
Dies Bath, England.

noTes

1. Jack Ellis, John Grierson: Life, Contributions, Influence (Carbondale and Edwardsville:
Southern Illinois University Press, 2000, pp. 38–9.
2. Ibid., p. 111.

RefeRences

Aitken, Ian, Film and Reform: John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement (London and
New York: Routledge, 1990).
Beveridge, James, John Grierson: Film Master (New York and London: Macmillan/Collier
Macmillan, 1978).
Ellis, Jack, John Grierson: Life, Contributions, Influence (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern
Illinois University Press, 2000).

Appendix 247
Index

Notes: Page numbers in bold indicate detailed analysis. Those in italic refer to illustrations.
Foreign-language films are indexed under their English titles (where these are given), with country of
origin.
n = endnote.

6.30 Collection (1934) 39 Afrikaners Andrews, Stanhope 125,

cinema 210–11, 212, 213 127, 128, 129–32, 133,
Aamot, Kristoffer 86–7 cultural identity 210–11 136n77
Abbott, John 18 history 211–12 ‘Films for Democracy’
Abraham, T. A. 164 migration 211–12 129–30
accents, on screen/in society nationalist movements 8, ‘Propagandists with Good
49, 54 212, 214 Consciences’ 132
According to the Law (Sweden Ag, Lars 82 Anstey, Edgar 171, 245
1957) 88 Aitken, Ian 7, 13, 24, 36, 37–8, Anthony, Scott, and James
Achilles, HMS 128, 129 81, 187, 198 Mansell, The Projection of
‘acting’ Akimoto Takeshi 76n41 Britain 4
debates on styles 45–6, ALACI (Asociación Araya (Venezuela 1959) 234
56n21 Latinoamericana de Ardmore Studios 178
stilted 5, 43, 46–9, 51–3; as Cineístas Independientes) Argentina, Grierson’s visit to
proof of authenticity 46 223 229
tendency to overlook 53 Alberta, University of 109 Arghya (India 1961) 164
Adams, Brian 148n2 Alfaro, Hugo 227, 235n6 Arguedas, José María 231
Adamson, Margaret Ann 246 All My Ships (Denmark 1951) Aristotle 72
Africa 187–201 86 Arnheim, Rudolf 60, 64, 83
anti-colonial movements Allakarialluk (‘Nanook’) 48 art, social function of 159–61
193–4, 200–1 Almquist, Stig 87 Aryeetey, Sam 192, 193
audiences 199 Alto Plano, people of 231 Asanuma Keiji 76n37
British films set in 187, The Ama of Wagu (Japan 1941) Atlantean (Ireland 1980) 181
196–7, 199 73 Atsugi Taka, translation of
casting of films 195–7 Amenu’s Child (Ghana 1950) Rotha 60, 62, 63, 65–71,
depictions of local people 5, 192 73–4n3
190, 191–2, 194–7 Amuah, James 193 biographical/professional
film commentaries 194, Ancient Weavers Today (India background 62–3, 73
195–6 1957) 163 compared with Sekino’s
languages 194 Andersen, Hans Christian 69–70
training of technicians 195 88 criticisms 67–8, 76n39
see also South Africa Anderson, Lindsay 53–4, 55 dating 66

Index 249
Atsugi Taka cont. The Back of Beyond (Australia Bonney, E. G. 145, 146
emendations by Sekino 68 1954) 149n9 Boon, Timothy, Films of Fact 4
errors in 59, 61–2, 67, Baëta, A. R. 191, 202n21 Borge, Erik 87
76nn38–9 Bakiga people (Uganda), Bose, Debaki Kumar 164
own comments on 72, 74n7, resettlement/depiction The Boy Kumasenu (Ghana
77n49 190–1, 197–8 1952) 189, 190, 192, 194,
revisions 70–1 Balázs, Béla 60, 64, 83 199, 204n76
Atsumi Teruo 73 Balcon, Michael 188, 196, 198, Boyer, Raymond, Dr 112
Auden, W. H. 160, 228, 246 199–200 Brando, Marlon 56n21
Auerbach, Erich 45 Baptista, Clement 156, 164 Brandon, Tom 31
August Rhapsody (Sweden Barry, Iris 17–18, 31 Brasilianas (Brazil 1945–54)
1940) 87 Basic Education (India 1950) 230
Austin, J. L. 55n2 159 Brault, Michel 54
Australia 4, 5, 7, 139–48 Bassett, Michael 136n58 The Brave Don’t Cry (1952) 195
Committee on National Batterbee, Sir Henry 126 Bravo, Sergio 225, 233–4,
Morale 141–2 Battleship Potemkin (USSR 237n31
Council of Film Societies 1926) 13, 16, 29–31, 30 Brazil, documentary in 230,
146–7 Baxter, John 194 236n16
Department of Agriculture BBC (British Broadcasting Breathless (France 1960) 181
144 Corporation) 82, 103n8, Britten, Benjamin 246
Department of Information 209 Brown, Judith M. 154
139–40, 143, 144 Beeby, C. E., Dr 123, 125, 127, Bruzzi, Stella 55n2
Department of Postwar 128, 133, 136n76 Buchanan, Donald 109
Reconstruction 144 Benacerraf, Margot 234 Bullfighters and Condors (Peru
film societies 146–7 Benoit-Lévy, Jena 246 1956) 231
government film policy Bertrand, Ina 139, 143–4, Burns, Robert 134
140–2, 143–4, 147–8 145–6 Burton, Julianne 223
governmental structure Beveridge, James 105, 114, Butler, Judith 55n2
148n3 157, 162
Grierson’s visit to 127, 139, Bevin, Ernest 197 Cameron, Earl 197, 203n61
145 Bhavnani, Mohan 157–8, 164 Campbell, R. M. 135–6n47
National Film Board 139, Bhownagary, Jean 157, 162, Canada 4, 5, 7, 35–6, 105–15
140–1, 148, 149n10 164 anti-Communist agitation
nationalist sentiments/film Billimoria, Fali 157, 164 112, 117n34
140–2 Birri, Fernando 223, 225, 229 cinema legislation 105,
postwar reconstruction Blackburne, K. W. 191 106–7, 109
140–2, 143–4 Blaylock, Jennifer 192 criticisms of Grierson 174–6
production facilities Blewitt, Bill 43, 47, 47–8, 51 Grierson as film commissioner
139–40 Bloom, Peter 192 109–12, 110
state film centres 144–8 Body of Cuzco (Peru 1955) 231 Grierson’s comments on 105,
Australian Centre for the Boer War (1899–1902) 107–8, 114, 174, 178
Moving Image (Melbourne) 211–12 Grierson’s departure from
150n36 Bolivia, documentary in 21, 112, 174
authenticity (of screen 230–1, 232 Grierson’s influence in
performances) 46–7, 54–5 Bolivian Cinematographic 105–6
failure of 43 Institute (ICB) 232 Grierson’s time in 107–12,
unprofessionalism as proof of Bollywood, alternatives to 156 113–15, 123
46 Bomholt, Julius 81 media distribution 109

2 50 The Grierson Effect

Canada cont. Chanda Committee (India colonies, film in 3–4, 6, 7,
as model for Ireland 178–80, 1966) 165 93–102, 187–201
181–2 Chaplin, Charlie 245 depictions of local people 5,
newsreels 109, 111 Chaskel, Pedro 224 190, 191–2, 194–7
non-theatrical film Cherry, Lawrence 56–7n29, see also Africa
screenings 108, 109, 117n34 A Colour Box (1935) 39
110–12, 116n23 Chicago, University of 1, 14 Come Back, Sebastiana (Bolivia
population relocation Chilcott, Mollie 123–4 1953) 232–3
schemes 113–14 Children at Work (Ireland 1973) The Coming of Dial (1933) 39
provincial film centres 106, 178, 180 Conlon, Alfred 143
115n8 Chile, documentary in 233–4, constructivism 16, 37
talks by Grierson 21–2, 114 237n31 Coombs, H. C., Dr 140–1,
trade union showings 108 Christensen, Theodor 6–7, 79, 143–4, 146, 149n10
university extension 80, 81, 83–6, 84, 89–90 Cooper, Charles 31
programmes 109, 116n21 ‘Documentary – hvad er det?’ Cooper, Frank 145
US-backed films made in (‘Documentary – What Is Cooper, Frederick 197
106–7 That?’) 84–5 Corbett, Edward ‘Ned’ 109
wartime documentary ‘Dokumentarfilmens krise’ Corner, John 44
production 108–12 (‘The Crisis of Counterplan (1932) 33
Wartime Information Board Documentary Film’) 85 The Country Come to Town
111 Christie, Ian 29, 31–2, 34, 35 (1933) 246
see also National Film Board Churchill, Winston 96, 180 Country Lads (NZ 1941) 130–1
(Canada) Cilliers Film Committee (SA reception 131–2
Canada, from Coast to Coast 1943) 210–11 Cover to Cover (1936) 20
(1932) 106 cinema vérité 24 Croagh Patrick (religious site)
Canada Carries On (newsreel, Cinematograph Films Act 1927 180
1940–59) 109 (UK) 106–7 Crown Film Unit 2, 93, 98–9,
Canadian Government Motion Citizen of Singapore (1950) 100 155, 187–8
Picture Bureau (CGMPB) Clann na Poblachta (Family of Cry, the Beloved Country (1951)
106 the Republic) 173 197
Cantegriles (Uruguay 1958) Clarendon, Lord 126 Cunningham, Stuart 140, 146
235n6 Clark, Joseph, et al., Useful
Carnival of Kanas (Peru 1956) Cinema 4 Dances of Assam (India 1963)
231 class, social 163
Cathay-Keris/Cathay Film of directors 52 Dansk Kulturfilm 79
Services 99–100 importance in UK society 49 Davidson, Norris 174, 184n15
Cavalcanti, Alberto 48, 228, Coal Face (1935) 39, 195 Davis, Thomas 173
230, 246 Cohen, Jack 29 Davison, J. D. 245
A Century of Indian Archaeology Cold War 95–6 Daybreak in Udi (Ghana 1949)
(India 1960) 163 Cole, Lionel 234 187–8, 195
Cerruto, Waldo 232 Collins, Diane 139, 143–4, de Lothbiniere, Anthony 232
Chadwick, E. R. 187–8 145–6 de Valera, Eamon 171–2
Challenge for Change Colonial Film Unit 2, 5, 7, De Villiers Report (SA 1956)
(Canadian project) 181–2 93–4, 98–9, 102, 191 215–18
Chambi, Manuel 223, 226, 231 closure 99 Dean, Colin 140–1, 143, 144
Chambi, Martín 231 Colonial Office 93–4, 97, 102, Dean, James 56n21
Chambi, Victor 231 188–9 Deep Are the Roots (TV 1950)
Chanan, Michael 39 Colonial Service 214 196

Index 251
Denmark 6–7, 79–81, 83–6 Druick, Zoë 17 The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty
camera equipment 80 Drummond, David Henry 145, (USSR 1927) 31, 177
cinema legislation 85–6 147 Fall-Out (Norway 1964) 87
institutional frameworks for Dry Leaves (India 1961) 164 Feldman, Simón 223
cinema 79–80 dubbing 162 Fenner, Charles 145
National Film Board 79, 85 Duncan, Catherine 144 Fenuku, R. O. 192
Nazi occupation/resistance Fernández, Emilio ‘El Indio’
movement 89 Earth (USSR 1930) 33 233, 234
social agenda films 88–90 Eco, Umberto 44 Festival (Ireland 1967) 178,
television 81 educational theory 1–2 180
The Deserter (USSR 1933) 33 Ehrenborg, Lennart 81–2, 83 Festival Time (India 1950)
Dewey, John 19 eighteenth century, debates on 162–3
A Diary for Timothy (1935) acting 45–6 Fianna Fáil (Republican Party)
52–3 Eisenstein, Sergei 13, 16, 34, 173
Diawara, Manthia 192 59, 60, 64, 83 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 36
Dickinson, Thorold 31 death 39n4 Field Diagnosis Boat (1939)
Diesen, Jan Anders 82 Grierson’s criticisms 33, 212 73
Direct Cinema 49, 87–8 influence in Africa/Americas Fighting Soldiers (Japan 1939)
directors, social class of 52 195, 212, 225, 233 66, 76n41
documentary influence on Grierson 6, 16, Figueroa, Gabriel 233
budgets 52 29–32, 38 Figueroa, Luis 231
coinage of term 2, 16, 171, lectures 32 Film Act 1938 (Canada) 105,
245 meeting with Grierson 31 109, 114
compatibility with montage Method 37 Film Act 1950 (Canada) 105
24–5 The Eleventh Year (USSR 1927) A Film Board for Ireland? (1975)
definitions 2, 47 31 181–2
economics of 1 Ellis, Jack C. 13, 14, 15, Film Law 1939 (Japan) 60, 61
‘high’ vs ‘low’ cultural forms 16–17, 29, 114, 201n7 Films Division (India) 5, 7, 93,
5 Elton, Arthur 48–9, 52, 109, 153, 155–66
intended aims 2, 187 245–6 as alternative to Bollywood
Japanese words for 61 Elton, Ralph 95 cinema 156
limitations (of British style) Empire Marketing Board 2, 3, under colonial rule 156–7
5 16, 136n74, 155, 173, creation (post-independence)
studies 4 184n13 155
Documentary Film (Rotha) 6, The End of the Game (Denmark criticisms of output 162,
60–2, 128, 142, 217 1960) 90 163, 165–6
criticisms 64–5 The End of St Petersburg (USSR distancing from British
Japanese translations 59, 1927) 31, 33 tradition 155
61–72, 73–4n3, 76n39; Endsleigh, Rex 230 divergence from government
errors in 59, 61–2, 67–8, Engmann, Nortey 199 policy 163–4
69–70, 76nn38–9 Enthusiasm (1930) 33 films of rural life 164–5
dominions 7, 94 Ermler, Fridrikh 33 Griersonian influences on
see also Australia; Canada; Everett, Percy Edgar 144 159–61
New Zealand internal rifts 93–4
Dovzhenko, Aleksandr 33, 34 The Face of Britain (1935) 20 logo 154
Dreyer, Carl Theodor 88–9 Faces in Shadow (Sweden 1956) units 156
Drifters (1929) 6, 16, 30, 31, 88 Fine Gael (Tribe of the Irish)
39, 49, 72, 102, 172, 245 Fairbanks, Douglas 29 173

2 52 The Grierson Effect

Fires Were Started (1943) Geijutsu Eigasha (Art Film Grierson, John cont.
49–53, 51, 54 Company) 63–4 in New Zealand 127–8; in
claims made for 52 The General Line (1934) 33 South Africa 213, 216–17,
depiction of criminal Genette, Gérard 198 218; in US 21–3; in USSR
behaviour 50 Ghana 5, 8 32–4
language 50 anti-colonial movement comments on South African
Fisherman’s Nets (Mexico 1934) 193–4 society 209, 210–11,
233 independence 188 212–14, 218
Five Faces of Malaya (1938) Gibson, Ross 148 criticisms 174–7
94–5, 95 Gideon’s Way (TV 1964) 100 as film critic 16
Flaherty, Robert 2, 13, 16, 29, Giménez, Manuel Horacio as film producer/director 8,
48, 109, 169, 170, 170–2, 229, 236n14 30, 102, 171, 190, 200
174, 183, 228, 230, 246 Godard, Jean-Luc 181 health 116n16
criticisms 8, 66 Goffman, Irving 44 ideological stance 158,
influence 79, 144, 225, 233 Gold Coast see Ghana; Gold 159–61
relationship with Grierson Coast Film Unit influence: global 3–9, 49,
171–2, 181 Gold Coast Film Unit 8, 187, 54–5, 59; in Australia 142,
Fogo Island (Newfoundland) 189, 191 143, 148; in colonies 93,
nucleus of personnel 191–2
113–14, 181–2 94, 96, 189; in India 153,
Golden River (1954) 159
Folk Dances of India (India 156, 158, 159–61, 165; in
Goldsmith, Oliver 45
1961) 163 Ireland 169–70, 172,
Gopal, Krishna 156
The Forgotten Indians 176–7, 180, 182–3; in Latin
Gorbachev, Mikhail 38
(Bolivia/UK, 1956–7) 232 America 224–5, 232–3,
Gordon, Walter 117n34
Forman, Denis 52 234–5; in New Zealand
Gouzenko, Igor 112, 174
Fowle, Henry E. ‘Chick’ 230 127–9, 132; in Scandinavia
Govan, H. W. 96
Fox, Jo 188 79, 81, 82–3, 84–5, 88, 90;
GPO Film Unit 2, 3, 16, 155,
Frankel, Cyril 8, 190, 195, 196, in South Africa 212, 219;
173, 246
199–200 in US 20, 24–5
Graham, Sean 189, 189, 191–4
Fraser, Peter 123, 124–5, opposition to 7, 93–4, 97–9,
racial attitudes 192–3
126–7, 128, 130, 131, 133 101–2
A Surfeit of Sun 193
Free Cinema 53–4, 85 Graham, Shirley 148n2 others’ reminiscences of 181
Freedom? (Ireland 1960) 176, Granton Trawler (1934) 20, 39 political outlook 35–8,
177, 178 Greene, Graham 103n8 213–14
Freedom for Ghana (Ghana Greene, Hugh Carleton 96, PR strategies 45, 46, 53
1957) 193–4 103n8 role in development of
Friendship (Germany 1931) 65 Grierson, John 110, 132, 224, documentary 1–2, 3
From Misfits to Yuppies (Sweden 228 travels 1, 5; to Australia
1993) 88 biography 1, 245–7 127, 139, 145–6, 147; to
Furhammer, Leif 83 as Canadian film Canada 21, 107–12,
commissioner 109–12 113–15, 184n29; to France
Gael Linn (Gaelic Pool) change in views 175–6 113; to Ireland 173–6; to
169–70, 176–7, 178, comments on cinema 1, 2; in New Zealand 121–7, 133,
184n26 Africa 188–9, 191, 193, 135n15; to South Africa
Gamla Stan (Sweden 1931) 87 194–5, 200–1; in Canada 211–15, 219; to South
Gardiol, Roberto 235n6 105, 107–8, 114, 174, 178, America 223–32, 234–5,
Garga, B. D. 161 181–2; in Ireland 169, 235n4; to UK (from
Garrick, David 45–6, 56n21 173–6; in Latin America Canada) 116n16; to US
Gary, Brett 19 227–9, 236n14, 237n31; 13–17, 22–3, 24, 29–31

Index 253
Grierson, John cont. Hediger, Vinzenz, and Patrick India 5, 153–66
as TV producer 8, 200, 225, Vonderau, Films That Work ambiguous relationship with
231 4 UK 161–2
views on television 82 Hegel, Friedrich 24, 36 British colonial rule 153–4,
writings: ‘A Film Policy for Hen Woman (Ireland 1933) 156–7
Canada’ 169, 174, 175–6, 174, 184n15 censorship 165
178–80; ‘A Film Policy for Hénaut, Dorothy 181 colonial legacy (to
Ireland’ 173–6; ‘First Henningsen, Poul 88 independent state/film-
Principles of Documentary’ Here Are the Railroads makers) 154–5, 160–1
38, 233, 234; ‘Shaping a (Denmark 1948) 89 disenchantment with
South African Film Hertogs, Daan, and Nico de government policy 163–4,
Instrument’ 188–9, Klerk, Uncharted Territory 165–6
190–1, 193–4, 195, 196, 4 documentary production
197, 214–15 Hesse, Chris 192–3 154–6
see also ‘Grierson effect’ Heyer, John 7, 140–1, 142–3, dubbing of films 162
Grierson, Margaret 135n15 144, 145, 146, 149n9 film audiences 157–8,
Grierson, Marion 56–7n29 Higson, Andrew 188 160–1
Grierson, Ruby 52, 56–7n29 Hill, Annette 44, 147 Film Enquiry Committee
Grierson Cinema, Melbourne Hill, John 174 158
139, 144–5, 148 Hipkins, B. H. 96 films of rural life 164–5
‘Grierson effect’ 3, 4–5, 139, Hodge, Tom 7, 96–100 focus of films on
148, 172 Hong Kong 5, 7, 97–102 social/political advances
contradictory impacts 6, 7, 8 opposition to Griersonian 159, 160–1
Grieveson, Lee ideas 97–9, 101–2 languages 162–3
Film and Empire 4 refugee population 100 Legislative Assembly 155
Film and the End of Empire 4 Hong Kong Film Unit 5, linguistic limitations of
Griffith, Richard 198 99–102 films/film-makers 162
Griffiths, Fred 51, 51, 57n33 decline/demise 101–2 literacy levels 158–9
Groulz, Gilles 54 outsourcing 102 national heritage films
Group 3 2, 188–9, 190, 195, Horton, S. A. 52, 57n33 162–3
198 Housing Problems (1935) 20, nationalist movement/
Groys, Boris 34 52, 56–7n29, 246 cinema 154, 156
Houston, Penelope 146 railways 159–60
Hackett, Yvette 117n27 Hughes, John 143, 149n10 urban film distribution
Handicrafts of Travancore (India Hunter, Sir Thomas 123, 125 centres 161–2
1950) 162 Hurwitz, Leo 233 wartime propaganda 153–5
Hardy, Forsyth 14, 21, 82, see also Films Division
201n7, 235n4 I Am Ireland (Ireland 1959) Indian Art through the Ages
Harper, Sue 194 176, 177, 178 (India 1959) 163
Harris, Walter 129 Iijima Tadashi 76n39 indigenous peoples,
Hart, Ben 99, 100 Imaizumi Yoshitama 73 presentations of see Africa;
Hart, Roger 181 Imamura Taihei 60, 62, 63, 71, Latin America
Hasegawa Nyozekan 60 73n2, 76n39 individual, relationship with
Hawes, Stanley 96, 109 Imperial Relations Trust 3, state 36–7
Hearst, W. R. 6, 15–16 107–8, 122, 139, 145 Industrial Britain (1931) 171,
The Heart of the Matter (1953) In Queue for Life (Denmark 181, 246
197 1958) 90 Information Films of India
Heath, Gordon 196 Incursions (Swedish TV) 82 161

2 54 The Grierson Effect

International Documentary Japan cont. Labaki, Amir 236n18
and Experimental Film prestige of documentary Labyrinth (Canada 1967) 180
Festival (Montevideo 1958) 60–1 Langdon, Harry 245
223–9, 230, 232, 236n14 translations of other film Langstone, Frank 122, 124,
delegates 223, 224 theorists 59, 60 133
Grierson’s talks to 227–9 translations of Rotha 59 Larkin, Brian 193
significance of Grierson’s Jarl, Stefan 87–8 Lasswell, Harold 14
attendance 223, 225, 226 Jeffries, Shirley Williams 145 Latin America 4, 5, 8, 223–35
International Film Associates Jennings, Humphrey 49–53, emergence of documentary
246 55, 246 223–4
Iran 8 actors’ performances under film societies 224–5, 226,
Ireland 4, 5, 169–83 51–3 235n3
cinematic ethos 172–3 attitude to subjects 52 Grierson’s plans for cinema
cinematic influences 169 ‘exhaustion technique’ 50–1 227–9, 234–5
criticisms of Grierson 176–7 Jensen, Georg 89 presentation of indigenous
domestic politics/unrest Job in a Million (1937) 49 peoples 230–2
171–2, 173, 177 Johnny Frenchman (1945) 48 range of cinematic influences
Grierson’s visit to/talk given Jordan, William 122 232–4
in 173–6 Just a Girl (Denmark 1959) 90 Lawrie, James 198
National Film Institute Leacock, Richard 53–4
172–3 Kamei Fumio 66, 76n41 Legg, Stuart 109, 245, 246
nationalist film-making 8, 173 Kamei Katsuichiro 60 Lemass, Seán 178
relations with UK 184n13 Kant, Immanuel 2, 24 Lenin (V. I. Ulyanov) 31
television 176 KARFO (Afrikaner Calvinist Den levende virkelighed 1–3
Irish Film Society 172–3 Film-making Organisation) (Denmark 1989) 80, 84
Irish Free State 184n13 211–12, 214, 215 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien 195
Irish (language) 180–2 Kathakali (India 1960) 163 Leyda, Jay 29
Irwin, Arthur 112 Kaufman, Boris 109 Light of Snow (Peru 1957) 231
Is This Possible in Denmark? Kaulen, Patricio 223 Lindgren, Ernest 31, 38
(Denmark 1937) 84 Keene, Ralph 94–5 Linton, Freda 112
Ishimoto Tokichi 63, 72–3 Khandpur, K. L. 157, 161 Lippmann, Walter 6, 14,
It Concerns Your Freedom Khrushchev, Nikita 38 15–16, 19, 22, 214, 245
(Denmark 1946) 89 Kigezi people/resettlement Public Opinion 15
Ito Sueo 73 programme see Bakiga London Film Society 6, 31–2,
Ivens, Joris 87, 109 people 107, 143, 235n3
Ivres, Ivar 83 King, Mackenzie, PM 112 Longinotto, Kim 55
King, Sir Truby 124 Lorentz, Pare 18, 20
Jackson, Pat 47 King, Tiger 171 Low, Colin 114
Japan 4, 5, 59–73 King, Tom 46 Low, Rachel 184n15
cinema legislation 60, 61 Kitchener, Lord (calypso Lubitsch, Ernst 245
cinematic vocabulary 61 performer), ‘Nora’ 199, Lumber (1933) 246
documentary film-making 204n76 Lumumba, Patrice 200–1
63–4, 71–3 Knight, Eric 20, 74n4 Lye, Len 246
influence of Rotha 59–61, Kubota Tatsuo 64–5
63–4, 71–3 Kukuli (Peru 1960) 231 Macheret, Aleksandr 33
invasion of China (1937) 60 Kuleshov, Lev 34 Mackenzie, A. A. 123
political conditions 60, 69, Kuwano Shigeru 62, 71–2 The Magic Stone: A Legend from
71–2 Kyogoku Takahide 73 Hong Kong (1965) 100–1

Index 255
Makiritare (Venezuela 1972) Mauro, Humberto 230, Murray, John Lawrence 7,
235n6 236n18 97–100, 101
Malaya 7, 94–7, 102 Mazzetti, Lorenza 53
‘Emergency’ (1948–60) 95–6 McAllister, Gilbert 122 Naficy, Hamid 8
Malayan Film Unit 94–6, 98, McCarthy, Joseph, Senator 24 Nakai Masakazu 60
100 McGill University (Montreal) Nanook of the North (1924) 13,
Man of Africa (1953) 8, 188, 113–14, 184n29 48
190, 190–1, 194–201 McInnes, Graham 111 Nash, Walter 122, 124, 130–1,
‘all-negro’ status 190–1, 196, McLaren, Norman 109, 112, 133, 135n14, 136n59
198, 199 226 A Nation Once Again (Ireland
audience responses 199 McLean, Ross 107, 112 1946) 173
avoidance of stereotyping McLoone, Martin 171–2 National Film Board Act 1963
199 McPherson, Hugo 114 (SA) 216
casting/voices 190–1, 195–6, Meat for Millions (Ireland, date National Film Board (Canada)
198 unknown) 174, 184n15 5, 21, 96, 105, 108,
cut for UK cinemas 200; Medley, (Sir) John 145 109–12, 114–15
disowned by producers A Memo from Fogo (Canada cooperation with Wartime
200 1972) 181 Information Board 111
(near-)absence of colonial Men and Jobs (1933) 33 as model for other regions
authority 200–1 Menzies, Sir Robert 127, 145 139, 140, 144, 157, 174,
scripting 194–5 Merriam, Charles 14 178–80, 181–2
technical crew 195 Method acting 56n21 non-theatrical showings
title 198 Miller, Alberto 235n6 110–12
visual spectacle 199–200 Ministry of Information postwar survival 112–13,
Man of Aran (1934) 8, 169, 154–5 117n35
170, 170–2, 171, 174, Mir, Ezra 156, 157 prestige 115
183n5 Mirams, Gordon 121, 134n1 sidelining of other film
Man with a Movie Camera Mise Éire see I Am Ireland activity 115
(USSR 1929) 31, 32 Mitchell, Dennis 54 trade union circuits 110–11
Mandu – The City of Joy (India Moana (1926) 2, 13, 16, 31, ‘vulnerability’ (to Communist
1958) 163 171, 245 infiltration) 112
Manvell, Roger 146 Moholy-Nagy, László 60 National Film Board (South
Marcus, Louis 8, 169–70, Monotonous Facades (Sweden Africa) 215–18
178–80, 181, 182, 183 1960) 88 administrative structure 218
María Candelaria (Mexico montage 13, 16, 24–5, 88 collapse 216
1943) 233 Moore, Rachel O. 196 government departmental
Marshall, John 18–20, 19, 86 Moran, Albert 140–1 affiliation 216–17, 218
Martin, Adrian 148 Morning in the Street (1959) 54 government subsidy 217–18
Marxism 35, 65, 68, 71 Morris, Peter 36, 38, 116n15, microfilm operation 217
Griersonian rejection of 36, 174–5, 176 Nehru, Jawaharlal 7, 153, 154,
38 Morrison, George 176, 177, 155, 156, 158, 161, 165
Mary, Queen 126 183 opposition to 163–4, 165–6
Mason, J. H. 122 Mpambara, Seperiera 195, 196 Nelson, Joyce 174, 175, 176
Mass Observation project Mr Mensah Builds a House neorealism 8
116–17n25 (Ghana 1956) 193 New South Wales, State Film
Massey, Vincent 107, 112 Munch, Carsten E. 82 Centre/activities 145–6
Maternal Help (Denmark 1942) Münsterberg, Hugo 59, 60, 64 New York Museum of Modern
88 Murnau, F. W. 245 Art (MoMA) 17

2 56 The Grierson Effect

New York Sun 2, 16, 29 North Sea (1938) 48, 50, 226, People in a House (Denmark
New Zealand 4, 5, 7, 121–34 246 1943) 89–90
(claimed) place in Northern Ireland 173–4 People Like Maria (Bolivia 1958)
documentary movement Norway 79, 80, 86–7 232
121, 122 television 82–3 Pereira dos Santos, Nelson
government film strategy 223, 226, 230, 235n2
123–5, 129–31, 133–4 O’Brien, Harvey 170, 172, Peru, documentary in 230–1
Grierson’s comments on 121, 176, 177, 178, 183 Peterson, A. D. C. 96
127–8 The Real Ireland 181 The Plow That Broke the Plains
Grierson’s influence in Ó Conluain, Proinsias 173–4, (US 1935) 18
127–9, 132 176, 178, 183 Poitier, Sidney 197
Grierson’s visit to 121–7, Ó Laoghaire, Colm 169, Poitín (Ireland 1974) 180–1
133, 135n15, 139 176–7, 183 Popple, Simon 194
Labour Party 7, 121, 123 Ó Laoghaire, Liam 8, 169, 172, Port of Hong Kong (1972) 102
National Film Library 122 173–4, 176, 178, 183 Porter, Vincent 194
National Film Unit 121 October (1928) 31 Portus, G. V. 145
non-theatrical distribution O’er Hill and Dale (1933) 246 Pott and Pett (1934) 246
125–7, 129 Ogawa Shinsuke 72–3 Powell, Anthony 45
social conditions 131 Okuda Shinkichi 64 Powell, Dilys 53
social legislation 123, Omura Einosuke 63 Pratt, Mary Louise 193
135n14 Ontario Motion Picture Bureau Progress in Kojokrom (Ghana
wartime documentary 106, 115n8 1953) 193, 194
128–9, 130–2, 136n66 O’Regan, Tom 140–1 Prokino (Japan) 62, 71
New Zealand Film Letter Orgeron, Devin, et al., Learning propaganda 2, 5, 217, 218
(periodical) 129–30 with the Lights Off 4 in (pre-/post-independence)
New Zealand on the March Osborne, Richard 154–5 India 153–4, 156
(1938) 121 Oslo films 86–7 Pudovkin, Vsevolod 31, 33, 38,
Newfoundland, relocation of Our Country (Ireland 1948) 173 60, 66, 83
population 113–14, 181–2 Our Original Inhabitants (India Purseglove, John 198
Nichols, Bill 33, 37, 46, 55n2 1953) 162–3
Night Mail (1936) 17, 39, 52, Our Panchayats (India 1950) Quechua communities (Peru)
246 164–5 231
casting/performances 45, 50 Owen, Wilfred 50 Quinn, Bob 8, 170, 172,
influence on later cinema 180–2, 183, 185n36
159–60 Pabst, G. W. 65 ‘quota quickies’ 106–7
inspiration for 33, 177 Páistí ag Obair see Children at
overseas screenings 20, 72, Work A Race against People (1965)
126, 226 Paranaguá, Paulo Antonio 223 101
Nine Men (1943) 51 Parer, Damien 142–3 Ramirez, Gracia 18
Nishiyama Eulogio 231 Park, Robert 14 Ramsay, A. H. 147
Nkrumah, Kwame 193 Parker, Charles 54 Rands, Stan 117n34
Noble, George 94–5, 191–2 Pathy, P. V. 156, 162 Rao, A. Bhaskar 156, 162,
Noise (Denmark 1967) 89 Paul, J. T. 123, 127 164
non-theatrical distribution People (Ireland 1970) 179, 180 ‘realism’, demands for 98–9
in Canada 108, 109, 110–11, People Burning Coal (Japan Record of a Nursery (Japan
116n23 1940/1) 73 1942) 73
in New Zealand 125–7, 129 People in the City (Sweden Reisz, Karel 53, 54
Norsk Kulturfilm 86 1947) 87 Reith, Lord 209, 210

Index 257
A Respectable Life (Sweden Ruiz, Jorge 223, 226, 231, Shlapentokh, Dmitry/Vladimir
1979) 88 232–3, 234, 236nn23–6 35
Rice, Tom 191–2, 194, 198, Russell, Patrick, and James Shub, Esfir 31, 177
202n21 Taylor, Shadows of Progress Shumiatsky, Boris 34
Richardson, Maurice 50 4 Silver (Denmark 1956) 89
Richardson, Tony 53 Ruttmann, Walter 85 Simba (1955) 187
River Plate, Battle of 128 Singapore 5, 7, 100, 102
The River (US 1937) 20 Sadoul, Georges 38, 231 Sixpenny Telegram (1935) 39
Rivers in Harness (India 1949) Saoirse? see Freedom? Sjöblom, Karl-Axel 82
159, 159 Salt, Brian 100–1 Skinner, Kate 192
Roberts, Graham 35 Sasaki Norio 76n39 Slater, Montagu 195–6, 200
Robeson, Paul 196–7 Savage, Michael 123 Slum (Denmark 1952) 89
Rocha, Glauber 230 The Savings of Bill Blewitt (1936) Smith, T. P. 52
Rocha, Hugo 224 43, 45, 47, 53, 54, 246 Smith Committee (SA 1943)
Rockefeller, John D., Sr 14 characterisation 47–8 211
Rockefeller, Laura Spelman 14 Scandinavia 4, 5, 6–7, 79–90 The Smoke Menace (1937) 20
Rockefeller Foundation 1, television 81–3 Smyth, Rosaleen 5
13–14, 18–19, 23 see also Denmark; Norway; Snow Country (Japan 1939)
Rockett, Kevin 172 Sweden 63, 72–3
Roos, Jørgen 89, 89–90 Schmitt, L. J. 123, 127–8 Snowshoers (Canada 1958) 54
Roos, Karl 83–4 Schrire, David 49 Social Security Act 1938 (NZ)
Roscoe, Jane 44 Scotland 5, 8 123, 135n14
Rosenthal, Newman 147–8 Scottish TV see This Socialist Realism 34–8
Rotha, Paul 18, 52, 82, 94, 96, Wonderful World SODRE (Servicio Oficial de
232, 245 The Sea and the Sky (1972) 102 Difusión, Radiotelevisión y
comments on documentary Sekino Yoshio 67–70 Espectáculos) 223–9, 230,
74n4, 82 biography 68 232
criticisms 61, 64–5 commentary on Rotha/Atsugi biennial festivals 225–6
disagreements with Grierson 67–9 Solbrig, Heide 23
60 translation of Rotha 69–70 Song of Ceylon (1934) 20, 39,
Documentary Diary 17 Sellers, William 7, 97–9, 189 226, 246
The Film till Now 17 Sethna, Hom 156 The Source (Bolivia 1958) 232,
influence in Japan 4, 6, 18, Seton, Marie 32 236n27
59–61, 63–4, 65, 71–3, Shadow of the Mountain (1933) South Africa 5, 209–19
76n41; own unawareness 246 apartheid policy 209, 212,
of 60, 74n4 Shakespeare, William 218, 219
influence in other areas 84, Henry V 50 cinema legislation 217
102, 128, 142 Othello 196 Department of Education,
politics 71 Shantaram, V. 157, 161 Arts and Science (DEAC)
visit to US 14, 17–21 Shaw, Alan 246 216
see also Documentary Film Shaw, Alexander 94–5, 156, Grierson Report (1949) 209,
(Rotha) 157 211–15, 216–17, 218,
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques Sheets of Almahue (Chile 1962) 219n1
171–2, 183 233 international isolation 219
Routt, Wiliam D. 140, 146 Shell Film Unit 234 National Party 209–10,
Roy, Srirupa 157, 163 Shipyard (1935) 84 212–13, 215
RTE (Raidió Teilifís Éireann) Shirai Shigeru 72 social/linguistic divisions
176, 181, 184n25 Shirali, S. V. 164 209–11

2 58 The Grierson Effect

South Africa cont. Symphony of Life (India 1954) Tully, Montgomery 192
United Party 211 164 Turin, Victor A. 33
see also Afrikaners; National Turksib (USSR 1929) 33, 177
Film Board (SA) Tagore, Rabindranath 164 Tynan, Kenneth 196
South African Broadcasting Takagiba Tsutomu 64
Corporation (SABC) 209 Tallents, Sir Stephen 122, 127, Ueno Ichiro 63, 68, 70–1,
Soviet cinema 29–39, 106 245, 246 74n12, 75n29
change of outlook 38–9 Tamakloe, Frank 199 Ueno Kozo 72, 73
depiction of collectives Tanikawa Yoshio 72–3 unemployment 48–9
40n17 Target for Tonight (1941) 246 UNESCO (United Nations
eradication of Taylor, Donald 245 Educational, Social and
documentarism 35 Taylor, John 245 Cultural Organization) 7,
Grierson’s comments on Taylor, Richard 29, 31–2, 34, 112–13, 174, 189
32–4 35 United Artists 23
influence in Denmark 88 television United States 6, 13–25
influence in Ireland 177 as documentary medium 82 change in approach to
influence on Grierson 6, 16, Grierson’s work for 8, 181, documentary 53–4
29–32 200, 225 Grierson’s visits to 13–17,
see also Eisenstein; Socialist in Ireland 176 22–3, 24, 29–31, 174
Realism in Scandinavia 81–3 impact on Griersonian
Spice, Evelyn 49, 56–7n29, in South Africa 218 documentary 16–17
117n34, 245 Templer, Sir Gerald 96 influence of Griersonian
Spottiswoode, Raymond 83, Thevenet, Homero Alsina 227, practice in 20
84, 246 228–9 lack of documentary
Squadron 992 (1940) 129 They Call Us Misfits (Sweden tradition 17–18, 20–1
Square Table Society 75n30 1968) 88 role in world cinema 21–3
Stafford, Brendan 173 This Is Hong Kong (1961) Universal
Stalin, Joseph 35, 38 99–100 Filmaktiengesellschaft
Stanislavsky, Konstantin 46, This Wonderful World (TV (UFA) 61
48 1957–65) 8, 181, 200, upper classes, stilted
Steiner, Ralph 20, 233 225, 231, 247 performances 49, 52–3
Stevens, David 19 Threshing (Chile 1957) 233–4 Upstream (1933) 246
The Stones (Peru 1956) 231 Thunder over Mexico (Mexico Uruguay 223–9
Stoney, George 113 1933) 233 National Film Board 224
Stout, Alan 7, 140–3, 141, 144, Tickell, Jerrard 192
145, 146, 147, 149n16 Today We Live (1937) 17, 20, van Dyke, Willard 20, 233, 234
biography 141–2 21 Vasudevan, Ravi 156
Strand, Paul 233 Toho (Japanese film company) Vega, Alicia 237n31
Stroheim, Erich von 245 63, 68 Venezuela, documentary in
Study of a Port (1951) 100 Torres Nilsson, Leopoldo 223 234
Sucksdorff, Arne 87 Tosaka Jun 60, 62 Vertov, Dziga 16, 31, 34, 44,
Sussex, Elizabeth 44–5 Toto and the Poachers (1958) 60
Sutch, W. B. 125, 133, 100 Grierson’s criticisms 32–3
135–6n47 Train C57 (Japan 1940) 63, 73 Verwoerd, Hendrik 218
Swann, Paul 46–7, 48 Trelies, Danilo 223, 224, 225 Victoria (Australia), State Film
swearing 50 Truman, Harry S., President Centre/activities 144–5,
Sweden 79, 80, 87–8 22 146–7, 150n36
television 81–2, 83, 87 Tsumura Hideo 64 Vidor, King 245

Index 259
A View of Ireland (newsreel, Weiss, Peter 87–8 working classes cont.
Ireland 1955–64) 176 We’re Hanging by a Thread in wartime Canada 110–11
Vigil on Wheels (India 1955) (Denmark 1961) 90 World in Action (newsreel,
160, 160 Whadwani, Mohan 164 Canada 1942–5) 109,
Vigo, Jean 230 Where No Vultures Fly (1951) 116n17
Village in Travancore (1956) 187, 199 The World Today, Inc. 23
157 Whipple, Mark 19 World War II
Village of Stone (Japan 1941) WHO (World Health aftermath 140–1, 188
73 Organisation) 98 Australian film responses
Village without a Doctor (Japan Wicker (Chile 1957) 233–4 139–40
1939) 73 Wildflower (Mexico 1943) 233 British documentary during
Villanueva, César 231 Williams, Christopher 214 49–53
Virgin India (Bolivia 1947) 233 Williams, R. Maslyn 144 Canadian film responses
The Vital Link (India 1951) 160 Williams, Raymond 187 109–12
Voices of the Earth (Bolivia The Wind and the River (Sweden colonial responses 153–4,
1956) 232 1950) 87 156–7, 161
Winston, Brian 174 Danish resistance movement
Wang, Charles 101, 102 Woods, H. 117n34 89
The Water in the Countryside Woods, Philip 153–4, 157 New Zealand film responses
(Denmark 1946) 88–9 Workers and Jobs (1934) 48–9 128–9, 130–2, 136n66
Waterhouse, John 230 working classes, screen state appropriation of film
Watt, Harry 43, 44–5, 50, 129, representations 43–55 23–4
232, 234 British vs Soviet approaches Wright, Basil 31, 32, 45, 100,
direction of actors 45, 46, 35–6 109, 189, 245–6
47–8, 49, 51 casting 45 Wright, Noni 100
Watt, Nigel 100, 101 convincing portrayals 49 Wright, Richard 194–5, 196
We Are the Lambeth Boys (1959) directors’ problems with 52
54 Japanese vocabulary of 61–2 Young, Albert 101–2
We Live in Two Worlds (1937) ‘stilted’ portrayals 5, 43,
20 46–9, 51–2 Zavattini, Cesare 225
Weber, Max 95 and unemployment 48–9 Zils, Paul 162

LIst of ILLustratIons

While considerable effort has been made to correctly identify the copyright holders,
this has not been possible in all cases. We apologise for any apparent negligence and
any omissions or corrections brought to our attention will be remedied in any future
editions.

Today We Live, Strand Film Company; Drifters, New Era Films; Battleship Potemkin,
Goskino; The Savings of Bill Blewitt, GPO Film Unit; Fires Were Started, Crown Film
Unit; Støj, Minerva Film/Statens Film Central; Five Faces, Strand Film Company;
River in Harness, Films Division of India; Vigil on Wheels, Films Division of India;
Man of Aran, Gainsborough Pictures; Pobal, Gael-Linn; Man of Africa, © Group 3 Ltd.

2 60 The Grierson Effect

A View of Ireland (newsreel, Weiss, Peter 87–8 working classes cont.
Ireland 1955–64) 176 We’re Hanging by a Thread in wartime Canada 110–11
Vigil on Wheels (India 1955) (Denmark 1961) 90 World in Action (newsreel,
160, 160 Whadwani, Mohan 164 Canada 1942–5) 109,
Vigo, Jean 230 Where No Vultures Fly (1951) 116n17
Village in Travancore (1956) 187, 199 The World Today, Inc. 23
157 Whipple, Mark 19 World War II
Village of Stone (Japan 1941) WHO (World Health aftermath 140–1, 188
73 Organisation) 98 Australian film responses
Village without a Doctor (Japan Wicker (Chile 1957) 233–4 139–40
1939) 73 Wildflower (Mexico 1943) 233 British documentary during
Villanueva, César 231 Williams, Christopher 214 49–53
Virgin India (Bolivia 1947) 233 Williams, R. Maslyn 144 Canadian film responses
The Vital Link (India 1951) 160 Williams, Raymond 187 109–12
Voices of the Earth (Bolivia The Wind and the River (Sweden colonial responses 153–4,
1956) 232 1950) 87 156–7, 161
Winston, Brian 174 Danish resistance movement
Wang, Charles 101, 102 Woods, H. 117n34 89
The Water in the Countryside Woods, Philip 153–4, 157 New Zealand film responses
(Denmark 1946) 88–9 Workers and Jobs (1934) 48–9 128–9, 130–2, 136n66
Waterhouse, John 230 working classes, screen state appropriation of film
Watt, Harry 43, 44–5, 50, 129, representations 43–55 23–4
232, 234 British vs Soviet approaches Wright, Basil 31, 32, 45, 100,
direction of actors 45, 46, 35–6 109, 189, 245–6
47–8, 49, 51 casting 45 Wright, Noni 100
Watt, Nigel 100, 101 convincing portrayals 49 Wright, Richard 194–5, 196
We Are the Lambeth Boys (1959) directors’ problems with 52
54 Japanese vocabulary of 61–2 Young, Albert 101–2
We Live in Two Worlds (1937) ‘stilted’ portrayals 5, 43,
20 46–9, 51–2 Zavattini, Cesare 225
Weber, Max 95 and unemployment 48–9 Zils, Paul 162

LIst of ILLustratIons

While considerable effort has been made to correctly identify the copyright holders,
this has not been possible in all cases. We apologise for any apparent negligence and
any omissions or corrections brought to our attention will be remedied in any future
editions.

Today We Live, Strand Film Company; Drifters, New Era Films; Battleship Potemkin,
Goskino; The Savings of Bill Blewitt, GPO Film Unit; Fires Were Started, Crown Film
Unit; Støj, Minerva Film/Statens Film Central; Five Faces, Strand Film Company;
River in Harness, Films Division of India; Vigil on Wheels, Films Division of India;
Man of Aran, Gainsborough Pictures; Pobal, Gael-Linn; Man of Africa, © Group 3 Ltd.

2 60 The Grierson Effect