Section 5: Further Varieties of Film Experience

Chapter 18: Experimental film

Film theory

The distinctive and defining relationship that film has to space and time has given rise to two conflicting fundamental theories about film. Some theorists, following Dziga Vertov, a Russian filmmaker and theorist working in Soviet cinema in the 1920s, have argued that film should concentrate not on telling stories but on investigating the nature of time and space in a consciously abstract way. Such an approach moves us towards experimental film and away from the fictional narratives that have in fact formed the predominant tendency throughout film history. Others, such as the French film critic, André Bazin, have maintained that the strength of film is its photographic ability – the way it can realistically portray the natural world – and have suggested that filmmakers should focus on this possibility in order to show human events in such a way as to reveal something of the nature of the human experience. This approach emphasises the potential qualities of film that are the very opposite of experimental.

Case Study: Un Chien Andalou (Luis Buñuel, 1929, France)

Case Study: Vivre sa vie: film en douze tableaux/My Life to Live (Jean-Luc Godard, 1962, France)

Chapter 19: Documentary film: theory and practice

Resources

The following resources are useful for research and keeping up to date with recent examples and developments in documentary. Some websites also provide extracts/entire screenings of documentaries (particularly useful for some older examples).

• http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/storyville/ Provides details of the documentaries produced in the Storyville series, links to useful websites, interviews with documentary makers etc.
• http://www.dochouse.org/ Dochouse is an organisation devoted to the development of documentary in the UK through screening and production. The website gives details of events and opportunities to get involved.
• http://www.channel4.com/fourdocs/ Very detailed site including timelines, articles, interviews, and documentaries to download. There is also the chance to upload your own documentary.
• http://www.griersontrust.org/index.htm An organisation that promotes the legacy of John Grierson and recognises the work of a range of documentary makers through their annual awards.
• http://www.drewassociates.net/ The website of Richard Drew – one of the founder members of the Direct Cinema movement – provides information on past and current developments in observational documentary making.
• www.screenonline.org.uk The BFI’s educational resource with detailed information on documentary movements, periods, and individual filmmakers for British film and television. Extracts of a variety of documentaries are also available online.

Case Study: Documentary as propaganda

 

The Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin is credited as being the first to recognise the significance of film as propaganda, though its importance as a medium of persuasion had been put to use as early as nearly two decades before. Albert E. Smith of the Vitagraph Company filmed scenes of the Spanish–American War in 1898, adding material shot back in the USA to ensure the right image and gravity was achieved. In 1899, The Biograph Company sent W.K.L. Dickson to Africa to cover the Boer War (at one point working with a young Winston Churchill), where he was well supported by the British military in promoting a ‘correct’ view of the conflict (British servicemen were even dressed in Boer uniforms to stage re-constructions of events for the camera). Needless to say, his films were informed by the British view on the conflict, and were somewhat less than impartial.

First World War

When the First World War broke out, both the British and German governments were quick to make documentary-like films that portrayed the enemy in a poor light, often using a ‘newsreel’ form to further convince the audience of the authenticity of their claims. Many British audiences were convinced of atrocities being carried out in ‘plucky little Belgium’ by the German occupiers, through the implications of dubious ‘re-construction’ films – a belief firmly held by that war generation for decades, despite evidence to the contrary; clear testament to the power of film documentary as propaganda.

Russian Revolution

With the post-war Russian Revolution, documentary was put to work for the benefit of the Soviet State. Documentaries were produced by many Soviet filmmakers with the intention of promoting the Soviet cause and ‘educating’ a population who may not have fully understood what the revolution had been about. Dziga Vertov, along with many other filmmakers, was sent out across the Russian states on ‘agit-prop’ trains, where he shot and screened countless short documentary films for the Soviet cause.

Spanish Civil War

Political ideology took Joris Ivens to Spain in 1936 to make a documentary about the Spanish Civil War, sponsored by a group of prominent American writers, artists, and intellectuals, who were all politically of the left. The resulting film, which focuses solely on the Republican forces’ struggle against the Fascist forces of General Franco, includes ‘found sound footage’ of earthquake sounds from the feature film San Francisco (W.S. Van Dyke, 1936), which they ran backwards over images of bombing to ‘create’ the feeling of the ‘real’.  Blatantly biased to the Republican cause, The Spanish Earth (Ivens, 1937) was clearly propagandistic; yet its artistry could not be doubted.

1930s in Germany

The similar difficulty of propagandistic documentary that is constructed with considerable filmic talent is met when looking at the films of the Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. While her hastily constructed short film Seig des Glaubens (Victory of Faith) (1933) is little more than a homage to Hitler on his becoming dictator of Germany, it is her grand-scale epic documentaries – Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will) (Riefenstahl, 1935) and Olympische Spiele (Olympia) (Riefenstahl, 1936) – that are most problematic. Central to the problem is Riefenstahl’s continued assertion that she was not a Nazi, and was not sympathetic to the Nazi ideology, which (since she had complete control over the production and editing of both films) is at odds with the powerful opening sequence of Triumph des Willens, which begins with a dissolving title sequence announcing:

On September 5
1934

20 years
after the outbreak
of the World War

16 Years
after the start
of German Suffering

19 months
after the beginning
of Germany’s rebirth

Adolph Hitler flew
again to Nuremberg
to review the columns of his faithful followers

This alone could be considered evidence of the propagandistic intent, but when it is then coupled with the opening images of Hitler’s plane descending from the clouds, a god returning to earth with salvation for the German people, then both the propaganda aim, and Riefenstahl’s allegiance is confirmed.

Similarly, in Olympische Spiele, her coverage of the Nazi Olympic Games in Berlin, 1936, she claimed (as she did with her earlier documentary) she was simply recording the event, but again the opening sequence offers a clear sense of underlying ideology and intention. The film opens with an Olympic torch being handed through the generations from the ‘cradle of civilisation’ that was Greece, to the modern Nazi state overseen by Hitler himself, with the suggestion that Nazi Germany is the natural successor to the Ancient Greek empire and that it is the new cradle of civilisation. Couple to this the imagery that Riefenstahl uses which echo the Nazi theme of strength and racial purity, and Riefenstahl’s simple recording of the event becomes a masterpiece of Nazi propaganda.

Second World War

As the Second World War broke out, the propaganda elements of documentary became more obvious (in retrospect), though to an audience sympathetic to the views being expressed, they may not have seemed so blunt. In America, Hollywood feature-film director, Frank Capra, was drafted in to make the Why We Fight series between 1942 and 1945, and contracted both Robert Flaherty and Joris Ivens for some of the work. Boris Kaufman also found himself in America as a refugee, before moving north to Canada where he worked on Grierson’s propaganda films at the National Film Board of Canada. In Britain, documentary making was centralised under the Ministry of Propaganda in the form of the Crown Film Unit, where many Grierson-trained filmmakers such as Basil Wright, Humphrey Jennings, and Harry Watt produced numerous films alongside European refugees and émigré directors such as Alberto Cavalcanti. In Nazi Germany, filmmakers were dispatched to film all the major military and ‘security’ tasks. Much of this footage (such as the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto, the operation of the concentration camps – such as Majdanek – including the details of the systematic mass murder of those sent there, and the atrocities of Operation Barbarossa – the brutal war against the Soviet forces) was used in the war crimes trials at Nuremberg.

Post-war Britain

In post-war Britain, a milder form of documentary propaganda developed through the government communication agency The Central Office of Information (still existing and responsible for the commissioning of everything from the recent advice leaflet in the event of a terrorist attack, through to the annual drink-driving advertisements). This development, designed to build a common purpose in the population in the immediate and difficult post-war years, highlights an interesting point about propaganda: propaganda is always assumed to belong to a perceived ‘enemy’ view, whereas a nation’s own material is viewed much more sympathetically. Thus, when considering the issue of documentary film propaganda, it is more useful to detach any nationalistic preconceptions, and consider it in more simple terms of whether a film is made with the express intention of persuading an audience of the validity of a particular viewpoint, and whether it positions that audience to share that viewpoint.

Case Study: Documentary Auteur – Errol Morris

Errol Morris was born in Hewlett, New York, on 5 February 1948, and was a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He was briefly a graduate student at both Princeton University and the University of California-Berkeley where he was studying for a PhD before dropping out to make his first film Gates of Heaven (1978), which follows the fortunes of two pet cemetery owners.

His most controversial film is The Thin Blue Line (1988), which is billed as the only film ever to have solved a murder. Here Morris investigates the murder of Robert Wood, a Dallas police officer, and proves the wrongful conviction of Randall Dale Adams, who was on Death Row, awaiting execution.

Morris’ use of the interactive mode has led audiences to respond to his ‘authenticity’, and this has meant he has become America’s most respected contemporary documentary maker. He has won several awards for his work, including the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature Film for his Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003).

Personal Documentary

The immediate post-war period was a time of crisis for documentary makers, who were wrestling with a film form that over the past decade had become closely associated internationally with propaganda, and thus had lost validity in the eyes of the audience.  Similarly, merely documenting reality seemed somehow insubstantial when faced with the horrors of recent reality that were being slowly revealed to the public post-war. These conditions gave rise to a new style of documentary making – the personal documentary.

The personal documentary sets out not to offer a universal view that spectators can ascribe to, but rather personal (and often less common) views on a subject, which are then used to illustrate or cast light on more universal themes and issues. Many of these personal documentary filmmakers were from left-wing backgrounds, or from radical art movements, and had seen both oppression (both physical and intellectual) and conflict first hand during the war.

Le Sang des Bêtes/Blood of the Beasts (Georges Franju, 1949)

Le Sang des Bêtes/Blood of the Beasts offered an audience, who were still too close to the slaughter of the Second World War, a frank look at the daily life of slaughterhouses. Whilst peppered with surrealist imagery, and the casual brutality of the slaughterhouses set at the gates of Paris (a significant motif itself), the film is often reminiscent of newsreel imagery of the Nazi concentration camps. Franju’s use of music (for instance, ‘La Mer’/‘The Sea’ plays over the image of a slaughterman sweeping a sea of blood across the slaughterhouse floor towards a drain) adds a personal commentary to the images, and his casual juxtaposition of the suffering animals and the homes and churches overlooking the slaughterhouses implicates them (by their inaction) in the slaughter. In doing so, Franju edges towards questions about the role of France in the Second World War that were certainly not being raised publicly at the time.

Nuit et Brouillard/Night and Fog (Alain Resnais, 1955)

In Nuit et Brouillard/Night and Fog, the juxtaposition of monochrome archive footage of the Nazi concentration camps alongside full colour images of the deserted camps as they were at the point the film was made, offers a powerful and personal commentary on the nature of the subject. At the same time, the film’s commentary explores the difficulty of capturing the past. Resnais’ frank, direct approach, often setting the frenetic archive/newsreel footage against long, slow tracking shots, placed reality and memory in tension, and stirred a wider debate around whether the underlying drive that led to the camps had been extinguished, or whether (like the colour images) it had merely adopted a different image. His inclusion of the image of a gendarme in a guard tower at one of the French transportation camps led to the film being censored and banned from the Cannes Film Festival – the confirmation of collaboration and complicity in such crimes was too much for many French to bear.