INTERVIEW

Dai Vaughan: Between a Word and a Thing / You Encounter Only Yourself
Richard MacDonald and Martin Stollery
Readers of this journal may know Dai Vaughans pioneering book, Portrait of an Invisible Man: The Working Life of Stewart McAllister, Film Editor (1983), but are perhaps less likely to be familiar with other aspects of his wide-ranging career as a documentary editor and writer. After taking a BFI evening class in lm appreciation Dai Vaughan left his job as a junior draughtsman to become, in 1956, one of the rst students to attend the London School of Film Technique, the precursor to the London Film School. He worked as an assistant to the renowned subtitler Mai Harris, following which he joined two other lmschool alumni to form David Naden Associates (DNA), a cooperative specialising in editing services. As editor he has contributed to several landmark television series, including episodes of World in Action (ITV, 196398), Disappearing World (ITV, 197093) and Omnibus (BBC, 19672003). He also collaborated with ethnographic lm-makers David and Judith MacDougall and Melissa Llewelyn-Davies. In 2011 he was given a Special Award from the Royal Anthropological Institute for a lifetimes contribution to ethnographic lm-making. Dai Vaughans parallel career as a lm writer also began in the 1950s and has included contributions to many journals and magazines including Film, Films and Filming, Sight and Sound, Screen and, more recently, Vertigo. He was a founding editor, with Boleslaw Sulik and later Alan Lovell, of the journal Denition (19601). In addition to Portrait of an Invisible Man, his books include a BFI Classic on Odd Man Out (1995) and a collection of essays, For Documentary (1999). He has also published ction and poetry, including the novels Moritur (1995) and Totes Meer (2003). This interview, conducted in November 2010 after

Journal of British Cinema and Television 8.3 (2011): 430446 DOI: 10.3366/jbctv.2011.0048 Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/jbctv

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some initial correspondence, is the rst attempt at a critical overview of Dai Vaughans work on and in lm and television. Richard MacDonald/Martin Stollery (RM/MS): Was there a decisive experience, a lm viewing or reading that made you realise that this is how I want to make my career? Dai Vaughan (DV): I read in the paper that the Telekinema from the Festival of Britain, which I had never actually visited as part of the Festival, was going to be retained, largely due to a petition organised by Denis Forman, who was then head of the BFI and who is really one of the unsung heroes of British lm culture, and was going to open up as a national lm theatre that would show historical lms. I read that and I was fascinated because it said that they would be showing old silent movies with people like Buster Keaton and the Gish sisters. My parents had talked about these names and I thought it would be interesting to see what my mum and dad had been talking about. So I joined the National Film Theatre and went to their opening show which consisted of extracts from what nowadays we would call standard classic repertoire, Caligari and everything up to Norman McLaren. In the course of that they showed an extract from Battleship Potemkin, it was probably the Odessa Steps, I cant remember. I thought, this is amazing; Ive never seen anything like this before. And the fact that it was silent gave it an extra oomph. I was used to the way things are rather evened out by the use of background music in conventional lms. So I thought I must nd out more about this guy Eisenstein and I bought a copy of Film Form. I was bowled over by that because, suddenly, I found here was somebody discussing the way lms went together image by image, shot by shot. I wrote poetry as a kid, all teenagers write poetry, so I was interested he seemed to be talking about lm on the same level that someone like William Empson would talk about poetry. I had read Seven Types of Ambiguity, which was another one of those pow experiences in my late teens and I thought you can do that about lm. Not only that but then he started talking about montage working like Chinese ideograms, which is exactly what Ezra Pound had been talking about in relation to poetry. So I got into the whole interest in lm via having tried to write poems when I was young. I suppose my model, though I never articulated it, for what a lm is like would previously have been drama for obvious reasons. But the fact that you could see it in quite a different way, that you could see shots or images as a complex metaphor was a revelation. I still nd the idea exciting, that hasnt gone.

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Early criticism and Denition

RM/MS: Between 1957 and 1960 when you brought out Denition (Figure 1) you were writing regularly on lm for Film and Films and Filming, short reviews and also longer pieces. How were you developing as a lm writer? DV: Yes. There are two longer pieces I think, one on the pre-history of documentary and one on Dziga Vertovs Man with a Movie Camera. They were part of a project I had probably in the early days at the lm school, if not before, of writing what I called at that time a history of documentary reality. What I understood by that was what you would nowadays call different ways in which reality had been represented. In those days you saw them as realities in their own right. I had a slightly different though recognisably ancestral view of documentary in those days. Part of the Eisenstein thing, I know he was making ction, was tied up in my mind with the idea that lm had a special claim on reality. At that time I would probably have argued that it was because of the mechanical nature of the camera which is probably not what I would say now. But nonetheless the idea that there was a privileged relationship between the lm image and the real world that doesnt exist with a painted image and that therefore by manipulating the lm image you are in some sense manipulating a potential reality: the world became malleable through its representations in lm. As I say my progress, if it has been progress, in writing about lm has been in rening that idea, dropping out things that dont make sense, and the fact that what is special about the lm image is not that it is mechanical but that you need the object in order to make the subject. The thing you are photographing is also part of the artistic medium itself. RM/MS: In your rst editorial for Denition you wrote that there was no tradition of analytical study of lm. What were the intellectual sources you were drawing on at the time? DV: One would probably be the Sartre essays in What Is Literature? There were quite a few people, not only Empson, but other people who were doing detailed and very exciting analyses of poetry. In terms of the visual arts, of course, there was John Berger who was writing in the New Statesman at the time and was another major gure of that period. What is interesting about John is that you dont have to agree with his judgements all the time, in fact I often dont with his individual judgements, but what remains admirable is the sheer intensity of his gaze. He never wavers, he never goes off and his formulations never, or very seldom, slip their moorings. They dont become, as I think they do

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Fig. 1. The journal Denition, of which Dai Vaughan was a founder editor.

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for some academics, counters to use in a casino. Most academic writers engage in a brisk exchange of footnotes, he doesnt do the footnotes. It is putting all the focus on what you have actually experienced, not in a way which is fanciful or ultra solipsistic, but rather what matters about a work of art is what a person, in this case it has to be me if I am writing the piece, gets from it. But then you actually try to analyse it and say why. The other piece in the rst issue, Towards a Theory, could create the impression that I was being prophetic of theory with a capital T which occurred later, and of course I wasnt, I wasnt expecting that. What I was hoping for was a more intensive and searching analysis of what is in front of you and why what is in front of you generates a certain response. RM/MS: The other site where that push for greater analytical rigour and professionalism in criticism was occurring was Oxford Opinion and Movie. How do you now see that moment in British lm criticism? DV: Our difference with Movie was, I think, more political. It wasnt that we objected to the detail with which they were studying things. We thought there was something a bit perverse about the things they chose to give their attention to. Whether I would think that now if I looked back I dont know because it was all very much tied up with the politics of the period as well. RM/MS: What was Denitions relationship to the New Left? DV: Denition as such probably didnt have one. There was very much a feeling that we were all part of the same thing at that time. It was actually a very exciting period to be around. You look back at some of these historical moments and wonder if it was really the ferment that it appeared or was it just a few isolated individuals who in retrospect we can group together. But in the late 1950s there really was that feeling that there were many things happening. The suppression of the Hungarian rising released from the Communist Party people like Edward Thompson and John Saville who founded the New Reasoner. Earlier in the year you had had all the protests at the invasion of Suez which was the younger generation at that time, university students, for the rst time as far as I am aware, really exing their muscles and saying they were fed up with Gaitskell and the wishy-washy Labour opposition to the Tory government. And there was the theatre: Theatre Workshop, the Royal Court. While we were at the lm school Arnold [Wesker] was writing Chicken Soup with Barley in the evenings. The Royal Court used to do productions without decor on Sunday night and people from the London School of Film Technique and their

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girlfriends from the Central School of Speech and Drama virtually had a pew. We used to go there every week and saw John Ardens rst play and there was this feeling we were all part of the same thing. Peace News had a regular column by John Arden, I had a poem in the New Reasoner and there was Free Cinema. We thought Denition was part of the same thing. RM/MS: In Denition you wrote an in depth study of Flahertys oeuvre and in the same year, 1960, a critical analysis of Man with a Movie Camera. What was the background to these pieces? DV:I had got it into my head that documentary rested on two basic planks, one of which was Flaherty and one of which was Dziga Vertov, with the difference being that Flahertys view was that you immersed yourself in a situation, rather in the way that observational lm-makers in the recent past have done, and then you learnt about it and if you had to set things up, you set them up: you couldnt get the camera into an igloo so Nanook had to build a half igloo. Is that cheating? Yes, but who cares? So it is coming out of your knowledge which is very thoroughly researched as to what you are doing. The other is that you start taking almost random shots of reality, with or without quotes according to your philosophical position, and then by putting them together you will automatically get some sort of truth because if you put bits of the world together some sort of truth will be generated. Most documentaries can be seen to fall somewhere between those two. I wouldnt like to reprint the Vertov essay now. I think I was right about the way the lm is structured but for some reason or another assumed that Vertov wasnt consciously trying to subvert the possible languages of lm whereas now I would assume that he was trying to do just that . . . the other thing, of course, politically, is that I failed to grasp the degree to which it was an attack on the NEP, an attack on the rich, partly because his idea of people being rich didnt look like our idea of people being rich.

DNA, World in Action and Disappearing World

RM/MS: How did you come to work on World in Action? DV: After we nished at the lm school David Naden carried on teaching there with the result that he would keep in contact with the really interesting people who were coming through, one of whom was Jane Wood, who, with myself and David, formed David Naden Associates (DNA) (Figure 2). We started in 1965 and we folded in

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Fig. 2. The name board of DNA, the cutting rooms of which Dai Vaughan was a co-founder.

2005, we had 40 years of existence going through various premises and various numbers. It mutated over the years, it started as being a bit more of a cooperative than it nished, but nevertheless a lot of the same people stayed around. Martin Smith joined us within weeks as an assistant editor then became an editor. Sheila Brady joined two years later, started assisting me and then became an editor, and so it went on. So that was the unit and again a casual contact got us in with Granada, somebody we knew who had assisted me in some lms Id cut. This was when the explosion of 16 mm work in television happened and Granada suddenly found that they had more work than they had cutting rooms. When we rst started we wrote to all the television companies, BBC obviously and the ITV companies, saying, we are a group of lm editors and these are our services, and nobody took us up on it. But within a year Granada were calling us, we were up there all the time. So we got to know all these people some of whom are still my friends. It was a very rich moment; all the creative people seemed to have congregated at Granada, partly because of [Sidney] Bernstein and Formans attitude to things.

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RM/DS: Did you have a sense at that time, working on World in Action, that you were involved in a television series that was going to be remembered? DV: Oh yes, I think everybody did. It was amazing, in that ofce you had people there who hated each others guts but when it came to the job there was quite a remarkable esprit de corps about that place. We were constantly looking for new ways to do things. And the management, to be fair, were on our side; they wanted it too. There was a very strange feeling in Granada. Sidney Bernstein had insisted that every room in Granada should have a portrait of Barnum to remind us of what we were really about. Yet in spite of that he, and Cecil [Bernstein] too I suppose, I dont know so much about him, and certainly by choosing Denis Forman as managing director, they were hoping that experimental, I hate the word but you know what I mean, imaginative lm-making would actually be popular. The idea that you should be groundbreaking was considered a good thing; they were in favour of it. So they were a strange bunch, and I think, although we didnt realise it at the time, strange in a way that other television stations werent. RM/MS: Is it possible for you to generalise on the director/editor relationship when you were working on those Granada productions or did it vary greatly depending on the individuals? DV: It varied. We all took the view, almost embarrassingly so in retrospect, that editing was the job of the editors. I know that Denis Mitchell, on one of the This England [19657, 197780] lms I worked on which was peculiarly difcult, reached the point where he would call the director in to discuss it with him and he wouldnt let me participate, probably because he thought I would keep complaining about everything he said. One learnt gradually to be a bit more subtle. Ive always, with or without subtlety, tried to make sure the lm was as good as possible and that had to mean as good as possible in my view, which doesnt mean that I was impervious to anything anybody else might say. In fact you learn over the years to use criticism constructively. RM/MS: You wrote in the introduction to the essays in For Documentary that much of the thinking that went into the essays in that book came out of the work you did on Disappearing World. DV: Id forgotten I said that but I suppose it is true, yes and others. That was one of the earliest places where the idea of following spontaneous action was central. It wasnt the only place because Roger Graef

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was doing such things as well. I cut some of them. But one forgets in the days before Disappearing World lms about other cultures had consisted of mute shots with a commentary telling you what they were thinking. Disappearing World, I think, or it certainly would have made that claim, was the rst serious attempt to listen to what the subject people wanted to say to you, ask them what they thought about life. So you got quite a different slant on things. In Disappearing World you always had the mediating gure of the anthropologist who knew not only the culture but also those individual people and they had lived with them. So it was a very different feeling from, say, World in Action, where they would get off the plane and shoot, a sort of gung-ho journalism which was a slightly negative side of the World in Action ethos. On the rst two Maasai lms Melissa [Llewelyn-Davies] was the anthropologist and Chris Curling was the director then she gradually, with some difculty, got herself into the position of being a director. First she was the anthropologist then she joined the team as researcher. But then it was youre not a director, you cant direct a lm. So she managed to set up this thing that only a woman could do, inside the womens quarters with married women in Marrakesh and she had to get an all woman crew. She managed to nd a camerawoman and sound recordist. She had to borrow a woman sparks from Thames because there were so few women electricians around. So she had a completely female crew and she chose me as the editor because Id been working on the two Maasai lms. There are two high points of documentary for me. One is the [Humphrey] Jennings model and the other is the observational model which Melissa [Llewelyn-Davies] and David and Judith [MacDougall] represent. On Disappearing World we wouldnt have got away with doing the sort of thing that David MacDougall was doing. But we did get much closer to it with some of the later Maasai lms for the BBC and partly because by then the whole thing of observation in families and Roger Graef doing stuff in prisons had become more part of the lingua franca of documentary. You probably wouldnt get away with it now, but twenty years ago. The Womens Olamal was pretty close. I think it is nearly two hours long and there are only two and a half minutes of commentary, one of which I fought bitterly that you didnt need it. In The Womens Olamal the Maasai have this thing that the women do and also in certain circumstances the warrior grade which is that if things arent going their way they freak out and start hyperventilating. We were under constant pressure to explain that: People wont know,

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they will be shocked about this and they wont know what is going on. And both Melissa and I resisted this whole idea. I may be putting thoughts into her head but I think she felt, what is an explanation? What do you mean by explain? That is what they do. And I was reminded of when I was a child we lived in London and my mothers family lived in Yorkshire and she had several sisters and whenever they met they would always embrace and they would cry. As a child I could never understand, why are they crying? Arent they glad to see each other? And my dad would say, yes that is why they are crying, and I had to learn to get used to that. I thought that if we just show this lm as it is, when the moment comes when they freak out, for want of a better word, we have to have created a situation so that, as with my aunties when they met, you sort of take it for granted, you dont ask the question what are they doing because, you know, that is what happens. And I think to an extent in that lm which runs for about one hour fty with very little commentary we got away with that. In David [MacDougall]s lms you dont have any commentary. Youve just got to make sure that if there is any explanation needed it is there in the dialogue, which it usually is. The weight of meaning, of comprehension is carried by the dialogue.

Portrait of an Invisible Man

RM/MS: One extraordinary thing about Portrait is the incredible wealth of primary sources. I cant think of a precedent where a lm historian prior to that book had gone to such lengths to dig out the documents from the Public Records Ofce and elsewhere. DV: I hadnt realised that. It seemed the obvious thing to do. Remember that when I started to write that book there was almost no information about Stewart McAllister available anywhere that I could nd. I shared a house with Jane Wood and one evening we were sitting around the kitchen table and I was talking about the sense of responsibility that the editors in our company had towards the material, which wasnt universally shared and seemed at that point to be dying out. I said, I dont know where it came from this idea that we should take a moral stand, take responsibility for what we are editing. And Jane said, you assisted me, I assisted Ian Woolf, Ian Woolf assisted Stewart McAllister, it all comes from there. And I said somebody ought to write a book about Stewart McAllister and I then got that tingling at the back of my neck. Nobody else is going to do it; it would have to be me. So that is how it began. And that moment in my life, those few seconds, are really among my most important memories.

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RM/MS: Were there any models of historical research that you were drawing on when you embarked on Portrait of an Invisible Man? Who were your precursors? DV: I dont think there were any. The inuences on the structure of that book are the inuences of someone who is used to editing lm. It is a consciously structured book in the sense that every chapter has a slightly different relationship between the interview material, the archival material, my comments. It is not uniform, it is meant to have a fragmented surface. The chapters vary quite considerably in length and again that was part of the plan that that should be the case. Do you know it is amazing the things that actually inuence you in life? The silly little thing that has stayed in the back of my mind for years and years, I read something by the people who were designing the Festival of Britain and one of the things they said was that they were careful to use different underfoot surfaces: cobble, tarmac, grass, whatever, to avoid peoples feet becoming too tired. Montage for the feet. It is the only tactile comparison that I have come across. RM/MS: And was that in your mind when you were writing Portrait? DV: Well I think it probably was. It is so often in my mind. Whatever Im writing I hate the idea of it all coming across as uniform. My ction work is, in many cases, quite fragmentary, not to the point of being a bit of this and a bit of that, but sharp cuts. I think there is some inuence of lm editing in that. As far as the structure of that book is concerned nobody who has written about it has ever said that it breaks new ground in the writing of biography and I thought it did. And I was actually rather chuffed that it did. It was my rst book so it meant a lot to me. RM/MS: Can you spell out what you feel that new ground was? DV: I think partly, and this is where the relationship to cutting documentaries comes in, it was to do with letting the interview material largely speak for itself rather than introducing it: and here is somebody who says so and so. The thing that any documentary editor, Im sure, will tell you is maddening is when someone comes on to say, I think the Crimean War was a bad thing and the commentary before it says, so and so thinks the Crimean War was a bad thing. Because they dont believe that you can actually take information from arbitrarily selected members of the public. They think that everything has to come from the voice of authority.

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RM/MS: So that is replicated in the structure of the book to a certain extent? DV: Only to an extent because obviously a lot of it is me rabbiting on about auteurism or just giving plain historical or factual material but I like to juxtapose it with other things so that the connection isnt smeared over. You have got to make the connection yourself. For example, I dont think I made the direct juxtaposition but people talking about the sort of guy McAllister was, somebody says, he was a free spirit, he was like Ariel and the next person says he was like Caliban. That is wonderful. I made no attempt to reconcile those two. RM/MS: You discuss briey in Portrait that your appreciation of gender politics was accentuated by working as an editor. Can you elaborate on that? DV: Well yes there is something feminine in status. Youve got to be a little bit devious about how you get your way. And you have a sort of equality which isnt quite an equality. There is a funny sort of relationship between a director and an editor. Anthropologists refer to a joking relationship. It is when the rules of your society determine that I am superior to you because of X, Y and Z but you are superior to me because of A, B and C, and there is a conict, so you make jokes. That is very much the relationship in the cutting room; the director is formally the ruling party but on the other hand they are in your room using your equipment so you have a certain status and it is your skill. RM/MS: Portrait is a major contribution to the debates on authorship. Were there any arguments about authorship that you were intrigued by or implicitly challenging through the book? DV: Not specically but I was interested in the fact that having rescued the director from oblivion the door was now closed on everybody else. That seemed a bit unfair, especially in lm of all media, conning to one person. I know there is a chapter in there talking about that. So it was addressing itself to the general debates which had been going on. I used to read Screen, which was a real lovehate relationship because it was written with such a doctrinaire set of positions. Whenever it came through the door my heart used to sink, oh God Ive got to read Screen, but I felt I ought to, these were highly intelligent people with interesting ideas, they might express themselves with a rather stilted language and as if they had the moral truth and nobody else had. And it was a bit hard to stomach sometimes, and if you used the wrong word, like reality, you were in trouble. Nonetheless there was enough of substance in it to think that it was worth slogging through this stuff.

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RM/MS: I wondered if you felt there was a connection between Portrait and your later critical pieces on Odd Man Out, Jeux interdits and Salvatore Giuliano around the theme of negation or invisibility? DV: I was interested in that question in your preliminary letter because it was not something I was conscious of and I started to think is that true of my ction . . . I dont know the answer. And Im sometimes a bit cautious about enquiring too much into what my themes are. Im not obsessive about it, but I know that once I had written a few books I thought, ah, there is a common theme here which I didnt know was a preoccupation of mine but clearly is, which in that case was to do with loyalty, nishing a job you have started, all that sort of thing. But I dont know, states of negation, I shall think some more about this. I cant give you an answer.

Contemporary documentary and digital technology

RM/MS: What is your assessment of documentary television now? Is there anything of value being screened? DV: Yes, but it is in a very limited format. With the exception of the current affairs ones like Unreported World [C4, 2000] and Dispatches [C4, 1987] which are doing a terric job in journalistic terms while at the same time being often quite imaginatively structured, in terms of any other documentary, unless I am overlooking something, all you have really got are experts talking to you about archaeology, science, the arts. Sometimes what these people are saying is extremely interesting but that that should be the only permissible format tells you something about a society where authority is regarded as being the only structure available, where everything has to be mediated through authority gures. You can learn a lot from listening to them, and Im not saying they shouldnt make those programmes, certainly the editing now is far less sloppy than it was two or three years ago, but the fact that this is the only format available I nd very worrying. RM/MS: You suggest in your essay From Today Cinema Is Dead in For Documentary that the age of the chemical photograph has broadly coincided with that of mass democratic challenges to entrenched power, by representing a world open to scrutiny and evaluation. How do you now view the conclusions you made in From Today Cinema Is Dead concerning the loss of trust in the digital image? DV: I made those comments in From Today Cinema is Dead and thought that documentary would become almost a meaningless term.

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The funny thing is that is not what seems to have happened. I think that the lack of trust in some strange way has mutated into the ction area. Fiction lms always used to make great attempts to look like documentaries. They always used documentary styles to say this is real, even though you know it isnt real, to enhance your suspension of disbelief. That seems to have weakened whereas documentary seems to have ducked under the bar in some way. By using the rough and ready techniques they are managing to say this isnt a gimmick. Obviously it remains your responsibility to say well Im going to read that as a documentary, which in my view is what denes a documentary, it is how you read it. And you can of course be misled but that was always the case. But in ction lm you have got so far away, partly because more gimmickry is used in ction lms and when used in documentary it is so obvious. An example would be when I think back on The Lord of the Rings, what I remember is not moving footage, it is stills, and it is as if I am remembering a graphic novel. I know there was plenty of movement, quite dramatic movement but it all seemed to be movement which was trying to recapture the framing of a very well done graphic novel. So in a way the idea of a lm has become lost, it is as if real life has become the equivalent of animation rather than animation trying to copy real life. I dont know maybe that doesnt prove anything but I did nd myself thinking one day that it has gone the opposite way to what I was expecting. But I think there is an underlying loss of trust in the photograph and a lot of people think good riddance to it because it was always misguided trust anyway. But that remark that you quote abut the days of hope having gone, that was a bit of a throwaway remark and was deliberately provocative. It still niggles at me that there is some truth in that, that on some level, and we can dispute what the level is, that photochemical lm was a valid equivalent of the world and that by manipulating it yourself or endorsing the manipulations as a viewer of those images you could create something which was meaningful as a reection on the real world, and therefore in a sense that the real world became malleable and capable of change. That whole mindset seems to have been subtly undercut. I dont know I could be wrong. The other side of the thing about digital technology is what it does to the process as well as the result. With a Steenbeck you viewed the lm and to get back to the start you had to rewind. So youd rewind it fast but you would keep your eye on it and youd see something hiccup and youd think, theres something wrong there. And next time through you would look carefully and sure enough there was something that

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raised a certain discomfort. And you wouldnt have spotted that going at normal speed. It is like a painter looking at his work in the mirror to check the composition. RM/MS: What positions did you feel yourself to be writing against in For Documentary? DV: I think on the whole I was writing against a set of assumptions that I couldnt pin down to particular individuals that there is no real difference between documentary and ction because both are narrative forms, both are using imagery, one image is as valid as another image. It is very easy to make a case which would demolish documentary and sometimes I have to confess that in my own life Ive thought is this whole project a waste of time. I dont think it was or is a waste of time but pursuing the logic of some of those writers, and again I cant give you names but Ive come across that attitude many, many times, would actually mean there was no point in making documentaries or, to put it another way, that any documentary reading of those lms would be invalid and therefore what is the point in trying to elicit it if it is going to be invalid. Documentary is a dicey sort of medium. It always was, but it did call forth a great deal of passion and loyalty from people like me, Stewart McAllister, others. Sometimes I feel the way some of my communist friends felt after the Soviet Union collapsed, what has my life been about?

Motivations
RM/MS: As someone with many years grounding in lm production it is interesting that in your lm analysis you rarely attach a signicance to the contingencies of the lms production. DV: The problem is that a lot of the time you dont know. What gets irritating is when academics start attaching a great signicance in terms of directorial choice to something which you suspect, though you could never be sure, was purely uke. But when you are actually looking at a lm and saying why does this move me, why does it work, those considerations are probably on a different critical track. Ive always been convinced that the lm for you is the lm you have seen and what it means to you. In fact that has been a very central thing in the doubts that I have had about the academic treatment of lm. I am not hostile to, it is probably out of date now because I havent read academic writing for some time, but I am not hostile

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to the trends such as semiology, structuralism, all those things, very interesting insights came out of those. But one thing they do seem to almost deliberately bracket out of consideration is the way the human individual responds to a lm. I came across a wonderful quote very recently in a poem by Ingeborg Bachmann which said, between a word and a thing / you encounter only yourself. I thought wow, you might say it is obvious but I had never seen it expressed quite so succinctly and powerfully. In a way that seems to be something which certainly in the 1970s and 1980s, maybe still today, academic critics didnt take into account: that the hinge between the world and its representation is individual human consciousness, whether of the maker or the recipient it hardly matters, and that you always have to lter it through that. And that was really what was at the root of those debates we had in the 1950s about commitment and criticism. I do remember then being very, very impressed by Sartres collection What Is Literature? And this whole idea that the way we read a work of literature or by implication any of the other arts is an existential choice. That is what I was always keen on homing in on, what is really happening when we look at a lm. And funnily enough, perhaps because it has the appearance of being purely subjective or fanciful or not scientic enough the academic community seems to ght shy of that, sometimes with very positive results. The sort of analysis that people like Barthes were making works; you are persuaded by what he is saying, but there is an implication that these meanings occur in an abstract realm not in somebodys mind. When Godard said that every shot is a moral choice, I think he meant for the lm-maker; but it is true for the viewer too. RM/MS: Who do you imagine as the audience for your lm writing? DV: Anybody who likes what I write. I dont start with a target audience in mind for that or ction or anything, just an intelligent layperson. RM/MS: Are you hoping that you might be speaking to other lm-makers? DV: Oh yes I would like to think that people in the business would be interested in what Ive said, and to a large extent they have been. Ive had some good feedback, especially for Portrait of an Invisible Man. I dont have any proof of the readership of those books but I suspect that they are people who have a prior interest in documentary. Im also slightly saddened that there is this cordon sanitaire between what Ive written about lm and my ction. There is an overlap; Moritur was about a lm editor so you could say that it is a contribution to lm editing ethics.

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RM/MS: Writing ction and poetry are seen as more individual whereas your work as an editor is always in a collaborative context. How do those two modes of creativity t together for you personally? DV: Funnily enough that has never presented itself as a problem. I dont know to what extent my editing experience has informed the way I write ction. It would be extraordinary if it didnt after I had been doing it for forty years. There must be something wired into my brain that says that is how you put things together. And the fact that it is not collaborative is less of a distinction than it appears to be because when you are editing a lm, yes you are working with somebody else, part of the time you may have them there, part of the time you may not, but you are still making your choices and your decisions and deciding where to cut. It may be that the director will say it would be better to do X, Y and Z, in which case you would consider that. You may think it is worth trying or you may think it is denitely a good idea. Implementing that is still part of the same process so even though somebody else is there working with you on lm it is not that different when it comes to the crunch.
References Vaughan, Dai (1958), The pre-history of documentary, Films and Filming, May, pp. 8, 34. Vaughan, Dai (1960), Complacent rebel: a re-evaluation of the work of Robert Flaherty, In default of a manifesto, Towards a theory, Denition, 1, pp. 34, 58, 1525. Vaughan, Dai (1960), The Man With the Movie Camera, Films and Filming, 74, November, pp. 1820, 23. Vaughan, Dai (1983), Portrait of an Invisible Man: The Working Life of Stewart McAllister, London: BFI. Vaughan, Dai (1995), Moritur, London: Quartet Books. Vaughan, Dai (1995), Odd Man Out, London: BFI. Vaughan, Dai (1999), For Documentary, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Vaughan, Dai (2007), Passenger, Vertigo 3: 5, pp. 523. Vaughan, Dai (2008), On being Paulette: reections on Jeux interdits, Vertigo, 3: 8, pp. 245. Vaughan, Dai (2008), On being Thompson, Vertigo, 17, http://www.vertigomagazine. co.uk/showarticle.php?sel=bac&siz=1&id=1011, accessed 30 March 2011. Richard MacDonald teaches cinema history at Goldsmiths, University of London. His PhD thesis on the volunteer contribution to alternative lm culture in Britain is entitled Film Appreciation and the Postwar Film Society Movement. Martin Stollery lectures part-time on lm and television history for the Open University. His publications include British Film Editors (2004), which was co-authored with Roy Perkins, and essays on various aspects of the British documentary lm movement.

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