Theories on the Documentary Genre

John Grierson
Born in Deanston, Perthshire in 1898 Grierson has
been described as the father of documentary
filmmaking.

Grierson regarded documentary as primarily about

observation, he also argued that cinema should play
a socialising and mediating role in modern society.
Thus the observation must be “of the changing
world...the ordinary business of life”

Grierson was influenced in his thinking by A. D. Lindsay who was a chair of Moral
Philosophy at the University of Glasgow while Grierson was a student there. She
argued that ordinary people, workers in particular, lacked the education and
knowledge to make informed political decisions. Grierson was convinced that the
mass medium of film was the ideal tool for such educating. For him the
documentary genre “gives generous access to the public. It is capable of direct
description, simple analysis and commanding conclusion, and may, by its
tempo’d and imaginist powers, be made easily persuasive. It lends itself to
rhetoric, for no form of description can add nobility to a simple observation so
readily as a camera set low , or a sequence cut to a time beat. But principally
there is this thought that that a single say-so can be repeated a thousand times a
night to a million eyes, and over the years, if it is good enough to live, to millions
of eyes. That seven-leagued fact opens a new perspective, a new hope, to public
persuasion.”

Given such a powerful tool Grierson was committed to using it for social good, to
show the imperative of personal and collective improvement and to provide
models for social action. For him documentary was propaganda - art as social
engineering, its function being to express cultural values which then become
integrated into the value system of the spectator. Writing of the documentary film
movement he founded he said:

“The basic force behind it was social not aesthetic. It was a desire to make a
drama from the ordinary to set against the prevailing drama of the extraordinary:
a desire to bring the citizen’s eye in from the ends of the earth to the story, his
own story, of what was happening under his nose. From this came our insistence
on the drama of the doorstep. We were, I confess, sociologists, a little worried
about the way the world was going… We were interested in all instruments which
would crystallise sentiments in a muddled world and create a will toward civic
participation. ”
What is true of the movement is true of the individual films that it produced. The
philosophical idealist imperative to 'treat' reality in order to reproduce the
underlying reality of generative forces is combined with a social purposiveness.
This included the belief that positive representation should dominate negative
representation. Such an instrumentalist and prescriptive aesthetic is clearly not
strictly realist and forms the central tenet of the creative treatment of reality.
He is marking the difference between the phenomenal reality and the 'real' which
underlies it. For Grierson the reality he sought to express through film was
exactly this philosophical reality. To do so necessarily involved a commitment to
a naturalistic representation of the perceived world since it, as the manifestation
of underlying reality, was the best means of comprehending this transcendent
reality. However to do more than depict the surface qualities of the phenomenal
Grierson also believed it necessary to do more than point the camera and record:

“You don't get truth by turning on a camera you have to work with it …you don't
get it by simply peep hole camera work …There is no such thing as truth until
you have made it into a form. Truth is an interpretation, a perception. ”
The motivation for the 'creative treatment' of reality was not however exclusively
aesthetic. From Grierson's social commitment came the idea of documentary as
a means to an end:

“the idea that a mirror held up to nature is not so important in a dynamic and
fast changing world as the hammer which shapes it…It is as a hammer, not a
mirror, that I have sought to use the medium that came to my somewhat restive
hand ”
An unmediated reflection of the world was not what Grierson aspired to
producing. Rather 'actuality' had to be shaped and treated. By isolating an
individual activity or event the camera could reveal the inherent complexity of that
event. Reducing the inaccessible multiplicity of facts to accessible dramatic
patterns not only revealed the underlying generative forces at work in the
contraction of phenomenal reality, but also encouraged both a greater
understanding and social participation.

The supposition that any reality is left after 'creative treatment' is naive and
possibly duplicitous. Nevertheless, for Grierson documentary was an essentially
an adventure in observation but one in which the crucial step was how one
arranged those observations to reveal 'real'.
Also in addition Grierson's faith in the power of interpretation is influenced by
Georg Wilhelm Friedrick Hegel 's statement on art.

“True reality lies beyond immediate sensation and

the objects we see every day. Only what exists in itself
is real ... Art digs an abyss between the appearance
and illusion of this bad and perishable world on the
one hand, and the true content of events on the other,
to re-clothe these events and phenomena with a
higher reality, born of the mind ... Far from being
simple appearances and illustrations of ordinary
reality, the manifestations of art possess a higher
reality and a truer existence. ”

Paul Rotha
Paul Rotha (born Paul Thompson, 3 June 1907)
was a British documentary film-maker, film
historian and critic. Rotha was a close
collaborator of John Grierson.

Rotha’s and Grierson were the political

theoreticians of the movement and their ideas
can show to us the major components of the
documentary ideology and their relationship to
the politics of social democracy. While Grierson
was the movement’s right wing, its essence, a
bureaucrat, Rotha was the left face of British
documentary and its more serious thinker.
The documentarists, in particular Rotha as left pole, were faced with the task of
resolving the obvious contradiction between the “proletarian” orientation of the
documentary and its subservience to bourgeois sponsorship and control. In
seeking to reconcile the irreconcilable, Rotha is inevitably forced to deny the
class character of the state. The documentarists subscribe to the idea that the
state (the army, the police, the parliamentary, judicial and executive bureaucratic
apparatus), rather than being an instrument by which one class maintains
domination over another, is a structure though which class antagonisms can be
reconciled.

According to Rotha’s political theory, documentary film liberated itself from

capitalism by allying itself with the “impartial” state. And yet Rotha and the
documentarists did not disapprove of sponsorship by industry. One can
legitimately wonder what exactly constitutes British documentary’s independence
from capitalism. Rotha gives us the following answer: What is essential in
determining the ideology of cinema is not the ideological message it
communicates nor the political forces which act on it, but simply the process by
which it is produced. The “entertainment” film is produced in the capitalist
manner, in emulation of “modern manufacture.” That is, it is a commodity
produced on a large scale and for profit. The documentarists’ films, on the other
hand, are created in a “collective” manner through the cooperative effort of
individual filmmakers.

It is, of course, undeniable that Hollywood films, as a whole, are infused with
bourgeois ideology and that the filmmaker is subject to political and artistic
constraints. But to look at the “entertainment” film the capitalist- or state-
sponsored propaganda film as a model of “free” cinema is absurd. The irony is
that cinema directly controlled by industrial sponsorship or by the state must
submit to the most direct kind of political interference. And this is what Rotha
eloquently confirms.

So to conclude, most cinema, because of the financial conditions of production,

is a business activity, and the independence of the filmmaker from capitalism is
problematic from the beginning. The British documentary film does not represent
a solution. Despite their independence from the film trade and despite their
innovations in production and distribution of films, the documentarists did not
succeed in liberating their art but simply made bourgeois domination more
directly political by allying themselves with the state. What Marxist critics must
reproach the British documentary film with is that it failed to expose the
contradictions of the decadent capitalist social system. Wittingly or not, it made of
itself a tool in the hands of the bourgeoisie. Succumbing to the dominant
ideology, it sowed illusionism to its working class audience concerning the
ultimate reform-ability of capitalism, and it promulgated the politics of class
collaboration.
 Bill Nichols
Bill Nichols, in his book ‘Representing Reality’
explores the significance of documentary films:

The pleasure and appeal of documentary film lies

in its ability to make us see timely issues in need
of attention, literally. We see views of the world,
and what they put before us are social issues and
cultural values, current problems and possible
solutions, actual situations and specific ways of
representing them. The linkage between documentary and the historical world is
the most distinctive feature of this tradition. Utilizing the capacity of sound
recording and cinematography to reproduce the physical appearance of things,
documentary film contributes to the formation of popular memory. It proposes
perspectives on and interpretations of historic issues, processes, and events.

The status of documentary film as evidence from the world legitimates its usage
as a source of knowledge. The visible evidence it provides underpins its value for
social advocacy and news reporting. Documentaries show us situations and
events that recognizably part of a realm of shared experience: the historical world
as we know and encounter it, or as we believe others to encounter it.
Documentaries provoke or encourage response, shape attitudes and
assumptions. When documentary films are at their best, a sense of urgency
brushes aside our efforts to contemplate form or analyze rhetoric. Such films and
their derivatives have a powerful, pervasive impact.

The status of documentary as discourse about the world draws less wide-spread
attention. Documentaries offer pleasure and appeal while their own structure
remains virtually invisible, their own rhetorical strategies and stylistic choices
largely unnoticed. "A good documentary simulates discussion about its subject,
not itself."

Questions of structure and style of documentaries alter and evolve, shift and
adapt to changing social conditions. It is the choices available for representing
any given situation or event - choices involving commentary and interviews,
observation and editing, the contextualization and juxtaposition of scenes - that
raise historiographic, ethical, and aesthetic issues in forms that are distinct to
documentary.
“Documentary attends to social issues of which we are consciously aware. It
operates where the reality-attentive ego and superego live. Fiction harbours
echoes of dreams and daydreams, sharing structures of fantasy with them,
whereas documentary mimics the canons of expository argument, the making of
a case, and the call to public rather than private response.”

Moreover:
The Prospect theory
Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky developed the prospect theory. This is a
theory that describes decisions between alternatives that involve taking a risk, or
in other words, alternatives with uncertain outcomes, where the probabilities are
known. Their theory describes how individuals evaluate potential losses
and gains. This is highly relevant to the documentary film as most documentaries
encourage the making of a choice and formation of perspective as the theorists
above discuss. But most importantly, in connection to our own documentary
'Education Treadmill', the prospect theory has been put into action as our
audience has to outweigh the gains of university and the gains of vocational
studies and at the end they are faced with a very significant choice to make.