A Companion to Documentary Film History [1 ed.] 1119116244, 9781119116240

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A Companion to Documentary Film History

A Companion to Documentary Film History Edited by

Joshua Malitsky

This edition first published 2021 © 2021 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions. The right of Joshua Malitsky to be identified as the author of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with law. Registered Office John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA Editorial Office The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK For details of our global editorial offices, customer services, and more information about Wiley products visit us at www.wiley.com. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats and by print‐on‐demand. Some content that appears in standard print versions of this book may not be available in other formats. Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty While the publisher and authors have used their best efforts in preparing this work, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaim all warranties, including without limitation any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives, written sales materials or promotional statements for this work. The fact that an organization, website, or product is referred to in this work as a citation and/or potential source of further information does not mean that the publisher and authors endorse the information or services the organization, website, or product may provide or recommendations it may make. This work is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a specialist where appropriate. Further, readers should be aware that websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read. Neither the publisher nor authors shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data Names: Malitsky, Joshua, editor of compilation. Title: A companion to documentary film history / [edited by] Joshua Malitsky. Description: First edition. | Hoboken : Wiley-Blackwell [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020025445 (print) | LCCN 2020025446 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119116240 (cloth) | ISBN 9781119116295 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119116301 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Documentary films–History and criticism. Classification: LCC PN1995.9.D6 M3285 2020 (print) | LCC PN1995.9.D6 (ebook) | DDC 070.1/8–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020025445 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020025446 Cover Design: Wiley Cover Image: © image by Rainer Ganahl, ganahl.info (artist’s website), Kai Matsuyima Gallery, NYC Set in 10.5/13pt Minion by SPi Global, Pondicherry, India

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Contents

List of Contributors Introduction: Expanding Documentary Histories Joshua Malitsky

ix xi

Part I  Documentary Borders and Geographies Alice Lovejoy

1

Introduction Alice Lovejoy

3

1 A Distant Local View: The Small‐Town Film and US Cultural Diplomacy and Occupation, 1942–1952 Martin L. Johnson

9

2 The Work of Displacement in Colonial Documentary: History, Movement, and Collectivity Between the Postwar Metropole and Colonial French 27 West Africa Paul Fileri 3 Negation of the Negation: Tracking Documentary Film Theory in Japan Naoki Yamamoto

47

4 The Topographical Aesthetic in Late Stalinist Soviet Documentary Film Raisa Sidenova

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Part II  Authors, Authorship, and Authoring Agencies James Leo Cahill

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Introduction James Leo Cahill

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vi Contents 5 Documentality: The Postwar Mental Health Film and the Database Logic of the Government Film Agency Zoë Druick

107

6 Unmanned Capture: Automatic Cameras and Lifeless Subjects in Contemporary Documentary Joshua Neves

123

7 Corporate Authorship: French Industrial Culture and the Culture of French Industry Brian R. Jacobson

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8 A Skillful Isis: Esfir Shub and the Documentarian as Caretaker Alla Gadassik

165

9 Now and Then: On the Documentary Regime, Vertov, and History Philip Rosen

187

Part III  Films and Film Movements Joshua Malitsky

207

Introduction Films and Film Movements Joshua Malitsky

209

10 Documentary Dreams of Activism and the “Arab Spring” Jane M. Gaines

217

11 A Culture of Reality: Neorealism, Narrative Nonfiction, and Roberto Rossellini (1930s–1960s) Luca Caminati

239

12 The Romantic Becomes Dialectic?: Joris Ivens, Cold Warrior and Socialist Realist, 1946–1956 Thomas Waugh

255

Part IV  Media Archaeologies Malte Hagener

283

Introduction Malte Hagener

285

13 A Concise History and Theory of Documentaries on the Visual Arts Steven Jacobs

291

14 Documentary in the Age of Mass Mobility: Minzu wansui and the Epic Gesture of Ethnographic Propaganda Weihong Bao

311

Contents 15 Documentary Plasticity: Embryology and the Moving Image Oliver Gaycken 16 Hans Richter and the Filmessay: A Media Archaeological Case Study of Documentary Film History and Historiography Yvonne Zimmermann

Part V  Audiences and Circulation Brian Winston Introduction Brian Winston 17 Nonfiction Film in and out of the Moving Picture Theater: Roosevelt in Africa (1910) Gregory A. Waller 18 The Marginal Spectator Brian Winston

vii 337

367

391 393

401 421

19 “Every Spectator Is Either a Coward or a Traitor”: Watching The Hour of the Furnaces Mariano Mestman

437

20 From Media Effects to the Empathy Machine: The Nature of the Audience and the Persistence of Wishful Thinking William Uricchio

461

Index479

List of Contributors

Weihong Bao University of California USA

Malte Hagener Philipps University Marburg Germany

Luca Caminati Concordia University Canada

Alice Lovejoy University of Minnesota USA

James Leo Cahill University of Toronto Canada

Steven Jacobs Ghent University Belgium

Zoë Druick Simon Fraser University Canada

Brian R. Jacobson California Institute of Technology USA

Paul Fileri American University USA

Martin L. Johnson University of North Carolina USA

Alla Gadassik Emily Carr University of Art + Design Canada

Joshua Malitsky Indiana University USA

Jane M. Gaines Columbia University USA

Mariano Mestman Universidad de Buenos Aires Argentina

Oliver Gaycken University of Maryland USA

Joshua Neves Concordia University Canada

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List of Contributors

Philip Rosen Brown University USA

Thomas Waugh Concordia University Canada

Raisa Sidenova Newcastle University UK

Brian Winston Lincoln University UK

William Uricchio Massachusetts Institute of Technology USA

Naoki Yamamoto University of California USA

Gregory A. Waller Indiana University USA

Yvonne Zimmermann Philipps University Marburg Germany

Introduction: Expanding Documentary Histories Joshua Malitsky

Indiana University

Documentary Film and the Documentary Tradition Documentary media has a more prominent role in the contemporary global ­zeitgeist than it ever has before. Documentaries are produced by massive government agencies, by leading broadcast corporations, by independent collectives, by individuals, and by a host of formations in between. They are viewed in theaters, on broadcast and cable or satellite television, in public spaces, at workplaces, in schools, in galleries and museums, in planes, trains, and automobiles, and in homes. We  access them on screens small and large, projected in theaters, on walls, and on  personal devices, be they phones or personal computers. We watch them in one ­sitting or over the course of days, weeks, or months. A way of speaking about the world with images and (often) sounds connected to the world, they have become increasingly integral to how we experience our personal and professional lives. And whereas they serve a host of different functions, they have become perhaps the most significant form through which we think in depth about the past. Scholarship on documentary and nonfiction film has grown substantially in the last 30 years and exploded in the last 10. A handful of excellent volumes on the current state of documentary studies have either recently been published or are forthcoming. Some serve as introductory textbooks, such as Louise Spence’s and Vinicius Navarro’s Crafting Truth (Spence and Navarro, 2010). Some have sought to encapsulate the “present agenda of concerns” in documentary studies such as Brian Winston’s The Documentary Film Book (Winston, 2013) or the volume that Patrick Sjoberg and I produced entitled The Documentary Moment (Malitsky and Sjoberg, 2021). Others focus on debates and statements that have taken place over the history of documentary, such as Jonathan Kahana’s The Documentary Film Reader (Kahana, 2016). Alexandra Juhasz’s and Alisa Lebow’s A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film (Juhasz and Lebow, 2015), with which this book is affiliated, is an  authoritative as well as an activist study of “documentary’s world‐changing

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aspirations,” participating in the project to which it sees documentaries, scholars, and artists deeply dedicated—“the passionate commitment to and direct engagement with the lived world” (Juhasz and Lebow, 2015: 1). This relationship between documentary media and the past is the subject of A Companion to Documentary Film History. In this book, a cluster of major scholars address the textual, industrial, and social aspects of this media form. Among the many recent works, A Companion to Documentary Film History is the only anthology that focuses its attention on the history of the documentary. Its goal in this capacity is both to shed light on central historical issues, be they related to reception, geography, authorship, multimedia context, or movements, and to do so by highlighting a breadth of historiographical approaches. Crucially, it achieves this by radically expanding the purview of what counts as documentary. Recent years have witnessed growth in scholarship on nonfiction film practices that are seen by many to be peripheral to documentary. Travelogues, newsreels, industrial films, educational films, home movies, film diaries, science films, and promotional films were “considered too quotidian, too topical, too instrumental or too ephemeral to have a place in the documentary tradition” (Kahana, 2016: 3). Their aesthetics were too inconsequential, their voices too muted, their purposes too obvious. The new scholarship on this work, however, has transformed the field of documentary history by expanding the (cinematic) objects of consideration—and it has done so methodologically as well with its focus on materialist and archival histories. Challenging dominant auteurist and national cinema paradigms, such work highlights the conditions of film production and the context of its use, including the reasons for commission, the understanding of intended audience, the proposed purposes, and so forth. Doing so does not only make the subfield of documentary richer and more generative—though certainly it does that—but it is also historically necessary. In Michael Cowan’s book on Walter Ruttmann, for example, he expands beyond Ruttmann’s more commonly considered experimental films to include his sponsored work on advertising films, industrial films, medical films, and Nazi propaganda. For Cowan, Ruttmann was not exemplary in this range of work, as “all of them [the Weimar avant‐garde] made sponsored films before and after 1933”—a practice which expanded beyond Germany, “encompassing filmmakers such as Joris Ivens, Len Lye, Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein, Rene Clair, and many others” (Cowan, 2014: 12). This fusion never goes away, and a combination of independent feature‐length filmmaking and commissioned shorts can be seen, for example, with Errol Morris’s work. But beyond the scope of such studies, Cowan, Malte Hagener, and others have demonstrated that thinking together experimental aesthetics and practical application in sponsored work enables a fuller understanding of these filmmakers’ aesthetics. Rather than imagining the commissioned work as a practical and time‐consuming diversion, we become open to the possibility that each practice encourages and enables innovation in form and approach in the others (Cowan, 2014; Acland and Wasson, 2011; Hediger and Vonderau, 2009; Hagener, 2007; Orgeron, Orgeron, and Streible, 2012; Dahlquist



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and Vonderau, 2020). The new and expanded history of documentary film is also a new way of understanding what documentary is and how it has functioned over time. This volume binds histories of what we might take as “classical” or “social” documentaries together with work that addresses “useful” nonfiction film practices under the heading of “documentary” (Acland and Wasson, 2011). I do so to encourage the creation of an expanded, enriched sense of documentary and nonfiction film studies and, most importantly, to account for the argument made above about the value of such a framework for understanding materialist and aesthetic histories. But there is no consensus about terminology in the field of Cinema and Media Studies, i.e. what counts as documentary and what should be described as a nonfiction genre is not at all decided. This generates a tension with perhaps the most cited study of documentary media. In his introduction to documentary cinema, Bill Nichols offered this pointed, precise explication: Documentary film speaks about situations and events involving real people (social actors) who present themselves to us as themselves in stories that convey a plausible proposal about, or perspective on, the lives, situations, and events portrayed. The ­distinct point of view of the filmmaker shapes this point of view into a way of seeing the historical world directly rather than into a fictional allegory. (Nichols, 2010: 14)

Nichols’ definition centers on the tripartite structure of documentary meaning‐ making (filmmaker—subjects in the film—viewers), the film’s connection with the historical world, the form’s distinction from narrative fiction film, and the voiced, perspective of the filmmaker. It has become the default definition of much work on the topic. Yet there is increasingly little agreement about what defines documentary or documentary film in the first place. The contributors to this volume use a range of terms to describe the films associated with their objects of study, most frequently taking their cues from the labels being used at the time—kulturfilm, film journal, propaganda film, to name a few. There is even some playfulness and defiance about the effort to define it at all. Kahana remarks that “documentary is a slippery eel” (Kahana, 2016: 1). Juhasz and Lebow open their volume somewhat surprisingly with the remark, “even if we can agree that the majority of documentaries … may be identified by certain well‐worn practices … we accept what has become commonplace in documentary studies: that documentary defies definition” (Juhasz and Lebow, 2015: 1). To be sure, definitions of documentary—and there are many who make the effort to define—depend on whether they are driven by aesthetic, epistemological, ontological, or political concerns. Many reckon with the most famous one: John Grierson’s “creative treatment of actuality,” the fundamental principles of which drive Brian Winston’s deconstruction and disavowal in Claiming the Real (Winston, 1995). The father of documentary would surely not be pleased by any inclusion of these “lower” forms of nonfiction film practices, which so often mistake “the phenomenon for

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the  thing itself … ignoring everything that gave it the trouble of conscience, and penetration and thought” (Grierson, 1966: 201). Eschewing those labels, Michael Renov turns to poetics and rhetoric, an approach to artistic technique whose ­position at the border of science and art, and truth and beauty, he sees as homologous to the stance of documentary. He identifies four “fundamental tendencies or rhetorical/ aesthetic functions” of documentary that emerge from particular historical, cultural, and technological contexts: to record, reveal or preserve; to persuade or promote; to  analyze or interrogate; and to express (Renov, 1993: 21). From the literary to the historical, Philip Rosen emphasizes the temporal gap required for the process of  “converting document into documentary” (Rosen, 2001: 263). For Rosen, it is the  process of transforming “relatively unbridled visual indexicality into sense” via  sequenciation, that marks documentary’s imbrication with historical meaning (Rosen, 2001: 232). Others have sought to define documentary as an approach to speaking about the world with the world that expands beyond cinema and even photographic or pictorial‐based media. Robert Coles’s Doing Documentary Work—the first book on documentary I was assigned in graduate school—addresses documentary projects across literature, photography, and film, assessing artists’ aesthetic, ethical, psychological, and critical struggles to communicate about the world. For Coles, documentary, across these media forms, is about engaging with others, and any attempt to speak about others is inflected by the subjective position one occupies (Coles, 1998). The film historian Charles Musser likewise aims to think documentary beyond ­cinema, linking his interest in definition to questions of history and origins. He argues in favor of “the need to think about documentary as a formation and as a practice that is not arbitrarily tied to the appearance and rapid adoption of that term” (Musser, 2018: 2). Musser points to two strands of cultural production that help us understand documentary’s longue durée: the magic lantern and the lecture. The former links nonfiction to technology and the image while the latter points to a founding instance of documentary truth, one based in science and experienced collectively. Rather than documentary depending on technological reproducibility, he writes: The documentary tradition should not be seen as a subset of the history of cinema— but something else. They are two perhaps incommensurate histories that intersect, overlap, and become intertwined. Documentary practices offered a method of communication that incorporated new media forms as they became available. Projected celluloid‐based motion pictures was but one of these. (Musser, 2018: 11)

For Musser, this long view of documentary provides insight into the form’s past and offers flexibility for thinking about contemporary practices. Definitions are multiple, varied, even contradictory. Yet, in this way, with their negotiation between precision and flexibility and their various foci, they can be helpful; they call attention to the epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic concerns of the moment of their articulation. Along those lines, the goal of this Introduction is



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not to attempt to define documentary but instead to introduce some of the ideas leading thinkers on the subject have put forth. Readers of the volume can then see how related conceptions are articulated by the contributors themselves, as well as how various tenets of documentary are prioritized by the work under consideration in their pieces.

Writing Documentary History The history of documentary has often been told with a technologically determinist bent. It begins with the move from the predocumentary phase of the actuality to the classical period of documentary with the inauguration of narrative in Nanook of the North (1922) (Barsam, 1973; Barnouw, 1974). With the emergence of sound films around the 1930s, the form develops with voice‐over narration assuming the role of intertitles. The classical period sustains until approximately 1960, when the availability of portable 16 mm cameras and synchronous sound enabled a more intimate, democratic, less authoritarian model. The more recent histories (of the last 35–40 years) are still in the process of being understood. To be sure, Direct Cinema’s claims of providing objective evidence of the world through an observational approach have been called into question across contexts and by a range of approaches. Films with reflexive and performative elements have become more common and are often highly presentational in their address, calling attention to their acts of articulation and processes of production. In so doing, they locate the truth less in the relationship between the image and reality than in the trust between filmmaker and viewer. But that’s not to say that filmmakers and viewers abandoned the possibility of documentary communicating the truth of the past (i.e. its historiographic function). As Linda Williams describes in an analysis of Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line, “some kinds of partial and contingent truths are nevertheless always the receding goal of the documentary tradition” (Williams, 2013: 392). In the early 2000s some scholars saw the development of this line of (postmodern) thought—the inability of the photograph or its digital replacement to serve as a guarantor of truth—as an indication that we have moved into a “post‐ documentary” moment (Corner, 2000; Winston, 2013). Yet this line of thinking never matched how documentary films were being watched. Viewers consistently and penetratingly interrogate films’ truthfulness or factuality in ways that have probably changed less in the last 40 years than most expect. Indeed, with the information age, the availability of paratextual and extratextual materials (information that is in addition to critical responses to the film) increasingly shapes the judgments viewers make about the film and those involved in its production and circulation. But if those are some broad strokes for telling the history of documentary, the vast majority of scholarship on the topic is more concerned with specific instances, whether it focuses on a filmmaker, a movement, or a geographic area. Documentary studies began to develop as subfield of Cinema and Media Studies in the 1990s in

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response to a number of scholars’ interest in documentary’s underlying legitimacy (Renov, 1993; Winston, 1995; Gaines and Renov, 1999; Nichols, 1991; Kahana, 2016: 723–725). The subfield is associated by many with the academic conference Visible Evidence, also the name of a book series published by University of Minnesota Press (1997–2014, since taken over by Columbia University Press) that was one of the primary publishers of monographs and anthologies on documentary topics. This included volumes on documentary’s role in nations’ histories, on subgenres of documentary (including some on “peripheral” practices such as home and amateur movies), on individual filmmakers and individual films, on documentary’s connection with political and intellectual movements, on documentary’s relationship with other media forms, and on theoretical approaches to the form (https://www.upress.umn. edu/book‐division/series/visible‐evidence). Other (mostly academic) presses have supported this research as well: Wallflower, which has a “Nonfictions” series, Indiana, Columbia, Oxford, and more recently California and Amsterdam have all produced books on documentary‐related topics. Academic journals are the other most significant place for the publication of historical work on documentary and nonfiction film material. Studies in Documentary Film is the only journal completely devoted to the topic, but there are fairly consistent publications in film and media‐specific journals such as Cinema Journal (now the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies), Jump Cut The Moving Image, Film History, Film Quarterly, Black Camera, Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, and Screen, as well as in transdisciplinary journals focusing on critical theory, media and culture, and art criticism like Discourse, October, and Journal of Visual Culture. This volume is designed to provide an overview of the best historical scholarship being done on documentary and nonfiction film at the present moment. Instead of selecting previously published work, however, I reached out to scholars across the globe who are doing the most innovative and rigorous work in the area. To organize this work, I have created thematic strands that I believe productively account for the dominant and emerging approaches to understanding the history of documentary film and video. I am confident that these strands will spark intellectual conversations about the material and about the historiographical approach to the material. In other words, like so many of the best documentaries themselves, I aim to produce a work that encourages careful consideration of the historical objects at hand as well as the process of object‐making that the approach entails. At some points, this is likely to be explicit. More often, however, this critical reflexivity will be evident in the creativity and meticulousness of the scholar’s approach. The thematic strands enable and encourage such critical reflexivity by creating terrain that is fertile for debate around methodology and expansive to underrepresented groups and contexts. They account for approaches that allow us to take an international and global approach. By engaging both established and developing approaches to documentary and/as nonfiction film, this volume aims to locate readers clearly in an intellectual conversation and to equip them to shape its future direction.



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Thematic Strands The volume consists of five thematic strands, each consisting of an introduction by an expert in the area and three to five essays.

Documentary Borders and Geographies Practically from its inception, documentary has been seen as having a privileged relation to the nation. It was in the 1920s and 1930s—the period of documentary’s early maturity—that politicians started to believe cinema could influence citizens. Nonfiction filmmakers’ arguments about what cinema could and should do were often made by those working for the state. Buttressing this notion was many filmmakers’ conviction that the film camera could uniquely capture nationality, both in established forms and in emerging states. This close connection between nonfiction film and national identity came to the fore again in the 1980s and 1990s when the emergence of national cinema studies coincided with the birth of documentary studies. In recent years, however, new approaches (archival and cultural‐historical), new forms, and newly available sources have pointed to the internationalism of not only current projects but historical ones as well. As Alice Lovejoy notes, this transnational work “highlighted the importance of internationalism to documentary, and documentary to internationalism.” The essays in this section build on this principle, noting documentary’s consistent concern with borders and geographic frameworks but also highlighting the extraordinary variety of geographies under consideration in this research. They do so across scale, moving from the local town level in the United States to regional/supranational dynamics in the Soviet Union to unsponsored challenges to colonialism in French West Africa to the reception of Western documentary film theory in Japan. In addition to illuminating a range of conceptual issues related to the geographical, the essays in this section are all concerned with a particular era in documentary, from the end of World War II to the mid to late 1950s, a significantly understudied period in nonfiction film history.

Authors, Authorship, and Authoring Agencies The issue of authorship is central to many definitions of documentary; for John Grierson, it is a key aspect that distinguishes the documentary from less thoughtful or refined nonfiction genres. But authorship, as the essays in this section make plain, is a highly contested issue for documentary, encompassing questions about who controls or owns the image and debate over the status of documentary as commerce or journalistic speech. In addition to the definition, legal and academic, authorship remains a key framework for histories of documentary and nonfiction film. Following these arguments, the essays in this section take it as a frictive phenomenon to be explored with rigorous attention to context. James Cahill even develops a term that

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captures the approach to authorship these essays take: AuNT or Author‐Network Theory, which accounts “for the interplay of forces involved in the creation of nonfiction and documentary films.” The essays in the section likewise offer innovative conceptual frameworks for understanding the role of individuals, communities, and institutions in efforts of creative labor and the agency undergirding them. They do so across history, context, and nonfiction media form, interrogating authorial functions related to, among others, the creative and the artisanal, visibility and invisibility, documentary versus avant‐garde historiography, and concluding with the issue of human subjectivity and posthuman modalities.

Films and Film Movements The third section of this volume focuses on how scholars of nonfiction film work with both individual films and bodies of films as a way of understanding cinema’s relationship to the past. Like the other categories, a “movement” is one of the most enduring frameworks scholars have for classifying bodies of films—both nonfiction and fiction. However, the connective tissue that links films within a movement is not always self‐evident. The essays in this section interrogate those connections by addressing films that have been classified as part of film movements but do so in a way that establishes new, unanticipated connections with other films—those thought to be part of that movement as well as those outside of it—and cultural currents. As such, they urge us to reconsider the dominant associations of film movements with European cinema and with fiction film. Moreover, the term movement in scholarship on documentary film often takes on multiple meanings, referring to both the body of films and, frequently, the political movement with which they are aligned. The essays in this section explore in depth the implications of thinking of these films in relation to the movements with which they are associated. Sometimes this requires rigorous attention and sensitivity to the politics of the moment (Waugh), at others it requires reimagining what constitutes the movement itself (Gaines), and still at others it requires subverting the accepted genealogies of one of the most prominent movements in film history (Caminati).

Media Archaeologies Media archaeology is an approach to studying media history that aims to challenge what many see as teleological narratives of progress and technological development. Applying Michel Foucault’s archaeological approach to media and technology, scholars sought to identify forgotten examples in media history and to do so explicitly across media. It aims to radically destabilize narratives about media history, hierarchical relations across media, and the epistemological stability of cinema, radio, television, new media, and other forms. As Malte Hagener argues, the application of such an approach to documentary is generative. Documentary’s reliance on the dynamic between the fragment or “the document” and its insertion into a new



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context, “the documentary,” is ripe for media archaeology’s interest in the “materialities and medialities” of ruptures and originary contexts. It also aligns with the efforts of documentary scholars to continually question documentary’s definitional center and borders. The essays in this section take up this challenge, applying rigorous historical research to an array of nonfiction film material, looking “not only for the breaks and fissures, but rather for the contact zones and adhesive joints at which new formations emerge and new concepts are born.”

Audiences and Circulation Traditionally less about entertainment than about education, instruction, and preservation, documentaries have rarely attracted substantial theatrical box office success. As a result, filmmakers and producers have had to argue that they have audience impact in a different way—by claiming that documentaries have lasting effects on viewers. But such claims, Brian Winston asserts, have little verifiability. The goal of sparking audiences to act in support of the film’s argument has been achieved on a limited basis and with limited, targeted communities. The more common effect of mainstream documentaries (for Winston, this is part of the Griersonian tradition) on a mainstream audience has been an empathetic response that seldom led to social action. But any assessment of audience impact, whether as empathy or action, has been made in the absence of an archive. As Winston notes, “Our historical understanding of viewers’ responses is trapped between the limitations of positivist social science and, essentially, anecdotage.” The essays in this section point to areas and methods that aim to redress these gaps. They urge us to reconsider established narratives of nonfiction film history: about the emerging dominance of fiction film entertainments inside and outside of the movie theater from 1907–1910 (Waller), and about the audiences and spaces of exhibition for films central to the Western European and American documentary canon in the late 1920s and early 1930s (Winston). They think through the implications of this historical (mis)understanding: on how the meaning of a film we thought we knew can be transformed both over time and across reception context (Mestman), and how those who dream of or project a certain type of audience engagement would be wise to think about how viewers have historically interacted with media technologies both old and new (Uricchio).

References Acland, C. and Wasson, H. (eds.) (2011). Useful Cinema. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Barnouw, E. (1974). Documentary: A History of the Non‐fiction Film. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barsam, R. (1973). Non‐Fiction Film. New York: E. P. Dutton. Coles, R. (1998). Doing Documentary Work. New York: New York Public Library. Corner, J. (2000). What Can We Say about “Documentary?”. Media, Culture, and Society 22 (5): 681–688. Cowan, M. (2014). Walter Ruttmann and the Cinema of Multiplicity. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

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Dahlquist, M. and Vonderau, P. (eds.) (2020). Petrocinema: Modern Imaginaries and the Oil Industry. London: Bloomsbury. Gaines, J. and Renov, M. (eds.) (1999). Collecting Visible Evidence. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Grierson, J. (1966). Grierson on Documentary (ed. F. Hardy). Berkeley: University of California Press. Hagener, M. (2007). Moving Forward, Looking Back: The European Avant‐garde and the Invention of Film Culture, 1919–1939. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Hediger, V. and Vonderau, P. (eds.) (2009). Films That Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Kahana, J. (ed.) (2016). The Documentary Film Reader. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Juhasz, A. and Lebow, A. (eds.) (2015). A Companion to Documentary Film. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell. Malitsky, J. and Sjoberg, P. (2021). The Documentary Moment. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Musser, C. (2018). Documentary’s Longue Durée: Reimagining the Documentary Tradition. Charles Musser interviewed by Joshua Glick. World Records 2 (4): 1–15. Nichols, B. (1991). Representing Reality. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Nichols, B. (2010). Introduction to Documentary, 2nd edition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Orgeron, D., Orgeron, M., and Streible, D. (2012). Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Renov, M. (1993). Toward a Poetics of Documentary. In: Theorizing Documentary (ed. M. Renov), 12–36. New York: Routledge. Rosen, P. (2001). Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Spence, L. and Navarro, V. (2010). Crafting Truth. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Williams, L. (2013). Mirrors without Memories: Truth, History, and The Thin Blue Line. In: Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video, New and Expanded Edition (eds. B. Grant and J. Sloniowski), 385–403. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. Winston, B. (1995). Claiming the Real: The Documentary Film Revisited. London: British Film Institute. Winston, B. (ed.) (2013). The Documentary Film Book. London: BFI.

Acknowledgments There are a number of people I’d like to thank for helping make this volume happen. Most important are my Theme Editors: James Cahill, Malte Hagener, Alice Lovejoy, and Brian Winston. They were all an absolute pleasure to work with – they helped identify contributors, showed sharp editorial acumen, and displayed remarkable patience and positivity. Malin Wahlberg, Alisa Lebow, and Alex Juhasz were instrumental in getting the project underway and I thank each of them for their suggestions – the volume is much stronger as a result. We worked with a number of teams at Wiley-Blackwell and I want to thank them for their efforts. At Indiana University, Zach Vaughn and Cole Nelson did timely and thorough work whenever I needed them. I believe their meticulous attention to detail is evident in the final product.

Part I

Documentary Borders and Geographies

Introduction

Documentary Borders and Geographies Alice Lovejoy

University of Minnesota

Bill Nichols has observed that when documentary film took shape, it did so at the same moment – the late 1920s and early 1930s – that critics, filmmakers, and politicians began to argue that cinema could play a role in national (and nationalist) endeavors (Nichols 2001). These projects existed in close proximity, and often informed one another. When British critic and filmmaker Paul Rotha was writing his 1930 The Film till Now: A Survey of the Cinema, for instance  –  a book that chronicles the history of cinema in the United States, Britain, France, Germany, and the Soviet Union  –  he was also making nonfiction films for institutions like the Empire Marketing Board, one of the cornerstones of the British Documentary Movement (Rotha 1930). At the same moment, in Prague, filmmaker Jiří Jeníček was arguing for a Czech national cinema that could contest territorial claims by Czechoslovakia’s German and Hungarian neighbors. Although Jeníček held that the “national” would reach its apex in the fiction feature, in the same years, he also was producing the short nonfiction films that he saw as a training ground for this format (Jeníček 1940: 27). The idea that nonfiction film had a privileged relationship to the nation proved long‐lasting in documentary studies, a subfield of cinema and media studies that emerged in the 1980s – perhaps not coincidentally, the same decade when the idea of “national cinema” rose to prominence. In the subfield’s early decades, films such as Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 Triumph of the Will (documenting the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremburg, Germany), American director Pare Lorentz’s 1936 The Plow That Broke the Plains (a New Deal film addressing the Dust Bowl), and Harry Watt and Basil Wright’s 1936 Night Mail (a key work of British documentary depicting the British postal service’s operations) became foundations of courses on documentary film, while widely read texts situated documentaries and their makers in A Companion to Documentary Film History, First Edition. Edited by Joshua Malitsky. © 2021 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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national frameworks (see, e.g. Grant and Sloniowski 1998). As a result, through the end of the twentieth century, documentary scholarship frequently echoed interwar authors’ confidence in documentary’s links to the nation, as well as the authors’ arguments about the nation’s self‐evidence  –  its readiness to be documented. As Stephen G. Tallents, founder and director of the Empire Marketing Board, wrote in his The Projection of England, “national projection” was “the art” “of “throw[ing] a fitting presentation” of a country “upon the world’s screen,” through a combination of “honest self‐expression” and “honest confidence” (Tallents 1932: 37). Nationality, in Jeníček’s theory of cinema, was something a camera could simply capture. In the 2000s, documentary’s embrace of networked technologies, and the turn by a growing number of film and media scholars to archival and cultural‐historical methods, unsettled the nation’s central position in documentary studies. At the same time that formats such as interactive documentaries (i‐docs) underscored the connectivity undergirding a significant subset of contemporary documentary, linking viewers and locations (see Aston et al. 2017), historical research pointed out that, long before the rise of digital technology, documentary worked between and among geographies. In her work on UNESCO, for instance, Zoë Druick emphasized the role of the “international” in giving shape to postwar documentary (Druick 2008), while new approaches to the work of Joris Ivens, and to interwar radical documentary, highlighted the importance of internationalism to documentary, and documentary to internationalism (Waugh 2016). Much of this work employed transnational approaches, underscoring that even when documentary undertook “national” projects, it often did so with personnel, material, and ideas from elsewhere (Ivens’s Power and the Land is a classic example: produced for the U.S. Film Service yet directed by the peripatetic Dutch communist). (See also Druick and Williams 2014; Malitsky 2013). Moreover, by turning their attention to a wider range of institutions, films, and historical sources, scholars called into question the very definition of the nation in and for documentary. In revisiting documentary’s interwar foundations, for instance, Lee Grieveson and Jonathan Kahana demonstrated that British documentary and American New Deal documentary were as much a matter of the state – the set of institutions governing a territory – as of the nation (a more contested, and thus difficult‐to‐define, idea) (Grieveson 2011; Kahana 2008). The essays in this section continue in this vein, underscoring documentary’s investment in borders and geopolitical frameworks, yet pointing to the considerable variety of, and overlaps between, the format’s geographies. The essays shift between lenses and scales – starting small, with the American town in the aftermath of World War II. In “A Distant Local View: The Small‐Town Film and U.S. Cultural Diplomacy and Occupation, 1942–1952,” Martin Johnson examines three nonfiction films produced in the early 1950s by the Reorientation Branch of the United States Army’s Civil Affairs Division: A Town Solves a Problem (1950), Women and the Community (1950), and Social Change in Democracy (1951). Destined to be shown in countries occupied by the United States after World War II, the films depicted life, work, and governance in three small towns: respectively, Pittsfield, Vermont; Monroe, New



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York; and Biloxi, Mississippi. While the films were intended to positively portray the United States to audiences in Germany, Japan, and Korea (and particularly to offer instruction in democracy), Johnson makes clear that their geopolitics were not limited to “national projection.” Indeed, when screened in the towns where they had been made, the documentaries also served as “local films,” showing places and faces that, familiar at home, doubled as diplomatic representatives abroad. Johnson’s essay demonstrates both this imbrication of the local, the national, and the international in films that were primarily works of propaganda  –  a mode of cinema typically understood in chauvinistic national terms – and the instability at the heart of the “national,” whose portrayal in documentaries such as these depended on multiple material factors. Raisa Sidenova’s essay, “The Topographical Aesthetic in Late Stalinist Soviet Documentary,” chronicles the Soviet government’s postwar attempts to rein in such divergences between documentary’s geopolitical imaginaries. Sidenova argues that, from 1945 to 1953, the dominant genre in Soviet nonfiction film was the “geographical documentary” – a format that attempted to foster pride in the Soviet Union after its World War II victory and to give audiovisual shape to the country’s new boundaries (which now included the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania). Films such as Soviet Armenia (Sovetskaia Armeniia, 1951), Soviet Lithuania (Sovetskaia Litva, 1951), Soviet Turkmenistan (Sovetskii Turkmenistan, 1950), and Soviet Georgia (Sovetskaia Gruziia, 1952) used a standardized set of devices  –  an episodic structure, a lack of individual characters, synchronized sound, and a “totalizing view of Soviet life” – that Sidenova characterizes as a “topographical aesthetic.” While this standardization emphasized the Soviet Union’s ideological uniformity (in the process masking the distinct nationalities, ethnicities, and cultures in the regions the films depicted), its formulas also offered a “survival strategy” for filmmakers under Zhdanovism, the brutal, anti‐Western and anti‐cosmopolitan cultural policy that lasted from the end of World War II to Stalin’s death in 1953. Sidenova’s essay is one of the first to explore Soviet documentary in this period. She shows not only how the postwar Soviet government attempted to harness, in new ways, documentary’s historic links to publics and polities, but also the diversity of institutions and film forms that comprised postwar Soviet documentary (which, in addition to dedicated documentary film studios, was also situated in popular‐science and n ­ ewsreel studios). While Johnson and Sidenova investigate state‐sponsored nonfiction film, Paul Fileri explores the complex geopolitical dynamics in “unofficial” French postwar documentary – that is, films made without government support (and at times with government opposition). In “The Work of Displacement in Colonial Documentary: History, Movement, and Collectivity Between the Postwar Metropole and Colonial French West Africa,” Fileri closely analyzes two films made as part of the struggle for decolonization in francophone Africa: René Vautier’s Africa 50 (Afrique 50, 1950) and Mamadou Sarr’s and Paulin Soumanou Vieyra’s Africa on the Seine (Afrique sur Seine, 1955). He argues that the films must be seen both within the contexts of French or African cinema and as a response to the history of the state‐sponsored

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colonial documentary, to whose form the films respond. Africa 50 and Africa on the Seine do not resolve this geographic instability; instead, as Fileri describes, they give voice to the filmmakers’ powerful experience of “displacement” between the (French) metropole and the colonies. Displacement is legible at once in the films’ production history – as Fileri writes, Africa 50’s makers “[cut] across and mix[ed] African and French cultural expression and locations” – and in their aesthetics, which depend not only on the use (and reuse) of documentary footage, but also on the filmmakers’ experience of censorship by the French state. Ultimately, the films find “belonging” outside of official geopolitical boundaries: for instance, in experiences of “solidarity and fraternity” depicted in Africa on the Seine. Fileri’s destabilization of media‐geopolitical commonplaces (such as the notion that a documentary must be from somewhere) is echoed in the section’s final essay, Naoki Yamamoto’s “Negation of the Negation: Tracking Documentary Film Theory in Japan.” Turning his attention to how ideas about documentary moved, Yamamoto examines the reception, in Japan, of Rotha’s 1936 Documentary Film  –  a book, as Yamamoto writes, that “ignited surprisingly fierce and long‐lasting debates among its local readers.” Focusing on readings of Rotha from the late 1930s to the mid‐1950s by film critics Tsumura Hideo, Imamura Taihei, and Hanada Kiyoteru, Yamamoto considers these critics’ discussions of Rotha, their own theories of documentary film, and their interactions with one another. He argues that the reception of Rotha’s theories in Japan was “elliptical,” echoing the development of Japanese film theory in general, whose “critical debates … developed in constant dialogue with ideas or concepts imported from abroad.” More broadly, Yamamoto calls into question the idea that there are “unique,” “nation‐based theories and practices,” asking us to pay attention, instead, to the “actual conditions that informed these activities’ emergence at a specific moment in history.” He also critiques the common assumption that the West was the primary point of origin for theories of cinema. Documentary theory in Japan, he argues, emerged as part of a larger international conversation about cinema, one in which Japanese critics and filmmakers played an active role. While all four of these essays examine documentary’s geographies, they are also concerned with the history of documentary, and documentary theory, at a distinct moment in time: from the end of World War II to the mid to late 1950s. Wedged between the flourishing nonfiction film cultures of the 1930s and World War II and the emergence of cinéma vérité/direct cinema (as well as the essay film) in the late 1950s – and defined politically by the polarized height of the Cold War – the first postwar decade is typically remembered as a period of sober, unimaginative films. In Bert Hogenkamp’s words, “the common view was this: after the 1930s nothing happened” (Hogenkamp 2001: xi). These essays, however, make clear that from North America to East Asia, from Europe to Africa, filmmakers, film institutions, and governments were deeply invested in working out what documentary – in its production, distribution, and exhibition – could mean and do in the postwar world. Moreover, to the argument that this period was formally barren, films as divergent as Soviet Armenia, Africa 50, and A Town Solves a Problem respond that the question of documentary form in these years was not only active, but had very much to



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do with geopolitics. If, as these essays demonstrate, these geopolitics extended beyond the nation (or at least any simple understanding of it), so too did the conversations that helped shape documentary, and its films, institutions, and theories.

References Aston, J., Gaudenzi, S., and Rose, M. (2017). i‐Docs: The Evolving Practices of Interactive Documentary. New York: Columbia University Press. Druick, Z. (2008). “Reaching the Multimillions”: Liberal Internationalism and the Establishment of Documentary Film. In: Inventing Film Studies (eds. L. Grieveson and H. Wasson), 66–92. Durham: Duke University Press. Druick, Z. and Williams, D. (2014). The Grierson Effect: Tracing Documentary’s International Movement. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan on behalf of the British Film Institute (Cultural Histories of Cinema). Grant, B. and Sloniowski, J. (1998). Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Grieveson, L. (2011). The Cinema and the (Common) Wealth of Nations. In: Empire and Film (eds. L. Grieveson and C. MacCabe), 73–113. London: BFI. Hogenkamp, B. (2001). Film, Television and the Left in Britain, 1950–1970. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Jeníček, J. (1940). Krátký Film. Prague: Nakladatelství Václav Petr. Kahana, J. (2008). Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary. New York: Columbia University Press. Malitsky, J. (2013). Post‐revolution Nonfiction Film: Building the Soviet and Cuban Nations. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Nichols, B. (2001). Documentary Film and the Modernist Avant‐Garde. Critical Inquiry 27 (4): 580–610. Rotha, P. (1930). The Film till Now: A Survey of the Cinema. New York: Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith. Tallents, S. (1932). The Projection of England. London: Faber & Faber. Waugh, T. (2016). The Conscience of Cinema: The Works of Joris Ivens, 1912–1989. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

1

A Distant Local View

The Small‐Town Film and US Cultural Diplomacy and Occupation, 1942–1952 Martin L. Johnson

University of North Carolina

Introduction In June 1942, the United States government created the Office of War Information (OWI) to collect its propaganda efforts under the administration of a single agency. Although the OWI’s efforts within the US are well known, the organization also created a series titled Projections of America (or, in some instances, The American Scene) that was designed to promote American ideals internationally. Other US government agencies – including the Council on Inter‐Cultural Affairs and, after the end of World War II, the Civilian Affairs Division of the United States Army – produced or commissioned their own motion pictures, also for consumption overseas. Within a few years of the war’s end, propaganda efforts were taken up by the US Information Agency, which remained active even after the United States Congress placed limits on the domestic distribution of its films.1 In this chapter, I focus on a narrow band of these documentary films that promoted small‐town politics and culture as the essence of American values. In recent years, scholars in a number of disciplines have argued that the American small town was a powerful ideological topos in the mid‐twentieth century, as it allowed the US government to present its cultural and economic imperialism abroad under the guise of local, common‐sense values.2 Small‐town films such as Julien Bryan’s five‐ film Ohio Town series (1945), indeed, used government resources to promote a “local view” that was then sent around the world as a documentation of American values in practice. Although a number of agencies produced these films, I focus on the Reorientation Branch of the Civil Affairs Division (CAD) of the United States Army, which, starting in 1947, produced documentaries for exhibition in five

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countries occupied by the US military, Japan, Germany, Korea, and, for a briefer period, Austria and Italy, many of them set and filmed in small towns in the United States. In addition to analyzing these films, I consider how their production and reception was covered in the towns where these films were made. While these films’ domestic distribution was limited, they were publicly screened in the towns where they were made. As a result, these motion pictures also functioned as local films – motion pictures made in order for people to see themselves, and places they recognized, on screen. As such, they served as sites where small‐town, and implicitly American, ideals were performed and critiqued by local and global audiences alike.

Domestic Films for Overseas Consumption In the later years of World War II, film producers in the Office of War Information and other offices in the United States government shifted focus from making films intended to help win the war to creating motion pictures that would help the United States secure peacetime prosperity. For example, in early 1943, Robert Riskin, head of the Overseas Bureau of the OWI, launched a new documentary film series titled “Projections of America” that was intended to counteract negative images of the United States perpetuated through Hollywood film.3 Meanwhile, with the sponsorship of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter‐American Affairs (CI‐AA), the lecturer and documentary filmmaker Julien Bryan shot a series of five films in Mount Vernon, Ohio. As one newspaper put it at the time, the series, which was filmed in 1944, was produced “to give the people of other nations a true picture of how the greater part of America lives,” and, once again, counter Hollywood’s presentation of the United States.4 While some government critiques of Hollywood focused on the industry’s depictions of sexuality and violence, others centered on its perceived anti‐urban bias. In keeping with this, many government‐produced films intentionally highlighted places that were thought to be neglected by Hollywood.5 In turn, those places that were filmed by the government came to think of themselves as the essence of American identity. Soon after Bryan’s Ohio films were exhibited in the town where they were made, for instance, another paper in the state called them “a true picture of how that average American family lives in the nation’s thousands of small and medium‐sized towns and villages.”6 Although historians have speculated on these films’ ideological functions, government agencies did not hide their intentions from domestic audiences, particularly from the towns that were asked to participate in the films’ production. For example, when a representative from Riskin’s Overseas Bureau of the OWI arrived in Cummington, a small village in western Massachusetts, in the autumn of 1944, the region’s newspaper announced that the film was intended to “inspire confidence in America and to promote a better understanding of the American people and their way of life.”7 More specifically, it was to do so by depicting the “small group of refugees who settled in Cummington and learned about the people, the traditions and



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the workings of democracy that make New England so distinctive a region of the United States.” Just as local residents of Mount Vernon, Ohio, were expected to appear, unpaid, in Bryan’s films, the newspaper suggested that The Cummington Story (directed by Helen Grayson) required “whole‐hearted co‐operation on the part of the people who made up the community,” who were expected to be “on hand” the following Sunday, September 17, for the initial shoot. The article also noted that those who attended services at the Community Church for the benefit of the picture would be served free meals, and another shoot would take place at the town hall on October 8. By agreeing to materially participate in the production of the film, the people of Cummington implicitly supported the film’s ideological objectives as well. Although The Cummington Story was completed in 1945, the film was not exhibited in the town until January 1946, when more than 700 people crowded into the town hall to see the picture.8 While an article on the screening emphasized the fact that the town of Cummington was able to “see itself ” in the movies, it also praised the picture’s high production values, as did an article in Time.9 Like other films produced by the OWI, most notably Josef von Sternberg’s The Town, filmed in Madison, Indiana, in September 1943, The Cummington Story valorizes the stability and resilience of American small towns.10 But rather than serving as a paean to rusticity, The Cummington Story narrates the experience of political refugees as they transition to life in the United States, with a focus on two characters, Joseph and Anna. Narrated by a pastor, who identifies himself as the person who brought a family of refugees to Cummington, the film presents the town as an idyllic space, with traditions and landscapes largely unchanged since the town’s founding in the late eighteenth century.11 The film’s score, by Aaron Copland, invites the viewer to lose oneself in reverie, as images of Cummington’s farms, churches, and historic sites underscore its idyll. Copland’s stature as national hymnist was such that he was the only individual listed in the film’s credits.12 Even though the film acknowledges that, in this snow globe of a town (which one can observe, but never change), Joseph and Anna are not welcomed by all, the narrator attempts to reconcile the differences between Joseph and Anna’s old life in Austria and their new one in the United States. For example, as Joseph and Anna play Mozart, the film cuts to a slow pan across the New England landscape, while the narrator notes that “our land is similar to their own, chopped into small one‐man, two‐man farms.” And after Joseph gains acceptance in the close‐knit community, he starts a job with a local book publisher, his previous profession. The end of the film returns to a crowd scene, this time a town meeting, with Joseph announcing that, having learned the value of community from his neighbors in Cummington, he is returning to his home country to help rebuild it. Here, Grayson suggests that American small towns are not permanent homes for immigrants but can provide models for how foreigners might improve their own communities. In fact, although The Town, The Cummington Story, and many films like it shared a reverence for small‐town life, they were not particularly invested in promoting the towns they depicted as places welcoming to immigrants or people of color looking to resettle in the United States. Rather, they were an attempt by government

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filmmakers to connect with foreign audiences by presenting societies and l­ andscapes that might be more familiar to people living in rural areas abroad than the cities that were more frequently depicted in Hollywood films. As the narrator asks in von Sternberg’s The Town, “Where is this town? Where you can find an old English tower, an Italian campanile, down the street a Gothic doorway?,” and proceeds to identify a half‐dozen national architectural styles that appear in the community. “Few,” he continues, “may have guessed that this is a town in the United States of America,” a message that argues against the distinctiveness of the United States (if only architecturally). And indeed, small towns were useful for the OWI because they served as a point of connection between rural sites across the United States, as well as between rural sites internationally. Moreover, they allowed for encounters between cultures and populations to be depicted in a space that was familiar to many viewers, regardless of their nationality. If urban imagery in film, at this moment, promoted national exceptionalism with depictions of skyscrapers and other symbols of modernity, rural images in small‐town films instead suggested partnerships between nations through the uniting lens of local values.13 When the Office of War Information was disbanded at the end of the war, films such as these, now orphaned, were ripe for adoption by other agencies.

Motion Pictures for Occupied Territories After World War II ended, the US government found itself not simply communicating with other nations, but occupying several, with peacetime operations in, among others, Germany, Japan, Korea, Italy, and Austria. At this point, government films began emphasizing the United States’ distinctiveness, rather than its similarities with other nations, perhaps in recognition of the country’s new prominence on the global stage. Two years earlier, in 1943, the War Department had established a Civil Affairs Division (CAD), which was tasked with coordinating all nonmilitary operations in occupied nations, including cultural production and dissemination. Pare Lorentz, well known for his government film production in the 1930s, was selected to head this effort in 1945. Among the responsibilities of the CAD’s “reorientation branch” was the distribution of US-approved motion pictures to theaters in occupied nations. While the exhibition of American movies in occupied Germany, Japan, and Austria has been the subject of many monographs and articles, there has been considerably less written about the production of the films screened in these countries.14 As Hiroshi Kitamura explains in his introduction to Screening Enlightenment, which focuses on Japan, this emphasis on the circulation of American cinema within occupied countries is part an effort to counter the “sender’s perspective” that marks much of the scholarship on Americanization and cultural imperialism in the post war period.15 By assuming that US interests were well‐defined and consistent regardless of whether a film was made by the government or a Hollywood producer, such studies neglect the extent to which production decisions, not just those related to distribution and exhibition, had considerable impact on the efficacy of propaganda.



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Government‐produced documentaries, in particular, have been neglected in these studies, perhaps because heavy‐handed attempts to control which Hollywood films were permitted to circulate in occupied countries was seen as a more pressing matter, particularly when such films were intended to counter the occupied nation’s own cinema.16 Leaving aside questions of cultural imperialism for the moment, it seems worth emphasizing the pragmatic questions involved in selecting and distributing films for millions of people. At first, the CAD relied on its existing catalog of pictures produced by the OWI and other agencies, along with those Hollywood films that met their standards and, more importantly, were made available to them by the motion picture industry.17 The task of assessing Hollywood films for ideological content proved difficult for the Army. As Susan Smulyan has noted, the Civil Information and Education (CIE) section of the CAD’s efforts in Japan “found the content of documentaries and newsreels easier to control and understand than the slippery ideology presented by commercial films.”18 For this reason, it is no surprise that the government invested considerable time in selecting, distributing, and even producing nonfiction films. The CAD’s first proposed documentaries sought to cover a range of topics, from rural cooperatives to juvenile delinquency, the American university to the Columbia River Valley, but it is unclear how many of these were actually produced.19 Within a  year, however, their focus narrowed. For fiscal year 1947, the CAD committed $1.7 million for the production of original documentaries that would “show how essential aspects of democracy work in the United States.”20 According to an article in Motion Picture Herald, the Army had produced just three documentaries in the previous year, and was now committed to making 52 documentaries, with half shot by the Army in Germany and Japan, and the other half “made on contract by independent producers on the coast.”21 The decision to rely on outside producers was likely guided by an awareness that the industry itself was no longer interested in deploying its considerable talents to help government film production, and the Army’s existing motion picture unit in the Signal Corps was more accustomed to training films and newsreels than the kind of films Civil Affairs wished to make. Several people who were affiliated with the CAD felt frustrated by the organization’s slow progress, including Lorentz, who left the organization in May 1947.22 A few months later, in late November 1947, Major General Robert McClure, who headed the CAD’s New York Field Office, sent a long memo to the CAD’s Washington‐ based chief, General Daniel Noce, on the division’s documentary production plans. Having decided that they had had their fill of motion pictures on music and art, World War II, and international relations, the division targeted five categories of production. The first four all dealt explicitly with America  –  “Our Democracy,” “Our People,” “Our Land,” and “Our Industry” – while the fifth focused on “community resources.” In a policy statement that was included in the same memo, McClure argued: Wherever possible, we should tell our story in terms of real, down‐to‐earth people. Foreign audiences know us as an industrial colossus, but not as a nation made up of middle‐class working people who are the real strength of country. We should emphasize

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the routine rather than the spectacular; the small rather than the large; the rural rather than the urban; the faulty rather than the perfect; the struggle rather the ease – so that our audience will see us against our real, not our glamorized, background.23

By suggesting that the “real” America was its ordinary, middle class, flawed, and struggling people living in rural areas, McClure laid the groundwork for films that would celebrate small towns and their inhabitants. While this statement echoed earlier comments, given in various venues, about the necessity of counteracting, or supplementing, other views of America that circulated worldwide, here McClure established the thematic line that the CAD would follow in the next few years’ productions, which focused on small towns, even when they were nominally depicting other issues, from the first amendment to women’s rights. According to the memo, the Signal Corps’s procurement office handled contracts for screenplay writers and filmmakers, who would be asked to submit a “six‐ to seven‐page treatment on how they propose to treat a film on the subject.” If the CAD was interested in the proposal, they commissioned a script, and after it was accepted a contract went out to production companies, many of which were private firms that serviced the nontheatrical market. As stated earlier, this model of production was sharply different from that used by the OWI and other agencies, which did the work in house or took a more direct supervisory role over production. In the memo, McClure justified the need for each production, citing both demand from CAD staff in the occupied nations and the absence of similar films made by either private companies or other government agencies. Another limiting factor was technical – because color film could not be duplicated overseas, all films had to be in black and white – and a number of existing films were rejected for this reason. Because the CAD sought to cover topics that were not addressed by other filmmakers, the list of films they sought represented an unlikely set of concerns. For example, in justifying the need for motion pictures on women and democracy, the memo noted that they needed one or more films that showed the “general attitude of comradeship and respect between American men and women, and the equality accorded women in America.” For its proposed six‐film series on the city, McClure echoed earlier government critiques of Hollywood: Commercial films project chiefly the lush “play‐boy” groups  –  or the lower class “­problem” groups. The real working middle class – the strength of our country – has no adequate film treatment. Cities, such as Minneapolis, Winston Salem, Akron, would be used, not the large cities such as New York, San Francisco and others that have been covered in many ways in other films. Also, the life of the family will be tied into the main industry of that particular city.

Even though the CAD occasionally filmed in small cities such as Tulsa, Oklahoma, and suburban communities such as Yonkers, New York, these films tended to emphasize community life and the values associated with small towns rather than metropolitan aspirations.24 It is not surprising, then, that most of the films that made



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it through the CAD’s production process were set in small towns, even when the subject matter of the picture was not geographically defined.

Small‐Town Films Although the CAD ramped up its production efforts by 1948, I have not been able to locate production records for individual titles. In part, this may be due to the fact that the films were produced by outside companies, and the scripts that are held by the National Archives and Records Administration served as adequate textual records for government purposes, which meant that no other records were kept. Further complicating matters was the tendency for other government agencies to later reclaim the CAD’s films as their own. NARA lists just 28 extant films in their records, along with another dozen production records of motion pictures that may no longer be extant. In what follows, I will focus on three films that were made in, and depict, small towns: A Town Solves a Problem (1950), made in Pittsfield, Vermont; Women and the Community (1950), made in Monroe, New York and Social Change in Democracy (1951), made in Biloxi, Mississippi. Although these films were made for different reasons, all are invested in portraying the small town not as just a pleasant setting for a picture, but as the essence of American democracy. This message is made explicit in A Town Solves a Problem, which was filmed in Pittsfield, Vermont, in March 1950, and depicted the “town meeting” form of government used in New England as a model of democracy. Like other CAD films, A Town Solves a Problem was made by a private contractor, in this case James and Schwep, headed by director William James and screenwriter Charles Schwep. The New York firm had previously made films for the religious market, including several titles made in Japan, and James had worked previously for the International Film Foundation, which was founded by Julien Bryan, who produced the “Ohio Town” series discussed earlier. As a result, James, at least, was well versed in the kinds of audiences the CAD sought to reach. The film’s subject was chosen because the CAD believed that there were no films that adequately depicted the town meeting. In a letter from Patrick Belcher to Pittsford’s town archivist, he observes that: there never has been a film that showed what a New England Town Meeting is. That is certainly our oldest form of government, here in the States, and it is one of most significant contributions to democratic action. Yet it had never been presented in a film. … But to just make a film about a Town Meeting, without giving it some dramatic story, would make a pretty dull film. So we turned to the minutes of the 1949 Meeting and discovered that right there, in Mr. Dopp’s own words, was a perfect outline for our story, and one that would have very real meaning to the Japanese audiences.25

According to this letter, the CAD had already ended its role as a film supplier for Germany and Korea, and thus the only audience for the Pittsford motion picture was

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to be found in Japan. Even so, the film was to have wide release there, with 35 mm prints screening in movie theaters, and 16 mm prints made available to “Unions, Women’s Clubs, school groups, etc.,” as well as local prefectures, who would lend the picture out to “all those little isolated farming communities which never see a Hollywood movie.” A copy of the film was also provided to the State Department, who, Belcher noted, might elect to distribute it worldwide and translate the narration into dozens of languages. However, Belcher feared that the “Pittsford Film may be too strictly an educational, how‐to‐do‐it film, for the State Dept. to use.” Finally, Belcher’s letter lamented that the film would probably not be seen in the United States, as the government did not want to compete with commercial producers of short films. Pittsford residents would have to be content with their film earning the town a global reputation, even while their fellow Americans would not even be aware that a movie was made of their town. Although A Town Solves a Problem opens much like earlier small‐town films, with shots of the landscape and paeans to the village’s townspeople, the film is distinguished by the fact that it identifies both the town and its inhabitants by name, though in the latter case pseudonyms are used. Very quickly, the narrative focuses on two inhabitants, Mr. and Mrs. Croft – the janitor and teacher, respectively, at a community school. The voice‐of‐god narration moves effortlessly from describing the people and places depicted to an analysis of Pittsford’s political economy. For example, in a medium shot of Mrs. Croft sitting at an old desk while looking at a school supply catalog, the narrator observes, “today Mrs. Croft is going to order a new desk that she has long hoped for. The Superintendent of Schools has finally approved the purchase with funds which the townspeople voted for school improvements.” At the moment that the narrator says “funds,” the film cuts to a close‐up of Croft’s hand over the catalog itself, showing a picture of the new desk. In this way, the film associates the acquisition of new materials with financial support from the town’s inhabitants, a dynamic that sets up the remainder of the film’s narrative. After drawing an explicit relationship between school expenditures and democratic action, the film proceeds to present its central “problem,” the fact that the students bring their lunches from home, rather than eating a “hot lunch” prepared at school. At this moment in the film, the narrator explains that hot lunches would lead to “healthier pupils” and “better classwork,” as medium shots of a dozen schoolchildren eating their homemade lunches are intercut with medium shots of Mr. and Mrs. Croft shaking their heads. Exterior shots of the Crofts leaving the school are paired with the narrator outlining the next steps for the “hot lunch” plan, including the recruitment of parents to assist with building local support for obtaining a kitchen and stove. As the film’s characters traipse across the snow, the narrator identifies the challenges ahead: raising taxes to pay for the purchase of a stove, or, perhaps, using existing funds, including those designated for a new desk, to help offset the cost. Following a meeting of the parent‐teacher association, which takes place in the classroom, the group reaches a decision to bring it to the upcoming town meeting.



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The second half of the film takes place at the town meeting itself, which is presented by the narrator as a “get‐together, when [the townspeople] elect new offices and discuss problems of the town … finances, health, safety, the library, the schools and any other questions which anyone wishes to bring before his townspeople.” Several shots of an impressive two‐story brick building are followed by a series of interior shots of the auditorium, with the parent‐teacher association just one of many groups of citizens present to discuss town issues. As the narrator argues, “everyone welcomes a new problem put before the people,” so the hot lunch ­proposal is welcomed not on its merits, but rather for its capacity to generate debate. Despite the fact that the film depicts participatory democracy in action, the narrator, not the townspeople, vocalizes the perspectives of those in attendance. Anna McCarthy has argued that many mid‐century educational films and television programs presented “group discussion” as a model for governance, as it privileges the “democratic values of creativity, choice, and freedom,” as a counter to authoritarian tendencies.26 Given the purpose of the CAD films, it is not surprising to see A Town Solves a Problem adopt this strategy, even if the use of the narration undercuts the idea of individual expression. While CAD films used a narrator for pragmatic reasons – since these films were used in many countries, new narrations needed to be recorded in a variety of languages – such techniques meant that local voices were not heard. After some discussion, the hot lunch program goes to a vote, and the participants decide in its favor. The film closes with a five shot sequence of the program in action – a medium shot of three women, including Mrs. Croft, serving bowls of hot soup, followed by a close‐up of the soup itself, followed by another medium shot of the schoolchildren eating soup, followed by a second shot of the women in the kitchen, and a second shot of the children eating soup. These images of the fruition of democratic action are accompanied by the narrator’s praise for the town’s capacity to analyze and resolve the challenges that face it, calling the decision a “gift of good health from the people of a town that can solve its own problems.” This image of warmth and companionship is a sharp contrast from that of the snowy plain that opens the film, a closing that is also very different from the small‐town films made by other agencies, which instead resolved their narratives with long shots of the local landscape. In this way, A Town Solves a Problem invites audiences to draw parallels with their own situation, even if the problems at hand, and the ways to resolve them, appear to be very different. That is, by deploying a structure in which problems are presented, debated, and addressed in a community setting, the film implies that issues of shelter and sustenance can be resolved internally, without the need for outside intervention. In this way, films such as A Town Solves a Problem may also have been intended to model how communities could address issues after the end of occupation, when foreign aid was no longer available. One of a series of films about women in the United States, Women and the Community, made by RKO Pathe’s nontheatrical production unit, opens similarly to A Town Solves a Problem, with an aerial shot of Monroe, New York, a small town 60 miles northeast of New York City. Like A Town Solves a Problem, Women and the

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Community is intended to bring the viewer closer to a particular community, but its opening narration takes the opposite tack: What is a community? To a pilot it is a cluster of buildings seen as the birds see them. To the locomotive engineer it is another “stop on the line.” He knows it only as a station name on his schedule. To city planners a community means an area on a map, where everything is laid out in orderly, geometric patterns. To the garbage man it just means rubbish – and more rubbish.

As the narrator offers this list of possible frameworks one might use to interpret a community, a series of shots –  train locomotives, city planners looking at a map, and, of course, a garbage man – underscore the validity of these possible interpretations. But the film settles on another way to see a community: through the eyes of a mailman, for whom the term “means familiar houses with well‐known numbers of them. And it means the people who live inside these homes.” In the next several shots we see the mailman visit the town’s grocer and dentist, a widow and senior citizens. The choice of the mailman and, by extension, the postal service to articulate the ties that bind a small community to its national government is a common trope in government documentary film; Harry Watt and Basil Wright’s 1936 Night Mail, produced by the UK’s General Post Office Film Unit, is the best‐known example. The CAD even made its own version of such a film, R.F.D. (1949) using as its title the abbreviation for Rural Free Delivery. But Women and the Community is not interested in praising the virtues of the postal service. Rather, the film is invested in democracy itself, particularly the role women play in sustaining its local institutions. After commenting on the mailman’s rounds, the narrator returns to seeing the town as a representative of democracy: Though the town is a small one like thousands of others that will never get into the headlines, important things happen here, too. At least the people who live in the town think so, and they are right. This is a special day. Elections are being held and the people are taking their place in line to vote.

Although the film takes place on Election Day, the narrator emphasizes the democratic process as a whole, arguing “the actual casting of the vote is an end result, not a ‘spur of the moment’ action.” The male narrator then turns his attention to the unpaid, and, in this case, female, labor of democracy itself, presenting the League of Women Voters’ work educating the public on civic matters. For example, in a scene in which women are calling registered voters, close‐up shots of lists of names are superimposed with medium shots of women making phone calls, as the narrator comments on the “tedious” work that the women find “worthwhile because it led to a more satisfactory community life.” In the film’s second reel, the story shifts focus once again, this time to the use of private and public resources to provide services for schoolchildren, from



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recreation centers to educational films to hot lunches to dental visits. Although the film’s title suggests that its true subject is the important roles women play in civic and community life, Women and the Community is somewhat sly about making this point, as it presents the institutions of small‐town life first, and only then shows the role women play in sustaining them. Toward the end of the film, the narrator speculates on the future of a young girl. After running through various things women can do in small towns, from donating blood to joining a garden club, the narrator observes “whatever she does, as an interested and intelligent American woman, she will become part of the bloodstream of her community.” At the same time, the narrator argues that voting will be the “climax of her civic career,” as it allows her to “register her will as a self‐governing citizen.” The film ends with a shot of a closing of a curtain, in this case the one that wraps a voting booth. Unlike the pat story presented in A Town Solves A Problem, then, Women and the Community is burdened by a surplus of ideas, moving from a disquisition on small‐ town life to an explanation of the role nongovernmental civic organizations play in a democracy. If CAD’s early films were as interested in the image of democracy in action as they were in seeing it actually practiced, Social Change in a Democracy (1951) was intended to illustrate how democracies were different from totalitarian societies. The film was produced by the New York firm Sun Dial Films, Inc., which was incorporated in 1944 and headed by Samuel Datlowe, who made B‐movies before turning to the nontheatrical field after the war.27 Although the script itself did not indicate a specific setting for the film, H. M. Lambert, a production manager for the company, was sent by the company to Biloxi, Mississippi, presumably because of its fishing industry. The local newspaper in Biloxi emphasized the fact that the picture was for Japanese audiences. As Lambert told the local newspaper, it was intended to “show how the people in a democratic fishing town overcome a local problem by democratic methods.”28 Like the other films discussed in this chapter, the film used local actors, who were asked to give freely of their time and other resources for government benefit. The Biloxi Chamber of Commerce assisted with the casting of students in exchange for an English‐language 35 mm print of the film, and, according to the newspaper, “local boat owners … agreed to let the company film their boats and plants as scenic backdrops for the movie, which will also include scenes of classrooms, and of the mayor and local administrators at work.”29 The film was directed by Joseph Henabery, best known for his portrayal of Abraham Lincoln in D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of A Nation (1915).30 Despite the film’s Southern setting and provocative title, Social Change in a Democracy does not address the struggle for civil rights for African Americans in the American South, a political movement that garnered international attention in the late 1950s and 1960s. Instead, the “social change” with which the film is concerned is narrower in scope. Like Women and the Community, Social Change opens with a series of shots of its setting, in this case the residential and business districts of Biloxi. From the outset, the script emphasizes the contradiction at the heart of many of these films, as the narrator notes:

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Every small town in the United States has its own special character – it is unique – quite unlike any other place in the world. But in a larger sense, each small town can be taken as typical of many other small focal points of population in America. There is the same easy space, the same unity of culture, tradition, background – a cohesiveness of society.

Like Women and the Community, Social Change makes a sharp transition from an overly generalized look at small‐town life to a lecture in a high school civics class on the subject of democracy. In this case, the lecture, on the “philosophy of government,” is delivered by a teacher who is particularly adept at drawing on the chalkboard. In the lecture, the teacher first criticizes what the narrator calls a “pyramid” structure of government, in which all decisions are made by a few people at the top. In contrast, a democratic government is portrayed as a “kind of house designed to shelter and protect citizens.” While pyramid‐style governments offer little hope to those who are unhappy with their lot, the narrator argues that the “house of democracy” has a “workshop – available to all citizens – in which significant changes in the structure can be made – changes designed to satisfy the growing needs of the people.” A close‐up of a chalk drawing of a house, with one stick figure holding a hand saw while another holds a hammer, makes literal this image of a house of democracy, which seems primarily to serve as a support for the narrator’s next point – “citizens never change the basic foundation of a house,” such as laws that guarantee freedom of speech, assembly, and the right to vote. The fact that this scene is shot in a segregated school is not commented on in the film itself, and the absence of African Americans in this film, and the absence of racial or ethnic minorities in other small‐ town films, suggests that its democratic vision is implicitly linked to whiteness. However, even if someone was not aware that this film was shot in Mississippi, which was a focal point for civil rights activists, the absence of nonwhites becomes a more prominent issue when the teacher shows a 16 mm film about the rise of Nazi Germany as an example of what happens in a “pyramid” government. This film, which has a March of Time‐style narration, includes images of concentration camps and several reaction shots of the students that reveal their discomfort with seeing this footage, perhaps for the first time. But instead of analyzing Nazism as a belief system, Social Change argues that the government failed because it made the “welfare of the state superior to the welfare of the people.” This assumption allows the film to argue for a process‐oriented vision of government in which democracy, “ever sensitive to the needs and pressures of the people,” is able to resolve conflict between social groups. After these long civics lessons, the film returns to Biloxi and to the conflict that is to be resolved through democratic action. As the narrator explains, several years earlier a factory had opened in the community, bringing jobs to the region, but “as a part of the plant’s operation, a waste material was being discharged into the bay – a foreign substance pouring into the salt water for two years.” Over time, the pollution began to impact the shrimp population, and thus the fishermen who relied on shrimping for their income. As was the case with the other two films, this initiative



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begins as something organized by a group of private individuals. In this case, the fishermen raise money to hire “experts, scientists, to investigate” the cause of the decline in the shrimp population. Although this problem is, first, an environmental one, the use of close‐up of the fishermen’s faces suggests that it is the interpersonal conflict that is most critical here. Medium and long shots of the private investigators show them collecting water samples and determining that the factory pollution has hurt the food supply for the shrimp. After learning this news, the fishermen approach the plant manager, who is unsympathetic to their plight. The fishermen’s first response is to destroy the plant – as the narrator notes, “these are simple people. Violence seems to be their only solution” – but then one fisherman, identified as a veteran, suggests a democratic solution instead. Once again, the local government, here identified as the “Board of Selectmen,” is offered as the institution that can resolve this conflict. The film’s reference to a governmental structure most common in New England is only further evidence that there was little thought given to the production location of Social Change, which is a shift from both earlier CAD films and, in particular, those made by the OWI and the CI‐AA, which wished to explore the particularities of American places and people. At the meeting, the town’s elected officials realize that, as the narrator observes, “what began as a dispute between two small groups in the community has grown into a recognition of a basic evil, menacing the entire community,” and must be addressed by the town, which now plans to build a “sewage disposal plant” with taxpayer dollars. Instead of this action being seen as absolving the factory of any responsibility for its own pollution, the narrator argues that collectivizing the cost of pollution benefits all. The film ends with a shot of three fishing boats on the water, suggesting that the waters were made safe again by the government’s action.

Small‐Town Films as Local Films In an October 1950 report by the Reorientation Branch for its stateside operations supporting the occupation of Japan, the United States government boasted of its production of “original documentaries” for use overseas. The chart depicts an explosive growth in film production, from just one movie in fiscal year 1947, to 5 the following year, 12  in 1949, and 38 in 1950.31 Not surprisingly, the report repeats some of the same l­ anguage that first appeared in McClure’s 1947 plans for documentary production, suggesting that films discussed in this essay were in keeping with the mission of the CAD. The report also underscores the importance of the cinema to military objectives in Japan, praising the medium for “its power to attract and hold attention, stimulate thinking and discussion and to leave lasting impressions.”32 Although a number of scholars have commented on the value movies had in this occupation period, the “original documentaries,” including those described here, were particularly indicative of what the Army expected the cinema to accomplish – to show people in occupied countries how they could transform their civil society by ­adopting American democratic traditions.

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While other scholars have noted that presenting the “small town” as the face of American democracy was a strategic choice designed to benefit the US government in the post‐war period, the films discussed in this essay suggest the challenges a small town faces when it is asked to perform as an emblem of democracy in action.33 While it is unclear how involved the CAD was in the selection of the communities that were to be filmed for their productions, the people in the towns themselves were aware of the important roles they were to play in promoting American democracy, and, presumably, small‐town values, overseas. For this reason, these community‐ based films are best understood not as documentaries that just happened to be produced in a particular place, but also local films, of interest to audiences because they could see people and places they recognized on screen. Unlike other local films, however, these films also had global reach, making them a rare instance in which political questions that were presented as of merely local interest were seen as indications of how small communities and nations around the world would engage with the United States and its allies. Although these films had a relatively short (but very wide) run in occupied countries, the prints that were given to these communities for their own use endured as moving image documents of their past. In almost all cases, these films continue to be screened, debated, and written about by local historians. Some films, such as The Cummington Story, ask communities to reflect on their own responsibilities to welcome immigrants, support democratic solutions to critical problems, or build resilient institutions.34 At the same time, the fact that these films were produced for use in a fairly limited context and, until recently, were very difficult to see, means that they are much less well‐known than the government films produced in the 1930s or during World War II.35 But they are worth revisiting, not just as a forgotten set of films produced for a particular purpose, but also as one of many instances in which the US government used documentary as both a propaganda tool and as a way to articulate, analyze, and critique its own belief system.

Notes 1 As Nicholas J. Cull observes in his history of the USIA, many government agencies identified their work as being part of the United States Information Service, the name first used to describe a White House office tasked with promoting the New Deal and later adapted by Robert Sherwood, of the Foreign Information Service, for use in overseas propaganda campaigns during World War II. In 1946, several foreign propaganda offices were consolidated within the State Department, creating the Office of International Informational and Cultural Affairs, but, to avoid confusion, the State department continued using the name USIS. The United States Information Agency was established in 1953, but the government continued to use USIS in its overseas campaigns. See Cull (2008: 14). While overseas propaganda campaigns were largely controlled by offices in the State Department after the end of World War II, the US Army retained control over film propaganda efforts in occupied countries. See “U.S. Film Makers Planning Pictures To Teach World,” Motion Picture Herald, 8 July 1946, 15.



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2 See Immerwah (2015). 3 For more on Riskin’s operation, see Scott (2006). In Richard Dyer MacCann’s history of government filmmaking, he notes that Robert Sherwood, Director of the Overseas Branch of the Office of War Information, hired Riskin, best known as the screenwriter for several Frank Capra films, in part to counter the “glamorizing” of American life as seen in Hollywood films. See MacCann (1973: 140). 4 “A Picture of America,” The Logan (Ohio) Daily News, 5 April 1946, 4. 5 See MacCann (1973: 137–151). 6 “A Picture of America,” The Logan (Ohio) Daily News, 5 April 1946, 4. 7 “OWI To Make Movie in Cummington,” The (Pittsfield, Mass.) Berkshire Evening Eagle, 7 September 1944, 7. 8 “Cummington Packs Town Hall to See Itself in the Films,” The (Pittsfield, Mass.) Berkshire Evening Eagle, 30 January 1946, 4. 9 Local participation in government documentary was not a new phenomenon, as it was also used before the war. In Jonathan Kahana’s analysis of Joris Ivens’s Power and the Land (1940), he suggests that the film constructs a “public sphere that is depicted in, and eventually embodied by, the film itself.” See Kahana (2008: 131). 10 “Madison Sees Itself in Preview of OWI Film,” Indianapolis Star, January 14, 1944, 9. A copy of the film was given to the Madison Chamber of Commerce, so it could be screened noncommercially in public and private settings. See The (Columbus, Indiana) Republic, 9 June 1944, 4. 11 Although the pastor is unidentified in the film, later accounts name him as Rev. Carl Sangree, a conscientious objector during World War I, and a Congregationalist minister. See Richie Davis, “The Cummington Story,” The (Greenfield, MA) Recorder, 30 April 2005. http://www.recorder.com/richie‐s‐top‐40‐cummington‐4080218 (Accessed 20 September 2016). 12 For more on Copland’s role in the film, see Lerner (2005). 13 For example, the wave of “city symphony” films produced in the 1920s and 1930s encouraged filmmakers and audiences to make connections between modernism and international aspirations. See MacDonald (1997-1998). 14 See Goldstein (2009), Kitamura (2010), Wagnleitner (1994), and Fay (2008). 15 See Kitamura (2010: xii). 16 As Alice Lovejoy (2018) notes, the selection of American films for exhibition in occupied countries was a logistically and politically complex process, with lobbying groups in the film industry negotiating with government officials which films were appropriate to be screened. 17 Among the government films adapted by the CAD were the Pare Lorentz pictures The River and The Plow That Broke the Plains. 18 Smulyan (2007: 100). 19 Memo from Pare Lorentz to Lt. Col. R. B. McRae, “Documentary Films for Germany,” 29 October 1946. Box 252. 20 “Reorientation Branch Work Program, Fiscal Year 1947.” 21 “Army to Release 52 Documentary Shorts in Reich,” Motion Picture Herald, 8 November 1947, 20. The Herald reported that the Army planned to spend $600,000 on d ­ ocumentary films. 22 Lorentz’s departure may have also been linked to political disagreements over the direction of the CAD. Lorentz, like many other government filmmakers active in the 1930s,

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was closely associated with nongovernmental leftist filmmaking. Several of the projects proposed by Lorentz  –  a documentary on African American history titled “The Thirteenth Amendment,” a study of rural cooperatives, and a profile of community organizer Saul Alinsky  –  reflected this political agenda. Of these proposals, only The Rural Co‐Op was produced. After Lorentz left, the CAD tightened its control over film scripts, and began outsourcing film production to companies accustomed to working on contract. See Memo from Pare Lorentz to Lt. Col. R.B. McRae, “Proposed Productions for Occupied Areas,” 4 October 1946. Box 252. 23 Memo, Chief, New York Field Office to Chief, Civil Affairs Division, 24 November 1947, Box 254. 24 The CAD’s film Tulsa, Oklahoma (1949) is apparently the only of the planned six‐film series to come to fruition. In 1950, another CAD film, titled Community Chest, was made in Yonkers. In fact, several CAD films were produced within a few hours’ drive of New York, where the film production unit was based. 25 Letter from Patrick Belcher to Mary, Undated. Pittsford, Vermont Historical Society. 26 McCarthy (2010: 99). 27 “Sun Dial Films to Make Educational, Tele Pix,” Film Daily, 28 June 1944, 2. 28 “Democracy Film To Show Biloxi Fishing Scenery,” The (Biloxi, Mississippi) Daily Herald, 26 June 1951. Thanks to Ray Bellande for providing these articles. 29 “Biloxi Students Needed to Take Part in Democracy Films,” The (Biloxi, Mississippi) Daily Herald, 30 June 1951. 30 Monday Date Set For Beginning of Democracy Film,” The (Biloxi, Mississippi) Daily Herald, 12 July 1951. 31 Stuart J. Seborer, “Annual Report of Stateside Activities Supporting the Reorientation Program in Japan and the Ryukyu Islands.” October 1950. Reorientation Branch, Office for Occupied Areas. Office of the Secretary of the Army. Washington, DC. 32 Ibid. 33 See Immerwah (2015) and Sackley (2011). 34 For example, the production of The Cummington Story became an important episode in the town’s local history. See Richie Davis, “The Cummington Story,” Greenfield (MA) Recorder. 30 April 2005. http://www.recorder.com/richie‐s‐top‐40‐cummington‐4080218 35 In recent years moving image archivists from NARA have started placing online high‐ resolution digital scans of government films, including A Town Solves A Problem (1950) and The Cummington Story (1945).

References Cull, N.J. (2008). The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945–1989. New York: Cambridge University Press. Fay, J. (2008). Theaters of Occupation: Hollywood and the Reeducation of Postwar Germany. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Goldstein, C.S. (2009). Capturing the German Eye: American Visual Propaganda in Occupied Germany. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Immerwah, D. (2015). Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kahana, J. (2008). Intelligence Work. New York: Columbia University Press.



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Kitamura, H. (2010). Screening Enlightenment: Hollywood and the Cultural Reconstruction of Defeated Japan. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lerner, N. (2005). Aaron Copland, Norman Rockwell, and the “Four Freedoms’”: The Office of War Information’s Vision and Sound in The Cummington Story (1945). In: Aaron Copland and His World (eds. C.J. Oja and J. Tick), 351–378. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lovejoy, A. (2018). “A Treacherous Tightrope”: The Office of War Information, PWD/SHAEF, and Film Distribution in Liberated Europe. In: Cinema’s Military Industrial Complex (eds. H. Wasson and L. Grieveson), 305–320. Berkeley: University of California Press. MacCann, R.D. (1973). The People’s Films: A Political History of U.S. Government Motion Pictures. New York: Hastings House. MacDonald, S. (1997–1998). The City as the Country: The New York City Symphony from Rudy Burckhardt to Spike Lee. Film Quarterly 51 (2): 2–20. McCarthy, A. (2010). The Citizen Machine: Governing by Television in 1950s America. New York: New York University Press. Sackley, N. (2011). The Village as Cold War Site: Experts, Development, and the History of Rural Reconstruction. Journal of Global History. 6 (3): 481–504. Scott, I. (2006). From Toscanini to Tennessee: Robert Riskin, the OWI and the Construction of American Propaganda in World War II. Journal of American Studies 40 (2): 347–366. Smulyan, S. (2007). Popular Ideologies: Mass Culture at Mid‐Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Wagnleitner, R. (1994). Coca‐Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria after World War II (Trans. D.M. Wolf). Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.

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The Work of Displacement in Colonial Documentary

History, Movement, and Collectivity Between the Postwar Metropole and Colonial French West Africa Paul Fileri

American University Introduction In the decade following World War II, a fraction of independent documentary ­cinema on the left emerged from struggles over decolonization within western European empires. This current appears now as a scattered set of projects all designed to make new sense, in moving image and sound, of the crisis in relations among t­erritory, public, race, nation, and empire that anticolonial political movements continued to raise. In the context of the French colonial empire, documentary cinema registered in its formal innovations and public controversies the emergence of new possibilities for social and political transformation. The most radical work did so by confronting how colonial state regulations and cultural institutions policed the ­production and circulation of documentary cinema. And at its most incisive, this documentary work openly addressed the imperial political order straining to uphold stable administrative and political divisions between the metropolitan center (­representing a ruling continental nation of France, identified with mainland Europe territory) and colonial overseas territories. For its makers and critics, documentary filmmaking offered a way to cut across boundaries that sought to keep metropolitan space and time distinct and apart from colonial geographies and histories. This essay returns to the archive of French colonial documentary to analyze the material and discursive relations between two of these projects  –  René Vautier’s denunciation of colonial atrocities in his counter‐travelogue Afrique 50 [Africa 50] (1950) and the conflicted collective portrait of the metropolitan everyday life of black African students in Paris made by Paulin Vieyra and the Groupe Africain du Cinéma in Afrique sur Seine [Africa on the Seine] (dir. Mamadou Sarr and Paulin A Companion to Documentary Film History, First Edition. Edited by Joshua Malitsky. © 2021 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Soumanou Vieyra, prod. Groupe Africain du Cinéma, 1955). It describes how these films seized on documentary’s capacity to shift modes of public address and reflected on the displacements involved in the cinematic act of historical recording and social intervention. It also asks how, in documentary constructions claiming to represent opposition to French late colonial rule, we can regard the montage of new images produced under the threat of colonial state censorship and of existing images reused in new contexts, and how we can make sense of the sounds used in relation to these images. Documentary and its modes of address afforded filmmakers a means to critique norms for representing the relationship of voices and images to social reality. And theirs was an intervention that was especially incisive in the postwar period of political contestation over late colonial rule, when a new rhetoric of modernization, development, and technical expertise was supplanting an older set of official rationales about the French civilizing mission. Afrique 50 and Afrique sur Seine bear a specific relation to the site of colonial French West Africa (before political independence was secured in 1958 and 1960) in imperial geography, a region that stood as a key point of reference for African diasporic and pan‐African cultural, intellectual, and political developments in the postwar era.1 When examined together, the films demonstrate how documentary voice‐over and montage techniques emerged in response to political conditions of constraint. By confronting or evading censorship restrictions and by addressing cross‐territorial movement in their production and circulation, the two documentaries are usefully understood as works that posed unsettling questions about crises in the representation of belonging across colonial and metropolitan publics. René Vautier and Paulin Vieyra each published autobiographical accounts of their early documentary efforts and their confrontations with colonial authorities, and they often credit themselves with originating particular forms of anticolonial filmmaking that adopt the perspectives of respectively French metropolitan citizens or colonized subjects. Their own insistent activities of critical self‐definition indicate the deepening fault lines over cultural identity and belonging that emerged at a time when political mobilizations and social and intellectual movements began to dismantle prevailing colonial‐era articulations of race, nation, and empire. In retrospect, each project attests to an attempt to imagine a political future that would overcome the metropolitan domination of colonial territory and colonized peoples. These films have been at once singled out and marginalized, but their important position within documentary film history is revealed when we pay attention to their different inscriptions within African and French film histories.

Displacing Outrage and Mobilization to French West Africa: René Vautier and the Making of Afrique 50 In late July and August of 1949, two young French citizens, René Vautier and Raymond Vogel – the former a recent graduate of the national film school IDHEC (Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques) and the latter a graduate student



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in literature at the Sorbonne – left metropolitan France and arrived separately in Dakar. They joined one another in or near Mopti in the Niger River delta region, with the declared mission to shoot a documentary on the colonial administrative territory of French West Africa. The film that resulted, René Vautier’s Afrique 50, holds a significant place in the history of anticolonialist documentary cinema. Its primacy as the “first French anticolonialist film” has underwritten its promotion and revival ever since its initial reception.2 Yet around 1950, anticolonial contestation encompassed a range of distinct political stances. To take a critical anticolonial position did not necessarily mean articulating an explicit call for a nationalist revolution for political independence or state sovereignty. The film was a particular kind of French anticolonial film. It made an appeal to French citizens that was thoroughly informed by both French state republican ideals and by the French Communist Party’s (Parti Communiste Français, PCF) patriotic embrace of nationalist identifications to defend France during wartime resistance to Nazi Occupation. At the same time, it attested to the contemporary reality of regional political organizing, more  internationalist in spirit, among groups of colonial citizens and subjects in the French West African territories, and it responded to the French colonial state’s violent suppression of this consolidating power. Afrique 50 was the first film that René Vautier produced, although not the first he worked on. The circumstances of the film’s production were defined by its encounter with police surveillance and colonial administrative authority. This struggle over shooting, editing, and exhibition, as well as Vautier’s own trial and imprisonment, contributed to the film’s subsequent renown, even in the absence of widespread international availability.3 Afrique 50 was initially a commissioned project to depict the conditions of rural village life in the colonial territories of French West Africa l’Afrique occidentale française (AOF). Its sponsorship by the League of Teaching (Ligue de l’Enseignement) marks the film’s uneasy relation to a civil‐society organization that had been closely linked to the French state’s ideals of national popular education and state secularism (laicité) since the period of the Third Republic (1870–1940) and revived under French national reconstruction efforts after the Liberation. Under the commission, Vautier and Vogel were meant to show primary and secondary‐school students in France how French West African villagers lived: it was to be “a small teaching film, in 16mm […] of images reflecting the quotidian reality of African peasantry” (Vautier 1998: 30). After encountering the violent reality of the colonial order, however, the filmmakers turned this work of state‐­sponsored civic pedagogy into an explicitly oppositional work that undermined the hierarchical ­relations of sponsorship and the pedagogical representation of the colonies for the metropolitan center. The documentary material for Afrique 50 was shot on silent 16 mm black‐and‐ white film over several months from 1949 to 1950 in French West Africa, following the filmmakers’ travels from Dakar to Bamako to Abidjan, and in towns throughout the region, principally in the areas of present‐day Mali (Soudan Français), Côte d’Ivoire, and Burkina Faso (Upper Volta). This material was edited in Paris later in 1950 upon Vautier and Vogel’s separate returns to France. The two filmmakers had

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been briefly detained in French West Africa during their 1949–1950 journey and then further pursued by French police as they arranged for pieces of footage to be clandestinely sent back to the metropole through multiple intermediaries. For Vautier, this aspect of the production – the survival of the footage and his evasion of authorities – signified a story of solidarity between sites and people across Africa and France. In his account, the clandestine movement of the documentary footage served to embody the clandestine passage of the truth that could not be suppressed. Back in Paris in 1950, the League of Teaching, Vautier’s sponsor, disowned his work and complied with the police by handing over all the positives and negatives left at its office. When Vautier was detained again in Paris by inspectors who questioned him about the footage, he was finally able to retrieve a fraction of the seized footage (21 of some 60 reels) in secret, under their haphazard surveillance. Vautier managed to have this material developed by splicing the footage to the end of reels of undeveloped pornographic films that film laboratories customarily allowed to pass. After he completed and screened the film in 1950, Vautier was convicted of shooting without administrative authorization under the Laval Decree and served a prison sentence of a little more than a year from 1951 to 1952 (Vautier 1998: 45) In the immediate postwar period, this Laval Decree set strict limits on authorized audiovisual recording, as well as the circulation of films, in the colonial territories, and it constrained documentary filmmakers within the French colonial empire.4 The 1934 law took its name from Pierre Laval, who served as Minister of the Colonies between his terms as Prime Minister. Laval’s role in the Vichy government had led to his conviction for high treason and execution by De Gaulle’s new Republic after the Liberation. Officially known as the “Décret du 8 mars 1934,” the Laval Decree was applied first to the jurisdiction of French West Africa, before other territories. This priority can perhaps be explained by the particular interwar political importance of French West Africa for administrators, policymakers, and propagandists who spurred a reform movement called colonial humanism that sought to recast colonial governance and control colonial publicity circuits around new tenets of benevolent scientific administration and economic development.5 Yet after the war, the political press began to underline Laval’s Vichy collaboration and the renewed salience of his name. When the French Communist Party–­associated film weekly L’Écran Français published a report in May 1951 about Afrique 50 and the prosecution of Vautier and Vogel, the piece was headlined “Afrique Noire: Zone Interdite par Pierre Laval aux cinéastes” (“Black Africa: A Zone Forbidden by Pierre Laval to Filmmakers”) and described Vautier as an opponent of “all the Laval Decrees of the world, against racism and fascism” (Krier 1951). Although, at the time it was made, Afrique 50 did not become a model for broader, more sustained networks of radical anticolonial documentary activity, the film did represent an exemplary instance of radical documentary methods for constructing sound and image, and their adaptation to emerging anticolonial mobilizations in French intellectual and cultural life. Indeed, the role of metropolitan intellectuals outside the colonies became more important to the anticolonial struggle than before the war; for documentary filmmakers, then, the task was to reject colonial



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documentary conventions and to translate into cinematic form the causes of political equality and self‐determination emerging from colonial territories. Combining the form of an educational travelogue with a critical inquiry into the conditions underlying uprisings against police repression, Afrique 50 revived styles of critique and protest from an interwar tradition of international solidarity documentary that linked Joris Ivens, Henri Storck, the Workers Film and Photo League, Nykino, and other practitioners who drew on principles and methods of Soviet documentary production back to Dziga Vertov.6 In French documentary history, the film’s precedents included the work of the Groupe Octobre and anti‐fascist PCF‐associated political documentary from Popular Front cultural production of the 1930s.7 Popular Front committed filmmaking, exemplified by La Vie est à nous (dir. Jean Renoir, Jean‐Paul Le Chanois, Jacques B. Brunius, and Jacques Becker, 1936), addressed inequality at the national level but was limited in its engagement with the political context of colonial empire. But countering state‐sponsored colonial documentary called for a form that distinguished its use of sound and images from both the social and material aspects of cinematic representations supporting colonial rule. The ­regulation of moving image recording that maintained a stark division between metropolitan and colonial territories constituted a problem for the film’s production and may be read as manifest across its form, from the rhetorical address of Vautier’s voice‐over commentary – a challenge to state voice‐over conventions – to its use of montage as part of its committed engagement with collective political activity. In the film, colonized people are first represented in scenes of village residents taking part in everyday life and then later in organized party demonstrations: the opening offers the viewer a brisk tour, establishing a representation of work and life in and around the village (which is not given a specific identity other than its proximity to the Niger River). Through a series of brief long‐shot sequences, the film shows views of activities over the course of one day, such as brickmaking, bathing, weaving, millet grinding, rope‐making, hair‐dressing, playing ball, and building pirogues. The voice‐over, with a tone of good‐humored instruction, comments on and likens these scenes to what people do as well in the provinces of metropolitan France, for example, by fishermen in the ports of Brittany (Vautier’s native region) or rugby players in Toulouse. By drawing an analogy between daily life in provincial mainland France and in the colonies the film initially follows a commonplace of colonial documentary that instructs metropolitan spectators. Yet the voice‐over also reminds the viewer that this series of images may be recognized as an instance of the “picturesque” (pittoresque), idealized clichéd images contrasted with the reality of economic exploitation and political violence that his film points to as documentary actuality: “You will see very picturesque things, without a doubt, but little by little you’ll come to realize that the picturesque poorly hides great poverty.” The film’s critique of the imperial political economy follows this initial depiction of tranquil yet impoverished life in the African countryside, of a village “that is still fortunate in its misery” since “there’s still peace.” The film stresses the evidence of a lack of economic resources and the lack of education for children. While the voice‐over acerbically anticipates that such conditions elicit surprise (“You’re surprised to see a

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village without a school, without a doctor?”), this address is a prelude to scenes of evidence of colonial state violence (bullet holes, blood stains, burnt huts) and to sequences of analytical explanation of colonial economic conditions (colonized laborers perform arduous work and receive meager wages from colonial state ­capitalist firms) that the film uses to elicit outrage and mobilize sympathy for the anticolonial cause. The film presents an on‐site tracing of the evidence of a specific colonial massacre, in Palaka in the northern Ivory Coast in 1949, that had been carried out by the French colonial police forces, used by the film to represent the threat that “awaits African villages.” The scene of recent atrocities serves as a stage for the voice‐over to direct the viewer to imagine absent scenes of French state violence on African people, as well as on the villages, land, and animals. Throughout Afrique 50, the specificity of the documentation of the massacre at Palaka continues to characterize the structure of the voice‐over narration. In its mode of address, this principle of naming in speech, of making known names that would otherwise be suppressed by “official images” (and speech) marks the documentary’s aims of denunciation as well as remembrance. The film names both perpetrators, from colonial administrators to colonial companies, and victims, from heroic martyrs to political organizers. The priority that Afrique 50 grants in the voice‐over commentary to the direct designation of names, individually and collectively, and to this style of enunciation, could be said to underpin its model of the politics of truth in documentary representation. Afrique 50 presents to the viewer an official political party to represent and claim unity for “the African people” as a political actor threatened by and committed to opposing colonial state violence: the mobilizing collective ranks of the African Democratic Assembly (Rassemblement Démocratique Africain, RDA), the mass transterritorial party of imperial citizens founded in 1946 in Bamako in French West Africa. The political party sought to organize people under colonial rule to struggle for greater political autonomy and a form of electoral reorganization that would guarantee equality of rights within the new French Union, as the empire was called after 1946. In alliance with the French Communist Party (PCF) until 1950, the party pointedly did not advocate for sovereign independence from the Union. Aligning with these activities, Afrique 50 can be read as an exposé of colonial administrative atrocities as well as of colonialist‐supported economic exploitation of labor. It therefore stands as an anticolonial solidarity film that contends with the dilemma of speaking from a French metropolitan and an internationalist perspective on the conflicts depicted. It seeks to establish a relation between the sites of metropolitan France and colonial French West Africa, linked in the film by geographic mobility, both at the stage of production and on the level of textual representation. In linking these two spaces, the film also linked groups of people and institutions at the stage of production. African political figures played a crucial, still unappreciated role in the making of the film, and there is evidence of the film’s West African contacts’ own violation of the Laval Decree that clarifies our sense of the documentary’s challenge to colonial authority and the film’s relevance to histories of authorship in African diasporic documentary. The colonial police placed Vautier and Vogel under extensive surveillance, and the administration was especially concerned with



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tracking the young filmmakers’ interactions with the RDA, as is revealed in bureaucratic correspondence between officials in the Political Affairs Bureau of the Ministry of the Colonies. A Political Affairs Bureau letter from February 1950 contains a police account of the Vautier‐Vogel activities and portrays their meetings with leaders and village chiefs throughout their French West African tour as a direct challenge to the authority of the colonial administration.8 Among Vogel and Vautier’s main contacts were the RDA’s founders and assembly representatives, Gabriel D’Arboussier and Félix Houphouët‐Boigny, as well as Ouezzin Coulibaly (the assembly deputy from Côte d’Ivoire, and the representative of the African section of the League of Teaching), who helped Vautier obtain resources and an additional camera. Coulibaly is even identified in the surveillance report as having shot and “directed” some film footage himself (“prises de vues dirigées par un OUEZZIN COULIBALY”). This line in the colonial state surveillance report remains the only evidentiary trace of this unauthorized African filmmaking activity, and it is not corroborated by Vautier’s memoirs or by Coulibaly’s own writings. It furthermore remains unknown whether particular pieces of footage shot by Coulibaly survived as part of the finished work.9 Afrique 50 only bears Vautier’s directing credit, whether for reasons of shielding any West African collaborators from being exposed to prosecution or on the principle that it was a work for which only he could claim final artistic responsibility.10 Nevertheless, by Vautier’s account, these political leaders, especially Coulibaly, and the RDA party organization, played significant roles in the film’s production and provided crucial support, protection, and guidance. This newly available evidence for Coulibaly’s previously obscured filmmaking role allows one to further define this anticolonial documentary work as emerging from black African collaboration in and outside of the colonial territories. The report’s identification of Ouezzin Coulibaly shows that authorities regarded as a serious political threat the prospect of any film production by colonial subjects, who had recently attained, in the postwar French Union order, the uncertain second‐class status of imperial citizens and formed political parties. On a textual level, in its construction and rhetorical strategy, the film Afrique 50 culminates by calling the viewer to join in solidarity with the active resistance to a violent colonial administration that is already mobilizing in Africa as well as in France, linked through a closing montage of two political demonstrations, one in metropolitan France and one in French West Africa. This parallel defines the film’s closing refrain listing capital cities: “From Abidjan to Niamey, from Dakar to Brazzaville, the people of France and the people of Africa are shoulder to shoulder, and the African people will hold this place in the common struggle over and against all opposition, until the battle of life has been won.” In fact, in a gesture that would become a motif of militant documentary, the closing montage of Afrique 50 reuses a piece of footage from the final demonstration sequence of La Grande Lutte des mineurs – a 1948 film by Louis Daquin – that serves as an image of the “people of France.” Vautier cross‐cuts from a shot of colonial subjects marching in French West Africa to a medium close‐up panning shot of a black man (wearing a black beret) and an older white woman, marching arm and arm to the Internationale during a  metropolitan miners’ strike. This emblematic scene of cross‐racial and

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inter‐generational labor alliance is inserted to complete a cinematic figuration of border‐crossing metropolitan‐colonial solidarity. In concert with this montage work, the film’s use of sound, both its voice‐over and its recorded music, departed considerably from the rhetoric and texture defining conventions of state‐sponsored colonial documentaries. Early in the film, Vautier’s self‐recorded voice‐over acknowledges metropolitan spectators’ presumed familiarity with official colonial propaganda: “This is not the official image of colonization, my friends. Colonization here, as it is everywhere, is the reign of vultures.” The film offers a critique of the conventional form of state‐modernist documentary and its authoritative voice‐over by presenting unofficial images of life under colonial rule to the viewer and by anchoring these images in Vautier’s explanatory narration that points to the location of shooting yet also generalizes from the site he is speaking from (linking here to everywhere).11 Phrased in this way, the statement represents the larger project’s model of truth in the medium of documentary filmmaking and its claims to correct dominant modes of representing colonial social and political life in Africa. In the voice of the intellectual as filmmaker, Vautier readily speaks of a true image that replaces a false one.12 At the same time that the film explicitly articulates this aim to correct official representations and provide documentary evidence of reality, it embodies this stance in the material quality, tone, and rhythm of the film’s sound. Vautier’s untrained, partially improvised voice‐over brings to the film a rapid delivery and a tone of impassioned anger that function in the text as signs of urgency and determined engagement. For example, especially in the final third of the film, Vautier’s phrasing grows insistent and accelerates as he declaims litanies of martyrs and condemns the administration for a mounting series of shootings, abductions, and massacres, leaving ruins. Vautier’s voice‐over represents the voice of any lone French citizen embracing the anticolonial cause and draws on an apparent poverty of means that becomes the vocalization of unpolished, rough craft. As in political activist speechmaking, the exclamations and even strident tonality of the voice‐over represent the stance of partisan countermobilization decrying exploitation, marking not impersonal analysis but rather a form of distinctive personal participation in that action. The improvised performance of the voice‐over and the crude texture of the work also indicate the priority accorded to documenting the event of the filmmaker’s encounter and to refusing to work in professional, institutional contexts. The film adopts these impoverished and small‐scale aesthetic attributes as badges of authenticity that attest to the truth of its production. Furthermore, on the soundtrack, there was a political aspect evident not only in the selection of West African music and cultural forms and producers (by way of Paris) but also in the acts of collective performance, gathering, and solidarity their recording required. Vautier recruited Keita Fodéba, the Guinean‐born founder and leader of the Ballets Africains since 1947 in Paris. Vautier and Fodéba had musicians from this ensemble record the music for the soundtrack with the screening of a silent work print of the film during an open‐air concert for 600 attendees, in front of the Confédération Générale du Travail’s Maison du Peuple in the working‐class Paris suburb of Argenteuil.



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As Vautier recounts with evident pleasure, the choreography of confrontation was part of this performance and its historical legacy, since the union organization’s building stood across the square from the police station. This event, even as these circumstances cannot be heard in the film’s soundtrack, could be regarded as a notable episode in the history of documentary recording before direct synchronous sound: “the first French anticolonialist film would be given a soundtrack [sonorisé] in the open air, in public, by an African orchestra, under the protection of the working class, and facing the police office charged with seizing it” (Vautier  1998: 43). Closing the circle on the location of production and exhibition, the first screenings of the completed film were organized by Vautier in his Brittany hometown of Quimper, the regional site of his formative French Resistance service. Never seeking nor receiving any visa authorization, the film circulated in 16 mm prints made to be distributed by militant youth and workers’ organizations for noncommercial, private screenings across the country and more widely in Soviet and Eastern bloc film festivals in Warsaw and Leipzig. The storied history of Afrique 50, its outlaw defiance, suggests its relation to a longer history of the politics of filmmaking between French metropolitan and colonial sites. More broadly, the history of the technical conditions of Francophone African cinema would be defined by the persistence, well after formal political independence, of this colonial norm of an unequal division between metropolitan and (former) colonial sites across the stages of shooting, film processing, editing, and postproduction mixing. For Afrique 50, every stage after shooting was accomplished in metropolitan France. And yet Afrique 50 troubled such divisions in the labor of production and also did so in this arrangement of sites of performance and recording by cutting across and mixing African and French cultural expression and locations to produce the sound of the film.

The Work of Displacement in the Metropole: Afrique sur Seine, Paulin Vieyra, and the Groupe Africain du Cinéma The short documentary Afrique sur Seine, shot on black‐and‐white 16 mm film in 1955, might usefully be considered both a film about displacement and a displaced film, and perhaps it has remained so in both documentary and African film historiography since the moment of its limited exhibition in noncommercial screening spaces throughout Paris. Furthermore, Afrique sur Seine is materially linked to Afrique 50 by an act of appropriation that installs a minute‐long sequence from Vautier’s film in this work by Vieyra and the Groupe Africain du Cinéma. This piece of displaced film footage is reused with a new voice‐over that turns the sequence into one about the subjective experience of and development narrative about m ­ oving from the colonial territories to the metropolitan center. Even in its title’s punctuation, the film raises the question of geographical and cultural displacement.13 To speak of “Afrique sur Seine” suggests a town or enclave near water, named on the model of Neuilly‐sur‐Seine, the Paris suburb, or Boulogne‐sur‐mer, the coastal

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town. Yet it also represents a catachrestic use of language, suggesting that this is a documentary that will propose the improper use of a term. The title Afrique sur Seine may also readily be heard as “Afrique sur scène,” or “Africa on stage,” a play on the representational and performative stakes of the production that would be missed if the film had been given a title such as “Le Quartier africain” or “L’Afrique à Paris.” This form of play implies that beyond its title the documentary explores the translation of this figure of speech into the form of cinema, the use of one bit of language as a placeholder for another, one piece of film as a placeholder for another in a film about place and belonging. Afrique sur Seine was the first production of the Groupe Africain du Cinéma, a newly formed and short‐lived collective of four young francophone black African filmmaking students, all of whom had disparate backgrounds but had ties to French West Africa, and were linked through formal social organizations and informal circles of overseas students, artists, and intellectuals in Paris.14 The film was made under the auspices of the Comité du Film Ethnographique, the seat of Jean Rouch’s efforts to support a more inventive form of ethnographic film practice since 1952, situated within the Musée de l’Homme, and it credits the use of materials from its musicology collection. The group’s lack of access to filming in Africa was readily apparent to the makers at the outset. As Rouch later recounted, the young filmmakers attempted to draw on the ethnographic museum’s relationship to Marcel Griaule, the eminent ethnologist, leader of interwar African ethnographic expeditions, and Rouch’s mentor: they “solicited […] an intervention” from Griaule, addressed to the Ministry of Overseas France, “to abrogate the ‘Laval Decree’,” but the appeal did not succeed and no official exception was granted.15 The Groupe accepted this constraint, working within the state‐centered academic cultural formation of Rouch and the museum world (as uneasily as Rouch at times fit into this milieu), proceeding down a path distinct from the militant labor‐union affiliations of René Vautier. The Groupe Africain du Cinéma consisted of Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, Mamadou Sarr, Jacques Mélo Kane, and Robert Caristan. Co‐credited for direction and commentary on the film, Paulin Soumanou Vieyra and Mamadou Sarr were both recent graduates of the French national film school IDHEC. Vieyra was born in Dahomey (in the territory that would become Benin), and he had likely gained French citizenship due to his father’s birth in Gorée, one of the Four Communes of Senegal that had been extended citizenship rights, as well as his father’s civil service in the colonial administration. Sarr was born in Senegal. Jacques Mélo Kane, credited as the film’s script manager (under the name “Mélo Khane”), was also Senegalese, and the cinematographer Robert Caristan had been born in French Guiana, bordering Latin America, but grew up in Senegal (his younger brother Georges Caristan would go on to become a preeminent cinematographer, working on Ababacar Samb‐ Makharam’s Et la neige n’était plus… [1965] and with Ousmane Sembène).16 Shot silently and narrated by a post‐synchronized voice‐over, Afrique sur Seine assembles a fragmentary and oblique portrait of the everyday life of black African students living in mid‐fifties Paris around the Latin Quarter and Saint Germain‐ des‐Près. In part, the film alludes to the practice of ethnographic documentary,



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marking its association with the Musée de l’Homme, the central institution of French colonial ethnography. In addition, through the troubled and shifting rhetorical modulations of its mode of address and its revelation of a conflicted subjectivity, the film may now very well appear to documentary film historians – even though the phrase would have had only an emerging currency in the mid‐1950s – as a collective lyrical essay film. The critical beginnings of a self‐conscious postwar cinematic essay tradition lead back to another project devised within and against this same colonial cultural institution, the Musée de l’Homme: two years earlier, Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, and Ghislain Cloquet made Les Statues meurent aussi [Statues Also Die] (1953), as a documentary on the subject of “black art,” under a commission from the publishing house and journal Présence Africaine. As a site of cultural collecting, exhibition, and the ongoing production of cultural knowledge and heritage inextricable from ­practices of colonial possession and dispossession, the Musée de l’Homme was used by a generation of makers with some access to its holdings in their own critical discursive investigations into not only the history of colonialism, but also the history of a heritage of colonial documentary moving images and recorded sounds. One might even think of Afrique sur Seine when a key figuration of black documentary image‐ making and direct address appears in the final incendiary third of Les statues meurent aussi, devoted to the “art of transition” and “art of the present” made by black artists: we see a shot of a black photographer holding his flashbulb camera aloft and pointed directly toward the viewer, as the narrator speaks of images captured everyday (“the sorcerer captures images everyday”). Statues, banned by French censors, exemplified an emerging current in postwar documentary formal experimentation before cinéma verité, in the form of what Marker would later call a “cinematic pamphlet” (Marker 1961: 9). It did so by working toward a particular transformation of ­literary essayistic commentary and critique, set in relation to newly shot material but also an intricate montage of preexisting archival documentary and newsreel material. In this light, Afrique sur Seine approached similar problems of construction and enunciation, and it especially sought to settle on a way to assemble new and preexisting footage with a voice‐over narration that could produce a work of collective first‐person subjectivity. Paulin Vieyra effectively took the lead in the Groupe Africain du Cinéma, and through his critical writings, he became its first critic and historian. He would also go on to become the best known and most influential former member of this group, as a critic and organizer. Through his educational and public work, he was integral to revising the limited Western‐authored accounts of the history of cinema in Africa and to writing new, more comprehensive histories of African cinema that chronicled its postcolonial development and rethought its coherence as a project and category for film history. He participated in pan‐African institution‐building, later working for FEPACI (the Fédération Panafricaine des Cinéastes), work that began with his writings for the journal Présence Africaine in the period between the 1956 First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris and the 1966  World Festival of Black Arts in Dakar. It then continued with the publication of two of the

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earliest post‐independence historical and critical studies that have shaped the understanding of African cinema as a cultural project – the collection Le Cinéma et l’Afrique (1969) and the work of reference Le Cinéma africain: des origines à 1973 (1975).17 Hardly unknown, yet still of limited availability for decades, the documentary Afrique sur Seine (1955) has mainly been distinguished as an untimely outlier in the historiography of African cinema. It has been screened as a noteworthy work mostly in the context of African, rather than French, film festivals and events. In 2005, a screening of the film at FESPACO marked the fiftieth anniversary of African cinema south of the Sahara (Ruelle et al. 2005: 13). In many narratives of African cinema, including in Vieyra’s and Jean Rouch’s writings, the film is cited as a milestone, yet framed primarily as a false start or a precursor to the more fully “legitimate” beginnings of an autonomous African cinema made by filmmakers from independent nations in Africa south of the Sahara.18 It has also been regarded as an emblem for later acts of resistance to dominant cultural representations through the act of speaking back or reclaiming one’s voice against the figure of the colonizer. This change in the politics of enunciation marks a turn in narratives of the colonization and decolonization of culture, of black African producers taking cameras into their own hands and speaking in their own voices to work to consolidate or strategically mobilize a unified identity and call for the making of an African cinema (Thackway 2003). Yet the film also deserves greater attention than it has received by documentary film scholars and in critical histories of documentary film in general. It carries considerable critical value due to the productively troubling occasion and location of its production in relation to histories of cinema in Africa, France, and the French colonial empire. Afrique sur Seine approached its subject of black metropolitan cultural life and colonial racism in a manner that avoided censorship and suppression (unlike Afrique 50 or Les Statues meurent aussi), and it now stands as one of the only postwar documentaries made by colonial subjects or citizens about colonial racism in the French Union before the ­dissolution of most of the empire in the years surrounding 1960.19 Crucial to understanding what is at stake in the complexities and contradictions of voice and form in Afrique sur Seine is grasping the act of appropriation that ­figured in the film’s production. The opening sequence of Afrique sur Seine ­reproduces the image track of an 18‐shot sequence, lasting 1 minute and 10 seconds, that comes directly from Afrique 50. This reuse of footage, with Vautier’s original narration replaced, is uncredited. In the opening sequence of Afrique sur Seine, the viewer is shown images of young boys playing in an expanse of African countryside at the edge of town – gathering around a spinning snail‐shell top, roughhousing in a game of ball, and jumping into the Niger River – while the voice‐over speaks of the “carefree” pleasures of a past childhood “before the sun” “in our little corner of Africa.” This image sequence is thereby relocated to an historical and memorial past within the documentary, as a piece of documentary film history. The gesture of including such images shot in French West Africa was highly significant given the censorship conditions defined by the Laval Decree. The provision of this footage made it possible for the Groupe Africain to circumvent its failure to obtain authorization to shoot in the colonies. Several opposing meanings accrue to



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these images when considered in their relation to the writing of history in images. Whether examined at a historical moment of galvanizing decolonizing activism or at a later time once they belong to the archive of documentary cinema, the incorporation of these images into the body of the film attests to an adherence to the letter of the law. Yet this documentary act also invites one to both imagine a possible ­violation of the regulation by the Groupe and recall the actual violation committed by Vautier. Afrique sur Seine’s reuse of others’ footage may be accounted for as a resourceful act determined by practical necessity and economic scarcity. More significantly, for the purpose of investigating the colonial documentary archive, this cinematic ­transposition of material bears a complex ideological meaning in terms of voice and subjectivity. This re‐voicing of another’s footage implies both a move toward and away from a certain model of documentary practice and discursive construction in which the use of original material takes precedence. The act inscribes a material and symbolic connection between the makers that at the same time necessarily marks a distance in terms of formal technique, political position, and socially recognized status in terms of race and citizenship. Vieyra and the Groupe Africain spliced in  this strip of film at an editing table in Paris. Vautier had shot these images of ­children during the period of 1949–1950 when he traveled throughout French West Africa on a trip funded by an organization dedicated to the promotion of the republican civic ideals of the French state. Much later in his life, Vautier would attribute Vieyra’s use of this previously shot footage to their different stances on exhibiting and circulating cinematic works ­facing possible political censorship. In an interview published in a 2004 issue of Présence Africaine featuring a dossier on Paulin Vieyra’s career, Vautier recounts how he provided the material for this sequence to Vieyra, whom he knew through the film school and elsewhere. This interview appears to be the first published acknowledgement and discussion by either Vautier or Vieyra that the footage had been borrowed, although the uncredited appropriation had never been denied or obscured. Vautier offers his interpretation of Vieyra’s selection and strategy: “The part chosen by Vieyra is therefore very playful compared with the rest of Afrique 50 [. . .] [Vieyra] wanted to avoid having his film censored like mine had been. He wanted it to be seen” (Loftus 2004: 56). By judging Vieyra’s decision to be one of expediency or a desire to avoid censorship, Vautier only notes the most readily apparent difference in tone between the projects. What should not be diminished is the political significance of Vieyra’s decision to select this particular excerpt, of this particular length, and to remove Vautier’s voice, explicitly racialized as that of a white metropolitan French citizen, in relation to the rest of the Groupe’s own film. It should equally be acknowledged that Vieyra and the Groupe Africain du Cinéma had to consider the distinctly increased risks and suspicion in the eyes of colonial authority they would be subject to as black students and producers. As much as it grew out of economic contingency, this instance of intertextuality exists as an archival reminder of a division in social and political documentation maintained by the colonial regulation of the public sphere, of the fact that black French West African colonial citizens could not be authorized to film in the territory of their birth.

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Vieyra’s intervention at the stage of editing resembled practices of archival c­ ompilation that were beginning to be more widely explored in postwar French and international documentary culture – in such works as militant films made by the PCF, Joris Ivens’s Song of the Rivers (1954), Nicole Vedrès’s Paris 1900 (1947), Resnais and Marker and Cloquet’s banned Les statues meurent aussi (1953), and even in more experimental works like the Lettrist Isidore Isou’s Treatise on Venom and Eternity (Traité de Bave et d’éternité) (1951).20 Afrique sur Seine’s reuse of these images in a different register indicates how the restrictive conditions of mobility and access that filmmakers confronted in this period first limited their documentary practice yet thereby incited the development of inventive strategies both of contestation and resignification that relied upon the historicity of the moving image and sound. This extract of film was a fraught strand woven into the text of the film, the unspecified incorporation of images from an unauthorized anticolonial documentary. Though by no means principally a compilation film, as conventionally understood, Afrique sur Seine did take advantage of two significant aspects of the form that suggest its political charge under colonial rule: its avoidance of location shooting and the potential it opened up for a critique of the colonial conditions of nonfiction image production and film heritage. In the rhetoric and narration of Afrique sur Seine, the sequence’s opening shots of children by the Niger River serve as images of an idealized past, framed to evoke a nostalgic memory and summon a fantasy of what everyday life – figured as traditional and innocent – was like years ago for the collective subject “we” attributed to black African students. The voice‐over’s reference to the “kingdom of childhood” (“royaume d’enfance”) under the sun recalls the celebratory lyrical language of  Négritude elaborated by the Senegalese intellectual and future president Léopold Sédar Senghor in his poetry (his collection Ethiopiques was published in 1956) ( Senghor 1956). The vitality of life in Africa is conjured from an articulation of a mythic and nostalgic childhood of innocence. In Afrique 50, Vautier had deployed with brutal irony these images of calm everyday life around a village as a counterpoint to his own voice‐over description of the deprivations of insufficient education and medical care for school‐aged children in “black Africa.” At first glance, in its use in Afrique sur Seine, the final shot in this sequence – an image of two boys in medium shot walking away from the camera to disappear into a thicket of tall grass – suggests the beginning of a linear journey of French state‐led civilizing development. Indeed, the film cuts from the realm of memory that Afrique sur Seine casts as “the time of the kingdom of children” to a view of a Parisian cityscape that the film calls a place to “grow up, and leave home for,” which could even be affirmed as “the capital of the world, the capital of black Africa.” Yet the idea of development and progress aligned within the framework of French imperial republican universalism is also shadowed by the documentary’s elaboration of a sense of drift. By the end of the work, in fact, Paris is not affirmed as the ruling “capital of black Africa.” The film’s narration of a search rests on a longing for what the voice‐over ultimately calls finding oneself and others in solidarity and fraternity. A scene in the film’s final sequence shows us an interracial group of five people, together and broken down into medium close-ups, enjoying a meal at a



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restaurant, a picture of the pleasures of integrated social life and leisure, the hope of fraternity between “black and yellow friends, black and white friends,” to use the film’s own phrasing. Years before Chronicle of a Summer offered similar scenes of political and intellectual group encounters, this image serves as the documentary’s model of openness and social conviviality, a claim to belonging that holds out the possibility of transcending the hierarchical divisions of colonial governance and citizenship within the French Union. The Groupe Africain du Cinéma registers the appeal of this call to individual tolerance and fellowship, as well as the appeal’s limitations, in a work of moving image and recorded speech that is repeatedly drawn to figures of postponement, reverie, and digression, rather than to an articulation of structural conflict and collective action. In other words, it tempers its celebration of fellowship by acknowledging frustrated ideals and impasses. This perspective is finally most clearly evident in its repetition of moments of thwarted belonging, such as a key scene of a misunderstood rendez‐vous between a black man and woman, and especially the ambiguous conclusion represented by its final scene of a solitary man failing to find a companion or dance partner in a nightclub before calling it a night. The voice‐over initially speaks of Paris as a “center of hope” and “city of promises,” apostrophizing the city through a series of recurrent invocations of its name and the punctuation of long shots of its monuments. Yet it also identifies the disillusionment of colonial elite students observing a city that fails to accord with the precepts of colonial education that upheld notions of metropolitan benevolence and glory: the voice‐over asks, “Paris, where are the gold‐paved streets of our nursery books?” The everyday life of the Paris depicted in the documentary also presents images of a city of working‐class black laborers  –  we see a restaurant waiter, a meter attendant, a street sweeper – but these are not figures depicted in struggle or collective organizing. The film raises the specter of deprivation and despair, of a Paris of “days without bread, days without hope.” Vieyra and the Groupe Africain structure their film more freely according to a series of variations on re‐enacted encounters of recognition and misrecognition in the relations among fellow students and inhabitants of the Latin Quarter. Rather than adopting the fierce political critique of colonial humanism and fascism inaugurated by Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism (2000 [1972]), the film sounds the psychoanalytic and existential concerns over alienation, the voice, and the body elaborated in greater depth in this same milieu by Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (2008). The soundtrack to the film assembles transnational musical traditions and popular styles of the black diaspora in an alternation of passages: first, we hear an alternation of West African djembe and balafon percussion. This piece presumably comes from the credited archives of the musicology department of the Musée de l’Homme, and it recalls the musical accompaniment to Afrique 50 played by Keita Fodéba. Then we hear an alternation of choral and solo singing and of blues jazz guitar, scatting, and Afro‐Cuban cha-cha-chá dance music (a 1955 recording of the Enrique Jorrin Orchestra’s “Me Muero” concludes the film with the pointed lyric in Spanish “I’ll die if you don’t come”), a varied composition that can be heard as a sonic counterpoint to any embrace of a monumental and univocal official French culture.

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One passage demonstrates especially well the technique of modulating its mode of address and linking these rhetorical shifts in speech to questions about the discourse of civilization and political collectivity. Early in the film, the camera follows the figure of a tall, finely attired black student (played by Philippe Mory) as he walks through a square. The voice‐over narration, having spoken of a plural “we,” narrows in this sequence from evoking a collective voice to speaking in the individual voice of an “I,” the only first‐person singular utterance heard in the film. Over the image of the on‐screen student giving some coins to another black man who is asking for spare change, the voice‐over comments acerbically that the streets of the Latin Quarter were the place “where I found, one morning, civilization in the school of outstretched hands.” In this shift in grammatical number, the voice‐over thereby seems to adopt in free indirect discourse either the presumed inner voice of the on‐ screen student or that of the panhandler. With this statement, the representation of an unexpected exchange between strangers in public on the street becomes a possible exchange of voices, and it pointedly takes the place of any standard celebration of the official civilizing mission in French schools. This articulation of the first‐person singular subjectivity of a black African voice coincides with an image of individual benevolence that also ironizes colonial benevolence and promises of equality. The Groupe Africain du Cinéma produced a work of their own that recorded and centered the speaking subject of a black African man, speaking in French in particular, shifting between the singular and the plural and raising the question of how assimilation related to struggles over decolonization. And in doing so, the Groupe put into their work the first‐person speech of such a figure three years before Jean Rouch worked with Oumarou Ganda in Moi, un noir (Treichville) (Vieyra 1958) to create post‐synchronized voice‐over monologues of fantasy and memory about the experience of migration from the French colony of Niger to the Ivory Coast. In the wake of independence in Senegal and throughout the former French ­colonies of West Africa after 1960, Afrique sur Seine’s focus on the perspective of educated elite overseas students and migrants already living in the metropole soon appeared to many audiences and intellectuals as signs of a film eclipsed by and ­displaced from the prevailing project of creating a new African cinema: it did not satisfy later more urgent pan‐African and nationalist goals to retrieve historical examples of forthright anticolonial cultural production. In this sense, Afrique sur Seine embodied neither the agitational fervor of a work of anticolonial denunciation and mass mobilization, such as Afrique 50, nor an attempt at caustic and ironizing reverse ethnography, which later projects by Rouch and African makers would ­pursue. Rather it served as a sign of and testimony to the reality of various guarded hesitancies, conflicts, and ambivalences of black Africans situated within yet on the margins of spaces of colonial French white supremacy during a time of late colonial crisis. Its construction marked a particular idiom for formulating political and cultural demands for one form of emancipatory possibility and equality in this fraught period of late colonial politics. By returning to two significant projects of documentary cinema that emerged out of cultural shifts in anticolonial counterpublicity in the French colonial empire from



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the 1940s to the 1950s, this essay has argued that documentary makers such as René Vautier and Paulin Vieyra and the Groupe Africain du Cinéma produced new documentary approaches to the exploration of displacements between the sites of the metropole and the colonies and regarded this field of divisions and crossings on and off screen as a means through which to register the postwar world’s decisively shifting relations of race, nation, and empire, as the terms of colonial power were subject to renewed critique. In a landscape still defined by the French colonial bureaucratic censorship regulations of the Laval Decree, the documentary experimentation in sound and image of Afrique 50 and Afrique sur Seine represented reworkings of these political and formal limits. As this essay’s examination of such techniques as the reuse of footage from Afrique 50 in Afrique sur Seine has proposed, the political provocations contained in these films’ histories of production and their relations to African and French documentary film history begin to become intelligible in all their implications if one analyzes how this colonial context of censorship worked its way into makers’ conception of documentary methods and into the materiality and form of documentary itself.

Notes 1 The federation of French‐ruled West Africa (l’Afrique-Occidentale française, or the AOF) was a significant administrative entity from 1895 to 1958, with continuity across various reorganizations from the colonial empire under the Third Republic to the French Union under the Fourth Republic constitution (1946) and ending with the formation of the French Community under the Fifth Republic constitution (1958). At its height, the AOF was composed of the colonies of Senegal, Mauritania, Soudan (Mali), Upper Volta (Burkina Faso), Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire, Dahomey (Benin), Niger, and the mandated territory of Togo. 2 All French‐to‐English translations in this essay are my own. The film critic and historian Georges Sadoul may have inaugurated this designation in 1951  when he wrote that Vautier “has already toppled the wall of silence on colonialism with his Afrique 50, which in one sure blow is the first French anticolonialist film.” This defense is reprinted on the back cover of Vautier’s memoirs, but I have not succeeded in locating an original source, perhaps from an uncollected journalistic piece (Vautier 1998). The combination DVD and book Afrique 50 / De Sable et de sang insists upon the credit, used by Vautier himself, and refers to Vautier’s film as the “first anticolonial French film” (“le premier film anticolonial français”) (Azam and Richard 2013). 3 See the pamphlet Afrique 50, Collection “Les Cahiers de Paris Expérimental,” no. 3, ed. Christian Lébrat (Paris: René Vautier / Éditions Paris Expérimental, Lébrat 2001), which contains an English translation by Tami L. Williams. See also Ungar (2011); Vautier (1998). 4 See the full text of the “Décret Laval” included in the folder “Réglementation – A.O.F.” Archives Nationales d’Outre‐mer, Fonds ministériels, Direction des Affaires Politiques, Box 1733, ANOM/FM1/AP/1733. The decree was printed in the federal register, Journal Officiel de la République Française, no. 60, 11 mars 1934, p. 2541. 5 On the historical, political, and technological context shaping the Laval Decree and the roles of Vautier and Vieyra, see Diawara (1992 : 22–24). See also Genova (2013: 24–30).

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6 7 8

9 10

11

12

13

14

Paul Fileri Paulin Vieyra, later drawn on by Manthia Diawara, pointed to the introduction of ­synchronized sound in the late 1920s and early 1930s as the main context for reforming colonial regulations due to the heightened concerns of administrators about more effective colonial counter‐publicity made possible by this development. See Vieyra’s early work of African film historiography, “Propos sur le cinéma africain,” Présence Africaine no. 22 (October–November Vieyra  1958: 106–117). On the ideas, institutions, and ­initiatives of the “new colonial rationality” of the interwar reformers, see Wilder (2005). See Thomas Waugh’s analysis of the heritage of the “international solidarity” genre in committed documentary and its recurrent features, such as the “demonstration trope.” (Waugh 1999; Waugh 2016). On these lineages in French committed filmmaking, see Buchsbaum (1988) and Marie (2005). The folder titled “Affaires Vogel et Vauthier [sic]” contains a February 12, 1950 six‐page letter to the Ministry of the Colonies that reports on Vogel and Vautier as RDA “­agitators.” See Archives Nationales d’Outre‐mer, Fonds ministériels, Direction des Affaires Politiques, Box 2145, Dossier 3, ANOM FM1/AP/2145/3, “Affaires Vogel et Vauthier [sic].” Because current French law imposes a 60‐year delay in accessibility (“délai de communicabilité”) on these archival records concerning “national defense,” this file only became available to archival researchers in 2010. As similar records become accessible, historians will have new state sources to interpret and incorporate into studies of late colonial‐era regulations of moving image and sound production and exhibition. For more on Ouezzin Coulibaly’s history in the RDA movement, see Coulibaly (1989). After the title card “Afrique 50 / Film de René Vautier,” the film only provides two additional title cards: one to credit the sponsor and the date of shooting (“Tourné pour la Ligue / de l’Enseignment / en 1949‐1950”) and one for the soundtrack consisting of the recorded musical accompaniment and scripted voice‐over, crediting the orchestra leader Keita Fodéba for the former: “Musique de Keita Fodeba / Texte de René Vautier.” On the integral alignment between methods of modernist formal montage and classical state voice‐over with the welfare‐state ideology of political authority, see Jonathan Kahana’s analysis of New Deal‐era American documentary cinema (Kahana  2008: 89–140). Vautier’s notion of the documentary vocation follows this model: “to become a documentary maker. The objective was evidently to put a truth into images; as the role of the censor was to veil [voiler] all or part of a truth that doesn’t conform to the official truth, I was condemned from the start to fight against it!” (Vautier 1998: 9). The phrase “Afrique sur Seine” is used by Jean Rouch 15 years later as the title for the second section of his film Petit à Petit (1969, released in 1971), in which his frequent collaborators, the Nigeriens Damouré Zika and Lam Ibrahim, stage the fiction of visiting Paris to conduct a “reverse ethnography” of European life, in a scenario partly inspired by the reversals of Persian Letters (title of the first section in the film). In 1961, one reviewer wrote that Chronicle of a Summer could be called “Afrique‐sur‐Seine” since it depicted the “Africans of Rouch” in Paris (Bory 1961: 169). In 1953, the journal Présence Africaine devoted an issue, entitled “Black Students Speak…” (“Les étudiants noirs parlent…”), to the new rising postwar generation of African students. Présence Africaine no. 14 (1953). The number of black African and Caribbean overseas students in Paris and the metropolitan provinces grew considerably from some 250 in 1946 to 2000 in 1955 and some 5500 in 1960, according to the National



15 16 17 18

19

20

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Ministry of Education. A number of postwar associations, such as the Fédération des étudiants d’Afrique noire en France (FEANF), founded in 1950, represented this ­growing visibility (Blanchard 2011: 192–193). Neither Rouch nor Vieyra provide this particular detail about the appeal made to Griaule elsewhere in their other accounts (Rouch 1967: 21). On the early lives of each of the group’s members, see the interview that Pierre Haffner conducted with Vieyra (Haffner 1984). For the most comprehensive biographical reference on Vieyra, see Pfaff (1988). In later scholarship on African cinema, such claims about Afrique sur Seine as a single landmark have been appropriately qualified: “It is important to recognize the inadequacy of regarding African cinema as having one clear moment of departure – say the creation of the ‘first’ African film  –  an honor often accorded to Paulin Vieyra and Mamadou Sarr’s Afrique sur Seine, made in Paris in 1955” (Harrow 1999: x). In 2012, the filmmaker’s son Stéphane Vieyra and the Vieyra family in Cotonou, Benin established the PSV‐Films foundation to promote Vieyra’s legacy and restore his films. It has produced DVD editions of several of his films, now more readily accessible to viewers. Several tributes to Vieyra have been programmed in the last decade – for example, in Dakar in 2012, at FESPACO and at the Musée Dapper in Paris in 2013, at Cannes in 2014 with a restoration of his 1963 documentary Lamb, at Cannes in 2015 to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Afrique sur Seine, and at FESPACO in 2017. Jay Leyda’s 1964 study Films Beget Films named the “compilation film” as a distinct form and traced the development of the form back to the early years of various combinations and manipulations of preexisting material of either film footage or ­actuality (Leyda 1964).

References Archives Nationales d’Outre‐mer, Fonds ministériels, Direction des Affaires Politiques, Box 1733 (n.d.). ANOM/FM1/AP/1733. Dossier “Réglementation – A.O.F.” Archives Nationales d’Outre‐mer, Fonds ministériels, Direction des Affaires Politiques, Box 2145, Dossier 3 (n.d.). ANOM FM1/AP/2145/3. Dossier “Affaires Vogel et Vauthier [sic].” Azam, O., assisted by A. Richard (eds.) (2013). Afrique 50 / De Sable et de sang. Paris: Éditions Les Mutins de Pangée. Blanchard, P. (ed.) (2011). La France noire: trois siècles de présences. Paris: Eds. La Découverte / Groupe de recherche Achac. Bory, J‐L. (1961). Review of Chronique d’un été, Arts, October 25, 1961. Reprinted in Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin, Chronique d’un été, special issue of Domaine Cinéma no. 1, Cahiers trimestriels, (Winter 1961–62). Paris: InterSpectacles, 1962, 169. Buchsbaum, J. (1988). Cinéma Engagé: Film in the Popular Front. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Césaire, A. (2000 [1972]). Discourse on Colonialism (trans. J. Pinkham. 1950/1955). New York: Monthly Review Press. Coulibaly, O. (1989). Combat pour l’Afrique, 1946–1958: La Lutte du R.D.A. pour une Afrique nouvelle (ed. C. Gérard). Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire: Les Nouvelles Éditions Africaines. “Décret Laval.” (1934). Journal Officiel de la République Française, no. 60, 11 mars 1934, 2541. Diawara, M. (1992). African Cinema: Politics & Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Fanon, F. (2008). Black Skin, White Masks (trans. R. Philcox. 1952). New York: Grove Press. Genova, J.E. (2013). Cinema and Development in West Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Haffner, P. (1984). Quatre Entretiens avec Paulin Soumanou Vieyra (III), Deuxième Partie. Peuples Noirs Peuples Africains 40: 26–40. http://mongobeti.arts.uwa.edu.au/issues/ pnpa40/pnpa40_04.html. Harrow, K. (ed.) (1999). African Cinema: Postcolonial and Feminist Readings. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Kahana, J. (2008). Voice‐Over, Allegory, and the Pastoral in New Deal Documentary. In: Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary, 89–140. New  York: Columbia University Press. Krier, J. (1951). Afrique Noire: Zone interdite par Pierre Laval aux Cinéastes. L’Écran Français, no. 307, May 23–29. Partially reprinted in: Afrique 50 / De Sable et de sang (eds. O. Azam with Richard, A.), 74–77. Paris: Éditions Les Mutins de Pangée. Lébrat, C. (ed.) (2001). Afrique 50. Collection “Les Cahiers de Paris Expérimental” no. 3 (trans. T.L. Williams). Paris: René Vautier / Éditions Paris Expérimental. Leyda, J. (1964). Films Beget Films: Compilation Films from Propaganda to Drama. London: George Allen & Unwin. Loftus, M. (2004). Entretien avec René Vautier. Présence Africaine 170, special issue “Hommage à Paulin Soumanou Vieyra,” 55–59. Marie, L. (2005). Le Cinéma est à nous: Le PCF et le cinéma français de la Libération à nos jours. Paris: L’Harmattan. Marker, C. (1961). Commentaires. Paris: Seuil. Pfaff, F. (1988). Paulin Soumanou Vieyra (1925–), Senegal. In: Twenty‐Five Black African Filmmakers: A Critical Study, with Filmography and Bio‐Bibliography, 289–303. New York: Greenwood Press. Présence Africaine (1953). no. 14 “Les étudiants noirs parlent…” Rouch, J. (1967). Préface.). Premier catalogue sélectif international de films ethnographiques sur l’Afrique noire, 20–29. Paris: UNESCO. Ruelle, C., Tapsoba, C., and Speciale, A. (eds.) (2005). Afriques 50: Singularités d’un cinéma pluriel. Paris: L’Harmattan. Senghor, L.S. (1956). Ethiopiques. Paris: Seuil. Thackway, M. (2003). Africa Shoots Back: Alternative Perspectives in Sub‐Saharan Francophone African Film. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ungar, S. (2011). René Vautier’s Afrique 50 and the Emergence of Anti‐Colonial Cinema. L’Ésprit Créatur 51 (3): 34–46. Vautier, R. (1998). Caméra citoyenne: mémoires. Rennes, France: Éditions Apogée. Vieyra, P.S. (1958). Propos sur le cinéma Africain. Présence Africaine no. 22 (October– November): 106–117. Vieyra, P.S. (1969). Le Cinéma et l’Afrique. Paris: Présence Africaine. Vieyra, P.S. (1975). Le cinéma africain: des origines à 1973. Paris: Présence Africaine. Waugh, T. (1999). Joris Ivens and the Legacy of Committed Documentary. In: Joris Ivens and the Documentary Context (ed. K. Bakker), 171–182. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Waugh, T. (2016). Anti‐Fascist Solidarity Documentary. In: The Conscience of Cinema: The Works of Joris Ivens, 1926–1989, 195–254. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Wilder, G. (2005). The French Imperial Nation‐State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism Between the Two World Wars, 43–75. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Negation of the Negation

Tracking Documentary Film Theory in Japan Naoki Yamamoto

University of California

Rotha, Japan, and Documentary Theory Aside from its well‐known tradition in fiction filmmaking, Japan has a long and vibrant history of nonfiction or documentary film practice. Catalyzed by and emerging in resistance to Japan’s sudden rise to imperial power, the history of Japanese documentary film was marked by a number of signal events: the formation of the Proletarian Film League in Japan (known as Prokino for short) in 1929; the banning of Kamei Fumio’s “antiwar” documentary film Fighting Soldier (Tatakau heitai, 1939) and his subsequent imprisonment; the enforcement in 1939 of the Film Law that mandated the screening of bunka eiga (culture film), or any kind of cultural, educational, and propaganda films contributing to war effort. In the postwar period, one could witness the emergence of experimental documentary filmmakers such as Hani Susumu, Kuroki Kazuo, and Matsumoto Toshio in the 1950s, and then the development of a new form of political documentary  –  represented by Ogawa Shinsuke’s Sanrizuka series (1968–1977) and Tsuchimoto Noriaki’s Minamata series (1971–1987)  –  that required the director’s joint struggle with the filmed subjects through surprisingly long‐term and devoted commitments. Finally, the Yamagata International Film Festival has served as a major hub for documentary filmmakers from Asia and beyond since 1989. This tradition has continued unabated in the new millennium, as witnessed by the continuous production of numbers of documentary films dealing with the ongoing nuclear disaster in Fukushima and beyond.1 Given the depth and breadth of these activities, it seems natural to assume the existence of a great corpus of writing that might be called Japanese documentary film theory. It is true that Japan has a long history of publications dedicated to

A Companion to Documentary Film History, First Edition. Edited by Joshua Malitsky. © 2021 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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nonfiction film practice, an archive that includes some outstanding manifestos and theoretical essays such as Sasa Genjū’s “Camera: Toy/Weapon” (Sasa 1928: 29–33), or Tosaka Jun’s “Cinema’s Epistemological Value and Its Depiction of Social Customs” (Tosaka 1937: 13–19). However, we must acknowledge that any ethnocentric desires to single out the uniqueness of nation‐based theories and practices often distract us from actual conditions that informed these activities’ emergence at a specific moment in history. In fact, what has characterized Japanese film journalism from its inception in the early 1910s is its perpetual openness to intellectual and aesthetic trends from abroad. Consequently, the general readership of this local critical tradition not only became familiar with the names and achievements of the latest film stars and directors, but actively participated in the international debates about what is now called “classical film theory.” Indeed, all the major texts by Hugo Münsterberg, Jean Epstein, Béla Balázs, Rudolf Arnheim, and members of the Soviet montage school were translated into Japanese by the mid‐1930s. This particular constitution of the local critical discourse proves the impossibility of the existence of a purely “Japanese” film theory, revealing instead the inherently hybrid nature of local film criticism and practice in Japan.2 The Japanese debates on the Griersonian conception of documentary are perhaps the most intriguing example of the interplay between the global and the local (and not the unidirectional influence from the former to the later) at work in the history of Japanese cinema. Here I use the term Griersonian in order to illuminate Japan’s peculiar, if not thoroughly unorthodox, adoption of the British producer’s conceptions of documentary film. For neither John Grierson’s own writings nor the films he supervised at the E.M.B. or the G.P.O. film units had palpable impact on the Japanese film world. Instead, it was Paul Rotha’s 1936 book Documentary Film that first introduced the term documentary to Japan and then ignited surprisingly fierce and long‐lasting debates among its local readers. According to Abé Mark Nornes, whose account of this cultural encounter remains the finest and most informative to date, this book’s popularity was so enormous that it went into third printings immediately after Atsugi Taka’s Japanese translation was published in the fall of 1938.3 Moreover, as the book gradually earned a reputation as the “Bible” for documentary filmmakers, Rotha’s name began to appear everywhere in the history of Japanese critical writings on cinema, achieving similar esteem to the likes of Balázs, Arnheim, and Eisenstein (Nornes 1999: 94–95). Such an unmistakable visibility of Rotha in the Japanese context is particularly startling when we compare it to his minor presence in the Anglo‐American discourse. In Britain and the US, Rotha is remembered primarily for his humble or secondary contribution to the foundation of the British documentary film movement from the late 1920s through the 1930s (Petrie and Kruger 1999). Behind Rotha’s unexpected popularity in wartime Japan was the Japanese government’s increasing interest in the potential use of film as a practical tool for war propaganda, which culminated in the enforcement of the Film Law. But one could also speculate that the book’s success rested in its peculiar structure consisting of Rotha’s self‐satisfied admiration for the British model of state‐sponsored film production,



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his relentless attack on the then dominant mode of profit‐oriented filmmaking, and his unabashed celebration of the dialectical approach to film composition which he learned from Eisenstein. In reading his ostentatious treatment of these complex and conflicting issues, Japanese readers of the time saw Rotha as offering a timely but double‐edged lesson, which could be useful both for those who openly support the government’s hardline tactics and those who tried to implicitly insert social criticism in their seemingly neutral educational or P.R. films. As Nornes points out, what we can observe in this self‐contradictory, multi‐faceted readership is far from a passive or even submissive adoption of Grierson’s original ideas, but rather a series of contingent transformations of them through a series of linguistic and cultural translations (Nornes 1999: 93–94). In what follows, I also examine the Japanese reception of Rotha’s Documentary Film but from a very different perspective. First, unlike Nornes’ marked emphasis on the role of the translators, I look closely at what the Japanese readers of the time actually read and responded to in Rotha’s documentary theory. To bracket possible issues posed by translation, I choose to illuminate a specific kind of reader who was able to read – or at least had access to – Rotha’s original text. Second, rather than treating Rotha as a mere stand‐in for Grierson, I present him as a theorist with a distinct character and intellectual background. It is true that Rotha’s argument in general follows the same examples Grierson used in his own essays such as “The Russian Examples” and “First Principles of Documentary” (Grierson  1971: 121–132; 145–156). Nevertheless, I argue that Rotha can still be distinguished from Grierson in his ­incorporation of dialectical thinking – or the collision between two or more categories that are mutually exclusive or self‐contradictory  –  into the theoretical debates on ­documentary. And for this very reason, he deliberately replaced Grierson’s famous definition of documentary (“the creative treatment of actuality”) with his own formula (“the creative dramatization of actuality”), despite his animosity to what he called the “story‐film.” Consequently, both wartime and postwar Japanese criticisms revolved mostly around Rotha’s particular usage of the term dialectics (benshōhō). Finally, in contrast to Nornes’ restriction on the contemporary reception of Rotha in wartime Japan, I address more insightful and creative interpretations of his theory emerging in the postwar period. Film historians have acknowledged that the ways in which Japanese critics adopted Rotha’s theory before the end of World War II were highly biased due to the period’s peculiar ideological setting. For instance, the documentary critic/filmmaker Noda Shinkichi wrote in 1967 that “it is not until the end of the war that Rotha’s theory received proper criticism,” because, he added, most wartime Japanese critics and filmmakers appropriated the idea of documentary for the sake of militaristic nationalism (Noda 1973: 334–335). This temporal gap also indicates a significant shift in the attitude of Japanese critics toward the general value of Rotha’s writings: no longer deeming it necessary to follow Rotha’s original intentions, those postwar commentators tended to use him as a practical point of reference for the development of their own documentary theories. To facilitate this revisionist approach, I will look at the work of three leading Japanese film critics – Tsumura Hideo (1907–1985), Imamura Taihei (1911–1986),

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and Hanada Kiyoteru (1909–1974) – who provided their own critical and irreconcilable readings of Rotha from the late 1930s to the mid‐1950s. Of these critics, I pay particular attention to Hanada and his original concept known as sur‐documentary. In Japanese cultural history, Hanada is widely acclaimed as one of most influential theorists and organizers of the postwar avant‐garde art movement. While Hanada’s provocative essays had enduring impacts on the work of younger experimental filmmakers such as Matsumoto Toshio and Teshigawara Hiroshi, what is more significant for the purpose of this chapter is his persistent call for the historicization of film theory on both domestic and international fronts (Hanada et al. 1957: 41). Writing in the mid‐to‐late 1950s, almost 20 years after the introduction of the term documentary to Japan, Hanada did not simply offer an assessment of Rotha’s argument. Rather, he provided a meta‐critique of the hitherto domestic interpretations of the conception of documentary as such; or, to use the basic formula of the dialectics that informed his intellectual activities, he deliberately presented his theoretical intervention as a negation of the negation. In doing so, Hanada gives us a helpful vantage point from which to observe how elements of the global and the local converged in the context of Japanese film theory and criticism. But before moving on to Hanada’s radical reconceptualization of documentary, we must first look at how Tsumura and Imamura interpreted Rotha’s theoretical text.

Reality and Actuality: Tsumura Hideo From the early 1930s until the end of World War II, Tsumura Hideo was one of most influential – and perhaps most arrogant – film critics in Japan. His reviews for the prestigious Asahi, written under the famous penname “Q,” nearly always condemned movies with “vulgar” entertainment values. Alongside these, Tsumura published longer essays either on films with high artistic values – he was a great supporter of Jean Renoir and French Poetic Realism – or on topical issues related to the ongoing restructuring of the domestic film industry under the militaristic government’s increasing intervention. His critical activities were so visible even outside film journalism that he was chosen to be one of the participants in the now‐famous 1942 “Overcoming Modernity” debates (Kawakami et  al.  1979 [1943]),4 and was also appointed as a member of the Central Association for National Mobilization. It thus comes as no surprise that Tsumura eventually became one of the most powerful advocates for the state control of domestic film practice, broadly preaching his dogmatic policy proposals in books like On Film Policy (Tsumura 1943) and Film War (Tsumura 1944). Such aggressive right‐wing turns were not rare among the Japanese cultural elites of the period, but the irony here was that Tsumura was also highly critical of the British model of state‐sponsorship for documentary film production, which Rotha proudly described in his book.5 When Tsumura brought out his 60‐page treatise “A Critique of Paul Rotha’s Film Theory: On His Documentary Film” (Tsumura 1940), Japanese debates on nonfiction and documentary film were heating up due to the Film Law and the administrative



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support it granted to the production and distribution of bunka eiga. Atsugi’s 1938 translation of Documentary Film had been published amid this turmoil surrounding the film industry, with the opportune title Bunka eigaron (Theory of the Culture Film), a significant change that helped create hype around the text. Quite naturally, Tsumura begins his critique by attacking this inappropriate Japanese title and the confusion it caused for readers. According to Tsumura, Rotha’s conception of documentary is a sub‐category of bunka eiga and not vice versa, because the former excludes newsreel and other types of nonfictional genres (e.g. science film, exploration film, and educational or lecture films), whereas the latter covers them all (Tsumura 1940: 150). For this reason, Tsumura uses dokyumentarī, the Japanese transcription of the English term documentary, to refer to Rotha’s specific use of the term, and in turn keeps the more conventional Japanese term kiroku eiga (usually used to mean “documentary film” in general) for the traditional category of nonfiction film practice more generally. At first glance, Tsumura’s counterargument seems reasonable to the extent that he rightly criticizes his fellow Japanese critics’ lack of “critical mind” (hihyō seishin) toward film theories imported from the West and provides a point‐by‐point critique of Rotha’s text by revealing its logical flaws (Tsumura 1940: 109). However, the true incentive for Tsumura to write this essay was Rotha’s relentless attack on all cinematic forms other than documentary. It is true that Rotha indicates in his introduction that he has no intention “to decry or limit the functions of the cinema as entertainment” (Rotha  1936: 15–16), but in the pages that follow he repeatedly stresses his opposition to the commercial use of the medium and the industry’s exclusive reliance upon sugar‐coated delusive stories: The fact is that under the limits defined by the present commercial system, entertainment cinema cannot possibly hope to deal either accurately or impartially from a ­sociological point of view with any of the really important subjects of modern ­existence. It is my contention, moreover, that whilst developed under the demands of financial speculation alone, cinema is unable to reach a point where its service to public interest amounts anything more valuable than, as Mr. Blumer has it, an emotional catharsis. (Rotha 1936: 46)

Absolutely furious at this one‐sided judgment, Tsumura responds with a similarly aggressive rejection of Rotha’s book project as a whole: In other words, Rotha’s book is very brave and heroic. While praising the documentary that is based on materialist socialism as the most valuable future form of cinema, it in turn smashes fiction film [geki eiga] into smithereens and verbally abuses it everywhere and as much as possible. Moreover, the way he assaults fiction film is totally reckless and idealistic, and I must confess that this is one of the reasons that gave me the guts to present my criticism of Paul Rotha. (Tsumura 1940: 111)

Before assessing the legitimacy of Tsumura’s criticism, it is necessary to pay attention to an easily overlooked, but no less significant, miscommunication at work here. Throughout his book, Rotha prefers the term story‐film to fiction film to

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indicate a certain group of films that become the object of his criticism, that is, films that had been manufactured and sold worldwide “along the lines of prevailing methods of big business, with the financial reins held tighter and tighter by large‐scale capitalists” (Rotha 1936: 41). However, in Atsugi’s translation, the term story‐film is not translated properly as monogatari eiga but as geki eiga (“fiction film” or more literally, “drama film”), and this terminological slippage caused a deal of confusion and misplaced criticism among Japanese readers (Sekino 1940). Perhaps the most telling is the logical inconsistency created in Rotha’s main assertion: to the majority of the Japanese readers who had no access to the English original, he appeared to attack the harmful effects of geki eiga in general, while at the same time championing the unparalleled advantage of documentary film which he defines as “the creative dramatization of actuality” (genjitsutsu no sozōteki geki ka – notice the same Japanese word geki [drama] used here). To justify her rather sticky word choice, the translator Atsugi argued in 1940 that to her knowledge, Rotha himself did not ascribe any specific meaning to the term story‐film, and as if to confirm this, she continued, even the main commentators on Rotha like Tsumura made little of her translation even after he checked the English original (Atsugi 1940: 119). In reality, however, Tsumura – and many of his contemporaries, including Imamura – came to interpret Rotha by reading him in light of this artificially established distinction between fiction and documentary films, rather than by addressing how he tried to challenge that very distinction with what he called “dramatization.” For this reason, Tsumura’s counter‐argument often becomes misleading if not imprecise. For instance, he considers it shameful that Rotha ignores the “glorious” tradition of the German studio UFA’s (Universum Film-Aktien Gesellschaft) scientific films in his section on the “evolution of documentary,” even though it is a reasonable choice for Rotha in that he, along with Grierson, clearly differentiated their notion of documentary from such purely scientific or objective lecture films (Tsumura 1940: 122–123). Similarly, in dismissing Rotha’s approving comments on G. W. Pabst’s Comradeship (Kameradschaft, 1931) as a sign of the incongruity of his documentary theory, Tsumura goes on to argue that the finest examples of cinematic treatment of modern social problems are to be found not in the handful of films the British documentary film movement had produced so far but rather in recent Hollywood and French fiction films such as Heroes for Sale (1933, dir. William A. Wellman), La Bandera (1935, dir. Julien Duvivier), and La Grande Illusion (1937, dir. Jean Renoir) (Tsumura 1940: 119–120). As is clear with these examples, Tsumura persistently consigns documentary to the realm of nonfiction and thereby defends his beloved fiction films from its sweeping invasions. For him, the generic distinction between these two modes of filmmaking should be kept intact because they differ from each other not only in terms of how (form) but also of what (content) their filming processes demonstrate. Interestingly, Tsumura finds a way to prove his point in Rotha’s definition of documentary as “the creative dramatization of actuality,” strategically interpreting it as assigning the two different domains of the world to each genre, namely, actuality to documentary and reality to fiction film.



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This significant distinction between actuality and reality was not visible at all to most Japanese readers of Rotha’s book, because in Japanese these two terms are usually translated into the same single word genjitsu (Atsugi followed this convention in her translation). However, Tsumura not only detected the distinction by reading the English original but went on to explain the substantial difference between these two domains by referring to their German equivalents, Wirklichkeit and Realität, respectively. According to Tsumura, actuality/Wirklichkeit emphasizes its immediate and external presence (genzon), a world characterized by force and motion, whereas reality/Realität designates an objective being (kyakkanteki sonzai) that will never be affected by anything but its essential determinants. In other words, the difference between actuality and reality can be understood by their opposing modalities, which Tsumura categorizes as “existence” (sonzai) and “truth/essence” (shinri) (Tsumura  1940: 144–145). And if Rotha’s notion of documentary aims to offer a purportedly scientific analysis of the mechanism of actuality with its application of the dialectical method, he continues, fiction film has a no less important role in its exploration of the secrets of reality through what the Germans calls Dichter or Dichtung, or “the most important human intuitions and sensibilities that make art possible” (Tsumura 1940: 133). Moreover, Tsumura anticipates that the future direction of kiroku eiga – again, it should be stressed that Tsumura uses this term to indicate nonfictional film in general and not Rotha’s particular use of the term documentary  –  must involve “the producer’s effort to artistically express the purely humanistic ­emotions he receives from the actual world [genjitsu sekai] with his camera and editing skills” (Tsumura 1940: 149). As Yuriko Furuhata rightly points out, Tsumura’s philosophical interpretation of the difference between actuality/Wirklichkeit and reality/Realität might be somewhat too inventive, since Rotha himself seemed to pay no special attention to it in his own text and uses these two terms almost interchangeably (Furuhata  2013: 62–63). Yet it still deserves some consideration for the following reasons. First, reflecting his Romanticist background, Tsumura gives higher priority to reality than to actuality and privileges the human artist’s intuitionist quest for truth. In regard to this, we should acknowledge that in his postwar writings Hanada criticized Tsumura precisely for the latter’s underestimation of actuality as a secondary category by quoting Hegel’s definitions that “actuality is the unity … of essence and existence, or of what is inner and what is outer” and “what is rational is actual and what is actual is rational” (Hanada  1977 [1954a]: 244).6 Hegel continued to argue that the idea, contrary to its common understanding, “is at once what is quite simply effective and actual as well” and sarcastically adds that only “practical men,” or those “who are devoid of thoughts,” treat actuality as mere “synonymous with external, sensible existence” (Hegel  1991 [1830]: 213–214). As we will see later, Hanada, following Hegel’s warning, developed his documentary theory around the question of how to approach the unknowability of reality by scrutinizing the contingent existence of actuality as such.

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Second, the distinction between actuality and reality  –  or rather between the actual and the real – itself constituted a central focal point in Grierson’s (and not Rotha’s) theorization of documentary. Indeed, in one of the untitled lectures he gave sometime between 1927 and 1933, Grierson offered the following  remarks that seemed to foreshadow Tsumura’s argument: When documentary people like myself talk about the superiority of the world outside the studios and tell you how much more genuine our world is than the other worlds, it is wise to remember the philosophic meaning of reality. In documentary we deal with the actual and in one sense with the real. But the really real, if I may use that phrase, is something deeper than that. The only reality which counts in the end is the interpretation which is profound … So when we come to documentary we come to the actual world  …  but I charge to remember that the task of reality before you is not one of reproduction but of interpretation. (Grierson 1998: 76–77)

This statement clearly tells us that both Grierson and Tsumura were working within the same intellectual tradition, even as they differed in some respects. Where Tsumura gave a somewhat esoteric account of the filmmaker’s intuitionistic revelation of the secrets of the human world through fiction films, Grierson presented his motto of the “creative treatment of actuality” as the first and foremost step to get closer to what he called “the really real.” Despite their opposing attitudes toward the concept of documentary, both Tsumura and Grierson had much in common in their idealist search for the hidden and universal truth of reality/Realität. Nevertheless, at the time of his commentary on Rotha’s text, Tsumura was completely unaware of this unexpected affinity with Grierson, and Rotha, at least in his chapters in Documentary Film, seemed to pay no critical attention to Grierson’s philosophical argument about the real and the actual. Consequently, what Tsumura found in Rotha was not an intellectual bedfellow, but a “clichéd and dogmatic materialist” who shamelessly invaded the well‐maintained territory of art and fiction films (Tsumura  1940: 132). “But in the world of art,” Tsumura contends, “there is nothing more dangerous than seeing the world by applying an ideology called ‘materialist dialectic’ [yuibutsu benshōhō] … Needless to say, I do not trust the success of the application of such a man‐made calculator in the world of art, so I can never agree with Mr. Rotha” (Tsumura  1940: 143). Seen from Tsumura’s blatantly anti‐Marxist perspective, Rotha’s term dramatization means a shallow interpretation of actuality through its economic basis alone, and for that reason, Tsumura refuses to see any positive value in Rotha’s documentary theory by concluding that “the world of documentary is nothing but the materialist world that has nothing to do with the human spirit” (emphasis in the original) (Tsumura 1940: 133). As his final words, Tsumura warns the reader that he is not totally dismissive of the potential of nonfiction films in general, but never forgets to stress that its healthy development must lie in the producer’s proper understanding of its stylistic, thematic, and ontological difference from fiction film (Tsumura 1940: 149).



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Cinema of Facts: Imamura Taihei It should be remembered that Tsumura published his counterargument when Rotha’s prestige in wartime Japan was at its zenith; it thus provoked significant criticism from his fellow critics. This criticism, however uncompromising, focused mostly on Tsumura’s misunderstanding  –  or rather, intentional dismissal  –  of Rotha’s basic terms and political standpoint, therefore leaving behind his philosophical questioning of the categorical difference between reality/Realität and actuality/Wirklichkeit (Takakiba  1940: 525–528). This theoretically unfruitful situation did not change much until after World War II, as was also the case for the Marxist film critic Imamura Taihei, who commented only sporadically on Rotha before 1945. During the war, Imamura had already earned a reputation as “the best film scholar of our time who has most beautifully proved the theoretical character [rironteki seikaku] that we could ascribe to the Japanese” (Ōkuma 1938: 411) for his very prolific and systematic writings on cinema. Indeed, Imamura published 10 monographs between 1938 and 1943, including The Form of Film Art (Eiga geijutsu no keishiki) (Imamura 1938), Theory of Documentary Film (Kiroku eigaron, 1940), and Theory of Animated Film (Manga eigaron) (Imamura 1941), to name but a few. Today, Imamura is recognized as the founder of Japanese animation theory (Lamarre 2014), but the focus of his theoretical writings always revolved around the camera’s ability to offer an immediate and objective “document” of events or phenomena that took place before its lens, or around what Michael Renov has once called “a direct, ontological claim to the ‘real.’ ” (Renov 1986: 71). It thus seems natural that Imamura, unlike Tsumura, found common ground with Rotha – there is a portrait of him reading Documentary Film (see Figure 3.1) – and detailed his favorable interpretation of the book in the last chapter of his 1952 Introduction to Film Theory. Imamura begins his chapter by pointing out his fellow Japanese critics’ conventional misunderstandings of Rotha’s documentary theory. While these local interpretations frame Rotha as a kind of “formalist” who rejected fiction film tout court, Imamura rightly reminds the reader that what Rotha criticized was not fiction film as a whole but the capitalist basis of the film industry that had privileged this genre as the most important form of film practice. Similarly, Imamura speaks highly of Rotha’s promotion of documentary as the most effective tool for mass propaganda, writing that Rotha’s documentary theory “reflects [his] strong social consciousness … and is based on the contemporary mass public’s most urgent/real demand,” and that it thus should be respected above all for its unflinching aim to “enlighten the people politically, to turn their eyes to fundamental contradictions in the modern social system” (Imamura 1952: 153–154). Highly sympathetic to Rotha’s promotion of documentary’s mission of social reform, Imamura goes even so far as to declare that “under Rotha’s opinions lies the idea of socialism, and in this sense his ‘documentarism’ shares commonalities with that of the Soviet Union” (Imamura 1952: 154). As a Marxist writing before Nikita Khruschev’s critique of Stalin’s cult of personality, Imamura uses a comparison with the legacies of Soviet

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Figure 3.1  Imamura Taihei.

Union’s revolutionary model of film practice in the 1920s – which had huge impact on the Japanese left in prewar Japan despite severe state censorship – as the highest compliment for Rotha’s political consciousness.7 Despite these general accolades, Imamura is highly critical about Rotha’s own theorization of documentary. For instance, he condemns Rotha’s inclusion of Potemkin and other examples from the Soviet Union within the category of documentary, arguing that these films should be treated as what he calls “semi‐documentary.” Although they use some basic methods borrowed from documentary, films that present us with a reenactment or reproduction of historical events, he argues, must remain in the realm of fiction because “they did not record the facts [jijitsu] themselves” that took place in front of the camera (Imamura  1952: 160–161). Moreover, after concisely paraphrasing Rotha’s idea of dramatization  –  “rather than showing the fact as it is, one should change it at one’s discretion by  ­filtering it through our subjectivity so that certain principles behind it are revealed” – he abruptly dismisses it by saying “this statement is so illogical that it is hard to grasp its meaning” (Imamura  1952: 166). Likewise, Imamura’s unsympathetic judgment is applied to Rotha’s application of dialectics. “It seems apparent,”



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he  writes, “that this [Rotha’s reference to dialectics] is nothing more than a mere repetition of Eisenstein’s dialectic of collision, and in this instance, too, the term ‘dialectic’ serves as a magic spell. In depicting anything, this position deems it to be enough to see the collision of things, and, as a result of this collision, lead to the dialectical formula composed of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. This is the most foolish part of Rotha’s Documentary Theory” (Imamura 1952: 176).8 Imamura concludes his reading with a highly self‐contradictory remark: “As I have shown, Rotha’s Documentary Theory contains a lot of inaccurate terms used in an idiosyncratic manner, but if we try to understand what he meant to say as a whole, then we come to realize that it has very correct views” (Imamura 1952: 167). Imamura’s schizophrenic interpretation of Rotha’s text was inseparable from his own determination to fight against domestic opponents of documentary film practice. In other words, he deployed Rotha as a mouthpiece through which his own theory of documentary could be disseminated. What are, then, main characteristics of his theory, and how do they differ from Rotha’s? First, in contrast to Tsumura’s discussion of the philosophical difference between actuality and reality, Imamura introduces a third term “fact” (jijitsu) as the foundation for what he considered to be kiroku eiga (Imamura uses this category in the same way as Tsumura, meaning nonfictional films in general). To be sure, Imamura does not ignore the creative intervention of the human agent in the capturing of the fact, as he likens the operation of montage to that of the human cognition in his earlier publications such as Theory of Documentary Film (Imamura 1940: 26). But his film theory in general repeatedly emphasizes that the factuality of filmic representation is guaranteed by the mechanical nature of the photographic image, which is able to capture what has been invisible or unknowable to the human perception, to grasp an object’s motion as it simultaneously moves before the camera, and to reproduce identical images at all times. In Imamura’s view, it is this mechanical nature of the photographic image that distinguishes cinema from the traditional arts, and, just like the late Kracauer, he argues that “one can understand film’s property by knowing the features of the photography that constitutes this medium’s basic units, structural elements, and historical origin” (Imamura  1957: 97–99). And as long as it makes use of those mechanical/photographic features properly, kiroku eiga – or what he now calls the “cinema of facts” (jijitsu no eiga) – must be placed higher than geki eiga – or the “cinema of fiction” (kakū no eiga) – in the historical development of film practice (Imamura 1957: 137). As expected, Rotha’s documentary theory is evaluated only in this light; although Rotha clearly differentiated his conception of documentary from the descriptive and objective treatment of the facts found in newsreels or educational films, Imamura tactically interprets him as someone who “paid attention to the film’s recording ability and came to believe that the real beauty lies only in the documentation of the fact” (Imamura 1952: 154). Another, and perhaps most telling, characteristic of Imamura’s documentary theory is his tireless effort to make generic distinctions between fiction and nonfiction films, and, ultimately, to defend the latter as a superior form of film practice. Like Tsumura’s argument on the philosophical distinction between reality/fiction and

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actuality/documentary, Imamura’s formula appears to be somewhat schematic, but with a different emphasis. In fiction film, Imamura argues, all aesthetic efforts are made “to exhibit the necessity [hitsuzen] as the contingent [gūzen],” whereas documentary film aspires “to reveal the necessity among the contingent” (Imamura 1955: 107). Imamura tries to prove the legitimacy of his formula by connecting it to recent trends in postwar film culture. After its long, indulgent tenure in the dream‐like world of fiction, he says, cinema is now consciously beginning to recuperate its social function through different uses of the medium, as represented by the recent upsurge of the so‐called “semi‐documentary” films such as Roberto Rossellini’s Paisan (Paisà, 1946), René Clément’s The Damned (Les maudits, 1947), and Jules Dassin’s The Naked City (1948). One the one hand, this ongoing move toward a more concrete and down‐to‐earth filmic representation/documentation of the actual world outside the studio is a necessary result of the catastrophic destruction of reality as such brought about by the world war, for contemporary audiences “are eager to see in the movies not melodramas but vivid reflections of their own life due to radical changes in their living conditions” (Imamura  1955: 113). One the other hand, the continuous development and increasing availability of recording devices (e.g. small‐gauge cameras and cheaper film stocks) through mass production promises progress toward the perfect realization of what Béla Balázs once called the period of “visual culture.” In this period, he argues, individuals would no longer remain in the position of mere passive receivers segregated by language barriers but would begin to directly communicate with each other by becoming witnesses, reporters, and even protagonists of ongoing historical events. According to Imamura, a new and promising form of film art should arise from this “vernacularization of cinema” (eiga no nichijōka) as a personal mobile tool for the documentation of the everyday (Imamura 1955: 114). Aside from its prophetic tones, Imamura’s documentary theory is problematic for its uncritical determinism. He argues that documentary must differ from fiction in its exclusive focus on the facts, and that the filmic documentation of those factual events (both historical and mechanical) would almost automatically attain both perceptual and epistemological credibility due to its “photographic objectivity” (shashinteki kyakkansei). But this statement immediately raises a question: What if either governmental powers or individual filmmakers appropriate such a strong “reality‐effect” generated by the cinematic apparatus to cover up their malicious will to manipulate the viewer’s world‐view? To be more precise, hasn’t the term fact in its philosophical sense been always relative and not absolute, radically changing its value and meaning according to the particular set of each receiver’s empirical perception, preexisting knowledge, and sociocultural background? Similarly, one could take issue with Imamura’s argument on contingency and necessity. As a sympathizer of socialism, Imamura may well have said that every necessary step to be taken in modern history had always been indicated in the success and progress of the Soviet Union. And in fact, he writes, “it is socialist society that has unraveled more significance in documentary than in fiction film. Having started with documentary film, Soviet/Russian film created a method of fiction film based on the documentary



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method” (Imamura 1955: 115). Nevertheless, we should also be aware that this sort of political posture is always relative and changeable over time; in a series of essays he published during the war, Imamura repeatedly expressed his view that the liberation of film practice from the hands of capitalists could only be possible under total state control of the film industry, a model that, in his view, had been most completely accomplished in Nazi Germany. When asked in the postwar years about his past appraisal of Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia (1938), Imamura had little choice but to depoliticize his standpoint: It is, as it cannot be denied, the Nazis Government that produced this film, but what it expressed to us was not the government’s will; it was rather the international, humanistic, and peaceful sprit of the Olympics. This was a film that foiled Nazis’ trap. And it was possible only because it was a documentary. (Imamura 1957: 135)

If the revelation of such a “respectful” or even “universal” mission in the modern Olympics speaks to Imamura’s belief in documentary’s power to present what he considered to be a “fact,” this “fact” tells us nothing about the reality of the world system around 1938, in which so many countries and peoples were ruthlessly exploited and suppressed by colonial powers, including Japan itself. In this sense, Imamura’s theorization of documentary as the “cinema of fact” is useful, at best, to technological determinists, and, at worst, to political conformists, given its lack of concern about the role of the viewer, or about the actual condition under which we see and admit the factuality of given film texts. In its own context, Imamura’s adamant promotion of documentary as a superior form of film practice also led to a famous debate called kiroku eiga ronsō in 1956– 1957. The debate originated in Imamura’s aggressive – indeed, offensive – review of another Marxist film critic Iwasaki Akira’s 1956 book Film Theory (Eiga no riron). Imamura reproached this book for Iwasaki’s complete ignorance of documentary as a legitimate genre within film theory, and for his alleged plagiarism from Imamura’s own previous book Introduction to Film Theory. In response Iwasaki wrote a lengthy refutation which can be summarized as follows: (1) Imamura is a “dogmatic documentarist” (kiroku eiga shijō shugisha) who never admits the value of fiction film; (2) Imamura’s focus on the photographic nature of the film medium leads only to an animism of the camera‐eye, or to the formalistic equalization of realism and mechanical recordings of the events; and (3) there is no substantial difference between fiction and documentary because in both instances what really matters should always be the filmmaker’s creative and conscious treatment of the subject matter as such (Iwasaki 1957: 32–49). Twenty years after its publication, one cannot not help but see Tsumura’s initial counter‐argument against Rotha make a full circle here. Of course, Imamura tried to dispel Iwasaki’s polemical criticism by clarifying his standpoint further, but the result was far from fruitful (Imamura  1957: 199–226). The reason for Imamura’s failure, I contend, rested not so much in his promotion of documentary’s own legitimacy as in his inability to overcome the conventional dichotomy between fiction

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and nonfiction. Despite his Marxist leanings, Imamura’s documentary theory, as one critic points out, is modeled not after dialectical meterialism but after August Comte’s positivist theory of evolution that, when applied to film theory, delineates a highly teleological course of progress from the mechanical reproduction of the theater to the development of fiction story‐telling, and finally to the dominance of nonfiction or documentary film (Nakamura cited in Sugiyama 1990: 184). In this irreversible line of thought, it is technically impossible to address the mutual transformation of fiction and nonfiction genres which was in effect taking place in postwar cinema, because with it Imamura tended solely to pin down and compare the static modes of being – and not of becoming – they had already developed in the 1920s and 1930s. In retrospect, the déjà vu‐like appearance of the Iwasaki‐Imamura debate in the late 1950s clearly marked the impasse of the traditional Japanese discourse on documentary, and, as is must be clear by now, it is against this particular discursive backdrop that Hanada Kiyoteru made his theoretical intervention.

Sur‐documentary: Hanada Kiyoteru As mentioned at the beginning of the essay, Hanada served as the most influential leader/agitator (sendōsha) of the postwar Japanese artistic and political avant‐garde movement, frequently collaborating or having disputes with numerous important artists, writers, and filmmakers including Okamoto Tarō, Haniya Yutaka, Abe Kōbō, Yoshimoto Takaaki, and Matsumoto Toshio. As a result, some scholars have seen him as marking a significant rupture not only between wartime and postwar critical discourse, but also between traditional, studio‐based commercial filmmaking and the more independent‐leaning Japanese New Wave of the 1960s (Sakamoto 2011: 57–68). It is true that Hanada remained relatively unknown as a critic until the end of the war, but we should remember that he also belonged to the same generation as the two critics discussed above, and that his intellectual formation dates to the 1930s and the early 40s. During this period of obscurity, Hanada was diligently writing a series of essays on what he called “the spirit of the transformative period” (tenkeiki no seishin), pieces that interpreted how the major European figures in art and science  –  Dante, Leonardo, Copernicus, Swift, Villon, and so on  –  articulated their experience of the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, or to the modern period of the Enlightenment (Hanada  1977 [1946]). When these essays were published in book form in 1946, many contemporary readers welcomed them as an opportune guide to their own survival of the crisis of (Japanese) modernity. And yet especially remarkable from today’s perspective are the rigor and boldness of Hanada’s method of creative interpretation, which he elaborated through his wide range of knowledge of Marxism, the Kyoto School of philosophy (Kyoto gakuha), Continental philosophy (from Plato to Hegel to existentialism), and many other contemporary literary and art movements that, perhaps surprisingly, he was able to access and contemplate on during the war. If Hanada’s reconceptualization of documentary appears radically new and different, it was not because of his generational



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gap from the other two critics, but due rather to the critical distance he had from the relatively small world of Japanese film criticism, as well as to his wide reading in modern and contemporary thought. This is, however, not to say that Hanada lacked interest in film in his early career. Although his first essay on film did not appear until October 1951, he had been paying constant attention to both domestic and international currents in critical discourse on this medium. In fact, it was Hanada who took the lead in reassessing the enduring relevance of Imamura’s film theory in the postwar era. Not only did he help republish Imamura’s Theory of Animated Film in 1948 from his own publishing house Shinzenbisha, he also contributed a favorable preface to the 1950 reprint of Imamura’s first book The Form of Film Art: “Although there are so many film critics around us, only a few can think things cinematically. If [the poet] Nishiwaki Junzaburō’s so‐called ‘kaigateki shikō’ [pictorial thinking] was peculiar to Surrealists of the past, one could say that Imamura Taihei’s ‘eigateki shikō’ [cinematic thinking] stands at the forefront of our times” (Hanada 1950: 1). There is no doubt that Imamura’s influence on Hanada was profound at the beginning – for instance, Hanada’s first book on cinema was precisely titled Cinematic Thinking (Eigateki shikō) (Hanada  1978 [1958c])  –  but Hanada’s assessment of Imamura gradually went sour as he developed his own documentary theory. Indeed, after reading the aforementioned debate between Imamura and Iwasaki, Hanada dismissed both critics as “the t­ypical prewar figures who had  finished forming their thoughts in the 1930s” (Hanada  1978 [1956]: 208). In his view, while Iwasaki fell completely behind the times due to his old‐fashioned humanism, Imamura was also problematic in his naïve treatment of the fact as a self‐evident truth. Hanada’s criticism of Imamura and other fellow Japanese critics became more apparent in his meta‐commentaries on the hitherto local interpretation of Rotha’s documentary theory. According to Hanada, the problem with Imamura’s reading of Rotha is that he was never seriously concerned with the conceptual distinction between reality and actuality. Given his treatment of these opposing terms with the same single Japanese word genjitsu, the reader is likely to get confused because it is not clear at all whether what he meant by it was the idealist “essence” of a universal truth or the materialist “existence” of an external being. Moreover, Imamura’s overemphasis on the fact as a transcendent category would likely diminish the possibility of our active and conscious commitment to the self‐transformation of the world in motion. On this point, Tsumura was more careful with his argument on the categorical difference between reality/Realität and actuality/Wirklichkeit. Yet again, Hanada argues, Tsumura was no less problematic for his dualistic thinking that reality and actuality are completely separable from each other, and that one could even achieve the general truth of reality without stepping into the hustle and bustle of actuality. And precisely because this schematic dyad between reality and actuality, between fiction and nonfiction, and between essence and phenomenon was a common feature of previous Japanese debates on documentary, Hanada asks his readers to revisit Rotha once again:

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I don’t need to restate here the self‐evident axiom that the “truth” is nothing more than a relative and historically determined concept. As Paul Rotha tells us, I think we must start our work by addressing the  raw and vivid problems our external reality [genjitsu] presents us,  from the standpoint of what he called “the creative dramatization of actuality” [actuaritī]. (Hanada 1977 [1954a]: 244)

It goes without saying that Hanada, in writing this statement, did not intend to provide a more accurate reading of Rotha’s original text. Rather, he only used Rotha as a foothold for the exhibition of his own documentary theory. Let us look first at how he considers the significance of the term actuality used in Rotha’s call for “the creative dramatization of actuality.” Unlike Tsumura, Hanada does not underrate actuality but instead treats it as an indispensable means of reaching reality, which he thinks of as a mysterious, uncanny, and even unknowable entity, almost equivalent to “the thing‐in‐itself ” in Kantian philosophy. To foreground the relevance of actuality as the main subject of film practice in his times, Hanada argues that this term can also be replaced with “contingency” (gūzensei)  in part following Imamura’s claim that “the aim of documentary film is to reveal the necessity among the contingent” (Hanada 1978 [1957]: 367). Here, however, it is also possible to presume that Hanada’s equation of the actual and the contingent came from Hegel, who defined contingency as the immediate, external appearance of actuality, or “the shape in which actuality first presents itself to consciousness” (Hegel 1991 [1830]: 218). But if Hegel, as an Idealist philosopher, was rather critical of contingency for its indeterminate, transformative, and inessential nature, Hanada finds more values in exactly what Hegel has negated. In other words, his main motivation is to establish a documentary theory that hinges on those miscellaneous and ever‐changing phenomena that appear and exist for our experience alone. In this regard Hanada maintains that actuality/contingency can also be seen as equivalent to existence (jitsuzon), having some unmistakable resonance with Sartre’s famous motto “existence precedes essence” (Hanada  1978 [1957]: 368). Consequently, what becomes important for Hanada’s existentialist standpoint is “to pay more attention to individual ‘objects’ as such than to the ‘essence’ or ‘universal meaning’ ” (Hanada 1978 [1957]: 373). Hanada further explicates the significance of actuality in his documentary theory by comparing it with two other modalities of empirical thinking discussed in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason – necessity (hitsuzensei) and possibility (kanōsei). According to Hanada, each of these modalities represents three different moments in temporality, namely, the past (necessity), the present (actuality), and the future (possibility). And it is on this formula that one could understand – or rather, “experience” – the ontological meaning of reality in temporary terms, because, he says, “‘reality’ is that which sublates in itself both the necessity of the ‘past’ and the possibility of the ‘future’ by taking a lead from the contingency of the ‘present’ ” (Hanada 1978 [1957]: 367). Hanada himself admits that this triadic formula itself is too Hegelian, but it still helps us know how he tries to give shape, in a purely dialectical manner, to the basic structure of the world surrounding us and the multiple roles film plays in it (Sasaki et  al.  1956: 151). To provide a clear exposition of Hanada’s rather



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Reality (Documentary)

Possibility

Necessity

Revolution (Avant-grade)

History (Fiction)

The past

The future

= Actuality/Contingency The Present (Newsreel)

Figure 3.2  Dialectical diagram of Hanada’s documentary theory (as interpreted by Naoki Yamamoto).

complicated argument, I would like to explain it using the following interpretive diagram (Figure 3.2): 1 The x‐axis represents a specific moment in history and illustrates Hanada’s existentialist attitude that foregrounds the embeddedness of our lived experience of reality within the present. 2 Reflecting Hanada’s Marxist background, the y‐axis represents the ongoing progress toward socialist revolution. 3 Actuality/contingency is located at the intersection of these coordinate axes, dialectically mediating two correlational sets of the opponents (the past/the future and necessity/possibility). 4 Moreover, Hanada seems to be assigning four different modes of filmmaking to each end of the coordinate axes, with “fiction” being associated with “history,” “avant‐garde” with “revolution,” “newsreel” with “the present,” and “documentary” with “reality.” It is on this dialectic diagram that Hanada set out his criticism of Rotha, attacking in particular the latter’s treatment of the term dramatization. In Hanada’s assessment, the problem with Rotha’s theory is that it aimed to enhance the dramatic quality of documentary in accordance with the conventions of modern theatrical plays developed since Ibsen. “What Rotha meant by the term ‘drama,’” he says, “was nothing but the highly rational drama of everyday life which is completely caught in the grips of

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causal relationships” (Hanada 1978 [1958b]: 163). Interpreting this statement according to the diagram I posed above, it becomes obvious that Rotha’s “dramatization of actuality” goes against the historical progress toward revolution, indicating the eclectic unity of fiction and documentary for the sake of necessity, or “the mere artistic expression of social reformism,” as Hanada puts it (Hanada 1978 [1958a]: 157). On the contrary, Hanada’s own formula must head in the opposite direction on the ­temporal x‐axis, aiming for the dialectical unity of the avant‐garde and documentary that is mediated through possibility. Hanada names this sur‐documentary (shuru‐ dokyumentarī). While the French prefix sur here undoubtedly derives from Surrealism, but it also means the sublation of the documentary genre as a whole through its ­serious confrontation with the legacy of the interwar artistic avant‐garde. It is necessary to explain here what Hanada means by the avant‐garde. His understanding of the term owes much to his collaborator Okamoto Tarō’s concept of “bipolarism” (taikyoku shugi). Having spent 10 years (1930–1940) in France actively participating in the Surrealist‐influenced group Abstraction‐Création, Okamoto argued that avant‐garde art movements in 1920s Europe were composed of two opposing ­currents – the logical and nonfigurative expression of abstract painting, and the irrational but concrete expression of Surrealism. The main impetus of their interrelation, Okamoto contends, was not to combine them through eclecticism but rather to open up a new horizon of artistic possibilities by intensifying the conflict between the two as deeply as possible (Okamoto cited in Ōtani 2009: 18). To this, Hanada adds that one could easily find a similar division in the avant‐garde cinema of the same period, between German absolute films on one hand and French Dada/Surrealist films on the other. But he also notes that in the realm of filmmaking such a bipolar opposition between abstract art and Surrealism did not constitute a real dialectical relationship in its strict sense, for insofar as film practice is premised on the medium’s recording capacity, filmmakers must always begin with the concrete objects the camera captures in the world and not with the abstract ideas they come up with in their mind. Consequently, avant‐garde filmmakers of the past came to concentrate their creativity in order “to boldly visualize our internal world, that is, the world of ideas and the unconsciousness,” while at the same time consciously separating themselves from the immediacy and intimacy of actuality (Hanada 1977 [1953]: 216). Thus the real dialectic in filmmaking, Hanada contends, must instead lie between the documentary method and the avant‐ garde aesthetic. Rather than accepting what the camera presents before us as a priori facts, creators of sur‐documentary films must first of all be skeptical of our common perception of ­actuality, and thereby aim to reveal “how enigmatic and mysterious those concrete things in our external world are,” just as avant‐garde artists demonstrated through their experimentation with our internal worlds (Hanada 1977 [1951]: 170). Still, one last question remains: what kinds of films can qualify as sur‐­documentary? Like Imamura, Hanada refers to Clément’s The Damned, Dassin’s The Naked City, and some Italian neorealist films. These films, he argues, partly share his existentialist attitude in that they focus less on the search for the general truth of reality than on the filmic presentation of the contingent status of concrete objects and social phenomena. He also highly praises Luis Buñuel’s The Young and the Damned (Los ­olvidados, 1950) for its conscious attempt to look at the actuality of Mexican



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society through the eye of a surrealist. These examples, however, still cannot be seen as the exemplary sur‐documentary films of which he dreams, the films that are able to reformulate the entire genre of documentary by negating its conventional choice and treatment of subject matter. As a possible theme for this new approach, Hanada goes so far as to suggest the creative adoption of the tradition of ghost or supernatural creature stories written and circulated widely in Japan since the seventeenth century. “Especially in stories of ghost cat incidents in the Arima and Nabeshima clans,” he says, “surrealistic elements are merged into highly realistic elements. If it were possible for us to inherit and develop this tradition properly, then we must be able to create a documentary art that could prevail over Surrealism—the finest of its kind with novelty and eccentricity.” (Hanada 1977 [1954a]: 234). Of course, this is a rather playful suggestion that was meant to ridicule his fellow Japanese documentary filmmakers, who were still hesitant to abandon their persistent belief in naive realism. Hence, aside from this particular example, Hanada deliberately kept his vision open to many different possibilities. This was partly because his role as a theorist was to provide a concept and not to offer practical advices for filmmakers. But the more significant reason is that Hanada, like Okamoto, believed that creative imagination lies less in the synthesis of a thesis and an antithesis as such than in the perpetual collision between the two. Indeed, ­everywhere in the essays he wrote during the 1950s Hanada repeatedly presented dialectics as the unending process of becoming: “To unify the opposites without dissolving their conflicts” (tairitsubutsu wo tairitsu no mama tōitsu suru) (Hanada 1977 [1949b]: 14). As Hanada himself admits, this idiosyncratic call for the eternal struggle of mutually exclusive opposites  –  which I paraphrase as “dialectics without synthesis”  –  may seem illogical at first glance, but it was intentionally formulated thus with the clear intent to “smash down those who privilege the unity over the conflict in the course of dialectical progress” (Hanada  1978 [1954b]: 109). Furthermore, inasmuch  as Hanada was indeed faithful to Lenin’s observation of the laws of dialectics – “The unity of opposites is conditional, temporary, transitory, relative. The struggle of mutually exclusive opposites is absolute, just as development and motion are absolute” (Lenin 1975 [1915]: 649) – one could find in his seemingly counterintuitive gesture a highly self‐reflective treatment of theory as such. For Hanada, theory – including his own – never meant a universal and timeless account of general truths but always manifested itself in motion, as part of a particular discursive practice deeply embedded into the both historical and political contexts of the present.

Conclusion In his contribution to Hanada’s posthumous anthologies, the renowned experimental filmmaker Matsumoto Toshio acknowledged Hanada’s decisive influence on his own practice and theorization of a new genre called “avant‐garde documentary”: The critical consciousness that questions conventional thinking, uncompromising anti‐authoritarianism, and the exhaustive mentality that objectifies both the object

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and the subject without being entrapped with sentimental emotions—these were the best things I learned from Mr. Hanada. And his dynamic and flexible method that unifies the essential opponents without dissolving their conflicts had been served as a guide for my own practice for a long time. (Matsumoto 1978: appendix 10)9

As this brief statement makes clear, it is no exaggeration to say that Hanada’s conceptualization of sur‐documentary was instrumental or even indispensable for the radical transformation of both documentary and experimental film practices in Japan from the mid‐1950s onward. But since the adaptation of his theory into filmmaking has been studied elsewhere, I would like to conclude my chapter instead by foregrounding the potential of Hanada’s thinking for a reconfiguration of the history of film theory in general. In his early writing, Hanada developed a concept called “elliptical imagination” (daen gensō). This concept aimed to illustrate the particular mentality of those who lived through the transitional period from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, the mentality in which various sets of two opposing elements – poetry and mathematics, intuition and logic, vulgarity and piety, humanism and anti‐humanism, and the pre‐modern and the modern  –  coexisted without minimizing or unifying their mutual conflicts. As a geometrical figure generated on the condition that the sums of the distances of each point in its periphery from the two focal points are equal, the ellipse has been interpreted by many as illustrating Hanada’s formulation of dialectics, given its constant negation of the harmonious unity with a single center (a circle or synthesis) and inherent possibility for eternal transfiguration (Hanada  1977 [1946]). However, it should be pointed out that he applied this concept to the very constitution of the modern world as such, which, as Stuart Hall and others remind us, has always cultivated itself on the two opposing but always correlational focal points: The West and the Rest, or the subject and the object of the Enlightenment (Hall 1996: 184–227). In this geopolitical configuration, it is impossible to draw a perfect circle by focusing only on either of those focal points, or, as Hanada maintained in one of his essays, “what is ‘Japanese’ is at the same time ‘Western’” (Hanada  1977 [1949a]: 37). This makes it clear that the complexity of diverse instances of modernity can be explained fully neither by a teleological narrative of the so‐called “modernization theory” that always leads to the alleged superiority of the Western model of modernity, nor by the discourse of “alternative modernities” that tends to put aside the fact that what we consider to be “local” or “indigenous” in the experience of modernity are not absolute but only conditional or relative, made visible through the internalization of the Western perspective (Lamarre 2004: 1–35). What I have aimed to illustrate in this chapter is that such an elliptical relationship also formed around the local reception of the Griersonian conception of documentary in Japan. There is no such thing as a purely “Japanese” film theory because the critical debates on cinema in Japan have always  developed in constant dialogues with ideas or concepts imported from abroad, revolving around two correlational poles of the local and the global. With this remark, however, I do not mean that the creation of theory always originates in the West, and accordingly, that any examples



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from the non‐West must be treated as derivative copies or secondary arrangements of the original. Indeed, I contend that the problem with the preexisting study of film theory has been its egocentric attempt to draw a perfect circle of influence by locating the West as its single center. Or, as Masha Salazkina has recently suggested, we now must critically reconsider the fact that the highly exclusive Eurocentric selection of canonical texts in film studies as an academic discipline undeniably follow and duplicate “the imperial hierarchy of the modern world system” (Salazkina 2015: 325–349). It is here that one could understand the utility of Hanada’s theoretical intervention: not only does it demonstrate the maturation of local debates on documentary as a distinct form of film practice, it also encourages us to discover hitherto neglected constellations of global thought which have yet to be documented in the general history of theories of cinema and its related cultural phenomena.

Notes 1 To encompass a more comprehensive picture of documentary practices in postwar Japan, it is necessary to consider a number of TV documentaries produced by TV stations such as NHK (Nippon Hosō Kyōkai, a public broadcasting company) and NTV (Nippon Television Network Corporation, especially under the supervision of the producer Ushiyama Jun’ichi). Unfortunately, these TV works and their related discourse are beyond the scope of this paper, but I would nonetheless emphasize that despite the saturated presence of TV, film as a medium still holds a significant place in Japanese documentary culture today. Indeed, the renowned TV documentarist Mori Tatsuya has chosen a film – entitled 311, co‐directed with Watai Takeharu, Matsubayashi Yōju, and Yasuoka Takaharu – to make public his commentary on the earthquake‐tsunami‐nuclear triple disaster that hit the north‐eastern region of Japan on March 11, 2011. 2 I have discussed this issue further in Yamamoto (2020). 3 The translator Atsugi was one of the few female documentary filmmakers active in wartime Japan, and, as with other supporters of Rotha, she had been involved in the proletarian film movement before making her move to the production of bunka eiga. Surprisingly, Atsugi’s translation remained in print for more than four decades, with the latest edition being published in 1976. 4 For Tsumura’s contribution to this debate, see Harry Harootunian (2000: 34–94). 5 Recent studies of the British documentary film movement also criticize its unabashed reliance on the state‐sponsorship and concomitant support for Britain’s imperialist expansionism. See, for instance, Brian Winston (1995) and Lee Grieveson (2011). 6 Hanada quoted these two definitions from the Japanese translations of Hegel (1991 [1830]) and Hegel (1991 [1821]), respectively. 7 Soviet films officially released in prewar Japan include Storm over Asia (1928, dir. Vsevolod Pudovkin), Turksib (1929, dir. Victor A. Turin), and Man with a Movie Camera (1929, dir. Dziga Vertov). Other major films such as Battleship Potemkin (1925, dir. Sergei Eisenstein) and Mother (1926, dir. Vsevolod Pudovkin) were not allowed to be shown until the postwar period due to the state’s censorship. Despite such limited access, prewar Japanese intellectuals became familiar with Soviet film practice through the translation of  written accounts of it either by the directors mentioned above or by its foreign

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s­ ympathizers like Léon Moussinac. For more on the Japanese reception of Soviet montage theory, see Yamamoto (2020). 8 Perhaps Imamura’s negative comments here reflect his awareness of the development of the anti‐montage discourse in wartime Japan. For instance, around 1940, Imamura’s fellow critic Sugiyama Heiichi harshly criticized Pudovkin’s montage theory as an “escapist strategy” and in turn praised Jean Renoir and Yamanaka Sadao for their innovative use of long takes and deep focus. See Heiichi Sugiyama (1941). 9 As a filmmaker, Matsumoto is widely known for a series of experimental documentary films he made from the late 1950s to early 1960s, including The Weavers of Nishijin (Nishijin, 1961) and The Song of Stone (Ishi no uta, 1963). Hanada’s influence on Matumoto’s own writing is best represented in Matsumoto (2012 [1958]).

References Atsugi, T. (1940). Story‐film no yakugo ni tsuite [On the Translation of the Story‐Film]. Bunka eiga kenkyū 3 (4): 118–119. Furuhata, Y. (2013). Cinema of Actuality: Japanese Avant‐Garde Filmmaking in the Season of Image Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Grierson, J. (1971). Grierson on Documentary, revised edition (ed. F. Hardy). New York and Washington: Praeger Publishers. Grierson, J. (1998 [1927‐33]). Untitled lecture on documentary. In: The Documentary Film Movement: An Anthology (ed. I. Aitken), 76–77. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Grieveson, L. (2011). The Cinema and the (Common) Wealth of Nations. In: Empire and Film (eds. L. Grieveson and C. MacCabe), 73–114. London: BFI. Hall, S. (1996). The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power. In: Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies (eds. S. Hall, D. Held, D. Hubert, et  al.), 184–227. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Hanada, K. (1950). Jo [Introduction]. In: Eiga geijutsu no keishiki, revised edition, vol. 1 (ed. T. Imamura). Tokyo: Onkodō. Hanada, K. (1977 [1946]). Fukkōki no seishin [The Renaissance Spirit]. In: Hanada Kiyoteru zenshū, vol. 2, 223–419. Tokyo: Kōdansha. Hanada, K. (1977 [1949a]). Kamen no hyōjō [Expression of the Mask]. In: Hanada Kiyoteru zenshū, vol. 4, 30–43. Tokyo: Kōdansha. Hanada, K. (1977 [1949b]). Yūmoresuku [Humoresque]. In: Hanada Kiyoteru zenshū, vol. 4, 13–22. Tokyo: Kōdansha. Hanada, K. (1977 [1951]). Kikai to bara [The Machine and Roses]. In: Hanada Kiyoteru zenshū, vol. 4, 163–172. Tokyo: Kōdansha. Hanada, K. (1977 [1953]). 20‐nendai no ‘avangyarudo [The Avant‐Garde in the 1920s]. In: Hanada Kiyoteru zenshū, vol. 4, 213–222. Tokyo: Kōdansha. Hanada, K. (1977 [1954a]). Warai neko [The Cheshire Cat]. In: Hanada Kiyoteru zenshū, vol. 4, 232–246. Tokyo: Kōdansha. Hanada, K. (1978 [1954b]). Tōsō to tōitsu [Struggle and Integration]. In: Hanada Kiyoteru zenshū, vol. 6, 109–111. Tokyo: Kōdansha. Hanada, K. (1978 [1956]). Eiga hihyō ni tsuite [On Film Criticism]. In: Hanada Kiyoteru zenshū, vol. 7, 202–215. Tokyo: Kōdansha. Hanada, K. (1978 [1957]). Gūzen no mondai [An Issue of Contingency]. In: Hanada Kiyoteru zenshū, vol. 6, 359–382. Tokyo: Kōdansha.



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Hanada, K. (1978 [1958a]). Shuru‐dokyumentarizumu ni kansuru ichi kōsatsu [A Study of Sur‐Documentarism]. In: Hanada Kiyoteru zenshū, vol. 7, 156–160. Tokyo: Kōdansha. Hanada, K. (1978 [1958b). Shukumei wo megutte [On He Who Must Die]. In: Hanada Kiyoteru zenshū, vol. 7, 161–166. Kōdansha. Hanada, K. (1978 [1958c). Eigateki shikō [Cinematic Thinking]. In: Hanada Kiyoteru zenshū, vol. 7, 145–313. Tokyo: Kōdansha. Hanada, K., Sasaki, K., Abe, K. et  al. (1957). Eiga hihyō no saikentō [Reconsidering Film Criticism]. Kinema junpō 172: 41. Harootunian, H. (2000). Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hegel, G.W.F. (1991 [1821]). Hegel: Elements of the Philosophy of Right (trans. H.B. Nisbet) (ed. A.W. Wood). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hegel, G.W.F. (1991 [1830]). The Encyclopaedia Logic, with the Zusätze (trans., intro., and notes, T.F. Geraets, W.A. Suchting, and H.S. Harris). Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing. Imamura, T. (1938). Eiga geiutsu no keishiki [The Form of Film Art]. Tokyo: Ōshio shorin. Imamura, T. (1940). Kiroku eigaron [Theory of Documentary Film]. Kyoto: Daiichi geibunsha. Imamura, T. (1941). Manga eigaron [Theory of Animated Film]. Kyoto: Daiichi geibunsha. Imamura, T. (1952). Eiga riron nyūmon [An Introduction to Film Theory]. Tokyo: Itagaki shoten. Imamura, T. (1955). Eiga nyūmon [An Introduction to Cinema]. Tokyo: Syakai shisō kenkyūkai. Imamura, T. (1957). Gendai eigaron: Kirokusei to geijutsusei [On Contemporary Cinema: Documentary and Art]. Tokyo: Heibonsha. Iwasaki, A. (1957). Kiroku eiga ni okeru watakushi no iken [My Opinion about Documentary Film]. Eiga hyōron 14 (1): 32–60. Kawakami, T., Nishitani, K., Moroi, S. et al. (1979 [1943]). Kindai no chōkoku [Overcoming Modernity], rev. ed. Tokyo: Fuzanbō. Lamarre, T. (2004). Introduction: Impacts of Modernities. In: Impacts of Modernities (eds. T. Lamarre and K. Nae‐hui), 1–35. Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Press. Lamarre, T. (2014). Cartoon Film Theory: Imamura Taihei on Animation, Documentary, and Photography. In: Animating Film Theory (ed. K. Beckman), 221–251. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lenin, V.I. (1975 [1915]). On the Question of Dialectics. In: The Lenin Anthology (ed. R.C. Tucker), 649. New York: W. W. Norton. Matsumoto, T. (1978). Hanada‐san to eiga hihyō [Mr. Hanada’s Film Criticism]. In: Hanada Kiyoteru zenshū, vol. 7, appendix 10–11. Tokyo: Kōdansha. Matsumoto, T. (2012 [1958]). A Theory of Avant‐Garde Documentary, trans. Michael Raine. Cinema Journal 51 (4): 148–154. Noda, S. (1973). Nihon ni okeru kiroku eiga undō [The Documentary Movement in Japan]. In: Gendai eiga jiten, revised edition (eds. S. Okada, K. Sasaki, T. Satō and S. Hani). Tokyo: Bijutsu shuppansha. Nornes, A.M. (1999). Pôru Rûta/Paul Rotha and the Politics of Translation. Cinema Journal 38 (3): 91–108. Ōkuma, N. (1938). Batsu [Postscript]. In: Eiga geiutsu no keishiki (ed. T. Imamura), 409–412. Tokyo: Ōshio shorin. Ōtani, S. (2009). Okamoto Tarō no “taikyoku shugi” no seiritsu wo megutte [On the Formation of Okamoto Tarō’s “bipolarism”]. Tokyo kokuritsu bijutsukan kiyō 13: 18–36.

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Petrie, D. and Kruger, R. (eds.) (1999). A Paul Rotha Reader. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Renov, M. (1986). Re‐Thinking Documentary: Toward a Taxonomy of Mediation. Wide Angle 8 (3‐4): 71–77. Rotha, P. (1936). Documentary Film. London: Faber and Faber. Rotha, P. (1938). Bunka eigaron [Culture Film], trans. T. Atsugi. Kyoto: Daiichi geibunsha. Sakamoto, H. (2011). Kiroku to avangyarudo: Sengo Nihon ni okeru zen’ei kiroku eigaron to sono haikei [Documentary and the Avant‐garde: Avant‐Garde Film Theory in Postwar Japan and its Context]. Wakkanai hokusei gakuen daigaku kiyō 11: 57–68. Salazkina, M. (2015). Introduction: Film Theory in the Age of Neoliberal Globalization. Framework 56 (2): 325–349. Sasa, G. (1928). Gangu/buki—satsueiki [A Toy/Weapon—The Camera]. Senki 1 (2): 29–33. Sasaki, K., Hanada, K., and Takeda, T. (1956). Eiga riron no hihan to sōzō [Criticism and Creation of Film Theory]. Shin‐Nihon bungaku 11 (12): 146–155. Sekino, Y. (1940). ‘Kyō made no eiga’ to ashita no eiga: Dokyumentarī to Rōsa no hatten [The Film till Now and the Film of Tomorrow Today: Developments of Rotha and Documentary]. Bunga eiga kenkyūI 3 (2): 8–11; 3(3): 58–60; 3(4): 109–112; 3(5): 176–179. Sugiyama, H. (1941). Eiga hyōronshū [A Collection of Film Criticism]. Kyoto: Daiichi geibunsha. Sugiyama, H. (1990). Imamura Taihei: Kokō dokusō no eizō hyōronka [Imamura Taihei: A Lofty and Original Critic of the Moving Image]. Tokyo: Riburopōto. Takakiba, T. (1940). Kyokō no riron: Tsumura Hideo‐shi no ‘Pōru Rūta hihan’ wo yomu [A Fabricated Theory: Reading Tsumura Hideo’s “Critiquing Paul Rotha’s Film Theory”]. Bunka eiga kenkyū 3 (1): 525–528. Tosaka, J. (1937). Eiga no ninshikironteki kachi to fūzoku byōsha [Cinema’s Epistemological Value and its Depiction of Social Customs]. Nihon eiga 2 (6): 13–19. Tsumura, H. (1940). Pōru Rūta eigaron hihan [Critiquing Paul Rotha’s film theory]. In: Zoku eiga to hihyō, 107–168. Tokyo: Koyama Shoten. Tsumura, H. (1943). Eiga seisakuron [On Film Policy]. Tokyo: Chūo kōronsha. Tsumura, H. (1944). Eigasen [Film Wars]. Tokyo: Asahi shinbunsha. Winston, B. (1995). Claiming the Real: The Griersonian Documentary and its Legitimations. London: BFI. Yamamoto, N. (2020). “Soviet Montage Theory and Japanese Film Criticism. In: The Japanese Cinema Book (eds. H. Fujii and A. Phillips). London: BFI.

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The Topographical Aesthetic in Late Stalinist Soviet Documentary Film Raisa Sidenova

Newcastle University

Introduction Even a cursory look at the filmography of documentaries produced in the USSR between 1946 and 1953 reveals that the main topic of Soviet nonfiction films was the geography of the country. Other popular themes included sporting events, celebrations, international visits, industrial achievements, and biographies, but year on year, films that took as their primary topic a specific Soviet region were made in significant numbers, with the peak of production falling in 1950 and 1951, the infamous years of the film crisis, known in Russian as malokartin’e (production of fewer pictures). Between 1946 and 1953, Soviet popular‐scientific studios produced over 80 short films as part of the Travels across the USSR project (Eremin 1950: 5; Shneiderov 1953: 103). The country’s documentary film studios, in turn, made 23 documentary short and feature‐length films about the Soviet territories between 1946 and 1949. After 1950 the number rose steeply: in three years until 1953 the studios produced 73 geographical films (Drobashenko 1960b: 653–704). The dramatic growth of the genre in comparison with general documentary film output can be seen in the following numbers: out of the 33 feature‐length documentaries released in the Soviet Union in 1951, 23 were films about the Soviet republics and regions within the Russian Soviet Republic (Drobashenko 1960b: 682–690). Neither before nor after did geographical nonfiction film play such a prominent role in Soviet cinema. The unprecedented rise of the Soviet geographical film started in 1946, when the Soviet Ministry of Cinema commissioned a series of nonfiction films under the title Travels Across the USSR (Puteshestviia po SSSR). The series was meant to contain 150

A Companion to Documentary Film History, First Edition. Edited by Joshua Malitsky. © 2021 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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one‐reel long short films produced at popular‐scientific film studios across the country, led by Mosnauchfilm (the Moscow Scientific Film Studio). The ministry formulated the goal of the series as follows: The main task of the Travels across the USSR series is the creation of geographical films to acquaint the wide masses of film viewers with the geography, natural resources, beauty, and sightseeing landmarks of areas and regions of the Soviet Union; with their characteristic economic and ethnographic features, the lives of their people, and the transformation of nature accomplished by Soviet man in both central and peripheral regions of the USSR. (Stenogramma, 22 April 1952: 3)1

In the original, the adjective “geographical” (geograficheskii) is accompanied by two other words, vidovoi and kraevedcheskii, which describe two approaches to representations of nature and geography in Soviet culture. The former refers exclusively to film: vidovoi, deriving from the word vid, meaning a “scenic view,” is usually translated as “nature or travel film.” The latter, kraevedcheskii, refers to kraevedenie, a much broader idea of the study of local areas, which was popularized in Russian culture in the 1920s and was widespread throughout the Soviet period. Kraevedenie is an interdisciplinary approach encompassing many types of research  –  history, geography, ethnography, ecology, topography, and so forth – and appeals widely to both scholars and amateurs, with public engagement in the creation of knowledge about local areas effectively constituting a social movement (Johnson 2006). The use of these three words – geograficheskii, vidovoi, kraevedcheskii – to describe the purpose of the film series thus indicates the series’ broader goals. These were not simply to educate audiences about the geography of the country, and allow them to learn about different locales (“traveling” to places they had never been), but also to engage them in the larger project of fostering Soviet patriotism and love for the country, its nature, and its people. In the words of the Ministry of Cinema, “the series must awaken in the film‐going masses the feelings of pride and love toward their socialist motherland, reinforce and cultivate Soviet patriotism” (Stenogramma, 6 April 1949: 2). As is often the case with such top‐down cultural policies, Travels Across the USSR seemed straightforward on paper but proved difficult to complete. The challenges lay with the lack of a clear definition of the concept of “geographical” (vidovoi, kraevedcheskii) film as well as the institutional separation of production of such films between popular‐scientific and documentary studios. While popular‐scientific studios were responsible for the Travels series, documentary film studios, led by the Moscow‐based Central Studio of Documentary Film (Tsentral’naia studiia dokumental’nykh fil’mov), had their own order from the Central Committee of the Communist Party to make films about all of the Soviet Union’s republics (Deriabin 2010: 57). They called them “survey” (obzornye) films, as they meant to give a comprehensive overview of a region. Some of the first films produced in 1946 were Soviet Tatarstan, Tadjikistan, Turkmenistan, and Chuvashia. What follows shows how these



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two projects, the Travels series and survey films, became intertwined creatively, i­ deologically, and institutionally. For the purpose of clarity in this article I use the Russian term vidovoi to designate the film genre of nature and travel films (usually short films) and “documentary” and “survey” for films about the Soviet republics and regions (usually feature‐ length), and the umbrella term “geographical” films when discussing both types of films. This distinction reflects the Soviet division of vidovoi and documentary films in the press and critical literature as well as the institutional separation in state‐run film production, where popular‐scientific studios produced vidovoi films and ­documentary film studios produced documentaries. This distinction, unfortunately, was not clear‐cut. In the early 1950s, Soviet film critics started using the term “­documentary‐vidovoi” (dokumental’no‐vidovoi) film to describe the growing numbers of geographical films. This, in a way, proves the popularity of the genre at the time, but it does not make the nomenclature any clearer. Initially there was a difference between these two types of films: if vidovoi films mainly, but not exclusively, showed geographical landmarks such as rivers, lakes, mountains, or smaller regions, the survey films usually featured a larger region such as a Soviet republic or a notable province within a republic. But as time went by, the differences between the two became less discernable. The films’ growing popularity (with filmmakers rather than audiences) led in 1949 to the demise of the Travels Across the USSR as a self‐contained series of short popular‐scientific films. Nevertheless, the genre of films about the Soviet regions remained a mainstay of socialist realist documentary of the late Stalinist period. In 1950, even Mosfilm – the leading Soviet film studio, better known for fiction – was producing geographical films (Stenogramma, 1 February 1951). Over the next three years, the Central Studio continued producing geographical films, both short and feature length Iskusstvo kino (The Art of Cinema), the main Soviet film journal, published articles on ­geographical film and the House of Cinema in Moscow, a gathering place for the filmmaking community, held joint conferences for filmmakers and geographers to discuss the genre and its “theoretical foundation” (Eremin 1950: 5). What can these geographical films tell us about the Soviet film industry during the crucial period from 1946 to Stalin’s death in 1953? These years are usually regarded as, to use Maya Turovskaya’s (1993) words, “the worst of any periods” in Soviet cinema (131). Due to the harsh censorship of Zhdanovism, a disciplinary campaign masterminded by Stalin and inaugurated in 1946 by his closest supporter and a Politburo member Andrei Zhdanov, the last years of the Stalin period were dreadful for Soviet culture with heightened censorship and strict ideological limitations on what could and could not be addressed in works of art (Margolit 2012: 384). This article does not argue that the films were artistically significant: they were ­uniform in style, or as a Soviet critic put it retrospectively in 1960, “superficial and lacking any distinctive qualities” (Drobashenko 1960a: 497). I would argue, ­however, that when considered as a corpus, these films reveal what I call a “topographical aesthetic,” a set of representational formulae that both promoted the main facets of

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Stalin‐era Soviet patriotism, and were used by filmmakers as a “survival strategy” under the harsh cultural policies of Zhdanovism. On the one hand, the topographical aesthetic served the ideological purpose of fostering postwar patriotism, which was rooted in such foundational myths for the Soviet project as the multi‐ethnic state, the transformation of nature as part of socialist development, and the state‐socialist social welfare system. As Emma Widdis and others have argued, documentaries advanced these ideas throughout the early Soviet period (Dobrenko and Naiman 2003; Sarkisova 2016; Widdis 2003). Yet what distinguishes the early postwar films from the prewar tradition is the absence of the revolutionary impetus and the impulse to create a cinematic “map” of a region encompassing all possible elements (ethnicity, nature, economics, and culture). In other words, they had an impulse to create a topography, or detailed arrangement of the natural and artificial physical features, of Soviet life. In this sense, the “superficiality” for which the films were later criticized was in fact their essential quality, as the films were fundamentally concerned with surface aspects of Soviet life rather than with in‐depth analysis of Soviet reality. These goals had representational corollaries, among them aerial shots and medium and long shots (with a lack of close‐ups), a rigid episodic structure, an absence of individual characters and a standardized voice‐over narration. Cinematography and composition created a visual map of physical space, while characters and sound created an ideological map, resulting in a “total vision” of the Soviet society. This very superficiality, on the other hand, also served as a coping mechanism, or a survival strategy, for filmmakers working within the brutality and arbitrariness of Stalinist censorship. The cultural policies of the period strictly limited what could be represented on film. Although Zhdanovism did not invent socialist realism (launched in 1934), it brought its doctrines to absurdity, declaring, “The only c­ onflict that is possible in Soviet culture is the conflict between good and best.” This dictum led to the development of what was called “conflictlessness” (bezkonfliktnost’) and the “varnishing of reality” (lakirovka). The idea of conflictlessness precluded filmmakers from representing any type of disagreement within Soviet communities, which, in turn, encouraged the practice of varnishing when artists grossly embellished Soviet reality (Clark 2000: 194). The classic cinematic examples of these pitfalls of socialist realism are, of course, works of fiction, but documentary genres also suffered thematically, aesthetically, and ethically. In this context, it is not surprising that documentary film studios turned to geographical films, as the breadth and vagueness of the genre allowed the filmmakers to work in a largely descriptive mode, praising Soviet achievements rather than offering any analytical or critical comment. This, however, did not mean that these films were immune to censorship or criticism, as even aesthetically formulaic films encountered problems. What follows traces some such cases, which illustrate the detrimental effects the personality cult and the anti‐cosmopolitan campaign had on nonfiction film. As Eric Naiman noted, in Russia, “the notion of space was imbued with remarkable ideological prominence” (Naiman 2003: xiv), and the topographical aesthetic, discussed in this chapter, as both a representational tool and a survival strategy for



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filmmakers, elucidates how documentary film interpreted Stalinist culture’s ideological preoccupation with geography into a specific film genre that fostered some foundational myths of Soviet culture.

Institutions and Genre Definitions Although Soviet nonfiction film production functioned within a state‐run planned economy, its organization was far from efficient. Not only did several types of studios produce documentaries (documentary and newsreel studios, popular‐scientific studios and even fiction film studios), but the studios worked under different levels of local and national administration. After World War II, the Soviet Union had over 40 film studios that produced nonfiction films: each Soviet republic had at least one film studio, though Ukraine had 3 and Russia 15, with 5 in Moscow alone. In the late 1940s, the majority of studios in the Soviet republics predominantly produced nonfiction footage that was sent to larger studios for inclusion in newsreels and documentaries. For example, the Frunze Newsreel Studio (located in what is today Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan) sent footage to the Tashkent Film Studio, which at that point produced the Soviet Kirghizia newsreel, while most regional studios sent footage to the Central Studio of Documentary Film in Moscow (CSDF). Established in June 1931, the CSDF was the country’s largest documentary film studio, and dominated Soviet documentary production. The CSDF produced newsreels as well as short and feature‐length films. Between 1946 and 1953, it released approximately 150 of the latter and more than 600 of the former, employing over 200 so‐called “creative workers,” including cameramen working all over the country as well as abroad (Drobashenko 1960a: 496–497). The CSDF’s dominance in documentary film production in this period can be seen in the following numbers: in 1946, out of 41 Soviet documentaries (short and feature length), 34 were credited to the Central Studio (Drobashenko 1960b: 653–658). In 1951 – the notorious year of film production crisis, when fiction‐film output in the entire country amounted to a meager nine feature‐length films – the CSDF produced 35 documentaries out of 91, accounting for 15 out of 30 feature‐length documentaries (Drobashenko 1960b: 682–690). Between 1950 and 1955, documentary film output of Soviet film studios approximately doubled, and the CSDF retained its leading position. The studio’s central role in Soviet documentary film production meant that it was the industry’s creative and ideological hub. Local studios looked up to the works of the CSDF, imitating its style and approaches. One of the ways in which the studio’s influence was spread was through cooperation between the Central Studio and regional studios, through the involvement of permanent employees of the Central Studio in local productions. For example, Arsha Ovanesova, one of the founders and the chief editor of the Pioneriia newsreel (about the Soviet children’s organization), made Soviet Armenia (Sovetskaia Armeniia) at the Yerevan Film and Newsreel Studio in 1951. In the same year, Olga Podgoretskaia directed Soviet Lithuania (Sovetskaia Litva) at the Lithuanian Film Studio. Roman Karmen, one of the CSDF’s

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leading directors and cinematographers, directed Soviet Kazakhstan (Sovetskii Kazakhstan, 1950), Soviet Turkmenistan (Sovetskii Turkmenistan, 1950), and Soviet Georgia (Sovetskaia Gruziia, 1952), all credited to local studios. By and large, these exchanges helped spread common practices, set professional and ideological norms, and disseminate the aesthetic style of socialist realism. Moreover, the CSDF was the ultimate arbiter of standards: the Ministry of Cinema sent the CSDF workers as inspectors to the regional studios, where they were to check the studios’ compliance with accepted practices for documentary filmmaking. Nonfiction film production in the Soviet Union was not limited to documentary and newsreel studios. Studios such as Mosfilm, which specialized in fiction, occasionally produced documentaries. But the biggest rivals to documentary film studios in production of geographical films were popular‐scientific studios. Most important among them was Mosnauchfilm (Moskovskaia studiia nauchno‐­ populiarnykh fil’mov), which specialized in scientific and educational films. After the war, when Travels Across the USSR was commissioned, Vladimir Shneiderov, one of the pioneers of Soviet travelogues, was appointed its artistic director. As we will see later, Shneiderov – who came to prominence in the 1920s thanks to his film travelogues of Central Asia and the Urals – became one of the most ardent supporters of the vidovoi genre, and argued for its specificity in contrast to documentary film. In his seminal study of film genres, Rick Altman posits that genres are shaped not by individuals, but by institutions such as film production companies, government agencies and the critical establishment (Altman 1999: 90–91). The Soviet debates on the genre of vidovoi film provide a classic example of such generic formation. Initially the distinction between vidovoi and documentary film was insignificant, and it would be safe to assume that the generic difference was not crucial for the Ministry of Cinema when it issued its proposal for the series. Apparently the plan to produce a series of geographical films was proposed by the director Mikhail Kalatozov, who had worked in the United States during the war, and served as a deputy minister of cinema after the war. In 1946, inspired by the films he saw in the U.S., he organized a screening of American Technicolor travel documentaries made by James A. FitzPatrick (Stenogramma, 6 March 1951: 3). Although the Soviet filmmakers and geographers present did not appreciate the ideological dimensions of FitzPatrick’s films, which they considered “bourgeois,” they admired his technical achievements and set them as a standard to aspire to (Stenogramma, 6 March 1951: 3). They concluded that, while their Western counterparts “merely” celebrated nature’s beauty, Soviet travelogues should show positive human impact on nature. Why was Kalatozov’s proposed series assigned to popular‐scientific studios in the first instance? The reason may have lay in the ministry’s active promotion of ­collaboration between filmmakers and geographers, particularly scholars from the Institute of Geography at the Soviet Academy of Sciences and the Soviet Geographical Society. If Shneiderov was the artistic director of the series, its main scientific consultant was Professor Dmitrii Shcherbakov from the Academy of Sciences. This partnership – or smychka (linkage), to use a Bolshevik term popular



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at the time – between filmmakers and geographers was meant to add scientific and educational credibility to the films (Stenogramma, 6 March 1951: 31). Between 1946 and 1949, 34 films were produced as part of the series. At the same time, however, the Central Studio had its own – albeit less defined – series of geographical films, and by 1950, when Mosfilm, too, began producing vidovoi films, it became evident that Travels Across the USSR was losing its shape and purpose as a series of scientific films. Contemporary Soviet film historians oddly attributed the series’ demise to its “success”: they argued that the films were so popular that documentary and fiction film studios could not help but adopt the genre, which meant that vidovoi films lost their “institutional and thematic unity” (Al’tshuler and Nechaev 1960: 576–77). Discussions among filmmakers found in archival documents, however, reveal a less positive picture of institutional struggle: aside from the cultural context of Zhdanovism, which stifled any argumentative documentary works, there were pragmatic reasons for the decline of vidovoi films. In 1950, Soviet studios extended the length of films from one to two reels in an effort to raise filmmakers’ pay, as they were compensated according to the film’s final length, not according to the time they spent working on a film. For example, at the CSDF, a filmmaker was paid 2500 rubles for editing an episode of the News of the Day (Novosti dnia) newsreel, which could be done in about a week, and the same amount for a short film, which could take six months to produce (Stenogramma, 24 April 1953: 13, 51). And while this change presumably increased filmmakers’ salaries, it had a detrimental effect on the series’ exhibition, which mainly consisted of screenings before feature‐length films, for which one reel was the most appropriate length. In short, two‐reel films were too long to be screened before a feature film and too short to be screened on their own. Shneiderov desperately tried to preserve the genre’s purity by arguing for a fundamental difference between vidovoi and documentary films. The former, in his opinion, was meant to depict nature and people’s interaction with it, while the latter was intended to cover current events and tell stories of individual people participating in those events (Stenogramma, 26 June 1950: 4–5). Shneiderov’s division of genres might have been regarded as reasonable during a different historical period, but during late Stalinism such distinctions were met with dismissal, if not outright hostility, on the part of documentary filmmakers and some film bureaucrats. Among the most ardent opponents of the division between vidovoi and documentary films were N. K. Semenov of the Ministry of Cinema and Nikolai Kastelin, the head of the CSDF. For them, vidovoi film – or, broadly, popular‐scientific cinema – was a type of nonfiction film. The stumbling block for this discussion was the representation of people. Although everybody agreed that the “transformation” (preobrazovanie) of nature by the Soviets was the films’ defining feature, not everybody agreed on the representation of people on screen. For Shneiderov, it was not essential to show individual people because in his opinion, landscape was intrinsically linked to human activity: even if a film does not portray people, the trace of their presence is always there (Stenogramma, 22 April 1952: 4–5). Semenov, in turn, backed his argument with a Stalinist cliché that the aim of vidovoi films was to represent the “Soviet man”

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as the “master” (khoziain) of nature. Therefore, showing individuals on screen was obligatory. To bolster his view, Semenov extensively cited Maxim Gorky, who once wrote to the writer Mikhail Prishvin that the reason he admired his writing about nature was because “Usually people say to nature ‘We are yours’ but you say to nature ‘You are mine’” (Stenogramma, 26 June 1950: 8–10). The problem with the representation of people in documentary film was not, however, purely theoretical. In the political climate of late Stalinism, Shneiderov’s idea of documentary as reflecting current events and individuals was a nearly unattainable goal, and geographical films offered a welcome opportunity to avoid tackling any potentially controversial topics. By erasing people and their stories from their films, filmmakers could produce narratives that were much more malleable and less susceptible to criticism.

Films and the “Topographical Aesthetic” Although studios’ output of geographical films was quantitatively significant, creatively most of the films were uninventive. Both popular‐scientific (vidovoi) and documentary films followed their narrative and aesthetic conventions, influenced by the standards of socialist realism. Since popular‐scientific films were mainly one or two reels long, they were slightly more thematically focused than feature‐length documentaries. As their titles reveal, they usually covered a smaller region; for example, this article looks at The Valley of the Geysers (Dolina geizerov, Mosnauchfilm, 1949), Leningrad Sanatorium (Leningradskaia zdravnitsa, Leningrad Studio of Popular‐Scientific Films, 1949), On Lake Ritsa (Na ozere Ritsa, CSDF, 1950), and Lake Seliger (Ozero Seliger, CSDF, 1953). This selection of vidovoi films reflects the diversity of the genre both in production and themes. Two former films were made by the popular‐scientific studios under the auspices of the Travels series, and two latter ones were produced at the Central Studio, outside of the series. These films were also thematically varied: The Valley of the Geysers is about a scientific expedition to Kamchatka, Leningrad Sanatorium is about a health resort, and the Ritsa and Seliger films are classical examples of “descriptive” vidovoi films, exploring region’s geography and leisure activities offered to the viewers. Feature‐length “survey” films usually encompassed the above‐mentioned topics but aimed to cover a larger region, usually an entire Soviet republic or a federated region within Russia. What follows looks at five such films, characteristic of the series: Soviet Kazakhstan (1949), Soviet Latvia (1950), Soviet Belorussia (1951), Soviet Georgia (1951), and Soviet Yakutia (1952). The choice of films represents four ethnic clusters within the Soviet Union (Central Asia, Baltics, Slavic nations, and the Caucasus), and in the case of Yakutia, a republic within Russia. The selection includes typical (one might say average) films, e.g. Soviet Belorussia, ideologically important films (e.g. Soviet Georgia), and critically acclaimed films (e.g. Soviet Yakutia). Shneiderov, as the leading theorist of vidovoi films, distinguished between “description” films and “travel” films. The former were meant to represent ­geographical and economic features of a region, its peoples’ lives, and their efforts



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to transform nature “in accordance with Stalin’s plan for the transformation of Soviet nature” (Stenogramma 22 April 1952, p. 6). The latter was conceived as an expedition film, featuring not only nature and people but also travelers overcoming obstacles on their path to their destination. Within those two types, the films explored one of four prominent topics: economy and geography; nature; travels across a region; and health resorts (Stenogramma, 6 March 1951: 2). The two main characteristics of vidovoi films, Shneiderov argued, were their documentary quality and their educational value. He saw reenactment as a problem for both, challenging the strategy’s essential veracity and scientific accuracy. Indeed, the collaboration between filmmakers and geographers was meant to guarantee that the films would be both artistically accomplished and scientifically accurate. But although most vidovoi films produced within the Travels series had consultant geographers, the collaborations were not always straightforward. At times individual consultants felt that filmmakers ignored their input and that their work was not properly credited (Stenogramma, 6 March 1951: 31). Often these collaborations were hindered by a lack of resources; scientific consultants, for instance, could rarely travel with a film crew to participate in fieldwork. Moreover, if filmmakers could not film certain scenes, it was not uncommon for them to use similar footage filmed in another region. Such recycling had been widespread in documentary since the 1920s but was unacceptable for consultant geographers. For example, in a presentation at the House of Cinema, Shneiderov mentioned that a film about the Far East used footage taken at the Moscow Zoo and another one about Kazakhstan included footage filmed in the Caucasus (Stenogramma, 22 April 1952: 6–8). Another point of contention was the use of maps in the films: for educational purposes, initially films from the Travels Across the USSR series opened with a map of the country to demonstrate the exact geographical location of the region portrayed in the film. The actual location was of crucial importance for geographers, who argued that without the use of maps, the films lost some of their documentary credibility (Stenogramma, 22 April 1952: 8). This echoes Viktor Shklovsky’s critique of some of Dziga Vertov’s films, which, in Shklovsky’s opinion, lost some of their documentary value by omitting indications of time and space (Shklovskii 1988: 151–152). For unknown reasons, however, in later films and especially in survey films, filmmakers were inconsistent in following this rule and often omitted maps from their films. The Valley of the Geysers is perhaps a classic example of a vidovoi film as conceived by Shneiderov and his team. A short expedition film about Kamchatka, it is dedicated almost entirely to educating the audience about the scientific significance of geysers. From the start, the narrator states that the film crew is accompanying a scientific expedition to learn more about the region and about geysers. The 10‐minute film is packed with information about this physical phenomenon: the types of geysers, their temperature, the mineral content of the water in them and its scientific and medicinal use. The film’s scientific narration is intercut with images of landscapes and animals as well as the footage of cameraman’s work and the challenges the expedition faces working in such dangerous conditions. These reflections of the

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filmmaking process however are kept to the minimum and the film stays focused on its educational purpose. Leningrad Sanatorium explores several health resorts around Leningrad. According to Shneiderov, praising Soviet health resorts was one of the main goals of vidovoi films. With no scientific agenda, this film has a much stronger ideological connotation than The Valley of the Geysers: the narrator emphasizes how some of the resorts are housed in the former mansions of the Russian aristocracy but now they are used to promote the health of the working class. The film shows happy representatives of Soviet society, from babies to adults, enjoying their time at specialized sanatoria. The film briefly mentions a tuberculosis clinic, but only to emphasize how the state is aiming to eradicate TB rather than to alert the audience to the threats of the disease. Overall, the film has a celebratory tone, claiming that, at the resorts, the Soviet citizens are “surrounded by love and care.” Both films produced at the CSDF, On Lake Ritsa and Lake Seliger, are also dedicated to showcasing Soviet nature and recreational infrastructure. If earlier many Soviet documentaries were about labor, a significant number of late Stalinist documentaries were dedicated to leisure. These short films promote the idea that Soviet workers deserve their rest and the state provides them not only with vacation time but also with extraordinary amenities. While Seliger focuses on nature‐based recreation – fishing, hunting, mushroom picking, hiking, and kayaking – On Lake Ritsa paints a picture of great material abundance. Filmed in color, the film praises Abkhazia and Lake Ritsa for their natural beauty, but also presents the human achievements of building incredible infrastructure for tourists and visitors: roads, summer houses, boats, and restaurants. It is difficult not to think of this film as an example of both lakirovka and Stalin’s personality cult: Lake Ritsa was one of Stalin’s personal favorite vacation spots and was unquestionably linked to the leader; for viewers in 1949, his virtual presence, although never mentioned in the film, would have been obvious. Although it not credited in the film, it is claimed that Stalin himself wrote the initial script for the film (Deriabin 2010: 166). It would also have been obvious that the film’s advertisement of riches readily available for all Soviet citizens was at best aspirational, if not straightforwardly deceitful. Although the survey films did not have the same level of artistic and production supervision as Travels Across the USSR, the films were quite similar. In this sense, they can be seen as an example of Soviet “studio authorship,” and especially of the Central Studio’s and its workers’ great influence on both artistic and production standards at various studios across the country, which ensured uniformity in both creative and ideological output. Despite the fact that out of the five feature‐length films discussed in this article, only Soviet Yakutia was officially credited to the CSDF, nearly all of the films employed at least one key crew member from the CSDF (usually the director, but sometimes the cameraman). Both Soviet Kazakhstan and Soviet Georgia were directed by Moscow‐based Roman Karmen with Arkadii Zeniakin as a cameraman. Soviet Latvia was directed by Fyodor Kiselev with Mikhail Posel’skii. Soviet Belorussia was co‐directed by the local filmmaker Vladimir Korsh‐Sablin with the CSDF’s Il’ia Kravchunovskii and Nikolai Shpikovskii.



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Due to their descriptive nature, the films had a rigid episodic structure that was intended to create a “total vision” of Soviet life: agriculture was followed by industry, then education, then culture. The usual opening was an aerial or landscape shot, showcasing nature or a region’s capital. The structure varied little, as every film emphasized natural resources (coal in Kazakhstan, timber in Belorussia, gold and coal in Yakutia), local industry (steelmaking in Kazakhstan, shipbuilding in Latvia, automobile, tractor and hosiery production in Belorussia), transportation systems, agriculture (rice, cotton, tobacco, fruit in Kazakhstan, flax and potatoes in Belorussia, winemaking in Georgia), education (often with special attention to women’s ­education), and culture (theaters, opera, ballet, and sports). Within this structure, there were several variables: a film could have a segment shot in Moscow, for example, documenting a week of their folk culture celebrated there, or it could depict the visit of a local party official to the USSR’s Supreme Soviet (both are present in Kazakhstan). Alternatively, there could be a scene of national celebration (such as the 10‐year anniversary of Soviet Latvia or a folk festival in Yakutia); more rarely, there could be a glimpse into people’s personal lives (a wedding celebration in Belorussia or holidaying workers in Latvia). As a rule, the films did not have a plot, but an overarching narrative that highlighted the development of a particular territory within the USSR. This entailed emphasizing the role of various ethnic groups in building the one socialist country (the Soviet Union). Following ideological standards of the time, Stalin’s leading role was often highlighted at the end of the films. Generally, geographical films (whether short vidovoi films or feature‐length survey films) avoided any in‐depth characterization of people. In short films, people were often shown incidentally. The Valley of the Geysers, for instance, depicts the expedition, but never mentions the names of the crew or even how many people participated. The survey films at times mentioned by name prominent workers, ­scientists, or cultural figures, but they were rarely, if ever, interviewed or allowed to say anything of significance. The focus of the films, in short, was the collective rather than individuals, a fact that prompts us to revisit the socialist realist formula in connection to documentary. As defined by Katerina Clark, the “Master Plot” of the Soviet novel was driven by the “spontaneity vs. consciousness” dialectic, in which the collective would reform an unruly individual as part of his or her progress toward socialist conversion (Clark 2000: 15–24). As documentary neither featured individual characters nor covered negative aspects of Soviet life, nonfiction films displaced this dialectic onto the “human vs. nature” juxtaposition, which supported Stalin’s “plan for the transformation of nature.” But even then, documentary representations usually zoomed in on only the successful outcomes of Soviet attempts to “transform” the nature. Thus, most films centered on the use of natural resources in agriculture and industry, as well as human intervention into natural processes such as soil amelioration, draining swamps, and building hydroelectric stations. The main visual method for surveying a geographical space was through aerial shots and landscape shots, which conveyed the vastness of the land. These were ­usually accompanied by an explanatory voice‐over narration, usually ideologically

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Figure 4.1  Soviet Latvia (Riga Film Studio, dir. F. Kiselev, 1950). Still courtesy of the Russian State Archive of Film and Photo Documents.

tinged. Such comments, often imbued with imperialist undertones, reinforced the idea that nature itself was a bearer of the ethno‐national identity. For example, in the beginning of Soviet Latvia, we see an aerial shot of a small settlement surrounded by forest. Far in the distance, there is a river, presumably the Daugava, Latvia’s main water artery (Figure 4.1). The voice‐over commentary interprets the landscape in terms of its national origin (“cultivated for thousands of years and praised in old folk songs, the Latvian land is changing”), socialist ownership, and Stalinist transformation of nature (“now, this land belongs to the people, and they are transforming it in a new, Stalinist way”), and finally, it emphasizes nature as a part of historical development and the region’s connection to the Russian metropole (“the Daugava and its banks have borne witness to the historical destiny of the Latvian people. It is not a coincidence that the Daugava originates in Russian lands, next to the Volga. Russia has always been the faithful friend and defender of Latvians.”). Similarly, in Soviet Belorussia, the opening images of the forest are accompanied by the commentary about Belorussian partisans, who famously operated in the country’s woods during World War II, forming a resistance movement opposing Nazi Germany. This soundtrack represented the core of the films’ propagandistic message. Sound, indeed, was one of the most rigid features of Soviet documentary filmmaking during this period. The films featured voice‐over narration against an orchestral score, with folk songs, poetry recitals, or theatrical performances at the end. Synchronized sound was reserved for special occasions such as speeches by party officials or



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performances. Retrospectively, in 1965, the director Sergei Iutkevich (1964) wrote that in Stalin’s opinion, the voice in documentary should be the “voice of the state,” not of an individual (77). The idea of the “voice of the state” can be seen in the fact that most of the films were voiced by the two prominent voice‐over actors, Leonid Khmara and Ruvim Vygodskii, whose voices were devoid of any regional accents or individual particularities. Khmara, the leading voice actor at the Central Studio, for example, was Ukrainian (born and trained in Kharkov) but he spoke what can be called standard Russian with a slightly exaggerated and studied enunciation. His tone was usually soft and solemn. These voice actors may be seen as predecessors to Soviet television’s newsreaders, who also were not allowed to have accents. Yet although the “voice of the state” did not have an accent, most films still aimed to convey ethnic identities through songs, poems, or excerpts from plays. Some films featured such recordings in local languages. Tellingly, these sequences were rarely translated into Russian, the lingua franca of the films, playing into an imperial ­exoticism present in Soviet culture of the time. These insertions of tokens of local cultures into the grand narrative of Soviet socialist development contributed to a myth about the making of the diverse yet unified Soviet identity. Behind the scenes, the multinational nature of Soviet cinema was also more of an aspiration rather than reality as there was a lack of ethnic diversity among filmmakers. Most film ­crewmembers working on geographical films were either Russian or Jewish. There were virtually no ethnic filmmakers from the Baltic nations or Central Asia. A rare exception to this rule was, for example, Armenian Arsha Ovanesova, who was a director of Soviet Armenia.

Soviet Patriotism While the geographic films were meant to teach viewers about the USSR, patriotism was undoubtedly one of their raisons d’être. During one of the discussions of geographical films at the Moscow House of Cinema, a speaker noted that, ultimately, these films must make viewers “feel the advantages of the socialist regime and the Soviet political system” (Stenogramma, 6 March 1951: 2). Along similar lines, Shneiderov emphasized that the films should boost patriotism, and cited Mikhail Kalinin as saying “to be a patriot is to know one’s country” (Stenogramma, 6 April 1949: 28). Even beyond the Soviet Union, since the early years of cinema, domestic film travelogues appealed to a sense of patriotism and national pride. In her study of early prerevolutionary and Soviet travel cinema, Oksana Sarkisova (2007) shows that in the late imperial tradition, travel films promoted “scenic patriotism” rooted in admiration for the richness of the natural landscape. Right after the revolution, however, Soviet film producers focused on class struggle as a unifying national principle, thus making representations of nature, landscapes, and remote corners of the country less relevant. An interest in travel films reemerged in the mid‐1920s, when the focus shifted from the hopes for an imminent world revolution to the idea of

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“building socialism in one country.” Throughout Stalin’s rule, Soviet patriotism was not a monolithic concept. For example, starting from the late 1920s and the 1930s, patriotism was often framed in terms of the multinational “Soviet people,” yet as Terry Martin (2001) argues, “Soviet patriotism” was “most frequently used in discussion of the need to resist potential foreign aggression” (450). After World War II, the idea of patriotism turned inward, concentrating on celebration of the diversity and multinationality of the Soviet people and their relationship to nature and landscape, while embracing a sense of pride in the achievements of state socialism such as education, healthcare, and housing. During the late 1940s and the early 1950s, the victory in World War II had yet to become a central tenet of Soviet patriotism. During this period, the war and postwar reconstruction occupied a relatively minor place in documentary representations of Soviet life. Obviously, for regions that were home to key wartime battlegrounds, the memory of the war was unavoidable, as in the case of Belorussia. Yet Soviet Belorussia does not address the issue directly. Rather, it celebrates the resilience of the population and its ability to recover from the wartime experience. There are several reasons why nonfiction filmmakers ignored the challenges of postwar recovery. On the one hand, these films were made to assert the government’s efforts to normalize the country after the war. On the other hand, the Soviet Union’s postwar reconstruction was laden with a range of economic and political challenges that could not be discussed in depth within the limited public sphere (Qualls 2009). The benefits of state socialism were regarded as a source of pride and glory among Soviet people. This can be seen in the films’ rhetoric about the transformation of nature and Soviet people’s role in building a new industrialized country. But it is also evident in the films’ emphasis on the material benefits of the socialist way of life. Both vidovoi and documentary films boast about such social achievements as house building, education (particularly for women), and healthcare and leisure activities, specifically the accessibility of sanatoria and resorts to the working class. The conquest of nature was one of the key ideological concepts of the early Soviet and Stalinist culture (Dobrenko and Naiman 2003; Widdis 2003). Considered an intrinsic part of socialist development, the idea permeated many spheres of Soviet life, from agriculture to industry, natural resources to medicine (Conterio 2015). The representation of the transformation of the natural world, however vague the idea, was crucial to filmmakers working on geographical documentaries: failure to reveal the relationship between human activity and natural processes was immediately branded as “bourgeois” and inappropriate for Soviet documentary. Ideological guidelines dictated that when Soviet viewers looked at a landscape, they would not just see its beauty but appreciate the possibilities offered by the socialist transformation of nature, and the ways in which nature could be made useful for the building of socialism. In the films, the idea was represented in various forms, from classic examples such as the construction of hydroelectric stations or plant breeding in agriculture, to outright ludicrous claims such as Soviet Latvia’s about the exponential increase in milk yield in three generations of cows. One of the common themes was the physical transformation of landscape through either the drainage of the



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swamps (as mentioned in both Soviet Latvia and Soviet Belorussia), soil amelioration (Soviet Kazakhstan), or building in permafrost (Soviet Yakutia). Transformation of nature was always shown as driven by scientific inquiry: each film emphasized the role of scientists in this process. As the Soviet Union was federalized along ethnic lines, the geographical films could rarely avoid a discussion of a particular ethnic group and its culture. The films often propagated a grand narrative about the connections between different areas within the country, emphasizing the central role Russia, and Stalin personally, played in the development of the non‐Russian republics. Such representations were a ­continuation of the Soviet nationality policies, within which every region’s ethnic particularity was preserved and, to an extent, nourished – but only as long as the process of national self‐identification did not clash with socialist development within the Soviet Union as a whole (Slezkine 1994). The narration often emphasized the historical ownership of the land by a particular people; thus Latvia, for example, was not just a Soviet land, it was manifestly nationalized “Latvian land.” Of course, the question of Sovietization was particularly pertinent to the Baltic republic, as it was only annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940, after the Molotov‐Ribbentrop Pact. The opening sequences of Soviet Georgia set a similar narrative about the republic and its relationship to Russia: the aerial shots show fields, rivers, orchards, and mountains, and while the narrator first provides geographical facts about the area and the population, he soon switches to broader cultural references, mentioning that the mountainous landscape inspired the great Russian poets Alexander Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov and emphasizing that the Georgian people “have historically linked their fate with the Russian people.” The only overt mention of Soviet nationality policies and their effects can be seen in Soviet Kazakhstan, where the filmmakers directly cite Lenin’s statement that “the essence of the nationality question in the Soviet Union rests in the elimination of economic, political and cultural backwardness of some nations so they can keep up with central Russia,” and whose voice‐over reiterates that Stalin’s five‐year‐plans transformed nomadic Kazakhstan into an industrial country. Indeed, while industrialization was appreciated as a great achievement for many provinces, including the Baltic countries and European parts of Russia, the rhetoric of backwardness was particularly prevalent in representations of Central Asia.

Survival Strategy The benign geographical documentaries flourished during the not‐so‐benign years of late Stalinism, and they cannot be discussed outside of “cultural disciplinary campaign” of Zhdanovism. In mid‐1945, right after the victory in World War II, the Soviet state could follow a number of paths as a new superpower with European and North American allies. By mid‐1946, however, it became clear that any hopes for a political or cultural change were futile. That summer Andrei Zhdanov launched Stalin’s campaign, in Sheila Fitzpatrick’s (2015) words, “to tighten up discipline in

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the cultural field and combat decadent modernism and Western influence” (191). The first targets of the new policies were two literary journals, Zvezda and Leningrad, and personally the poet Anna Akhmatova and the writer Mikhail Zoshchenko. They were accused of Western influences and of promoting apolitical, bourgeois aesthetics. After the vicious attack on literature, Zhdanov’s policies moved to other spheres of Soviet culture, including music, science, and film. Although Zhdanov died in 1948, his repressive campaign remained in effect until Stalin’s death in March 1953. What started as an anti‐Western crusade turned into an overtly anti‐Semitic movement under the euphemism of “anti‐cosmopolitanism.” The most famous victim of the anti‐cosmopolitan campaign in the documentary film industry was Dziga Vertov, who in March 1949 had to publicly denounce his “formalist” works at a party meeting at the Central Studio (Protokol 1997: 124–133; Roshal 1997). The event caused him such distress that he subsequently suffered a heart attack (Pumpianskaia 2002). One can only guess how this meeting affected the morale at the studio and relationships among workers, many of whom not only worked together but also lived in the same apartment block in Moscow. The political climate at the popular‐scientific studios was no less tense than at the Central Studio, although events there were not as well publicized, as most filmmakers were less renowned. However, if at the Central Studio the pillorying was disciplinary in character, with filmmakers publicly humiliated and ostracized  –  but not fired or arrested  –  at Mosnauchfilm, several filmmakers and film administrators were arrested and imprisoned. For example, the director Solomon Levit‐Gurevich and the director and administrator Mikhail Kapchinskii, both members of the Jewish Anti‐Fascist Committee, were charged with participation in a “conspiracy of Jewish nationalists.” The former was sentenced to 10 years in prison, and the latter was sentenced to a year and a half (Deriabin 2010: 230, 234; Rubenstein and Naumov 2005). One of the biggest artistic consequences of Zhdanovism in documentary was the widespread use of lakirovka, an inability to represent reality “unvarnished” or a fear to represent it in a “wrong” way, which prompted filmmakers to deliberately embellish reality. But under the ambiguous rules of totalitarian censorship, lakirovka was used as both a carrot and a stick. On the one hand, the varnishing of reality was ubiquitous, as filmmakers aimed to represent Soviet reality in the best possible light. The classic example was Ivan Pyryev’s musical Cossacks of the Kuban (Kubanskie kazaki, Mosfilm, 1949), which painted a deceptive picture of material abundance at a collective farm. It was a hugely successful film, for which the filmmakers were widely praised. On the other hand, some films could still be chosen for public pillorying, sometimes based on ludicrous accusations. For example, in 1951, Belorussian cinematographer I. N. Veynerovich was charged with several accounts of lakirovka, including reenacting a celebration of Stalin’s birthday at a collective farm with champagne glasses brought by the film crew from Minsk (Deriabin 2010: 168–169). The most infamous example of such aggressive public criticism was Iakov Bliokh and his 1949 film Fishermen of the Caspian Sea (Rybaki Kaspiia, Nizhne‐Volzhsk Film Studio), which was officially banned in January 1950, and brutally rebuked in Pravda



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(V ministerstve 1950: 3). During that entire year, critics used Bliokh’s film as a cautionary tale against lakirovka, and the director’s career never recovered from the attack (Eremin 1950: 10; Kopalin 1950: 23; Nazarov 1950: 4). Less publicized examples of banned documentaries include Lidiia Stepanova’s Across the Krasnodar Region (Po Krasnodarskomu kraiu, CSDF), which was criticized for not confirming the riches described in Pyryev’s Cossacks of the Kuban, and Leonid Varlamov’s Soviet Armenia (Sovetskaia Armeniia, 1949, Armenfilm), which was banned for “not providing the correct representation of Armenia’s economic and cultural development” (Katanian 1997; Deriabin 2010: 108, 130). Aside from strict government censorship, films were subject to a number of unwritten rules imposed by Stalin’s personality cult. Jan Plamper (2012) calls the Stalin cult an “alchemical” project, which involved artists, party patrons, state functionaries and Stalin himself. The metaphor points to the core of the personality cult – something beyond logic, transformational yet unpredictable. Initiated in the 1930s, by the late 1950s the Stalin cult became a constant of Soviet culture that was nevertheless ephemeral, more symbolic rather than concrete (Plamper 2012). In the geographical films, made at the end of the Stalin years, the General Secretary is omnipresent yet invisible, mostly mentioned in voice‐over in connection to “Stalin’s five‐year plans,” his “new‐builds” – a building plan for postwar reconstruction – and his writing. The personality cult is most prominently evident in such films as Soviet Georgia and On Lake Ritsa. Soviet Georgia, which at eight reels is one of the longest films of this genre, painted a particularly flattering picture of the leader’s motherland. Elements of the personality cult were connected to the idea of Stalin as the ultimate film viewer. For example, there was a rumor that he particularly enjoyed scenes of animal races in documentary films, which motivated many filmmakers to seek out opportunities to film racing, even if it was not traditional or common for the regions in which they filmed. At a conference after Stalin’s death, the director Il’ia Kopalin recalled an incident in which the Minister of Cinema, Ivan Bol’shakov, reprimanded him for not showing horse races in his film North Ossetia (Severnaia Osetiia), even though the local committee of the Communist Party told the filmmakers that traditionally there were no horse races in the area. Kopalin, who went on to direct Soviet Yakutia, concluded the story by stating that luckily he managed to film both horse and reindeer racing in Yakutia and considered it a big success (Stenogramma, 24 April 1953: 22). Another example of such hidden agendas can be seen in Soviet Georgia, where a prolonged sequence features mountaineers ­climbing a snowy mountain to hoist a Soviet red banner with Stalin’s portrait on it (Figure 4.2). Aside from the obvious expression of the personality cult, the sequence has another significance, less clear for today’s audiences: during the war, Caucasian mountaineers earned a special reputation for their participation in the defense of the region in 1942–1943 under the supervision of Lavrentii Beria. As late as 1951, the filmmakers discussed the importance of making vidovoi films on the Caucasus Mountains and mountaineers in order to remind the viewers of this military history (Stenogramma, 6 March 1951: 11).

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Figure 4.2  Soviet Georgia (Tbilisi Film Studio, dir. S. Dolidze and R. Karmen, 1952). Still courtesy of the Russian State Archive of Film and Photo Documents.

The proliferation of geographical genres in documentary during late Stalinism can be compared to the rise of biographies and literary adaptations in fiction film. In March 1946, the director Ivan Pyryev was quoted as saying, “Contemporary topics are absent in our cinema. Everybody is afraid of tackling them, including first and foremost Bol’shakov [the Minister of Cinema] himself… . Considering the censorship that exists at the Committee [Goskino] and higher authorities, we can only survive making historical films or adaptations of the classics” (Dokladnaia zapiska 2005). Although no documentary filmmaker publicly criticized documentary film genres in the same way, one can see that the Soviet filmmaking community grew tired of the geographical films and saw them as a limitation on the practice. This is particularly visible in the speed with which filmmakers became critical of the genre after the death of Stalin in March 1953. The shift in the debate started as early as April 1953, a month after Stalin’s death, when at a three‐day filmmakers’ conference on the problems of vidovoi and documentary films, most participants agreed that the genres required a significant creative overhaul and openly discussed how the films were hindered by unnecessary conventions. The most criticized features of the films were their episodic structure and their tendency to cover all aspects of Soviet life in one film without any original creative solutions. Vsevolod Pudovkin, present at the conference, was particularly harsh about these documentaries, stating that the films about the Soviet republics are “standardized” (standartnye), which, in his



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­pinion, pointed to “mediocrity and poverty of imagination” (Stenogramma, o 22 April 1953: 34). The veteran director concluded that the pace of the films was “so slow that it was nauseating” and that the films could be only improved by better scripts, which should be written by professional scriptwriters, not directors (Stenogramma, 22 April 1953: 34). Some filmmakers, including Karmen, defended the standard composition of the films, stating that it was impossible to avoid ­repetition because the studios imposed certain standards and the films were made “on behalf of the studio,” not a director (Stenogramma, 22 April 1953: 47–48). This internal criticism of the geographical films slowly seeped to academic film history, and during the Thaw it became a commonplace to blame the creative shortcomings of postwar documentaries on the Stalin personality cult.

Conclusion The bulk production of geographical films ended abruptly after Stalin’s death, at the same time that criticism of them emerged. As early as April 1953, at the aforementioned conference, documentary filmmakers started discussing ways to find new topics and a new aesthetic for post‐Stalinist documentary, while at documentary film studios, it became increasingly clear that the rise of geographical films was a response to censorship rather than a creative will of directors and scriptwriters (Stenogramma, 22 April 1953: 47–48). Change, however, was slow. The somewhat artificial link between vidovoi and documentary films was broken: popular‐scientific studios continued to make short nature and travel films, but under less ideological pressure, and Vladimir Shneiderov continued to be one of the most prominent advocates for geographical films. In the early 1960s, he played a crucial role in finding a new home for the genre on Soviet television. Indeed, while he had begun his career as a director during the silent era, he became a household name in this decade by presenting a popular TV program, “The Club of Cinetravellers” (Klub kinoputeshestvennikov); on air until 2003, it was one of the longest‐running television shows on Soviet and post‐Soviet television. And while production of geographical films stopped, the topographical aesthetic – with its episodic structure, totalizing view of Soviet life, absence of individual characters and synchronized sound  –  had remarkable longevity in Soviet documentary film practice. This can be seen even in the most critically acclaimed post‐Stalin documentaries, such as Roman Karmen’s A Tale of the Caspian Sea Oil Workers (Povest’ o neftianikakh Kaspiia, CSDF and Baku Film Studio, 1953), Alexander Medvedkin’s film about the Virgin Lands, The First Spring (Pervaia vesna, CSDF, 1954), and Roman Grigor’ev’s and Iosif Posel’skii’s The Joy of Difficult Paths (Schast’e trudnykh dorog, CSDF, 1955). As late as 1959, one can see traces of the same visual and narrative clichés in a film such as Karmen’s Conquerors of the Sea (Pokoriteli moria, Baku Film Studio). All of these films introduced small changes to Soviet documentary practice, but they remained largely dependent on representational strategies of the topographical

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aesthetic. For example, all attempted to introduce individual characters, but because of their episodic structure, failed to provide enough time for proper character development. This is particularly evident in The First Spring, which follows a group of young people on their journey from the European parts of the USSR to Kazakhstan, where they are to participate in the cultivation of the Virgin Lands, Khrushchev’s ambitious agricultural initiative to turn Central Asia into a grain‐producing region. At the beginning, the narrator introduces two protagonists, a technician from the Moscow Automobile Plant, Zoia Gavrilina, and an agronomist, Anatolii Kozulin, but by the middle of the film the filmmakers forget almost entirely about the two, as they aim to demonstrate different aspects of collective life in Kazakhstan – work, leisure, education, etc. Synchronized sound, meanwhile, would not return to Soviet documentary until the early 1960s, with the exception of Arsha Ovanesova’s film Extraordinary Encounters (Neobyknovennye vstrechi, CSDF, 1958). Ultimately, the longevity of the topographical aesthetic has to do with a certain inertia that perpetuated Stalinist tropes within Soviet culture for a long time after the leader’s death, and even after Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin. To an extent, it was connected to the fact that the Soviet state and cultural producers never repudiated socialist realism as the main artistic doctrine, which led to a rather slow return of attention on the contemporary in nonfiction film. Finally, the topographical aesthetic of the socialist realist documentaries was not exclusive to Soviet films and can be traced in films in other national traditions during the early 1950s. One of the most prominent examples is Joris Ivens’s Song of the Rivers (Das Lied der Ströme, 1954, discussed by Thomas Waugh in chapter  12). Dedicated to the promotion of the World Federation of Trade Unions, the Ivens film was conceived as a way to draw a new map of the world, revealing connections between countries of the first and the third worlds: New York and South Africa, London and India. While the trope of the river is central to the film, the film was also engaged with an ideological mapping: using montage, the film presents a map of colonial exploitation, emphasizing that this does not exist in the Soviet Union (Musser 2002). The flattering representation of Soviet life, shown in a sequence about the Volga River, makes this film a close kin to the topographical socialist realist films, in which the ideological praise for the Soviet country overweighed the filmmakers’ commitment to realism. The story of the rise and fall of the Soviet geographical films is a case study in genre and a cautionary tale about the limits of the union between documentary and geography. On the one hand, the discussions around vidovoi films demonstrate that genres have both stable features and historically specific qualities, based on the ideological, industrial and aesthetic configurations of a particular period. On the other hand, the history of the genre also reveals that the relationship between documentary and geography is governed by various ideological forces. Documentary film’s objectivity claim makes it a particularly suitable medium for conveying scientific knowledge (as was the intention with the Travels Across the USSR series) and this gives documentary its educational value and its utopian potential (as in



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Jamesonian cognitive mapping). But the example of the topographical aesthetic show documentary film can utilize geography and geographical tropes in the ­service of a totalitarian dictatorship at a time when politics had an exceptionally tight grip on art.

Note 1 If not otherwise stated, all translations are mine.

References Altman, R. (1999). Film/Genre. London: British Film Institute. Al’tshuler, B. and Nechaev, M. (1960). Razvitie sovetskogo nauchno‐populiarnogo kino. In: Ocherki istorii sovetskogo kino, 576–577. Moscow: Iskusstvo. Clark, K. (2000). The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual, 3e. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Conterio, J. (2015). Inventing the Subtropics: An Environmental History of Sochi, 1929–36. Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 16 (1): 91–120. Deriabin, A. (ed.) (2010). Letopis’ rossiiskogo kino, 1946–1965. Moscow: Kanon. Dobrenko, E. and Naiman, E. (eds.) (2003). The Landscape of Stalinism: The Art and Ideology of Soviet Space. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Dokladnaia zapiska narodnogo komissara Gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti SSSR V.N. Merkulova A.A. Zhdanovu o nedostatkakh v rabota khudozhestvennoi kinematografii v 1945 godu. (2005). In Kremlevskii kinoteatr, 1928–1953. Dokumenty, 722. Moscow: ROSSPEN. Drobashenko, S. (1960a). Dokumental’noe kino. In: Ocherki istorii sovetskogo kino, 496–497. Moscow: Iskusstvo. Drobashenko, S. (1960b). Fil’mografiia. In: Ocherki istorii sovetskogo kino, 653–704. Moscow: Iskusstvo. Eremin, D. (1950). O Sovetskom vidovom fil’me. Iskusstvo kino (8). Fitzpatrick, S. (2015). On Stalin’s Team. The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hicks, J. (2014). Challenging the Voice‐of‐God in World War II‐Era Soviet Documentaries. In: Sound, Speech, Music in Soviet and Post‐Soviet Cinema (eds. M. Salazkina and L. Kaganovsky), 129–144. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Informatsionnyi otchet o rabote TsSDF. (n.d.). pp. 189–193. RGALI, f. 2487, o.1. d. 926. Iutkevich, S. (1964). Razmyshleniia o kinopravde i kinolzhi. Iskusstvo kino (1), 77. Johnson, E.D. (2006). How St. Petersburg Learned to Study Itself: The Russian Idea of Kraevedenie. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Katanian, V. (1997). Lidiia Stepanova, shiroko izvestnaia v uzkom krugu. Retrieved August 2, 2018 from Muzei TsSDF: https://csdfmuseum.ru/articles/113. Kopalin, I. (1950). Dokumental’nye fil’my iubile’nogo goda. Iskusstvo kino (2), 23. Margolit, E. (2012). Zhivye i mertvoe. Zametki k istorii sovetskogo kino, 1920–1960‐kh godov. Saint‐Petersburg: Seans.

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Martin, T. (2001). The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Musser, C. (2002). Utopian Visions in Cold War Documentary: Joris Ivens, Paul Robeson and Song of the Rivers (1954). Cinémas: Revue d’études cinématographiques 12 (3): 109–153. Naiman, E. (2003). Introduction. In: The Landscape of Stalinism: The Art and Ideology of Soviet Space, xiv. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Nazarov, I. (1950, April). Pravdivost’ v dokumental’nom fil’me. Iskusstvo kino (4), 4. Nechaeva, M. (1964). Vladimir Shneiderov. Moscow: Iskusstvo. Plamper, J. (2012). The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemy of Power. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Protokol (1997) N11 otkrytogo partiinogo sobraniia Tsentral’noi studii dokumental’nykh fil’mov ot 14‐15 marta 1949 goda. Iskusstvo kino (12), 128–133. Pumpianskaia, S. (2002). Ia mechtala rabotat’ na kinostudii. Retrieved September 1, 2018 from Kinovedcheskie zapiski: http://www.kinozapiski.ru/ru/print/sendvalues/147. Qualls, K.D. (2009). From Ruins to Reconstruction: Urban Identity in Soviet Sevastopol after World War II. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Roshal, L. (1997). Protokol odnogo zasedaniia. Iskusstvo kino (12): 124–127. Rubenstein, J. and Naumov, V. (2005). Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti‐Fascist Committee. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Sarkisova, O. (2007). Across One Sixth of the World: Dziga Vertov, Travel Cinema, and Soviet Patriotism. October, 121, 19–40. Sarkisova, O. (2016). Screening Soviet Nationalities: Kulturfilms from the Far North to Central Asia. London: I.B. Tauris. Shklovskii, V. (1988). Kuda shagaet Dziga Vertov?. Sovetskii Ekran, 14 August 1926. In: The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents (eds. I. Christie and R. Taylor), 51–152. New York: Routledge. Shneiderov, V. (1953, June). Sovetskii kinoatlas. Iskusstvo kino 6: 103. Shneiderov, V. (1973). Moi kinoputeshestviia. Moscow: Biuro propagandy sovetskogo kinoiskusstva. Sidenova, R. (2016). From Pravda to Vérité: Soviet Documentary Film and Television, 1950– 1985, 61–68. Yale University. Slezkine, Y. (1994). The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism. Slavic Review 53 (2): 414–452. Stenogramma doklada Semenova o povyshenii kachestva vidovykh fil’mov i kinoocherkov (1950, June 26). 4‐5. RGALI f. 2923, o. 1, d. 509. Stenogramma rasshirennogo zasedaniia sektsii po obsuzhdeniiu serii fil’mov ‘Puteshestviia po SSSR,’ (1951, March 6). 3. RGALI f. 2923. o. 1, d. 582. Stenogramma tvorcheskoi konferentsii O zadachakh po uluchsheniiu proizvodstva dokumental’nykh i vidovykh fil’mov (1952a, April 22). 34. RGALI F. 2923, o. 1, d. 718. Stenogramma tvorcheskoi konferentsii O zadachakh po uluchsheniiu proizvodstva dokumental’nykh i vidovykh fil’mov. (1953, April 24). 13, 51. RGALI f. 2923, o. 1, d. 719. Stenogramma zasedaniia sektsii po obsuzhdeniiu doklada V.A. Shneiderova. Osnovnye priznaki, zadachi i perspektivy razvitiia sovetskogo vidovogo fil’ma. (1952b, April 22). 3. RGALI, f. 2923, o. 1, d. 661. Stenogramma zasedaniia sektsii po obsuzhdeniiu dokumental’no‐vidovykh fil’mov studii ‘Mosfil’m’. (1951, February 1). RGALI, f. 2923, o. 1. d. 596.



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Stenogramma zasedaniia sektsii po obsuzhdeniiu serii fil’mov ‘Puteshestviia po SSSR’. (1949, April 6). 2. RGALI, f. 2923, o. 1, d. 424. Turovskaya, M. (1993). Soviet Films of the Cold War. In: Stalinism and Soviet Cinema (eds. R. Taylor and D. Spring). London and New York: Routledge. V ministerstve kinematografii. (1950). Pravda (30 January), 3. Widdis, E. (2003). Visions of a New Land: Soviet Film from the Revolution to the Second World War. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Wojnowski, Z. (2012). De‐Stalinization and Soviet Patriotism. Ukrainian Reactions to East European Unrest in 1956. Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 13 (4): 799–829.

Part II

Authors, Authorship, and  Authoring Agencies

Introduction

Authors, Authorship, and  Authoring Agencies James Leo Cahill

University of Toronto

Authorship and its conceptual limits have significantly shaped documentary’s ­history, at least as it has been told in the capitalist West. In the Anglophone tradition, one need only return to a few of the primal scenes of the mode’s conceptualization – John Grierson’s 1926 review of Robert Flaherty’s Moana in the New York Sun and his “First Principles of Documentary” of 1932–1934  –  in order to trace the assertion of documentary as an evaluative category and authorship as that which divides documentaries from the supposedly “lower” forms of filmed actuality comprising the larger field of nonfiction cinema. In “First Principles” Grierson writes, “Documentary is a clumsy description, but let it stand. The French who first used the term only meant travelogue. It gave them a solid high‐sounding excuse for the shimmying (and otherwise discursive) exoticisms of the Vieux Colombier. Meanwhile documentary has gone on its way” (Grierson 1971: 146). Grierson dismissively and incorrectly attributed the French use of the term documentaire with a limited understanding rooted in travelogues and other “shimmying exoticisms” projected at places like the Théâtre du Vieux Colombier, a Parisian avant‐garde cinema directed by Jean Tedesco that was known for its eclectic and imaginative programs, and was an important s­ upporter of historical and emergent nonfiction and documentary cinemas.1 Recalling his famous formula of the “creative treatment of actuality” outlined in 1933  in “The Documentary Producer” (Grierson  2016: 216), Grierson reserved the term documentary for work that he believed transcended the merely descriptive nature of nonfiction materials through “arrangements, rearrangements, and creative shapings” of “natural material” that produced revelatory insights (Grierson  1971: 146). If his negative example of the Vieux Colombier aimed to foreclose an already declining exhibitor‐as‐author model where individual texts blurred into a larger program format, as well as the A Companion to Documentary Film History, First Edition. Edited by Joshua Malitsky. © 2021 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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indulgence in “shimmying exoticisms” of various sorts, Grierson leaves no doubt to the centrality of a creative agent – an author – in the elevating work of arranging and shaping representations of reality into a form that merits the designator documentary. One recognizes here a species of the structural opposition between the “raw” and the “cooked,” which Grierson himself describes as a distinction between “lower” and “higher” categories of documentary (Lévi‐Strauss 1964; Grierson 1971: 145; Gunning 1997). Simply cranking a senseless camera could produce nonfiction footage, but even forms that require considerable technical expertise, such as animal and scientific films, rarely met the criterion of elevation for Grierson. Documentary required a considerable quantity of intentional intervention. Grierson was otherwise flexible about who might occupy the role of the authoring agent or agency: be it in the form of a “producer,” which he likens to both a schoolmaster and knee‐wife, an “artist” or “director” (Grierson 2016: 215–216), or institutions such as the Empire Marketing Board and National Film Board (discussed by Zoë Druick in her contribution to this section). Despite Grierson’s dismissals, a rather rich and polyform practice of the film documentaire had been developing in France for three decades, setting the stage for the very concerns Grierson and his cohort would alternately instrumentalize and repress in the Anglophone context. Beginning with the convenient target of France – as but a first step in a more globally minded provincialization and denaturalization of the Grierson model – an alternate genealogy of documentary emerges that also gives the author a privileged place, even if in the form of a split and multiplying subject. The ascription of the “documentary interest” and “undeniable documentary value” of films had already been made in 1898 and 1899 by the Lumière company camera operator and film archive champion Boleslas Matuszewski and the surgeon Eugène‐Louis Doyen (Matuszewski 1898: 6; Doyen 1899: 3). Doyen filmed his surgical procedures in order to have a record of his performances for his own study, for use in medical training of students, and as a contribution of historical records for the posterity of the profession, claiming that unlike other modes of documentation, films were uniquely capable of capturing and communicating a surgeon’s “personality” (Doyen  1899: 2–3; Lefebvre  2004). Two camera operators – Ambroise‐François Parnaland and Clément Maurice – worked in parallel filming Doyen’s procedures in order to maximize coverage and ensure redundancy in case of mechanical failures. The film strips were not cut together since a key element of the truth claims of surgical demonstrations relied upon asserting the integrity of the surgical performance. In addition to his contributions to scientific cinema, cinema pedagogy, and the conceptualization of documentary film, Doyen also inaugurated important legal precedents in France for establishing that films were authored creations and determining who counted as a film author, and as film historian Thierry Lefebvre notes, whether an author and a legal owner of a film were necessarily the same thing (Lefebvre 2004: 61). In February 1905 the Tribunal civil de la Seine decided a suit in favor Doyen and against Parnaland in a dispute over who was the rightful author and owner of footage they produced together beginning in 1898 (Anon 1905: 76–77). Doyen objected



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to Parnaland’s arrangement with Société générale des phonographes et cinématographes to distribute some of the film strips that he had recorded, in part because the public exhibition of such films at fairgrounds and other locations where films were shown could damage the doctor’s reputation. Doyen’s claim to authorship rested on having commissioned the filming and appearing as its primary subject. Parnaland’s claim relied on him having recorded the footage with precise technical knowledge and a camera of his own devising. Based upon Doyen’s role as the one who commissioned the films, the tribunal determined that films were works of intelligence (rather than a simple canned commodity) protected by the laws of 19–24 July 1793, establishing author’s rights (droit d’auteur), and the laws of 11 March 1902, which extended author’s rights to sculpture and architecture and set a precedent for the consideration of such “industrial arts” as photography and cinematography (Anon  1905: 76; Nesbit  1987: 236). The court also found that Parnaland violated Doyen’s “image rights” by exhibiting films of his likeness without his expressed permission, and on these grounds found Parnaland and Société générale des phonographs et cinématographes culpable, and required them to pay Doyen 8,000 francs in restitutions as well as pay to have this settlement publicized in 15 papers of Doyen’s choosing2 (Anon 1905: 77). This case helped establish an important legal precedent for films as authored works. But it would be short‐sighted and ahistorical to discount Parnaland’s claims to authorship as merely frivolous or the work of an opportunistic conman  –  regardless of whether or not one agrees with the outcome of the case. For it is in these contesting claims to the footage that the specificity and stakes of documentary and nonfiction authorship complicates understandings imported from literary and other artistic contexts while also revealing the limiting nature of legal definition of cinematic authorship in France. It would be a mistake to consider these rulings as either the final word or a universal model for documentary film authorship: alternative models of authorship not based in a concept of possessive individualism were being developed. For example, in a 1928 interview, the filmmaker André Sauvage bristled at the term documentary due to its etymological links with the traite documentaire (bill), which he felt was too freighted with implications of functional commerce and structures of debt rather than the lofty ideals of a cinematic art. Yet his definition of the cinematic documentary as an “art of the real” that required of the filmmaker “to multiply himself, to ceaselessly forget and rediscover himself, to prodigiously decenter himself ” suggests a radical understanding of the cinematic author that owes a considerable debt to the documentarian’s encounters with the historical real (Anon 1928: 19–20). The designation of authorship has a separating function, inscribing an imaginary line above or below which the creative responsibility of a film gets retroactively assigned by a movie’s credits. A recent lawsuit in France over La Marche de l’empereur/ March of the Penguins (Luc Jacquet, France, 2005), echoes the conflict between Doyen and Parnaland and testifies to the enduring status of authorship as a critical category through which documentaries get defined, conceptualized, regulated, and  studied, not just in terms of textual properties and questions of style, but in terms of the ways they manifest contested categories of labor and cultural value.

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In  approaching the production of March of the Penguins, director Luc Jacquet claimed he “wanted the film to have a fresh look that only a crew who had never been down there [Antarctica] before could give” (Most 2007). He thus chose to send the cinematographers down to work primarily in his absence. The cinematographers Laurent Chalet and Jérôme Maison spent over a year in Antarctica filming, suffering numerous hardships, including getting lost in a blizzard that required a month of medical convalescence and then enduring a very difficult transition back to everyday life after such long stretches of isolation. Jacquet, who was in France during almost the entire shoot, later appropriated the stories of their adventures as his own experiences during promotion for the film, inspiring David Fontaine to quip in the pages of Canard enchaîné: “Sometimes I is another, or more precisely, two others” (Fontaine 2006; Most 2007). Jacquet’s project was originally intended to be a documentary for television, but it was reconceived as a feature film based upon the quality and drama of the footage (the original French version is more narrative in the style of a Disney’s True-Life Adventures series, whereas the English dub, thanks to Morgan Freeman’s narration, is more soberly documentary). Chalet thus made a case for co‐authorship since the director was neither present nor in direct communication with Chalet and Maison for much of the filming. Given the footage was shot in the wild, Chalet argued that he was more than a technician following orders, he was an artist making important creative choices in the field (Maison for his part, continued to collaborate with Jacquet, and did not participate in the suit) (Anon 2006a). Anne Boissard, lawyer for the production company Bonne Pioche, successfully appealed to precedent in making a case in favor of Jacquet, referring to the law of 1957 that restricted the role of cinematic author to the director, the screenwriter, and musical score composer (Vulser 2006; Nesbit 1987: 239). The implication, ironically, is that those most directly responsible for the capture and creation of the images in a ­documentary film are often denied any claim of authorship over these images. ­A century of legal disputes from Doyen vs. Parnaland to Jacquet vs. Chalet have consistently favored a rather narrow definition of authorship and with it a rather narrow sense of what counts as documentary. But that such suits continue to be filed and fought suggests that even within a rather narrow sense of authorship corresponding to conceptions of expression as ultimately a question of individual private property, “author” is not a stable, self‐contained signifier. It is not the responsibility of scholars to respect the status quo or secured common sense understandings of such concepts, but rather to critically examine the historical specificity of consolidated patterns as well as their fissures. As Cynthia Chris and David Gerstner propose, authorship is best approached as a “frictive” phenomenon (Chris and Gerstner 2013: 11). If authorship may be understood as a category of creative labor and an agency (individual, collective, even transhuman) involved in the production of intentional expressions, everything else about authors and authorship requires scrupulous attention to context. In the revolution‐era Soviet Union – as Philip Rosen and Alla Gadassik discuss in their contributions to this book – ­practices of authorship critical of the singular bourgeois subject were being explored.



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Relatedly, in the People’s Republic of China, we find conceptions of ­popular authorship ­distinct from Western capitalist and Soviet socialist models developed to privilege the collective – the people – as the ultimate agent and author of creative works (Pang 2013: 72–86). Questions of documentary authorship require an approach to the term as a condensation or nodal point for a network of creative acts, ­enactments of subjectivity and agency, forms of labor, and regulative practices that produce and circulate texts. The question of documentary authorship may require  –  with ­apologies to Bruno Latour  –  the development of an Author‐Network Theory or AuNT, to account for the interplay of forces involved in the creation of nonfiction and documentary films. *** It is the collective endeavor of the contributors to this section to apply critical pressure to the concepts of the authors, authorship, and authoring agencies in documentary and nonfiction media, opening paths for a refreshed historiography of these fundamental concepts and their continued nonlinear development and contestation in our own present. Working across diverse geographical and historical contexts  –  such as the Revolution‐era Soviet Union, post–World War II Canada and Europe, and contemporary China  –  as well as with varied foci  –  from individual creative actors, to governmental agencies and corporations, to posthuman networked systems of ambient surveillance  –  the contributors offer both historical specificity and a generative conceptual flexibility for approaching nonfiction and documentary authorship. Philip Rosen and Alla Gadassik consider how the aesthetic shifts instantiated by the Russian Revolution and its valorization of collective effort informed authorship as well as models of cinema historiography. Rosen’s “Now and Then: On the Documentary Regime, Vertov, and History,” extends his substantial reflections on documentary, film history, and historiography in Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (2001). Viewing Vertov’s Kino‐Nedelia (1918–1919), he asks “was this the emergence of the Vertov we now know?” The recognizability of “Vertov” as a distinct authorial vision animates reflections on the proximity of documentary and experimental media practices for how they organize and possibly disorganize approaches to film history. Rosen sees Vertov’s work as a model of historical temporalization, wherein it may be understood as configuring the relationship of now and then, transformation and stasis, as well as the historical object and historiographical subject (what Rosen refers to as the “historical subject in the future of the historical objects”). The Vertovian documentary, which assembles indexical signs into daring temporal configurations, concretizes a practice of radical historical thinking. Gadassik’s “A Skillful Isis: Esfir Shub and the Documentarian as Caretaker” considers the innovative work of Shub as both a pioneer of the documentary compilation film but also as exemplary of the “authorial invisibility” of the many women working as editors and editorial assistants (montagesses) in the revolution‐era film industry. Gadassik examines the tensions between editing as a formal property and

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as one of the stages of film production. Through her attention to the gendered dynamics of the distribution of labor and credit, as well as to the material specificities of this work, she proposes a feminist theory of distributed and anonymous authorship. Expanding upon Sergei Eisenstein’s likening of the editorial assistant to the Egyptian goddess Isis, who reassembled the body parts of her husband Osiris in order to reanimate him, Gadassik concludes that Shub’s often anonymous labor “is precisely what allowed [her] to function, like Isis, as a gatherer and compiler of historical bodies and faces that would have otherwise remained on the battleground of the artistic revolution.” Gadassik does similar work for the montagesses and the many women who labored in and through anonymous authorship. Rosen and Gadassik pose variations of a question tidily formulated by Jonathan Gray (2013): When is an author? Their contributions allow us to examine the manners in which authorship shifts in minor and substantial ways throughout the film production process, but also how our perceptions of authorship (and who or what is an author) shift over time. The tensions between individuals and collectives evident in the cases of ­revolutionary art forms, or between artisans, departments, and industrial practices that characterize what André Bazin christened “the genius of the system” of classical studio filmmaking (Bazin 1957: 11) are brought further into relief by the substantial role of institutions, granting agencies, and corporations in the production and distribution of nonfiction and documentary films. Such attention opens to analysis how authorship gets configured in such well‐known cases as the institutions that Grierson helped found and lead – the Empire Marketing Board and the National Film Board of Canada, and other such government film agencies that Zoë Druick examines in her contribution – or in the cases of nonfilm corporations, such as the furriers (Revillon Frères) who sponsored Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) or to the oil and energy corporations examined by Brian R. Jacobson in his contribution to this section. Druick and Jacobson ask what conceptual adjustments must be made to authorship when the subjectivity expressed is not the first person I (which has, perhaps, always been a convenient reduction of the many voices and hands that contribute to the production of a text) and, alternately, how must ­personhood be rethought when claimed by corporation? What adjustments to interpretive and ­analytic practices should scholars bring to the textual products of institutional and corporate entities, for whom the film plays a far more explicit mediating function between organization and imagined public, and is often a means to another, noncinematic, end? Jacobson’s “Corporate Authorship: French Industrial Culture and the Culture of French Industry” draws on a deep well of archival research in developing a “symbiotic” approach to authorship through his consideration of documentaries made for corporations. Using the case study of the relationship between Société Cinétest (a producer of industrial films) and the oil company Société Nationale des Pétroles d’Aquitaine, Jacobson racks focus between a micro‐level attention to the artisans and would‐be auteurs at work and a macro‐level attention to the corporate images that



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are the expression of abstract corporate authors. He expands our understanding of the entwined histories of documentary capture and forms of extractive capitalism and petrocultures, considering the aesthetics and visual cultures of modern energy. Like Gadassik’s study of the analog information processing powers of the montagesses, Zoë Druick’s “Documentality: The Postwar Mental Health Film and the Database Logic of the Government Film Agency” interweaves close and distant readings of two series of mental health films – Mental Mechanisms, which enjoyed wide distribution, and Mental Symptoms, which was intended for use by medical professionals – to sketch a genealogy of what we now call the “database documentary” that develops through the instrumental use of documentary film as a tool of governmentality, or as she develops it with reference to Hito Steyerl, “documentality.” Conceptualizing the post–World War II efforts of the National Film Board of Canada as an “information apparatus of the welfare state,” Druick reads the state‐ sponsored documentaries as entries into a bureaucratic archive and proto‐database of modern life. These case studies consider authorship at the level of the state, the  film institution, and the clinic, and pose the “text” as not just the films, but the  attempted management of an imagined national population as “written” and ­administered in the liberal state’s image. Audiovisual writing and erasure in or against the state’s image forms the subject of the final entry to this section on Authors, Authorship, and Authoring Agents. Joshua Neves’s “Unmanned Capture: Automatic Cameras and Lifeless Subjects in Contemporary Documentary” analyzes the highly networked, posthuman modality of unmanned capture. Foregrounding the connective aspects of AuNT, he explores the forms of audiovisual recording in which the presumptive ethical agent of an in‐ the‐flesh human camera operator – often theorized as bearing witness to what she records – has been redistributed between computer interfaces, artificial intelligence, and human actors working remotely, such as in the case of camera‐equipped drones and closed‐circuit surveillance video. To this, he also adds the countervailing emergence of forms of highly subjective and personal witnesses through cell‐phone video uploads that produce a form of event perspectivalism, whose unruly potential is increasingly tamed by algorithmic processing and interpretation. Neves mobilizes episodes from across the globe (including Tripoli, Foshon, and Ferguson) to consider how such emergent forms of networked and unmanned audiovisual encounter push at the limits of actuality, authorship, and what, following Michael Renov (2004), we might (still?) call the “subject of ­documentary.” Who is or isn’t made recognizable by such distributed audio‐visual practices in the era of unmanned capture? How do these new forms of nonfiction image‐making and interpretation participate in the redistribution and reconsideration not just of authorship but of “the human subject and subjectivity”? These questions indicate the stakes involved in the struggle over whose images, voices, and lives count – and how they get counted – in the cacophony of a globalized audiovisual public sphere, and why historically and theoretically nuanced approaches to authors, authorship, and authoring agencies remain vital to the study of documentary and nonfiction media.

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Notes 1 Tedesco’s Vieux‐Colombier programming of newsreels, documentaries, pre‐war comedies, animal and science films, and experimental films had a strong historiographical dimension: he believed viewers would be educated and inspired by the accumulated history of film styles to not only become more demanding and informed spectators, but electrified makers of cinema’s future. For more on the occluded history of the Vieux‐ Colombier, see Cahill (2015). 2 No such image‐right courtesies were extended to his patients, including the famous conjoined twins Radica and Doodica whom Doyen separated on film in a headline grabbing operation.

References Anon. (1905). Épreuves cinématographiques protégées par les lois de 1791 et 1902 en faveur de celui qui les a ordonées et composées, Le Droit d’auteur: organe official du Bureau de l’Union internationale pour la protection des œuvres littéraires et artistiques, 18(6), 76–77. Anon. (1928). Chez André Sauvage. Cinéa‐Ciné Pour Tous, 113, 19–20. Anon. (2006a). Laurent Chalet brise la glace. Association Française des directeurs de la ­photographie cinématographique (1 January). https://www.afcinema.com/Laurent‐Chalet‐ brise‐la‐glace.html?lang=fr. Bazin, A. (1957). De la politique des auteurs. Cahiers du cinéma 70: 2–11. Cahill, J.L. (2015). Animal Photogénie: The Wild Side of French Film Theory’s First Wave. In:   Animal Life and the Moving Image (eds. M. Lawrence and L. McMahon), 23–41. London: Palgrave. Chris, C. and Gerstner, D.A. (2013). Introduction. In: Media Authorship (eds. C. Chris and D.A. Gerstner), 2–17. New York: Routledge. Doyen, E.‐L. (1899). Le Cinématographe et l’Enseignement de la Chirurgie. Revue Critique de Médecine et de Chirurgie 1 (1): 1–6. Fontaine, D. (2006). Deux qui ont raté la marche (de l’empereur). Le Canard enchaîné (22 March). Reprinted in La Lettre d’AFC, 154(1): https://www.afcinema.com/Deux‐qui‐ ont‐rate‐la‐marche‐de‐l‐empereur.html?lang=fr. Gray, J. (2013). When Is the Author? In: A Companion to Media Authorship (eds. J. Grey and D. Johnson), 88–111. Malden, MA: Wiley. Grierson, J. (1971). First Principles of Documentary (1932–34). In: Grierson on Documentary (ed. F. Hardy), 145–156. New York: Praeger. Grierson, J. (2016). Documentary Producer (1931). In: The Documentary Film Reader (ed.  J. Kahana), 215–216. New York: Oxford University Press. Gunning, T. (1997). Before Documentary: Early Nonfiction Films and the “View” Aesthetic. In: Uncharted Territory: Essays on Early Nonfiction Films (eds. D. Hertogs and N. de Klerk), 9–24. Amsterdam: Nederlands Filmmuseum. Lefebvre, T. (2004). La Chair et le celluloïd: Le cinéma chirurgical du docteur Doyen. Brionne: Jean Doyen. Lévi‐Strauss, C. (1964). Le Cru et le cuit. Paris: Plon. Matuszewski, B. (1898). Une Nouvelle Source de l’Histoire. Paris: Noizette et cie.



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Most, M. G. (2007). The Squabble and the Penguin: Icy Relations and Lawsuits over Credit for Oscar‐winning Doc. International Documentary Association (1 July). https://www.documentary.org/feature/squabble‐and‐penguin‐icy‐relations‐and‐lawsuits‐over‐ credit‐oscar‐winning‐doc. Nesbit, M. (1987). What Was an Author? Yale French Studies 73: 229–257. Pang, L. (2013). Authorship Versus Ownership: the Case of Socialist China. In: Media Authorship (eds. C. Chris and D.A. Gerstner), 72–86. New York: Routledge. Renov, M. (2004). The Subject of Documentary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rosen, P. (2001). Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Vulser, N. (2006). La Marche de l’empereur a‐t‐elle deux réalisateurs? Le Monde (December 13). https://www.lemonde.fr/cinema/article/2006/12/13/la‐marche‐de‐l‐empereur‐a‐t‐elle‐deux‐ realisateurs_845151_3476.html.

5

Documentality

The Postwar Mental Health Film and the Database Logic of the Government Film Agency Zoë Druick

Simon Fraser University

Introduction In the postwar decade, the National Film Board (NFB) of Canada operated in an irrefutable and purely descriptive way as an information apparatus of the welfare state. The NFB emerged belatedly out of initiatives of the interwar period to institutionalize educational filmmaking. It thrived during World War II, bringing commonwealth-produced images of the war effort to cinemas around the world, and went on to make a place on postwar screens for records of Canadian life. Although Canadian histories traditionally focus on the exceptional works produced under the auspices of the NFB, elsewhere I have undertaken to give the more “distant view” advocated by Franco Moretti (2013), considering the quantity and pattern as well as the quality intrinsic to the Board’s overarching project.1 In what follows, I pursue this line of thinking further still, proposing that we consider the quantity of NFB productions as the concerted effort to produce a catalog, archive, or database of modern life, a logic that is consonant with what Hito Steyerl terms “documentality,” or the “interface between governmentality and documentary truth production” (2003: 1). In order to explore this topic, I propose to elaborate the concept of documentality through a protracted case study of the formation of a database of documentaries about mental health in the first postwar decade. I want to lay out the rudiments of an argument that revisits past documentary practice with reference to the current interest in databases in cinema and contemporary analyses of the operation of biopolitical projects. This reframing contributes in part to an attempt to recenter the objectives of the state documentary film institution as a source of co‐authorship in certain sorts of documentary production. Indeed, in what follows,

A Companion to Documentary Film History, First Edition. Edited by Joshua Malitsky. © 2021 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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I shall consider the governmental objectives crystallized in the state institution as direct contributors to the shaping of the efforts of individual filmmakers. The fact of the NFB’s institutional nature is of paramount importance in this discussion. As an aspect of a variety of ministerial portfolios between 1939 and 1955, from Trade and Commerce to National War Services, Reconstruction and Supply, and Resources and Development, and fully funded by the state, the NFB was accountable to its government‐appointed board and subject to various governmental objectives. Its strategies of information dissemination and national citizen formation were deployed in the production, circulation, and exhibition of documentary and nonfiction series addressing questions of population and citizen well‐ being. I argue that, consonant with government film agencies in other national and international contexts (e.g. the UN Film Board), the postwar NFB committed to a form of documentary seriality in which stories became additive, constituting an ever‐evolving media supertext meant to express the logic of the nation‐state. In the Canadian case, this logic played out as a story about uniting the regions in a stronger federalism and crafting from a diverse population a modern citizenry. I analyze this strategy as an institutional attempt to evoke the totality of society through the administrative structure of the database. In mobilizing this approach, I argue that this film agency, like others, anticipates, rehearses, and even provides a model for a database logic (albeit an analogue one) of modern governmental administration, which we may term biopolitical. Although the NFB produced films on every aspect of Canadian society (see the complete catalog at nfb.gc.ca), I will take as my sample a set of films made about mental health in the first decade following World War II. In the case of these films, which encompass two main series, the short, sponsored form adds up to more than a convenience of circulation or an economy of resources. Rather, it gestures at the kind of comprehensive coverage of issues concerning the health and development of the population as a laboring force that puts them squarely in the arena of bureaucracy’s archive. And, in this case, Foucault’s (1990) interpretation of the nineteenth century ascendancy of the bourgeoisie and the concomitant maximization of life through the control of the population, or biopower, is an apt framework. “Power,” he writes in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, “is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large‐scale phenomena of population” (1990: 137). Within this framework, the relevance of mental health to the overall health or “hygiene” of the population makes it a useful case for thinking though governmental logics of filmmaking. Bureaucracy, as the apparatus of administered society and the shadow control system of liberalism’s freedoms, is profoundly documentary in orientation ­ (Du Gay 2000; Gitelman 2014; Graeber 2015). Administration is reliant upon evidence and data, both about individuals and also about the population as an anonymized statistical totality. When an individual comes into contact with the state, files are opened and documents created. In this regard, governmental relations are productive of an enormous and potentially infinite amount of data, information that then demands strategies for filing and organizing, eventually producing the

Documentality 109 need met by computerized databases. Although historically, it was quite common for useful cinema (Acland and Wasson  2011) or utility film (Hediger and Vonderau  2009) to be made in series of shorts, which begin to approximate the organization of the database, most of the current work about database cinema relates exclusively to digital cinema (e.g. Cohen 2012; Hudson 2008; Kinder 2011). However, if we accept that utility film of various kinds, including that with a documentary bent, shares its logic with the bureaucratic system we need to be open to the possibility that cinema and the database have a longer and more complicated relationship. Manovich (2002) defines database as “a structured collection of data” organized for “fast search and retrieval by a computer” (218), but he also characterizes database as a symbolic or cultural form. When the world is interpreted through “an endless and unstructured collection of images, texts, and other data records, it is only appropriate that we would want to develop a poetics, aesthetics, and ethics of this database,” he writes (219). In historicizing the form of the database, Manovich joins scholars such as Spieker (2008) and Vesna (2007) who consider the ways that individual artworks interact with the larger form of the archive or database through which they are operationalized. Indeed, archive/database aesthetics tend to privilege multiplicity over singularity, simultaneity over hierarchy, and collection over selection. Seriality and relationality take precedence, and the significance of any one object or image is downplayed in deference to the patterns visible in the whole. The database, in other words, opposes itself to the author/artist: both the masterwork and the individual are anathema. Nevertheless, authorship is not foregone completely. On the contrary, it is possible to consider the administering or institutional logic itself as a kind of animating or authoring principle. In current digital practice, interactive and/or Internet‐based documentaries (i‐docs) often signal their derivation from databases, sometimes by asking a viewer to make choices about the order of sequences from a larger set (see, for instance, Daniel 2012; Kinder 2011). The database of the government film agency that I am proposing exists rather in the subject catalog and the numbered title, a manifestation of documentality. Yet its structuring logic demonstrates that, if given enough time and resources, these agencies would attempt to encompass the entire national scene, what Amy Swiffen calls the “biopolitical emphasis on life and its unfolding” (Swiffen 2009: 240). In order to explore this perspective, one needs to examine film’s relationship to the bureaucratic dimension of modernity and the special role of educational and documentary cinema within that. In the next section, I explore more fully the relationship of documentality to modernity.

Governmentality and Modernity A strand of cinema studies inspired by Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer has associated film with vernacular modernism (Hansen 1999, 2000) and the invention of modern life (Charney and Schwartz 1995). Often focused on the silent period,

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this literature tends to overlook cinema’s documentary tendencies (even though Benjamin and Kracauer did not). Certainly the institutional formation of reality‐ based genres emerges several decades after the period considered by these authors. Nevertheless, liberal democratic government film agencies specializing in documentary may be seen as equally bound up in processes of modernization and vernacular modernism, a theme that tends to emerge in studies of state and corporate educational filmmaking (see Bonifazio  2014; Druick  2007; Grieveson  2012; Lebas 2011). This perspective implicates documentary film agencies – national or otherwise – in a governmental project of studying and administering populations with whose conduct they are concerned. The experience of modernity is clearly also bound up in the experience of administration and indeed bureaucracy, like modernity, can cut both ways, both repressing and enabling modern subjects. The links between documentary and governmentality may be explored through an analysis of the production of a data set within the larger database concerned with the modern subject’s mental health. In the aftermath of the traumas of World War II, as the welfare state became more fully established in Anglo‐American societies, the apparatus of the eugenic mental hygiene movement dovetailed with the rise in ­psychodynamic approaches to mental health, and biopolitical structures came more  fully into view. Not only were what Foucault calls “technical‐State powers” (Foucault 2006: 97) mobilized for the ongoing work of citizenship, but citizens – and children in particular as future citizens – were enmeshed in disciplinary practices working to make constant adjustments in everyday life. Miller and Rose (1994) suggest that the rise of “therapeutic authority,” a new “authority for authority,” was created through a complex of “expertises, technologies and representations” (29) able to problematize, diagnose and intervene where necessary. Foucault’s work on governmentality, often cited in discussions of educational film and documentary (e.g. Bonifazio  2014; Milliken  2004) is a useful starting point for the distant reading of government films about modernization and citizen optimization. In his 1970s lectures at the Collége de France, Foucault piloted a post‐structuralist approach to representations as products of an underlying “apparatus of power.” The apparatus of power that would go on to provide the basis for the theory of governmentality draws together sexuality, subjectivity, and discipline, often through the psy‐function disciplines (psychiatry, social psychology, and social work) and purpose‐built institutional spaces (prisons, schools, clinics) (Foucault 1990, 1995, 2003, 2006, 2008). In the media studies work that has proliferated around the concept of governmentality, it bears noting that the key role of psy‐function disciplines for the delineation of normalcy and abnormality in the process of subjectivization are not always afforded the central place Foucault assigned them. This stems in part from the way in which the governmentality lectures are situated within Foucault’s truncated explorations on neoliberal economics and possibly also because of how Foucault was taken up in media studies in many ways as a rejection of psychoanalytic film criticism (Copjec 1989). Yet, in order to explore documentality or the documentary film agency’s emphasis on citizenship, it seems to me well worth revisiting the

Documentality 111 centrality Foucault attributes to the importance of psy‐disciplines in the production of healthy adaptation to the stressful conditions of modern life. Anna McCarthy has noted that in the postwar period, citizenship began to be seen as a developmental discourse leading from irrational childlike behaviors to “the constitution of a rational, moderate, and self‐managing” subject (2010). Mental health was constituted as an essential aspect of that development, one that included the work of parents, teachers, social workers, doctors, nurses, and numerous other governmental agents. However, a focus on rationality in the media governmentality literature tends to obscure the usefulness of the irrational. If, as Miller and Rose suggest, the autonomy and responsibility of postwar citizenship assumes a “psychological shape” in this period, it bears reflection that the perpetual intervention so essential to governmental relations can occur best when the citizen’s neuroses are maintained and managed, rather than eliminated altogether. Engin Isin has coined the term neurotic citizen to describe someone who paradoxically attains a requisite level of self‐responsibilization through the perpetual seeking of expert help (2004). In order to more fully explore the relationship between documentary and modernity, it makes sense to return to the postwar moment when film played a key role in the articulation of psy‐disciplines and citizenship. I want to explore some of these pedagogical films then not merely as representations, but also as contributors to the truth‐effects of the disciplinary microphysics and biopolitical governmental logics they depict, documentality in the most basic sense. To that end, their consideration may prove worthwhile for thinking through bigger questions about cinema and conduct. One of my goals is to problematize the emphasis on rationalities that characterize much of the work on governmentality in media studies and on the false rationalities that preoccupy ideology theory. Instead, I consider the centrality of neuroses – by definition irrationalities – as a paradoxically productive site of citizenship.

The Psy‐disciplines and Citizenship In the years immediately following World War II, the Canadian state, like numerous others, became newly interested in the mental health of its citizens. Following wartime concerns about the psychological fitness of its soldiers that brought psychiatry to a new national prominence, the Canadian government established a department of Health and Welfare in 1944 within which was housed a mental health division. Debates about the role of institutions in the successful treatment of mental illness, and indeed the idea of positive mental health, attained a newfound prominence. Psychodynamic and ortho‐psychiatric theories that understood mental health to be affected by social conditions attained the status of common sense, and neuroses and psychoses began to be seen on a continuum rather than as starkly differentiated conditions. The National Film Board, which had been established just prior to the outbreak of war in 1939, was enlisted to make sponsored films to serve these new policies. As with sponsored films in general, the films’ content was meant to reflect

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in two directions simultaneously: both on the sponsor (state and specialized agencies) and on the citizen‐viewer. Filmmakers worked closely with leading ­ Canadian psychiatrists to develop forms of film‐storytelling that they deemed appropriate to the topic. They saw films from other countries, such as Neuro‐ Psychiatry 1943 (dir. Michael Hankinson, UK, 1943) and Let There Be Light (dir. John Huston, USA, 1946) and, in turn, their films had widespread international ­circulation giving this chapter of medical filmmaking at the film board a decidedly cosmopolitan flavor. Although much of the mental health film work of the time (including the two pioneering films named above) concerned military personnel, commentators noted, “Canada was the first to experiment with the psychiatric film for civilian use” (Starr 1951: 40, italics mine). The proliferation of mental health films at the NFB consisted of two main series, Mental Mechanisms (dir. Robert Anderson, 1947–1951) and Mental Symptoms (dir. Stanley Jackson, 1951), as well as the stand‐alone films, Drug Addict (dir. Robert Anderson, 1948), Breakdown (dir. Robert Anderson, 1951), Shyness (dir. Robert Anderson, 1952), To Serve the Mind (dir. Stanley Jackson, 1955), Alcoholism (dir. Robert Anderson, 1955), and Stigma (dir. Stanley Jackson, 1958). The films I will focus on in the remainder of this chapter are from the two series, with special emphasis on The Feeling of Rejection (Mental Mechanisms No. 1, 1947) and Depressive States: 2 (Mental Symptoms No. 7, 1951). My aim in this comparison is to give a general sense of the range of approaches to the mental health film evolving in this period and the scope and reach of the governmental database.

Mental Mechanisms and Mental Symptoms The Mental Mechanisms series was the first to be conceived after the war, and it tapped into the widespread popularization of psychodynamic ideas about the maneuvers and subterfuges undertaken by the subconscious mind to defend the ego in the attempt to produce a well‐adjusted personality. The theory of mental mechanisms presumed childhood causes for adult emotional struggles and saw the psyche as a dynamic machine for avoiding painful feelings. As one textbook from the period put it: “We all use them, usually without conscious realization, but it is the degree and extent to which we employ these mechanisms which determine normality or abnormality” (Gilbert and Weitz 1949: 115). Mechanisms were thought to include aggression, repression, phantasy, identification, depression, withdrawal, projection, rationalization, displacement, conversion, regression, and compensation, terms that have subsequently been absorbed into everyday language. Sublimation, though a mental mechanism like the others, was considered to be essential to socialization and therefore entirely normal (Polatin  1963: 1156). The emphasis on the human mind as a machine attempting to contain its primitive urges and attain equilibrium in the stressful conditions of modern life made mental health into a problem to be managed by new techniques. The ascendency of these ideas to common sense was one way that the mental hygiene movement insinuated itself into everyday practices,

Documentality 113 such as child rearing, combining social and biological forms of citizenship, and making the family an indispensable hinge between the individual and the population. Mothers played a central role in the discourse of healthy child rearing, and Philip Wylie’s derisive term momism became popular with military psychologists to describe the creation of soldiers unfit for the “emotional strain of combat” (Dowbiggin 2006, 182; see also Wylie 1959). The Mental Mechanisms series of sponsored films was developed by the NFB in conjunction with psychiatrists from the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal who had approached the NFB in 1946.2 This series of four 20‐minute films present scenarios where a single individual’s mental distress is presented as a mystery cleared up either by consulting with a psychiatrist who elicits flashbacks to the subject’s childhood, or by an omniscient narrator who recommends to the viewer that the subject seek psychological help. The structure of the films was drawn from a study done in the US Navy where it was determined that therapeutic films were best presented synoptically, “using flashbacks and other devices to link causal relationships” (“Pscyhotherapy” 1946: n.p.). However, surprisingly given the era, the films avoid all reference to the war. And unlike the wartime films, they include both male and female characters in roughly equal proportion, a marked difference from contemporary fictional treatments in which patients tended to be women (e.g. The Snake Pit, dir. Anatole Litvak, USA, 1948), unless they were war veterans, who were always male (e.g. Best Years of Our Lives, dir. William Wyler, USA, 1946). Scenarios were crafted from the past cases of consulting psychiatrists as well as Let There Be Light, John Huston’s controversial (and suppressed) film about the neuropsychiatric afflictions of returning veterans, which was used to obtain “ideas for psychiatric‐therapeutic film production” (Memo from DAR Moffatt to Jim Beveridge, September 4, 1946). There is also a record of the NFB library including Neuro‐Psychiatry, Michael Hankinson’s 1943 film about the Mill Hill Neurosis Centre in Britain. Let There Be Light and Neuro‐Psychiatry were the two most important documentaries about neurosis made before the release of Mental Mechanisms and both were focused on the psychological conditions of returning soldiers rather than ordinary civilians.3 These films show war‐affected soldiers returning to civilian life and thus form a kind of bridge to the transition of techniques of military discipline and mental fitness to the general population. The voice‐over in the NFB films – male, as is typical of the period – presents each subject as a case of mental disequilibrium even though the individual in question is oblivious to their problems. The films thus serve a pedagogical function to teach viewers about the therapeutic perspective on human personality where anyone – even someone who is not aware of being afflicted – can potentially become a patient. The films work to help people understand that psychic distress without any apparent cause is a normal aspect of modern life, although the causes are routinely presented as individual rather than collective, and to normalize the help of therapeutic experts. In the first film in the series, The Feeling of Rejection: Its Development and Growth, we meet the main character, Margaret, in a psychiatrist’s office.4 Shown in a close up while the narrator explains that her bad headaches have no physical cause, the

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camera zooms out to show the psychiatrist behind a desk scanning her test results, all clearly marked “normal” and “no abnormalities.” The 20‐minute film is told as a series of flashbacks punctuated by visits to the psychiatrist’s office and to group psychotherapy sessions (indeed one of the aims of the film was to be shown to people involved in group therapy, a newly introduced method for destigmatizing mental distress). The scenes of unexplained pain (headaches in the film; menstrual cramps in the original script  –  see below for an analysis of the film’s displacements) are accompanied by dramatic discordant music and film noir‐ish high contrast lighting and tilted camera angles. Slowly, with her doctor’s therapeutic authority, Margaret pieces together the childhood causes of her current inability to say no and her lack of resistance to the strong wills of others, which is making her so miserable. Through a mixture of flashbacks and narration, we learn of Margaret’s formation as a “good girl” and her overdependence on the approval of her parents, which has prevented her from growing up and asserting her own will. “The model child does not necessarily become the happy adult,” suggests the narrator. As a none‐too‐subtle warning to the viewer he further notes, “parents who are fond of their children can still discourage them from being active and confident.” The film ends with Margaret, now wearing a more fashionable hair style topped by a jaunty pill box hat, asserting her will while buying shoes and participating in an active conversation with friends at a café, situations with which she had formerly struggled. The four films in the series (after The Feeling of Rejection came The Feeling of Hostility [1948], Feelings of Depression [1950] and Over‐Dependency [1951]) cover common forms of anxiety and depression. The subject of each film is unhappy without understanding the cause. Their unhappiness takes the form of hostility, overconfident striving, resentful dependency or depressed withdrawal, but all stem from some unexamined cause in childhood. (One post‐screening poll indicated that a group of viewers in Manitoba had become all too familiar with the narrative strategies, complaining that the arrival of a new baby was used in three out of the four films as the “basic cause of maladjustment” [Feelings of Depression NFB Report, April 1, 1953: 5], paradoxically indicating that Canada’s celebrated postwar baby boom had the potential to produce a significant quantity of neurotic reaction in the population). While not a complete catalog of mental symptoms by any stretch, the series gestures at an implicit database of modern complaints as each apparently normal and functioning individual is likely to be harboring small dysfunctions. In fact, the expandability of the series was intentional, with the vision to “ultimately creat[e] a psychiatric library of basic therapeutic films” (Letter from Robert Anderson to Frank Fremont‐Smith, June 6, 1947); the 1952 film Shyness was seen to partake of the spirit of the series, if not officially listed in its number, becoming a ghostly fifth addition to the series (Memo from Robert Anderson to Tom Daly, April 23, 1952). Kirsten Ostherr has argued that medical films work to produce the clinical gaze of medical practitioners and the positionality of patients (2013: 4). And indeed, in this case, the film does place the viewer in the position of the omniscient narrator who in turn stands in the place of the health care practitioner. Yet, the melodramatic form of the films allows for multiple points of identification. By utilizing a dramatic

Documentality 115 form, the films invite further interpretation and sometimes laughter at the simple causes of the complex psychological symptoms. A review in the Journal of the American Medical Association, for instance, faulted the film for its reductionism: “Psychologically, the film oversimplified the nature of ‘feel of rejection’ and fails to clarify the complex sexual inhibitions, repressed hostilities and other unconscious conflicts that underly (sic) Margaret’s obsessive‐compulsive neurosis. Certainly, the implication that such deep seated character deviations can be corrected in a few therapeutic interviews, is seriously misleading.” Nevertheless, the reviewer conceded that it was “a commendable first attempt to present some of the modern concepts of dynamic psychiatry to lay or ancillary professional groups” (quotation from an undated review the Journal of the American Medical Association, cited in Report on the Mental Mechanisms Film Series, August 1950). The film’s prudish and allusive attitude toward sexuality renders it replete with provocative narrative suggestions. Is Margaret harboring a crush on her best friend, Jean, as was noted in the margin of one of the production scripts: “subconscious fear of own lesbian tendencies”? Similarly, Jimmy, the subject of Over‐Dependency, is presented as going through a “sissy period” as a child and of having an asexual marriage with an older woman whom he treats as a motherly figure; is he the victim of homophobia? As with the elision of Margaret’s menstrual cramps, noted above, at times the films paradoxically reinscribe the very repression they are expressly trying to expose and release. How did the films contribute to documentality? The films were shown extensively on the rural film circuits that predated the introduction of a national television broadcasting system in Canada (in 1952), and several of them obtained additional media exposure as photo‐play stories in newspapers such as The New York Times Weekly and the Montreal Standard. Feeling of Rejection alone clocked 3,036  individual screenings on these circuits and screening reports indicate that “For many screenings, both rural and urban, qualified professional people introduced the film and conducted the discussion period. These included medical doctors, public health nurses and social workers” (Audience Reaction Analysis for Feeling of Rejection n.d.). Reports on the screenings indicated a wide range of reactions. In one of the field reports, an audience member noted: “It is interesting to observe psychiatry becoming a part of the public domain like cooking or school teaching, in which everybody is his own expert.” Said another: “Some were afraid that if too many of these films are seen, the danger of normal people becoming obsessed with the idea that they must see a psychiatrist will result.” A third notes: “Such a picture could not fail to serve a useful purpose in any community. It has, and will continue to provoke thought among an ever increasing number of people everywhere, even among the most phlegmatic. It must be followed by a series of such pictures, however, to make the subject a permanent pattern for better thinking and wiser living” (Audience Reaction Analysis for Feeling of Rejection n.d.). A trailer, now apparently lost, was shown alongside the film in which Charles Stogdill, chief of the Mental Health Division of the Department of National Health and Welfare (who had earlier served as chief psychiatrist of the Canadian armed forces), explained the origin of the film in ­thinking about treatment rather than prevention of emotional disorders.5 It bears

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remarking that this approach introduces and normalizes a psychodynamic framework in which general irrationality rather than rationality is presumed to be the foundation of the modern subject. The final installment in the Mental Mechanisms series, Over‐Dependency, was made in 1951, the same year that the Mental Symptoms series went into production. According to mainstream psychology of the day, mental mechanisms out of control were liable to become mental symptoms (Page 1947: 51). Severe emotional disorders and psychological ailments fit into this category and required more intensive medical intervention. This was no longer the basically healthy psyche in need of a greater degree of self‐awareness and a simple tune up. Curing these kinds of mental illnesses required much more extreme measures, if a cure could be achieved at all, and the disciplinary regime of the asylum was still in an expansionary phase (Canada 2014: n.p.). This series of nine single‐reel films was made to be screened as part of the training of professionals in psychiatry and other health professions and, unlike the Mental Mechanisms series, were not made available to a wider public. As the promotional material that circulated with the series stated, Mental Symptoms films are “suitable as a teaching aid for undergraduate instruction in medical schools. Also suited for professional groups—physicians, nurses, social workers, psychologists—and students in these professions. The film is not suitable for the general public, and its distribution is restricted to professional audiences” (“Mental Symptoms Information Sheet” n.d.; emphasis in original). Filmed on black and white 16 mm stock and composed mainly of long shots with a minimum of editing, the films were produced for just $750 per reel and each print sold cheaply for $25 with the idea of moving large quantities. Because of their uniqueness as a teaching tool, it was apparently hoped they might become a “money‐making proposition” (Memo from Robert Anderson to Donald Mulholland, Jan 25, 1951). The director reported that there was “immediate and enthusiastic” response to the films at a meeting of the American Psychological Association meeting in May 1951. “No other teaching matter of this type exists,” he enthused (Anderson to Maurice Crompton, September 26, 1951). Materials collected in the production file for Mental Symptoms indicate that they were well received in South Africa, Scandinavia, France, and Australia. Unlike the emphasis on normal kinds of emotional suffering in the Mental Mechanisms series, these films focused on the display of extreme forms mental illness by long‐term inmates (shot using patients at the Verdun Protestant Hospital (now the Douglas) in West Montreal). The films thus inadvertently evoke concerns about the custodial function of asylums rather than the curative work of psychiatry in the community that was so topical in the period (Grob 1987). Very much in the tradition of the clinical training demonstration film (see Engstrom 2003), the nine films cover a range of mental diseases: extreme depression, senility, schizophrenia (three different types), mania, paranoia, and folie à deux, a charming name for the condition of induced psychosis; like the Mental Mechanisms series they, too, were sponsored by Health and Welfare and overseen by Dr. Charles Stogdill. Each film specifies in an opening title that they “are not meant

Documentality 117 to illustrate techniques of mental examination, but to demonstrate some manifestations of various mental disorders,” to create in other words a database of serious mental illness. However, paradoxically, the objective to display the various madnesses in these films requires that the patients’ voices be heard at length. The unrehearsed interviews that make up the bulk of the films thus present a very different kind of documentation from the reenacted and semi‐fictionalized stories of Mental Mechanisms. The emphasis on diegetic sound also extends to the narrator Dr. Heinz Lehmann, the clinical director of the Verdun Hospital who, unlike the voice‐over narrator in The Feeling of Rejection, is seen as he reads the script that presents the patient’s case and describes his or her problems, confirming Foucault’s assertions about the importance of the doctor’s body in the therapeutic encounter (2006). Wearing a double‐breasted pin‐striped suit, his hair combed to one side, and sporting a thin mustache, Dr. Lehmann, 40 years of age, is also seen at work in the filmed interviews where the patient and doctor inhabit the therapeutic and filmic scene together. Efforts were clearly made to render the sets less clinical with comfortable furniture and decorative screens. However, illuminated by harsh lighting, this succeeds only in making them appear more theatrical. In his work on psychiatric power, Foucault insists on the importance of the theatricality of the clinical demonstration in which the patient’s symptoms must be performed for an audience of spectators who simultaneously witness and authorize the physician’s interpretations. The psychotic patient must, through a series of treatments, ultimately renounce his or her false reality in favor of the reality being maintained by the doctor. This emphasis on reality is crucial for the regime of psychiatric truth and its disciplinary techniques. The ongoing “testing of reality” is key for the psychiatric field where there is, in effect, a perpetual intake to the hospital that retroactively confers reality on both the doctor and the psychiatric diagnosis (2006: 268). Without oversimplifying the role of documentary as a technology being used to represent and promote truths about mental health in this emergent period of destigmatization and general education, documentary’s own flexibility around realism – sometimes a question of form and sometimes a question of content – is crucial to the logic of documentality. Let us consider Depressive States: 2, which consists of two brief interviews of approximately five minutes each, one with a despondent housewife, another with a woman who is unhappy to the point of becoming suicidal. The first woman, whom Dr. Lehmann tells us has a history of “manic depressive psychosis,” is shown in static long shot walking very tentatively onto the set. Once she sits down she is framed in a medium shot that lasts for four unedited minutes. Dr. Lehmann begins his questioning, gently prodding the unnamed woman: “You didn’t want to come at first.” “I was afraid.” There are long painful pauses and misunderstandings: —What were you doing before you came in here? —I was keeping house. —No, just before, an hour ago. —Sitting in the day room.

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—What would you like to do now? —I’d like to go home. (This last statement is accompanied by a questioning glance at the doctor that seems to confirm her sense that he could help liberate her from the asylum.) —You’re not well enough to be home. You’ll have some treatments, then you’ll feel better. —No (decisively). I don’t want treatments, Dr. Lehmann (more conciliatory). I asked you not to give me any treatments (scarcely above a whisper). —Don’t they help you? —No. —Would you like to go back to the ward now? —I guess I have to go back, Dr. Lehmann.

Although the stated aim of the encounter is not to treat the illness but only to demonstrate its symptoms, given the power dynamic between patient and doctor, the encounter takes on an absurd performativity that highlights the failures of the asylum itself. This absurdity is intensified in the presentation of the second patient, which begins in medium shot with her already seated in the film set. This woman, with dyed black hair and dark lipstick, speaks matter‐of‐factly about her suicide attempts with Dr. Lehmann. Although she mentions living with a wealthy brother‐in‐law who keeps servants, she deploys a very unpretentious syntax, saying things such as “I don’t sleep good.” In response to Dr. Lehmann’s questions about her suicide attempts, a pan down to her hands shows that both wrists are bandaged, as, poignantly, is one arm of her glasses, which she plays with on her lap. The absurdity emerges when he asks her to recount the sequence of attempts on her own life and she gets caught up with recounting instead the order in which the attempts were made: This one was last week and this one was this week (pointing first to the left and then to the right wrist). I mean, today is Monday … last week I done this one, the week before I done this one (inverting the order by pointing at first right and then left wrist).

When asked about her motivations, however, the patient is evasive and speaks of being sick of life and wanting to try a new place: Hell. “I’m curious,” she says laconically, “can’t be any worse than it is here.” Religion features prominently in several of the patients’ discourse, something that was left out of the Mental Mechanisms scripts. In Paranoid Conditions, for instance, both of the women interviewed suffer from religious delusions. The first, a young Anglophone woman with an attitude of superiority, presents her view that the Book of Revelations proves that Hitler was a martyr. Lehmann, a refugee from Nazi Germany, doesn’t contradict her claims, calmly stating only that “most people in this country don’t think the way you do.” The second woman, a French‐Canadian, is convinced that she has been the subject of surveillance since her school days in a convent. Currently, she believes she is being monitored by the television. She explains the elaborate codes she has discovered of the ways that people with “jet‐black” hair communicate with one another through physical movements, such as the scratching

Documentality 119 of their heads or limbs. An elderly farmer in Depressive States: 1 reports “visions from Heaven or Hell” that indicate he won’t get better this time. In several films the patients express a wish to leave the hospital. “Joe” from Schizophrenia: Hebephrenic Type, says he’s been in the hospital for “900 years” and would prefer to be out on the streets of Montreal. The daughter in the joint psychosis pair in Folie à deux repeatedly demands that they be released. Unlike The Feeling of Rejection and other films in the Mental Mechanisms series, these patients do not miraculously remember the cause of their traumas and achieve a new healthy mental state in the course of the psychiatric interview. Being in the asylum is not a route to health, but rather a submission to the logic of biopower that mandates that they must be made to live at all costs. Most of the patients in the Mental Symptoms series have been living in the asylum for many years (especially those with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, who have all been in the hospital for over a decade), demonstrating the inability of the institution to heal their illnesses and, in fact, as per the mandate of the films, Dr. Lehmann is shown to be interested only in identifying the symptoms of each malady. Although the two sets of sponsored films were understood by film board personnel as having different aims and were geared at completely different audiences, their simultaneous emergence and their sponsorship by the Department Health and Welfare means that they can productively be looked at together to gain a wider perspective on ideas circulating at mid‐century about the mental health of the civilian population. While the Mental Symptoms films were kept under wraps, along with much else that took place in Canadian asylums in the 1950s and are not currently available on the NFB website (though they may be ordered on DVD), the Mental Mechanisms films enjoyed extensive distribution to a wide range of exhibition ­contexts beyond the rural circuits from institutional sites such as schools, clinics (including the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations and the Allan Memorial Hospital in Montreal), and the military to medical conferences (such as the International Congress on Mental Health), film festivals (such as Edinburgh and the BFI conference of film societies), television, and, only a few years later, screenings at avant‐garde film societies such as New York’s Cinema 16 (Ostherr 2013). With their modest stories of low expectations and minor revelations about emotional well‐ being, they seem to illuminate a set of previously taboo and unspoken issues in contemporary life even while they leave much about the practice of psychodynamic therapy and the challenges of modern life obscure. By contrast, in the way of many scientific films, the Mental Symptoms series was made with as little filmic intervention as possible, and yet the subjects’ keen awareness of the camera and their often frank expressions of unhappiness with the asylum differentiate them in very basic ways from the mild everyday suffering of the characters in Mental Mechanisms. Despite their purpose to illustrate types, these films become much more compellingly individualized than the fictionalized characters of Mental Mechanisms whose stories of overprotective mothers and distant fathers are relatively generic. Together, the series demonstrate the emerging common sense use of psychiatric power to express and regulate citizenship through the ability to implicate the expertise of psy‐disciplines and a continuum of mental health into everyday life.

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Conclusion As I’ve tried to show here, the two unique film series made by the NFB about mental health in the immediate postwar years are, in their different ways, good examples of documentality, combining governance of the individual with the database logic of administered welfare. It is precisely in their seriality, their concatenation of a variety of distinct but linked conditions, that they gesture at the range of stories that could ultimately cover the totality of the population, both normal and abnormal. In this regard, they are an excellent example of the intermeshing of documentary with the modern biopolitical project of nation‐building, of education’s disciplinary connection to administration. Together, the series may be seen to demonstrate the authorial power of the state, the documentary film institution and even the clinic in helping to frame an overarching legibility around mental illness and mental health. The intelligibility of citizens’ mental wellness in relation to both community and nation was focalized through the administrative lens of the welfare state’s therapeutic authorities, authorities that ultimately worked on and through the production of a data set of healthy minds and healthy bodies. The films operate at the level of establishing psychological knowledges and practices  –  a therapeutic apparatus of power  –  that would go on to become taken for granted, such as childhood etiologies for adult problems and the need for the permanent monitoring and regulation of psychic states. They mark the domestication of formerly radical practices into the pragmatic – and nationalized – microphysics of institutional power and everyday conduct. Perhaps most interesting for considerations of governmentality in media studies is the shift they indicate toward an apparatus of neurotic citizenship, demonstrating the constitutive role of neuroses in both population management and liberal citizenship. But it is ultimately their form as a citizen data set within a larger biopolitical project that should make us consider the authorial link between documentary and database in a longer historical relationship.

Notes 1 For more on John Grierson’s influence on the Film Board see Druick, Z. (2014). Grierson in Canada. In The Grierson Effect (eds. Z. Druick and D. Williams), 105–120. London: Palgrave‐Macmillan. 2 Anderson, who had previously worked on Psychological First Aid, spent a year with the US Mental Health Film Board in 1949. He returned to make the NFB film Breakdown (Starr 1951). 3 The Mill Hill clinic profiled in Neuro‐Psychiatry was originally intended for civilians affected by the war. Its patients turned out to be more than 80% soldiers (Jones 2012). The original title of Houston’s film, The Returning Psychoneurotics, betrayed its debt to Neuro‐ Psychiatry 1943 (Jones 2012: 322). 4 The original title was Feelings of Isolation and the Fear of Rejection. 5 A trailer accompanies the screening copy of The Feeling of Hostility in which an unidentified man in a suit speaks knowledgeably about the Clare’s case – is he a psychiatrist or an actor? We never find out.

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References Acland, C. and Wasson, H. (eds.) (2011). Useful Cinema. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Audience Reaction Analysis for Feeling of Rejection. (n.d.). Feeling of Rejection file, National Film Board (NFB) of Canada Archives. Bonifazio, P. (2014). Schooling in Modernity: The Politics of Sponsored Films in Postwar Italy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Canada. (2014). Mental Health, Mental Illness and Addiction: Overview of Policies and Programs in Canada, Report 1. Accessed at: http://www.parl.gc.ca/content/sen/committee/381/soci/ rep/report1/repintnov04vol1part3‐e.htm (accessed 10 June 2014). Charney, L. and Schwartz, V.R. (eds.) (1995). Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cohen, H. (2012). Database Documentary: From Authorship to Authoring in Remediated/ Remixed Documentary. Culture Unbound 4: 327–346. Copjec, J. (1989). The Orthopsychic Subject: Film Theory and the Reception of Lacan. October, 49, 53–71. Daniel, S. (2012). On Politics and Aesthetics: A Case Study of “Public Secrets” and “Blood Sugar.” Studies in Documentary Film 6 (2): 215–227. Dowbiggin, I. (2006). Prescription for Survival: Brock Chisholm, Sterilization, and Mental Health in the Cold War Era. In: Mental Health and Canadian Society: Historical Perspectives (eds. D. Wright and J.E. Moran), 176–192. Montreal: McGill‐Queen’s University Press. Druick, Z. (2007). Projecting Canada. Montreal: McGill‐Queen’s University Press. Druick, Z. (2014). Grierson in Canada. In: The Grierson Effect (eds. Z. Druick and D. Williams), 105–120. Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Du Gay, P. (2000). In Praise of Bureaucracy: Weber, Organization, Ethics. London: Sage. Engstrom, E. (2003). Clinical Psychiatry in Imperial Germany: A History of Psychiatric Practice. Ithica: Cornell University Press. Foucault, M. (1990). The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction (trans. R. Hurley). New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, M. (2003). Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974‐1975 (ed. A.I. Davidson). New York: Palgrave. Foucault, M. (2006). Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1973‐1974 (ed. A.I. Davidson). New York: Palgrave. Foucault, M. (2008). The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978‐1979 (ed. M. Senellart). New York: Palgrave. Gilbert, J. and Weitz, R. (1949). Personality and Mental Hygiene. In: Psychology for the Profession of Nursing. New York: Ronald Press Company. Gitelman, L. (2014). Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Graeber, D. (2015). The Utopia of Rules. Brooklyn: Melville House. Grieveson, L. (2012). Visualizing Industrial Citizenship. In: Learning with the Lights Out (eds. D. Orgeron, M. Orgeron and D. Streible), 107–123. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grob, G.N. (1987). Mental Health Policy in Post‐World War II America. In: Improving Mental Health Services: What the Social Sciences Can Tell Us (ed. D. Mechanic), 15–32. New Directions for Mental Health Services No. 36. San Francisco: Jossey‐Bass. Hansen, M. (1999). The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism. Modernism/Modernity 6 (2): 59–77.

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Hansen, M. (2000). Fallen Women, Rising Stars, New Horizons: Shanghai Silent Film as Vernacular Modernism. Film Quarterly 54.1 (Autumn): 10–22. Hediger, V. and Vonderau, P. (eds.) (2009). Films That Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Hudson, D. (2008). Undisclosed Recipients: Database Documentaries and the Internet. Studies in Documentary Film 2 (1): 89–98. Isin, E. (2004). The Neurotic Citizen. Citizenship Studies 8 (3): 217–235. Jones, E. (2012). Neuro Psychiatry 1943: The Role of Documentary Film in the Dissemination of Medical Knowledge and Promotion of the UK Psychiatric Profession. Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 69 (2): 294–324. Kinder, M. (2011). Reorchestrating History: Transforming The Danube Exodus into a Database Documentary. In: Cinema’s Alchemist: The Films of Péter Forgács (eds. B. Nichols and M. Renov), 235–255. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lebas, E. (2011). Forgotten Futures: British Municipal Cinema 1920‐1980. London: Black Dog. Manovich, L. (2002). The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. McCarthy, A. (2010). The Citizen Machine: Governing by Television in 1950s America. New York: The New Press. Mental Symptoms Information Sheet. (n.d.). Mental Symptoms file, National Film Board (NFB) of Canada Archives. Miller, P. and Rose, N. (1994). On Therapeutic Authority: Psychoanalytical Expertise Under Advanced Liberalism. History of the Human Sciences 7 (3): 29–64. Milliken, C. (2004). Continence of the Continent: The Ideology of Disease and Hygiene in World War II Training Films. In: Cultural Sutures: Medicine and Media (ed. L.D. Friedman), 280–298. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Moretti, F. (2013). Distant Reading. London: Verso. Ostherr, K. (2013). Medical Visions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Page, J. (1947). Abnormal Psychology: A Clinical Approach to Psychological Deviants. New York: McGraw‐Hill Book Company. Polatin, P. (1963). Mental Mechanisms. In: Encyclopedia of Mental Health, vol. 4 (eds. A. Deutsch and H. Fishman), 1154–1165. New York: Franklin Watts. Psychotherapy. (1946). Film News (February‐March), n.p. Spieker, S. (2008). The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Starr, C. (1951). Ideas on Film: Through the Psychiatric Looking Glass. Saturday Review of Literature (May 12), 38–40. Steyerl, H. (2003). Documentarism as Politics of Truth. European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies. https://transversal.at/transversal/1003/steyerl/en?hl=Documentarism (accessed 23 March 2017). Swiffen, A. (2009). From Hegemony to Biopolitics. Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 31 (2): 237–252. Vesna, V. (ed.) (2007). Database Aesthetics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wylie, P. (1959). Generation of Vipers. New York: Pocket Books.

6

Unmanned Capture

Automatic Cameras and Lifeless Subjects in Contemporary Documentary Joshua Neves

Concordia University

The camera image is different. It is not made after the event. The cameraman is himself in the dangerous situation we see in his shot and it is by no means certain that he will survive the birth of his picture. Until the strip has been run to its end we cannot know whether it will be completed at all. It is this tangible being‐­present that gives the documentary the peculiar tension no other art can produce. —Bela Balázs The video camera is efficient in the information‐gathering phases of surveillance, but in storage and retrieval the computer is king. —John Fiske

Introduction This chapter focuses on processes of unmanning in contemporary documentary culture. By this I mean both increasingly nonhuman or posthuman modes of inscription and encounter (such as surveillance and bystander videos), as well as image‐data of and for capture or killing – including proliferating visions of dead and dying bodies. Drawing upon the language of drones (unmanned aerial vehicles or UAV) and computational models of tracking (the “capture model”) (Agre  2003), I examine authoring agencies in contexts where cameras are focused on human worlds, but for which there is no identifiable camera operator or lively subject. This constellation Thanks to James Cahill, Wendy Chun, Joshua Malitsky, Jeff Scheible, Lisa Parks, and Charles Wolfe for their helpful suggestions to versions of this chapter. A Companion to Documentary Film History, First Edition. Edited by Joshua Malitsky. © 2021 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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pressures routine notions of documentary witnessing and assumptions about techno‐human relations. If what marks documentary realism and authority across cinema’s history is a “tangible being‐present” (Balázs 1970: 171), who is the subject of such an encounter? My preliminary argument is that contrary to by now well‐worn debates about the status of the digital image, a more consequential and less observed shift in audiovisual agency is taking place. I call this shift unmanned capture.

Death of the Camera Political theorist and photographer Meir Wigoder’s provocative analysis of the “digitized death of Colonel Gaddafi” provides the starting point for this chapter. Wigoder examines a widely circulated Associated Press photo of Muammer Gaddafi’s capture and dying moments (see Figure 6.1), focusing on two temporal scenes within this definitive image in Libya’s 2011 revolution: the staged presentation of a picture within a picture, on the left, and a spontaneous street scene, on the right. He notes, “it was hard to notice, at first, that the photograph within the photograph was actually a stilled image copied from a video screen on which we can see all the icons of playback mode and the date and time at which it was made” (Wigoder 2013: 55). Fascinated by how our knowledge of the scene relies on bystander/accomplice video footage that

Figure 6.1  This photograph of Muammar Gaddafi’s capture and death, credited to “AP Photo/ Abdel Magid al‐Fergany” circulated widely in October 2011, and is the focus of Meir Wigoder’s provocative essay “The Digitized Death of Colonel Gaddafi and the End of Photography.”



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has been paused and nested within a photojournalist’s scoop, Wigoder draws our attention to the common practice of image grabbing – and its discrepant role in witnessing and gatekeeping. Here, the photographer, who is not the witness at the scene, becomes the gatekeeper of the news with “the editorial power to make us remember an event by freezing a significant moment that has already been recorded” (Wigoder  2013: 56), and replacing it on the street to be photographed again. The untimely image is both detached from and powerfully rooted to the moment of ­capture – that is, to the distinct scenes of arrest, death, and celebration. This tension has led to debates about the authorship of the image, which has been copied from an ­unidentified source, relocated within a new scene of circulation, and credited to an Associated Press photographer. The picture signals the complex imbrication of ­photography and video, and the status of documentary nesting – where images are copied, broken up, and resituated – in the production of knowledge and affect. Wigoder continues by asking after the role that agency plays in documentary encounters. In particular, he develops two lines of thinking that are of interest to this discussion of unmanned capture. First, he reminds the reader of Vivian Sobchack’s analysis of camera ethics, agency, and point of view in her well‐known essay, “Inscribing Ethical Space: Ten Propositions on Death, Representation, and Documentary.” In the essay, Sobchack (2004: 249–253) offers several useful terms to describe the role of the camera (and camera operator) in extreme situations, including what she calls the accidental gaze, the endangered gaze, and the interventional gaze. The first is marked by the camera’s “unselective vision,” and “technical and physical unpreparedness” (Sobchack 2004: 249), which registers chaos through its wild movements, and often misses the focal scene altogether – as when, in Gimme Shelter (1970), the cameraman unwittingly records a murder. The endangered gaze is similarly marked by its proximity to the event, but it also registers the operator’s vulnerability at the scene – the camera wobbles, peers from behind objects or buildings, and risks both taboo representation and bodily harm. Here, Sobchack draws on Bela Balázs’ analysis of war documentary in his Theory of Film. He locates the pull of such documentary audiovisions in the viewer’s understanding that the cameraman may not “survive the birth of his picture” (Balázs 1970: 171). In this formulation, the power of documentary realism is located in its very contingency and incompletion: “until the strip has been run to its end we cannot know whether it will be completed at all” (Balázs 1970: 171). Finally, and most pertinent to this discussion, is the interventional gaze – a mode of recording that no longer attempts to hide itself. Rather, “its vision is confrontational” (Sobchack  2004: 252). Sobchack gives the example of The Battle of Chile (dir. Patricio Guzman 1976), but again defers to Balázs. He describes a war documentary where the camera not only records scenes of death and destruction, but where the operator dies in the act of shooting, the camera still running. Of this encounter, Balázs (1970: 171, my emphasis) writes: a sequence suddenly breaks off. It darkens and the camera wobbles. It is like an eye glazing in death. The director did not cut out this “spoilt” bit – it shows where the camera was overturned and the cameraman killed, while the automatic mechanism ran on.

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Balázs continues with reference to Captain Scott, Sir Ernest Shackleton, and the Soviet polar explorers, arguing that a “new form of human consciousness” has resulted from human‐camera relations – one with implications far beyond the battlefield. This new entanglement is what allows the cameraman to record icy landscapes at the edge of starvation or to remain at his post “to the last instant.” Of this camera consciousness, Balázs (1970: 172) continues: The internal processes of presence of mind and observation are here projected outwards into the bodily action of operating the camera. The operator sees clearly and calmly as long as he is shooting in this way; it is this that helps him mechanically to preserve his consciousness, which in other circumstances consists of a sequence of images in the mind. But now it is projected outward and runs in the camera as a strip of film, which is of advantage because the camera has no nerves and therefore is not easily perturbed. The psychological process is inverted  –  the cameraman does not shoot as long as he is conscious – he is conscious as long as he is shooting.

In addition to signaling a crucial genealogy of the automatic camera – and a form of camera consciousness through which the body becomes entangled with the machine, internal cognition projected/protected through the viewfinder – the above categories also frame, as Wigoder puts it, how the “camera can appear to participate in the scene without indicating a definitive witnessing‐agency” (2013: 59). That is, with an accidental, automatic, or even dead author. The effect of this genealogical movement from the camera‐operator to the computational camera decouples one of documentary’s basic dyads. This brings me to the second conceptual framing I want to borrow from Wigoder: his use of the term free indirect image. Building on the literary free indirect discourse and Gilles Deleuze’s free indirect subjective, the concept describes a form of combined speech  –  here, a visuality  –  creating the impression of access to a subject’s inner state of mind as distinct from direct or reported speech or imagery (such as Wigoder’s fascination with how the erratic photograph‐video described above conveys “the discombobulated state of mind of Gaddafi himself ” [2013: 61]).1 Put otherwise, that the camera continues to shoot after its operator has been killed is more than a literal description of the risk involved in recording a violent encounter. It also signifies a transformation in modes of “being with” (Deleuze 1986: 72), to borrow Deleuze’s phrase, or “being‐present” (Balázs 1970: 171) in Balázs’ formulation, that characterize documentary – including the current proliferation of unmanned capture. Such shifts challenge documentary’s humanist tradition and ask us to speculate about the very meanings and functions of documentary media now. For Wigoder, the free indirect image describes a cluster of important shifts in how we understand technology and perception. His summary includes (1) the effect of implication – with the image of Gadaffi, a sense of taking part in the lynch mob; (2) the sense of a participatory camera combined with access to a subject’s inner state of mind – wherein Gadaffi is not simply captured but also gazes out; (3) its role as an affect image, addressing us first in a precognitive mode; as well as (4) the “impression



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of a lack of authorship or witnessing agency, which makes us think of a ‘camera consciousness’ capable of participating and recording the event” independent of a human operator (Wigoder 2013: 67).

Unmanning + Capture While Wigoder is chiefly interested in how official discourse disappears the on‐the‐ scene videographer, as well as how playback and gesture articulate new forms of “bodily‐affect‐vision” – such as the new significance of the mobile phone camera – I want to extend his observations about witnessing and camera consciousness in another direction (Wigoder 2013: 69). What I am calling unmanned capture brings together two insights about documentary’s digital culture: (1) ubiquitous non‐ and posthuman documentary recording – where documentary media become data and are basically linked to deadly visual regimes; and (2) an ongoing transformation in privacy‐and‐publicity, a shift from panoptic surveillance to what Philip Agre terms the capture model. First, unmanned is a term adopted from military drone technologies, or unmanned aerial vehicles UAV. Unmanning points to both the human elsewhere, and thus the humanless or autonomous machine (literally, without a crew), as well as a divisive distribution of the physics of risk. In this context, surveillant aerial vehicles are not only automated or algorithmic, but the human operator – saved from certain forms of exhaustion and physical danger,2 not to mention the pleasures of risk – is remote, often perched in front of a bank of screens, or an analyst who engages stored footage only retrospectively as part of the process of computer‐aided detection and identification (such as biometric recognition).3 In addition to the spatial divide associated with ideas like remote sensing – where, for instance, a drone operates in Pakistan but the pilot is stationed at a base in Nevada – unmanning also inaugurates a set of temporal transformations. This includes the intensification of real‐time and ubiquitous interactions, as well as an emergent media forensics marked by the fluid permanency of aggregative data.4 In contradistinction, unmanning signifies something else entirely for those on the ground: that one can be legally and ethically tracked, captured, or even killed. The latter is now normalized through presidential kill‐discourse,5 so‐called “drone porn,”6 terrorist videos, or deadly policing, among less immediately violent forms. What I want to emphasize here is the significance of documentary videomedia to the process of unmanning – its becoming data and metadata (Paglen, 2016). Such images (infrared, high‐definition, recognition algorithms, data banks, etc.) do more than record, represent, or indicate the will of an agent or agency but instead operate as a kind of software or database. This is to say that unmanned capture describes another moment in the transformation of camera consciousness. To rephrase Balázs’ often quoted couplet about the inverted relation of the camera operator and consciousness, we might instead say: the psychological process is now expanded – the camera does not shoot as long as he is conscious – he is conscious as long as it is shooting.

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To capture, most basically, is to take into one’s possession or control by force, to absorb into a certain sphere or system, or to accurately record in words or pictures. Drawing on computer systems design, Philip Agre, in a small but classic essay, suggests capture as a crucial way to make sense of privacy and surveillance beyond the over‐extended panoptic model.7 If the panopticon relies on permanent visibility and the automatic functioning of power, the capture model and metaphor articulates how new media systems collect and track through wide‐ranging information gathering, storage, and analysis – and crucially, how such systems (from ID badges, mail barcodes, and product stock keeping units to cookies, “pattern of life” recognition algorithms (Cavallaro et  al.  2012: 10), and, increasingly, photographic and video data) act to reorganize behavior so that it is amenable to capture: a computer can only capture what it can describe. What matters, Agre asserts, are: the ways in which human activities have been structured. The capture model describes the situation that results when grammars of action are imposed upon human activities, and when the newly reorganized activities are represented by computers in real time. (2003: 746, my emphasis)

This marks an important historical transformation in the career of documentary – a shift from visual inscription and human presence to “datafication”  –  that is, “the ability of networked platforms to render into data many aspects of the world that have never been quantified before” (van Dijck and Poell 2013: 9). For example, Agre points to distinct models of privacy and publicity informing these two modes. The surveillance model, he suggests, relies on visual metaphors and “derives from the historical experiences of secret police” and imprisonment. The capture model, on the other hand, stems from linguistic metaphors and logistical procedures to reorganize flexible labor and economic flows (Agre 2003: 740). While emerging from the language of information technologies and commercial/military logistics, the impact of capture on audiovisual forms (and vice versa) are no less significant. One of the important ramifications of this shift in emphasis and metaphor relates to paradigms of governance and control. This has many shorthands in contemporary theory, with Deleuze’s characterization, via Michel Foucault, of the uneven transition from disciplinary to control societies being one of the most influential (Deleuze  1995: 177–182). What this shift brings into focus are forms of exposure and modulation, associated with neoliberal economic policies and technologies of governance that fundamentally alter ideas about what constitutes a person or population. Moving away from rhetorical and legal categories of rights and citizenship, neoliberalism(s) rely on an economic model of personhood that, as Maurizio Lazzarato puts it, establishes “a threshold, a vital minimum, above which the individual can become an ‘enterprise’” (Lazzarato 2009: 128) and below which they must struggle against the cruddy or catastrophic conditions of their own abandonment or disposability. While a more in depth discussion of such shifts is out of the scope of this chapter, suffice it to say that capture is to control societies what surveillance is to disciplinary societies. Further, this is not a simple replacing of one regime with



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another, but a new entanglement that has significant ramifications for documentary’s everyday manifestations – including its role in and as ubiquitous computing. The implications of a computational mode of capture for our understandings of agency and authority in documentary culture are manifold. Beyond the recognition of the internalized self‐regulation of the subject – a common insight linking panoptic regimes to myriad actuality forms, reality TV to CCTV – capture both points to the reorganization of behaviors and to the constitution of what Nigel Thrift terms “movement‐space.” For Thrift, the intensification of computing power across the field of everyday life engenders a “new calculative background” – he calls this qualculation – that is transforming “what counts as ‘thinking,’” as well as our basic understandings of speed, memory, spatial awareness, the body, and so on (2004: 594). Thrift (2004: 593) describes this shift as driving a peculiar mode of posthuman relations defined by ubiquitous and spatialized “cognitive assistance.” He (Thrift 2004: 591) writes: I want to emphasize that these developments are producing not only shifts in what is understood as “human” but also shifts in what is understood as “environment” since, increasingly, the “artificial” environment is sentient and has the feel of a set of “natural” forces blowing this way and that.

Thrift and Agre’s insights, taken together, describe how everyday activities, and surveillance itself, are recast by computational processes and grammars of action –  even for those perceived to exist without or against the digital. While these extensions are often mundane, offering minor automations and ongoing renderings, they are also diagrams of the world. For such backgrounds to take root and be e­ ffective they must both disappear (like “‘natural’ forces blowing this way and that”) and contain textured models of the activities taking place. The more detailed the schemas, the more such processes can log, learn, and augment behaviors. I take up these ideas below by examining security and bystander footage of accidents in China, and the racialized protocols that shape extrajudicial killings in the United States. Although Agre emphasizes ordinary processes of tracking and capture that are seldom understood to be political in the sense of older forms of surveillance – such as the delivery of a package – his basic claim that capture restructures everyday behaviors so that they can be analyzed and enhanced remains crucial and open to development. As Agre puts it, existing ideas about discrete human relations with computers fail to describe the “activity‐systems that are thoroughly integrated with distributed computational processes” (2003: 743). Moreover, this is not the self‐policing of the subject, who may, at any time, be watched and thus act accordingly. Rather, it is a new qualculative lifeworld for which capture is a necessary condition for functionality and inclusion. Capture is thus a kind of thresholding: its grammars of action form insides and outsides, constantly rendering our experience of (who is in) the world. Indeed, the capturability of our actions and worlds has increased exponentially since Agre’s writing in the early 1990s, both online and offline – from banking and social media to smartphones and CCTV systems, among more lo‐fi encounters, all

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of which are able to record, analyze, and co‐constitute daily habits. In this context, one of my aims in this chapter is to emphasize the importance of documentary video – as visuality and data – to the capture model. While distinct from familiar interpretations of panoptic visual regimes, and not crucial to Agre’s initial conceptualization, audiovisuality is now central to emergent capture regimes. In this context, video data is represented for and integrated into computer processes in both real time and as an ongoing forensic record. Such processes give the lie to technologically centered anxieties about digital transformation, where the lack of human intervention is fundamental, and about the failure of indexicality. As Jonathan Crary notes in Techniques of the Observer, “most of the historically important functions of the human eye,” and we can add the camera‐eye to his formulation, are being transformed by “practices in which visual images no longer have any reference to the position of an observer in a ‘real,’ optically perceived world” (1990: 2). Put otherwise, Crary’s emphasis on the “techniques of the observer” can be said to mark an early recognition that digital media rely upon a particular form of unmanning. What is at stake here is not merely a shift to computational inscription and apparatus, but a redistribution of witnessing and the “real world” observer onto such systems. Unmanned capture returns us to basic ideas about what constitutes documentary. A key lineage in the documentary tradition is that of the creative treatment of actuality (ala Grierson), where certain “men of vision” transform nonfiction encounters into “documentary” through their artistry and through new and meaningful social or aesthetic functions. As limited as such discourses can be, they also get to the heart of documentary as a social practice, including its recent transformations. What distinguishes documentary are not banal claims about pure representation. Rather, it is always about the relationship between reality and its capture. Or as Erika Balsom describes the documentary imagination in a recent piece about post‐truth anxiety, more so than other nonfiction forms, “documentary reflects on its relationship to truth” (2017). It this contested relationship to shared social experiences and truths that I want to hold onto, and that justifies my investment in the term documentary in the context of this chapter. What matters is how capture shapes and organizes, stores and recalls, evidentiary material and the traces of real world action. Echoing Bill Nichols’ observations about “The Voice of Documentary,” we might say that its voice is logistical and predictive (Nichols 1983). In contrast to our everyday sense of documentary cinema, computational modes rely on the persistence of actuality, documents, and other recordings as data, as well as in using nonvisual methods for recognizing patterns in this “sea of data” (Steyerl 2016). Parallel then to the earlier transformation of nonfiction into documentary, this chapter asks after the relationship between data and documentary  –  what I am tempted to call datamentary. How do current forms of unmanning and computational vision, among related processes, constitute an important shift in the “creative treatment of actuality”? Documentary matters in the present context because it helps us to see how a redistribution of witnessing qua capture is basically tied to new social projects. For instance, how do we understand documentary agency and social affect in situations where there is no embodied human who sees and



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experiences what the camera‐computer captures  –  when being‐there is always a kind of being‐remote? In a basic sense, of course, mediation always describes such a distancing. But my argument here is that unmanned capture intensifies this gap by consolidating a non‐ or posthuman gaze such that intimacy is not produced by human interaction and a real‐world observer – but through close and individuated (or qualculative) engagements with technology. Documentary now describes programmed engagements with social worlds whose reliance on evidentiary data are once humanist and inhuman. Given the conceptual emphasis on unmanning across this chapter, let me here return to UAVs. Drone capture is suggestive of a pervasive logic that brings together computing, documentary video, tracking and data aggregation, and a new proximity with images of death and dying. Moreover, it underscores a thicker transformation in modes of being‐with or being‐present that are at the center of this analysis. If Wigoder (2013: 59) helps us to theorize how the “camera can appear to participate in the scene without indicating a definitive witnessing‐agency” – we now require a new conceptual frame to describe the entanglement of camera‐computing and the unmanning of witnessing‐agency. A key tension in this regard is that between the “tangible being‐present” (Balázs 1970: 171) identified by Balázs, and many others, as key to documentary’s force, and the kinds of being‐remote or being‐without that seem to be suggested by new media systems and variegated forms of political and economic management. Put otherwise, how does this seeming distance and disconnection in fact shore up new technological intimacies – intimacies that are crucial to disparate forms of social and geopolitical unmanning? The cultural geographer Derek Gregory offers a useful response to such questions in the context of drone warfare. Gregory (2011: 193) argues that UAVs do not simply enable game‐like and remote killing, as many critics have emphasized, but also consolidate a visual regime whereby we are increasingly accustomed to seeing from the perspective of predation – from, that is, the perspective of capture. In particular, the role of documentary video in the process of intelligence gathering, and in the decisions of Combat Systems Officers stationed at distant control stations, reveals a peculiar techno‐cultural sensorium – documentary’s becoming‐big‐data – that normalizes, as Gregory puts it, the point‐of‐view of the “hunter‐killer” (2011: 192–193). Of the Predator drone, already dated but still suggestive, Gregory (2011: 194) notes that the US military’s “Gorgon Stare” video capture platform utilizes five cameras capable of shooting two 16‐megapixel frames per second, with the capacity to stream up to 65 “motion video feeds from a single Reaper” in 2012. This massive videodata requires, as Gregory observes, 185 personnel to operate a single Predator or Reaper patrol (2011: 194) – a reminder that unmanning is, most basically, a redistribution of bodies. So‐called “pattern of life” recognition, military algorithms that seek to identify suspicious behavior – a group doing jumping jacks, a “personality” target who frequents a monitored location – are emblematic of this logic. Sensors communicate algorithmically significant video feeds to distant officers who decide, in the last instance, whether or not to launch a kill strike (Cavallaro et  al.  2012: 14). Strikes by UAV have thus produced what has been called “war without witnesses” (Gregory 2011: 204).

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To take stock, I have begun to theorize unmanned capture across disparate technologies of production, distribution, and reception – with a particular emphasis on documentary‐as‐data. These processes are not only entangled – in the sense of Thrift’s “qualculative” background or Agre’s “grammars of action” – but also divide or carve up populations. The example of drone technologies, while perhaps extreme, most concretely demonstrates this target sensorium: unmanning redistributes and normalizes risk, immunization, and abandonment.8 What had been the purview of citizenship and rights is now bipolitically managed at the level of the population – or, more precisely, by justifying the capacity of one population to thrive against legal and ethical norms to surveil, sequester, and kill others. But how are we to make sense of the new ubiquity of unmanned recognition and logistics in everyday life? And what does it mean to code the epistemology of capture, tracking, and predation into computational power – to design the computer‐camera to turn information into knowledge in this way? With this conceptual framework in mind, I now turn to two distinct scenes of unmanned capture. These examples are intuitive starting points and thus far from comprehensive. Rather they signal a crucial set of entanglements related to documentary authority, witnessing, technological cohabitations, and regularized violent encounters. Following Rey Chow’s provocation, entanglement is a concept or method that seeks out forms of enmeshment or contact that remain invisible to our common frameworks for assigning meaningful connection (2012: 1–2). The scenes addressed here span different parts of my own life: as an American academic working to identify and oppose legally sanctioned forms of racialized killing – both at home and globally; and as a scholar engaging the politics of everyday digital life in China – a context of rapid socio‐technical change, whose technological apparatus, figured as a dystopian global future, is very often made to buttress visions of a benevolent Western capitalism. I begin with the latter.

Scene 1: Double Hit In October 2011, two‐year‐old Wang Yue was run over twice by two different vehicles while walking in a market near her parent’s shop in the city of Foshan, Guangdong (Figure 6.2). Neither driver stopped to help the screaming and visibly injured child, and an additional 18 people passed by without coming to her aid. After nearly 10 minutes in the street, an elderly trash collector finally moved the young girl out of harm’s way. CCTV footage of the event quickly went viral across news and social media sites, both in China and internationally, sparking debates about declining values, callousness, and social responsibility. Little Yueyue was hospitalized but died from her injuries eight days later. Soon after, the driver of the first minivan to strike the child, Hu Jun, turned himself in. He was later convicted of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to three‐and‐a‐half years in prison – a lightened sentence because he had helped to pay Yueyue’s hospital fees. The female rubbish collector who came to her aid, known in the media as Granny Chen, came to stand in for “the nicest and most natural side of us” (CNN Wire Staff 2011).9



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As one in a series of such incidents, the death of Wang Yue catalyzed public and legal attention to social apathy, including the so‐called bystander effect, as well as Good Samaritan laws. The former is a social psychological term describing cases where individuals do not offer help to those in need when other people are present. It points to a diffusion of responsibility that minimizes the culpability any one person. What such crowding means in age of mass surveillance is an interesting question. Are people more likely to intervene if they know their actions are recorded? Or does the presence of security cameras and the possibility of a distant observer, among other forms of tracking, remove them from this responsibility? Good Samaritan laws, on the other hand, give legal protection for those offering reasonable assistance to victims. At least since the much‐publicized Peng Yu Incident in 2006 (Minter 2012) – where a Samaritan was made liable for the medical bills of an elderly women to whom they had offered aid – public discourse has been filled with anxiety about such encounters. This includes the novel worry that victims would facilitate or fake injury or accident for financial gain. Public outcry over the apathetic response to an injured child led to the identification and harassment of some of the people in the video, and to calls for Good Samaritan protections, then nonexistent in the People’s Republic of China – including penalties for people who fail to help those in need. In August 2013, as a direct result of public uproar over the video of Wang Yue’s death, China’s first Good Samaritan Law was adopted in the Southern city of Shenzhen (He 2013). Let me thicken this discussion with two related incidents. First, is another sense of “double hit” car accidents. Echoing similar reports elsewhere, including the “hit‐to‐ kill” phenomenon in Taiwan in the mid 1990s and the dash‐cam video craze in Russia, “double hit” refers to drivers who attempt to kill pedestrians after they inadvertently strike them with their cars. They do so, because, as one report suggests, “if you cripple a man, you pay for the injured person’s care for a lifetime. But if you kill the person, you only have to pay once” (Sant 2015). While certainly linked to discourses about the darker sides of China’s nouveau capitalism that are popular in the West, such stories also have remarkable traction across Chinese news and social media, most significantly because of the large number of incidents that have been captured by security cameras and bystanders, and that have recirculated on TV, as internet videos, still images and, as above, in debates about a perceived decline in social care.10 One such video, recorded by a security camera in 2010  in Xinyi, Guangdong, shows a reversing driver hit a three‐year‐old boy with his BMW X6.11 Having backed over the child, a reporter notes: The driver then shifts his BMW into drive and crushes the child again. Remarkably, the driver then gets out of the BMW, puts the vehicle in reverse, and guides it with his hand as he walks the vehicle backward over the boy’s crumpled body. The man’s foot is so close to the toddler’s head that, if alive, the boy could have reached out and touched him. The driver then puts the BMW in drive again, running over the boy one last time as he drives away. (Sant 2015)

In many such cases, despite video evidence showing drivers hit pedestrians a second, and even a third or fourth time, the crimes are treated as accidents by the

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courts. In other words, such documentary video falters as legal evidence – failing to establish clear causality and intention. According to reports, “double hit” drivers regularly skirt murder charges, serving short jail sentences, or commonly escaping with a one‐time payoff to the family of victims or bribe to a local official (Sant 2015).12 At the same time, double hit videos have drawn powerful responses from viewers of TV news, online videos, and the like – taking on dynamic afterlives in journalistic accounts, as well as across screen cultures and social media. In some cases, the videos have spawned so‐called “human flesh search engines” (renrou sousuo), wherein online crowds move offline in search of retribution – locating, exposing, and sometimes attacking perpetrators. That viewers of the videos are moved in ways that those on the scene are not is crucial to the double‐hit phenomena – and to what I am calling unmanned capture more generally – as well as to entwined ideas about witnessing, mediation, and the authority of the recordings. Let me here emphasize that I understand bystander videos and security camera footage, among others, not as interchangeable encounters but rather as part of a heterogeneous network of audiovisual unmanning. These modes represent qualitatively different forms of unmanning – and yet, they are often conflated or aggregated in circulation. This latter point is significant given the crucial role of spectatorship  –  from watching videos on YouTube to watching drone video feeds – within systems of unmanned capture. Moreover, if CCTV cameras constitute a planned or permanent visuality, whose immediacy and capacity to witness is deferred to recognition software or as memory and storage (to be consulted after the fact), bystander videos point to altogether different ways of removing the human (the “man” in the militarized logic of unmanning) from the scene. This includes a new kind of technological rubbernecking, where those on the scene record rather than intervene, or whose distracted thrall with devices like the mobile phone removes them from the scene, as well as deliberate forms of countersurveillance that seeks to reclaim the authority of witnessing by challenging the government, police, shopping centers, and others. In short, my point here is not that there are no people involved in unmanned documentary. On the contrary, my interest is to begin to examine how unmanning processes signal a redistribution of bodies, agency, and authority. No longer rooted to being present, on the scene, unmanning inaugurates a system structured on potentiality – where real‐time data analytics replace prior notions of liveness or indexical value. A final example builds on this distinction or spectrum, and adds to the discussion of double hit videos and deaths. In November 2016, a security camera captured a two‐ year‐old girl wander into traffic and get run over by a slow‐moving SUV while her mother, walking a few feet behind her, was distracted by her smartphone and failed to intervene. Tutu, as the child was referred to in the media, died at the scene. This accidental death in a provincial city in Hunan echoes many similar reports about unattended children killed just small distances from their caretakers (Guo and Ives 2016). As above, what gives these stories their spectacular social impact are the widely disseminated images and video clips recorded by security cameras or bystanders – videos that show both negligent parents and quiet injury or death (security cameras rarely



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have audio). Importantly, the multiple impacts of these encounters include the technology of the mobile phone itself. Such incidents, of course, freight in a familiar technophobic hysteria. Their focus on the neglect and death of small children and the elderly is key to their affective charge. In short, they punctuate widespread social anxieties about technological distraction and forms of social disconnection – indexing scenes of violence and deep social uncertainties. The New York Times coverage of the incident, reported in both Chinese and English, quotes Liu Qinyue and Sherry Turkle, two well‐known s­ cholars of digital culture, about the failures of awareness, new dependencies, and “declining capacities” associated with the overuse of mobile phones and our attachments to technology (Guo and Ives 2016). In addition to pervasive automatic cameras and lifeless subjects, the example signals yet another register of unmanned encounter. In this case, though the subject is present on the scene, their inactions indicate powerful forms of distraction, detachment, and even a kind of inhumanism shored up by technological consciousness. These examples ask important if sensational questions about our technological habits and habitus – and their relation to unmanned capture. The increasing way, that is, that documentary encounters seem to lack a human subject or operator and yet are animated or documented by a participatory camera. If security footage of Wang Yue’s death fomented outrage and led to the adoption of new Good Samaritan laws, similar footage of so‐called “double hit” accidents, while moving viewers and circulating widely online, has routinely failed as legal evidence. Similarly, recent stories about distracted parents and endangered children intensifies discourse about everyday forms of withdrawal and disconnection. In this context, unmanning describes not only computational surveillance and scenes of death and dying, but operators who, enthralled by the screen, fail to intervene in real scenes of danger – their inattention marking them as bystanders to their own experience. What is captured in these encounters is a peculiar unmanning of mediation and of witnessing. Removed from the scene itself – where the camera and subject are remote, programmed, dead – witnessing becomes a camera‐effect. It is remediated in/as spectatorship alone. Documentary mediation thus functions as a kind of double hit  –  its impacts stretched over multiple scenes or traces. This dark cultural meme offers a way to theorize documentary agency and social affect in situations where there is no embodied human who sees and experiences what the camera‐computer captures –  when being‐there is always a kind of being‐remote. As I suggested above, capture intensifies the gap in mediation by consolidating a non‐ or posthuman gaze such that intimacy is not produced by human interaction and a real‐world observer – but through computational relationships, like the rise of track and trace technologies. Further, such scenes are folded back into capture, becoming crucial to the operability of the systems themselves. That many such videos have tens of thousands of views suggests the strange way they have become content for watching and sharing. They register a move from on the scene to on the screen. While I am wary here of reproducing the pop‐academic paranoia that we are, as Turkle puts it, increasingly “alone together” (2011) – her idea that we are attached to technology and distant with one another – I do want to think about the stakes of

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unmanned capture for social affects, visuality, and violence. This is because unmanning is not just the production of detachment, but forces new entanglements and intimacies. One of the chief problems with Turkle’s analysis is its strong technological determinism, which makes new technologies the cause of massive shifts in habits and social relations. This is why her solutions can be to spend less time with our gadgets and more time talking to each other. Such arguments eschew larger questions about how technological applications are made to operate in concert with regimes of knowledge and power. Put otherwise, her analysis falls into the trap of unmanned capture. In what follows, I want to build on “double hitting” as a mode of mediation peculiar to contemporary documentary. To do so requires examining not only the death of the camera/operator, and the consolidation of the bystander effect in spectatorship, but unmanned subjects and racialized networks of capture.

Scene 2: Racialized Capture and the Politics of Nonrecognition The problem of capture and of so‐called big data is not, as it is sometimes described, the challenge of looking for a needle in the haystack, but rather how tracking is operationalized – including what is erased or not recognized in the production of common sense and in gatekeeping. As suggested by the previous example of racist HP software (Figure 6.3), a key example for Simone Browne, whose work I draw on

Figure 6.2  Security footage captures two‐year Wang Yue moments before she is struck by two vehicles while walking near her parents’ shop in Southern China.



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Figure 6.3  A widely circulated video, “HP computers are racist,” demonstrates how HP’s motion tracking web cameras are unable to see black faces.13

below, the problems of data, capture, and redistribution help us to see the crucial work and violence associated not only with video surveillance but also the less‐than‐ visible or legible aspects of unmanned capture. At least since the murder of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman in 2012, or the killing of Michael Brown by officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri in August, 2014, the myth of the post‐racial society in the United States has, once again, come under intense national scrutiny. In particular, extrajudicial killings of African Americans at the hands of vigilantes and police officers have generated new documentary testimony regarding ongoing racial violence and practices of dehumanization.14 This visible dissent, hard won by both organized activists and spontaneous protests, has drawn attention to murderous policing and the fact that the federal government does not keep comprehensive annual records of police shootings. Instead, departments voluntarily report such data, which has led to massive underreporting if not outright fraud. For instance, the data collected and circulated by the FBI has been shown to represent less than half of actual police shootings, including fatalities (Kimbriell et al. 2016). In response, numerous organizations, ranging from the Washington Post and Wikipedia to killedbypolice.net and Black Lives Matters, have developed their own tracking platforms. In December 2016, the Washington Post summarized its collected data since 2015. The report, “Fatal Shootings by Police Remain Relatively Unchanged After Two Years,” confirms what had been occluded by the violently incomplete reporting.

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First, when adjusted for population, black males were three times more likely to be killed than white assailants. Secondly, when accounting for unarmed fatalities, black men are nearly six times more likely to be killed (they make up 6% of the population, but represent 34% of unarmed people killed by police). Additionally, the report showed that mental illness also continues to be a crucial factor – with as many as one in four people killed by police categorized as mentally ill (Kimbriell et  al.  2016). These routine killings – 963 people were fatally shot by police officers in 2016; a total of 52% were identified as people of color, 233 of them black  –  are only the most extreme form of anti‐black policing.15 The Justice Department’s investigation into the Ferguson Police Department, for example, found pervasive unconstitutional and racist (the report prefers the more benign term, “biased”) practices. Black men and women accounted for 85% of traffic stops, 90% of tickets, and 93% of arrests. One reporter summarizes the story as describing a “city that used its police and courts as moneymaking ventures, a place where officers stopped and handcuffed people without probable cause, hurled racial slurs, used stun guns without provocation, and threatened anyone as suspicious merely for questioning police tactics” (Apuzzo and Eligon 2015). Alongside the resurgence of formal and informal record keeping, numerous reports also document a substantial increase in the number of fatal shootings recorded on video – by mobile phones, dashboard and body cameras, security cameras, and others. The Washington Post reports the number of such videos to have increased from 142 in 2015 to 231 in 2016 (Kimbriell et al. 2016). This surge is a direct result of increased attention and agitation, including repeated police shootings and the routine acquittal of officers (including non‐shooting‐related deaths, such as the killing of Freddie Gray, in April, 2015, while in police custody), as well as community struggles against police, and widespread municipal and judicial discrimination. This contradiction is clearly indicated by the strategic failure of the official data itself – where local, state, and federal offices have regularly disregarded significant information, all the while massively expanding legal and illegal surveillance programs, especially for people of color. In this context, nonrecognition is not a by‐product of hi‐tech policing but rather its raison d’être. Documentary video and “racialized surveillance” have a long history. The recording of the brutal beating of Rodney King, by a bystander with a consumer camcorder, is just one notorious example. I borrow the term “racialized surveillance” from Simone Browne’s important book, Dark Matter: On the Surveillance of Blackness. As Browne puts it, racialized surveillance “signals those moments when enactments of surveillance reify boundaries, borders, and bodies along racial lines” (2015: 16), normalizing discriminatory practices. Like Agre, one of Browne’s aims is to displace the central role of the panoptic model within understandings of surveillance. Instead, she focuses on the “absented presence” of blackness in discourses of visibility and power, insisting that the historical formation of surveillance is entangled with the historical conditions of slavery (Browne 2015: 13). In her wide‐ranging study, Browne examines slave narratives, advertisements seeking the return of runaway slaves, the census, plantation rules, lantern laws, and plans for the slave ship



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Brooks, among many others. Plans for the Brooks, for example, demonstrate an alternative and mobile architecture of power that emerged alongside Bentham’s diagram, and one which, as she shows, Bentham was acquainted. Browne (2015: 32) writes: if the panopticon relied on “an exercise of power where the inspector sees everything while remaining unseen, how might the view from ‘under the hatches’ be another site from which to conceptualize the operation of power?” Her intervention thus connects contemporary practices of surveillance and control to the crucially under examined history of racialized power. Learning from Browne’s analysis of racialized surveillance and its “absented presence” within social and governmental structures, my aim here is to extend this “view from under the hatches” to contemporary forms of unmanned capture. What we might call racialized capture combines forms of surveillance (over‐sight) and sousveillance (under‐sight or forms of “inverse surveillance” such as citizen videos) (Mann et  al.  2003: 331), and what scholars like David Lyon have called “dataveillance” (Lyon 2014: 4), including changes to monitoring, tracking, and policing practices consonant with the above discussion of capture. No longer “collected for certain limited, specified, and transparent purposes,” dataveillance points to a “preemptive” function that relies on new modes of prediction and processes of aggregation that are open to a wide range potential uses (Lyon 2014: 4). This includes both violent forms of nonrecognition, where, for instance, the routine killing of black men and women is officially obscured, as well as the consolidation of activity systems so that certain acts are amenable to capture. Documentary video is important to both. Further, unmanning, like surveillance and capture, must be rethought as an “absented presence” and form of racialized power  –  one that redistributes bodies and risk along clear and prejudicial racial lines. Put otherwise, the biopolitical logic of drone warfare  –  which places one population at risk to support the health of another, and which relies on normalized extrajudicial targeting and killing, and “collateral damage” – is not, as it is often described, a distant form of violence targeting non‐state actors in the “war on terror,” (though, this too is a race war). It is crucial to the domestic security state’s engagement with people of color, among other intersectional identities. Capture thus intensifies what was already present with racial surveillance: its effectiveness at producing visible differences from the white norm. Writing about the surveillance of blackness in the 1990s, John Fiske recognized this possibility for visual forms like video to be amplified by computational systems and directly employed in the identification and production of abnormality – in, that is, processes of unmanning. He writes, norms are what allow surveillance systems “to decide what information should be turned into knowledge and what individuals need to be monitored.” While the particular details of such information may not be widely analyzed or applied to individuals, its norms “are necessary to identify the dissident and the dangerous.” This is why, he adds, being a person of color “in all but a few places in the United States, is to be seen to be out of place” (Fiske 2002: 385). What matters here is not simply the project of racializing videos in this way, but the emergence of a new assemblage we might call documentary computing (or datamentary).

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This assemblage also helps us to understand the failure of documentary videos – from mobile phones to body cameras – to successfully challenge the legal norms of prototypical whiteness. Thus, while Justice Department investigations into Ferguson, among many other contexts, identify widespread evidence of “racial bias” – including normalized harassment, fines, fear, brutality, and death – police officers, departments, and government officials are rarely made culpable. This is, in part, because discriminatory policing is discursively understood to be systemic, thus requiring, as the former Attorney General, Eric H. Holder Jr. states, “immediate, wholesale and structural corrective action” (Associated Press 2015). Such rhetoric is laudable, but its reliance on legal norms continues to define which actions are capturable and which are not. It defines criminality, in other words, through a logic of racialized capture – a failed synecdoche where the “absented” part is unable to challenge or relate to the whole. Through this lens, the courts and others routinely see it as legally “reasonable” for police to violently apprehend and choke to death a man accused of selling illicit cigarettes – as with the police murder of Eric Garner in Staten Island on July, 14, 2014 – and unreasonable to hold police personnel (officers Daniel Pantaleo and Justin Damico were not indicted), departments, and other governmental units or leaders accountable for their role in creating and affirming dehumanizing life conditions. This is why video evidence alone is not the answer. At least four videos document Keith Scott’s killing in Charlotte, North Carolina in September, 2016 (Almukhtar et al. 2016). Two of the videos were recorded on mobile phones by people on the scene, including his wife, Rakeyia Scott, one by a police body camera, and one by a police dashboard camera (Figure  6.4). The overwhelming audiovisual evidence  –  including multiple angles and durations, and both police and bystander

Figure 6.4  The New York Times “3‐D Reconstruction” of the Keith Scott shooting, including a split video timeline, demonstrates the limits of video capture, including the dangerous norms produced by seeing from the point of view of capture.



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footage – failed to establish, with any legal certainty, what happened on the scene, including whether or not Mr. Scott had a gun in his hand. Even though officers made Scott a suspect for simply being out of place, failed to take into account vital information about his disability, and acted in the face of clear video evidence showing Keith Scott’s hands down at his sides, the district attorney for Mecklenburg County, R. Andrew Murray, argued “it’s a justified shooting based on the totality of circumstances” (Fausset and Blinder  2016). What this totality shows instead is that five armed officers surrounded Mr. Scott, and unnecessarily and dangerously escalated a low risk situation to one in which force could be “justified.” In this case, as in thousands of others, police actions are sanctioned against the presumed unruliness of black subjects. The incident recalls, as Fred Moten and Stefano Harney retell it, Michael Parenti’s critique of how Hollywood movies depicts colonial settlement. Moten and Harney (2013: 17) write: “In films like Drums Along the Mohawk (1939) or Shaka Zulu (1987), the settler is portrayed as surrounded by the ‘natives’, inverting […] the role of the aggressor so that colonialism is made to look like self‐defense.”

Coda In unmanned capture, not only is the representational power described by Parenti, via Moten and Harney, maintained, but it is expanded and enriched by computational processes that shape everyday protocols and sites, rendering the experience of who is in the world, and who falls away. Let me here summarize three related arguments advanced in this chapter – with the caveat that this is not meant to be any kind of final word but a modest contribution to research on the entanglement suggested by unmanned capture. First, and most basically, I argue that the real transformation associated with the rise of digital media as an actuality form has to do with the redistribution of human subjects and subjectivity – and not merely a shift from photographic (silver halides) to computerized (1s and 0s) inscription. This remanning, including its racial and gender‐logic, while entangled with new capture regimes, is what is novel and dangerous. It describes not simply automation or the death of the camera/operator but a model of sociality that removes human agents and witnesses from the field of experience, both depoliticizing them and establishing new thresholds for what or who can be a witness. Further, it turns agency into a complex relation between humans and computers – from pilotless missile strikes and security cameras to new inattentions‐cum‐intimacies and what Browne has called the “absented presence” of racialized surveillance. This division of who can claim the authority of the witness, and who cannot, mirrors the risk distribution of unmanning processes. What these distinct processes share, and this is my second point, is a significant shift in modes of being‐with technology and each other. This is what is felt  –  by numerous commentators and those on‐the‐scene – as a lack of witnessing agency in computational video cultures. In a real sense, the scale of computing power and aggregated data is post‐ or inhuman – but it must also be understood to be the concrete application of knowledge within specific social projects. This latter fact points

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to the dangers of biopolitical‐democracy  –  of which the anti‐immigration, anti‐­ people‐of‐color, anti‐women, anti‐queer, and too‐many‐more‐to‐list, politics of the newly installed Trump administration are emblematic  –  whose norms produce extreme divisions in lifeworlds, including dehumanization and premature death. Relatedly, this shift in being‐with is tied to an intensification of seeing and feeling from the perspective of predation and capture – the proliferation of what can only be called terror (captured for the moment by ceaseless ICE raids on US TV news). As the political theorist Adriana Cavarero has shown, terror is the discourse and perspective of those engaged in warfare. What the present requires, in contrast, is an understanding of what she names “horrorism” – humanned perspectives from those abandoned, surveilled, and targeted by such regimes (Cavarero 2009: 1–3). Finally, unmanned capture demonstrates the intensification of gatekeeping – as a real time calculative background and the emplacement of grammars of actions – in the production of knowledge and affects. Here, what I have called documentary computing or the becoming‐data of documentary signals an increased significance for how we understand seemingly quaint notions like authorship and the “tangible being‐present” that is its precondition. This is all the more important because unmanning, in ways that are both old and new, produces actualities that appear to be self‐generating but seem to lack witnesses. To return to Wigoder’s analysis of the video‐photograph of Gaddafi’s death, these scenes ask us reconsider basic questions and assumptions about agency, authority, witnessing, and mediation. The aim of such questioning, of course, is not a nostalgia for previous social relations or forms of governmentality. Rather, it is to understand and intervene in the documentary cultures of the present. In this regard, one of the key shifts underway has to do with new challenges facing lo‐tech forms of countersurveillance – which are crucial to challenging dominant modes of capture. Writing in the 1990s, John Fiske (2002: 387–388) observed the peculiar power of “low (low capital, low technology, low power) video” to intervene in social contests. Indeed, it was the very low‐tech nature of such recordings, like George Holliday’s video of Rodney King, that gave them their authenticity. One of the effects of current gatekeeping, however, are a series of techno‐political shifts that undercut the significance of nonprofessional and lo‐fi actuality footage. In the case of videos of police shootings or double hit “accidents,” for example, bystander recordings are now subjected to hi‐tech forensic analysis: the complex slowing, zooming, enhancement, shifted perspectives, 3‐D renderings, and so on, act to resituate bystander footage into a new context to be shot again and ­recirculated – not unlike the stilled video image of Colonel Gaddafi captured and rephotographed by an AP reporter on the streets of Sirte.

Notes 1 Drawing on Deleuze, Wigoder emphasizes this “semi‐subjective” mode that relies neither solely on the perspective of the spectator nor the “subjective view of a character (inside), but has its own poetical existence that can be thought of as the camera’s own eye or a form of camera consciousness” (Wigoder 2013: 61).



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2 Contrary to the unmanning of bodily risk, numerous recent articles report on the unexpectedly high occurrence of PTSD among drone pilots. See, for example, Dao (2013). Drone pilots are found to get stress disorders much as those in combat do. The New York Times, [online] 22 February. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/23/us/ drone‐pilots‐found‐to‐get‐stress‐disorders‐much‐as‐those‐in‐combat‐do.html [Accessed 12 July 2017]. 3 On this desire for biometric‐video policing, see Gates (2011: 97–124). 4 On the latter point and, in particular, critiques of screen essentialism, see Kirschenbaum (2008: 25–72). 5 The normalization of kill discourse, wherein casual and celebratory headlines announce the death of dozens, sometimes hundreds, of unnamed and un‐prosecuted people is a crucial part of the so‐called drone war. In this context, the terrorist is conceived as a state‐less actor without rights, who can be killed by anyone – “the enemy of all.” The idea of the enemy of all points back to Cicero and Roman law’s treatment of the pirate and the barbarian. See, for example, Heller‐Roazen (2009). Additionally, what I refer to as “Presidential kill discourse” is exemplified by the headlines of articles like: Sanchez (2017), “Obama’s Last Airstrike ‘Kills 100 Al‐Qaeda Fighters in Syria.” Available at: www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01/21/obamas‐last‐airstrike‐kills‐100‐al‐qaeda‐ fighters‐syria [Accessed 12 Jul. 2017]. 6 Drone porn, while now signifying the production of pornographic films using consumer drone technology, was used to describe Department of Defense videos celebrating precision‐strikes. Such videos were widely circulated online, including being initially posted on the Department of Defense’s own YouTube channel. See, for example, Thompson (2010). Available at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/keith‐thomson/drone‐ porn‐the‐newest‐you_b_407083.html [Accessed 12 Jul. 2017]. Other classified footage circulated widely via Wikileaks. “Collateral Murder,” is one such example: https:// collateralmurder.wikileaks.org. 7 Jeremy Bentham’s notion of the panopticon has been hugely influential in a number of fields, including surveillance studies. The most influential articulation remains: Foucault (1977: 195–230). 8 Michel Foucault’s discussion of biopower as the management of populations based on racial difference/violence is crucial here. See, for instance, Foucault (2003: 239–264). 9 The story circulated widely, see, for example: Wenfang (2011), “Girl in Double Hit‐and‐ Run Dies.” Available at: www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2011‐10/22/content_13953890. htm [Accessed 12  Jul. 2017]; Moore (2011), “Chinese Hit‐and‐Run Toddler Dies.” Available at: www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/8840381/Chinese‐girl‐ run‐over‐by‐a‐car‐dies.html [Accessed 12 Jul. 2017]. 10 This includes very high‐profile events such as the Li Gang Incident. Widely circulated via the meme “My Dad is Li Gang,” the incident occurred on October 16, 2010, when a 22‐year‐old drunk driver, Li Qiming, hit two university students in Hebei. One of the students later died. When arrested, Li Qiming proclaimed “Go Ahead, sue me if you dare. My Dad is Li Gang,” certain his father’s position as the head of the Public Security Bureau would grant him immunity. See, for example, Huazhong (2010), “Drunken Driver Boasts Father Is a Police Official.” Available at: www.chinadaily.com.cn/ china/2010‐10/20/content_11431705.htm. 11 Graphic videos of the incident are available on several streaming sites. See, for example, “Death of Boy Killed by BMW Exposed by Security Video” [男童遭宝马车碾轧身亡现 场视频曝光]: http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMjA2MzQyMTA0.html

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12 Sant also discusses this story on CBC Radio. See As it Happens (2015), “Some Drivers in China Are Intentionally Killing Injured Pedestrians.” Available at: http://www.cbc.ca/ radio/asithappens/as‐it‐happens‐monday‐edition‐1.3218166/some‐drivers‐in‐china‐ are‐intentionally‐killing‐injured‐pedestrians‐1.3218168 [Accessed 12 Jul. 2017]. 13 The video of “black Desi” is available on several streaming platforms, including: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4DT3tQqgRM; See also: Garvie and Frankle (2016). Available at: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/04/the‐underlyingbias‐of‐facial‐recognition‐systems/476991 [Accessed 12 Jul. 2017]. This video also serves as a key example in Browne (2015: 161–164). 14 For more information see: About the Black Lives Matter Network (n.d.). Available at: http://blacklivesmatter.com/about. 15 The Washington Post now keeps yearly records through its open access database, “Fatal Force”: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police‐shootings‐2016.

References About the Black Lives Matter Network. (n.d.). Black Lives Matter’s Official Website. [online] http://blacklivesmatter.com/about (accessed 12 July 2017). Agre, P. (2003). Surveillance and Capture: Two Models of Privacy. In: The New Media Reader (eds. N. Wardrip‐Fruin and N. Monfort), 737–759. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Almukhtar, S., et al. (2016). The Keith Scott Shooting: A 3‐D Reconstruction. New York Times, [online] 13 October. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/09/25/us/charlotte‐scott‐ shooting‐video.html (Accessed 12 July 2017). Apuzzo, M. and Eligon, J. (2015). Ferguson Police Tainted by Bias, Justice Department Says. New York Times, [online] 4 March. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/05/us/us‐calls‐on‐ ferguson‐to‐overhaul‐criminal‐justice‐system.html (accessed 12 July 2017). As it Happens. (2015). Some Drivers in China are Intentionally Killing Injured Pedestrians. CBC Radio, [radio] 7 September. http://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as‐it‐happens‐ monday‐edition‐1.3218166/some‐drivers‐in‐china‐are‐intentionally‐killing‐injured‐ pedestrians‐1.3218168 (accessed 12 July 2017). Associated Press. (2015). Holder’s Report Describes Racial Tension [video]. New York Times [online] 4  March. https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000003551245/holders‐report‐ describes‐racial‐tension.html?searchResultPosition=1 (accessed 12 July 2017). Balázs, B. (1970). Theory of Film: Character and Growth of a New Art (trans. E. Bone). London: Dennis Dobson LTD. Balsom, E. (2017). The Reality‐based Community. e‐flux, [online] Volume 83.http://www.e‐ flux.com/journal/83/142332/the‐reality‐based‐community (accessed 12 July 2017). Browne, S. (2015). Dark Matter: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cavallaro, J., Sonnenberg, S., and Kunckey, S. (2012). Living Under Drones: Death, Injury and Trauma to Civilians from US Drone Practices in Pakistan. New York: International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic (Stanford Law School) and Global Justice Clinic (NYU School of Law). Cavarero, A. (2009). Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence (trans. W. McCuaig). New York: Columbia University Press. Chow, R. (2012). Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.



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CNN Wire Staff. (2011). China Hails Woman Who Rescued Bleeding Toddler Left for Dead. [online] CNN. http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/19/world/asia/china‐toddler‐rescued/index. html (accessed 12 July 2017). Crary, J. (1990). Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Dao, J. (2013). Drone Pilots Are Found to Get Stress Disorders Much as Those in Combat Do. New  York Times, [online] 22 February.http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/23/us/drone‐ pilots‐found‐to‐get‐stress‐disorders‐much‐as‐those‐in‐combat‐do.html (accessed 12 July 2017). Deleuze, G. (1986). Cinema 1: The Movement‐Image (trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. (1995). Negotiations: 1972–1990 (trans. M. Joughin). New  York: Columbia University Press. van Dijck, J. and Poell, T. (2013). Understanding Social Media Logic. Media and Communication 1 (1): 2–14. Fausset, R. and Blinder, A. (2016). Charlotte Officer “Justified” in Fatal Shooting of Keith Scott. New York Times, [online] 30 November.https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/30/us/charlotte‐ officer‐acted‐lawfully‐in‐fatal‐shooting‐of‐keith‐scott.html (accessed 12 July 2017). Fiske, J. (2002). Videotech. In: The Visual Culture Reader (ed. N. Mirzoeff), 383–391. New York: Routledge. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (trans. A. Sheridan). New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, M. (2003). Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975–76 (trans. D. Macey). New York: Picador. Garvie, C. and Frankle, J. (2016). Facial Recognition Software Might Have a Racial Bias Problem. The Atlantic, [online] 7 April. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/04/the‐ underlying‐bias‐of‐facial‐recognition‐systems/476991 (accessed 12 July 2017). Gates, K. (2011). Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition and the Culture of Surveillance. New York: New York University Press. Gregory, D. (2011). From a View to a Kill: Drones and Late Modern War. Theory, Culture and Society 28 (7–8): 188–215. Guo, O. and Ives, M. (2016). A Toddler Dies as Her Mother Checks Her Phone, and  China  Wrings Its Hands. New  York Times, [online] 1  November.http://www. nytimes.com/2016/11/02/world/asia/china‐mobile‐phone‐mother‐daughter.html (accessed 12 July 2017). He, H. (2013). Shenzhen Introduces Good Samaritan Law. South China Morning Post, [online] 1 August. http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1293475/shenzhen‐introduces‐good‐ samaritan‐law (accessed 12 July 2017). Heller‐Roazen, D. (2009). The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations. New York: Zone Books. Huazhong, W. (2010). Drunken Driver Boasts Father Is a Police Official. China Daily, [online] 20 October. www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2010‐10/20/content_11431705.htm (accessed 12 July 2017). Kimbriell, K., et  al. (2016). Fatal Shootings by Police Remain Relatively Unchanged after Two Years. Washington Post, [online] 30 December. https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/fatal‐shootings‐by‐police‐remain‐relatively‐unchanged‐after‐two‐years/2016/12/30/ fc807596‐c3ca‐11e6‐9578‐0054287507db_story.html?utm_term=.26f5b31426a6 Accessed 12 July 2017).

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Kirschenbaum, M. (2008). Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lazzarato, M. (2009). Neoliberalism in Action: Inequality, Insecurity and the Reconstitution of the Social. Theory, Culture and Society 26 (6): 109–133. Lyon, D. (2014). Surveillance, Snowden, and Big Data: Capacities, Consequences, Critique. Big Data & Society 1 (2): 1–13. Mann, S., Nolan, J., and Wellman, B. (2003). Sousveillance: Inventing and Using Wearable Computing Devices for Data Collection in Surveillance Environments. Surveillance and Society 1 (3): 331–355. Minter, A. (2012). China’s Infamous “Good Samaritan” Case Gets a New Ending. Bloomberg, [online] 18  January. https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2012‐01‐17/china‐s‐infamous‐good‐samaritan‐case‐gets‐a‐new‐ending‐adam‐minter (accessed 12 Jul 2017). Moore, M. (2011). Chinese Hit‐and‐Run Toddler Dies. The Telegraph, [online] 21 October. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/8840381/Chinese‐girl‐run‐over‐by‐a‐ car‐dies.html (accessed 12 July 2017). Moten, F. and Harney, S. (2013). The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. New York: Minor Compositions. Nichols, B. (1983). The Voice of Documentary. Film Quarterly 36 (3): 17–30. Paglen, Trevor (2016). Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You). The New Inquiry, [online], 8 December. https://thenewinquiry.com/invisible-images-your-pictures-arelooking-at-you/ (accessed 12 July 2017). Sanchez, R. (2017). Obama’s Last Airstrike “Kills 100 al‐Qaeda Fighters in Syria. The Telegraph, [online] 21  January. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01/21/obamas‐ last‐airstrike‐kills‐100‐al‐qaeda‐fighters‐syria/ (accessed 12 July 2017). Sant, G. (2015). Driven to Kill: Why Drivers in China Intentionally Kill the Pedestrians They Hit. Slate, [online] 4 Sept. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2015/09/ why_drivers_in_china_intentionally_kill_the_pedestrians_they_hit_china_s.html (accessed 12 July 2017). Sobchack, V. (2004). Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Steyerl, H. (2016). A Sea of Data: Apophenia and Pattern (Mis)recognition. e‐flux #72, http:// www.e‐flux.com/journal/72/60480/a‐sea‐of‐data‐apophenia‐and‐pattern‐mis‐recognition Thompson, K. (2010). Drone Porn: The Newest YouTube Hit. World Post, [online]. http:// www.huffingtonpost.com/keith‐thomson/drone‐porn‐the‐newest‐you_b_407083.html (accessed 12 Jul. 2017). Thrift, N. (2004). Movement‐Space: The Changing Domain of Thinking Resulting from the Development of New Kinds of Spatial Awareness. Economy and Society 33 (4): 582–604. Turkle, S. (2011). Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books. Wenfang, L. (2011). Girl in Double Hit‐and‐Run Dies. China Daily, [online] 22 October. www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2011‐10/22/content_13953890.htm (accessed 12  July 2017). Wigoder, M. (2013). The Digitized Death of Colonel Gaddafi and the End of Photography. In: The Versatile Image: Photography, Digital Technologies, and the Internet (eds. A. Moschovi, C. Mckay and A. Plouviez), 53–73. Leuven: Leuven University Press.

7

Corporate Authorship

French Industrial Culture and the Culture of French Industry Brian R. Jacobson

California Institute of Technology

Introduction During the 1950s, the rapid rise of the French economy helped spur the expansion of an important subset of French documentary cinema: the industrial film or, as it was also known in French, the film d’entreprise or film fonctionnel. Although this ­sector of the French film industry provided a site of experimentation and financial support for a number of subsequently recognized auteurs – the likes of Franju, Godard, and Resnais – more often it depended upon the work of many now‐­forgotten film professionals, some of whom hoped to break into feature film production but never made it; others who happily plied their trade in relative obscurity. For all of these filmmakers – and especially for their sponsors – industrial film posed pressing questions about the nature of authorship. These questions concerned tensions between idea and execution, information and interpretation, content and form, and creativity and constraint. Could filmmakers with little knowledge of manufacturing processes properly capture and elucidate them? Could they convey industrial information in engaging, even entertaining ways? Could sponsors with little knowledge of film properly judge the filmmaker’s efforts to do so? Could they understand the significance of film form in the delivery of industrial content? In more practical terms, could sponsors trust directors – who were often seen as profligate artists – to stay within production schedules and budgets and to maintain corporate public images? Finally, could directors trust sponsors to give them the freedom to create respectable work, especially when it might be a gateway to future career prospects? Such questions animated the increasing attention to industrial film in the trade press, in advertising and public relations journals, in books about short and

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industrial film, and in lectures for potential sponsors at industrial film festivals. Some observers worried that industrial film made creation impossible; others argued that constraint promoted creation. Most hedged their bets. In 1965, for instance, the young writer (and later director) François Porcile cynically described le film fonctionnel as “the domain of ‘lost liberty’ [liberté perdu]” (Porcile 1965: 206). But he also acknowledged that it was one of the few practical means to assure regular short film production and that it might even offer aesthetic opportunities. Through “exercises in style,” Porcile argued, some filmmakers could transfer the “nobility” of industries like steel to cinema itself (Porcile 1965: 216).1 In a 1978 special issue devoted to the film d’entreprise, the editors of L’Avant‐scène cinéma offered a similar assessment. On the one hand, they argued, the “art” of industrial film was “put humbly in the service of craft.” On the other hand, however, “the industry [had] never managed entirely to stifle the art” (Un autre cinéma 1978: 3).2 The journal sourced this artistic remnant in more than two decades of work by a small cohort of industrial artisans – Robert Enrico, Jean Guglielmi, Sydney Jézéquel, Robert Ménégoz, and Carlos Vilardebo – whose work appeared in the issue. Situated in a tidy auteurist history dating to the Lumières, Jean Epstein, and Jean Painlevé, these directors offered a starting point for a new canon of ­industrial auteurs. But in establishing an uneasy art–industry binary, the editors of L’Avant‐scène cinéma betrayed the fact that industrial films didn’t quite fit the authorial model. Thanks to a few “real” artists, industry may never have managed to stifle the art, but these directors were the exceptions that proved a rule: the film d’entreprise in its more typical mode was authorless – or rather, its authorship worked differently and had to be sourced elsewhere. As the editorial put it, in industrial film “the personality of the author hides itself behind its subject” (Un autre cinéma 1978). To celebrate the corporate‐funded triumphs of Enrico or Ménégoz was thus to be reminded of the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other industrial films, the authors of which need (and may) never be known. While Franju, Godard, or Resnais might manage to assert enough authorial control to counterbalance corporate intentions, for many directors – handed a script, a budget, and a deadline – the industrial film was a means to a pre‐scribed end. That prescription came from the films’ other authors: their corporate sponsors. What kind of authorship was this? To what degree and through what means did corporations – nonfilm corporations – assert authorial control over film content and form? This chapter examines the nature of documentary authorship in the corporate world, a world of bureaucracy in which authorship was most often deferred from individuals to the abstract entities they served. These conditions shared similarities with the world of film corporations and the model established during the Hollywood studio era. Like their Hollywood counterparts and the similar studio directors of the classical French cinema, industrial filmmakers served the interests of a corporate system and used their creativity to define the corporate image. In each case, films served, as Jerome Christensen has argued about the classical Hollywood system, as instruments of corporate strategy – as expressions of what corporations hoped to be



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(Christensen 2012: 2–3). Thus just as Warner Brothers gangster films, in Christensen’s reading, allegorized the company’s efforts to muscle its way into the marketplace, or MGM’s star vehicles sought to refract its glamor, so films made by nonfilm corporations served multiple roles: first and foremost, of course, to generate profit, but also to deliver corporate content and to reflect overarching corporate ideologies (Christensen 2012: 6–7). In each system, the film director was charged with executing strategy by creating content – giving voice, that is, to corporate ideals. That pivotal role, however, was also a source of uncertainty. Just as certain feature‐film authors – directors like Josef Von Sternberg or Max Ophuls – inspired skepticism in studio strategists, so industrial authors were a source of anxiety for corporate planners, who feared ceding too much of their own voice and agency in the process. For filmmakers and their sponsors, the preoccupation with industrial film authorship had important stakes for the working norms and public perception of their practice. For the historian, the question of authorship has important methodological stakes for how one should approach this subfield of documentary history. The ­parallel rise of the politique des auteurs in the 1950s highlighted the tensions in the corporate model, leading some critics and observers (such as the editors of L’Avant‐ scène cinéma) to seek out auteurs in the industrial film world. One finds the same tendency in industrial film historiography today. The first industrial films to receive scholarly attention – Robert Flaherty’s Revillon Frères‐sponsored Nanook of the North (1922) or Alain Resnais’s Pechinay film, Le chant du styrène (1958), for instance – have been auteur works celebrated for their virtuosic demonstration of creativity in the face of corporate constraint (see Dimendberg 2005). More recently, however, studies of industrial film – shaped by the approaches of the New Film History – have also taken a kind of anti‐authorial turn, shifting the emphasis toward the institutions and settings that nurtured industrial film’s development and use, at times with attention to film authors but just as often not (see Hediger and Vonderau 2009; Acland and Wasson 2011; Grieveson 2012; Orgeron et al. 2012). Thomas Elsaesser has offered a methodological framework for the latter approach, arguing that industrial films should be studied through three As: the Auftraggeber (commissioner), Anlass (the occasion for the commissioned film), and Anwendung oder der Adressat (the film’s purpose and/or audience) (Elsaesser 2009: 23). Elsaesser rightly emphasizes the need for context in studying films that had different production histories and uses than popular, independent, or avant‐garde films. But in pushing those other “A”s – the films’ authors – to the margins, Elsaesser implies that they don’t matter as much for industrial film, whether because their authorship is difficult to ascertain or because authorial control rested so strongly in the hands of the Auftraggeber, not the auteur. This chapter will, in one sense, follow Elsaesser’s approach by acknowledging the central role that corporate film commissioners played in documentary film culture and asking what model of authorship best describes their role. But it will also highlight the limits of corporate control and the tensions between the demands of corporate authors and the needs and aims of the directors and film production companies upon whom they relied. In practice, these various “authors” could scarcely be

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separated, nor should they be in historical analysis. For all of the control that corporate authors had over budgets, subjects, and their films’ ultimate uses, directors and especially producers nonetheless left their own, at times distinctive, often discernable, marks on form, content, and practice. In short, the relationship was symbiotic: a shifting interplay of reliance, imposition, and resistance. In what follows, I explore the nature of that symbiosis in three interrelated contexts: the general discourse about industrial film production and authorship that developed at industrial film festivals and in the film trade press and public relations journals; the shifting definitions of authorship in both film criticism (shaped by the rise of the politique des auteurs) and in French copyright law, which was revised in 1957 to grant greater authorial rights to both film directors and producers; and the specific case of filmmaking by two companies, the Société National des Pétroles d’Aquitaine (SNPA) and its film production partner, Cinétest. From 1955 to 1970, the SNPA sponsored six industrial films, all produced by Cinétest and directed by a series of filmmakers including Robert Ménégoz, Henri Fabiani, and Jean Faurez. The SNPA–Cinétest relationship highlights the concerns about authorial control raised in trade discourse while also demonstrating what authorship looked like in a well‐functioning corporate film relationship. The films that resulted illustrate the means through which such corporations managed to satisfy the needs of the numerous individuals – including but by no means limited to the films’ directors – who could rightly claim authorship and authorial rights over the work they collectively produced. Ultimately, the SNPA–Cinétest example and the discourse that defined its broader context illustrate a profound contradiction at the heart of corporate authorship: in a film world comprised of innumerable authorial claims, all were deferred to an abstract anti‐author, the corporate system.

Making a Corporate Film in the 1950s In October 1957, the Société Nationale des Pétroles d’Aquitaine and the Société Cinétest completed the first project of what would become a 15‐year collaboration.3 Entitled Profondeur 4.000, the 28‐minute film documents the history of the SNPA’s new natural gas refinery in the southern French town of Lacq. The idea for the film had originated more than two years earlier when SNPA president André Blanchard received a request from a trade union, the Chambre Syndicale des Fabricants de Tubes en Fer et en Acier, which hoped to make its own film documenting the use of its member companies’ materials in the construction of the SNPA’s refinery. Blanchard, likely hoping to bolster public support for his own company, saw film as a means to valorize the SNPA’s newest project. During the next six months, Georges d’Hauteville, the SNPA’s director of public relations, took over the project: he identified potential producers using advertisements published in trade journals, narrowed the list to Cinétest, obtained references from colleagues who worked at Cinétest’s previous corporate clients, watched the company’s previous films, and interviewed and negotiated with its president, Robert Courtot. That October, on d’Hauteville’s



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recommendation, Blanchard proposed the plan to the SNPA Board of Directors, and with approval in hand, he wrote to Courtot confirming an agreement for a 35 mm color film of 20–25 minutes, produced by Cinétest but as the exclusive property of the SNPA. It would take two years before Blanchard would have his – the SNPA’s – film. During that time, a long list of filmmakers and SNPA bureaucrats helped determine its final form. Within a month of Blanchard’s letter, Cinétest had produced a first outline of a film with the title “Lacq, Champ Petrolifère,” authored by Pierre Gillette. During 1956 a shifting series of crews shot footage of drilling operations and the refinery’s construction. Georges d’Hauteville still monitored the project from Paris, but for the film crews in Lacq, the new point man was local PR head J. P. Rouchier, who coordinated travel and access to the refinery with its managers, security teams, and other local agents. The following February, Cinétest delivered a new synopsis with a new title, “Le Gaz de Lacq,” but no identified author, Gillette having left the project, presumably because he had been hired to edit Albert Lamorisse’s Le Ballon Rouge (1956). During the next seven months, the film’s voiceover script underwent eight revisions in dialogue with the SNPA’s PR team and technical advisors, both to ensure accuracy and no doubt to keep pace with the SNPA’s efforts to reposition itself politically after the 1956 Suez Canal Crisis (Briand 2010).4 Finally, in October 1957, Cinétest and the SNPA agreed upon and recorded the commentary. Directorial credit went to Jean Faurez, a 20‐year film industry veteran who had gotten his start as a directorial assistant in the 1930s and worked on films including Max Ophuls’s drama about Franz Ferdinand, De Mayerling à Sarajevo (1940). Faurez had experience making documentary shorts and could also draw upon the talents of the five cinematographers who worked on the project. Jacques Klein had the most directly related background, having worked with Henri Fabiani on Les hommes de la nuit (1952), a short film produced by Cinétest‐competitor Son et Lumière for the French coal company Charbonnages de France. But Faurez’s other crewmembers had also worked on short films with industrial film producers including Procinex and Les Films Jean Mineur.5 Their film became SNPA property, but Cinétest retained reproduction rights, ensuring that the two companies had to work together to produce new copies and on any future editions or changes. The latter included an English‐language edition (13,000 Feet Underground) and an updated version with new footage and dialogue (again heavily edited by SNPA staff) in 1963. In 1970, when Cinétest dissolved, it sold these rights back to the SNPA for 5,000 francs. The story of Profondeur 4.000 is typical of industrial film production in 1950s France. Although French industrial film dated to the early silent period and included major corporate sponsors during the interwar years (Bloom  2008; Michel  2009; Levine 2010), it expanded substantially in the 1950s. Riding the wave of economic prosperity that followed the period of reconstruction and taking cues from American businesses and other European competitors, French corporations turned to film as part of a hearty embrace of public relations. Good PR, business leaders hoped, would help ensure competitiveness in a new era of international competition defined by

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European integration and trade deregulation. Industrial film production companies such as Cinétest, Son et Lumière, and Procinex arose to meet this demand. In the process, they provided much needed work for French film professionals, whether industry veterans like Faurez seeking income between major projects (or in their absence), or the newest generation, including many of the early graduates of the Institut des hautes etudes cinématographiques (IDHEC) who had the requisite ­technical skills but little professional experience. The complex authorship of Profondeur 4.000 is also typical of the industrial film industry, and it will sound familiar to anyone who has considered the nature of authorship in popular or art cinema. Added to the usual range of collaborators on any film – the other creators who challenge simple authorial designations – industrial films also integrated the creative and regulatory input of people who often had little or no experience with film: public relations agents like Georges d’Hauteville, technical advisors, boards of directors, and even corporate executives like André Blanchard. This web of creative input, contractual obligation, support, and resistance defined the creative output of corporate relationships like the one established between the SNPA and Cinétest in 1955 and the intricate nature of authorship upon which that output depended.

Corporate Film Conflict and the Discourse of Authorial Control While the history of Profondeur 4.000 – and the fact that the SNPA and Cinétest continued to work together for 15  more years – suggests a fruitful collaboration, such a complex creative web just as often involved conflict. Even for this film, the numerous edits to the film synopsis and eight rounds of revisions to the voiceover illustrate the kinds of tensions that arose between filmmakers and their corporate clients. Notes scribbled in the margins of the draft texts, for instance, show just how exasperated the SNPA’s PR team and technical advisors could become with Cinétest writers who misunderstood the gas industry or attempted to replace specific facts and figures with approximations. For their part, the Cinétest team must have struggled to meet these demands while also creating what they imagined would be an engaging and aesthetically pleasing film. These kinds of tensions were the norm in industrial filmmaking, and they made the question of authorship central in industry discourse in the 1950s. Coverage in the trade press, in public relations magazines, and in lectures at industry events returned, again and again, to the question of authorship. In all of these venues, journalists – and often industrial film producers and directors themselves – attempted to explain film’s value and potential uses in the corporate world while also addressing a series of implicit questions about the nature of control: How, in practical terms, did corporate film work? Who controlled the process? Could filmmakers be trusted? Would their films be useful? Such concerns came to the fore at an event designed to give French industrial film a greater platform: the 1958 Journées Européenes du film technique et industriel in



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Rouen (see Jacobson  forthcoming). The event brought together filmmakers, producers, and corporate executives for five days of screenings, exhibitions, parties, and a series of lectures. The latter, which were aimed largely at would‐be film sponsors, often foregrounded the question of authorship. Of the nearly two dozen speakers, nine addressed the filmmaker‐sponsor relationship, five exclusively. These lectures focused primarily on preempting corporate concerns. First and foremost, speakers urged careful communication between filmmaker and sponsor about their respective goals. If a film was to succeed, both parties would have to be clear about what kind of film they were making and for what audience (a “prestige” film for mass publics, a worker training film, or a technical film for industry insiders). Too often, lecturers warned, conflicts between filmmakers and sponsors arose from the simple failure to reach a mutual understanding – a shared authorial vision – about the form of the end product. In a lecture tellingly titled “Relations Between the Film Director and the Firm,” for instance, director‐producer Jean Bélanger argued that it was up to the filmmaker to ensure this clarity, first by asking the sponsor about the desired goals, audience, tone, and style, then by visiting the business to learn about it, and finally using this information to ensure that whatever went into the film fit the corporation’s profile and met its goals (Bélanger 1958, p. 39). It was also up to the director to use his or her expertise to steer the business toward these goals, even if it meant pushing back against certain requests. Often, for instance, owners, engineers, or technicians would insist that images of certain machines or processes – sources of pride for the business or its workers – “must” be included, even if they had little to do with the film’s aims. In these cases, it was the director’s responsibility to assert more authorial control in the service of the business’s ambitions, even if it contradicted the desires of specific individuals. We might call this authorship as arbitration. Its goal was to find a mutually acceptable corporate vision – the vision of an abstract corporate author – and then work toward it together. This mutual understanding, however, was not always easy to achieve. For Jacques Schatz, director of the production company Films Ganayssa, the problem came down to an obvious difference between the film (a visual medium) and the more typical business forum: the conference, which Schatz argued was primarily an aural format (Schatz 1958: 27). Businessmen acquainted largely with the latter would need to learn how to think visually if they hoped to make good films. At the same time, however, the filmmaker would need to learn something about industry. In a lecture about worker training films, Jean A. Legrand (of the Centre d’études des problèmes Humaines du Travail), emphasized that filmmakers without such understanding often didn’t understand why their films had failed. In these kinds of films, Legrand explained, “the ‘artsy image’ [belle image] doesn’t necessarily pay,” a fact that filmmakers focused only on aesthetics had trouble understanding (Legrand 1958: 28). That lack of understanding explained why so many corporations were skeptical about film’s use value. Such skepticism could also go the other way. A number of the lecturers chided sponsors for their misconceptions about film and its authors. Marc Magnin,

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secretary of the Groupe des Trente, offered the most schematic – and humorous – of these fallacies, noting that too many executives still held a “lasting” and “romantic” vision of the filmmaker as “a man with plaid knickers, a visor and a megaphone, turning the crank himself on a camera from which the film appears completed!” (Magnin 1958: 37).6 In more measured terms, Bélanger counseled his audience that engineers often needed to be reminded that film was also “delicate work,” not just a matter of pushing buttons (Bélanger 1958: 40). Finally, Jean Farcy, director of the in‐house film unit at Renault, similarly encouraged businessmen and engineers to think of film as another kind of tool and to make it their responsibility to determine if it was the best one for their present needs (Farcy and Leymarie 1958: 22). The best‐case scenario, it seemed, would be a hybrid corporate author created through the fusion of filmmaker and industrialist. Schatz envisioned a case in which the sponsor would have some experience in filmmaking, even as an amateur, and the filmmaker some experience working in industry (Schatz  1958: 27). For many of the lecturers, the most practical means to achieve this form of hybrid authorship was to add another intermediary: the technical advisor. This commonly used plan could, at the very least, alleviate corporate anxieties about control. Pierre Mouton (public relations head for the accident prevention association O.P.P.B.T.P.), for instance, argued that the filmmaker may not ever be sufficiently trustworthy, but even the most skeptical sponsor could take some solace in having a technical advisor around to ensure a good final product (Mouton 1958). Similarly, if less cynically, for Marc Cantagrel, a veteran of pedagogical filmmaking and former head of scientific film production at the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers, the technical advisor could help the filmmaker with the essential task of understanding machines and systems. If successful, the filmmaker would be able to “penetrate and interpret the thinking of technicians” (Cantagrel 1958: 35). The ultimate goal, once again, was a hybrid, someone like Cantagrel himself, a trained chemist turned filmmaker. The 1958 festival discourse was by no means isolated. It both distilled the industry’s general sense about this still‐developing practice and helped generate further discourse in the film trade press and even further afield. In the trade papers Le ­technicien du film and La technique cinématographique, articles, interviews, and profiles of corporate film units, directors, and producers helped create an image of the production and distribution processes. According to Henriette Dujarric, editor of Le technicien du film, this coverage – organized in a special new section of the paper in 1958 – was notably prompted not by filmmakers but by corporate executives seeking knowledge about best practices in the new field (Dujarric 1958). Members of France’s growing public relations profession took similar interest in the possibilities that industrial film offered. For them, overcoming the divide between corporate sponsors and film authors was seen as an urgent need. Numerous special features about film began to appear in the PR trade press beginning in the late 1950s, many again written by filmmakers themselves. In the magazine La Maison de verre, for instance, producers including Roger Leenhardt, Pierre Long, Claude Clert, and Robert Mariaud de Serres extolled film’s virtues as a PR instrument while also proposing guidelines for industrial film production.7 Their articles often



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echoed the claims about authorship made at the 1958 festival in Rouen. A 1960 piece by Mariaud de Serres (director of the Société Films et Relations Publiques), for instance, rebukes that ever‐present stereotype of the director as a “robot” and the similar image of the corporate sponsor as little more than a “budget machine” (Mariaud de Serres 1960). But these often‐self‐interested writings (which at times stray into overt self‐­ promotion) also placed an additional emphasis on the role of another potential author: the film producer. A 1961 article by producer Pierre Long, director of Son et Lumière, one of the most prolific French industrial film companies, illustrates this rhetorical turn. Long begins by reproaching filmmakers for their role in generating one of the corporate sponsors’ greatest fears: directors more intent upon artistry than delivering coherent messages. “As a result of ‘cloaking’ messages and concealing intentions under the pretext of providing spectacle,” Long argued, “we have made aestheticized, bizarre  .  .  .  ‘labyrinth‐like’ films” (Long  1961).8 It was not, ­however, only film directors who were to blame for this “luxury of uselessness.” While it was true that directors demanding freedom from constraint and intent upon making masterpieces were obvious candidates, it was also true that corporate sponsors often knew little about how to deliver views of industry that would be comprehensible to the average viewer. The solution? That sage, business‐oriented, and most PR‐like figure of the film world: the producer. “In his hands,” Long argued (essentially about himself), “this art was bound to exceed the stage of its original seduction to become a means of expression of which the possibilities for precision and clarity offer an infinite field of action for public information” (Long 1961).9 Other producers made similar claims for their own authorial utility. In an article calling for a “change in the relations between producers and businesses,” Claude Clert, director of Les Films Caravelle, for instance, highlighted the producer’s instrumental role in responding to another corporate concern: cost (Clert 1960). Cannily shifting both the power and the responsibility for a film’s success away from directors and into the hands of the corporation and the film producer, Clert councils executives to work with just one producer, to give this producer precise and comprehensive information about the problems that the film should address and the means available to make it (including shooting locations and funds), and to offer the ­producer a small budget to produce a preliminary study, from which a final, more precise budget could be determined. Given these means, the producer should then be able to provide a clear proposal and realistic budget for the eventual film and thereby preempt later conflicts.10 Implicit in such calls for a new relationship between filmmakers and corporate sponsors was the removal of at least one author from the whole equation: the film director. If, as so many of the commentators at Rouen and in the trade press had insisted, the great need for corporate filmmaking was predictability (of budgets and film products), why not simply remove what most agreed was the most unpredictable variable? And if the goal was mutual understanding between filmmaker and film sponsor – to the point that many fantasized about a mythical filmmaker‐­ industrialist hybrid – why not put the power in the hands of the closest thing: the

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film producer, someone with both filmmaking chops and business acumen? Who better to bring aesthetics to business than someone who had learned to make a business out of ­aesthetics? Beyond the realm of self‐promotional rhetoric, a framework for such a ­system was being created. In both film critical discourse and the French legal system, new ways of thinking about creation and ownership were in the works, and they had important consequences, both for the practical functioning of French corporate film and for its definition of authorship.

Corporate Authorship in a New Authorial Context The concerns about authorship that film producers and sponsors voiced during the post–World War II decades need to be understood in the context of contemporaneous developments in corporate culture and French law. If authorship was so prominent in industrial film discourse in the 1950s, it was due in part to the fact that the status of creative work produced under the corporate banner had reemerged as a cultural and legal concern. Two specific developments defined this reemergence: the revision of French copyright law in 1957 and the rise of the politique des auteurs in discourse about French film. The legal changes to copyright (le droit d’auteur – literally, the right of the author), in particular, not only had practical effects on the working practices of industrial film; they also highlighted the complicated nature of – and longstanding conflicts over – creative authorial work produced in industrial settings. Suspicion about individual authorship was nothing new for French industry. As Molly Nesbit has argued, nineteenth‐century copyright laws highlighted a fundamental contradiction between individual authorship and industrial prerogatives. Put most succinctly by Nesbit, “industry did not want authors in its ranks; it wanted control over the property rights to every phase of production, from technical drawing to finished commodity” (Nesbit 1987: 234).11 French laws drew a sharp distinction between industrial and artistic property, the former comprising things like industrial designs, models, trademarks, and patents; the latter oriented initially toward music, theater, and literary works. The distinction would prove important, for corporations worked hard to maintain control over – and dispute the authorial basis of – creative work produced at their behest (McCauley 2008: 62). Inherent in this distinction was a set of judgments about what counted as “art” and “culture” in the first place. As Nesbit explains, authorship only applied to particular cultural works defined by particular media forms. To be culture, work required personality and imagination, but these traces of the artist could only be found in certain kinds of media. In nineteenth‐century corporations, the medium that most highlighted the tensions in this model was drawing. While drawing had and might still be a form of art, one kind of drawing – technical drawing for industrial design – could not count as art because industrial objects and their designs were corporate property. The expert draughtsman – a vital industrial agent – thus could not achieve the status of artist and had to cede authorship to the corporation. French copyright laws codified this arrangement, one in which, as Nesbit



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puts it, “the cultural was always being distinguished from its other, the industrial” (Nesbit 1987: 234–235). The inventions of photography, phonography, and cinema – and the authorial claims soon made by the culture makers who used them – disrupted this arrangement. To grant the title of artist to these machines’ users was to associate their machines with high culture. Doing so threatened to associate machine labor too closely with aristocratic culture and thereby to break down the distinction that had defined culture itself (Nesbit 1987: 236).12 In authorial terms, if machine labor was a kind of art – making its laborers artists and thus authors – where would that leave the corporations who had been able to claim ownership of machine‐made products based on their status as not art and thus not authored, at least not by an individual author with the legal right to his or her work? These questions went unresolved in French law until a revision of copyright in 1957 expanded to include cinema and photography.13 In granting copyright protection to cinema, the law had to take up the complex nature of authorship in collaborative arts. It did so by granting authorial status to specific film professionals including directors, writers, and composers. As Nesbit argues, this was a boon to the French film critics promoting the director’s essential authorship under the banner of the politique des auteurs (Nesbit 1987: 239). In recognizing the director as author, even of a collaborative work, French copyright made directors artists and associated cinema with other traditional arts that similarly relied upon “crews” – whether art studio understudies, bookbinders, brush makers, or gaffers – who ceded their creativity to a single authorial figure. On the other hand, the law also defined cinema as an industrial as much as an artistic form. It did so by granting final ownership of film products to the producers. In effect, the law made cinema, as Nesbit describes, “take on some of the characteristics of ordinary, gritty, factory‐made work” (Nesbit 1987: 239). Film inhabited a gray zone. Not quite advertising, which was denied copyright protection altogether, nor painting, which bore none of the foul traces of industry, film was legally coded as a hybrid industrial art. For Nesbit, the modernization of copyright law thus “began to undermine the old, clear distinction between culture and industry” (Nesbit 1987: 239). But in another sense, it simply placed culture even more firmly in industrial hands.14 After all, even as the politique des auteurs was attempting to wrest art away from industry by arguing that even in the most regimented sectors of Hollywood’s “dream factory system” one could still find true artists, French law stepped in to ensure that such art, in the French context at least, was still the domain of the producer and the corporation. Godard and Truffaut might be artists – even authors – but Beauregard and Braunberger owned the products. It is important to recall that one of the main targets of criticism for those promoting the politique des auteurs was the so‐called “quality cinema.” This technically refined, Hollywood‐like form was in part the result of the new influx of graduates of the IDHEC, the filmmakers who we might think of as the industrial draughtsman of French cinema: artisans, not artists; industrial experts who lent their creativity and ceded their rights to corporate authors. Resistance to “quality cinema” was in part a

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response to these graduates and the competition for work and access to the means of production that they represented. In other words, claims for authorship and art status were arguably one discursive attempt to undercut a sector of the film workforce by associating IDHEC training with a dull form of film‐as‐industry. That the IDHEC graduates often found work in industrial film underscores the point: this corporate film world of non‐art anonymity was where they belonged. The resulting tensions spilled over from popular criticism into the discourse of industrial film itself. Its leading proponents resented the directors who not only took away much‐needed work from the industrial film sector but also attempted to turn industrial film into little more than prestige‐making spectacle. These ­tensions came to the surface after the 1960 “Festival international du film industrial” in Rouen. Industrial film professionals criticized the festival organizers and jury for presenting industrial film as something it wasn’t. The veteran director and industrial film producer Fred Jeannot, for instance, lamented that the festival had created “an erroneous conception of industrial film” and asked if Rouen had actually been an “industrial” film festival or just “a festival of films by ‘­cinéastes’ about industrial subjects” (Jeannot 1960). Jeannot’s question ­concerned the differences in quality that could distinguish what he considered industrial film proper – films shot at relatively low cost in black and white 16 mm – from ­expensive, 35 mm color films that had come to dominate the festival, wowing audiences and juries with harmonious movements, precise editing, and pristine images. Playing, perhaps unwittingly, right into the discourse of the politique des auteurs, Jeannot argued that these prestige films were the work not of industrial filmmakers but rather of “cineastes.” The work of industrial film, he implied, deserved respect for its quiet competence; its authors deserved recognition that they were unlikely to receive when forced to compete with an altogether different domain of film art. Jeannot’s criticism went to the heart of the tension in industrial film between functionality and artistry. Thanks to the 1957 revision of French copyright law, that divide also distinguished two kinds of authorship: the functional kind that made “authors” anonymous corporate servants, and the artistic kind that promised creative freedom, even if it still put the power with the producers. Both versions were operative in the world of industrial film, and both worked to leave the majority of its filmmakers in silent anonymity.15 The law granted power to companies like Cinétest, Son et Lumière, and the Société Films et Relations Publiques that enlisted film artists to work as industrial artisans producing corporate products for corporate partners like the SNPA. The law’s application to the industrial film context highlights its assertion of industrial control over art – that is, how it supported the appropriation of film culture by industrial capital, both within and beyond the narrow realm of the film industry itself. The hopes voiced by industrial film producers and corporate sponsors that hybrid artist‐industrialists could best create industrial films found validation in the French legal code. Films were industrial products, their producers were industrial partners, and art would be put in the service of industrial capitalism.



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At the 1958 Industrial Film Festival in Rouen, the union representing film producers presented corporate attendees with a code of practice designed to make the new system clear (see Présentation . . . 1958). In it, the producers highlighted their own official status as holders of licenses assigned by the Centre National de la Cinématographie (CNC), which also regulated the whole production process. The document then outlined the laws governing financing, production, and distribution. Its sponsors aimed, most succinctly, to put corporate sponsors at ease with the knowledge that their collaborators were industry professionals like them, and that they were backed and monitored by the state. These were no profligate artists; they were businessmen. Even better – and this was the point – the industrial film producer was the one who could control the artists without whom the whole system collapsed. The producer could perform the complicated task of turning those artists’ creativity into a corporate product. The producer had the film vision and the business acumen to balance the interests of art and industry. The producer, finally, had the legal right to make claims on the artists and to cut deals with the corporations. That right and the influence it ensured gave producers powerful author‐like control within the corporate film system.

Corporate Personhood, or, Authors upon Authors in a World Without Authors But did corporate films even have authors? For all of the potential authorial claims, only one tended to matter, and it was the most abstract: the corporate brand. Profondeur 4.000 was an SNPA film, and it if wasn’t that, it was a Cinétest film. To be sure, it was also a Robert Courtot film and a Jean Faurez film. At a stretch, it might even be a film by Pierre Gillette (its first scriptwriter), not to mention the dozens of other crewmembers and SNPA staff who oversaw its completion. This symbiotic kind of authorship resisted direct authorial claims and it resists author‐centered analysis. For a system in which the relative influence of director, producer, and corporate sponsor could vary widely – and is often difficult to trace in the archives – only select films made by select directors lend themselves to the auteur approach. As the SNPA‐Cinétest case suggests, corporate authorship was always collaborative, and arguably more so than feature filmmaking, especially as defined by the politique des auteurs. In this sense, the corporate “author” tended to be many authors. Corporate authorship, in other words, worked like the corporation itself: a collective authorized to act as a single entity. At the commissioning corporation, this collective could include everyone from CEOs, boards of directors, and public relations officers to low‐level bureaucrats and technical advisors. Whoever they were, they were subsumed under the corporation. Something similar was true for the filmmakers who worked for industrial film production companies. Directors often received name credit on their films, especially for “prestige” work, and they maintained a degree of control over the final product. But as the experience of Faurez on Profondeur 4.000

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shows, they might have to work with shifting film crews, with numerous scripts shaped by various writers, and on projects with changing and uncertain aesthetic goals. Only the industrial film producer – people like Courtot – could claim a modicum of individuality, but those producers often hid it behind corporate brands like Cinétest. In another sense, then, the corporate author was scarcely an author at all, at least not insofar as authorship is equated with human agency. Tracing authorship to all of the individuals who might lay claim to creative agency – that is, scaling down to the micro level – reveals a diffuse system of authorial symbiosis composed of human subjects with diverse objectives. But reversing this path – scaling up to a macro view of the system as a whole – points to quite the opposite: a single abstract author, capitalism, with a distinct objective, profit. The kinds of assumptions held by corporate sponsors – and resisted by filmmakers and producers – tended toward the latter ideal. This explains the persistent corporate image of filmmakers as robots. However much they may have pushed back against it, industrial filmmakers were meant to be industrial agents with the agency of cogs in the corporate machine. As the editors of L’Avant‐scène cinéma understood, in the film d’entreprise the author’s personality was meant to hide behind the subject (Un autre cinéma 1978). The flipside of course was that the sponsors who imagined this robotic system were no less part of it. The whole system, in its most ideal form, tended to defer authority to an abstract, nonhuman system from which humans derived their agency. Corporate authorship operated in the balance of this movement between deferral and derivation. For all of its abstraction, this system has had clear repercussions for corporate power and aesthetic experience since at least the 1940s. The corporate appropriation of modern esthetics and cinematic experience has played an instrumental role in creating the modern image world – the “society of the spectacle,” to use the name coined by Guy Debord in the immediate aftermath of the corporate film acceleration of the 1950s. The spectacle is at once diffuse – seemingly without (or with an endless number of) identifiable authors‐cum‐ideological agents – and singular but abstract – driven by capitalism itself and its elusive agent: the “corporate person.” Like corporate film, corporate personhood does not lend itself to authorial approaches, for in each case the system is designed to resist not just authorial claims but also authorial responsibility. If no one can claim agency, who can bear the responsibility for action? We live in a world shaped by corporate action and, for now at least, its legal protection. In the United States, in particular, the legal status of corporate personhood goes to the very heart of new millennial debates about capitalism and (in)equality. In the wake of the 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision (in case 08‐205/558 U.S. 310), corporations have operated with the legal rights of individuals – authors of their own political, religious, and social ideologies. It’s hard to define this authorship or assign it to any individual authors. In companies with thousands of employees – the microlevel authors of corporate products, often including films – who is ultimately responsible for the corporate person’s decision to support this political candidate or that religious belief or some other social norm?



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All of this is no doubt strategic, a means, for instance, to ensure, in the case of corporate malfeasance, that crimes are legally “authorless.”16 Faced with such uncertainty, such ambiguity, and so few clear signs of individual agency, it might seem futile even to consider authorship. But every ideology requires a moment of execution that resides in that space between deferred authorship and derived agency. In the realm of aesthetics, the moment of execution was also a moment of interpretation – when abstract ideology had to become something concrete, something tangible, visible, and meant for mass public persuasion. This, and not just overshot budgets, is why corporate sponsors were so worried about profligate artist filmmakers. Those individual authors did have opportunities for agency that had to be carefully controlled. They had opportunities to introduce uncertainty, to flip the script, and to shift the balance – to be more than robots, even when the corporate sponsors – and even their own producers – tried to ensure that they couldn’t ever be anything else. To investigate corporate authorship at the micro level is to seek out those individual authors and the small moments of execution that coalesced to form the official corporate images we see – the macro‐level works of abstract corporate authors. Theirs is a politique des auteurs for un autre cinéma – a cinema of artisans who would be artists; draughtsmen who would be authors. They’re mostly unheralded and forgotten, but they’re also the agents behind the spectacle, the authors who endowed corporate personhood with aesthetic forms – forms that need to be better understood for all they can tell us about the logic behind the spectacle and the specificity behind the abstraction.

Notes 1 Porcile’s description of “exercices de style” recalls Raymond Queneau’s narration in Resnais’s Le chant du styrène (1958). See Dimendberg’s discussion of this phrase’s significance (Dimendberg 2005: 82). 2 « Dans lequel l’industrie, à y bien regarder, n’est jamais parvenue à étouffer tout à fait l’art ». 3 The history of the SNPA‐Cinétest collaboration that follows is based on documents held at the Archives historiques du Groupe Total S.A. at La Défense, Ile‐de‐France. I thank Benoît Doessant and the team at Total for their generous assistance. 4 After the crisis, the SNPA came under increasing pressure to accelerate its operations, while also negotiating new government loans and a potential national gas tax. 5 Faurez’s previous shorts included Les Grenadiers de Lessach (1952) and Georges de la Tour, peintre oublié (1954), a contribution to the artist film genre that was much celebrated by French critics in the 1950s. The rest of the crew included André Villard, who had directed a segment of the 1954 Cannes‐nominated short La vie des chamois and worked on films including Jean‐Pierre Melville’s Vingt‐quatre heures de la vie d’un clown (1946) and Les vacances de M. Hulot (Jacques Tati, 1953); Raymond Picon‐Borel, who had worked for Procinex (on the 1955 short documentary Les Bras de la Seine [Claude‐Jean Bonnardot]) and Jean Mineur (where he worked with Henri Alekan on Comédiens ambulants [Jean Canolle, 1946]); and Jean Penzer, who also worked on a Procinex film, Georges Franju’s Mon chien (1955), and as camera operator for André Dumaitre on Yannick Bellon’s short Colette (1952).

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6 “Encore aujourd’hui, trop de chefs d’entreprise se font une vision — disons « romantique » — des cinéastes et se figurent voir arriver un monsieur avec des knibockers à carreaux, une visière et un porte‐voix, tournant lui‐même la manivelle d’une caméra dont le film sortirait terminé ! . . . Et croyez‐moi, cette illusion a la vie dure.” 7 Roger Leenhardt perceptively noted the parallel – and not coincidental – rise of French public relations and industrial film, arguing that whether it was the direct influence or simply the “spirit” of the former, there could be little doubt that interest in industrial film came from the recognition in the PR world that selling ideas required a nuance that had been absent in earlier publicity and propaganda (see Leenhardt 1960). 8 “A force d’« enrober » les messages, à force de dissimuler les intentions, sous prétexte de donner « du spectacle », on a fait de l’esthétisme, de l’insolite. . . des films « labyrinthe ». Le mot d’ordre semblait être: Tout, pourvu qu’on s’offre le luxe de l’innefficacité. C’était pour le prestige.” 9 “Entre ses mains, cet art doit dépasser le stade de sa seduction originelle pour devenir un moyen d’expression dont les possibilities de precision et de claret offrent un champ d’action infini pour l’information du public.” 10 Mariaud de Serres advocated an alternative version of this arrangement in which corporations would generate a library of short film segments (at fixed prices), rather than whole films. The film producer would then work closely with agents within the corporation (technical directors as well as PR people), becoming a kind of corporate employee charged with overseeing the production of all future films using the premade content (Mariaud de Serres 1960). 11 In France, as elsewhere in Western Europe, laws governing authorial privilege date to the fifteenth century, when monarchs wielding “royal privilege” sought to control arts performed in their courts as well as the output of the newest mass medium, the printing press. New edicts issued in the wake of the French Revolution and in the early nineteenth century established the basis for modern copyright protection. This included the reinstitution of the dépôt légal, the system that required authors claiming copyright protection to deposit copies in state libraries, a practice that dated to the sixteenth century but was overturned during the revolution, renewed in 1810, and applied to lithographs in 1817. For an overview of this history (see McCauley 2008: 59–61). 12 Those who resisted the idea that mechanical reproduction could produce art tended to point to the importance of the artist’s hand. As Anne McCauley argues, such claims had an important effect on the discourse of arts like painting, which had previously sourced their artistry in composition and argued that handwork was the domain of mere artisans. Legal claims by photographers presenting themselves as artists, however, pushed painters to reverse such claims and take up the hand, not just composition (which photographers could rightly claim made photographs art), as a critical component of artistic practice (see McCauley 2008: 71). 13 My discussion of the 1957 law’s approach to cinema draws heavily on Nesbit’s work (see Nesbit 1987: 238–239). 14 André Bazin had anticipated this move. Recognizing both the power that producers held in the film industry and the degree to which film culture was industrial culture, Bazin reminded readers in 1953 that “film is not an art AND an industry, but instead an industrial art that is likely to vanish into thin air as soon as the industry’s profits disappear” (Bazin 1997 [1953]: 85).



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15 The law also helps clarify an important point: industrial films were not understood to be advertising, either in the strict legal sense or within industry or the film trade. Rather, they circulated in commercial venues, at times via the same distribution networks as fiction and nonfiction feature films, or in public and private venues (schools, churches, factories, etc.) via corporate cinémathèques. On the history of film advertising more specifically, see the essays in (Vonderau et al. 2016). 16 In French, the perpetrator of a crime is its auteur.

References Acland, C.R. and Wasson, H. (eds.) (2011). Useful Cinema. Durham: Duke University Press. Bazin, A. (1997 [1953]). Will Cinema Scope Save the Film Industry? In: Bazin at Work: Major Essays and Reviews from the Forties and Fifties (trans. A. Piette and B. Cardullo) (ed. B. Cardullo), 77–92. London: Routledge. Originally published in Esprit, 21(207‐208) (October‐November 1953), 672‐683. Bélanger, J. (1958). Les rapports entre le réalisateur de films et l’entreprise. La Revue de Rouen 10 (1): 39–40. Bloom, P.J. (2008). French Colonial Documentary: Mythologies of Humanitarianism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Briand, C. (2010). Société Nationale des Pétroles d’Aquitaine: An Industrial Strategy between National Interests and Local Expectations (from 1951 to the end of the 1960s). In: A  Comparative History of National Oil Companies (ed. A. Beltran), 215–232. Bruxelles; New York: Peter Lang. Cantagrel, M. (1958). Le réalisateur de film technique dans ses rapports avec l’entreprise. La Revue de Rouen 10 (1): 35–36. Christensen, J. (2012). America’s Corporate Art: The Studio Authorship of Hollywood Motion Pictures. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press. Clert, C. (1960). Il faut changer les relations entre les producteurs et les entreprises. La Maison de verre 4: 24–25. Dimendberg, E. (2005) “These are not exercises in style”: Le Chant du Styrène. October (112), 63–88. Dujarric, H. (1958). Les industriels et le cinéma. Le Technicien du film et le cahier de l’exploitation 4 (38): 13. Elsaesser, T. (2009). Archives and Archaeologies: The Place of Non‐Fiction Film in Contemporary Media. In: Films That Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media (eds. V. Hediger and P. Vonderau), 19–34. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Farcy, J. and Leymarie (1958). Communication de M. Farcy sur la place tenue par le film dans les auxiliaires audio‐visuels. La Revue de Rouen 10 (1): 22–25. Grieveson, L. (2012). The Work of Film in the Age of Fordist Mechanization. Cinema Journal 51 (3): 25–51. Hediger, V. and Vonderau, P. (eds.) (2009). Films that Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Jacobson, B. (forthcoming). On the Red Carpet in Rouen: Industrial Film Festivals and a World Community of Film Makers. In: Films That Work II (eds. V. Hediger, F. Hoof and Y. Zimmerman). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

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Jeannot, F. (1960). Une conception erronée du film industriel. La Technique cinématographique 28 (213): 254. Leenhardt, R. (1960). Cinéma et Relations Publiques. La Maison de verre 3: 26–27. Legrand, J.A. (1958). Pour une mesure objective de l’efficacité des films de formation. La  Revue de Rouen 10 (1): 28–29. Levine, A.J.M. (2010). Framing the Nation: Documentary Film in Interwar France. New York: Continuum. Long, P. (1961). Le film de R.P.: La Passion de l’inutile. La Maison de verre 8: 39. Magnin, M. (1958). Du réalisateur de court métrage dans ses rapports avec l’entreprise. La Revue de Rouen 10 (1): 37–38. Mariaud de Serres, R. (1960). De la continuité des rapports entre les entreprises et les producteurs de films. La Maison de verre 5: 19–21. McCauley, A. (2008). “Merely Mechanical”: On the Origins of Photographic Copyright in France and Great Britain. Art History 31 (1): 57–78. Michel, A.P. (2009). Corporate Films of Industrial Work: Renault (1916–1939). In: Films that Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media (eds. V. Hediger and P. Vonderau), 167–186. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Mouton, P. (1958). La collaboration entre commanditaires et producteurs réalisateurs. La Revue de Rouen 10 (1): 32–34. Nesbit, M. (1987). What Was an Author? Yale French Studies 73: 229–257. Orgeron, D., Orgeron, M., and Streible, D. (eds.) (2012). Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States. Oxford: New York: Oxford University Press. Porcile, F. (1965). Défense du court métrage français. Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf. Présentation d’un document officiel du syndicat des producteurs français de films éducatifs, documentaires et de court métrage (1958). La Revue de Rouen, 10(1), 41–47. Schatz, J. (1958). Naissance d’un film technique. La Revue de Rouen 10 (1): 26–27. Un autre cinéma (1978). L’Avant‐scène cinéma, (199/200), 3. Vonderau, P., Florin, B., and De Kerk, N. (eds.) (2016). Films That Sell: Moving Pictures and Advertising. London: BFI/Palgrave Macmillan.

8

A Skillful Isis

Esfir Shub and the Documentarian as Caretaker Alla Gadassik

Emily Carr University of Art + Design

Introduction When early film critics in the Soviet Union debated between the filmmaking approaches of Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein, the name of Esfir Shub often appeared as a third mediating figure. Shub, a pioneer of the documentary mode that Jay Leyda (1964) would call the “compilation film” or “compilation documentary” (9), became a favorite example of a self‐effacing artist dedicating herself to locating fragments of anonymous or forgotten footage and piecing together the national history they revealed. Unlike her friend Sergei Eisenstein, whose early films also strived to capture the postrevolutionary Soviet spirit, Esfir Shub’s work was grounded in archival material, without taking dramatic liberties or relying on controlled staging. And unlike her colleague Dziga Vertov, the most vocal promoter of a cinema grounded in factual reality, Shub avoided formally bold and stylistically inventive filmmaking techniques in favor of simple editing structures with longer takes and clearly delineated thematic arcs.1 Her contemporaries rhetorically framed her as the exemplar of ideal authorship in a socialist state: dedicated to accurately portraying her society; modest and diligent; meticulously attentive to the archival reels and newsreel sequences that formed her raw material; austere and unobtrusive in her formal approach. According to Martin Stollery, Shub’s “authorial invisibility” in assembling other cinematographers’ footage into new politically charged compositions embodied the socialist value of the author as producer, “thinking and working collectively, rather than just as an individual concerned with making her own films” (2002: 93–94). In other words, Shub’s achievements as a documentary filmmaker were praised more for avoiding intervention than for intervening. That such praise

A Companion to Documentary Film History, First Edition. Edited by Joshua Malitsky. © 2021 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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was typically bestowed by critics and artists, who themselves took great pains to promote and assert their own authorial contributions, is an irony not lost on film historians who have written about Shub’s work (e.g., Atwood 1993, Stollery 2002, Osipova 2011, Malitsky 2013, Kostina and Dyhlyuk 2016). While Shub wrote little about her experiences as a filmmaker, and even less about being one of the few women directors of her generation, subsequent scholars have noted the gender dynamics implicit in her legacy as the consummate team player of early Soviet cinema. What remains largely neglected in discussions of Shub’s work, however, is her wider career as a film editor that preceded and then defined her independent work. Esfir Shub may have been exceptional in achieving her status as an early female documentary auteur, but she was also exemplary of a much broader trend of authorial invisibility attributed to women working in the editing room. These women included not only notable editor Elizaveta Svilova (Dziga Vertov’s collaborator and wife), but Shub’s colleague Tatiana Kuvshinchikova, Sergei Eisenstein’s editing assistant Esfir Tobak, and numerous editing assistants, who worked anonymously, or whose work was not credited as a creative contribution. As Esther Leslie writes in her recent profile of Shub, whose compilation documentaries Leslie places in the tradition of the essay film: It is hard to see Esfir Shub because of her authorial anonymity, her use of found footage, grainy, second‐hand materials, gathered strips made by nameless filmers. Shub was an editor of films. Or perhaps someone whose labor on film did not even have a name, for she was not simply an editor in the way that many other women were, in terms of their job description, engaged in sorting shots, cutting the negative, but not making even a rough cut of the film. In her work, she did something else. (2015: 10)

Leslie goes on to define this “something else,” like other scholars have done before her, as something other than the craft of film editing, yet still outside the traditional parameters of directorial authorship, running into the inevitable challenge of trying to articulate the distinction. Rather than continuing to focus on establishing Shub as a director, I want to resituate her work in the context of that anonymous editing collective, from which she supposedly elevated herself. What can early writings by and about Shub tell us about the undocumented history of those editors and editing assistants, who assembled a significant amount of early Soviet cinema, particularly documentary films? Where was the line between editing as mere cutting and assembling and editing as creative generative montage, and what kind of model of authorship may have shaped that difference? Focusing on Esfir Shub as a case study for approaching these larger questions, this chapter locates the different and sometimes incompatible roles that editing played in early cinema discourse, particularly editing (noun) as a formal property of film and editing (verb) as a stage in film production. In the course of pursuing the first meaning, I consider the stakes of Shub’s relative restraint in cutting her footage at a time when her contemporaries called for more



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transformative, more rapid, and more radical editing forms. In pursuing the second, I highlight the gendered tenor that framed the actual process of editing as the work of a collective female apparatus endowed with invaluable dexterity but lacking its own creative intentionality. The widely circulated portrait of the ideal editing assistant (монтажница/montazhnitsa, or montagess), which Shub continued to embody even as a director, depicted her as a faithful, observant, and selfless caretaker of film – a gifted preservationist rather than a maker. This portrayal of the editor as a caretaker implicitly influenced the diminished authorial status of film editing more broadly and the compilation documentary of the type that Shub pioneered more specifically.

Editing as Re‐editing: Revision and Preservation The major challenge in discussing Shub’s work stems from her biographical connection to numerous more famous contemporaries, which inevitably begs comparative evaluations. Shub’s name may be well known to scholars of early documentary cinema and Soviet film, but it is a name that never appears alone. All writing on Shub’s life and work positions her within a larger network of figures, many of whom were more prolific and more influential on the trajectory of film theory. After graduating from university with a degree in literature, Shub worked in various administrative roles in the newly established Theater Department of the People’s Commissariat of Education (TEO). Her duties included serving as personal assistant to theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold, and in this capacity she became closely acquainted with Moscow’s inner circle of avant‐garde playwrights and poets. Her second husband was pioneering constructivist artist and theorist Alexei Gan, who died under suspicious circumstances that suggested he was a victim of Stalinist repression.2 When Shub left the theater world for the film industry in 1922, her understanding of the importance of editing in shaping the meaning of individual shots was influenced by time spent in the studio of Lev Kuleshov, whose work formed the foundation of what would become known as Soviet montage.3 In addition to Kuleshov, filmmaker Dziga Vertov and his collective (the “kinoks”) inspired Shub with their commitment to making films based on captured fragments of reality, rather than staged fictional scenarios (Shub 1972). Vertov even served as Shub’s mentor and intellectual sparring partner until deteriorating studio politics strained their relationship. Finally, Sergei Eisenstein, the third major figure of early Soviet montage, credited Shub with introducing him to the inner workings of the editing studio and handing him his very first piece of celluloid. The two maintained a lifelong friendship, and Shub claims that Eisenstein continued to seek her advice on film scripts and ideas, although publicly he kept at a distance.4 Moving between these roles of assistant, student, partner, mentor, friend, and collaborator, Shub’s legacy takes on as much of a compilational character as her films. Even her contemporaries routinely defined her achievements by relating them to other figures in her orbit, while at the same time using her work as a favorite

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springboard to launch accusations against rivals. This relational matrix was not a straightforward case of a filmmaker consigned to playing supporting roles by others; it was a role that Shub herself seemed to fully embrace. In her own memoir Krupnym Planom/Close-Up (1959), Shub devotes most of the book to profiles of peers and co‐workers, as well as defending those colleagues whose reputations were under attack at the time of publication.5 Chapters are structured around the names of her mentors and friends, whom she describes in careful and elaborate detail. Conversely, any comments on the methods and considerations underpinning her own films are terse, vague, and peppered with repetitive slogans likely crafted to prove her allegiance to the state’s ideological program. It is telling that Shub always reflects on her career indirectly through the choices she makes to detail or gloss over the qualities of others, often creating a pattern of linked recollections rather than assertive claims.6 This compilational quality of her autobiography echoes the kind of filmmaking approach she cultivated during her early training as an editor at the Goskino film studio. In addition to participating in the production of newsreel shorts, Shub got her big break in a department responsible for re‐editing [перемонтаж/peremontazh] foreign films to comply with postrevolutionary ideological standards. Imported film reels had to pass through censors and be reworked in the editing suite, so that they could be screened for the Soviet public without compromising the viewers’ ideological re‐education.7 For example, historian Yuri Tsivian notes that happy endings (colloquially called “American endings”) would be removed, in order to prevent spectators from believing that Western capitalism could have a positive outcome (1996: 333). Soviet film critics of the period frequently derided, with some justification, the disjointed and absurd results of such re‐editing exercises. However, Tsivian argues that the re‐editing mandate also made room for innovative and clever approaches to reassembling existing footage into new configurations; this, in turn, influenced the central role that montage would come to play in Soviet film theory. According to Shub, during her time as a film re‐editor she reworked some 200 foreign fiction films, primarily of German and American origin (1972: 73, 250). Her favorite projects consisted of writing new narratives for puzzling film reels that arrived without any guiding intertitles, or that were cut up and chaotically abandoned in the process of someone else’s re‐editing work (Shub 1972: 50–52). Such messy beginnings posed the greatest challenges for an editor, but they also offered the most opportunity for flights of imagination. By re‐editing hundreds of films, Shub mastered an approach to filmmaking that Esther Leslie describes as essayistic, defined by “drawing together disparate spaces and times, chasing conceptual elements suggestively, by dislocating images from their allotted places, establishing a thematic line out of the disparate, and asserting a directing intelligence” (2015: 10). Shub was not the only Soviet filmmaker to get her start in re‐editing foreign films. What distinguished her trajectory was the insight that one could apply the same kind of approach to previously recorded fragments of history by reorganizing archival footage. As Shub later recalled, both she and Sergei Eisenstein together stumbled upon a tangled roll of unmarked film that turned out to have a newsreel sequence of



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the October revolution. Moved by the images of this abandoned sequence, Eisenstein would go on to use it for inspiration in staging scenes for his landmark film October (1928). Shub, however, would go on to doggedly pursue other neglected and decaying pieces of archival footage, preserving them, and weaving many of them into a project she titled February – a compilational portrait of the declining Russian monarchy that preceded the revolutionary tide. The film, made in collaboration with screenwriter Mark Tseitlin, was released under the title The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927), and it remains Shub’s best known and most widely studied work. Watching The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, one can sense the filmmaker as re‐ editor straining to create a damning account of a former political regime by working with footage that was either neutral or complimentary toward its subject when it was originally recorded. In some respects, Shub’s re‐editing solutions are painfully blunt. Intertitles rely heavily on the use of ironic quotations to add a mocking tone to words that could have easily been printed with sincerity: the tzar’s navy enjoys a “peaceful” time at sea; the monarch’s subjects are “very loyal.” Shots of smiling political figures – clearly intended to be celebratory and commemorative – are accompanied by intertitles marking them as enemies of the people, and the dissonance is apparent.8 Elsewhere, however, the filmmaker is able to make subtler critical statements by suggestively juxtaposing previously disconnected reels. For example, in the first quarter of the film, shots of religious iconography are frequently accompanied by military iconography, in order to highlight and condemn the church’s role in morally justifying the monarchy’s violence. More impressive are Shub’s efforts to structure the entire film around the inevitable fact that much her found footage featured World War I battles, which were a catalyst for the development of newsreel cinematography across Europe. The bulk of the film’s middle section, which runs with very few intertitles, consists of military marches, scenes of weapon manufacture, and trench warfare in Europe and North Africa. Shub harnesses this material for her own ends by framing Russia’s entry into the Great War as a symptom of aristocratic vanity mixed with capitalist greed, blaming the war as a direct cause for the socialist revolution that followed. Instead of pursuing a more direct and well‐trodden path of identifying class inequality as the central inner conflict leading to the revolution – a path that was probably challenging to sustain with archival footage left over from the previous regime – Shub uses the powerful war footage as a bypass. The film’s intertitles proclaim that the monarchy enters the war for its own benefit, but that the Russian people are the ones who pay with their flesh on the battlefield. Shots of bombs, trench explosions, and fallen bodies (many of them likely unrelated to Russian forces) then serve as affective images of corporeal violence inflicted upon faceless masses. By following these scenes with footage of worker strikes and political demonstrations from February 1917, the film suggests that the war machine becomes the main breaking point that turns not only the everyday commoner, but also the trained military man, against the monarchy. Shub’s method of repurposing existing footage in The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty responded to her colleague Dziga Vertov’s call for an ideal, archive‐based system for

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documentary filmmaking (Vertov 1926: 6). Vertov promoted the financial and artistic benefits of maintaining a well‐organized studio database of footage that could be thoughtfully reused and reordered into multiple projects by subsequent filmmakers. A prudently preserved and cataloged archive would reduce so‐called filmic waste by limiting the need to reshoot the same types of images and by recycling material across more than one film; it would also challenge filmmakers to retroactively reconsider shot material from more than one perspective, allowing them to rearrange the same shots into different combinations. Shub echoed this sentiment in a brief 1926 article that advocated for a dedicated state‐sponsored newsreel footage library, which could be directly tied to the production of new documentary films, ultimately eroding the hegemony of fiction cinema (in 1972: 246). Vertov himself rarely followed through on this proposed program. Like so many European modernists, his relationship to the past was primarily one of disdain, and his manifestos often called for the eradication of established traditions and institutions in favor of envisioning the future from ground zero; this implicitly meant shooting new footage, underpinned by new aesthetic principles and new formal experiments. Presumably, the film material of his own time was what Vertov intended to become an archival repository for others  –  not anything he himself inherited from his predecessors.9 It was Esfir Shub, not Vertov, who actively pursued the goal of actually reworking extant prerevolutionary footage into new films. In her compilational documentaries, footage is wrested from its original context and reorganized to condemn the very subjects that it was initially intended to promote. A fragment featuring the tsar’s procession, likely filmed with the deliberate intent of exhibiting royal opulence and spectacle, turns into incriminating evidence of corrupt indulgence. In Shub’s hands, the task of re‐editing, born of a policy for revising fictional imports, becomes an act of revising national history. Of course, when the philosophy of re‐editing is applied to footage that promotes itself as a representational portrait of a national history, there is a dangerously murky line between re‐evaluating the past in light of subsequent developments, and recasting the past into a direct causal chain that justifies the present. Locating a new genealogy of the present in found footage of the past implies that the old fragments of preserved reality contain within themselves a multitude of meanings – that the polysemy of the moving image may already anticipate a potential, as yet unforeseen, future. At the same time, a compilational editing method developed in the context of censorship‐driven re‐editing becomes an obvious aid to a cinema of erasure, promoting the current regime as an inevitable historical outcome. Dziga Vertov’s appeals to reuse and reassemble factual footage creatively, so that it could express new underlying truths, held the danger of playing fast and loose with documents of history.10 Perhaps aware of the potential perils of documentary re‐editing, Esfir Shub gently admonished Vertov for what she considered to be his overeager manipulation of footage.11 Yet what about Shub’s own efforts in this mode? What was an acceptable amount of manipulation? Film historian Aleksandr Deriabin claims that Shub



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herself was guilty of recklessness with archival material. He notes that suspicious omissions in her account of how she came by the footage for The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty suggest that she received carte blanche to excise portions of original negatives and thereby compromise irreplaceable newsreels, and that she was too ashamed to admit so later. Moreover, Deriabin argues that Shub assembled her films according to simplistic political themes and clumsy ideologically laden scripts, without the attuned regard for rhythmic and compositional dynamism that characterized the montage work of her more innovative compatriots. He implies that Shub wasted the footage she found and cut apart, because she placed it in the service of an editing style that he describes as “simple, if not to say primitive” (2001).12 In other words, Shub may have been reckless with archival reels, but she was not bold enough in how she ultimately mobilized that material. Deriabin finds Shub’s films slow and dogmatic, and his dismissive description is typical of a sentiment shared more widely by Shub’s critics, for whom the extended length of shots in her films is the key symptom of her lack of artistic intervention. Even Graham Roberts, in writing about Shub’s work with admiration, describes her editing approach with the dubious compliment of “prosaic” (1999: 52). Without a doubt, Shub’s editing style, such as her take on the revolution in The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, lacks the musically inspired arrangements and exhilarating daring experiments that mark Eisenstein’s October or Vertov’s The Eleventh Year, both released the following year. Shots in Shub’s films tend to last long past their graphic impact or thematic clarity, often maintaining as much autonomy as single‐take early cinema actualités. We could cynically conclude, along with Deriabin, that Shub’s decisions to keep more of her footage intact stemmed from a lack of formal courage or from a desire to accumulate a longer running time. Conversely, we might try to understand her preference for the uninterrupted longer take as the deliberate choice of a maker well‐versed in and comfortable with editing. Without denying existing characterizations of Shub’s approach, I propose that the defining quality which separated her editing style from those of her more famous contemporaries  –  namely her use of extended longer takes and reluctance to cut footage into shorter rhythmic intervals – stemmed from a desire to temper her own interventions into images of (and made by) the past. Addressing the challenges of editing nonfiction (“nonplayed”) film in contrast to editing fiction (“played”) film, Shub described the editor of fiction films as someone who focuses on emphasizing emotional moments and picturesque scenes. Conversely, a nonfiction editor emphasizes shot arrangements grounded in fact, which for her meant: [A]rranging not only to show a fact, but allowing it to be examined, and having been examined  –  memorized, and having been memorized  –  comprehended; giving it a place, giving it an environment, giving it a human being in such a place and environment, and doing so with ultimate clarity, working with facts, assembling the material into semantic, associative, and broad generalizations that would clearly relay to the spectator the author’s attitude toward the shown facts. (Shub 1972: 268)

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Implicit in Shub’s description of her approach is a commitment to duration – time not just to see, but also to examine, to memorize. In preserving more of her found fragments intact, Shub strived to maintain the internal factual richness and clarity of each shot within and against the new contingent meaning, into which she as the editor could place it. This more conservative approach did not preclude Shub from conveying her attitude toward the historical fragments on display. By allowing her footage to reveal itself in more extended shot durations, Shub creates opportunities for her historical documents to condemn their subjects on their own terms (Figure 8.1). Some of the most striking moments in The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty happen precisely at times when shots are allowed to run long, rather than overworked at the cutting table. The best examples take place during parts of the film dedicated to contrasting

Figure 8.1  Six still frames representing three pairs of adjacent shots in The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty. Domestic servants linked to fieldworkers (top row); breaking into a sweat through leisure or labor (middle row); low-rank labor and high-rank leisure in the navy (bottom row). Source: The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927). Directed by Esfir Shub. Produced by Sovkino and Museum of Revolution. Fair use.



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exploitative landowners with toiling workers. Without having the luxury of returning to the past to adequately document the plight of the workers, Shub had to make do with archival footage of wealthy families enjoying leisure pursuits and picturesque shots of peasants photographed to evoke a pastoral idyll. In one passage (announced as “The Governor of Kaluga”), the film dwells at length on shots of a wealthy landowner, his wife, and their dog touring their estate. The couple descend an outdoor staircase, stroll along a garden path, and enjoy a luncheon al fresco. This footage is briefly intercut with shots of women gathering wheat in a field, ­followed by cattle grazing on a riverbank pasture. An intertitle describes the women and animals as laborers struggling under the landowner’s yoke, but the images chafe against the framing text, because the carefully balanced, layered compositions offer scenic portraits of country life. Much more effective is the final shot of this sequence, which stays on the landowner’s luncheon table, after the wealthy couple gets up to leave the frame. In those final moments after the main subjects and their dog leave the center, but before the camera stops rolling, nameless servants emerge from the back plane and jump into the center to clear the table. Their presence beyond their function as servants does not interest the camera, and the reel promptly ends, but Shub follows it with another extended shot of women harvesting hay. The flickering images of the domestic servants, who were of secondary importance in the recording of the original footage, are thus linked to the field workers and made primary. In fact, the very sense that they were caught in the margins of a shot dedicated to the estate owners imbues the sequence with a greater weight of unjust inequality. A similar technique occurs in a later sequence featuring gentry dancing on a river cruise. Shub allows the sequence to run long, to include footage that was likely irrelevant to the original camera operator. In the final frames of a wider shot, the dance is over, and laughing couples disperse and dab sweat off their faces. This was likely a cue for the operator to stop recording. Yet Shub follows those final frames with a separate shot of workers tilling soil and pausing to wipe sweat off their brow. This connection between two similar chance gestures creates a contrast between the exertion of leisure of the wealthy and the exertion of effort of the poor. The internal tensions and pressures of prerevolutionary Russian society are coaxed from the backgrounds and incidental details of found reels – from those segments that may well have been discarded on the cutting room floor of a zealous edit. An different version of this technique appears in a passage of the film dedicated to life in the tsarist fleet (introduced as “‘Peaceful’ was the life of the fleet”). Shots of low‐ranking seamen cleaning the ship and running drills in formation are crosscut with footage of high‐ranking officers enjoying a leisurely meal and after‐dinner cigars. The semantic contrast is clear even without accompanying commentary: the proletariat are toiling, while the gentry are reaping leisurely benefits. Yet there is a more interesting graphic contrast made by lingering upon (and thereby emphasizing) the difference between how the subjects are framed in the footage. The low‐ ranking men are framed as an orderly mass, shot from above as they stand to attention or composed in advancing rows as they scour the deck. The dining officers, in contrast, are shown at comfortable ease in more relaxed arrangements around

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a table. Most memorably, the foreground in two of the three dining shots is occupied by an officer’s dog: first proudly seated at the table with his own place setting, then sitting on an officer’s lap as the focus of attention, his white coat with black accents matching the men’s formal uniforms. While the dog might be overlooked in the first shot, the lingering duration and composition of the second shot, which is also the final shot of this passage, makes him impossible to miss. Shub didn’t stage the contrast here; the anonymous framing of the seamen and the more individualized framing of the officers with their animal companion was shaped by its own time – the priorities of what and how the camera operator was invited to film each scene. Yet in the rhythm of the edited sequence, the duration and focus afforded to the dog becomes an affront; the animal enjoys better status, literally and graphically, than the men working on deck. The extended shots in Shub’s films speak to a tension between parallel impulses of editorial revision and preservation. The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty seems both a sober condemnation of the tsarist regime and, simultaneously, an effort to preserve that regime as it was seen with its own camera eyes. Dissonant points of view are inherent in any documentary that relies on archival footage generated in one political context to form a re‐evaluation from a radically different perspective. The sourced material can be traitorously faithful to its original time and political spirit; it is risky to allow this footage free reign without the interjection of intertitles or critical commentary to pin it in its new place. As a pioneer of this mode of film, Shub had to face decisions on when and how to make interventions into the reels she painstakingly recovered. Aware of the semantic power of montage and relying on that power to further a socialist message, Shub was nevertheless invested in allowing the recovered footage used in her films some potential autonomy and density of meaning. This meant not only taking careful and detailed notes on each found fragment of film – both used and unused – but also allowing each chosen shot to run for a longer duration. As the examples above demonstrate, this approach often encouraged the footage to condemn its own subject on its own terms. But it also took a risk in allowing the images to have a different future beyond the era of the film’s release. Fifty years after the release of The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, the titular fallen Romanovs were canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church. Today, a century after the tsar and his family were overthrown and executed, they are nostalgically remembered as tragic leaders by an increasingly conservative nationalist Russia. What is remarkable about Shub’s film is that it can play successfully in the current political climate with minimal revisions. Passages from Shub’s film, divorced from their intertitles, appear in more contemporary documentaries that are more favorable to the Romanovs. If this is the film’s failure as a work of propaganda, it is also its unusual virtue as a work of archival compilation. By restraining formal intervention during the editing process, Shub afforded the individual parts that made up the whole of the film the chance to maintain a certain degree of independence. The film may have been assembled with a distinct political message in mind, but its structure and pacing ensure that it can double as a more ambiguous document, open toward future reconsideration.



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Editing as Collective Labor: Found Footage and Women’s Work The same year she completed The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, Shub published an article that acknowledged the role of female editors and editing assistants in the making of this work and in the operation of a film studio more generally. She titled the article “Rabota Montazhnits” or “The Work of Montagesses” (Shub 1927). Montazhnitsa, which I translate as “montagess,” was the widely accepted female‐ gendered term used to describe the position of an editing assistant throughout the 1910s to 1930s. This included a range of roles, from junior positions like joiner or polisher to senior positions like assistant to the editor or negative cutter.13 The timing of the article is noteworthy, because Shub herself was struggling to get proper authorial recognition on her debut film. Her compilational approach of working with already‐existing footage that she neither planned nor shot was not considered to be sufficiently generative to merit a directorial credit. Only the intervention of a number of colleagues helped her eventually get the credit and better remuneration. Keeping this context in mind, we might expect Shub to publish a defensive article that would insist on her authorial role in forming a cohesive work out of fragments of found footage. Instead, “The Work of Montagesses” focuses on the labor of women in editing more broadly. The article begins by briefly outlining the various functions that editing encompasses within a film’s production and distribution cycle: circulation editors check and repair damage to returning prints; assistant editors work with a director to review and organize thousands of meters of footage and shape the finished film; negative cutters maintain a meticulous system of storing, retrieving, and assembling original negatives to match the completed draft of a film. Shub describes the editing collective as an indispensable “organism” that embodies the spirit of socialist camaraderie and allows the studio to function. By maintaining and facilitating a system for footage classification and assembly, editors were instrumental to what Joshua Malitsky described as a shift toward a rationalized “factory‐archive” logic in Soviet cinema in this period (2004). However, Shub goes on to underscore additional qualities that make the montagess, or editing assistant, indispensable to the making of a film: Nowhere, not in any other department at the film‐factory would you find the same organization and planning that you would find in the department of negative editing. Eyes and scissors work with great intensity, since we still have no devices for reviewing negatives, nor machines for splicing. Industrious organization, sharpness of vision, formidable visual memory, an agility and quickness of the hands – these distinguish montagesses. (1927: 4)

In other words, a film editor had to be equipped with the capacity for nimble manual work, a keen eye for detail, and a prodigious eidetic memory. Without proper equipment for previewing and splicing film, editing assistants were expected to be able to mentally screen footage just by running celluloid manually and scanning it with their

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Figure 8.2  Esfir Shub (back right) reviewing film behind montagess Tatiana Kuvshinchikova at the Goskino Film Factory. Photo undated. Source: Muzei Kino photo archive. Courtesy of Muzei Kino.

eyes. Additionally, with numerous reels from different cinematographers passing through the editing room, editors would exercise and develop the ability to mentally compare and recall finer nuances of specific takes and even recommend footage from different film shoots. This meant that editing assistants had to be especially attuned to the small details and differences between the content of various takes – what Shub and others would call the “internal pressures and rhythms” of each shot, which are the qualities she would insist on emphasizing in her own film editing (Figure 8.2). This characterization of film editors was not unique to Shub and was echoed in other literature of the period. For instance, Vlad Korolevich’s short 1928 book titled Zhenshina v Kino (Woman in Film), most of which is devoted to actresses, nevertheless opens with an essay on the role of women in the montage suite: Almost no one will remember the army of unnoticed female workers, who created the film. In the same manner, we remember Napoleon, while forgetting the army that created his victories and defeats. […] Yet always – invariably and consistently, accurately and faithfully, like the bobbin drivers of gigantic machines – move the fingers of the female cutter and the montagess, who are partly responsible for the force of the emotions that the spectator experiences in front of the screen. (1928: 4)

The author’s description of the editors’ manual gestures as cogs in textile machinery is telling. If shots recorded on celluloid film were viewed as building blocks or pieces that needed to be stitched together according to a director’s pattern, as Lev Kuleshov proposed, then the editing assistant was the seamstress responsible for the patient, meticulous construction.



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In many ways, the gendered tenor of this characterization – what it implied about why the job was particularly suited for women, and what creative role they could play in constructing the national imaginary through film – reflected wider social discussions on how postrevolutionary collective production would reconfigure prior divisions of labor. Part of the description of the ideal editing assistant relied on models of the woman’s body as a body particularly adapted to meticulous manual tasks, capable of minute hand gestures, and having the temperament for patient, sedentary repetitive work. In the preindustrial Western household, women were trained to still their bodies and occupy their hands through handicrafts like quilting and embroidery. In the postindustrial factory, this history facilitated the employment of women in areas ranging from secretary work to textile production. And in the early film studio, across a variety of national contexts, this same history influenced the hiring of women not only for the tasks of manually editing celluloid film, but also for tasks like hand stenciling dyes onto film footage, inking and coloring animation cels, and clerical record‐ keeping (Ward Mahar 2006, Hill 2016, Wei Lewis 2018). The assumption behind the staffing of these various roles was that the labor of editing, like the labor of stenciling or inking, was a process of deftly (yet mindlessly) painting‐by‐numbers, or in this case, cutting according to a predetermined pattern. Considering this wider context, we can understand the trap that awaited someone like Shub on her path to directorial recognition. The dismissive attitude toward women in the editing room made it difficult for her to secure studio support to direct and shoot her own film. Shub found a creative way out of her position by making films with existing scraps, eliminating the need for any further shooting. Shub’s contemporary Lilya Brik also made most of her debut film (The Glass Eye) with salvaged scraps of footage for the same reason. Brik’s subsequent unfinished project, Love and Duty, or Carmen, was based on the conceit of a single film re‐edited three different times for three different imaginary audiences. Yet this method loudly advertised itself as a work grounded solely in editing; in doing so, it undermined its bid for creative authorial credit, as its claims to producing something new were not as tangible as a stack of original screenplay notes or a cabinet of shot film reels.14 Shub’s difficulty in securing credit points to a contradiction in the Soviet treatment of film editing, or montage. While montage as a formal property of film (the noun) came to play a central role in film theory and aesthetics, the actual process of montage (the verb) was paradoxically obscured, particularly in comparison with cinematography or directing. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, European and American critics came to pay increasing attention to the important role that cinematographers played in shaping the look of a film. Cinematography was increasingly professionalized as a trade in the Soviet Union, just as it was abroad, and a few distinguished camera operators even gained modest notoriety as experts in one type of approach or other (Dziga Vertov’s brother Mikhail Kaufman and Sergei Eisenstein’s long‐time collaborator Eduard Tisse are two notable examples). The parallel craft of film editing, however, enjoyed no such awareness or attention. Unlike the highly visible and technologically showy craft of cinematography, editing remained largely

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hidden in the depths of the studio and portrayed as technically unremarkable, ­simply cutting and gluing strips of celluloid. It was this portrait of montage that Shub contested in her quiet manner, understanding the unspoken gendered hierarchy that consigned much of the editing process to an invisible supporting role. Among the writings of Shub’s contemporaries, one particular text does address the potential of editing as a form of creative authorship that can thrive in isolation from cinematography, such as in the case of re‐editing. This is a manuscript by Sergei Eisenstein that Richard Taylor has translated under the title “Laocoön.” The manuscript happens to be the only time that Shub appears in Eisenstein’s writing as anything more than a biographical footnote, making his remarks on her work particularly noteworthy. In the manuscript Eisenstein links Shub to a distinct genealogy of montage that derives from the ancient poetic form of the cento and extends to the more modern decorative art of decoupage, both of which rely on creative repurposing of found material. The cento is a poetic form, in which new poems are created from lines of existing poems. In some cases the cento is made by extracting and reassembling phrases from a single longer work by another poet; in other cases the new text is a compilation of lines and quotations gathered from numerous works, which are patched together to evoke new meaning. Eisenstein mentions the cento as a “poetic curiosity” that is resurrected in those forms of film editing, which rely on reassembly of preexisting materials (Eisenstein, 2010: 178). As an avid lover of etymology, Eisenstein points out that the Latin word cento originally referred to a patchwork garment, and that its distant relative was used to describe sewn items of clothing. Indulging in his tendency for associative historical links, Eisenstein connects the cento to nineteenth century decoupage, the decorative craft of cutting out fabric or paper figures and pasting them onto various objects, in order to create new designs. In the case of the cento, the maker constructs a work by metaphorically “patching” together pieces from an expanded archive of phrases and sentences. In the case of decoupage, the maker slowly and meticulously composes a new visual arrangement by physically cutting out and gluing together graphic figures. Eisenstein argues that the principle of taking existing fragments and assembling them into new configurations is the same in both the poetic and the decorative form, and he therefore refers to decoupage as the “pictorial cento” (2010: 179). Again, Eisenstein notes that the same principle will also occur in those approaches to montage in which film editors create new works using pieces entirely sourced from other works. It is here that he praises the work of Esfir Shub as the most creative and impressive innovator of this type of editing. He calls Shub’s films “cine‐centos”  –  part poems, part decorative works, and part poetic reconstructions of ready‐made cinematographic fabric. Though Eisenstein does not expand on this topic, it is worth noting that the craft of decoupage was most often framed as a social parlor activity, as well as a hobby for women that would accompany embroidery and crochet‐work. Like the cento, a work of decoupage begins with ready‐made pieces produced by others. However, in the latter instance the original pieces were borrowed not from works of poetry written by previous artists, but from quotidian and ephemeral sources like decorative prints,



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fashion magazine pages, illustrations from cheap books and popular periodicals. The range of subjects available for excision and reassembly was thus limited and circumscribed by their humble origins in popular culture: botanical motifs, animals, angelic faces, and biblical iconography, fashionable men and women, fairy tale figures, and the occasional reproduced work of classic art. Yet, in their very repetition, these images could be aggregated to form rich visual tapestries evoking the personal or social histories, in which they emerged and were disseminated. The decoupage craftswoman worked to build an archive of possible source images and to locate resemblances and affinities between different sources. Glued together and lacquered onto a wooden keepsake box, dresser, or partition screen (some of the more popular surfaces for decoupage), collectives of cherubic faces or ladies on horses would turn into formidable armies. The more ambitious decoupage artist would not only collect and group similar images into aggregate motifs, but might also craft a thematic arc of development across the surface of the piece. For instance, a single panel in a four‐panel folding screen might be thematically devoted to the idea of romantic courtship; a second panel would trace family life and childhood; a third panel might explode into a tapestry of blooming flowers; while a fourth panel might assemble images of leisurely and domestic activities. It was also not uncommon to find surreal scenes produced by the encounter between images taken from different contexts and in different scales. A man garbed in ancient robes, cut out from some biblical scene, may extend his arms in yearning toward a blushing society woman dressed in the latest finery, creating a courtship that spans geography and time. Elsewhere, differently scaled images borrowed from three publications could stage a scene in which a gigantic bird may observe a pair of laughing children, who in turn mock a group of miniature riders that have fallen off their horses. Picking up from Eisenstein’s manuscript, we can pursue this genealogy of montage in connection to Shub’s “cine‐cento” work. Like the cento poet and the decoupage enthusiast, the editor who works with existing material repurposes words and images left behind by others, salvages material from a diverse range of sources, and develops archival methods for preserving the individual pieces while opening up potential connections between them. She then produces new works through creative juxtaposition, not only in terms of thematic links, but also the rhythm and scale of appropriated materials, including the scale of duration I discussed in the previous section. The cine‐cento’s hyphenated connection between found moving images and found lines of poetry also holds particular biographical relevance for Shub. In her memoirs Shub writes that her work in film was preceded and aided by her training in literature, particularly her lifelong passion for memorizing and reciting long‐form poetry. This was not an unusual hobby; it was indicative of a more widespread mnemonic literary culture in Russia. Poetry scholar Mikhail Gronas defines mnemonic literary culture as one that places the written work into “a whole chain of cultural practices, such as learning by heart in nursery and school, copying by hand and memorizing favorite poems, internal recitation to oneself, recitation in a circle of friends, public recitation, quoting and recognizing poetic quotes in conversations,

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public speeches, and literary texts” (2010: 185). He argues that poetic memorization and recitation played a key cultural and educational role in Soviet life, long after it began to wane elsewhere in Europe and North America. This mnemonic culture extended not only to readers but also to writers of poetry; many Russian (and later Soviet) poets actively drew on their own memorizations of preexisting poetic phrases when composing new pieces. We might therefore consider the cento, or the restitched poem, to be more than just an “unusual curiosity” in Soviet culture, as Eisenstein describes it. Instead, it was a likely additional influence on film re‐editing in early Soviet cinema. Shub herself writes that in developing as an editor, her highly trained skills of poetic memorization transferred from the linguistic to the audiovisual registers, so that she could mentally recall minor nuances and rhythms of various shots when thinking about how to thematically combine them into a larger composition (1972: 28). The transition was made possible by the material conditions of editing itself. To recall Shub’s remarks on the montagess, since the film studios had “no devices for reviewing negatives, nor machines for splicing,” the editing assistant developed not only a keen eye and agile hand, but also a “formidable visual memory.” The repetitive, menial labor of actually doing montage – the tedious process of reviewing, sorting, and cutting celluloid that Soviet film directors increasingly delegated to a collective of assistants – became an effective, if unintended, training method for spotting and remembering the nuances of different pieces of footage. This would become indispensable to the kind of filmmaking approach Shub would cultivate through her compilation films. As a student of literature, Shub was a mnemonic reader of written poetry. In the process of editing moving images, she became a mnemonic author (Figure 8.3).

Editing as Caretaking What motivates that artist who chooses to make a work from already‐completed pieces made by others, and whose creative endeavor rests in forging new connections? To describe the temperament of a maker who finds new patterns in the past, Eisenstein’s “Laocoön” manuscript tellingly invokes a mythical figure – the Egyptian goddess Isis, who assembles the body parts of her killed husband Osiris, so that he can be reanimated. Eisenstein writes about the dynamics of writing centos, assembling decoupage works, and other games built on similar principles: [I]s not a girl who spends an evening solving a crossword acting just like Isis, searching out word‐limbs and putting those scattered word‐limbs together to constitute a “body” out of words, the letters or syllables of which were scattered among the word‐limbs of the clues? (2010: 175)

Eisenstein’s cento artist is implicitly endowed with a feminine qualities, or at least a temperament of diligence and familial devotion associated with wifely duties and occupations.



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Figure 8.3  Esfir Shub as captured in Human with a Movie Camera. Source: Human with a Movie Camera (1929). Directed by Dziga Vertov. Produced by VUFKU. Fair Use.

The metaphor of the editor as film’s dutiful caretaker can be interpreted quite literally, keeping in mind the materiality of film, particularly celluloid. Like all media hardware, including the latest digital storage technology, celluloid film needed preservation and continuous maintenance, as well as eventual transfer onto newer prints and formats. Even if a film negative were properly and gently handled, it continued a slow process of constant decay. It is at this stage that early editing assistants, most of them women, served not only as the film director’s proxy in the editing room, but also as the caretakers of the film’s body. Esfir Shub began her documentary project on the fall of the Russian Empire by sourcing, untangling, and preserving neglected rolls of film that she

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found in the studio’s storage spaces. Without this intervention it is highly likely that none of this footage would survive the following decades. She extended the search outward, locating decaying nitrate in poorly maintained archives, identifying and describing forgotten footage of the dead tsar Nikolai II or the literary figure Lev Tolstoy. In a broader sense, however, the process of collecting and reassembling archival footage into a single portrait – taking strips of film outside of their original context and finding the links that could bind them – were themselves an act of collecting discarded fragments of a wounded body (a country dismantled by revolution) and piecing its torn limbs together into a new resurrected form. Eisenstein’s analogy of Isis faithfully assembling scattered body parts of a dismembered Osiris perpetuates the image of Shub as a faithful servant to the collective cause. It also suggests that maybe Shub’s interest in archival footage and in minimizing the formal visibility of her own interventions was its own form of quiet protest. Postrevolutionary Soviet artists eagerly embraced the ideological fervor of tearing down previously established traditions, inventing a new cinema language, and psychically dismembering the film spectator to reconstruct a new citizen. Perhaps in understanding the long‐ term implications of burning up the past or anticipating the potential ideological shifts of the future, Shub’s films not only recovered, preserved, and reincorporated fragments of discarded places and people, but functioned in part as historical archives, which could reactivate history for future artists. Shub concluded her 1927 essay “The Work of Montagesses” by emphatically stating another indispensable contribution of editing assistants: They are all, with rare exceptions, highly discerning about the quality of the film as a whole. In the screening room, when montagesses of negatives review the director’s control cut before starting the assembly of negatives, their evaluation of a picture is almost always unerring. Their reception of a picture is immediate and at the same time professional. (1927: 4)

Editing assistants watched more films than anyone else. They saw not only what was selected but what was discarded; they aggregated and compared the works of different directors and genres; and they became familiar with shot material in ways that even the directors could not appreciate. One could say that the montagess was the film’s first spectator, first fan and critic, and a proxy for its prospective future audience. In this, too, the function of film editors took on a gendered inflection both in the studio and in wider accounts of their work. Pointing out the film editor’s intimate familiarity with a film and ability to appreciate its quality and preservation, the author of Woman in Film connects these characteristics to domestic labor and child rearing, noting that: [The] habit and knack for carefully performing meticulous tasks gave Woman the ability to master film techniques. Moreover, she also brought from the family and into the cinema a loving approach to her duties. Woman transposed her fanaticism, which she



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was previously allowed to display only to the family or to the church, into her work, having found faith in the cinema. (Korolevich 1928: 6–7)

Without opportunity for creative control and agency, the feminized editor is nevertheless portrayed as a valuable cinephile who brings a certain intimacy and dedication to her relationship with film. It is telling that the only known recorded footage of Esfir Shub can be found in Dziga Vertov’s Human with a Movie Camera, where she is portrayed as a delighted observer. In a scene of spectators watching a soccer match, Shub is captured laughing and taking pleasure in the world around her, playing the role of an amused fan. In this role, she functions as a foil for the film’s own editor Elizaveta Svilova, who is shown surveying the footage with a stern, evaluative gaze at other moments of the film. Together, the two editors, both of whom passed through the ranks as montagesses at various times in their careers, enact both the “immediate” (unfiltered) and the “professional” (critically evaluative) gaze honed in the repetition of meticulous cutting and recutting. The montagess was the film’s caregiver and cheerleader, but, as Shub points out, this role also endowed her with expertise as a discerning spectator. By attentively editing and re‐editing a film at some remove from full creative ownership (since it was denied to her), the editing assistant cultivated an ability to detach herself from the intended meaning behind a shot to view it as pliable material for redeployment. In this, perhaps, the labor of the montagess offered the best training program for compilation filmmaking, which asked the filmmaker to disassemble and reimagine existing frames and sequences as neutral blocks that could be used afresh in new compositions: The power of documentation lies not just in the filming of living facts, but also in the selection of events, in the ability to pick out that, which is especially able to capture and excite the spectator, and to shape his comprehension of the shot material. This labor is fundamentally no different from the labor of a painter or a musician, who selects from a great variety of sounds and colors specifically those and not others. (1972: 188–189)

This passage is the closest that Shub comes to asserting the potential of film editing as a distinct form of generative artistry irrespective of mise‐en‐scène or cinematography. In it, she moves beyond documentation as the filming and presentation of “living facts” and emphasizes the importance of selecting images with deliberate anticipation of spectators’ reaction (making facts come alive). This is a subtle defense of the compilation documentarian as creative agent, coming from a filmmaker who otherwise eschewed loud proclamations, who avoided playing politics in the film studio, and who spent more time describing her surrounding collective than her own accomplishments. At a time when such invisibility and anonymity may have cost Esfir Shub her claim to authorship, it also guaranteed a certain level of liberty and survival in a repressive and dangerous regime. This anonymity is precisely what allowed Shub to function, like Isis, as a gatherer and compiler of historical bodies and faces that would have otherwise remained on the battleground of the artistic revolution.

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Notes   1 For a discussion of the debate between a so‐called “Vertovian” and a “Shubian” documentary cinemas, see Yampolsky (1991: 161).   2 Curiously and perhaps tellingly (since Gan’s fate may have been a politically taboo subject), there is absolutely no mention of him or his short‐lived but influential film journal Kino‐fot (1922–1923) in Shub’s personal memoirs.   3 Shub’s memoir notes that she actively attended Kuleshov’s film workshops and watched him experiment with editing and re‐editing film sequences on the fly (1972: 78). Her remarks on some of the projects she witnessed, such as the workshop’s live performances of “film without film,” suggest that she attended as early as 1921. She even considered officially enrolling in the State Film School to study under Kuleshov, but ultimately decided to go directly to Goskino and apply to work in the editing department (67).   4 According to Shub’s memoir, she helped Eisenstein develop his script for Strike (1925) and expected to be included in the production crew (1972: 82–83). When she was not included in the production, the two had a falling‐out that lasted until the release of Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) (1972: 99). The two maintained a steady correspondence until Eisenstein’s death, but this never translated into further collaborations.   5 The memoir was reprinted in 1972 in the expanded book Zhizn’ Moya: Kinematograf, which also included additional material like Shub’s published articles, private correspondence, and notes on unfinished projects.   6 For example, during her time at the TEO, Shub witnessed a struggle between established older artists who wanted to preserve aspects of Russia’s dramaturgical tradition and a vanguard of younger radical artists who vehemently rejected every aspect of prerevolutionary theater due to its alleged bourgeois decadence. Shub indicates her own position indirectly, by assembling sympathetic remarks on intellectuals who tried to diplomatically mediate between the two groups; unflattering brief remarks on the antisocial tendencies of dogmatic radical artists; and finally a quote by Vladimir Lenin that cautions his followers against buying into capitalism’s obsession with novelty at the expense of preserving and salvaging the best parts of tradition (1972: 50–52).   7 Before working as a re‐editor, Shub worked in the censorship office at the film studio (1972: 244).   8 The screenwriter Mark Tseitlin is credited as a “research consultant” on this film, and Shub wrote that his contribution consisted of helping to identify footage and crafting the intertitles (1972: 103).   9 On a discussion of Vertov’s reuse of footage from his own films, see Fore (2013: 3–37). 10 Vertov painfully discovered as much in his later years, when he found his early formal experimentation widely condemned by a subsequent state programme invested in unobtrusive aesthetic realism. 11 Addressing Vertov directly by using a play on words that references Vertov’s 1926 essay “Fabrika Faktov,” Shub wrote: “We don’t want a film factory [fabrika], if it means the fabrication [fabrikatsiya] of facts” (1972: 245). All translations of Shub’s writings from Russian provided in this chapter were made by the author. 12 Deriabin goes so far as to say that the chief creative role in Shub’s film was Tseitlin, not Shub. Translated from Russian by author.



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13 Unless otherwise specified, all translations from Russian in this article were made by the author. I am choosing to translate the word montazhnitsa as “montagess” in order to preserve the gender‐typing embedded in the job title. My full English translation of this article and accompanying commentary are published in Gadassik, 2018. 14 Interestingly, studio reviewers flatly rejected Brik’s proposal, stating that the film’s reuse of the same dramatic footage three times was an excuse for her to repeatedly indulge in the kind of bourgeois material that she was ostensibly critiquing. However, historian Valeriy Bosenko (1998) notes that the vehement tone of the rejections points to something else at work. He argues that the film’s conceit of exposing the power of re‐editing the same images for three different political messages (each of which became an equally plausible scenario) hit too close to home for a studio backed by a zealous re‐editing philosophy. The reviewers recognized Brik’s film for what it was – a critique of the relationship between cinematic and political revisionism.

References Atwood, L. (1993). Red Women on the Silver Screen: Soviet Women and Cinema from the Beginning to the End of the Communist Era. London: Pandora. Bosenko, V. (1998). Lilia Brik: “Lyubov’ i Dolg.” Iskusstvo Kino, 10. http://kinoart.ru/ archive/1998/10/n10‐article25. Accessed August 14, 2011. Deribian, A. (2001). Vremja Sobriat’ Otechestvennoye Kino I Sozdanie Pervogo v Mire Kinoarhiva. Kinovedcheskiye Zapiski 55. http://kinozapiski.ru/ru/article/sendvalues/542/. Accessed August 10, 2015. Eisenstein, S. (2010). Laocoön (1937). In M. Ghenny and R. Taylor (eds.), Sergei Eisenstein: Selected Writings: Vol. 2, pp. 109–202. New York: I. B. Tauris. Fore, D. (2013). The Metabolic State: Dziga Vertov’s The Eleventh Year. October, 145: 3–37. Gadassik, A. (2018). Ėsfir’ Shub on Women in the Editing Room: The Work of Montazhnitsy. Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe, 6. DOI: http:// dx.doi.org/10.17892/app.2018.0006.125. Gronas, M. (2010). Why Did Free Verse Catch on in the West, but Not in Russia? On the Social Uses of Memorized Poetry. Toronto Slavic Quarterly, 33: 168–214. Hill, E. (2016). Never Done: A History of Women’s Work in Media Production. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Korolevich, V. (1928). Zhenshina v Kino. Moscow: Teatr‐Kino‐Pechat. Kostina, A. and Dyshlyuk, L. (2016). Esfir Shub: Selected Writings. Feminist Media Histories, 2 (3): 11–28. Leslie, E. (2015). Art, Documentary, and the Essay Film. Radical Philosophy, 192: 7–14. Leyda, J. (1964). Films Beget Films. London: George Allen & Unwin. Malitsky, J. (2004). Esfir Shub and the Film Factory  –  Archive: Soviet Documentary from 1925–1928, Screening the Past 17. http://www.screeningthepast.com/2014/12/esfir‐shub‐ and‐the‐film‐factory‐archive‐soviet‐documentary‐from‐1925‐1928/. Accessed January 10, 2014. Malitsky, J. (2013). Post‐revolution Nonfiction Film: Building the Soviet and Cuban Nations. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Osipova, A. (2011). Difficult Facts: Esfir Shub and the Problem of Realism, Brooklyn Rail, September 5. https://brooklynrail.org/2011/09/film/difficult‐factsesfir‐shub‐and‐the‐ problem‐of‐realism. Roberts, G. (1999). Forward Soviet!: History and Non‐Fiction Film in the USSR. New York: I. B. Tauris. Stollery, M. (2002). Eisenstein, Shub, and the Gender of the Author as a Producer. Film History, 14 (1): 87–99. Shub, E. (1927). Rabota Montazhnits [photocopy of article], RGALI, f. 3035, op. 1, ed. 44. Shub, E. (1972). Zhizn’ Moya: Kinematogrof. Moscow: Iskussto. Tsivian, Y. (1996). The Wise and Wicked Game: Re‐editing and Soviet Film Culture of the 1920’s. Film History, 8 (3): 327–343. Vertov, D. (1926). Fabrika Faktov. Pravda, July 24: 6. Ward Mahar, K. (2006). Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Wei Lewis, D. (2018). Shiage and Women’s Flexible Labor in the Japanese Animation Industry. Feminist Media Histories, 4 (1): 115–141. Yampolsky, M. (1991). Reality at Second Hand. Derek Spring (trans.). Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, 11 (2): 161–171.

9

Now and Then

On the Documentary Regime, Vertov, and History1 Philip Rosen

Brown University

1 Roughly between World War I and the mid‐1930s, a handful of terms emerged to label broad tendencies in filmmaking, terms that became so strongly established that they are still commonly invoked. Three of the most important were documentary, experimental (or sometimes avant‐garde), and Hollywood cinemas. Such terms designate what we might loosely call cultural‐textual regimes. They are textual in that they encompassed films and filmmaking practices, of course, but in com­ bination with theories, reviews, and other kinds of nonfilmic discourses as well as  institutional arrangements and configurations. In a sense, such terms helped ­establish arenas for framing and fighting over the identity or self‐consciousness of cinema as such and also of differing filmmaking modes. This includes assertions about the relative values of these modes, whether positive or negative. As cultural‐ textual regimes, then, they may be associated with aesthetic tendencies but also with social and cultural stratifications, conflicts, and compromises. Very soon after these terms emerged, it became possible to understand each such regime as having its own chronology and developmental tendency and lineage; that is, they became categories of film historiography. It is generally accepted that notions and practices of documentary crystallized into self‐conscious and recognizable practices, ambitions, and ideals during the later 1920s to the mid‐1930s. This process involved claims for differentiation. Discourses working to define and promote the term posed it over and against other widespread “nonfiction” forms, which traded on the indexicality of the film images. In the English‐language context, the key example was John Grierson. He appropriated the

A Companion to Documentary Film History, First Edition. Edited by Joshua Malitsky. © 2021 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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word documentary to denote film practices formally and semantically different from contemporaneous newsreels and travelogues. It also was opposed to the earlier, once popular pre‐classical film genre of actualities. By the 1920s, actualities were regarded by most cognoscenti not only as outmoded, but as one of early cinema’s several dead ends whose fascinations were those of the unsophisticated, immature phases of the medium. Such a view was associated with a more general construction of film ­history that remained influential for several decades. This construction entailed dis­ missing all sorts of pre‐classical filmmaking except when they could be understood as contributing to the development of the later forms and styles of narrative cinema. By this time, of course, commercial cinema had undergone a series of rapid transfor­ mations into an enterprise textually centered on fictional narrative, conveyed within limits of a certain range of forms and styles that effectively became international textual norms. The normalization and dissemination of this textual framework was economically centered in national and international film industries with Hollywood cinema as the most popular and successful of these.2 The idea that filmmaking prior to this state of affairs was a “primitive” cinema grounded some of the earliest grand narratives of film history, as in Terry Ramsaye’s influential  1926 book A Million and One Nights. Ramsaye wrote one of the first detailed histories of cinema, often through accounts of individuals whose achieve­ ments led to the emergence of the “story film” as cinematic art and Hollywood as economically successful. One can understand his stake in this kind of teleology, for he himself was an industry figure for several decades – at different times producer, film editor, publicist, and industry journalist – and he personally knew some of the individuals appearing in his history. But it is striking to find implicit agreement about the primitive nature of pre‐classical cinema in Ramsaye’s contemporary, John Grierson, who in his own long and parallel career also functioned at different times as producer, film editor, journalist, and publicist‐promoter for his concept of docu­ mentary. The meanings and limits of the term actuality in Grierson’s much invoked definition of documentary as “the creative treatment of actuality” might be open to debate. But as much as Grierson explicitly excluded commercialized nonfiction film genres such as newsreels and travelogues from his realm of documentary, “creative treatment” implicitly excluded the pre‐classical genre of actualities.3 If expelling the earliest decade of cinema from the ranks of artistic or significant filmmaking helped naturalize mainstream fictional and especially Hollywood textual forms, at first glance it may seem peculiar that this attitude was shared by such different types as the Hollywood businessman Ramsaye and the social scientist documentarian Grierson. On the other hand, Grierson’s insistence that documentary cinema had to be creative was often specified as the idea that documentary should organize ­elements of reality into some kind of story or drama; and Hollywood was an ­unavoidable presence when it came to successful storytelling on film. But of course, Grierson’s foundational move was to call for something else. His writings from this period have often been treated as a locus classicus for originating definitions of documentary cinema, which he spent the rest of his life promoting and enabling in practice and theory. This call for alternatives to the mainstream can



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justify comparing the emergent documentary regime to another of those cultural‐ textual regimes gaining identity during this same period, namely so‐called “experi­ mental” cinema. At the time, this budding regime was often aligned with the historical avant‐gardes, so the contested term avant‐garde has also been used then and later. The “experimental” regime often involved a vociferous, polemical self‐ consciousness, found in a range of ­discourses from manifestos to critical reviews to theoretical tracts.4 Most basically, it shared with the documentary regime generally and Grierson an ambition for filmmaking that was alternative to (or challenged) the norms that had solidified under the international hegemony of Hollywood, that is, mainstream fictional narrative cinema. On that front, one might search for textual and historical alliances between documentary and experimental regimes along with the divergences between them. This suggests a general line of inquiry, treating the advent of documentary cinema through a kind of triangulation of agreements and oppositions among these three cultural‐textual regimes. As just one example, documentary and avant‐garde tradi­ tions might both be understood as having an ambition to implement conceptions of the film shot different from those of mainstream cinema. In both, the shot was con­ ceived primarily as doing something other than registering a fragment of performed fiction, though registration and/or performance of some kind could certainly be in operation. On the other hand, while the documentary regime would be much more likely to ground its conception of the shot as a matter of indexical registration, this was also something that remained important to Hollywood (for example, in the star’s body); however, the experimental regime would provide more room to play with – precisely, to experiment with – the materiality, formal qualities, space and time, and semantic or non-semantic elasticities of the shot as such. Such thoughts lead to questions of historiography and historicity. Documentary as a distinctive kind of nonfiction cinema was devised in the context of foundational transformations in film history. But like its sibling cultural‐textual regimes, main­ stream fictional and experimental cinemas, it has proven to have a long shelf life, with significant force throughout subsequent film history to the present late mod­ ern, technologically digital era. However, it should go without saying that its force now is not necessarily identical with that of the 1920s and 1930s. Even the term documentary cinema has its own history. (Incidentally, this suggests that one might attempt to trace a longer history of the triangulation among the three regimes that crystallized in the 1920s, and also that one might ask whether other cultural‐textual regimes of cinema – or screen media – have since appeared to intervene in these relations.) This means that throughout its history, those with theoretical or practical stakes in what we call documentary have always had to engage with matters of con­ tinuity and transformation. All of this provides broad premises for my concerns in this essay. In what follows, I start to extend my previous work in exploratory ways. That previous work associ­ ated the terrain identified with documentary cinema with the terrain of the modern writing of history, that is historiography. Among other things, I claimed that one defining element of modern historiography is the organization of time, for which a

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key problem is the articulation of change and stasis; and that another element is the source document, understood as a sort of indexical sign. I argued for parallels and juxtapositions of this combination of temporality and indexicality with theories and practices of cinema, including documentary (Rosen 2001: Chapter 6). My concep­ tual exploration here will be focused around the emblematic example of Dziga Vertov in the onset of the documentary regime. He was a filmmaker concerned with radical change, and his films sometimes “experiment” with temporal manipulations. One underlying theme will be the epistemological and political inescapability of modern historiography and its aporias, and so there will eventually be selective ref­ erence to theories of history, as well as films and film history.

2 Vertov drew attention as a major innovator in nonfiction cinema about the same time that Grierson first elaborated on the term documentary and Ramsaye helped formulate the implicit teleology that would influence histories of cinema for several decades. Vertov had connections to the journals and practitioners of avant‐gardist schools such as Soviet futurism and constructivism, and in that sense was affiliated with the historical avant‐gardes and the emergent experimental cinema regime. In fact, his contemporary, Kazimir Malevich (2002), of all people, paid Vertov the com­ pliment of holding up his films as the best kind of thing that cinema could do in comparison to painterly Cubism, Futurism, and (implicitly) Malevich’s own Suprematism.5 On the other hand, Vertov was a reference point both for contempo­ raries and in later film histories as a participant in the discursive and practical dis­ courses that generated the concept of documentary cinema. The Russian context points to the fact that, by the 1920s, the term documentary, or its cognates in other languages, was in play more widely than allowed in many English‐language origin accounts, which tend to be Grierson‐centered. Recent scholarship indicates that the idea of documentary may have had fragmented, inter­ nationally pluralized emergences. For example, Brian Winston notes that Grierson himself appropriated the word from French critics. For another example, Nilo Couret has found that Grierson was almost never cited in Brazilian critical dis­ courses until the 1950s; however, in the early 1920s, well before Grierson’s founda­ tional articles, the Portuguese word documentário was already utilized adjectivally to describe aspects of individual films or to characterize the potential of cinema as  such. Undoubtedly, there are more such instances in different countries. Most ­pertinently here, in his useful article on the debates around early Soviet documen­ tary, Joshua Malitsky notes Richard Taylor’s contention that the term “documentalnost, which he translates as ‘documentary quality’ and especially dokumental’nyi’, which translates as the adjectival form of documentary, were in use in the Soviet Union by the mid‐1920s.” The entertaining name‐calling between Eisenstein and Vertov over the artful, or played, versus the non‐played film is well known among film historians and theorists. But Malitsky demonstrates that a crucial problem for Soviet film of this period was to define what we would now see as the field of Soviet



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documentary. And in this debate, the alternative to Vertov was not Eisenstein but Esfir Shub (Winston 1995; Malitsky 2004; Couret 2017).6 But I am not interested for the moment in an arena that would have Vertov debat­ ing on one flank against Eisenstein in favor of the “unplayed” over the “played film,” and on the other flank against Shub in favor of manipulations of the apparatus in the name of materialist epistemology and ideological struggles. I am interested in some­ thing more abstract and conceptual, namely the exemplary use‐value of Vertov for understanding a variety of formative debates about the new medium of cinema in a revolutionary context. This use‐value seems especially complex and interesting because it is not unique to this historical moment. In fact, Vertov has intermittently appeared as a key reference point for many discussions of developments in cinema and imaging techniques and technologies. In recent years, for example, he is an important figure in Lev Manovich’s (2001) widely read theory of the digital. Once again the signifier Vertov is invoked as central to discussions about shifts in media, whether that signifier stands for the biographical individual or for his work. Whatever Vertov did and stood for then apparently matters in the very different historical context now. So as the actuality of Vertov’s existence continually recedes further and further into the past, certain controversies in which he was immersed in the past become invoked in the present. Thus, not only does Vertov seem to ambiguate the historical distinction between documentary and experimental media practices for the 1920s, but also his current relevance is useful for thinking about the historiographic dis­ tinction now and then, between “our” present and “our” past. Vertov’s historical importance seems to begin from his association with the urgency of producing the different, for he is identified with the insistence on a need for change already in the 1920s. We may want to connect this to his politicized modernism or cinematic experimentalism, but more broadly, we can properly treat this as a marker of his modernity. And yet, partly because of that, he himself seems to have become a kind of lasting presence, a constant. Of course, this could quite properly be treated as a matter of canonization, but I prefer to think of it as an issue of historical temporali­ zation. It is as if there were something timeless and unchanging at the present moment about his insistence on change. This question about temporality exceeds any narrow conception of historical method or theory. As Vertov himself in his Leninist guise might have insisted, the interaction of change and stasis, hence the construction of temporalities, is central not only to historiography but simultaneously to the political. With that in mind, I will now give somewhat more specific consideration to the peculiar conjunction of now and then around the signifier Vertov.

3 In 2004 the Giornate del cinema muto staged an important retrospective of Dziga Vertov’s silent films, screened chronologically. The earliest work shown was from the newsreel series Kino‐Nedelia (Kino‐Week), which appeared between May 1918

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and June 1919. In his program notes, the curator Yuri Tsivian (2004a: 30) describes Kino‐Week as “a year‐long week‐by‐week record of daily life at the time of the civil war.” It shows many sorts of events and activities, such as military scenes from the Civil War, a demonstration provoked by the murder of Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Leibnicht, other mass activities such as crowd scenes of Moscow in spring, and Communist Party figures posed facing the camera in static, medium long shot. Generally speaking, the cinematic style seems fairly simple, sometimes with shots framed and presented almost like pre‐classical actualities.7 The final sequence of the early Kino‐Nedalia (no. 1) showing that Moscow spring includes three successive shots of a park vendor selling hand‐driven mechanical toy figures, all from the same camera setup, with his back to the camera as he faces customers. In the foreground of each shot, hands hold and operate one of the toys, as if to demonstrate how they work for the camera, in compositional juxtaposition to the vendor and customers behind that hand in a middle range. This composition struck me as an uncomplicated but carefully staged arrangement of the mise‐­en‐ scène in two planes of significance. It seemed an effort to direct the attention of the audience by its obvious manipulation to contrast foreground and background, between the hands demonstrating the functioning of the toys, and the s­ ocioeconomic context of buying and selling them. This overt manipulation looked qualitatively distinct from the more centered, straightforward framings of other shots in this number and much of the series. Filmed reality was being more conspicuously organized. When I saw it, I wondered about change. Was this the emergence of the Vertov we now know?

Figure 9.1 From Kino-Nedalia no. 1 (1918).



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Was this the emergence of the Vertov we now know? This question reveals some­ thing about my own personal fascination with the retrospective, but note the ­peculiar temporal logic of that sentence. It includes two tenses, present and past, designating a now and a then. It also signifies another temporal element: a punctual point in time at which something changes – that is, a transformation which is an emergence, a beginning of a historical object that will afterward continue. This means that there is also an implicit future embedded within the past – call it the Vertov of the 1920s. For it was surely in the 1920s, not 1918, that Vertov can be first identified as the Vertov we now know. But additionally, there is yet another future entailed in this beginning: the future that is us, the we who now know the Vertov of the 1920s. That is, there is a historiographic subject in the future of the historical objects. This subject, this “we,” can only know these pasts and futures because we are not in that past, are not then, but come later. To summarize the strange overlap­ ping differentiations and con­junctions that make up the multiple temporal struc­ tures of the sentence: From the perspective of the initiating emergence of the new, we are dealing with at least two futures: (1) that of the historical object or process occurring after this emergence or beginning, which is nevertheless within the refer­ ential and discursive past of the sentence; and (2) therefore that of the historical subject, putatively the speaker of the sentence as a collectivity (“we”) who identifies that emergence, so that this second “future” is simultaneously our discursive pre­ sent. And from the perspective of this subject who writes the history, we are dealing with at least two pasts: (1) that of the time before Vertov became the Vertov we now know, and (2) that of the subsequent years when Vertov was indeed the Vertov we now know. The pertinence of this temporally complex sentence is the following: It is a ­properly historiographic sentence. In fact, it is a kind of sentence that Arthur Danto argues is inherent in historiography. He calls it a narrative sentence because it implies a beginning, middle and end (Danto 1985).8 No one watching this number of Kino‐ Nedalia when it premiered in 1918 could pose the question: “Was this the emer­ gence of the Vertov we now know?” or even, “Is this the beginning of the stylistic experimentations leading to Kino‐Pravda, Kino‐Glaz and The Man with the Movie Camera?” While there was certainly a Vertov who could be known in some sense at that moment, this Vertov could not be known as an object of historicization, for it lacked the completion of a future that could be referred back to an emergence. Therefore, that 1918 Vertov could not be the kind of signifier that might generate the multiple temporalities of my sentence. And therefore, a historiography circulat­ ing around the signifier Vertov was impossible. This illustrates a fundamental aporia of historiography as we know it. On the one hand, historiography demands a clean temporal break between past and present, which is to say between the object and subject of the writing of history. This is the kind of break not possible for the signifier Vertov in 1918–1919. Such a founding difference between subject and object rests on a presumption of change. On the one hand, it marks the type of historiography that we call modern, for it is premised on the appearance in time of the different and therefore the new. This is a temporal

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premise Vertov himself affirmed and a reason he was associated with both the experimental cinema tradition and the revolutionary ethos. On the other hand, in addition to this clean temporal break between past and present, this historiography simultaneously demands multiple, overlapping temporalities. This amounts to say­ ing that it requires persistences and conflations over the break. On a logical level, this may reasonably appear to be a contradiction endemic to modern historicity. On a discursive level, for various reasons it is not possible to elaborate here, it also seems to be an enabling characteristic for historiography, which is what makes it an aporia. For present purposes, note that this combination of change and persistence, and hence the multiple temporalities necessary to historicization, is illustrated by my earlier comments about the concept of documentary itself, or the signifier Vertov. By the way, for anyone interested, here’s the answer to the question posed by my sentence, “Was this the emergence of the Vertov we now know?” The shot which struck me so forcefully was probably not the emergence of the Vertov we now know. Not we, but rather I did not know enough. For Yuri Tsivian’s program notes indicate that Vertov did not begin supervising Kino‐Nedalias until late 1918, which must have been after this issue was made. Nevertheless, I recovered my scholarly self‐respect by thinking about that shot as a forerunner of the more general impulses that would lead to the cinematic revolu­ tions of the Soviet 1920s. And so, I saved historical thinking, for a similar sentence could be constructed for that more impersonal thesis also. But there are a variety of ways to do this. In his program notes, Tsivian gives a perfect example of the narrative sentence, though in a negative mode which only confirms its ubiquity: “But even in the Kino‐Week issues made under Vertov’s supervision, we will not find much that anticipates his later experiments in film form, of the kind found in his Kino‐Pravda, the experimental newsreel launched in 1922” (Tsivian 2004a: 30).9

4 Now let me go further by turning to a couple of specific examples from films of “the Vertov we now know,” in order to discuss a bit more how documentary cinema may be implicated in these temporal issues. The feature‐length Kino‐Glaz (Kino‐Eye) (1924), which we have in a postwar reconstruction by Vertov’s editor and spouse Elizaveta Svilova, is organized as a report on the nature and activities of the Communist youth group the Komsomol, or Young Pioneers. In her path‐breaking 1972 article “From Magician to Epistemologist: Vertov’s The Man with the Movie Camera,” Annette Michelson (1975) emphasized the use of reverse motion cinema­ tography in Kino‐Glaz, pointing to two extended sequences. In the first, the mother of a Young Pioneer who has patronized private street mar­ kets for food reads a notice posted by a Young Pioneer about a collective or coopera­ tive store. This leads to an extended reverse motion sequence, not only sending her to the co‐op store, but then showing how the meat was produced: the meat goes backward from the store to the slaughterhouse, where the bull’s innards are



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reinserted into its body and the bull returns to life; then, continuing in reverse motion, the bull is taken backwards to the railroad which shipped it to the town from the country, and the train returns backwards to the countryside. Only when the bull is  in the herd in the countryside does the film resume normal, forward motion. (In  a  wonderful parody of forward‐moving, linear “narrative” action not noted by Michelson, the sequence concludes when a Young Pioneer brings a letter to a herdsman who opens it. It says, “End of Reel One.”10) A second reverse motion segment begins with a Chinese magician who is paid in units of bread. An intertitle tells us a Young Pioneer’s thought: “If the clock could turn backwards, then the bread would return to the bakery.” We see a clock cease moving forward and start moving backward. Intertitle: “Kino‐eye continues the pio­ neer’s thought.” At this point, an extended reverse motion sequence begins, taking the bread backwards through the baking process that produced it from flour, these raw materials back to the grain mill, and the grain back to the rye field. Having arrived in the countryside again, the film resumes normal forward motion, and Young Pioneers in the country help a poor peasant widow. Michelson associates Vertov’s use of reverse motion in Kino‐Glaz with a rhetorical figure, the hysteron proteron. This is the trope which presents things in language in the reverse order of their everyday or conventional existence. Her argument is that this trope names a type of temporality central to Vertov’s conception of materialist cinema, and one that is fundamental to The Man with the Movie Camera. However, crucial instances of hysteron proteron in The Man with the Movie Camera are not in literal reverse motion sequences, but in the moments of the film displaying pro­ cesses of filmmaking. A strong example is provided by the famous transitions from traveling shots of a speeding horse‐drawn carriage into freeze frames, then to shots of the film strip itself, then to Svilova editing those shots. To put it crudely, first we see the consequences of the filmmakers’ work (the street scene of the speeding ­carriage) and only subsequently do we see the actions or processes of prior moments that produced the street scene, that is, elements of the filmmaking process itself. All of these cinematic instances might be teased out in comparison to my histo­ riographic sentence, with its complex, composite temporal relations of “before” and “after.” But relatedly, they involve another level of connection to historicity, in the realm of subject‐object relations. For Michelson, a central theoretical point has to do with the relation of language and cinema. Writing in 1972, she reaches from her own theoretical present – a present of Saussurian structuralism, Metzian cinema ­semiotics, and a nascent poststructuralism – to a theoretical past of the Soviet 1920s, as she notes the importance of linguistics and rhetoric to the Soviet filmmaker‐­ theoreticians and their avant‐garde conceptions of cinema. This is yet another inter­ mixture of past and present, one which brings together a semiological politics of the 1970s and a cinematic politics of the 1920s. Such parallels seem to have been ­particularly appealing in influential discourses about cinema at this article’s particu­ lar moment in the history of film theory – at least as we know that history now. However, if we position Vertov within the history of documentary cinema and the practical and discursive struggles to initiate and define that mode, another ­attitude

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toward cinema‐as‐language is of importance. On the geographically and geopoliti­ cally diverse terrain being established as that of “documentary” in the 1920s, the crucial testing ground was not “film language” per se, but relation between film and reality. We might rewrite this semiologically as the relation between sign and refer­ ent or “cinematic language” and referent. If we conceive of all this as a ­language‐­reality problematic, it becomes clear that it is also a crucial terrain for historiography. For by definition, historiography must claim to be about something actual, or at least to aim at some actual pastness. Otherwise, it could not be distinguished from fiction. In that case, we can make something of a leap and rewrite the oppositions between sign and referent, or between cinematic “language” and the objects it represents, or between historiographic language and the pastness at which it aims. In some way, all of them may also be rewritten as a relation between a subject and an object, a filmic/ historiographic subject and the filmic/historical object.11 As for Vertov, he may then be reframed as someone working within such connections, and thus also between cinema and historicity, through the relations of historiographic subject and histori­ cal object, at the very onset of the concept of documentary. This makes a certain kind of sense, but this is not only because Vertov claimed to be developing a historical materialist cinema, in the name of a new society based on the tenets of historical materialism. More pointedly, as Michelson emphasizes, ­temporality was a central consideration of Vertov’s films, and his concerns with tem­ porality were surely inflected by historical materialism. Yuri Tsivian thus comments on the meat sequence of Kino‐Eye as follows: Instead of going from cause to effect, the sequence goes from effect to cause. For Tsivian, this is a mark of Marxist analy­ sis. Ultimately, he explains, Vertov’s is a Marxism that “wishes to disclose the invis­ ible connections between things,” which is to say something like the connection between all parts (Tsivian 2004b, 10–14, quoted phrase on 13). This seems correct, as far as it goes, but I would reword and expand it. I would say the sequence seeks to go from immediacy to mediated totality. A seemingly direct and immediate activity of everyday life – buying food – is referred back to the necessity of comprehending where that action fits in the social whole or totality. This would make the reverse‐ motion strategy part of an attempt to configure a Marxist dialectics in cinema. It is politically understandable that a film made in the Soviet Union in the 1920s would manifest such dialectics by foregrounding relations between the urban working class and rural peasantry, with whom the reverse‐action meat sequence and the bread sequence both end. However, the project is not limited to this “content,” if that’s the right word.12 In these two examples from Kino‐Glaz, the normal moving image directly and immediately conveys ordinary everyday socioeconomic actions such as buying food and the labor of producing that food. But the distortion of everyday temporality involved in reverse motion clearly signals a reformulation of such familiar activities. As just noted, the content of this reformulation entails a dialectical mediation through the social totality. But this includes not only unpacking the appearance of immediacy in  such processes as consumption and production, or urban–rural ­relations. The means of doing this, through the reverse motion device, also refers the



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apparent immediacy of filmed movement in forward‐moving time back toward its cinematic mediation. In fact, intertitles explicitly associate Kino‐Eye with the capa­ bility for temporal manipulation. This might remind us of Vertov’s relation to the Soviet avant‐garde in the 1920s, since it could be called a making‐strange of percep­ tion, a defamiliarization. But it also refers us back to questions that were in play for cinema when the film was made: thinking through the capabilities and uses of cin­ ema, the concept of documentary, the very stance the apparatus could take toward its objects of representation – in a way, the configuration of filmic discourse or “lan­ guage” as the site of an active subject. So all of this bears on us, now, and how we might think such cinematic dialectics after so many years of film history have ensued. Take, for example, a reverse motion sequence in Kino‐Glaz not discussed by Michelson. During a scene when Young Pioneers swim in a pond, Kino‐Eye shows “the proper way to dive,” as an intertitle puts it, by means of alternations of forward and reverse motion, as well as slow motion. The diving sequence seems different than the film’s other reverse motion scenes. While it has a pedagogical alibi (“the proper way to dive”), it does not have the analytical charge of demonstrating the social divisions and linkages between city and country, product and the chain of productive labor, cause and effect, as do the other two reverse motion scenes. Its temporal manipulations and formal play ­therefore become part of a more general demonstration about filmic time and – as Malitsky might argue–defining the expansive possibilities of documentary as they were being explored in the 1920s.13 But also, to us, now, this sequence might look something like a stylistic cross between two moments in the history of cinema: one is the kind of pre‐classical pleasure in the apparatus one might find in a trick film such as the 1905 reverse motion film of a dive D’ou vient‐il? (France, Ferdinand Zecca); the second is the formal beauty connoted by the montage of variant camera angles and other filmic manipulations including some brief reverse motion shots in the diving sequence of Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia (Germany, 1938), or the reverse motion dive in the quasi‐surrealistic conclusion of Jean Vigo’s Taris (1931), shot by Vertov’s brother Boris Kaufman. These filmic references constitute a (very selective) past and future of Vertov’s diving scene, “as we now know it.” They could even be elements of a history of nonfiction cinema and the apparatus “as we now know it.” Certainly, when we construct such configurations as film historians, we can make narrative sentences. But the most general point would seem to be that, just as an imaged action is a figure working in sign‐referent and/or subject‐object relationships, so should an isolated detail or an end result, a present, always be constituted relationally. And this is the case not only for us now, but also for Vertov’s cinema. It is why John MacKay (2005), writing of Enthusiasm, intriguingly and counterintuitively com­ pares Vertov’s conception of documentary to Lukács’ realist dialectics of the social totality. At first blush, it may seem that a more modernist dialectics of the totality, such as Adorno’s, would be a safer theoretical reference point, given the claims of the experimental tradition to Vertov and his own fraught relationships with Soviet avant‐gardes of the 1920s. After all, Lukács’ opposition to montage and modernism,

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as well as a photographic aesthetic, is well known. However, Lukács’ evaluative standard was forms of representation and language that he could argue were ­adequate to representing the dialectics of social totality. It seems certainly true that Vertov was interested in developing the possibilities of new modes of representation – or “language” – in the face of socially determined insufficiencies of older modes. So while his aesthetic proclivities do not match up with Lukács, his epistemological concerns do.14 The centrality of temporality to this broad point might be encapsulated as follows. Vertov works with the goal of grasping a fully historicized reality of the social whole; hence the overlapping temporalities that ground Vertov’s kind of dialectical ­apprehension of the real. For this project demands a differentiation between the temporalities of the object and the documentary/historiographic subject. This is a way of understanding the formal devices, the rhetoric, the “language” of the latter’s approach to the object. It also provides the basis for the particular intersection in Vertov’s work of the documentary and experimental cultural‐textual regimes of cin­ ema, which (it now appears to us) were both being forged in the 1920s.

5 All of this justifies beginning a conclusion with a remark on the theory of history as the organization of temporality. In the dominant norms of historiography inherited from the nineteenth century, a subject in the present confronts and/or constructs objects that are processes and actions from the reality of the past. The modern com­ monsense phenomenology of time as an unceasing flow from past to present means that the past as object of knowledge is, by definition, lost to direct apprehension in the present. But the historian, as historiographic subject, seeks to overcome the gap between past and present in order to assert knowledge of the vanished past, to make contact with it, as it were. The conduit that lubricates this contact for the professional historian is a kind of indexical sign, the primary source document along with other types of survivals from the past that can serve that purpose. These are indexical because they were part of the past, generated by it, but still exist in the present; there­ fore they become a basis – evidentiary, logical, and/or affective – for signifying the reality of claims to knowledge of the past. Classic formulations in the theory of his­ tory conceptualize the resulting contact differently; for example, as logical inference from source documents, as empathetic understanding of historical agents based partly on such sources, as a hermeneutic of those sources, or simply as the organiza­ tion of historical documents as discursive formation, as in the early Foucault. More recently, the Dutch philosopher of history Frank Ankersmit (2005) empha­ sizes something he calls “sublime historical experience” as the repressed of historical thinking. According to his neat schema, there are three main approaches to ­historical theory currently on offer, and they all assume the separation of the historiographic subject (the historian’s writing) from the historical object (the past to be known): (1) Objectivizing professional historiography inserts the object into the context of



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history, but it firms up its assertions of knowledge of the past by claiming to exclude the historiographic subject from historical processes. (2) Hermeneutic theory, by which he means Gadamer, makes the history of the subject and its interpretations the basic determinant of historical thinking; that is, it contextualizes the subject rather than the object. (3) Deconstruction, by which he means Rorty as much as Derrida, demonstrates the absurdities of both, but in so doing it does not engage or explain the attractions and use‐values of historiography. Against all of these, Ankersmit’s concept of sublime historical experience reem­ phasizes the idea of an experience of contact between subject in the present and object in the past, as opposed to their separation. Given the premises of dominant historical theories, however, such proximity of past and present must amount to a historical decontextualization: a decontextualization of the subject and a decontex­ tualization of the object. Only by disarticulating both from their own historical times could it become as if they faced one another directly in contact across the gulf between past and present assumed in all modern historiography. This is a concep­ tion of a sort of simultaneity of past and present, and therefore a temporality that sublates them both into a perpetual “now.” Ankersmit believes sublime historical experience to be the generally unacknowledged drive of historical thinking, and he believes that it should not be disavowed. There is, he admits, a strong Romanticist component in his idea. One might even dismiss it by saying that it contains something of the mystical, or perhaps the anti­ modern. This is so to the extent that the modern or modernity is, ideally or ideologi­ cally, grounded in a temporality that is both disenchanted and admits of genuine change, hence insists on a break between past and present. But his primary example of this kind of historical thinking is certain writings of Walter Benjamin, in particu­ lar Benjamin’s (2003) discussion of Atget in his “Little History of Photography.” As it happens, this is a Michelson reference in her seminal reading of Vertov, and I will come back to the implications for Vertov and documentary. At this point, however, it is helpful to juxtapose Benjamin’s (1999a) more overtly political concerns in his noted theses in “On the Concept of History.” Here Benjamin invokes theology and traditions of Jewish mysticism to allegorize a materialist atti­ tude toward history. He proposes a historiography constructed through the “now‐ time” (jetztzeit) in which, at any instant, the constellation of present and past may momentarily be one of absolute contact. Figuratively, at least, this seems to me to parallel Ankersmit’s notion of a historical sublime, which also imagines historical knowledge as a decontextualized simultaneity. However, in Benjamin, this fleeting moment of now‐time, which enables contact with a vanished past in the present, is conceived on the political grounds of pain and suffering. It is true that pain and suf­ fering are a provenance of some canonical versions of the sublime. But unfortu­ nately, Ankersmit’s key analogy for the sublime relation of present to past is to love and heterosexual fusion, with reference to Plato’s creation myth. This indicates the limitations of Ankersmit’s bold conception. His insight is in his insistence on the inescapability of a historical imaginary, a subterranean desire for immediate experience of the past, which arguably underlies even the practices and

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theories of the most professional historiography.15 This means that claims of histori­ cal knowledge are underpinned by a generally unacknowledged drive for a historical decontextualization of both past and present. Ankersmit foregrounds that drive and wishes to validate it with concepts of the sublime and direct experience. However, he does not fully confront the contradictions inherent in his idea: between the absolute temporal division of past and present that makes ­historiography possible and neces­ sary, and the simultaneity of past and present that he so forcefully demonstrates is the desire of historiography. For example, the full achievement of sublime experi­ ence would mean that the kind of historiographic narrative sentence identified by Danto is obviated. With both past object and present subject decontextualized from their own times, there would be no need for the complex, multiple temporalities of such a sentence in order to articulate the ­relations between present subject and past objects. Although he believes himself to be defending ­historiography, the sublime fusion envisioned by Ankersmit dissolves modern historiography itself in a kind of love‐death. If this is the historian’s ­ultimate desire, it is a disciplinary death drive. What has all this to do with Vertov and documentary? It may be suggestive that “sublime” is a term occasionally used to evoke Vertov’s films. The most noted exam­ ple in recent years is probably that of the metaphysician Deleuze, but there are other scattered applications to Vertov.16 Suppose we supplemented the common way of thinking about Vertov’s stylistic and formal manipulations (his “experimental” side) as Russian Formalist defamiliarizations or Constructivist technological‐political pro­ jects, with a notion of the sublime. But suppose we kept in mind the connection between documentary and historiography on the one hand, and Vertov and “­historical materialism” on the other. In that case, we might follow Ankersmit up to a point, and think of such techniques and strategies as radical historical decontextualizations. For surely one thing that happens in the examples I have cited from Kino‐Glaz and The Man with the Movie Camera is a kind of extraction, a disjoining of objects, actions, and processes from their normalized or everyday temporal contexts. This urges a spectator to view their multiple temporalities and the film’s activity of pro­ ducing connections directly as such. This is instead of viewing them through the mediation of immediate, everyday phenomenologies of time, and through the medi­ ation of tired historiographic principles such as a temporality of closed, mutually exclusive historical sequences that sever relations of past from the present and object from the subject. Rather than direct contact and fusion between past and present, however, this means confronting a conflation of different time schemes and tempo­ ral overlaps. Such temporal multiplicity is reminiscent of Danto’s narrative sentence. In Vertov’s films, this temporal multiplicity is implicit in how indexical cinema con­ structs and configures its connections to its objects as well as relations among those objects. They propose temporal multiplicity as inherent in documentary cinema. Exposing the multiple temporalities of historiography – that is, their characteristic overlaps and reversibility as well as chronological succession, and so disjunctions as well as continuities – is a reaffirmation of the claims of modern historiography. For it reasserts the separation of past and present, hence the universality of the historical specificity of objects of representation, that is, historical context. Yet it also reminds



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us of the kind of drive that underlies all impulses to recover the past by overcoming that separation, which Ankersmit calls sublime historical experience. But what Ankersmit misses is that modern historicity operates in the aporia between contex­ tualization and decontextualization, between (in his own terms) ordinary and sub­ lime temporality. In Benjamin’s late writing and in Vertov’s cinematic practices there is a commitment to change, which makes this very aporia a key site not only of his­ torical knowledge but simultaneously of politicization and social transformation. It is not surprising if one aligns the so‐called sublime of Vertov with a Benjaminian conception of historiography rather than Ankersmit’s. Of course, Vertov and Benjamin both claimed to be historical materialists in some sense. But the important thing here is that for both, materialism partly consisted in refusing to abolish from consciousness the historian’s position in the present, facing a perpetually receding, vanishing past. This implies more than the usual appeal to a modernist aesthetics of reflexivity. They did not give up the modernist insight that the potential for change is necessarily embedded in time, and that this means that the relation of past and present, therefore of historical object and historiographic subject, is implicated in difference as well as the desire for simultaneity. Thus, Benjamin (1999b) marks the materialist historian’s position with metaphors of remembrance and of awakening, and he imbues it with horror at suffering, rather than with fusion and ecstasy.17 Remembrances and like mental states involve conjecture, conjuring up. They deal with objects never fully present to the subject, who is nevertheless actively making them and fully invested in them. In this, at least, they are like the past or pre‐existents that are of concern to historical thinking. And thus, Vertov glories in the differentia­ tions of filmic and everyday temporalities, in their overlaps, disjunctions, and con­ junctions in the constructions and arrangements of images and sounds as such, in the constructions and arrangements of indexical signs that are central grounds of the documentary cultural‐textual regime. For, indexically produced images and sounds are indexes of the specific actualities of the past, and they constitute the raw material of the documentary filmmaker in the present, in her own “context.” In that case, maybe it makes sense to think of Vertov’s attempts to impose a differ­ ent view of the field of documentary at its very beginnings as radical historical thinking. And it may help explain why we often feel compelled to jump to him, from our present into his past, which persists into the present. For the very use‐value of the category of documentary is “historical” in this sense. It is situated at the meeting place of change and stasis that generates both historiography and politics.

Notes 1 This essay revises Rosen (2007). 2 On Grierson’s conception of documentary as distinguished from other 1920s nonfiction film modes, see the landmark 1932 essay “First Principles of Documentary.” On early Hollywood’s aggressive development of its international distribution networks during and immediately after World War I, see Kristin Thompson (1985).

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3 Grierson’s much noted definition of documentary as “the creative treatment of actuality” only appears in a short 1933 article “The Documentary Producer.” It is not in the roughly contemporaneous and more expansive “First Principles of Documentary” (Grierson 1932). For some filiations of the term actuality in relation to Grierson, see Brian Winston (1995: Chapters 1 and 24). The latter chapter is richly suggestive in relating Grierson and the history of documentary film to the idea of probabilistic sampling and the exemplary case in contemporaneous science. As for film culture, however, Winston finds that Grierson’s terms “documentary” and “actuality” stem from cognates used by French critics, and he identifies the French actualité, which means current events, with the newsreel; he does not consider possible relations to the pre‐classical actualities, with which Grierson would have grown up. See Grierson’s important 1937 essay, “The Course of Realism,” where his rhetorical strategy is to begin by associating Lumière films with childhood memories of the first films he ever saw. His account of that first screening includes what seems to be a description of the Lumière proto‐actuality Repas de bébé, which, in his admittedly hazy memory, may have included a closeup. Connotatively, this conflates his own childhood with pre‐classical cinema and actualities, making it a kind of attractively immature cin­ ema containing the seeds of what came later; descriptively, he is already determining this one‐shot film teleologically, against a device that was virtually universal at the later time he was writing. (And if the film was indeed Repas de bébé, his memory is indeed a wrong one, arguably functioning to find the seeds of present sophistication in a past innocence. The film was in fact a single three‐shot of mother, father, and child, though at somewhat larger shot scale than many of the earliest actualities.) Like me, Jonathan Kahana (2016: 13–15) has also remarked that the exclusion of pre‐classical actualities as primitive cin­ ema was a component of Griersonian definitions of documentary. For a convincing, nuanced argument in favor of historical and theoretical distinctions between pre‐classical actuality filmmaking and later documentary cinema see Tom Gunning (2016: 52–63). 4 For an excellent and indicative selection of manifestos from the experimental or avant‐ garde regime in this period, see Section One of Scott MacKenzie (2014: 13–106). It would be typographically tiresome to use scare quotes around the term experimental throughout this essay, but they can be assumed whenever the word appears. I use them as a reminder that questions could be raised about this label. One danger is that the very word, experimental, may connote an unjustified marginalization of a key, long‐lasting tradition of non‐mainstream film practices. Another problem is indicated by Michael Renov’s objection to my short conference presentation of an early version of this paper: the very distinction between documentary and “experimental” traditions cannot be sus­ tained, because films labeled one or the other have too often occupied both historical categories. As I will note below, this is indeed the case with my central example, Vertov. Nevertheless, the term has been used during much of film history, often by critical sup­ porters of non‐mainstream filmmaking modes and filmmakers themselves, and none of these or other objections have prevented the category from having a relatively continuous presence in various institutions of cinema, critical discourses, and film scholarship. For some questions, something like this term seems necessary and, with these hesitations, I use it here. For Renov’s perspective with respect to particular historical cases, see his book The Subject of Documentary (2014: for example Chapters 5 and 6). Another important conceptualization of formative overlaps and conjunctions of these two traditions is Bill Nichols, (2001: 580–610). 5 See also Josh Malitsky (2004).



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6 Special thanks to Nilo F. Couret for making a copy of his paper available to me. Malitsky (2013) has since elaborated at greater length on Shub and the history of radical nonfiction film in a book that includes extensive discussion of Vertov; see Chapter 5 on Shub, and Chapters 1 and 3 on Vertov. We can also expect authoritative elaboration of the complicated nuances of variant terminologies for types of nonfic­ tion cinema in the Soviet Union in John MacKay’s much anticipated Dziga Vertov: Life and Work, 3 vols. As for Grierson himself, all agree that he first used the word documentary in his 1926 review of Moana, but not as a mode or category of cinema. Rather he attributes “documentary value” to the film and quickly adds that this is not its primary virtue (p. 86). This seems consonant with earlier appearances of the term for cinema in Brazil and its use in the Soviet Union, as reported by Couret and Malitsky, as well as Winston’s point about the French derivation of Grierson’s term. Indeed, Eugène‐Louis Doyen was using the term “valeur documentaire” to refer to his surgical film documents as early as 1898. I owe this last point to James Leo Cahill. 7 Malitsky (2013) emphasizes the political importance of displays of collectivity in the series. A parenthetical speculation: one wonders if Vertov’s engagement with Kino‐ Nedalia might have had anything to do with the mistaken claim made at one point by Georges Sadoul, that Vertov began as an “actuality cameraman” (MacKay 2017). 8 Some of Danto’s (1985) examples of such sentences are: “Aristarchus anticipated in 270 B.C.E. the theory which Copernicus published in A.D. 1543” (156); “Petrarch opened the Renaissance” (157); “The author of the Principia Mathematica was born in Woolethorpe” (158). For Danto such “narrative sentences” entail a relation between an initiating event and a future which could not have been known at the time of the initi­ ating event but only later. Thus, in 270 B.C.E., no one could know of Copernicus’s work; in Petrarch’s lifetime, the Renaissance was an unknown as such or as a period; and no one could have called Newton “the author of the Principia” in 1642, when he was born. 9 In addition, Malitsky (2013: 46) indicates even when Vertov was most fully engaged in Kino‐Nedalia, it was as an editor of footage shot by others, so he would not have directed the cinematography of the park vendor. The relation of Vertov to Kino‐Nedalia will undoubtedly also be discussed in MacKay (forthcoming). 10 To be painstaking about it, in the version I studied, a shot with the written intertitle “End of Reel One” immediately follows the opening of the letter. If the succession is under­ stood as ordinary continuity editing, this intertitle will be understood as the contents of the letter. However, no other intertitles indicating the end of reels manifest such ambiguation of the diegetic and non‐diegetic address. But my reading this moment as continuity is reinforced by the fact there is other continuity editing in the film. In fact, this entire reverse motion sequence is prefaced and motivated by a clear eyeline match, when the mother looks at the poster advertising the co‐op. 11 See Rosen (2001), where I make an extensive cultural‐theoretical case for this kind of leap. 12 While I am emphasizing Marxist dialectics of totality, on a more political plane compare the Soviet policy idea of smychka (union or alliance, most importantly between urban proletariat and rural peasantry) at this time, and for Vertov specifically see Malitsky (2013: 91–99). Smychka is mentioned but given less weight for Vertov in MacKay’s remarkable contextual and textual account of the film (MacKay 2013).

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13 This formal playfulness corresponds to the material being depicted, which is recreation, fun, a healthy respite necessary to the making of a socialist society, but not a political or economic process directly participating in that making. 14 As MacKay (2005) notes, Lukács denigrated the alleged naturalism of documentary photography as compared to his aesthetic ideal exemplified in the novelistic narrative forms he labeled critical realism. In contrast, Adorno at least once imagined a socially radical technical potential of cinema precisely as that of a naturalism that would go to an unprecedented extreme, which would break through the stilted, conventional narrativi­ zation of nature and consequent naturalizations associated with the culture industry (Adorno 1974: 142). 15 This seems related to something I have elsewhere identified as “the appeal of the index” for historiography; see Rosen (2001: 127–133). 16 See Gilles Deleuze (1989: 40, 157). Such passages in Deleuze have also drawn several commentaries and explications of their own. For other kinds of examples, see the com­ ments on Vertov’s conception of truth and cinema in Paul Coughlin (2000); and the suggestive but brief passage on Vertov in relation to the avant‐garde in Mikhail Iampolski (1998: 125–126). Incidentally, Iampolski refers to Jean‐François Lyotard’s definition of the sublime as the failure of representation to match the concept of the object and “the totality of what is,” something which could conceivably be wrenched back toward the dialectics of the social totality, as in Fredric Jameson’s much discussed and explicitly Marxist theory of a postmodern sublime. 17 See Convolutes K and N; as well as Benjamin (1999a).

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Thompson, K. (1985). Exporting Entertainment: America in the World Film Market, 1907– 1934. London: British Film Institute. Tsivian, Y. (2004a). Dziga Vertov: The Factory of Facts. Program Notes in Giornate del cinema muto 2004 catalogo, 27–78. Sacile/Pordenone, Italy: Comune di Sacile. Tsivian, Y. (ed.) (2004b). Dziga Vertov and His Time. In: Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties, 1–29. Sacile/Pordenone: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto. Winston, B. (1995). Claiming the Real: The Documentary Film Revisited. London: British Film Institute.

Part III

Films and Film Movements

Introduction Films and Film Movements Joshua Malitsky

Indiana University

The final section of this volume focuses on how scholars of nonfiction film work with both individual films and bodies of films as a way of understanding cinema’s relationship to the past. Each chapter addresses films that have been classified as part of film movements but does so in a way that establishes new, unanticipated connections with other films – those thought to be part of that movement as well as those outside of it – and cultural currents. The section underscores some of the key historical interventions made in recent scholarship on nonfiction film. First, as Luca Caminati demonstrates in his chapter on Roberto Rossellini and his connection to Italian Neorealism, there is much to be gained by locating documentary films not just in relation to fiction features, but also to various industrial, educational, scientific, and ethnographic endeavors and lines of thought. Second, Jane Gaines’s and Thomas Waugh’s chapters emphasize the importance of locating bodies of documentaries in relation to the political movements with which their production was associated. In this way, we can see that the term “movement” takes on a different inflection when connected with “documentary,” one that draws on the political as well as the aesthetic connotations of the term. Whereas “movement” is one of the most enduring frameworks scholars have used for classifying bodies of films – both nonfiction and fiction – the connective tissue that links films within a “movement” is not always self‐evident. Perhaps more importantly, reliance on the established connections and the assumptions on which they depend often silences voices that point in other directions. The chapters in this section of the volume aim to amplify those other voices, call into question accepted models of classification, and do so in a way that reconceives these films’ relations with the past.

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Connective Tissue When demarcating bodies of films, scholars have typically considered five distinct, but overlapping, categories: politics, aesthetics/style, geography, time, and institutional connections. To be sure, most analyses foreground associations across a few of these areas when asserting that a certain number of films constitute a movement. Bill Nichols, for instance, (Nichols 2010: 147–148) posits that historical periods and national boundaries help us to think about stylistic similarities between films. As such, for Nichols, these movements, having produced multiple, resonant films, help us understand the relationship between films and broader sociopolitical dynamics. A framework based on congruences across time, geography, and theme likewise points back to one of the most influential early efforts to articulate the relations between cinema and society – Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler. For Kracauer, Weimar cinema’s recurring visual and narrative tropes revealed the unconscious fantasies and desires of a nation; his symptomatic readings of the body of films became a psychohistory or a history of attitudes (Kracauer 2004). Traditionally, scholars in literature and fine arts have emphasized shared stylistic traits across works as the determining factor in identifying a movement. Many historians of fiction film have adopted this approach, but have done so in an expansive way, more likely to position films as part of a transmedia movement while identifying how the artistic concepts were translated into cinematic terms. For example, German expressionist cinema was aligned with the broader expressionist movement in painting, architecture, sculpture, and dance and yet developed its own emphasis on subjective intensity through jarring juxtapositions, unrealistic set designs, distorted angles, and chiaroscuro lighting schemes. Russian/Soviet formalist film had, perhaps, an even more complex relationship to other arts. Russian formalism began as a literary movement that aimed to establish the autonomy and scientific credentials of literary study by identifying the specificity of literary language. Filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin drew on these ideas, creating films that they believed accentuated the specificity of cinematic expression, films whose meaning relied less on the relationship between the image and the world and more on relationships across images or juxtaposition within images. Filmmaking was thus closely tied to scholarship in Soviet cinema of the 1920s. Even Italian neorealism, a movement associated almost entirely with cinema (it likely established the meaning of cinematic “realism” as we know it), emerged with a call for cinema to return to the tropes of Italian realist literary fiction of the early twentieth century. It is not an accident that the three examples of trans‐art movements and their manifestation in cinema I draw on here are European. Film movements are most closely associated with European cinema, emphasizing the twin pillars of “art” and the “national” that defined approaches to European cinema in the last third of the twentieth century. Ginette Vincendeau argues that European film has long been understood as “art,” also noting that most reference books subsume European cinema under “national cinemas.” Both frameworks enabled European cinema to serve as counter to Hollywood, which was industrial rather than artistic, and monolithic



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rather than national (Vincendeau 1998). The canonization of European film movements shaped not only scholarship but also how film courses were taught. This, in turn, helped ensure the distribution of these films at a time when it was not at all guaranteed. However, of the major European film movements canonized, the British documentary movement was the only one centered on documentary. Although cinema textbooks and anthologies rarely focus on nonfiction film movements, recent volumes focused entirely on documentary provide insight into ­scholarly approaches. Contributions to the anthology The Documentary Film Book (Winston 2013) discuss the historical and geographic emergence of new documentary “paradigms,” a framework that relates to but perhaps exceeds that of “movements.” These pieces describe the most influential and transformative methodological and aesthetic shifts in documentary – the Griersonian tradition, Vertov and the Soviets, direct cinema in the United States, for example – as well as their adoption in different contexts (Canada, Australia, New Zealand). Some contributions have a national focus while others rely on transnational or artistic‐cultural connections. In this way they combine an interest in conceptual foundations and historical specificity. For many scholars of documentary, however, films are associated with one another more decisively via political movements. Julia Lesage opens her landmark essay “The Political Aesthetics of the Feminist Documentary Film” by asserting the interrelation of documentary films made in a certain period (late 1960s – early 1970s) with contemporaneous feminist movements. During this time, many filmmakers with previous training began to make feminist films and many feminists turned to documentary cinema. To Lesage, the films evinced similar topics, approaches, and forms, with the primary goal of consciousness‐raising. But their use of a “realist” documentary structure was also shaped by their distribution goals. They saw “these films as an urgent public act and wished to enter the 16mm circuit of educational films especially through libraries, schools, churches, unions, and YWCAs to bring feminist analysis to women it might otherwise never reach” (Lesage  1978: 509). Lesage’s argument thus demonstrates the tight links between the films she considers and the feminist movement. Such cultural and sociopolitical connections have long been a concern of scholars of nonfiction film. Thomas Waugh likewise emphasizes these connections in the provocatively titled Introduction to his volume on radical political (“committed”) documentary, “Why Documentary Filmmakers Keep Trying to Change the World, or Why People Changing the World Keep Making Documentaries.” For Waugh, what unites “committed” films is their connection to various leftist movements – traditional left, workers, and the emerging progressive movements of the 1970s and 1980s (Waugh 1984). It is the combination of the expansiveness of this body of films – connecting various movements across time and space within a larger umbrella – and the specificity of each cinematic intervention in the world that serves as their connective tissue. Whereas the idea of the “committed” documentary links films and filmmakers across temporal and geographic context, the British documentary movement has long been seen as the core of the documentary tradition. Its influence is evident in the fact that it is sometimes simply referred to as the “documentary film

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movement,” as in the title of Ian Aitken’s anthology (Aitken  1998). For Brian Winston, the movement was vital in legitimating documentary’s realist project (Winston 1995), inaugurating philosophical, political, and ethical errors that continue to haunt the tradition. The films of the movement have related aesthetic and methodological approaches. The majority have dominant voice‐over narration, problem‐solution narrative structures, and (often) poetic but not defamiliarizing styles. But what unites them most is their comparable purposes. They aim to educate citizens about the increasingly complex modern world, allowing workers both to get in touch with their industrial‐working selves and to understand social issues outside their work contexts. At the same time, they advocate for those same workers. But for Winston and others, John Grierson’s sociopolitical vision and the organizational structure he put in place defined the movement. The films were funded by government agencies and, to Winston, it is this aspect that led them away from meaningful social change. The British documentary movement was distinct from other nonfiction film movements in that scholars often deemed it an integral part of British national cinema as a whole. Documentary distinguished British cinema in ways fiction film had not. In addition, its combination of realism and pragmatism was seen to represent something characteristic of British national character. The notion of a special relationship between Britishness and nonfiction film was challenged two decades later with the emergence of the British Free Cinema movement. In 1956, Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, and Lorenza Mazzetti, who were struggling to find exhibition for their films, decided to screen them together in a single program at the National Film Theatre in London under the banner “Free Cinema.” This decision was aided by the fact that Reisz was programming the NFT. Even though they were each working independently, they noticed that their films had a definite “attitude in common,” and were particularly attentive to life in northern, working‐class English settings. The first screening became the impetus for five additional programs of short documentaries that screened in London at the NFT from 1956 to 1959. The final three programs included diverse works by foreign directors Roman Polanski, Claude Chabrol, and François Truffaut pointing to the movement’s pragmatic and contingent dimensions. It is thus unsurprising that Anderson, the foremost leader of the group, famously questioned whether Free Cinema – with its geographic and thematic expansion – was unified enough to be understood as a movement.

Classification and Terminology Free Cinema’s reliance on contingency and pragmatism, and its international dimensions, thus challenge assumptions about the connective tissue underlying film movements. But it also connects us to the period that receives more attention than any other in writing about film movements – the 1960s. In Making Waves, a book focused on the decade, Geoffrey Nowell‐Smith identifies five film movements in



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Britain, France, Italy, East and Southeast Europe, and Latin America. They are distinct enough as individual projects to constitute separate examples but they are united in that they operated by negation, countering the “fundamentally inexplicit cinema” of Hollywood with ones that, in various ways, marked their own enunciations (Nowell‐Smith 2008: 4–5). These enunciations are described across the literature and in Nowell‐Smith’s book as movements and waves. It is interesting that Nowell‐Smith’s book has the term “waves” in the title but consists of individual “movements” that combined “make waves.” To be sure, the terms are rarely rigorously differentiated across the literature. Waves are more explicitly connected with the 1960s – the French New Wave being the archetypal example – whereas movements are more likely to be defined by scholars and critics. But there are two distinctions worth making here. First, waves are by their nature fleeting; they give way to other waves. Their power lies in their lack of permanence, in their gathering of energy, and in their ability to spark related waves elsewhere. Movements, by contrast, have more historical flexibility. They can be resuscitated, reimagined, put to different uses, drawing new connections in the process. Second, following the previous thread, they are more closely associated with political activities and, in this way, often align with filmmakers’ efforts to coordinate their work with such activities. These two associations of the term “movements” makes them especially valuable for scholarship on documentary film history and helps frame the interventions of the chapters in this section. Luca Caminati’s chapter highlights the first of these associations and focuses on the Italian director Roberto Rossellini, one of the founders and foremost directors of ­neorealism. For Caminati, the twin historical genealogies of art cinema and neorealism limit the understanding of Rossellini’s work and, in turn, of neorealism itself. To  subvert these genealogies, Caminati locates his work in relation to broader (and transnational) nonfiction film culture of the 1930s and 1940s – in particular “educational and didactic media, and their rhetorical modes of expression” – and to the ethnographic research and films of Jean Rouch, with whom Rossellini had a close relationship. This new framework allows Caminati to rethink some of Rossellini’s major works, including his Indian films, by accounting for the ethnographic and anthropological dimensions therein. This is a direction, Caminati concludes, that does not just open up neorealism to new analyses but establishes the roots of the new cinemas of the 1960s through the French New Wave and Italian neorealism. The chapters by Thomas Waugh and Jane Gaines, respectively, develop sophisticated models for understanding the relationship between film and geopolitical movements. Waugh’s chapter comes from his groundbreaking research on the Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens. But, as is evident in all of Waugh’s work on Ivens, he does not focus, in an auteurist mode, on Ivens’s personal vision (Waugh 2017). Rather, this chapter attends to a body of Ivens’s work – the Cold War films centered on political congresses – that are “most disavowed by the Ivens estate” and either ignored or lambasted by critics. The films adopt socialist realist principles, resulting in works in which “cheerfully utopian international communities are shaped by a deep structure

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of not only communist politics and ‘positive’ character dramatics, but also the processing of the trauma of wartime violation, partition and reconstruction.” The film Lied Der Strome (The Song of the Rivers, 1954) is the only one from the period that is cinematically inspired and important according to traditional aesthetic criteria; because of this, it receives the most attention. But at the same time, Waugh balances that consideration by unashamedly locating the body of films in relation to the political movement/moment. He challenges the blanket disavowals of this work and insists on historical and political rigor and sensitivity when judging the value of these contributions. Jane Gaines expands on Caminati and Waugh’s temporal scopes to include one hundred years of nonfiction film production in her chapter on the interrelationship between documentary activism – as part of a revolutionary movement – and technological change. Gaines sets the stage with the foundational moment of Soviet documentary of the 1920s, notably Vertov and Eisenstein. She then highlights two moments of the “doubly revolutionary,” examples when “technologies like motion picture film cameras when still thought to be ‘revolutionary’ as technologies are deployed in ‘revolutionary’ struggle.” For Gaines, the Workers Film and Photo League of the early 1930s and the Arab Spring (focusing on events in Egypt) become cases through which to consider core theoretical issues that face documentary scholars today. These involve the status of the documentary image as a representation of reality, the political and ontological relations between the real and the virtual, and the truth claims underlying documentary articulations. Gaines concludes compellingly, critiquing post‐structural critiques of realism while acknowledging an insight from post‐structuralism that remains relevant today. It is the rhetorical aspect of documentary enunciation that must be acknowledged, she argues, one that complicates any direct sense that proof = truth. In this way, it is recognition of the rhetorical shaping of the relationship between document and documentary that provides the uncertainty Gaines sees as so politically and epistemologically essential.

References Aitken, I. (1998). The Documentary Film Movement: An Anthology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Kracauer, S. (2004). From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological Study of the German Film (ed. L. Quresima). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lesage, J. (1978). The Political Aesthetics of the Feminist Documentary Film. Quarterly Review of Film Studies 3 (4): 507–523. Nichols, B. (2010). Engaging Cinema. New York: W.W. Norton. Nowell‐Smith, G. (2008). Making Waves: New Cinemas of the 1960s. London: Continuum. Vincendeau, G. (1998). Issues in European Cinema. In: The Oxford Guide to Film Studies (eds. J. Hill and P. Church Gibson), 440–449. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Waugh, T. (1984). Show us Life: Towards a History and Aesthetics of the Committed Documentary. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press.



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Waugh, T. (2017). The Conscience of Cinema: The Works of Joris Ivens 1912–1989. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Winston, B. (1995). Claiming the Real: The Documentary Film Revisited. London: British Film Institute. Winston, B. (2013). The Documentary Film Book. London: British Film Institute.

10

Documentary Dreams of Activism and the “Arab Spring” Jane M. Gaines

Columbia University

Twentieth‐century moving image documentary movements were born dreaming dreams of activism. And here the word dreams is meant to call up the “hopes and dreams” aspect of political theories of “the revolutionary” that we continue to test. Here, the 2011 Middle East uprisings that the West misnamed the “Arab Spring” are only the latest challenge to those theories.1 But after having misnamed these events, the last thing we want to do is to dismiss Middle Eastern political struggles as “only dreams,” so let me be clear that “dreams” here references the legacies of aspiration tied to the technologically new that begins with the Soviets. Note as well that the term utopian does not appear in my title, allowing critical distance on “techno ­utopianism.”2 Putting aside the question of political incommensurabilities (Russian, Arab), I single out the question of a shared activist legacy – organized movements powered by the technologically new, or political upheaval coincident with technological explosion such that recording machines are credited with socially transformative powers. For documentary studies such powers are also part of the legacy of Frankfurt School cultural theory as in Ernst Bloch’s (1986) “incomparable mimic power” of the camera (406) as well as hope as a “militant emotion” (112). Here I reach as well for Edgar Morin’s speculation that “it is perhaps in documentaries that cinema utilizes its gifts to the maximum and manifests its most profound ‘magical’ powers” (2005: 75). Documentary aligned with magic? While Morin’s use of the term magical derives from anthropology, in this context he associates “magic” with documentary political legends Dziga Vertov and Joris Ivens, a rather startling move. And why startling? Because, of course, documentary as aligned with rationality and truth‐telling has been framed as the antithesis of dreams and magic. But I need Morin’s concept of “magical,” as in inexplicably powerful, for what it adds to the

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expectations around political activism and networked technologies today. That the expectations are high is confirmed by the volume of literature on the topic.3 Perhaps the statement of the highest expectations, however, comes from Peter Weibel (2014) who sees global activism as itself the first new art form of the twentieth century. Here he sees neither art “object” nor image, but a move out of the image into “virtual data space” (55); no individual “artist” but art‐as‐participation: “Activism is the art form of the protest movement” (60).4

The Soviet Socialist Legacy Not so surprisingly, my earlier thinking about documentary activism began with the anthropology of the mimetic image, that is, the power of the image of the world when turned on the world of which it is an image.5 Let us however, see what, if ­anything, can be salvaged from where we have been. Tracing Morin’s “magical” reference, we can follow how the political struggle becomes aligned with the almost‐ beyond‐belief powers of the moving image and those powers become deployed first on behalf of political education and then political struggle. Effectively, beginning in the Soviet 1920s, this entailed the annexation of additional powers to the image. That is, to the original motion photographic powers to “bring to life” (no longer so amazing) were added the powers to “bring about” social upheaval; two miraculous powers became linked. In the Soviets, Eisenstein, and Vertov, then, the revolutionary legacy of documentary activism is the expectation that mimetic technologies turned on the world (and cut in an explosive new style) can be recruited to revolutionary ends.6 Historical images, footage, and reenactments of the 1917 revolution became agitational tools. Recall the requisite viscerality of Eisenstein’s concept of “agitational spectacle” so tied to the bodily, a veritable political aesthetics of emotional response (49). Left out of my earlier discussion of the Soviet contribution to media activism, however, was the connection we would today make between the newness of motion picture technology in the 1920s and the expectation of swift miraculous change. Miraculous change, first tied to motion photographic and later to digital capture technologies, might be thus tied but with a caveat – that the change these technologies promise spikes at their inception. Add to this the sociological phenomena in which things become “revolutionary” by association, from consumer products to ways of life. What we have sociologically might be called the “doubly revolutionary” – technologies like motion picture film cameras when still thought to be “revolutionary” as technologies are deployed in “revolutionary” struggle. Consider here those memorialized cases when 35 mm film technologies, liberated from the studio, have been “doubly revolutionary,” that is, recruited politically at the moment in which they are still relatively “revolutionary” as technologies. We can trace this doubleness to Sergei Eisenstein’s Soviet Socialist motion picture Strike (1924), now made an honorary documentary despite its original alignment with antirealism (Nichols 1995: 77). Further, there is the canonical example of documentary activism, Misere au Borinage (dirs. Joris Ivens and Henri Storck 1933), the 35 mm film shot among



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the strikers and then used as an organizing tool on behalf of Belgian Communist groups inspired by the Soviet example (Gaines 1999: 86–87; Waugh 2016). Key moments of twentieth‐century media activism correlate with the advent of what we could call “then‐new” media. Here I consider the last century’s “then‐new” media activism relative to the organizing efforts of the Workers Film and Photo League which operated between 1930 and 1935 out of New York City. Although the Film and Photo Leaguers are known for having shot 16 and 35 mm footage of ­hunger marches, my point of contrast is the nearly forgotten Bonus March (1932). From the Bonus March uprising in Washington, DC, I jump forward to the twenty‐first ­century “Arab Spring” and the Egyptian case, starting with the events of January 25, 2011.7 “Arab Spring” online activism then becomes a test case for pressing theoretical issues that face the subfield of documentary studies: the relocation of activism from the streets to the Internet and back again, the ascendance of capture and ­connection over recording, the loss of bodily experiential and perceptual parameters, and the evidentiary status of Big Data. The contrast between 1932 to 2011, from the standpoint of established documentary theory, as we will see, puts pressure on that theory. This is the theory that in its activist strain has been intent on real historical events and people’s struggles and on not denying the so‐called reality of the world before the camera while maintaining that the photographic image offers “no guarantee” that this or that “really” ­happened. The image offers no “guarantee” of world‐image correspondence, no “proof = truth,” all the while needing the evidentiary “proof  =  truth” equation as confirmation of injustice or abuse of power, “proof ” harnessed to the dream of social upheaval on behalf of the oppressed. Perhaps the “proof ” equation is unavoidable because, as we know, both political activism and work in the documentary mode have claimed a special relation to the historical world as empirically existing. And activism is in trouble if that world does not have empirical existence! On this point, Jean‐Louis Comolli (1999) is especially emphatic when he says that “the documentary film draws its power from its very difficulty, wholly derived from the fact that the real doesn’t give film the time to forget it, that the world presses on, that it is through contact with the world that cinema is made.” He continues, with more relevance for our case: “This intense charge of the real gives documentary a particular place, even as technological developments and computerization tend toward a virtualization of the world” (40).8 But just as soon as the term contact with the world arises in the context of net activism, it is put in check by the physical and infrastructural conditions of online organizing. The online activist, as we will see, is “in contact” at the same time that he has no contact, for he is experientially “cut off ” from the sites of activism – the streets. The “Arab Spring” Internet images of a national military brutally attacking ­protesters with tanks and tear gas, then, will not be recalled for the way in which they posed the old question of the relation between the empirical world and its moving picture image. Instead, the Egyptian uprising posed another, quite different, relational dilemma – that of the relation between two worlds, the one named “real” and other called “virtual.” Symptomatic of this dilemma, many Egyptians at the time

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worried about an apparent confusion between these two “worlds.” In recollections published in the immediate aftermath, the question was raised as to which “world” it was that the uprising could be said to have taken place in – that of the street or that of the Internet – with a consensus favoring the street.9 Rejecting the early conjecture that the uprising was only an internet phenomenon, one Egyptian artist scrawled on a painting: “This is a street, and this is Facebook and not a street” (As quoted in Ghonim 2012: 153). Following current thinking in Western documentary studies, however, one might be dubious of the argument that the “real” struggle was in the street and not online. We might say that the activity of online organizing was not exactly “not real” or that a real/not real dichotomy doesn’t apply. It doesn’t apply, we might argue – either because the relevant philosophy doesn’t oppose “the real” with “the virtual” or because there is no unmediated “real” except via the mediation of it. But both of these philosophical issues seem irrelevant. More relevant seems the unresolved question as to whether the Internet as system fosters control or inspires progressive opposition to it.10 For Western documentary theory, then, this is a déjà vu moment. One recalls that it was 1980s AIDS activists’ testimony as to the power of “realism” that forced the field to reconsider the “critique of realism” that had made documentary work politically suspect.11 The “two worlds” metaphor, however, is persistent in the early recollections of young middle class educated Egyptians published in English (Al‐Saleh 2015: 7). Yet consider how “two worlds” encouraged the idea of two “revolutions,” one of which was called too soon by the Western media that jumped to see itself in what was called a “Facebook revolution” (Smith, 2011).12 This mistake implicitly credited Western technology with overturning the old order, with a triumph of Western modern over Middle Eastern ancient culture. Only later did assessments reveal what journalists should have known – that Arab world social media users were a small percentage of the population and that high activity outside the region had been read as an indication of inside activity.13 At the time, young activist Egyptians described feeling pressure to choose between the “two worlds,” that is, skeptical of the Internet connection that they also credited, they were paradoxically investing in the very technological hope that roused their suspicions. Finally, in retrospect, it could be argued that the “two worlds” metaphor made it easy for US political scientists to argue that since the statistics did not support a social media revolution there was therefore no revolution in either world, as we will see. Egyptians, however, when asked today, may say that their revolution is not over.14

Two Media Activist Moments 80 Years Apart While the “Arab Spring” revolution question persists but remains up in the air, the revolutionary bona fides of the Workers Film and Photo League moment are not in dispute. The group was part of the Communist International’s cultural movement as a section of the Workers’ International Relief (WIR), the American chapter of the Internationale Arbeiterhilfe (IAH) founded by Lenin in 1921 in Berlin with the goal



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of helping strikers and their families hit by hard times (Campbell 1977a: 23). Although the Bonus March on Washington, DC, was not directly Communist‐led it provided a chance for Communists to recruit among the Workers Ex‐Servicemen’s League (74). Unemployed World War I servicemen and their families were there to urge passage of the pay bonus Congress had promised them. By June 1932, 20,000 were encamped and intractable. Confronting this resistance, the US cavalry pushed the veterans out using tear gas and probably started the fires that burned the camp. Two aspects of this footage I would stress: cameraman Sam Brody later recalled how he and Leo Seltzer, who shot Bonus March, liked to work with “small hand‐cameras” and that their “unrestricted mobility” helped them to show the “fiendish brutality of the police toward the marchers” (76). Further, they “shot the march not as ‘disinterested’ news‐gatherers but as … participants in the march itself ” (75). Later, film historian Russell Campbell commented (1977a) that while today we might be “immune to cinema verité,” at the time this was not the case because, as he says, “hand‐held work, close‐range views of street action must have struck spectators with great novelty and force” (74). The point here is that in Bonus March the mode of technological participation served political exigencies; hand‐held verité camera style was the very sign of political participation that so “struck” viewers in the newness of its immediacy. In the history and theory of cinema verité and ­activism in which Bonus March figures, new technological capacity boosts political efficacy15 (Figure 10.1).

Figure 10.1  Strike against High Rent. Leo Seltzer. Workers Film and Photo League.

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The obvious parallel between Washington, DC, June 1932, and Tahrir Square, Cairo, January 2011, is the style and content of the imagery that “documents” scenes of citizen protest against government policy, protest enacted as confrontation with armed police and military agents. Ordinary people are shown pitted against tanks and tear gas. The rough, dizzying style of shooting is similar, now an established code of activist radicalism, of spontaneous reaction and sign of lives “on the line.” Other parallels besides the style and content of digital video footage of protesters strike us – for one, the incendiary social condition of high unemployment. In 2011, Egyptian unemployment was at 30%, and, in addition, a high percentage lived in abject poverty (Ghonim 2012). Add to the deteriorating social conditions and the evidence of “suffering” here is media‐making as an irritant to a government refusing to acknowledge demands. But here is where the parallels end. Following Campbell (1977a), we in the West are now relatively “immune.” The Tahrir Square protest footage is not at all novel to you and me, indeed, images of police action against protesters is so ubiquitous in the West that such footage is called “riot porn” for Internet watchers (Kleinhans 2014). Where, then, is the analogous novelty or force, if any? Indeed, “where” will be our relevant question, as we will see. Because it is not only that protest images are ubiquitous in the West, it is that the Internet mode by means of which they are accessed is thought to be everywhere. However, given the wrong‐headed assumption about “everywhere” that yielded the Western media’s obtuse projection of a “Facebook revolution,” not surprisingly, the West also missed what was for Egyptians the technological novelty moment in which activists uploaded and posted to one another with increasing regularity ­during the struggle. The “novelty and force” with which these protest images struck Egyptians had to do with the delivery system  –  these images along with posted updates came to Egyptians who had cell phones and access to computers and ­connected them with immediacy and “force” as never before. How then not to deny the “newness” factor and to link it to the political moment without positing two revolutions that then become confused or conflated? And to approach the “Arab Spring” without doubting the significance of events sited as “r­evolutionary” by citizens of Tunisia, Bahrain, and Egypt? Neither is this to deny the effectiveness of networked image technologies to recruit citizen participation in the overthrow of tyrannical rulers as happened in Tunisia and Egypt. But as I posed the question at the outset, the issue is the impact of “Arab Spring” online activism on theories of documentary. The West’s theories of revolution are now severely tested in the Middle East, the case that reminds us of how thoroughly in Europe, Asia, and South America theories of revolution have relied on Marx. However, of all of the theorists to which one might turn, my choice may seem strange – the non‐Marxist theorist of European history Reinhart Koselleck (2004). Yet I turn to Koselleck (2004) for a bonus: his longue durée theory of revolution incorporates an explanation of technological “newness.” Here, admittedly, is a German thinking about the French Revolution, an event he privileges as the only revolution not in dispute among so many civil wars that never rose to this standard. For our purposes, more importantly, he posits 1789 as the date after which modern time is increasingly oriented toward a



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future freighted with expectations of “the new” (3). In other words, Koselleck (2004) affords us a more substantial foundation for the connection between our “two revolutions.” This explanation “takes some of the wind out of ” the “digital revolution” hypothesis by making a linkage to social change expectations part of a 200 year trend. In formulating a theory of activism and the technologically new, however, we would not want to end here. So although Koselleck (2004) is useful for an idea of revolution as a modern phenomenon that arrives already oriented toward “newness,” Jacques Rancière’s idea of revolution‐as‐anticipation is more hopeful. For Rancière, even though the revolution may never arrive, it is always expected: “The analysis of class struggle that was Marx’s paradoxical glory is rather the theatrical distribution of the shapes that may be taken by the conjunction of the not yet and the one more time” (31). And if the “Arab Spring” marks the revolution that did not happen, “not yet” functions as political placeholder for events‐to‐come. As for the other “revolution,” the technological one, I approach it with as much trepidation, especially as an ­outsider, which is why I turn to the account of the insider who became the West’s techno surrogate.

“That Google Guy”: Wael Ghonim The question of the “two revolutions” converges both outside in the West and inside Egypt’s educated community in the figure of Wael Ghonim.16 As the head of Middle East marketing for Google in 2011, Ghonim was an easy point of entry for the West. President Obama even referred to him as “that Google guy,” siding with him in the outcome of Egypt’s fate (Landler 2011). But while Ghonim’s immersion in Google culture is familiar – he negotiates the system with high level expertise, protecting his anonymity with proxies and strategically swapping passwords  –  his account of events is perplexing and his radicalization resists explanation by means of established Leftist wisdom. Ghonim’s memoir, Revolution 2.0, follows his transition from a cautious Egyptian living in Dubai as a Google executive to an invested activist who takes “personal days” off and returns to Egypt before the January 25, 2011, mass protest that he initiated with an announcement on his Facebook page. Here is an employee who effectively played “hooky” from Google in a gamble to jump start a national uprising. Ghonim posts “We Are All Khaled Sa’id” on June, 8, 2010, a protest on behalf of the 28‐year‐old Egyptian tortured to death in Alexandria by state police, his jaw broken and his face bloodied.17 On the night before January 25, 2011, Ghonim uploads to Google Docs “Why Protest?” His answer: 48 million poor citizens, 12  million with no shelter; Egypt’s ranking on the Corruption Perceptions Index – 115 of 139, as well as the highest rate of newborn deaths in the world, the number of anemic children, citizens infected with hepatitis C, and deaths from ­cancer due to water pollution (165). Clearly we are challenged to locate Wael Ghonim politically if he is both a Google executive and an Egyptian activist. Early on, arguing with an Egyptian correspondent for Reuters, Ghonim contests her position which is that although she wants

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regime change, like many Egyptians she is skeptical of online activism and doesn’t believe that it could amass crowds. Like many others she feared the emergency law. Ghonim (2012), still “wearing his Google hat,” as he says, thinks, however, that they could “make the leap from the virtual world to the real one.” Going on, he insists: “It was going to happen someday, somehow” (68). But by “it” does he mean the “leap from the virtual world” or the mass revolt? Because in an American television interview he later insisted, as he said, “This is not an Internet revolution. It would have happened anyway” (as quoted in Aday et  al. 2012: 5). Following from the “two worlds” metaphor is the inevitable relocation of the action, that fresh question for a documentary theory of Internet activism that requires us to theorize what it is that has changed about social change media as media. We might, however, just as well ask how theories of new media themselves have been changing because it seems as though newest media require constant theoretical updating by ever newer media theory. Updating, however, does not necessarily keep new media theories from lapsing into commonsense wisdom. Or from relying too heavily on the media industries’ own terms like convergence, as well as a house philosophy like Google’s in which there is a “virtual world” and a “real world” and that therefore a movement can “leap” from one to the other. Yet another Google formulation gives us pause relative to “Arab Spring” organizing. Let us call this the Google “disclaimer” which warns that social media platforms on a global scale can give online activists false confidence that their audience is there, encouraging an “overestimation” of that audience. This disclaimer figures in Google executives Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen’s (2014) discussion of the Middle East relative to the perils of what they term “virtual courage” in the chapter of their book titled “The Future of Revolution” (125–127). Now let me turn to a recent theorization of social media that addresses this particular issue but as a systematic structural disjuncture that has radically shifted human engagement with the sensory world. As it happens, this theory directly addresses Wael Ghonim’s experience of using social media to jump start the Tahrir Square uprising. Mark B. N. Hansen in his recent Feed Forward sees in twenty‐first‐century media a “microcomputational revolution” that, as he says, hooks up both machines with machines and people with people (2015: 38). For Hansen our “two worlds” question has to do with a perceptual shift. There is occurring, he thinks, a change in perception in which since so much is “modulated” under or “beneath” human sensibility, that a massive “disenfranchisement of perception” is under way (52). Now think of Wael Ghonim, reluctant activist and the West’s Egyptian avatar. The revolutionary momentum in which Ghonim is caught up is described in his memoir not as taking place in the heat of battle but as though it were unfolding in slow motion underwater and yet he must always act fast. He has no face to face contact with the other organizers he “meets” online and his online “followers” never materialize there either. The reader gets the impression that although Ghonim is controlling things, he is not in control. Hansen might explain Ghonim as in a perceptual bind, his agency displaced and his capacity to act thwarted. As Hansen might explain the online activist’s frustration, it is that “we simply cannot have direct operational or ‘real‐time’ access to the



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data milieus of cultural products.” We can’t have access and yet “we find ourselves faced with the imperative to respond – to take deliberate action and to make conscious decisions – in situations where deliberation is no longer the relevant mode of response and where consciousness is no longer the relevant level of experience” (59). So what is it that Facebook wants Wael Ghonim to do? Of course, Facebook wants him to “count” and to “be counted.” We know this. But a count is also all that he has. By January 25 he has his “count,” that is, site followers numbering around 500,000, with  27,000 confirming they will attend. However, with no indication other than ­numbers, a January 25 protest announcement is a gamble that his site followers will show up (2012, 143). Once he has posted the date, he has no way at all of knowing whether they will appear. He is frantic and sleepless. Before protesters do show up in numbers estimated in the millions, not only in Cairo but in Alexandria, Ghonim is frenzied, constantly updating his page, and worrying that he can’t keep his online anonymity. He panics when he accidentally forgets to use his proxy, putting himself in danger of identity exposure. Then, the worst happens. Two days after the protest begins he is arrested in the street. On January 27, Egyptian State Security picks Ghonim up and imprisons him for 12 days, a time he spends in solitary confinement. Revolution 2.0 is then oddly enough the memoir of an activist who, during 18 days of confrontation in which millions crowded Cairo streets, spent 12 days in isolation, blindfolded. That is, he is both perceptually handicapped and unable to act or to witness the protest in the most experiential real‐world sense. For the reader of Ghonim’s narrative, however, his imprisonment is just an extreme form of the position he was in already. Our narrator is returned to where he was in before – “cut off.” He is yet unable to give us a first‐person account of events in Tahrir Square because he still has no perceptual access to them. Hansen, explaining how in the social media world we are perceptually “cut off,” thinks that while there we are also subject to processes that are “inscrutable” to us – both micro, given that the digital file yields nothing to the eye, and macro in that the infrastructural command is unlocatable (64). Our Egyptian stand‐in, blindfolded and imprisoned, now perceptually “cut off ” in both worlds, literalizes this. Thus, also to the “inscrutability” of microprocesses we must add the “inscrutability” of the Egyptian state power that has mysteriously arrested him. The state, the unreadable power behind these inscrutable processes, inexplicably allows Internet activity then shuts down communications  –  the famous move that backfired on Mubarak State Security and drove thousands more into the street on February 28 (Ghonim 2012). Considering their error, however, we could also argue that even Egyptian State Security – with all of its resources and ability to monitor, to access other activists’ emails through Ghonim’s computer in the event that he is tortured – was unable to perceptually access events. Where then is the action if the all‐ powerful state is also in a disjunctive relation to the events it would quell? For Hansen, “The real action is… ‘elsewhere’…” or, better, the term he invents  –  the action is “elsewhen.” Thus, he goes on, “it occurs… in the microtemporal, and massively researched, details of our sensory‐material solicitation” (58–59). Solicitation? Again, what is it that Facebook wants us to do? To count and to be counted.

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Now let me return to my earlier point that the US media jumped to the wrong conclusion about the “Arab Spring” social media “revolution” – but with an emphasis now on data, the data at issue culled by the US government‐supported Institute of Peace (USIP) and published as an online report. For this US think tank point of view leads us back to the legacy of “the real,” the question raised around documentary realism in the 1970s. Tabulating and comparing total clicks in the context of  four 2011 protests  –  in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Bahrain  –  political science researchers concluded that more information via social media was spread outside the Arab world than inside. The study does not deny the high volume of information around the Tahrir Square moment in Cairo on January 25, 2011, circulated as #jan25.18 Twitter, however, couldn’t finally be linked to that action because the percentage of users inside the region was just too small (Aday et al. 2012: 11). Clearly, the USIP researchers didn’t find the data on media usage that they hoped to find. However, the authors do confirm that it was the enormity of outside foreign audiences following real‐time YouTube video on Facebook pages and Twitter feeds that gave rise to a commonsense idea of new media activism that was picked up by ­mainstream media reporters.19 The USIP researchers, however, are not interested in critiquing First World myopia; they are exclusively interested in data: “Claims about the causal role of new media, no matter how intuitively plausible, need to be supported with compelling empirical data” (Aday et al. 2012: 4). From the USIP point of view, there was no new media revolution in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, or Bahrain because social media use numbers did not add up inside the region. To refine my earlier point, there was neither a media revolution nor a political revolution. The revolution “didn’t really happen” because the numbers were not there. It is the “really” or didn’t “really happen” question that recalls the critical disrepute into which documentary work fell before it was cleared of the charge of “naïve ­realism,” that charge a legacy of the 1970s “critique of realism.”20 Eerily, the USIP commitment to Big Data returns us to the genealogy of the “critique of realism” and occasions a reassessment. To be clear, the USIP report is the political scientist’s approach to demographic knowledge as a predictor of regime change, here knowledge based on the analysis of personal data. Ironically, where Arab citizens “count” is where the situation has in Hansen’s phrase “exceeded our perceptual grasp” (253). That is, where persons “count” for policy is at the computational infrastructural level. USIP‐supported researchers discounted the “Arab Spring” as a political revolution because it was not a verifiable technological revolution, but not because there was no social media miracle compliments of Google, Twitter, and Facebook. There was neither one revolution nor the other because the events did not deliver enough data for policy decisions to be made by extrapolating from that data. That is, the outcome of a future election could not be predicted from so little user data. The “Arab Spring” didn’t really happen because verifiable users didn’t reach a critical mass. And yet, in so many later testimonies, young Egyptians associate their participation and their hopes with YouTube videos and Facebook pages. Neither let us discount the power of the “fantasy” that new media could produce the twenty‐first century revolution, that dream of so many Arab citizens.21



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The Critique of Realism and the Crisis of Historicism I began by asking for a documentary theory of technological hope by which I mean the “hopes and dreams” of activists on behalf of a future transformed. All of this is implied by the capacity of the technological, “as never before,” the technological that arrives wrapped in expectations as “Arab Spring” online activists attest. But other forces that reconfigure the mediascape bear watching – one, the paradox of disconnected connection, what Mark Hansen’s new media theory addresses in Wael Ghonim’s online activism; the other, the representations of Big Data, exemplified by USIP’s social media data collection and its analysis. Considering the latter, I now want to argue that Big Data delivers its own “technological representations of reality” – sometimes an abstract picture, as in visualized data, and sometimes just as an irrefutable numerical “count.” What should strike us here is the proximity of this new representationalism to the earlier “realistic representation of reality” ideal, historically part of the documentary legacy. This new representationalism now promises another source of knowledge – one that theories of documentary could not have anticipated given that the focus has been on aesthetic “realism” and its evidentiary signs but not on empirical evidence in bulk. Empiricism now returns as the promise of data to deliver a total picture and objective knowledge. Here in the Big Data moment we are closer than we may think to that old problem of historical knowing that predates the 1970s “critique of realism.” And here is why. Recall how the fate of motion picture film documentary work was held in the balance in the 1970s as a consequence of philosophical debates about representational realism. Here I refer to post‐structuralism’s transformation of the European academy after World War II. Post‐structuralism’s target, however, was the discipline of history. And it is insofar as documentary, like traditional history, can be seen to subscribe to a “correspondence theory of truth” that documentary work has been subject to the scrutiny of the “critique.”22 Yet the familiar version of the “correspondence theory” in which representations are held to a standard of “truth” based on how things “really are” should remind us that this position still underwrites digital video capture in the documentary mode. So this rehearsal of the past is no argument for bringing back the “critique of realism” and its judgment. Rather it is a revisiting of origins in the attribution of a particular historical stance to the documentary, one that relies on a version of the empirical historian as able to definitively know as well as bring back “the past,” that method famously summarized in Leopold von Ranke’s eighteenth‐century phrase “as it really was.”23 For us, however, Ranke is less important than the overreaction to Rankian historicists, that overreaction known as anti‐historicism in British and US film theory circles in the 1970s. This is the anti‐historicism that informs the post‐structuralist “critique of realism” that for a time decreed that a documentary recording of the real world could never be used to revolutionary ends, complicit as its world view was in the ideology of realism or “what you see is what you get.” But there is more to the “critique” than this, and here is what needs to be salvaged.

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1917 Let me offer as a means of explanation the date bolded as the title to the Prologue montage sequence from Bonus March: 1917. That title is followed in the Eisensteinian montage style with shots of World War I trenches and battlefield dead.24 Let us say then that 1917 reminds us of the human desecration that was World War I (although US casualties, due to entering so late in 1917, were small relative to those of the French). How could millions of casualties not disturb a world view? Not ­surprisingly, on the occasion of the centennial, commentators called World War I “holocaustal” in its human toll. Today we know that as a consequence of that toll, World War I also marks a caesura in the upbeat march of European progress. After World War I, ­following historian Charles Bambach (2013), “faith in both the meaning and coherence of history had been shattered,” contributing to, although not completely accounting for historicism’s “crisis.” Thus he explains how in philosophical circles, the “crisis of historicism” became aligned with a massive philosophical disillusionment (133). Recall the German anti‐historicists, those two strange theoretical ­bedfellows, Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin, as well as the French Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, to name only three post‐structuralists associated with anti‐historicism. To return to documentary and its antithesis, the formally correct “political modernism” (that anti‐realism embraced in the US and UK exemplified by the work of Jean‐Luc Godard from his Dziga Vertov period), begins to look different when we think the “critique of realism” from a “crisis of historicism” vantage – as a rejection of history, the discipline, as an empirical ­science of knowing. Documentary in the 1970s was then a casualty of a deep skepticism surrounding empirical knowing. But that is not quite all of it. Fredric Jameson (2002), revisiting German philosophy at the crisis moment of representation, thinks that one way of reconsidering Heidegger’s elaboration of “representation” is to see that “the real” performs another function: “Nothing less,” Jameson says, than the “construction of certainty.” The “certain construction of the real,” he continues, yields not “the real” and, after all, we already know the ideological underpinnings of evidentiary claims (47). So not “the real,” really, but a “certainty,” a certainty that we should still be very wary of wherever we find it. That is, whether we find it in the certainty‐to‐end‐alluncertainties of Western political scientists who calculate the outcome of Egyptian elections or we find it in the documentary stance. Because if “proof = truth” does this mean that we want “certainty” to be a defining aspect of documentary work, especially as it testifies to abuse of power? Yes, “proof ” does mean “truth,” some will say. What was effective about the “Arab Spring” moving images uploaded into the void and what was most explosive about the photographic image of Khaled Sa’id, tortured to death, was that these images were sent as well as received as new certainties. Here was “proof ” that Egyptian State Security tortured and murdered citizens on the street! But wait, I would reply, the  power of moving images and incendiary words in revolutionary situations may begin with the “proof = truth” status of the document. But there is a second



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necessary step and that is this: It is in the deployment of images (in the heat of battle) as rhetoric: “Look at this!” “The regime does this to its citizens!” While moving images may be encoded in the documentary mode, they have their effectivity in rhetoric as well as in the aesthetic shape a particular rhetorical position takes. Here is where technological hope linked to people’s dreams of a better world enters again, legacy of nearly a century of political activism. And here is why the “Arab Spring” moment pushes us toward difficult theoretical problems raised by documentary and online activism. Consider the new problem framed by the familiar one: whether in posing a “real world” versus an “online world” the “really was” of objective history returns again  –  even while we develop a more nuanced understanding of internet activism given Mark Hansen’s displacement of immediate “real action” to the “elsewhen” (58–59). Empiricism and scientificity, however, return in other forms. Some of these forms are more familiar than others and are therefore easier to contest as for instance Google’s corporate dreams of a consumer “revolution” based on the science of data collection – even in Egypt where in 2011 70% of the population remained illiterate and had no internet access. But will the future possibilities for activist uses of the miracle of digital immediacy offer unprecedented access to people in “real time”? That remains unanswered. To quote media theorist Henry Jenkins (2012), on user power: “The myth of the digital revolution allows us to imagine the possibilities of change, allows us to see once established norms and institutions are subject to rethinking and reinvention. In the case of networked ­technologies, they create new conditions of access to information, control over the circulation of messages, and the capacity to form networks which give rise to certain hopes for a more democratic society.” However, he concludes that “There’s nothing inevitable about the outcome. People will have to fight to get the results they want” (219). Nothing inevitable or certain? To which I would add that it is better to remain on the side of uncertainty.

Coda Never before have I written an article that went through so many revisions or researched a topic that took me in such opposite directions. The original plan I had for a 2015 conference was to compare two moments of political activism and two emerging technologies 80 years apart. This comparison grew from questions I had raised in an article that I titled “Political Mimesis” (Gaines 1999) itself requiring reconsideration 25 years later (Gaines 2020). This is because so many of the original questions about the circulation of political imagery seem to have been invalidated given the contemporary reach of digital delivery systems into so many aspects of our lives. Then, new r­ evelations about the dark side of the Internet began to call for a major course correction in media research that takes up the relation between social movements and online organizing. Yet, as this collection goes to press, it is likely that yet another reevaluation will be underway as we assess our increased online interconnection mandated by the 2020 world pandemic and plan political activity for the economic crisis to come.

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“Documentary Dreams of Activism and the ‘Arab Spring’ ” appeared in its earliest form as “Rêves documentaires de militantisme et ‘printemps arabe’.”25 At the time of the June 2015 Paris conference at which it was delivered as a paper, broader analyses and English translations of Arabic responses to the “Arab Spring” were just surfacing. Middle East scholars were taking account of the short‐lived euphoria post‐2011 as well as the reversal in which Muslim Brotherhood president Mohamed el‐Morsi was elected then overthrown in a military coup on July 3, 2013. Some studies of the “digital activism” that so interested sociologists had also begun to appear. However, the majority of these were interested in “participatory” democracy and I was not convinced. I remain skeptical of the ease (in the last decade) with which progressiveness was so quickly claimed for networked connection, the most dramatic example of which was the Western media’s too early call to see the 2011 Middle East uprising as a social media “revolution.” The title “Documentary Dreams of Activism” stems from the context in which a second version was developed and delivered as a paper for a 2016 conference titled “Utopia and Reality” at the University of Zurich.26 As I said at the outset, “hopes and dreams” is intended to suggest an oblique relation to the utopian. Thus, neither the second version nor this current one, which is very little changed, resolves the tension between the dystopian and the utopian. However, carrying over something of the theme of utopianism from that conference, this second version retains the original interest in the revolutionary Soviet use of the technologically new. Yet that earlier, now published version ends differently with an epilogue explaining why it was fortuitous, given the continued Middle Eastern turmoil, that I end the article with the word “uncertainty” as I still do here. But then, given the context of the utopia conference, I also wanted to indicate that post‐Arab Spring, at least one preeminent Leftist was willing to keep the utopianism in Marxism alive. Thus, I ended the epilogue by quoting Étienne Balibar who says, almost in response to the events of 2011: “Why, in fact, should we suppose that the day of revolutions is over?” (2015, 103). This coda, however, should be distinguished from that earlier epilogue because while I have left “uncertainty” as the last word in the article, I would now modify this qualification. Although, as with many both inside and outside the Middle East, I remain “uncertain” about the political future there; about other aspects of the ­original article, I am somewhat more certain. One: I am more convinced of the importance of the historical legacy of the Workers Film and Photo League international for the study of documentary theory and the activist tradition. Two: About the political organizing potential of “digital activism” I am certain that we should remain alert and critical. After so many upbeat studies of new social movements claiming the “participatory” potential of online activism, sociologist Jen Schradie delivers the news for which we should have been prepared. Relevant is Schradie’s comparative study of the digital networking capabilities of organizations in the Right‐to‐Work state of North Carolina just after the “Arab Spring” and before the 2016 election of Donald Trump. Rating 35 organizations on their digital capabilities in a political continuum ranging from Moral Monday to



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union organizing to Tea Party politics, she challenges the myth of digital activism. Her research reveals the deep digital divide produced by scarcity of resources from leisure time to education and access, not to forget the fear of online surveillance that characterized Black workers supporting unions. Here is an inequity for which  technology cannot compensate. Schradie concludes that “classism  –  and ­racism – were stronger forces than any revolutionary power of the internet to overcome inequality” (2019: 18). Eerily, I echoed Schradie’s title, The Revolution That Wasn’t, in a fourth version of my challenge to the “Arab Spring” mainstream media mistake at a second Paris Conference in 2019 with what I called “Documentary Activism: The Revolution That Was Not.”27 But of what else would I now say that I am more certain? While I am now more assuredly skeptical of the too automatic utopianism of digital activism, I have become even more committed to historical comparison. For around 2018 my research swerved when I began to connect the New York Film and Photo League with the Workers’ International Relief (WIR), headquartered in Berlin, and can now say with more certainty, after 80 years, that funds channeled from Moscow to New York helped to pay for film stock to make titles such as Bonus March (1932). It is worth returning to this documentary, which documents World War I veterans’ encampment in Washington, DC, a mass action remembered 30 years later in the Civil Rights march on Washington28 (Figure 10.2). Finally, however, referencing the legacy of radical documentary, we make a commitment to “now” as well as to “then.” In his analysis of political image‐making in

Figure 10.2  The Uprising (Peter Snowdon, UK, 2013).

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Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, and Syria, Dork Zabunyan develops new theory that attaches to the legacy of Dziga Vertov, Harun Farocki, and Chris Marker. What is new is to find this work from these Middle Eastern uprisings as addressed to the future. In that spirit, I would give the final analysis to Zabunyan who in his The Insistence of Struggle offers our best political rationale for historical connection: “Images of a struggle captured as it unfolds in the present also engage in future struggles” (2019: 27). There it is. What I had missed in my first attempts to think about the technologically new relative to the circulation of activist images of street protest was the permanence of ordinary uploads, stuck there on YouTube for all (who are looking for them) to find. These are the kinds of incendiary Arab Spring images Peter Snowdon gathered to make the stirring political compilation The Uprising (2013). So, I would give the final “last word” to Jim Hoberman who in his New York Times review of The Uprising calls the video “one of the great movies of the still‐young 21st century.” Here he sees not only the political “potential” of the internet but the future of “vernacular video.” Although I prefer my term the ordinary upload, I might concur with Hoberman’s analysis of The Uprising as “prophecy.”29 In the spring of 2020 we can only hope that it predicted not only the new ubiquity of a low‐res quarantine video aesthetic but the radicalization we will need to wrest for the hard times ahead.

Notes 1 I concur with Danahar (2013: 17) who thinks that the phrase “Arab Spring” was ill‐chosen because it calls up the “Prague Spring” of 1968 whose significance is in the Czech rejection of Soviet rule. Recently, Friedman (2013: A 23) has called for dropping “Arab Spring” in favor of the “Arab Decade,” or the “Arab Quarter Century,” a way of accommodating the fact that the overthrow of some but not all of the corrupt Arab rulers did not produce immediate change and that regional instability will likely continue during a longer period of struggle around the future of both these nations and of Islam. See Smith (2011) for the circulation of the term “Facebook Revolution.” 2 The majority of the digital activism scholarship could be characterized as in the vein of “technoutopianism.” Castells (2012: 15), for example, sees a “new species of social movement” made possible by the Internet. The automatic association of net‐based activism with “democracy” and therefore Leftist movements has been recently challenged by new sociological studies of Tea Party online organizing in the US (See Schradie 2019). 3 See, for example, Earl and Kimport (2011), Lievrouw (2011), Robé (2014), Weibel (2014). 4 To quote filmmaker Lara Barandi who saw “a sense of confusion about what is creativity, what is art, and what is activism.” See www.filmingrevolution.org for Lisa Lebow’s interviews with makers and thorough context, reviewed by Mayer: www.bfi.org.uk/news‐opinion/sight‐ sound‐magazine/reviews‐recommendations/bytes/filming‐revolution‐crowd‐documenting. Accessed March 15, 2016. 5 See Gaines (1999: 94) for Michael Taussig’s borrowing from South American indigenous cultures for the way “sympathetic magic” as ritual conveys special powers on images as copies. 6 See Waugh (1984) for an overview that puts the Soviets in perspective.



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7 The following timeline should re‐orient us to those events:

December 17, 2010 – Mohamed Bouazizi, Tunisian set fire to himself January 13, 2011 – Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Beni Ali resignation June 8, 2010 – Wael Ghonim Facebook page “We Are All Khaled Sa’id” created January 14, 2011 – Ghonim posts announcement of protest: “January 25: Revolution Against Torture, Corruption, Unemployment, and Injustice” January 25, 2011 – The uprising begins January 27, 2011 – Ghonim taken into State Security custody January 28, 2011 – Egyptian government closes down communications nationwide February 7, 2011 – Ghonim released February 4, 2011 – President Mubarak asked to step down.

8 Juhasz and Lebow (2015, 1) in one of the most comprehensive overviews to date say that “One of the more stubborn concepts to stick to these varied filmmaking practices is this commitment to a direct engagement with a world encountered by the filmmaker….” 9 Al‐Saleh (2015: 18) in his introduction to the stories he collected says that they will “­correct” the widely held belief that the Arab Spring was “merely a Facebook revolution.” See Ghafar (2015: 59) who contrasts activists with Twitter and Facebook accounts with his definition of what happened: “Egyptians, who had bowed down to their pharaohs for seven thousand years, simply said, no more.” 10 See Galloway (2010) for a nuanced overview of the operative network power dynamic and theories as to why the struggle between forces remains unresolved. 11 See Juhasz (1999: 194–195), in which she says: “‘Realism’ can function in any number of ways, including, but not limited to, the confirmation, perpetuation, and reflection of bourgeois, patriarchial reality. It can testify to alternative, marginal, subversive, or illegal realities; it can critique the notion of reality.” 12 See Schmidt and Cohen (2014: 6) for the point of view of two highly placed Google executives who in their introduction predict not only a future of life in “two worlds at once,” but one in which “virtual identities” will take precedence over physical ones. See, however, Chapter 4, “The Future of Revolution,” for their analysis of the “Arab Spring” which reads like a kind of disclaimer of any responsibility for the revolution that failed, with warning about “no risk revolution” (126–27) and online “revolutionary tourists” (128). If they can argue that “it’s the people who make or break revolutions, not the tools they use,” Google is “off the hook” (129). 13 To summarize Aday et al. (2012: 3): “New media in the form of bit.ly linkages – did not play a significant role in either in‐country collective action or regional diffusion during this period.” 14 Egyptian journalist Hadeer Elmahdawy (Belghazi and Elmahdawy 2014: 272) describes how the “culture of protest” has become part of everyday exchange. Eltahawy (2012), 274–5, credits youth with starting a revolt that was then picked up by an older generation, and testifies that “I know that each Arab watching the Egyptian protesters take on Mubarak’s regime does so with the hope that Egypt will mean something again. Thirty years of Mubarak rule have shriveled the country that once led the Arab world.” See also articles in Manhire (2012) and Lynch (2014). Krajeski (2014: 30–31), summarizing the post‐2011 art scene in Cairo, describes an exhaustion with “revolutionary chic,” and one curator she quotes says that it was “absurd” to mount a show about a revolution that was not over at all.

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15 In an interview with Campbell (1977b: 26), Leo Seltzer explained that Film and Photo League members also took photographic stills which they sold as a means of raising money. The photograph “Strike Against High Rent” was likely one such photograph sold to pay for food. Thanks to Russell Campbell for this image. youtube.com/watch?/v=wHcA-TTySQk 16 “I found myself unable to resist the word revolution. Although it took no more than a few keyboard strikes and a single mouse click to change the event’s name to ‘January 25: Revolution Against Torture, Poverty, Corruption, and Unemployment,’ my mindset changed drastically immediately after I did so” (Ghonim 2012: 136). 17 http://www.facebook.com/ElShaheeed 18 Schmidt and Cohen (2014: 127) trace @Jan23voices to John Scott‐Railton, a graduate student in Los Angeles, whose Twitter handle was the source of most of the information circulated. 19 On Twitter, the most used hashtag worldwide of the year 2011 was #Egypt (4). See the Twitter blog: “#YearInReview: Hot Topics and Top Hashtags of 2011, 4 December, 2011: http://blog.twitter.com/2011/12/yearinreview‐hot‐topics‐and‐top.html. 20 See Gaines (2007: 20, footnote #2) where I trace the “critique of realism” to Comolli and Narboni (1969) and the appearance of their “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism” in English translation in 1971. Here as well I give examples of what I have called the “critique of the critique of realism,” as, for example, Bruzzi (2000: 3): “Sometimes it seems necessary to remind writers on documentary that reality does exist and that it can be represented without such a representation either invalidating or having to be synonymous with the reality that preceded it.” 21 Lebow (2014: 65) sums up discussions with Arab film and video makers at the 2012 Istanbul Film Festival with the observation that those following the news “could indulge in a fantasy that twenty‐first century revolution was a matter of tweets and posts, and could be mediated instantaneously to great political effect.” See Aouragh and Alexander (2011: 1355), who in their conclusion also credit an effective myth: “It is precisely because it looked like it was a new, youth‐oriented, non‐ ideological, online, horizontal movement” that the Tunisians and Egyptians they studied paid it the attention that they did. 22 See Munslow (2003: 56–60), who in a useful overview of “reality and correspondence” explains the “correspondence theory” of knowledge and truth as dependent on our belief that a real and knowable world exists independent of how we narrate it. It follows from this belief that the “truth” of representations can be checked against how things are in the real world. 23 On this see Hediger (2010), who makes the case for seeing the potential empiricism of cinema as the dream of German historicists. 24 Copies of this film have not been widely available, reminder of the historical disrepute of American Communism, although the Museum of Modern Art in New York has 16 mm print negative material and prints have been available for sale through their Circulating Library. Bonus March (1932) Youtube: youtube.com/watch?v=wHcATTySQk 25 Aline Caillet et Frédéric Pouillaud (eds.) (2017). Un art documentaire: Enjeux esthétiques, politiques et éthiques/Documentary Art: Aesthetic, Political, and Ethical Issues. Rennes, France: University of Rennes Press. 26 Spiegel, S. and Goldberg, M. (eds.) (2020). Documenting Utopia: Documentaries, Activism and Future Worlds. Cardiff: Wales University Press. 27 “Documentary Activism: The Revolution That Was Not” was delivered at “Documentaire Expandi/ Expanded Documentary,” May, 2019, at Reid Hall/Columbia University Paris Global Center. It is forthcoming renamed as “The ‘Arab Spring’ Again: Online Activism and the Exceptional Temporality of Struggle.”



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28 “The Forbidden Topic: Documentary Radicalism and The Communist International.” Visible Evidence XXVI Conference (University of Southern California, 2019). 29 J. Hoberman, “Visceral Masterpiece of iPhone Cinema,” New York Times (April 5, 2020): AR 9. To view: vimeo.com/66820206

References Aday, Sean, Henry Farrell, Marc Lynch, John Sides, John Kelly, and Ethan Zucherman (2012). Blogs and Bullets II: “New Media and Conflict After the Arab Spring.” Washington, D.C. Peaceworks, no. 80. www.isip.org. Al‐Saleh, A. (2015). Introduction. In: Voices of the Arab Spring: Personal Stories from the Arab Revolutions (ed. A. Al‐Saleh), 1–18. New York: Columbia University Press. Aouragh, M. and Alexander, A. (2011). The Egyptian Experience: Sense and Nonsense of the Internet Revolution. International Journal of Communication 5: 1344–1358. Balibar, É. (2015). Violence and Civility: On the Limits of Political Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press. Bambach, C. (2013). Weimar Philosophy and the Crisis of Historical Thinking. In: Weimar Thought: A Legacy (eds. P.E. Gordon and J.P. McCormick), 133–149. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Belghazi, Y. and Elmahdawy, H. (2014). Arab Spring Is Not Over, But Continues in a Different Way. In: Global Activism: Art and Conflict in the 21st Century (ed. P. Weibel), 271–278. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bloch, E. (1986). The Principle of Hope, Vol. I. (trans. N. Plaice, S. Plaice, and P. Knight) [1938–1947]. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bruzzi, S. (2000). New Documentary: A Critical Introduction. London and New York: Routledge. Campbell, Russell (1977a). Film and Photo League Radical Cinema in the 30s. Jump Cut 14:23–25. ww.ejumpcut.org. Campbell, Russell. (1977b) A Total and Realistic Experience: Leo Seltzer Interview. Jump Cut 14: 25–27. www.ejumpcut.org. Castells, M. (2012). Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age. Cambridge: Polity. Comolli, Jean-Louis (1999). Documentary Journey in the Land of the Head Shrinkers. October (Fall) 90: 36–49. Comolli, Jean Louis and Narboni, Jean (1969). Cinéma, ideologie, critique. Cahiers du cinéma, 216, 11–15, trans. Cinema/Ideology/Criticism, Screen 12(1) (1971), 145–155. Danahar, P. (2013). The New Middle East: The World After the Arab Spring. New York and London: Bloomsbury Press. Earl, J. and Kimport, K. (2011). Digitally Enabled Social Change: Activism in the Internet Age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Eltahawy, M. (2012). The Facebook Generation Kickstarts a Seismic Change. In: The Arab Spring: Rebellion, Revolution, and a New World Order (ed. T. Manhire), 273–275. London: Guardian Books. Fridman, Thomas L. (2013). The Arab Quarter Century. New York Times, April 10: A 23 Friedman, Thomas L. (2016). Social Media: Destroyer or Creator? New York Times, February 3: A 23.

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Gaines, J.M. (1999). Political Mimesis. In: Collecting Visible Evidence (eds. J.M. Gaines and M. Renov), 84–102. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gaines, J.M. (2007). Documentary Radicality. Canadian Journal of Film Studies 16 (1) (Spring): 5–24. Gaines, Jane M. (2020). Political Mimesis @ 25: Activism and Agitation Reclaimed. In Josh Malitsky and Patrick Joberg (eds.) Visible Evidence Conference Proceedings. Galloway, A.R. (2010). Networks. In: Critical Terms for Media Studies (eds. W.J.T. Mitchell and M.B.N. Hansen), 280–296. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Ghafar, A.A. (2015). The Moment the Barrier of Fear Broke Down. In: Voices of the Arab Spring (ed. A. Al‐Saleh), 55–59. New York: Columbia University Press. Ghonim, W. (2012). Revolution 2.0: A Memoir. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Hansen, M.B.N. (2015). Feed‐Forward: On the Future of Twenty‐First Century Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hediger, Vinzenz (2010). Benjamin’s Challenge: If Art Is No Longer the Same After Cinema, Then What About History? In Francesco Casetti and Jane M. Gaines (eds.) Proceedings from Dall’inizio alla fine/In the Beginning and at the Very End… 455–463. Udine International Film Studies Conference, XVI. Udine, Italy. Hoberman, J. Visceral Masterpiece of iPhone Cinema, New York Times (April 5, 2020): AR 9. Jameson, F. (2002). A Singular Modernity. London and New York: Verso. Jenkins, H. (2012). Fandom 2.0: An Interview. In: Transgression 2.0: Media, Culture, and the Politics of a Digital Age (eds. D.J. Gunkel and T. Gournelos), 212–222. New York: Continuum. Juhasz, A. (1999). They Said We Were Trying to Show Reality—All I Want to Show Is My Video: The Politics of Realist Feminist Documentary. In: Collecting Visible Evidence (eds. J.M. Gaines and M. Renov), 190–215. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Juhasz, A. and Lebow, L. (2015). Introduction: A World Encountered. In: A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film (eds. A. Juhasz and L. Lebow), 1–17. West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell. Kleinhans, Chuck (2014). Subversive Media: When, Why, and Where. Jump Cut No. 56 (Fall). www.ejumpcut.org. Koselleck, R. (2004). Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Tribe, K. New York: Columbia University Press. Krajeski, Jenna. (2014). Art and Revolution in Cairo. The Nation. March 31, 28–34. Mark Landler (2011). Obama Seeks Reset in Arab World, New York Times (May 11, 2011).https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/12/us/politics/12prexy.html. Lebow, L. (2014). Filming the Revolution: Approaches to Programming the Arab Spring. In:  Film Festival Yearbook 6: Film Festivals and the Middle East (eds. D. Iordanova and S. Van de Peer), 61–73. St. Andrews: St. Andrews Film Studies. Lievrouw, L.A. (2011). Alternative and Activist New Media. Cambridge: Polity Press. Lynch, M. (ed.) (2014). The Arab Uprisings Explained: New Contentious Politics in the Middle East. New York: Columbia University Press. Manhire, T. (ed.) (2012). The Arab Spring: Rebellion, Revolution, and A New World Order. London: Guardian Books. Morin, E. (2005). Cinema, or the Imaginary Man. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Munslow, A. (2003). The New History. Harlow, UK: Pearson Education Ltd.



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Nichols, B. (1995). Strike and the Question of Class. In: The Hidden Foundation: Film and the  Question of Class (eds. D. James and R. Berg), 72–89. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Robé, Chris (2014). Anarchist Aesthetics and U.S. Video Activism. Jump Cut No. 56 (Fall). www.ejumpcut.org. Schmit, E. and Cohen, J. (2014). The New Digital Age. New York: Vintage Books. Schradie, J. (2019). The Revolution that Wasn’t: How Digital Activism Favors Conservatives. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Smith, Catherine (2011). Egypt’s Facebook Revolution. Huffington Post, February 2. Waugh, T. (1984). Why Documentary Filmmakers Keep Trying to Change the World, or Why People Changing the World Keep Making Documentaries. In: Show Us Life: Toward a History and Aesthetics of the Committed Documentary, xi–xxvii. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press. Waugh, T. (2016). The Conscience of Cinema: The Works of Joris Ivens: 1912–1989. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Weibel, P. (2014). People, Politics and Power. In: Global Activism: Art and Conflict in the 21st Century (trans. J Gaines). (ed. P. Weibel), 29–61. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Zabunyan, Dork (2019). The Insistence of Struggle: Images, Uprisings, Counter‐revolutions, (trans. S. Tarnowski), Paris: IF Publications.

11

A Culture of Reality

Neorealism, Narrative Nonfiction, and Roberto Rossellini (1930s–1960s) Luca Caminati

Concordia University

Introduction In this chapter I would like to repaint the Italian filmic landscape that historically surrounded the neorealist film movement by offering a symptomatic reading of Roberto Rossellini’s career. Through this reading I aim to highlight the lively nonfiction culture of pre‐ and postwar Italy. I will focus on two powerful historical moments bookmarking the neorealist movement: the late 1930s to early 1940s, right before World War II, and the mid‐to late‐1950s. More concretely, I would like to use Rossellini as a tool for the subversion of the traditional historiographic genealogies of neorealism and art cinema, placing them both in direct relationship to the histories of nonfiction film, educational and didactic media, and their rhetorical modes of expression, such as observational, ethnographic, etc. I will do so by tracing Rossellini’s early work and placing it in the context of the documentary film culture of the 1930–1940s, and, later, by highlighting his relationship to French film ethnographer Jean Rouch. Methodologically, this essay will provide a symptomatic and contextual reading of Rossellini’s more auteuristic works, by placing them in a different context, and under a different lens. Such cultural readings have previously been blocked by the presuppositions inherent in the conception of art cinema as a stand‐ alone category focused on the auteur as an exceptional artist, and on film as an expression of such artistic interiority. I focus on Rossellini because his career can be seen as exemplary in breaking the dialectic of modernism (figured as alienated auteurism) and realism (conceived as newsreel‐style, politically and socially ­conscious filmmaking) by moving seamlessly between levels of practice that the high modernist discourse sought to keep strictly separate: fiction and nonfiction;

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alternations in modes of production (independent, sponsored, etc.); media, genre and style switching; and the tendency to blend them polyphonically rather than separate them through ironic distancing techniques. Rosselllini was not only inspired by, but also actively participated in such socially driven educational projects as various practices of visual ethnography. Rossellini’s work in made‐for‐television didactic biopics (The Rise to Power of Louis XIV, 1966), journalistic interviews (Intervista a Salvador Allende, 1971), and NBC co‐produced Idea di un isola (Idea of an Island, 1967), a series of nonfictional comic sketches about Sicily, just to name a few, force us to reassess his work and the film culture that surrounded him. In short, I intend to read contrapuntally, to use a term dear to Edward Said (1994: 16), the otherwise straight narrative line of neorealism as the focal point of Italian cinema. In a recent essay on Rossellini’s made‐for‐television historical dramas – spanning 10 years of his career, from 1966 till 1975 – Michael Cramer claims that Rossellini’s later works are in a pedagogical mode that reconnects twentieth‐century art with pedagogy. Taking Fredric Jameson’s reflection in Brecht and Method (2011) on “the taboo of the didactic in art” triggered by twentieth‐century Modernism as his starting point, Cramer rereads these historical films in terms that place them outside the codes of art cinema, and in dialogue with pre‐modernist forms of didactic art (Cramer 2012). Following Cramer’s argument, I will argue that Rossellini is symptomatic of a very specific type of modernist filmmaking, part of what critics have termed “the anthropological turn.” Such a formation has been widely theorized by the likes of James Clifford and Hal Foster, and, in relation to moving image practices, by Catherine Russell, David MacDougall, and Fatimah Tobing‐Rony, among others. More poignantly, a recent volume by Anne Grimshaw and Amanda Ravetz, Observational Cinema: Anthropology, Film and the Exploration of Social Life, neatly traces the long‐standing interaction between any form of what the authors call the “observational mode” (ethnographic, anthropological, scientific, sociological, and so on) and Western art cinema. As they state in their programmatic introduction, they want to make a new case … returning observational cinema to its Bazinian roots, we argue that traditional interpretative frameworks drawn from science and semiotics have obscured the genre’s identity as a sensuous, interpretative, and phenomenologically inflected mode of inquiry. (Grimshaw and Ravetz 2009: ix)

To Grimshaw and Ravetz’s astute but rushed genealogy from neorealism to vérité,1 I would like to highlight their precursors in the prewar film culture. In fact, rather than seeing neorealism as a founder of a new cinematic style, I believe there were observational practices already in place in the European film circles from which both neorealism and vérité borrowed. In such an alternative version, the narrative which surrounds the anthropological turn in twentieth century modernist art – the discovery of “the primitive,” with the interest in the irrational, primordial and sensuous aspects of modernist experimentation – is shown to have roots in ethnographic discourses (the same impulse can be traced to the emerging “culture of reality” in



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Italy in the 1930s–1940s, of which neorealism emerged, and which found its ­culmination in the Rouchian documentary mode of the 1960s). To summarize, the map I am drawing here intends to create a connection between the early primitivist experiments of Modernist art, Surrealism, early scientific visual discourses and ­ethnographic practices. It is my contention that such a constellation of generic ­connections helped to generate both the neorealist movement, and, eventually, the postwar narrative ethnographies in which Rossellini was directly involved.

The Neorealist Imperative The scholarly reluctance to examine the relationship between neorealism and the history of nonfiction filmmaking in Italy – including its ethnographic mode – can perhaps be traced to the privileged place neorealism has occupied in the history of Italian cinema. Interestingly enough, most histories of Italian cinema – as if living under a Crocean spell – do not properly account for the cultural importance of nonfiction film practices, or, alternatively, relegates them to some small subparagraph. The available English‐language histories of Italian cinema, including Bondanella (1997) and Brunetta (2011), do not discuss nonfiction filmmaking at all. However, it is vital to point out how the later historicization of Rossellini as a “fiction filmmaker” might have to do with the stigma of non‐art imposed by idealist philosopher Benedetto Croce upon anything that sniffed of either didacticism or mere data collection. While a discussion of the impact of Croce on Italian culture throughout the twentieth ­century would be beyond the scope of this essay, it is worth briefly mentioning that his accusation of non‐art against any realist endeavors meant a de facto exclusion of nonfiction from any high‐culture narrative (Rizi 2003). Looking at this issue from the opposite perspective, few years ago Adriano Aprà postulated that the bad fortune of Italian documentary both in terms of theory (its exclusion from standard historical narratives on Italian cinema) and practice (small, marginal production of valuable films, and lack of proper state funding compared to, say, Canada, or the UK), was due to the hefty heritage of neorealism, and that this film movement had “absorbed any realist practice of documentary in Italy as a specific brand of neorealism” (Aprà 1998: 40). Beyond the actual historical impact of neorealism, Aprà’s comment can be read metacinematically; this neorealist obsession for scholars of Italian and European cinema has contributed to the derailment of any attempt to move beyond such a historical paradigm, or, alternatively, has made the actual analysis of neorealist theory and practice extremely complicated as Alan O’Leary (2008) has amply proven in his relentless attempt at decentering neorealism from Italian genealogical film practices. Over the last few decades, historians of Italian documentary film have started to take Aprà’s warning seriously and, as a result, a greater degree of time and attention has been devoted to the country’s nonfiction cinema (Bertozzi 2008). Such a shift was achieved by moving away from the assessment of Fascist media politics as exclusively focused on how documentary and newsreels played a role in the process of

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­ ppression brought forward by the Fascist regime, both through the inflated docuo mentations of the successes of governmental initiatives (the images of the Duce leading the way in all fields of modernization are a staple of this period), and, thanks mostly to Ruth Ben‐Ghiat’s (2001a, b) work, by looking at the Fascist nonfiction production as an integral part of a modernization imperative of the regime, with many and consistent links to the postwar film culture. In fact, once rid of the Springtime‐in‐Italy myth – the belief in a radical new beginning that surrounded neorealism and the birth of the new democratic state  –  the actual milieu that nurtured that movement showed its solid roots in nonfiction film practices (Caminati 2012). Now, in order to understand the way Rossellini’s work became canonical – and canonically associated with a radical break from pre–World War II cinema, thus severing all ties between earlier documentary tradition and Rossellini’s own later work for television – we must briefly look at the history of his critical reception and the impact his work (and life) had on academic scholarship.

Rossellini’s Animals Roberto Rossellini was typecast as the essential neorealist when his postwar films were taken up by André Bazin and the Parisian film circle as the de facto embodiment of the “Cahiers line.” As Dudley Andrew has recently written, Bazin was looking for a cinema of authenticity based on “the camera in search of the world,” and Rossellini’’s aesthetics provided a perfect case study (Andrew 2010: 6). Vociferously defending the newsreel‐style realist cinema of Rossellini’s early films – Rome Open City (1944), Paisà (1945), and Germany Year Zero (1946), as well as the more complex modernist narratives of alienation in his later “Bergman period,” Stromboli (1950), Europa ‘51 (1952) and Voyage in Italy (1954) – Bazin and his fellow Parisian critics successfully burned a very specific idea of Rossellinian cinema into the critical mindset of the film world. Rossellini was identified as an auteur, and what this excluded were any nonfiction works. If Rossellini had died in 1954, his critical afterlife would be much the same as it is now. It is therefore amusing to think that Rossellini started his career as an animal documentary filmmaker (the Green Porno series in which Isabella is currently involved is part of the family business) with a series of short films shot in and around Rome. One of the earliest of these works, Fantasia sottomarina (Undersea Fantasy, 1938) is shot at the family villa in Ladispoli, by the Roman seashore. Rossellini had a large aquarium built on the rooftop of this house, and the resulting 6‐minute film presented fish “falling in love” accompanied by a schmaltzy orchestra soundtrack. The film was produced by INCOM (Industrie Corto Metraggi), a production company formed by Luigi Freddi (already head of the fascist University Youth Film Club, Cineguf, and LUCE, the propaganda organ of the Fascist party) and his assistant Sandro Pallavicini (Rondolino 2006: 27). Why was the Fascist INCOM producing a documentary film about fish in the late 1930s? Documentaries were a profitable



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business in Italy after the implementation of Law 1000 in April 1926, which made it compulsory to screen a newsreel or documentary film alongside every feature film (Bertozzi 2008: 61). Quite often these would be propagandistic or didactic shorts produced by the state‐owned LUCE company (an acronym for L’unione Cinemtografica Educuativa, and founded by the Duce himself in 1925) (Perniola 2006: 376). Even a cursory look at Rossellini’s early productions  –  such as these nature films – shows evidence of an ethnographic impulse in his practice, which also manifested itself narratively in the “fascist trilogy”  –  La nave Bianca (The White Ship, 1941), Un pilota ritorna (A Pilot Returns, 1942), and L’uomo della croce (The Man with a Cross, 1943)  –  of the 1940s. All these films show an interest beyond melodrama in everyday details of their protagonists, who are often clearly marked through a specific detail as belonging to a certain region, or class. Indeed, critics at the time had already singled out this very particular quality in his method, which is indicative of the ability of these early Rossellini works to already stand out as hybrid products located somewhere between the LUCE newsreel – omnipresent at the time in Italian theaters – and a post‐calligraphic fiction whose other visible examples at the time were De Sica’s I bambini ci guardano (The Children are Watching Us, 1944) and Visconti’s Ossessione (Obsession, 1943), among others.2 Already in the fascist trilogy, in spite of the obvious propagandist tone, Rossellini developed a very personal and original form of realism, which combined ethnographic instances with sociological investigation reminiscent of Flaherty (whom Rossellini often mention as one of his major inspirations). Interestingly, these early films already have a reflexive sensibility both in terms of apparatus and narrative strategies, anticipating some later 1960s experiments. While De Sica and Visconti incorporated the pressing social issues and the stylistic traits and methods of the time (open‐air shooting, long takes, nonprofessional actors, etc.) into a recognizable melodramatic narrative structure – De Sica borrowing heavily from vaudeville shows (il varietà) and bourgeois theater, Visconti blending operatic mise en scène and American film noir – Rossellini had already developed a dialectical technique which brought reality and fiction to a point of collision. Fantasia sottomarina (1938) is the first in a series of animal narrative documentary shorts which include a small but interesting corpus: Daphne (1939), Il ruscello di Ripa Sottile (The Brook of Ripa Sottile, 1940), La Vispa Teresa (Lively Teresa, 1940), Il tacchino prepotente (The Bullying Turkey, 1940), all of which can be read in relation to both contemporaneous Disney animations3 and contemporary European experiments. Moreover, they exhibit aspects that resemble the underwater experiments of Jean Painlevé, which Rossellini might have seen at the Venice Film Festival in 1935 and 1936 (Castello and Bertieri 1959: 64), and were certainly part of a larger trend in scientific documentary at the time (such as Germaine Dulac’s shift from Surrealism to science films in that very period,4 along with the popularity of other French scientific filmmakers, Marey’s assistant Lucien Bull, and micro‐­ cinematographer Jean Comandon). Or, to look back at Italy, another inspiration could have been the great precursor to the cinema of the animal kingdom Roberto Omegna, a very interesting, yet understudied, figure of the Italian artistic scene at

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the turn of the century. Born in Turin in 1876, Omegna founded the first Edison movie theater in Turin and later the Ambrosio film studios. In 1926, he joined LUCE, where he continued his production of scientific films: his work Uno sguardo al fondo marino (A Look at the Bottom of the Sea, 1936) received a prize in Venice. Furthermore, both the popular Disney animation and the widespread scientific trend in European filmmaking can be understood as embedded within a broader transnational trend of narrative documentary filmmaking that crystallized around the British General Post Office Film Unit from 1933–1940 (GPO). This new hybrid genre, marked by the insertion of narrative techniques borrowed from fiction into nonfictional formats, had already been theorized (in Italy at least) by Alberto Cavalcanti in a 1938 article published in Bianco e nero (the official journal of the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia) as documentario narrativo (narrative documentary) (Cavalcanti 1938: 4). This shift of interest toward new documentary forms has to be attributed precisely to the cosmopolitan figure of Cavalcanti. This Brazilian‐ born, French‐educated intellectual of Italian origins moved to Paris in the late 1920’s and started his career in cinema as a set decorator. In 1934, Cavalcanti joined Grierson’s Empire Marketing Board (EMB), and then the GPO group, becoming one of the driving forces behind the British documentary movement, directly working on some of the BPO masterpieces such as Coalface (1935) and Night Mail (1936). In addition, he was cooperating with the Centro Sperimentale in Rome and contributed to film journal Bianco e nero. The documentario narrativo had its precursors, according to Cavalcanti, in Flaherty’s Nanook (1922) and Moana (1926), Schoedsack and Cooper’s Grass: A Battle for Life (1925) and Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness (1927), and Leon Poirier’s La Croisière Noire (The Black Journey, 1927). In The British Documentary Film Movement, 1926–1946, Paul Swann singles out a key issue in the Cavalcanti‐Grierson relationship. When Grierson resigned from the GPO in June 1937, Cavalcanti stayed on; it is at this point that “Cavalcanti led the GPO Film Unit away from theoretical discussions about public education and ‘art’ and towards films that relied heavily upon the narrative techniques of the commercial film industry” (Swann 1989, 84). While Grierson, in spite of his obvious admiration for Flaherty, was annoyed at his interest in exotic subjects rather than the “the working man,” Cavalcanti embraced that exoticism, and brought it to his tenure at the GPO. Cavalcanti’s role as an intermediary between Rome and London5 along with a general European zeitgeist of the time, had certainly given the Roman film community a taste for this new genre.

Rossellini as a Narrative Documentary Filmmaker The “documentario narrativo” promoted by Cavalcanti is visible if we look more closely at Rosselini’s Fantasia sottomarina, which is exemplary of the mode I am discussing here. The film begins in full swing, with a soundtrack made up of a pastiche of classical and pop tunes. The initial credits scroll across a marine‐themed background. “Once upon a time: this is how all fairy tales begin, and so, we’ll begin



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like this, too …,” announces the narrator, Guido Notari, with a voice trained in the Standard Italian of the time, but lacking the Fascist emphatic tone so common in newsreels. The tone of his voice is the familiar and friendly one often used in a pedagogical context to address a group of children. The first few frames show small fish swimming across the frame, accompanied by violin music in wide bow strokes. We then see “a young and vivacious sea‐bream” who is on his daily stroll to meet his sweetheart. Suddenly, a scorpion‐fish appears, and the music speeds up. Soon after, a “culinary snare” appears – a fisherman’s bait. The small sea‐bream “deflects the trap with a flick of the tail,” mainly to save the lives of his less shrewd companions. The soundtrack turns grim: an octopus enters the scene (from the top of the frame, obviously gruffly thrown into the tub). The morbid dance commences, and the sea‐ bream is captured by a tentacle. It manages to free itself, but, instead of fleeing, it teases the octopus because “he wants to have the last word,” the narrator explains. The sea‐bream joins forces with an eel, which attacks the octopus in a dramatic cross‐cutting sequence. A gruesome battle begins, the music becomes faster and frantic, but the fight is real. The result is a fairly powerful voyeuristic moment, unmitigated by the overarching fable‐like atmosphere of the work. The fighters need backup; the already hasty sequences become even more pressing and the sea‐bream makes use of the lobster’s antennae to send out a call for help. Another eel joins the battle and plunges toward the octopus. It is only thanks to this group action that the octopus unclasps and attempts to flee, “but it is exhausted and does not notice a boulder, hits its head and collapses.” Once the battle is over, we come back to the little sea‐bream, who is now “sad, because he is alone.” His grief grows stronger when he observes two cuttlefish engaged in amorous exchanges. But he soon finds his lover again; the violins resume their romantic strides and the narrator can joyfully proclaim that this, “like all other tales, ends happily.” Among a number of interesting stylistic devices, the great innovation brought about by INCOM in this and other short films that did not fit the propaganda mold of the time, is the use of sound, and, more specifically, the combination of real, live sound with a musical score, and the tone and content of the narrating voice. In Fantasia sottomarina, the friendly tone of the voice‐over, and its lyrical qualities, allows for a connection to later forms of documentary, where the voice functions more as a personal meditation and authentic expression of the authors and characters. Breaking here with a “God‐like” authority of the standard state‐sponsored documentary, these early animal films offer a new creative soundscape, which we are seeing at the same time in Cavalcanti’s GPO films. A good point of comparison here might be Disney’s True-Life Adventures series. Launched in 1948 by Walt Disney himself, the series’ focus on live action recording of animals was meant to provide anaturalistic grounding for Disney’s animations of animals (Mitman, 2009). The commercial opportunity offered Disney a chance to reinforce the main ideological tenet of the brand: the pristine and exceptional beauty of America’s landmass (and sea). Rhetorically, Rossellini’s early nature film follows this jovial vein of anthropomorphization, “innocent and timeless past” (Mitman 2009: 114) and contrapuntal music picked up later on by Disney. But even a quick look at Fantasia sottomarina

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shows its mixed origins and inspirations, and the different political climate that radically separate prewar Italy from postwar US. Gone in Rossellini’s film are the uplifting elements of American exceptionalism, substituted by a clear cynicism towards the love story of the subjects. The uplifting tone that dominates even the most gruesome parts of Disney animal films is replaced here by a more sarcastic approach. Moreover, I believe it would not be farfetched to think of Fantasia sottomarina as a political metaphor, where the octopus functions as a stand‐in for Fascism and the sea‐bream and other fish that rush to aid are the antifascist opposition? Or is it just a metaphor of oppression? Or, perhaps, the very opposite; is it an allegory on the tentacles of communism? Or, more straightforwardly, is it a romantic flick with a gangsteresque undertone; a “beastly” American‐inspired work in which the slums of New York City are replaced with the marine shoals of the aquarium of Ladispoli? Also, beyond the narrative mode, Rossellini’s tale about anthropomorphized fish needs to be seen, as I have suggested, in dialogue with Jean Painlevé’s scientific films. Painlevé’s films were, in fact, often showcased at the Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica di Venezia: in 1935, his masterpiece L’hippocampe (1934), a film about seahorses that gave the director his first burst of great popularity, and then Voyage dans le ciel in 1936 and Barbe‐bleue in 1938. Like Painlevé, Rossellini had a natural passion for technological innovations in the cinematic field. Noteworthy similarities can be observed between Painlevé and Rossellini’s anthropomorphization, especially in Fantasia sottomarina and in the later works Il ruscello di Ripasottile – likely shot in 1940, released in theaters in May of 1941 and recently restored by the Cineteca di Bologna – and La vispa Teresa (also from 1940). However, several important differences can also be observed between the two directors; but mostly, Painlevé’s artistic engine was fueled by his strong biological interest in the material he collected, a persnickety sense of curiosity for the peculiar characteristics of the animal kingdom, and a mesmeric fascination with the pure beauty of moving bodies in water (what James Cahill (2019) defines as “zoological surrealism”). However, for Rossellini, such investigative vigor was only the first step toward the fabrication of a storyline, the concatenations of the narration and, last but not least, the allegory of the tale.

Rouch and Rossellini My claim that Rossellini’s work from the 1930s and 1940s belongs to a larger body of documentary films, in particular displaying two modes of documentary filmmaking emerging in Europe and the UK within this period (i.e. narrative documentary and the scientific film) allows me, in the second portion of this chapter, to explore both of these forms inasmuch as they are concerned with film as an epistemological project for understanding the natural world. Both narrative documentary and scientific filmmaking á la Painlevé blend elements of fiction and documentary; both include particularly lyrical and, at times, reflexive narration. These same elements will appear, of course, in Rossellini’s neorealist style, but they are also key to the



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anthropological turn of the 1950s‐1960s, finding perhaps their strongest cinematic manifestation in the work of Jean Rouch. My claim is that, while the post‐neorealist phase in Italy has been traditionally linked to the cinema d’autore movement (as Fellini, Antonioni, and Visconti ruled over European festivals), a new generation of nonfiction filmmakers rose, mostly unnoticed, working in industrial and institution‐sponsored cinema. Directors such as Vittorio De Seta, Ermanno Olmi, Franco Piavoli, Cecilia Mangini e Lino Del Fra6 opened up new venues of investigation for nonfiction filmmakers, ones that are only recently being given detailed scholarly attention. While Rossellini was never properly associated with this group of emerging nonfiction filmmakers, his fictional work of the 1940s was being revaluated and reconsidered in France. In the second part of this chapter I focus on Rossellini’s post–World War II alternative productions, along with his presence as a maître à penser of the Parisian circles, in order to use him to point at another major shift toward anthropology. In fact, after his move to Paris in 1954, Rossellini, along with writing and shooting two new feature‐length narrative films, Viaggio in Italia (Voyage to Italy, 1954) and La paura (Fear, 1954), was organizing his trip to India, which would produce two long‐form reportages for French and Italian television (L’India vista da Rossellini, and J’ai fait un beau voyage, 1959), and a hybrid docudrama, India Matri Bhuma (1957–1959). In 1954, Cahiers, in perfect ideological and stylistic alliance with Bazin, hailed Voyage in Italy as a masterpiece; it was the straightforward story line, the minimalist style, but, most importantly, the low‐budget and lo‐fi production aesthetics of Rossellini’s directorial techniques that spoke to the young French filmmakers (Bazin 1971). Truffaut himself captured another major feature of Rossellini’s post‐­neorealist phase, suggesting “filmmakers the world over will give up imitating the novel in favor of the filmed confession and the essay” (Gallagher 1998, 450). This confessional, diary‐like style of filmmaking already dubbed camera‐stylo (as developed by Alexandre Astruc in his 1948 essay “Birth of a New Avant‐garde” [Astruc 1968] and picked up by Truffaut in his 1954 article “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema” [Truffaut 1976]), theorized the role of the director not just as a metteur‐en‐scène or skillful scenarists, but as a full‐fledged author in charge of his work from the beginning to the end of the production. Rossellini’s hybrid method, sparse style, and de‐dramatized novelization, which he had been implementing throughout his career as both a fiction and a nonfiction filmmaker, found in Paris, at last, the partisans it needed.

Rouch and the Ethnographic Discourse I would have never shot Moi un noir if Roberto hadn’t incited me to do it … (1956) —Jean Rouch (Gallagher 1998: 459). The first encounter between the two filmmakers was virtual: Rouch’s film Au pays des mages noirs (1947) was screened at the Cinémathèque Française, along with

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Stromboli, in 1950. But it was when Rossellini moved to Paris in 1954 that the two met and immediately formed a strong friendship, which quickly became a collaboration. Jean Rouch had started making ethnographic films in Niger right after WWII, and he was starting to gain some visibility in France both for the access he was granted by his subjects, and for the new style of filmmaking that will soon be associated with the verité‐style. With Rossellini, he formed a small reading group, the Atelier Collectif de Création, which included all the future directors of the ­nouvelle vague, headed by François Truffaut (Nijland 2007: 30). Truffaut had immediately offered his services to Rossellini, and had become his de facto secretary in Paris. It was here that Rossellini interacted with Jean Rouch, at the time working on Jaguar, which he had started shooting in Niger in 1954 (and released only in 1967). Jaguar tells the story of three young men from the savannah of Niger who leave their homeland to seek wealth and adventure on the coast and in the cities of Ghana, then the Gold Coast. Rouch’s investigation is part fiction, part documentary and part social commentary. Shot with no portable synchronized sound equipment available, Jean Rouch had the main characters of the film improvise a voice‐over narrative while they viewed the footage edited by the director, several years after the shooting. The resulting soundtrack consists of remembered dialogue, jokes, exclamations, and questions and explanations about the action on screen. The three young men, a herdsman (Lam), a fisherman (Illo) and their “ladies’ man” friend (Damoure), travel for a month to the coast of Ghana and eventually part ways to take jobs in different cities. Successful but homesick, they return to Niger; they have become jaguars with a knowledge of life in the modern city. Jaguar intrigued Rossellini because of some interesting narrative and stylistic choices; it was shot in 16 mm, it was shot soundless but sonorized in post‐production with ambient recording and voice‐over, it had nonprofessional actors and it took place entirely on location. According to Rouch, it was Rossellini’s suggestion to give up on the use of a professional voice‐over narrator and instead have his actors retell the story (Nijland 2007: 30), along, very probably, with the outcry generated by the traditional voice‐over narration of Les Maîtres Fous, with its orientalist overtones (Accra, capital of Ghana/Gold Coast, described by Rouch as “Babilone noir,” for example). This anecdote, it seems to me, speaks volumes about how Rouch’s revolution went well beyond his own field of visual ethnography, and expands right into the history of Western cinema. Also, both Rossellini on his way to India, and Rouch dealing with criticism from his early works, are interested in devising postcolonial, or anticolonial narrative strategies. This effort brought Rouch to develop a form of participatory ethnography in which the presence of the artist/scholar is made clear and visible from the inception through the use of metanarrative techniques, as in this case the voice‐over orchestrated with the ethnographic subjects. Rossellini, in related choices, incorporates local writers and stories for his film while also employing first‐person voice over narration from the characters. Both Nouvelle Vague and the rive gauche directors (Alain Resnais, Agnes Varda, and Chris Marker) embraced this anthropological turn, starting with their anticolonial masterpiece, the essay‐film Les statues meurent aussi (Statues Also Die) (Resnais, Marker, and Cloquet, 1953).



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The stylistic shift Rouch instigated is matched by an ideological one: the subject of scientific investigation was finally given a voice, complicating ethnography’s well‐ established hierarchical episteme. With Jaguar, Moi, un Noir (1958), and other films of the late fifties, Rouch developed a new attitude toward the representation of non‐ Western subjects. In spite of the criticism leveled against him at the time (and nowadays, for that matter), the impulse toward reflexivity and a more participatory form of ethnography lifted ethnographic discourse from the simple notion of translation of mores of one culture to the other (MacDougall 1969‐1970) to that “thick description” – theorized by Clifford Geertz – where the analysis of the ethnic other and the discourse surrounding them are investigated as part of the same discursive formation. These “Ethnofictions,” or cine‐fictions, represented the moment in which the camera was no longer aiming to capture the otherness of the other, that is to say, its exoticism (this was indeed Ousmane Sembène’s (1982) critique of Les Maitre Fous, where, according to him, Africans were looked at as “insects”). The auto and metashifts of the years to come in visual anthropology – from Chris Marker to Trinh T. Minh‐ha, for example – are seriously indebted to these early experimentations. The three migrant workers of Rouch’s story are forced to face the harsh reality of labor migration: to the eyes of the western spectator this unheimlich feeling has been traditionally assigned to the white male traveler. As MacDougall has pointed out, Rouch moves beyond “observational cinema” into “participatory anthropology … a world of radical juxtapositions, of poetic evocations, of children’s stories that frame epistemological critiques” (Stoller 1992: 202). Rossellini’s personal friendship with Rouch, and their intellectual exchanges during Rossellini’s long stay in Paris (till the mid‐1960s), is at the core of my argument that will conclude this chapter.

Voyage to India The trip to India in 1957 was a way for Rossellini to put into praxis a whole new cluster of ethnographic techniques that were read as innovative and daring at the time. The two four‐hour television documentaries L’India vista da Rossellini (1957) and its French counterpart J’ai fait un beau voyage (1957–1959) were both produced by state‐ owned television channels, namely Italian RAI and French ORFT. In these TV documentaries, Rossellini discovers in India the opportunity to create an expanded didactic cinema. In an interestingly anticipatory move, Rossellini was already in the late fifties thinking about the possibility of the end of cinema’s dominance by communicating his Indian experience in the new space of TV broadcasting. India was therefore not just a trip to the East, but also a trip into the contested future of the media. The experience of the liminal space between here and there, between “us and them” – typical of the postcolonial traveler – turned into a meditation on the medium itself, with its new scale and its new space of reception. Moreover, the trip to India becomes a “voyage in Italy” of sorts, because Rossellini played with the conjunctions and disjunctions of the two countries. The policy of Indian ­modernization (the fashion in development economics of the time) and the postwar political partition of

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India resonated with Rossellini’s poetics of realism and the investigations into the social realities of his early years, with the economic and social gap between Northern and Southern Italy haunting his version of the Indian project. It is precisely through this populist comparative anthropology that the Indian documentaries are framed, with Rossellini shown in a television studio with an interviewer. Every episode is structured around a specific theme (episode 10 is about animals in India) or geographical location (episode one is entirely devoted to Bombay). Working with an open‐ended script, the interviewer triggers Rossellini’s response. His live voice‐over accompanies the images shot by Aldo Tonti in both 35 and 16 mm, in color and in black‐and‐white, taking the audience through folkloric and more properly anthropological observations. At other times, complex sociopolitical issues are thematized. For example, episode six, “The Lagoon of Malabar,” gives Rossellini the chance to discuss Josué de Castro’s Geography of Hunger, probably the study that had the strongest influence on Rossellini. At the time, the Brazilian de Castro was president of FAO, a scientist of nutrition, and a key figure for Marxist intellectuals around the world. While his preliminary work has been superseded by more complex studies, his major assessment – that hunger is a not a natural law, but rather the direct product of a specific historical juncture – was a powerful influence on such contemporary economists as Amartya Sen (and filmmakers and theorists alike, such as Glauber Rocha and his “aesthetics of hunger”). In this epoch, de Castro’s work had a revolutionary impact on many state policies. De Castro attacked colonialism precisely on the planning front, contesting that it forced fertile land into monocultures that permanently drained the soil. Moreover, de Castro flips the Malthusian axiom that hunger is caused by overpopulation by claiming that overpopulation is instead one of the many disastrous consequences of hunger, all solvable through technological innovation. Here there is an intellectual convergence between Rossellini’s beliefs and the policy of the Indian government, which explains the invitation to make these TV documentaries (Nehru was a strong believer in de Castro’s theories). On the one hand, this can be easily read as sheer propaganda for the Nehru project of forced modernization; on the other hand, given that the last major famine in India occurred under the British between 1943 and 1945 in Bengal, merely a decade before Rossellini’s project, one might also say that, like Germany Year Zero, this was a reclamation project, a reminder of the vast terror famines associated with colonial rule in an epoch when the West’s memory of these events was being rapidly covered up by nostalgia and denial. At times, Rossellini’s enthusiasm for Nehru looks suspiciously like a revival of the unthinking adoration of Stalin within Popular Front culture, transferred to a Third World figure. Certainly, production support must have had an effect on Rossellini’s admiration for Nehru. Yet an explanation based on self‐interest ignores both the historical context (there was widespread admiration for the Indian leader among European intellectuals) and the fact that Rossellini could have made other choices, rather than plunging back into the documentary field. Rather, Rossellini’s fondness for Nehru and the Indian project stems from his intellectual interest in comparative anthropology. For Rossellini, the modernization of India and the modernization of postwar Italy were parts of the same global project. What India was doing, Italy was also doing, helped by the



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Marshall Plan: industrializing agriculture, resourcing electrification and infrastructure projects, etc. In short, this was Rossellini’s way of shooting an Indian Paisa as Peter Brunette (1996: 196) defines it. The other product of Rossellini’s India trip, India Matri Bhuni, the feature‐length film presented at Cannes in 1959, was written by Rossellini himself with the decisive contribution of one Indian writer, Sonali Das Gupta, and the French‐Iranian Fereydoun Hoveyda. Gallagher notes in his biography how Rossellini made systematic use of Sonali in an attempt to stay close to his subjects. Whilst we can’t go as far as defining this as a sort of participatory ethnography (Sonali was after all an urban intellectual and not an ethnographic subject), it shows a certain tendency toward unbalancing the structure of typical western reportage; the voice‐over narration limited only to the external frame of the film, the systematic use of original Indian music and on‐location sound recording and the use of first person narrative for the stories all contribute toward the creation of an ethnographic study. The film is roughly divided in four episodes: after a quick newsreel‐style introduction, with a voice‐over narrating the religious and ethnic diversity of the subcontinent, the film starts with the story of a mahout (an elephant herder) falling in love with a young woman; the second episode describes the strife of a worker at the Hirakud dams; in the third, an old villager tries to rescue a tiger from western hunters; and in the fourth and last episode a monkey is let loose by the death of its master. While the entire film deserves more attention, I would like here to highlight the two key moments that speak most clearly to the ethnographic turn in Rossellini’s filmmaking. The first feature is the creative use of sound. Whilst the film was shot without sync‐sound, with both 16 and 35 mm cameras in the hand of DP Mario Tonti, Rossellini employed a technique described in the titles as illustrazione sonora. This sound illustration, or sound design, was meant to provide a more realistic, live action sound experience for the audience. It is a mix of three separate sound tracks. The live‐sound recorded on location during the shootings, the voice‐over narration provided in the French edition by unnamed narrators (speaking French with no specific accent) and in the Italian version speaking Italian with a marked Indian accent, and the musical score made up of traditional Indian music processed by musicologist Alain Daniélou, probably from his own recordings (Daniélou 1987). This mix of sources, and techniques, can be thought of as emblematic of a certain type of development of ethnographic fictional documentary. The dubbing, a strategy dear, and necessary, to Italian neorealist filmmakers, with the live‐sound provided with the relatively light sound equipment (even though not yet synchronous), and the sophisticated musical score. The soundscape of the film is probably the most memorable part of Rossellini’s India, and this choice gives a particularly cinematic feel to the elephant bathing scene that open the first episode. This 6 minute and 30 second sequence follows the work of the animals as they proceed through removing tree trunks in a patch of jungle, and then take their long morning bath in the river. This piece of observational cinema, with no voice‐over or music, but just the live soundtrack mixed, offers another poignant entry into a blending of cinematic

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styles. The failure of Rossellini’s India project, and its de facto disappearance from the international film networks, are significant, among other, more mundane reasons, because of its oddity as an “art object” located between auteurism and observational cinema. Godard’s quip about this film, India ‘58 est beau comme la création du monde, probably the only recorded positive assessment of the film, reveals in its grandiosity the messy nature of this work, trapped in between two uncomfortable worlds (Godard 1959).

Conclusion Highlighting two major crystallizations in the nonfiction mode, the culture of transnational cinematic nonfiction in the late 1930s and the anthropological turn of the late 1950s, has allowed me to reread Rossellini’s early nonfiction work in the wider spectrum of realist film culture generated by the early ethnographic studies, the impact of the primitive on modernist aesthetics, and the development of scientific filmmaking. Then, I looked at the “ethnographic turn” of the late 1950s in Paris, headed by the charismatic figure of Jean Rouch, and his dialogue with Rossellini. The analysis of Rossellini’s films in and on India revealed the final blending of neorealist political and social ethic, its shooting style, and its loose narrative development with the ethnofictions developed simultaneously by the French filmmaker. What I would like to propose, in conclusion to this chapter, is the ethno‐ and anthropological filmmaking roots of the new cinema of the 1960s, in a line that runs through the nouvelle vagues and the Italian auteurs. Removing the modernist imperative from these movements allowed us to see them in dialogue with a minor cinema (in terms of production, but, also, more importantly, in terms of social and cultural capital) whose ramifications this essay just began to suggest.

Notes 1 See Catherine Russell’s critique of the volume for a sound reassessment of their work (Russell 2011: 143–149). 2 For a contemporaneous review, see Mèccoli (1941: 391–392). 3 Very popular in Italy at the time, see Gadducci et al. (2011). 4 See Williams (2014: 179–182). 5 As I have proved elsewhere; see Caminati (2012: 52–70). 6 For a quick recap, see Caminati and Mauro (2016: 361–374).

References Andrew, D. (2010). What Cinema Is! Bazin’s Quest and its Charge. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Aprà, A. (1998). A proposito del film documentario. Annali dell’Archivio audiovisivo del ­movimento operaio e democratico 1: 40–67.



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Aristarco, G. (1981). Sciolti dal giuramento. Il dibattito critico‐ideologico sul cinema negli anni Cinquanta. Bari: Dedalo. Astruc, A. (1968). The Birth of a New Avant‐garde: la caméra‐stylo. In: The New Wave (ed. P. Graham), 17–23. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Bazin, A. (1971). Defense of Rossellini. In: What Is Cinema? vol. 2, 93–101. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ben‐Ghiat, R. (2001a). The Fascist War Trilogy. In: Roberto Rossellini: Magician of the Real (eds. D. Forgacs, S. Lutton and G. Nowell‐Smith), 20–35. London: British Film Institute. Ben‐Ghiat, R. (2001b). Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–1945. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bertozzi, M. (2008). Storia del documentario italiano. Venezia: Marsilio. Bloom, P. (2010). Unraveling the Ethnographic Encounter: Institutionalization and Scientific Tourism in the Oeuvre of Jean Rouch. French Forum 35 (2/3): 79–94. Bondanella, P. (1997). Italian Cinema. New York: Continuum. Bourgeois, N. and Bernard, B. (1997). India, Rossellini et les animaux. Paris: Cinematheque Francaise. Brunetta, G.P. (2011). The History of Italian Cinema: A Guide to Italian Film from its Origins to the Twenty‐First Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Brunette, P. (1996). Roberto Rossellini. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cahill, J. (2019). Zoological Surrealism: The Nonhuman Cinema of Jean Painlevé. University of Minnesota Press. Caminati, L. (2012). The Role of Documentary in the Formation of Neorealist Cinema. In:  Global neorealism. The Transitional History of a Film Style (eds. S. Giovacchini and R. Sklar), 52–70. University of Mississippi Press. Caminati, L. and Sassi, M. (2016). Notes on the History of Italian Non‐Fiction Film. In: Blackwell Companion to Italian Cinema (eds. F. Burke and P. Brunette), 361–374. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Castello, G.C. and Bertieri, C. (1959). Venezia 1932–1939. Filmografia critica. Roma: Bianco e nero. Cavalcanti, A. (1938). Documentari di propaganda. Bianco e nero 10: 3–7. Translated in Alberto Cavalcanti: ‘Propaganda Documentaries.” Journal of Italian Cinema & MediaStudies, vol. 8, no. 3, 2020, pp. 399–403 (co-authored with Michael Cramer). Collins, J. (2012). An Anthropological Turn. New Left Review 78: 31–60. Cramer, M. (2012). Rossellini’s History Lessons. New Left Review 78: 115–134. Daniélou, A. (1987). Way to the Labyrinth: Memories of East and West. New York: New Directions Publishing. Gadducci, F., Gori, L., and Lama, S. (2011). Eccetto Topolino. Lo scontro culturale tra il f­ ascismo e il fumetto. Battipaglia: Nicola Pesce Edito. Gallagher, T. (1998). The Adventures of Roberto Rossellini: His Life and Films. New York: Da Capo. Godard, J.L. (1959). Cahiers du Cinéma 96: 41. Grimshaw, A. and Ravetz, A. (2009). Observational Cinema: Anthropology, Film and the Exploration of Social Life. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Henley, P. (2010). The Adventure of the Real: Jean Rouch and the Craft of Ethnographic Cinema. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jameson, F. (2011). Brecht and Method. London: Verso Books. MacDougall, D. (1969–1970). Prospects of the Ethnographic Film. Film Quarterly 2: 16–30.

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Mèccoli, D. (1941). I nuovi registi. Cinema 132: 391–392. Mitman, G. (2009). Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife Films. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Nijland, D. (2007). Jean Rouch: A Builder of Bridges. In: Building Bridges: The Cinema of Jean Rouch (ed. J. ten Brink), 21–38. London: Wallflower Press. O’Leary, A. (2008). After Brunetta: Italian Cinema Studies in Italy, 2000 to 2007. Italian Studies 63 (2): 279–307. Overbey, D. (1978). Springtime in Italy: A Reader of Neo‐Realism. London: Talisman. Perniola, I. (2006). Documentari fuori regime. In: Storia del cinema italiano (eds. L. Miccichè and O. Caldiron), 372–380. Venezia: Marsilio. Rizi, F.F. (2003). Benedetto Croce and Italian Fascism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Rondolino, G. (2006). Rossellini. Turin: UTET. Rouch, J. (2003). Ciné‐ethnography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Russell, C. (2011). Observational Cinema: Anthropology, Film, and the Exploration of Social Life by Anna Grimshaw and Amanda Ravetz. Cultural Anthropology 26: 143–149. Said, E. (1994). Culture and Imperialism, 1994. New York: Vintage. Sembène, O. (1982). Jean Rouch‐Sembène Ousmane: Comme des insectes. CinémAction 17: 77–78. Stoller, P. (1992). The Cinematic Griot: The Ethnography of Jean Rouch. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Swann, P. (1989). The British Documentary Film Movement, 1926–1946. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Truffaut, F. (1976). A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema. In: Movies and Method (ed. B. Nichols), 224–237. Berkeley: University of California Press. Williams, T. (2014). Germaine Dulac: A Cinema of Sensations. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.

12

The Romantic Becomes Dialectic?

Joris Ivens, Cold Warrior and Socialist Realist, 1946–1956 Thomas Waugh

Concordia University

There was virtually no artistic form in the diverse Eastern European films. —Hans Schoots, Living Dangerously

Introduction The Iron Curtain was already christened as such in March 1946, less than a year after the end of the War. The decade or so that Ivens spent east of it, based mostly in Prague, Warsaw, and East Berlin, was, although a frustrating one for him personally and creatively, more productive – and artistic – than some accounts might indicate. It is also undeniably key to his oeuvre and legacy. If we need masterpieces, this period led to the production of a film that has often received that accolade, Das Lied der Ströme (also known by its official English title Song of the Rivers [1954, DDR, 90]), and I concur. Lied synthesized and consolidated many of Ivens’s previous innovations, pushing in particular the compilation mode to match his epic artistic ambitions and global political ideals, as well as building prophetically on the postcolonial breakthrough of Indonesia Calling (1946, Australia, 22). At the same time, it echoed two other Cold War films Pierwsze lata (The First Years, 1949, Bulgaria/Czechoslovakia/Poland, 99) and Pokój zdobędzie świat (Peace Will Win, 1951, Poland, 90) in speaking eloquently with the traumatized voice of his postwar generation. This period was also the ­crucible for some of Ivens’s most problematic films—speaking both artistically and politically—those in which his most ardent hopes were most catastrophically dashed, those that Ivens himself looking back from the 1980s considered moments of repetition rather than development, films “hav[ing] slid the most in history” A Companion to Documentary Film History, First Edition. Edited by Joshua Malitsky. © 2021 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Figure 12.1  Poster for Lied der Ströme, 1954.

(Ivens and Destanque 1982: 243). Meanwhile, it was the interlude when Ivens offered his final synthesis of his relationship with socialist realism – final that is until wars and revolutions in Asia revived it in the late 1960s and 1970s. Finally, it was also an interval in which a 40‐something artist stepped up his involvement in a focused way in producing, collaborating, and mentoring, and thus one that complicates any auteurist presumptions about documentary film history we might still complacently be nursing. Historically speaking, this was the period in which Ivens and his collaborators, both external and internal, weathered the violent contradictions and ultimately fatal crisis within the Old Left during the opening salvos of the Cold War. The historical chronology of this crisis spanned from the perfidious and paranoid implantation of Russian dominance in Eastern Europe (the Soviets were no doubt justifiably paranoid in the face of the nuclear arms race, sparked by American arms‐testing in the immediate post‐Hiroshima years, which the Soviets were not able to counter with



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their own first nuclear test until August 1949), to the emergence and consolidation of Euro‐Communism in Western Europe at the time of the Thaw. The death of Stalin in March 1953 was followed by opposing pulls of liberalization and retrenchment within communist societies, including the famous de‐Stalinization that finally ushered in the Thaw in question in 1956 and the contradictory suppression of that same disavowal in the shape of tanks rumbling through Budapest that same year. Biographically speaking, this period culminated, just as Ivens’s adventures of the 1930s had, in exit and rupture, in a crumbling marriage with yet another female collaborator, and with artistic/political salvation on another horizon – in this case within the “progressive” cultural fronts of the West … of the South and of the Far East. Certainly the eight films Ivens directed, produced, or had a part in during his Cold War period are those most disavowed across the board by the Ivens estate, and even, to a certain extent, by his foundation: this period is the only major vector of his career not represented in any way whatsoever in the 2008 DVD box‐set restoration of his oeuvre.1 Lied is not the only work of note and grandeur to have emerged: another film, the troubled First Years, a transnational epic of reconstruction and nation building, offered what might be considered Ivens’s most carried‐through rendition of his personalized model of documentary form; and the uneven series of films, either directed, co‐directed, or “overseen” by Ivens, most like Lied caught in the potential trap of the commissioned “congress film” format, must be seen as credible efforts at the cinematic waging of peace in the era of the H‐test. One of these, Peace Will Win, made enough of an impact that it had a second life as a tool in the US anti‐war movement during the Vietnam era. The erasure of these films, admittedly on the wrong side of history it could be argued, might be deemed an attempted rewriting of that history on the part of Ivens’s executors – perhaps even the testamentary credo of the late Marceline Loridan‐Ivens (1928–2018)  –  or simply a revisionist ideological statement of failed ideals. Or it might simply reflect the insoluble encounter with issues having to do solely with rights (most of this period’s work was carried out for the East German state‐owned production company DEFA and other concerns in Prague, Warsaw, and Moscow). Whatever the case, the smoothing out of history and the disavowal of a decade’s artistic and political labor, however misguided or doomed or contradictory, is not an appropriate way to understand the progress of this international artist‐in‐exile as he moved from middle age to honorary elder status – nor to learn from it the valuable artistic and political lessons that abound there. Hans Schoots, Ivens’s most serious biographer, albeit controversial (1995 [2000]), loses all judgment in writing about his period, as we saw in the hysterical epigraph above: about the Old Left and its artistic trajectory, about Stalinism and its political legacy, about postwar documentary and its artistic struggles. Ivens and his collaborators from the US and Australia, Marion Michelle, Catherine Duncan, and Paul Robeson, and his Eastern European collaborators  –  including Béla Balázs, Jerzy Bossak, Bertolt Brecht, Alberto Cavalcanti, Hanns Eisler, Joop Huisken, Pablo Picasso, Gérard Philipe, Vladimir Pozner, Ivan Pyryev, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Andrew Thorndike were not fools or dupes, not opportunists, knaves nor cynics  –  though they may have been exiles,

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refugees, idealists, fellow travelers, or pragmatists, or all of the above. In any case, they deserve better of us, their descendants, than an indiscriminate silencing  –  a historiographical “iron curtain” of another kind. Indeed, they deserve our honesty, analysis, and critique  –  as well as our empathy and solidarity. Moreover Lied der Ströme, together with other Soviet‐bloc and “Old Left” films, deserves our empathetic scrutiny and a full place in the film historical canon of the postwar decade alongside Fiddle‐de‐dee, Ritual in Transfigured Time, Brief Encounter, La Terra Trema, Singin’ in the Rain, Ugetsu, Nuit et Brouillard, and Pather Panchali.

Cold War Phase‐In 1947–1954: Reinventing Socialist Realism Joris Ivens and Marion Michelle arrived in Europe in January 1947 to encounter a world, cinematic and political, very different from the ones they had left behind as progressive filmmakers in the wartime US and in postwar Australia. Though the reconstruction of postwar Europe had scarcely begun, the Cold War that would preside over the final four decades of Ivens’s career was already in full swing, with dire consequences for his generation of left filmmakers both inside the film industry and outside. And the hybrid form of the performed documentary that would dominate the postwar decade up to the explosion of direct cinema after 1957, a form to which Ivens and his contemporaries had been aspiring in the 1930s, and to which he was about to make his next, perhaps definitive contribution, was already implanted – not unrelated of course to the enthronement of socialist realism in the 1930s as the official communist aesthetic. This hybrid model had been buoyed up at one end of the spectrum by the successes of wartime docudramas like Target for Tonight (directed by John Grierson’s disciple Harry Watt, UK, 1941), and the early postwar breakthroughs of neorealism at the other end, which came to their arguably similar hybrid form from a direction opposite to Ivens, that is, from the direction of fiction. Ivens would enthusiastically tell his audiences that the narrowing of the gap between nonfiction and fiction  –  an eventuality he had himself, in fact, been pushing toward since the early 1930s – was intrinsic to the documentary’s social political role. One of Ivens’s examples was Land of Promise (1946, 67′), by Paul Rotha. This now‐ unwatchable yet epitomous sponsored work about the challenges of housing in the postwar UK laid out all the traps lying in wait for documentarists during the last decade before direct cinema would change everything, not only hokey and contrived performances in the name of narrowing the fiction/nonfiction gap but also perhaps more importantly the lures of sponsor compromise. The other aesthetic template privileged for documentary during the War had been compilation, and Ivens had contributed both a success and a disaster to this current, both in the US, respectively Our Russian Front (1941) and the never‐released Know Your Enemy Japan (1945). Compilation would take the back seat for now but would resurface with the 1954 masterwork on the horizon, Das Lied der Ströme. If corporate and state sponsorship was the new prevailing employment niche for his generation of documentarists, from Grierson to Flaherty, Ivens had burned his



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bridges for this option in the West with his communist affiliation and his Indonesia episode (in which he had publicly torn up his contract with the Netherlands colonial government). He accordingly now looked toward state‐sponsored projects in Eastern Europe. Eventually based in Warsaw and East Berlin, hives of skittish new cultural commissars, Ivens would discover the ruts of both the “event film” genre and the anthology format. These institutional and generic tendencies would all converge in 1954 in the DDR‐sponsored epic Lied, a triumph of both socialist realism and compilation, the artist’s most successful film of the decade he spent east of what was already called the Iron Curtain. In the short term however, he would devote three full years to an ambitious but doomed project in collaboration with the new Soviet‐backed regimes in Poland, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. The plan, according to Ivens, which would serve as an epic laboratory for his evolving ideas of socialist realism, was, as Schoots (1995 [2000]) sarcastically cites him, a “contribution to the building of socialism in Eastern Europe.”2 Joined by Catherine Duncan from the Indonesia Calling team, the group plunged into their research on the four Slavic nations, tweaked the working title of The Four Democracies toward the final title The First Years. The three filmmakers settled on single themes and “tonalities” chosen to match national characteristics and priorities that would dominate each of the four national segments: agriculture/”didactic” for Bulgaria, youth/”lyrical” for Yugoslavia, history/”epic” for Czechoslovakia and industrialization/”dramatic” for Poland (Ivens and Destanque 1982: 232). Ivens, Michelle, and Duncan, in collaboration with local filmmakers in each locality, ­delivered fervent, state‐of‐the‐art narrative essays about their chosen themes. The premiere finally took place in Prague in December 1949, and the film was then shown triumphantly in Paris three months later at an Ivens mini‐retrospective to an adoring overflow audience of communists and cinephiles. The glow was short‐lived, for notice soon came that the Bulgarians and the Czechs were pulling out, and the Poles simply shelved the film quietly, leaving the project as, in Ivens’s words, “an orphan with a great future, but the time of the future has not come yet” or even worse “an illegitimate child … treated with complete negligence”) (Schoots citing Ivens letter to Michelle, Schoots 1995 [2000]: 227; cited in Ivens 1969: 246). It seemed that more than three full years of Ivens’s life now needed to be written off, along with what was perhaps the most ambitious film of his career up to that point. The First Years, that is the extant 99‐minute triptych  –  the episodes featuring Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Poland, in that order – may have not been seen by anyone but Ivens fans and scholars for over six decades. This elegant and fastidious work of propaganda and solidarity clearly shows on the screen and the soundtrack the intelligence, generosity, passion, and commitment  –  and deliberately paced research and accomplished (if not academic) journeywork, both technical and interpersonal – invested in it by the three expatriates and their indigenous crews in the three countries. Each episode unfolds in the style chosen to match its national subject and in a carefully balanced sensibility to discursively match the compendium’s overall

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geopolitical mission. The “lyrical” Bulgarian narrative (“smotheringly” so, according to one critic), marries the agrarian heroics of Spanish Earth with the archetypal though quirky character development of Power and the Land. The episode follows an extended family, complete with craggy patriarch, pregnant daughter‐in‐law, and naughty prepubescent male scion through a drought‐ravished tobacco harvest toward salvation in mechanical, collective modernization, gigantic power dams merging with subterranean springs. The Czech episode also displayed competing agendas: it deftly spins on the previous year’s putsch as the culmination of six centuries of popular resistance to hierarchical and foreign authority and imaginatively tells national history compiled from period engravings and paintings, and ending with a “personalized” twentieth‐century history of the Bata shoe empire and its ­failure to support the revolution. The Polish episode, having to confront total devastation from war and invasion, is delivered suitably in what was conceived of as “epic” mode. “Epic” to be sure, but perhaps “allegorical” and “melodramatic” might have been added as qualifiers: the parabolic gist of its black‐garbed female protagonist’s recovery through participation in collective industrial reconstruction in the newly annexed Polish Silesia couches an individual drama of traumatic healing that in fact has real affect. Yet distinct as they are, the three episodes all show the ineradicable stamp of the socialist realist heritage. The official aesthetic doctrine was in the immediate postwar years at the nadir of its contradictory history – Soviet Minister of Culture Andrei Zhdanov3 was tightening his grip in the wake of the relative relaxation occasioned by the fervor of the “Great Patriotic War.” The three episodes of The First Years all show the familiar ascending arc of both history and narrative, inhabited by characters and societies who alike affirm their revolutionary destiny, all against a backdrop of heroic socialist labor and world‐historic collective production. From Ivens’s interviews and speeches about his documentary practice after 1934 and especially during the height of the Cold War up until the XXth Party Congress in 1956,4 one can distill certain key phrases and tropes that animate his objectives and practice. Together they provide a working definition of socialist realism that matches the one that emerged from what Régine Robin (1986 [1992]) calls the “creative cauldron” of the Soviet debates about realism in the 1920s and 1930s. Ivens had first implemented this aesthetic in Magnitogorsk in 1932 when he made Komsomol, at the height of the debates leading up to the All Union Congress of Soviet Writers of 1934 where the loose and open consensus around the ideals and pragmatics of realism became official. These tropes would become the center of his drive toward establishing personalized characterization within the documentary lexicon: 1 necessity of a hero, individual (personalization) but clearly situated within collectivity 2 organic unity between life, the film, and the director 3 recognizability to audience, accessibility 4 working class roots and perspectives 5 authenticity, reality, living men, not staying on the surface, but



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6 simple person, everyday life, real life, connecting to milieu, to his work, “typical,” but 7 trusting in happy future, transforms his surroundings, transformed by his ­surroundings, “revolutionary romanticism” 8 must be audacious and challenge censorship, and show “national” heroes, create understanding between peoples: peace 9 and specifically in relation to film (as opposed to the literature emphasized by the Congress): words and image a “choosing” subjects (dramatization), casting for expression of feelings but not psychology and not “performance” b must find proper style for creating men living, not cheap or symbolic types – just like in the fiction film c montage for placing our hero in his milieu The tension between revolutionary romanticism and the requirement of “typicality”/everyday realism entailed what Robin (1986 [1992]) has called an “impossible aesthetics.” But it could also be argued that this tension was not only the liability that it turned out to be for Ivens and many an aspiring artist but also an artistic challenge – the challenge to wrangle intuitively the legacy of other populist genres of didactic narrative in Western culture, from the saint’s life to the theatrical melodrama, from the poster to Brechtian agitprop. For writer Catherine Duncan the key word was “positive”: the filmmakers focused on finding a positive angle and making it a political lesson; it was possible to criticize everything, but the obligatory challenge was to be upbeat (Duncan 1950). This obligation is, of course, the transhistorical marker of all solidarity image‐making (Waugh, 2009) – including New Left/New Social Movement activist documentary (solidarity, advocacy and social issue genres) to this day – and perhaps it is only the intensity and Cold War flavor of Ivens’s iconography that evokes the pall of Zhdanov. The first and third segments offered the filmmakers the most opportunity for the development of the SR practice of “personalization” – as Ivens had originally called nonfiction character development two decades earlier. The Polish piano‐teacher/ steelworker widow Jadwiga’s character is perhaps Ivens’s most fleshed out of the entire classical era. One assumes that Michelle’s input was decisive in the development of this character’s performance and that of her crane‐operator gal pal (and in other proto‐feminist touches throughout The First Years). Production notes reveal both the tight professional scheduling and how focused and fastidious the casting process was, motivated both by SR “representativeness” and psychological nuance. No doubt one of the hindrances to reading the film 60 years after its star‐crossed premiere, is the vagueness of the line between solidarity documentary and the subgenre we might call the “interloper parachute commission.” Ivens’s group was sensitive to their contradictory status as foreigners airlifted into unfamiliar cultural and political territory  –  but this had been true of almost all of Ivens’s projects since Borinage and arguably defines the “flying Dutchman’s” entire career – their commitment to mentoring local artisans and crews was simply the latest version of the usual delicate balance of sponsorship, intervention and deference. Nevertheless, Ivens’s

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Figure 12.2  The First Years. Ivens directing the foundry lab sequence of the Polish episode with scriptwriter, partner and photographer Marion Michelle seen at rear, 1948.

ultimate patrons, the Russians, whom the commentary treats with partial truth as  liberators, were also imperialists no less than the Netherlands East Indies ­government that Ivens had signed on with and then repudiated so recently. Was his decision to try to negotiate the ambiguity and promote socialist ideals in this overdetermined context opportunist and willfully blinded, as Schoots would have it, or simply, as Michelle would put it much later “terribly naïve”? Or was the good‐faith effort to develop further the nonfiction‐fiction hybrid of the personalized SR documentary, in the rearguard of an occupying army, too vulnerable to cooptation by imposed smiling and hieratic two‐dimensionality to allow deeper documentary analysis and dramaturgy a chance? Interestingly “humanity” was discerned as a feature of the film by three critics at opposite ends of the Cold War ideological spectrum, and the term is flexible/extensible enough to operate as code for both socialist realist programmatics and begrudging acknowledgment of the promise for rounded realist characterization within the new hybrid format. In each case it disavows or complicates the film’s reading then as now as stereotypical propagandist fodder for the Soviet machine, which overwhelmed the response of my test audience of Eastern European‐diaspora friends in 2011. At mid‐century, Stalinist culturecrats of the three host countries did not give critics and audiences the chance to negotiate these readings for themselves, the film a casualty less of ideological stress than of the timid ressentiment of timid commissars. After the First Years debacle, Ivens followed the path of least resistance and accepted an “event film” commission from the state documentary studio in Warsaw and then in quick succession three more similar assignments based in East Germany.



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The first three of these led to what are undeniably “minor” films, but perhaps it was the frustration of having to plod through three bread‐and‐butter projects with complicated collaborative arrangements that somehow led to the inspiration of the fourth one, the magistral Lied. Peace Will Win (1951) was to be the official film of the Second International Peace Congress, a Cold‐War‐era gathering organized by the Soviet‐backed International Peace Council, held in Warsaw. The film is remarkably watchable, perhaps surprisingly so. After a compilation‐based prologue detailing with appropriate outrage the global nuclear arms race, the 90‐minute black‐and‐white documentary sticks relatively close to topic, with impassioned demonstrations, speeches, and low‐key committee meetings all brimming with cheerful delegates sketched in vivid SR vignettes. The itch to move outside the claustrophobic congress site is relieved periodically however: whether in street views of the city rebuilding in parallel to the congress organization, or in endless smiling, garlanded arrivals and departures, but most notably in a stunning scene where African‐American delegates silently tour the site of the Warsaw ghetto, and the soundtrack for once halts its clatter and matches their reverent response with its own silence. Unlike The First Years, Peace Will Win can be said to have had a modest career, both in theaters and in progressive nontheatrical spaces, in English in the US and the Commonwealth, and in French as well as in Polish, German, Russian, Chinese, and other bloc languages (Ivens, 1952). In the US it was distributed thanks to Artkino, the leftwing outfit who had handled Soviet and radical films in the US progressive network since the 1930s. Two New York City reviewers greeted its January 1952 premiere with reviews that predictably toed the US Cold War line while offering refreshingly open‐minded insights. Looking back in the last decade of his life, Ivens was not proud of this commission, something neither to hide nor boast of (Ivens and Destanque 1982: 234), and even at the time confided to Michelle that it was “not a wonderful film” (Schoots 1995 [2000]: 234). These perspectives may be understandable on both counts, but resourceful and effective journeywork on a commission tightrope does not require shame and Ivens had known this for decades. The next two works in the congress film cycle do not hold up as well. Hard on the heels of the victory of peace, came the triumph of friendship. In June 1951, still ­editing Peace Will Win, Ivens came to Berlin to launch what would become an intermittent five‐year, five‐film relationship with the East German state film enterprise DEFA (Deutsche Film‐Aktiengesellschaft5). His new topic was the “International Festival for Youth and Students,” which was to unfold over two weeks in August in East Berlin, with 66 countries participating. Ivens remembered an “enormous machine,” feeling “losing touch with reality,” and being reduced to the role of “­production management” (Ivens and Destanque 1982: 237). And then there was the 100 kilometers of Agfa color stock. Did Ivens the technical university graduate see the chance to make his first film in color as an offer he couldn’t refuse? Resisting his production manager demotion, Ivens developed ambitious plans to humanize the Congress event with SR‐shaped individual narratives around the congress participants, to curb the Riefenstahl temptation through a materialist grasp of

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the lives and sociocultural contexts affected. According to Jordan (1999), Ivens exceptionally “retained the deeper things.” For example, when a British woman who lost her brother in Korea meets a Korean man on a Berlin street, the Korean touches her gently and a smile ensues: “the camera stays with these two people who are speaking, and [Ivens] recognizes a scene in it” (92). More often, if the stress of being tied down by color technology and Comintern bureaucracy weren’t enough, pure grandiosity got the better of Ivens and his Soviet co‐director, and the three‐month edit in Moscow, devoted ultimately to 55 hours of footage over which they had had little control, could not fix the messy web of superficiality, compromise, and complicity. If hostile Western cold warriors had undertaken to imagine their ultimate stereotype of Stalinist propaganda, this film would be it, with almost no trace of Ivens’s hoped‐for personal vignettes. Otherwise, it may well be to Ivens’s credit that his Triumph of the Will is far from Riefenstahl’s hermetically sealed, steel‐clad choreography, but rather a chaotic kaleidoscope of movement and color with very little of the screen time devoted to the actual on‐the‐verge‐of‐anarchy proceedings in the new Walter‐Ulbricht‐Stadium. In short, if Peace in comparison was “all talk and no action,” with the saving graces of eloquence, ideas, principles, ideals and passions, Friendship offered according to Ivens’s DEFA colleague Jordan (1999) the “aesthetics of their era,” the “triumph of logistics over art, an unappetizing banquet of largesse in image, music and text” (90). And if Peace and Friendship were indeed Ivens’s negative Triumph of the Will, one might wryly wonder whether his next assignment, Wyscic Pokóju Warszawa‐Berlin‐ Praga (Friedensfahrt / Peace Tour 1952) was his failed counter‐Olympia. His second color film, also a multiple‐camera co‐production, this time between DEFA and Warsaw, Peace Tour is basically a reportage of a bicycle race in the spring of 1952 between the three Soviet‐bloc capitals. Looking at the first four quite different “Cold War” films in their totality, one can perceive a common dynamic: in all, cheerfully utopian international communities are shaped by a deep structure of not only communist politics and “positive” character dramatics, but also the processing of the trauma of wartime violation, partition, and reconstruction. One can dismiss such films as delusional and paranoid Kremlin blustering, brinkmanship, and bombast, salted with the desperate search for legitimacy by the Warsaw Pact regimes, especially East Germany. But is a scarred generation’s desire for peace ever cynical? After all, General MacArthur had advocated nuclear deployment in Korea and given the filmmakers a key ­rhetorical tool that they didn’t need to fabricate. Ivens’s letters and diaries, uncovered by Schoots (1995 [2000]), brim with both cinematic ideas and the fear of war. Rebounding from the humiliation of First Years, harnessing the positive energy as well as the “straitjacket” (Taylor 1979: 93) of socialist realism, and the positive energy of young people coming to him for training at Lodz as well as to perform enthusiasm for his camera in East Berlin, Ivens responded to the challenge with his traditional resourcefulness. After the sad ending to The First Years, little was made of these ideas, and they must be seen as a brainstorming for the major work around the corner.



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Lied der Ströme: Cold War Watershed? 1952 was a busy year with never a dull moment for the 53‐year‐old Ivens. January had seen the New York premiere of Peace Will Win (not that the US authorities would have let Ivens attend), April saw the premiere of Freundschaft in Berlin, while the Peace Tour shoot soon wrapped up, including footage of Mayday celebrations, and entered post‐production. The next month Ivens was invited to Berlin for discussions with DEFA about a major documentary on the Third World Congress of the Soviet‐backed World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) scheduled to take place in Vienna in October of 1953. In the DDR, political and economic unrest led to a congress in July of Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED, Socialist Unity Party), the DDR’s ruling party, which ominously opted for increased Sovietization of the satellite state, and increased state control not only of the cinema but also of the economy. This decision in turn led directly to the following year’s June 16 workers’ uprising, three months after the death of Stalin. Despite Ivens’s consciousness of a “relative freedom” that entailed “some restrictions” on his self‐expression, the filmmaker (Waugh and Ivens 1978) recalled “sincere enthusiasm” for his Eastern European work. He remained positive about commissions, feeling “that as an artist you have to think more than the other people, higher than the other people who order the film.” His utterances of the time revealed him wholly on board with the socialist realist project as a whole, which he praised in 1951 in the Federation’s French publication, Mouvement syndical mondial (Lacazette 1951) in relation to the positive experience of teaching working‐class filmmakers in Poland. Still, he felt apprehensive about becoming the “Congress man,” of playing the court photographer role (Ivens and Destanque 1982: 234) and at first resisted the Vienna project that would soon become Lied. Offers from both DEFA and the WFTU were too appealing to refuse however, especially when the WFTU General Secretary Louis Saillant and Committee President Guiseppe Di Vittorio quickly accepted his counterproposal. Ivens’s pitch was to use the Congress as a pretext to create a grass‐roots epic about work, workers, and union organizing around the planet, emphasizing what would soon become known as the “third world” and crystallizing in thematic narratives around six of the world’s great rivers. A climactic final movement would center on a seventh symbolic river, the movement of the revolutionary working classes, but the Federation downplayed this angle. The actual reporting of the congress would only take 20 minutes of a feature‐length project. For their part DEFA seemed to realize the limitations of the “giant machine” approach that had made everyone unhappy (except the cheering onscreen “youth”) with Freundschaft, and offered a scaled‐down project with less infrastructure: only two rooms, one telephone and a car, and above all the congenial Hans Wegner (d. 1984) as production head. An intimate and very productive working relationship would evolve with Wegner, as well as Ivens’s first biography in 1965. Moreover, two of Ivens’s close friends were “high‐ranking apparatchiks,” and appropriate lubrication was anticipated and no doubt delivered (Jordan 1999). The fourth congress film soon began to feel like the first major Ivens‐initiated project since First Years, with

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the theme of work and union organizing assuming a positive energy beyond the reactive, top‐down declamatory thrust of Peace Will Win, Freundschaft, and Peace Tour. By June 1953 (ironically a few weeks before the uprising), a one‐year contract with DEFA finalized the project that would take up the next year and a half of his life. The gathering momentum would result in “the most personal film I made in the East,” “the most lyrical of my entire career” (Ivens and Destanque 1982: 242), “one of the largest productions in the history of the documentary cinema” (Bakker 1999: 41) and by majority agreement then and now the one unambiguous artistic achievement of this period. If nothing else, Lied might be considered one of the lovingly luminous swan songs of black‐and‐white 35 mm documentary monumentality on the eve of the “less‐is‐more” direct cinema explosion and 16 mm. This time, even though Ivens was involved directly in the cinematography in the DDR only, his role involved much more than “production manager,” and can be termed “creative producer/orchestrator” alongside his official credit of “director.” The original Freundschaft concept of grass‐roots narrative and thematic threads contributing to a master exposition was finally taken seriously and now developed and implemented as fully as possible. Ivens and Wegner assembled a team of local filmmakers from around the world, many of whom Ivens knew from his travels and leftist networking over the years. Each received general instructions to film local preparations for the congress, especially single delegates in local contexts, “where he works, what he does, how he lives, etc.” before and after Vienna (Leyda 1964: 74).6 On the level of micro‐artistic practice, Ivens would integrate archival images with these on‐site materials. His talents as a compilationist, demonstrated in his works of the 1930s as well as in the World War II American projects, would be tested and confirmed here on a whole new scale. At DEFA a multinational team was set up (DEFA documentary institutions seemed packed with expatriates and migrants like Ivens himself, as if the Ulbricht regime could not trust German communists to carry out such important work). The roster of principal collaborators was headed by Vladimir Pozner, Ivens’s old friend from Moscow, Paris, and Los Angeles, collaborator on the script undertaken that summer and writer of the commentary once the shape of the final film was clear (in the official credits Ivens shared top‐billing authorship credit with Pozner, though not the directing credit). Also on board were assistant directors Joop Huisken (1901–1979), Ivens’s compatriot and collaborator on Regen (Rain, 1929, Netherlands, 16′) and Zuiderzee who had emerged from a Nazi stalag to become one of the leading DDR documentarists, viewed by his colleague Jordan as an exemplar of political and artistic accountability to worker subjects but who now accepted a backseat role to his old mentor; and the Frenchman Robert Mengoz (aka Robert Ménégoz, born 1926, who had just finished a documentary short on the Paris Commune). As cinematographers Frenchman Sacha Vierny, who would shortly collaborate with Resnais and Marker, and elder East German Erich Nitzschmann, who had worked with Riefenstahl on Olympia, first came to Ivens’s mind 30 years later, while the Ivens Foundation website mentions two additional cameramen Anatoly Koloschin and Maximilian Scheer, presumably Soviet and East German respectively; finally Ella



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Ensink (1897–1968), a veteran of the Weimar and Nazi periods of German cinema, quietly marshaled the editing process and would continue working with Ivens/ Pozner on their remaining East German projects. This seasoned and prestigious team was in place, but it may have been the anonymous contributors in the field who stole the show. New visual material from six continents was at the center of the 75 hours of rushes, alongside abundant archival material from both western and Soviet‐bloc archives, plus recycled images from Ivens’s Dutch productions, as well as from Borinage, The 400 Million (1939, USA, 53′), Indonesia Calling, and even First Years and Peace Will Win. Judging from the final selection and production documents, the rushes submitted from the cinematographers in the field were from Australia, Austria, Brazil, France, West Germany, Italy, Japan, South Africa, Sweden, the UK, and US; the still colonial areas of Algeria, French West Africa (Cameroon7), Nigeria, and Sudan; the recently “liberated” India, Indonesia, and Egypt; the Soviet‐sphere countries of China, DDR, Poland, USSR, North Korea (post‐armistice [Panmunjong]), and Vietnam (pre‐Dien Bien Phu); and with lesser presence, only a shot or two each, from Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Iran, Mongolia, Romania, and Spain. Most of these jurisdictions had communist parties with a strong underground presence (South Africa, US) or legitimate visibility within the public sphere (India, the Euro‐Communist zone, the Soviet sphere). Cold war security precautions in the non‐bloc countries have ensured that the exactness of the sources and even the distinction between archival and original imagery cannot often be verified. (The foregoing list, minus those jurisdictions possibly relying exclusively on archival materials [Nigeria?8], probably constitute the 32 designated source countries.) Little is known about the production of the footage from the field except what is on the screen, but over the years the filmmakers let out anecdotal tidbits alongside the predictable allusions to funding problems, customs challenges, and clandestine shipping of rushes: amateur union cameramen were the contributors from Australia whereas professionals produced the images in both China and Japan; prison shots were obtained clandestinely from prerevolutionary Cuba9; the Soviet material was very “pink,” with uniform and “boring” urban shots from Berlin to Vladivostok, and this selection thus emphasized Ivens’s usual last resort, never‐boring schoolchildren; the two American cameramen had some of their footage destroyed; the Iranian contribution was strong but understandably only shows figures’ backs10 (Waugh and Ivens 1978). The final Lied – epic yet lyrical, materialist yet affecting, outraged but optimistic, vividly cinematic but with a fine‐tuned and efficient deployment of the spoken word, anchored in the local but envisaging the global – shows Ivens inspired once again and in control. The 93‐minute feature, more symphonic than song‐like in its encyclopedic scope and complex structure, interpolates a meandering essayistic safari along the six selected world rivers – in order, the Mississippi, Ganges, Nile, Yangtze, Volga, and Amazon – with thematic excursuses first celebrating labor (the Marxian theme of the human transformation of nature), then exposing capitalist exploitation and misery, next a movement of approximately a half hour on the Congress itself, tracing local preparations for it around the world, the gathering in

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Vienna, and the follow‐up back home. Then come short extrapolations of the motifs of bread and the land, the arms race and capitalism, seguing into a utopian glimpse of socialism in practice in China and the Soviet sphere. Finally the struggles of the workers’ movements against war, hunger, and state/police oppression progress to the triumphant surge forward of the workers’ movements, the seventh river as originally pitched by Ivens. Three of the most developed clusters from the field cinematographers were from Africa: striking but somewhat stiff mise‐en‐scènes of union drives, workers’ oratory, and the election of congress delegates in Cameroon and Algeria (Cameroonian fieldworkers are summoned to their organizing meeting by drums!), and urban and rural shots of labor and police harassment in Egypt, focusing on irrigation, agriculture, and the cotton industry, as well as foreign militarization.11 The India segments are also strong and well developed, including rallies, meetings, and demonstrations (most from West Bengal, where the state communist party was poised to take electoral power), as well as shots of famine and brutal manual labor (barefoot rickshaw‐ pullers and elderly women carrying punishing headloads of stones), all deploying the moral outrage that is a characteristic of local left discourses following the Great Famine and Partition of the 1940s.

Figure 12.3  Das Lied der Ströme: incorporating unique footage by African cinematographers in the field, such as this socialist‐realism‐inflected mise‐en‐scène of an agricultural union drive.



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Intercutting archival footage and the new material surprisingly seamlessly, Ivens revisits most of his familiar motifs, from the analysis and celebration of manual work to the exploration, both lyrical and metaphorical, of the elements, especially water, not surprisingly, and earth. River iconography has, of course, an almost archetypal resonance in twentieth‐century documentary. While Musser (2002) sees echoes in Ivens’s river motif of Pudovkin and the Filmliga adventure around Mat (Mother, 1926, USSR, 90′) 25 years earlier, Ivens’s metaphorical figuration of rivers also references Vertov and Ivens’s own 1930s work on both sides of the Atlantic. With regard to the rivers as vehicles of history, Jordan (1999: 104) helpfully connects Lied to another major trend at DEFA, where a cycle of historical compilation films emerged shortly afterwards, modeled to no small extent on Ivens’s and Pozner’s film. These projects were responding to the imperatives of denazification and socialist construction of course but also no doubt to the frustration engendered by repeated futile efforts to second‐guess the ever‐tightening ship of state on touchy contemporary domestic political agendas, especially post‐June 16. The year of Lied’s release, Ivens reportedly had a supervisory hand in the Thorndike’s Du und mancher Kamerad (You and Many a Comrade, 1956, 110′), which Jordan (1999: 96) considers among the most successful and affecting of these historiographical efforts in the way it “discovered the internal force of archive material.” Indeed, Lied should not be considered in isolation from its complex intertext. Ivens’s old friend Leyda (1910–1988)12 was the first to situate Lied as a masterwork of the editor’s art, specifically of compilation, and he was right on both the macro and micro level. Nine elegant aqueous‐motif interludes mortar the movements of the film together. Within the movements, the ever tactful Leyda (1964: 77) praises Ivens’s and Ensink’s ability to produce spontaneity in even “over‐polished Soviet footage and the arranged Chinese shots,” and their ability to bring “maximum ­clarity” out of the amateur footage. Not surprisingly, rather than the fluid narrative and expository passages that are the architecture of the film, invariably connecting local detail to larger plan, it is easy to note the moments of virtuosity or even ­flamboyance. Leyda (1964: 77), for example, praises the skillful orchestration of the Mississippi’s flooding of its banks as if in angry response to the racial violence on its shore.13 One transition that stunned me the first and every subsequent time I’ve seen the film comes in the Amazon movement where a rainforest tribesman kindling fire with his “primitive” bow device produces the mushroom cloud of a nuclear blast (perhaps the Soviet H‐bomb test that had rocked the world as Ivens and Pozner were working on the script in 1953), a miraculously concise denunciation of the misuse of human productive technology that then segues into a critique of post‐Korea arms‐race geopolitics. For Leyda (1964: 144), in short, “[a] chance to re‐see his Song of the Rivers reinforced my admiration for it as a textbook of documentary idea, of cutting and selection, of reconciling breadth and detail, and of compilation.” The editing cannot be considered apart from the voice‐over commentary of course, and Pozner’s brilliance is soon evident in this respect, officially joining the line of talented writers from Ernest Hemingway to Catherine Duncan who had honored Ivens’s work since the 1930s with their creative counterpoint. Grelier (1965: 34)

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Figure 12.4  Compilation panache in Das Lied der Ströme: An eloquent edit in the Amazon movement, from a rainforest tribesman kindling fire to the mushroom cloud of a nuclear blast.

and Jordan (1999: 94) are among those who have praised Pozner’s restraint and imagination: the former admires the priority given to the images, and points specifically to the Indian footage of porters, while the latter praises the way Pozner allows spectators to create their own narrative, to join him in questioning images in an abstract rhetorical way, “general” and “planetary”: “Pozner’s commentary registers the swings, connections, and meanings of the images and sequences, and develops a new concept for the combining of image with text.” Nevertheless Jordan (Waugh and Jordan 2015) modulated the enthusiasm years later by observing that the raw material for Pozner to process diminishes in interest as the film advances. For his part, Pozner was rightly proud of how evocatively he was able to explain through a simple question the relatively abstract Marxian concept of surplus value over footage of South African gold miners: “In one year, a miner extracts 900 grams of gold. Where do the 800 grams of gold go that he extracts but does not keep? If we have the possibility in a film to explain what surplus value is, and moreover even more important things from Marx, in a way understood by millions, we must do it. Of course, it’s not a question of showing it in a primitive way but in a simple form” (Ivens 1955 [1965]). In the coffee‐table book that accompanied the release of the film Pozner elegantly describes the extent to which he had drawn inspiration for his shorthand commentary poetry from banners: I wanted it to be short, simple, and very repetitious. I had found my model while watching films of workers’ demonstrations, meeting, strikes, while reading what the workers themselves had written on the flags and banderoles the police were trying to wrest from them, what they had written on the walls of slums, on the entrances of struck factories and also on the huge streamers in Red Square in Moscow, in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, in Constitution Square in Warsaw, and Marx‐Engels Square in Berlin. I had Japanese posters translated, Romanian banners, Burmese streamers, Mongolian slogans, and discovered without surprise the universal language of the workers. “Wir fordern Lohnerhohung,” Austria said, and the echo came from Cosa Rica: “Luchamos para una alza de salarios.” “Libérez Henri Martin,” France was



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demanding and Cuba “Para la libertad de Lazaro Peña.” “We are hungry,” Algiers said, “Our children are hungry,” Bombay said. “We want work,” Dublin said, “We want a better life,” Djakarta said, and to all of them Toronto responded: “Justice.” Thus from demand to demand the commentary wrote itself. (Ivens and Pozner 1957: 19)

Critics would often single out Pozner’s work for praise: the politically unaligned Image et son’s (1964: 9) admiration was based specifically on its alternation of tone, “dry, tender, satirical, etc.” As for the second layer on the soundtrack, the music, much was made at the time of the contribution of Paul Robeson (1898–1976) to the film. The 55‐year‐old performer delivers verses of the theme song over each of the river movements, and then does so again in the finale, backed by chorus. The narrative of the marooned and passportless Red Scare martyr recording it a cappella in his brother’s Harlem parsonage made the rounds, and the performance with orchestral accompaniment added retroactively in East Berlin is indeed charismatic as well as a propaganda coup. However, Brecht’s lyrics seem to have been badly translated by Robeson’s American colleague, metrically awkward, and what is worse, not fully audible in existing DVD versions of the film. The original German version featured famous Brechtian singer Ernst Busch, which presumably works better. As for Shostakovich’s

Figure 12.5  A Bombay demonstration in Lied: Commentary writer Pozner drew inspiration from the universal poetry of protest signs. The visible fragment of the Marathi‐language ­placard reads “accept it!” (a wage hike? a contract?).

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anthem‐like song and accompanying score, it is catchily populist and melodious, larded out with recycled motifs from the already canonical wartime Eighth Symphony (1943) and his 1949 Zhdanovian oratorio Song of the Forests. Admittedly overbearing in spots, it allows lots of breathers and lives up to its task of monumentality despite its unfortunate, but perhaps symptomatic, echoes of the Protestant hymn tune “Beneath the Cross of Jesus.” Lied bowed in East Berlin’s Babylon theater on 17 September 1954, with the full DDR political hierarchy present, in Vienna a month later, and at the Karlovy Vary festival later in the fall. The self‐congratulatory reports of mass audiences reached thereafter presume systematic union screenings and nontheatrical circulation in left political organizations around the world (such as the Realist Film Association in Melbourne, where it was screened in January and March, 1956). But such reports unfortunately paper over uphill battles faced by the filmmakers in theatrical distribution channels  –  as usual. Jordan (1999) reveals that Lied was not distributed theatrically in the DDR after the premiere, but is not clear whether this was due to bureaucratic inertia or the ambiguous political shift toward the film industry that he locates earlier in 1954 (it was seemingly nothing personal around Ivens, for he remained the most honored filmmaker in the DDR over the next decade, with several retrospectives beginning in 1956 and many other honors); two years later, a repeat of the same distribution debacle happened to Huisken’s important film China – Land zwishchen Gestern und Morgen (China, Land between Yesterday and Tomorrow, 1956, 72′). At least the silence did not go unnoticed by civil society: the Academy of Arts, of which Ivens was a corresponding member, protested “it is the most humiliating incident in our documentary film history. This lack of appreciation for Joris Ivens’s Lied, one of the most important works in the history of the international documentary film” (Jordan 1999). Things were no better in the West: the UK and France were both brutal in their censorship, both presumably because of anticolonial discourses. The former trimmed one‐third of the running time of the film, and the latter’s list of required cuts took up eight pages single‐spaced, leading to an all‐too‐familiar tone in Pozner’s letter to his colleague: There remained the sentences we had to delete. We started to fade them out, once, twice, three times, but the truth doesn’t let itself be rubbed out, facts are a stubborn thing, we lowered the speaker’s voice, but one still heard it afterwards, only a whisper was left, but more revealing than a shout. Thus, we were forced, death in our hearts, to scrape the emulsion. The print was wounded: it’s the first casualty of the great battle just beginning to show the film, to get the film seen. (Pozner, letter to Ivens 1955, JIA)

In the US the film was never shown in any format, and Robeson (1958) was only able to see it at a Canadian screening, presumably in a Toronto left organization (where he performed in 1956). The 1978 Berkeley screening during Ivens’s and Loridan’s tour of Comment Yukong déplaça les montagnes (How Yukong Moved the Mountains, 1976, France, 718) was likely the first ever screening in that country.



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Such problems did not hamper an unsurprisingly polarized critical reception upon Lied’s release. Paris’s left‐leaning Esprit was the most extravagant, praising the film’s collective provenance and thereby comparing the film to medieval cathedrals, and citing Battleship Potemkin as a work worthy of comparison. The critic specifically mentioned the filmmakers’ ability to sustain the film’s opening “souffle” due to its strong editing and “formal audacity” (Legotien 1955). The Dutch centrist newspaper Volkskrant echoed Ivens’s current disfavor with the country’s regime, arguing that Ivens had paid for his communist allegiance with his artistic abilities, but in terms that are not wholly unfavorable: “primitively exciting” and “naively brutal” (de Volkskrant 1954). As political cinema, Lied tends to have a rough ride with post‐New Left viewers in the West who take on the task of providing a final retroactive judgment. Even Ivens’s sympathetic ex‐East German ex‐colleague Jordan (1999: 94) offered a fatal diagnosis: “the motive for the film and its progressive credentials are outdated.” Yet “outdatedness” – ephemerality – it can be argued are a characteristic by definition of any committed film, as I argued long ago, and the core of any “aesthetics of political use‐value,” “the common fund of our activist legacy” (Waugh 1999: 175): Instead of meeting the criteria of durability, abstraction, ambiguity, individualism, uniqueness, formal complexity, deconstructed or redistributed signifiers, novelty and so on, all in a packageable format, political documentaries provide us with disposability, ephemerality, topicality, directness, immediacy, instrumentality, didacticism, ­collective or anonymous authorship, unconventional formats, non‐availability, and ultimately non‐evaluability. (Waugh 1984, 2011, 13)

Schoots’s opinion is another case in point, basically a refutation of Marxism tout court and shooting the messenger: Although Song of the Rivers can be seen as an attempt to go beyond the standard ­congress film, it remained a product of centralist thinking, forcing a pluralistic global reality into a simplistic framework that reduced workers to extras in a single global movement. A telling metaphor in the film is a field of waving grain, visually echoed in the following shot of a mass of workers. (Schoots 1995 [2000]: 244)

Jordan (1999: 94) echoes this critique with the term “oversimplification of the world” but seemingly contradicts it in proposing aptly that “Ivens’s achievements are to present the view of a coherent world.” Yes, the virtue and the liability of ambitiously offering a Marxist analysis of “a pluralistic global reality” (Ivens and Destanque 1982: 242) – all six rivers, not just one – is by definition coherence or simplification, depending on what side you’re on. I prefer Pozner’s formulation of simplicity, and to me the beautiful metaphor of waving grain is about unity and coherence, artistic insight into common stakes across cultural and geographical boundaries, rather than centralist and simplistic reductiveness. In the postwar world a desperately urgent need to understand the planet as an integrated system was felt by all, and

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organizations like UNESCO and projects like Edward Steichen’s USAID‐sponsored international photo exhibition, The Family of Man (1955), all registered this need. Ivens should not be faulted anachronistically for his ambitious plan to do likewise, nor for seeking principles of coherence beyond the ideologically charged banality of “humanity,” “family,” or “man.” It is surely Ivens’s great contribution to link workers in France to workers in Vietnam in a single cinematic enunciation, in fact literally showing them embracing, while maintaining a strong sense of cultural and social particularity even on the gestural and behavioral level alone. Toward the end of his career when Ivens (Waugh and Ivens 1978) would frankly remember his frustration during the Cold War years with the trap of his congress commissions, he ruefully acknowledged the crucial role of resistance, of negation, in his work, and ventured “I’m a guerilla. I’m at my best when I’m in opposition.” But in fact his filmography would reveal that Ivens’s talents as an oppositional guerilla filmmaker saw their ­stiffest test not in the capitalist west but east of the Curtain, and in the unlikely site of this gargantuan congress film, in this particular contribution of vision and ­coordination, not even behind the camera but in the facilitation of other guerilla filmmakers around the world. It is all too easy to dismiss dogmatic Cold War ideological discourse rather than considering empathetically its artistic vehicle in its historical context, on its own terms, within its own generical conventions. Lied is a work of artistic advocacy negotiating a classical Marxist worldview, accepted as a given, and creatively grappling with the agenda of applying it to a radically transformed world, to engage with a politics of the future. It intervenes, not only within static and hegemonic top‐down Stalinist and Russian production, but also within the ferment that characterized cinematic cultures within the Eastern Bloc, whether within the Lodz film school in Poland, at DEFA, or in the Leipzig documentary festival constituencies beginning in 1955 – and international cinematic cultures as well. Ivens’s “evo[cation of] the dream of a socialist utopia” (Musser 2002: 111) is articulated not so much in the stodgy “pink” Volga scenes, but in the images and sounds of the global South, fully caught up in an entire generation’s anti‐colonial struggle still ongoing 60 years later. The iconography of what would emerge as “third world” politics at Bandung two years later, images of struggle from Africa, South Asia, and Latin America, fleshes out Ivens’s grass‐roots anticolonial concept, prophetic and dynamic artistic and political vision. Surely in an era when even the national communist parties of the imperial powers were having trouble sorting out the contradictions of racism and colonialism (Smith 2008), for Ivens and Pozner to apply a lucid class analysis to colonialism and to bring to life onscreen the bodies, voices, and comings together of workers from Cameroon, Algeria, Egypt, India, Italy, and the rest is surely a cinematic achievement that is incontrovertibly unique. Musser (2002) correctly emphasizes the film’s intertext of Family of Man and of Ivens’s own previous work here recycled, which he rightly declares makes the film intensely personal. But it is important to keep in view other postwar Cold War documentaries and hybrids, both those that rank with Lied as progressive documents of struggle against imperialism and racism, such as its companion



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pro‐subaltern masterpieces Strange Victory (Leo Hurwitz, 1948, 71′), The Quiet One (Sidney Meyers, 1948, 65), and Salt of the Earth (Herbert Biberman, 1954, 94′) as well as the union documentaries of Carl Marzani (Musser 2009) – to mention only American films of the same decade – but also parallel works that don’t measure up to their high standard. Take a film by Paul Rotha for example, a UNESCO‐­ sponsored feature documentary with a similarly aspiring title but evoking prayer rather than song, World Without End (1953, UK, 60′), with ambitions similar to Lied’s and almost exactly contemporaneous to it. By this time Grierson’s disciple had become head of another state documentary unit, the BBC documentary film department, and he emphasizes the “universality” and “humanity” of his Mexican and Thai ­subjects alike, the gospel of cute children who are nevertheless “crawling with lice” with a traditionally miserabilist message of “love your neighbour.” This vivid but unwitting demonstration of the political insufficiency of top‐down structures of “development” and “aid” offers no artistic dynamic of agency much less empowerment, no struggle or contradiction. One final point might be a vindication of Ivens’s original “seventh river” concept. I have explored in “Joris Ivens and the Legacy of Committed Documentary” (Waugh 1999 [2011]) the trope of the demonstration, both onscreen and off, as a convergence of artistic politics and the real‐world politics of street theater. But I was not able at that time for reasons of availability to include Lied in my transhistorical ­corpus, surely the über‐demonstration film to end all demonstration films with its triumphantly climactic montage of workers’ demonstrations on every continent. Lied’s spectacular peroration exemplifies my 1999 analysis: [Although] the demonstration is first and foremost about local space and its indexical recording [… it is] not only a cinematic trope but a political resource of great transformative power […] not only documents of collective actions of public defiance, but also performative engagements with those collective actions, active interventions by filmmakers and consequently by spectators into the political worlds of the films. […] A demonstration has […] to do, by definition, with public space, with territory, since the demonstration occupies the streets where the state stages its authority. The demonstration shows its force and commits ritual speech acts that perform territorial possession and liberation. […] The filmic act both performs and represents the demonstration. […] The film process infinitely extends the discursive space of the original demonstration: the original speech act not only proliferates through this magnification but is also changed qualitatively. […] The demonstration stops being a shorthand record of dissent, and becomes […] a subject‐centred cinematic performance of political action. […] “Staging” [a demonstration] acquires the innuendo of street theatre, of political performance, and by extension, since theatre is transformed into the real, of performativity in the public political sphere. (Waugh 1999 [2011]: 275–276)

In contrast with my 1999 transhistorical sample of representations of single‐event demonstration, Ivens extends this transformation with Lied’s montage structure, qualitatively again, cumulatively and dialectically, to perform a transhistorical

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and global demonstration as the peroration of this film, a global act of defiance, the seventh river of his original concept. Perhaps Ivens was referring to this when he looked back on the film as “romantic become dialectic” (Ivens and Destanque 1982: 242). On other counts can Lied’s engagement with other future politics be faulted? The film’s proto‐feminist credentials are admittedly somewhat less impressive than those for the American Salt of the Earth, which scooped Lied both by six months and by its cross‐pollination of antiracist and antipatriarchal discourses. A woman worker does not surface in Lied’s opening hymn to labor until the six‐minute mark, yet there is no need to dwell on this surprising gap when we have the stirring examples of First Years, Mein Kind, and Windrose to compensate, thanks no doubt to the women collaborators on all these works either as scriptwriters, producers, or directors. Let us touch then on another urgent issue: perhaps an even more conspicuous ideological shortfall around Ivens’s long‐standing celebratory engagement with the Soviet program of development, applying the Marxian gospel of the mastery of nature in terms of the industrialization of natural resources, hydroelectric dams, blast furnaces, etc. While such critique can admittedly be anachronistic, the contradictions are in fact visually and thematically embedded in the film in a way that they were not a generation earlier in the Five‐Year Plan Komsomol, and seep out from its clear thematics of harmony with nature and of the control/ownership of development of the natural world (more than one critic felt the prologue was stronger than the rest of the film). Wall Street or public/collective ownership? the film asks, but shows little corresponding sustainable vision of the latter. The iconography of the mushroom cloud emerging from the Amazon shatters the coherence of the film’s discourses of development. Left documentary would not desist from equating smokestacks and dams with utopia – either in the west or in the “third world” – for at least another generation, but thanks to Ivens this equation was clearly showing its wear and tear in 1954. In retrospect, another ideological dynamic, this time a silence, is striking. This film, developed during the months of mourning for Stalin, premiered a mere 16 months after his death in the vassal state that would soon lead the resistance to Khrushchev’s legendary de‐Stalinization campaign begun in February 1956. Yet the late leader is noticeable for the absence of all verbal or visual reference to him in either English or longer German version (except for mention of Stalingrad, a World War II turning point of great strategic and symbolic value that can of course refer obliquely to its namesake, but not necessarily). Lenin is mentioned in the lyrics of the verse about the Volga (“Lenin showed the way”), but otherwise the only other identifiable political leader depicted is Mao Zedong, shown greeting a female peasant, in a likely archival shot. If one can discern political shifts in minuscule nuances, can it be that Lied offers a first cinematic taste of Thaw? That Ivens and Pozner, quietly and in their byzantine and oblique way are scooping Khrushchev? On an even more global scale, can one discern also the postwar “crisis” in the left brought to the surface by the Cold War that I evoked in the introduction to this essay? Can the climactic synthetic surge forward of the ending be seen as a disavowal or refusal of that very crisis, and its triumphalism its very symptom?



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Conclusion Ivens would soon move westward, southward, and eastward to the next productive episode in his career, in Western Europe and in the emerging global south, but was first involved with three final DEFA films, undertaken at “arm’s length” and intermittently, more or less simultaneously, throughout 1955 and 1956, his last two years behind the Curtain. These include two fine and underrecognized works both commissioned by the East Berlin‐based, Soviet‐front International Democratic Women’s Federation (IDFF), both narrated by typically well‐honed Pozner commentary and introduced/narrated by the veteran Brechtian actress, the charismatic Helene Weigel: • Mein Kind (My Child, co‐dir. Vladimir Pozner and Alfons Machalz, 1956); and • Die Windrose (The Windrose, coordinator Alberto Cavalcanti, individual episodes directed by Alex Viany [Brazil], Sergei Gerasimov [USSR], Yannick Bellon [France], Gillo Pontecorvo [Italy], and Wu Kuo‐Yin [China], 1957). Both projects assigned Ivens the official credit of “artistic supervisor,” but were reportedly “inspired” and “produced” respectively by Ivens, and thirdly: • one unprecedentedly ambitious fiction feature Die Abenteuer des Till Eulenspiegel (Les Aventures de Till L’Espiègle/Bold Adventure, 1956, 90, directed by and starring the French film star and fellow‐traveler heartthrob Gérard Philipe, co‐produced by DEFA and the French Productions Ariane, Ivens’s contribution described variously as artistic supervisor or production coordinator “for DEFA”). Of the three last Cold War films, Ivens’s creative energies were invested most directly, extensively, and concretely in this film, ironically the least successful (to describe this disaster tactfully). Till’s unfortunate career no doubt cemented Ivens’s growing resolve to leave behind both DEFA and his days as a film bureaucrat and “coordinator.” At the end of 1956 Ivens traveled to Beijing for a symbolic reboot for his artistic and political career alike, symptomatically missing the premiere of Windrose and the Berlin premiere of Till Eulenspiegel. The Moscow‐Beijing rift was already in the cards, hence the symbolic valence of Ivens’s return to China, and although Ivens continued to be lionized in the DDR until the Prague crisis 12 years later, he would never again work in Eastern Europe. The invitation and the travel plans had no doubt been arranged well before the Budapest eruption of 1956, but Schoots (1995 [2000]: 249) is right that the symbolism tells of an irreparable and growing tear in the Curtain. A conclusion to Ivens’s productive and busy, frustrating and interrupted Cold War chapter, the full decade between his departure from Australia and his landing in Beijing, can at best be provisional, pending the much‐needed recirculation of his two feature documentaries and two medium‐length films as well as several minor and “supervised” works within cinematic and political cultural networks. The work

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from behind the Curtain must be incorporated into the ongoing conversation about the legacy of this artist from which they have been excluded – even and perhaps most egregiously at the time Ivens produced it. This conversation must not only include this crucial segment in the full assessment of the artist’s heritage and address not only the heritage of socialist realism but also the ineradicable status of party line advocacy, journeywork, mentorship, and the commission in documentary/film history, which as researchers from Nichols (1980, 1999, 2001) to Hagener (2007) have long since demonstrated, can no longer be understood and taught as a canon of texts but must be seen as a history of practices, institutions, and receptions. Throughout his career, Ivens embraced the commission as part of his political and aesthetic gospel of labor, of everyday productivity; late in his career he disputed the facileness of his Cuban friend Santiago Alvarez’s distinction between “free films” and “command films” (Waugh and Ivens 1978). The conversation must also, most importantly, situate this period – a prolific and varied one after all, however pockmarked, interrupted, and frustrating it was – in relation to the history of the Left, old and new. In all of these projects the place of socialist realism is fundamental, understood in its broad historical presence not only as a narrow and dogmatic template imposed from above, the “cynically conformist utopianism” (Stollery 2006) that has been too easily and contemptuously dismissed or ignored for 80 years, but also as a set of narrative and affective practices encoded dynamically and transculturally  –  often ethically, passionately, idealistically, and imaginatively: I have understood better that the greatest reward for a filmmaker is not in the applause of an enthusiastic audience who simply recognizes the beauty of a film, but in the certitude that he has exalted confidence in humanity, the love of life, and has given to the spectator the desire to struggle to make triumph his aspirations towards a better reality. […] For the artist must not only believe in beauty, but must, first and above all, have a perspective, see man in his environment, in his becoming, think the future and help him to release it. (Ivens, quoted in Lacazette 1951: 29)

The procession of nonfictional and semifictional characters who populate Ivens’s work of this period, the representation of their objective everyday labor and their subjective aspirations, in many cases their language and voices and in others simply their faces – from Jadwiga to Simone Signoret, from Pak Den‐ai to Paul Robeson, must be encountered on their own terms as distillations of this idealism, as semifictional constructions, fantasmatic projections, and historical agents. This hybrid aesthetic of “personalization” at its least inspired may well be caught up in what Robin (1986 [1992]) depicts as socialist realism’s often tense monologism. But it functioned also as a constraint similar to any other generic, cultural, economic, or institutional discipline, and in this case is inextricable from the undeniable but unrecognized artistic and political fervor, inventiveness, impact, and contradictory achievement of this current, which I hope I have demonstrated through my textual analysis. I am speaking especially of the reinvigoration in the Cold War context of the left’s



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political aesthetics, less that of class – though the classic discourses and iconographies of union organization remains first and foremost, and ever urgent in the context of the CIA assault on unions around the world  –  than of the emerging and prophetic agenda of gender and anticolonial/antiracist struggle. Even if some of the Cold War work was repetitive and lacked development (as Ivens himself allowed 30 years later [Ivens and Destanque 1982], and he was only partially right); even if the films were not allowed to fulfill their organic process of interacting with audiences; even if their visions come close at times to CIA caricature; even if Ivens’s commitment to socialist realism and its hybrid documentary forms that enable “personalized” historical agents rooted firmly in their collective spaces to change the world onscreen seemed compromised by his “naïvely” trusting relationship to the Soviet occupiers – despite his sustained collaboration with local subjects, artists, and students throughout the period; even if his nuanced and negotiated relationship with what we might call cinematic subcultures and civil society in  Czechoslovakia, Poland, and above all in the DDR were too often stymied by ­refractory, paranoid, and inevitably xenophobic apparatchiks who budgeted their contributions with one hand and hampered their distribution with the other; even if the collective nature of Ivens’s work with a transnational and transgenerational network of committed artists can be problematized, if only in terms of linguistic and other barriers to Ivens’s ideal of contextual, grass‐roots, “guerrilla” documentary; even if the Cold War Ivens has too often been consigned to oblivion … Even in the light of this litany of “even ifs,” these nine cinematic texts with their rhythm of defiance and eventual victory, their encyclopedia of global critique, and their canvases of everyday sweat and heroism, stand themselves as a testimony and legacy, all the more vibrant for their shortfalls and contradictions. Queer theory’s achievement of productively overturning the legacy and effect of shame might serve us as a template for considering productively the legacy of Cold War Ivens and the Old Left in general: what Sedgwick (2003: 65) calls the “powerfully productive and powerfully social metaphoric possibilities” of shame. The shame that occupies the middle ground between and informs my New Left generation’s combination of amnesia and denial on the one side, and of oedipal repudiation on the other, must be used creatively. The Cold War and the Stalin era required two to tango: the United Fruit Company, Senator McCarthy, the Marshall Plan and Eisenhower’s famous “military‐industrial complex” lined up against the Cominform and a disempowered Old Left who, like Ivens, publicly tolerated Budapest as “a historical necessity.” The 2002 American tour of the triumphant, first posthumous Ivens retrospective “Cinema without Borders” was organized by a New York outfit called “Red Diaper Productions.” Spearheaded by Wanda Bershen, who is like so many baby boomer New Yorkers the offspring of CPUSA members or sympathizers of the Cold War  era – who affectionately think of themselves swaddled in diapers the color of the communist flag – the retrospective was one of the few Ivens ventures to showcase Lied just as the Foundation and the estate were seeming to orchestrate, either actively or by default, the erasure of the Cold War era from memory and cinematic history (however “Cinema without Borders” significantly did not include any Yukong item

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among its 16 selections). The shame of communist infamy and the shame of infant excretion had been confronted in one blow. We are all red diaper babies and Uncle Joe is part of our legacy. Lied is not only part of our Old Left ancestry but also part of our human selves in the savagery and paranoia, blind obedience and conformity, amnesia and denial – and of course personality cultism – that Stalin cultivated and stood for and that Ivens’s epic compilation film obliquely conjures up. We have not fully processed this shame. After Yukong and the death of Mao, Ivens would begin to do his part in his own process of claiming the decade in Eastern Europe. Slightly defensive but proudly unashamed, he acknowledged that the structure of the party in Eastern Europe was “topheavy” and that the revolution didn’t come from underneath but was imposed from above. “If I’d had a chance to leave in 1954 I would have,” he said (Waugh and Ivens 1978). The contradictions of the Cold War era must be kept at the forefront of our historical research, and in our shame we must distinguish between the historical public persona and his private and artistic negotiations with his political conscience. Not signing petitions like Philipe (and Simone Signoret’s pupils in Windrose) – or rather only those in support of the Hollywood Ten – Ivens voted both with his feet and with his camera. The twenty‐first‐century global left has yet to conduct its truth and reconciliation commission about its legacy of Stalin, but Ivens’s Cold War camera and its output onscreen is a good “Exhibit A” for starting this process.

Notes 1 DVDs of the DEFA films are now available from the German concern “Alive ‐ Vertrieb und Marketing,” but unfortunately with no English subtitles: Joris Ivens  –  DEFA‐ Dokumentarfilme, Die Windrose ‐ Freundschaft siegt ‐ Friedensfahrt 1952 (2018); Lied der Ströme and Mein Kind (2015). 2 Some of the foregoing factual material is indebted to research conducted by Schoots, though interpretations and contextualization are my own. 3 Zhdanov died in 1948, but his influence cannot be said to have receded until well after the death of Stalin five years later. 4 Ivens evoked socialist realism explicitly only four times in the texts that have been preserved from this period, twice explicitly and twice by implication. Was he scarred by bureaucracy in USSR and Eastern Europe, and provided only the minimum talk of the talk? 5 According to Jordan (1999), DEFA had been founded in 1946 by “reform communists” but the ruling East German communist party took it over the following year. 6 Various gargantuan and often contradictory numbers float through the secondary literature around Lied, which become confusing and occasionally seem apocryphal, though not necessarily false: 800 delegates attended the congress, representing 79 countries (commentary) and 188 million workers (Wikipedia), though it is said elsewhere that WFTU had 60  million members in 1945 (http://www.wftucentral.org/?page_id=79&language=en accessed 8 March 2014); 32 cinematographers were involved (Ivens and Destanque 1982: 241), Schoots (1995 [2000]: 244) says in 18 countries while Ivens says 32 countries (Ivens and Destanque 1982: 241) and the Ivens Foundation website says ‘eighteen’ in one window and “36” in another; 120 000 m of film were allocated (cf.  100,000 m color stock for



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Freundschaft), while post‐production processed 75 hours or 12,000 m of rushes (Grelier 1965: 97), and the first version was 4575 m (166 minutes). Grelier (1965: 56) says the film was seen by 250 million spectators in 28 different ­languages, a figure corroborated by the website (Ivens said 18 languages [Ivens and Destanque 1982: 243]), while another claim puts the audience at 500 million (Ivens and Pozner 1957); such audience figures include the of course unverifiable Chinese figure of 40 million (Schoots 1995 [2000]: 245). I usually presume the conservative version of each statistic and am still awestruck. Between World War II and its 1960 independence, Cameroon was a hotbed of communist‐led organization and insurgency under the Union des populations camerounaises (Union of the Peoples of Cameroon). The Nigerian shots emphasize child labor and hungry kids lining up for food, under the commentary revelation that 95% of the colony’s children do not go to school, and are difficult to identify definitively as archival or new in‐the‐field imagery. I cannot identify such shots if they are included: the only explicit shot referencing the country is a mise‐en‐scène, probably made at the Congress, of a black man and a white man in suits, conversing around a desk, identified in the commentary as a Brazilian and a Cuban unionist, seen once the Cuban (Lazaro Peña) had been released from jail. Another Cuban shot late in the film shows not prison material but street action in what is probably Havana. One shot from Iran is identified by the voice‐over in the German version but not the English version, an extreme long shot, not very sharp, of workers leaving what could be an oil refinery plant, as part of the global concatenation of workers’ strike actions; in the English version this unfolds under the commentary’s list of translations of the word “unity” in various languages, including “Persian.” All eyes were on postcolonial struggles in Korea and Vietnam as the film was being made, but also on Egypt, with the “1952 Revolution” taking place in July of that year, the declaration of the Republic in June 1953, and Nasser’s confirmation in power just around the time of the premiere; the film clairvoyantly anticipates the continuation of the country as a flashpoint and its eruption in the Suez crisis two years later. Leyda was of course not only Ivens’s ghostwriter on the original version of The Camera and I, not only his collaborator in the New York communist documentary scene during the Popular Front, but also the editor/translator of Eisenstein’s Film Sense and Film Form, the two books that were basically the bible for English‐language progressive film editors for a whole generation after their publication in 1942 and 1949 respectively. His pioneering study of compilation documentary Film Begets Film (1964) is sadly neglected. One or two shots depicting the Ku Klux Klan, derive from fiction rather than document, calling into question editorial intelligence in this sequence, if not ethics.

References Bakker, K. (1999). A Way of Seeing: Joris Ivens’s Documentary Century. In: Joris Ivens and the Documentary Context (ed. K. Bakker), 25–45. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Duncan, C. (1950). The First Years. Sight and Sound 19 (1): 37–40. Grelier, R. (1965). Joris Ivens. Paris: Les éditeurs Français Réunis. Hagener, M. (2007). Moving Forward, Looking Back: The European Avant‐Garde and the Invention of Film Culture, 1919–1939. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Image et son. (1964). Chant des fleuves (review), 173, 9.

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Ivens, J. (1955 [1965]). Interview with Vladimir Pozner. In Grelier, R. Joris Ivens. Paris: Les éditeurs Français Réunis. Ivens, J. (1969). The Camera and I (ed. J. Leyda). Berlin and New York: International Publishers. Ivens, J. and Destanque, R. (1982). Joris Ivens ou la mémoire d’un regard. Paris: Éditions BFB. Ivens, J. and Pozner, V. (1957). Lied der Ströme. East Berlin: Verlag Tribüne. Jordan, G. (1999). Between Two Letters. In: Joris Ivens and the Documentary Context (ed. K. Bakker), 87–106. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Lacazette, R. (1951). Joris Ivens, une interview du grand cinéaste hollandaise: le cinéma au service de la classe ouvrière et de la paix. Le Mouvement Syndical Mondial 7: 25–31. Legotien, H. (1955). Le chant des fleuves de Joris Ivens. Esprit 23 (7): 1186–1189. Leyda, J. (1964). Films Beget Films: A Study of the Compilation Film. New York: Hill and Wang. Musser, C. (2002). Utopian Visions in Cold War Documentary: Joris Ivens, Paul Robeson and Song of the Rivers (1954). Cinémas: Journal of Film Studies 12 (3): 109–153. Nichols, B. (1980). Newsreel: Documentary Filmmaking on the American Left. New York: Arno Press. Nichols, B. (1999). The Documentary and the Turn from Modernism. In: Joris Ivens and the Documentary Context (ed. K. Bakker), 142–159. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Nichols, B. (2001). Documentary Film and the Modernist Avant‐garde. Critical Inquiry 27 (4): 580–610. Robeson, P. (1958). Comment j’ai enregistré Le Chant des fleuves. Lettres françaises, 716. Robin, R. (1986 [1992]). Socialist Realism: An Impossible Aesthetic. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Schoots, H. (1995 [2000]). Gevaarlijk leven. Een biografie van Joris Ivens. Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Jan Mets. Sedgwick, E.K. (2003). Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Smith, E. (2008). “Class before Race”: British Communism and the Place of Empire in Postwar Race Relations. Science & Society 72 (4): 455–481. Stollery, M. (2006). The Man with the Movie Camera. In: Encyclopaedia of the Documentary Film (ed. I. Aitken), 849–850. London: Routledge. Taylor, R. (1979). Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. London: Croom Helm. de Volkskrant. (1954). Das Lied der Ströme (review). 16 October. Waugh, T. (2009). The Four Hundred Million (1938) and the Solidarity Film: “Halfway Between Hollywood and Newsreel.”. Studies in Documentary Film 3 (1): 7–17. Waugh, T. (1984 [2011]). How to Queer Sexualities, Nations, and Cinemas, or the Romance (and Paradoxes) of Transgression in Canada. In: The Romance of Transgression in Canada: Queering Sexualities, Nations, Cinemas, 3–28. McGill‐Queen’s University Press: Montréal and Kingston. Waugh, T. (1999). Joris Ivens and the Legacy of Committed Documentary. In: Joris Ivens and the Documentary Context (ed. K. Bakker), 171–182. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Waugh, T. (1999 [2011]). Joris Ivens and the Legacy of Committed Documentary. In: The Right to Play Oneself: Looking Back on Documentary Film, 267–282. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Waugh, T. and Ivens, J. (1978). Interview with Joris Ivens. Waugh, T. and Jordan, G. (2015). Personal Communication.

Part IV

Media Archaeologies

Introduction

Media Archaeologies Malte Hagener

Philipps University Marburg

Academic fashions, like all fashions, trade on novelty. The promise of the new always has to be big and absolute, it comes with big flashing letters and has to proclaim a so‐and‐so turn, a this‐and‐that age, a something‐o‐cene. To claim, then, that “media archaeology” is not so much a paradigm change or a revolutionary upheaval, but rather a slight, albeit significant, shift of focus or a tendency, might be counterintuitive. Yet, this is exactly what this section is proposing. What I want to outline in this introduction is – in a gesture of modesty – how media archaeology might help us to reformulate and underline some of the approaches already present in current documentary research and to highlight some important larger shifts (well underway by now) which can be subsumed under such an umbrella term. In a way, I would argue that much of what is called media archaeology these days has already been practiced in (documentary) film history in one way or another. But there is another argument against the proclamation of newness and innovation: Media archaeology itself continually reminds us that promises of novelty should always be encountered with skepticism. It is thus paradoxical to pretend that innovation exists in emphatic terms for academic paradigms, but not for those media under consideration themselves. Archaeology itself, thus, should be approached archaeologically – the method has to reflexively address its own premises. To start with such a disclaimer is meant to put some perspective on the term which has garnered significant attention and momentum in recent years. There are broadly speaking two schools of media archaeology one could distinguish heuristically.1 At its most extreme, media archaeology contains two opposing impulses in relation to the historiographic project that it proposes. Some media archaeological studies, this would be situated on one end of a continuum, try to find precursors for contemporary techniques and media in forgotten and obscure practices and devices A Companion to Documentary Film History, First Edition. Edited by Joshua Malitsky. © 2021 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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of the past. Alternatively, other case studies radically place objects within their own use and logic. These different schools – both find common ground in their marked interest in material traces and the actual working of machines – have come to be known as the media materialists and the contextualists (Parikka 2011: 54). Both are, if thought until the end, futile endeavors, as we can never completely give up our own situatedness and perspective. But at the same time historical material contains resistance and always provides at least some clues as to how it should be read. In this way, media archaeology is a revisionist project and not coincidentally it has often been linked to the New Film History and its advances (Elsaesser 2014). As the two tendencies meet dialectically, one could say that media archaeology is ultimately interested in the relationship between the old and the new, no matter if it seeks the new in the old or the old in the new (Elsaesser 2016). As Jussi Parikka has argued: “Media archaeology is introduced as a way to investigate the new media cultures through insights from past new media, often with an emphasis on the forgotten, the quirky, the non‐obvious apparatuses, practices and inventions” ­ (Parikka 2012: 2). Obviously, all historiographic endeavors are guided by an interest that has its origin in the present, but the radical gesture of media archaeology tries to get away from certain kind of teleological narrations that posit certain media as given and then proceed to reconstruct how they became what they always already knew they would become. Traditional histories of single media often proceed as if the later contours of media practices were already known at a moment of invention, as if the Lumières already knew what was to become “cinema” and “film.” Media archaeology thus radically doubts the epistemological stability of such objects as cinema, radio or new media. Whereas the term media archaeology is complex and multifaceted and there is much disagreement on the finer details and ramifications, a broad agreement exists to question existing media boundaries and to show an interest in the marginal practices and technologies that are often overlooked. Media archaeology wants to break down barriers between established media and destabilize established hierarchies and value judgments. Documentary is a specific mode that proposes a particular relationship to the real through structures of referentiality that have transformed and changed over time. The dominant documentary approach claims to take elements from reality (whatever that might be) and transform them into a discursive and aesthetic object or event (Balsom and Peleg 2016). There is a quasi‐ontological argument to be extracted from this definition which supports a specific archaeological approach to the documentary. If the document is a fragment that is taken out of its original context and inserted into another, it always already stands one step away from reality because of its removal from the original place. Therefore, we have to pay attention to the materialities and medialities that constitute the fraught and complicated relationship between the fragment in its original place (the document) and its insertion into a new context (the documentary). Archaeology proposes to look for breaks and ruptures as well as to reconstruct originary configurations. Therefore, it is somewhat surprising that the study of documentary film – with perhaps the exception of those works focused on found footage‐based film – has so far not paid a lot of attention to



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media archaeology as an approach. It is this tension between the document as a seemingly neutral and uncommitted entity and the documentary as an argumentative structure and aesthetic object that the articles foreground. This tendency to work against established boundaries is already inherent in the very name given to the film form under consideration in this book. Documentary as a term has been often questioned and problematized, with scholars challenging the precision of its definition and the inconsistency of the materials included within its purview. The authors in this section address the issue directly, in turn challenging the supposed stability of the genre or field. They are particularly interested in addressing the porousness of the boundary between nonfiction film and documentary (Hertogs and Klerk 1997; Curtis 2015), a space that is enriched with scholarship attentive to the entire process of film production, circulation, and reception. What would a media archaeology mean if applied to the nonfiction film? This is the question that this section is asking – and the four articles are not so much theoretical interventions, but rather case studies that foreground specific aspects. They are not theoretical treatises, but rather rich empirical studies that show media archaeology “in situ” and “in action.” Despite this orientation toward the specific material, the four long essays, if taken together, provide a fitting overview of specific aspects and perspectives related to media archaeology, if seen less as a school, but rather as a way of approaching material. Such a media archaeology geared toward the documentary places the films within a wider network of other media (television and radio foremost among them, but print and newspapers, painting, and scientific illustration also figure prominently), it tries to incorporate the broader field of the nonfiction film (sponsored films and advertising, educational and industrial film, propaganda and scientific uses, etc.) and it covers a large geographical area which still shows many gaps (Africa and Latin America) in historical research. The recent turn to “useful cinema” (Acland and Wasson 2011), motion pictures screened in museums, classroom, libraries, factories, etc. for both public and private ends, is aptly illustrated in the first contribution by Oliver Gaycken on films dealing with the subfield of embryology. As he rightfully notes in the beginning of his essay, the “documentary tradition has engaged science filmmaking only peripherally,” even though such specializations relied heavily on visualization through film and other media. Yet again, film history has often overlooked or bypassed operative usage of the cinema within scientific contexts because there is neither an aesthetically interesting application to be found nor is film used consistently. Gaycken argues that the piecemeal operation and the reliance on different formats (mixing animation and live‐action footage, infographics, and text with enacted scenes) contributes to a configuration in which the production of knowledge is bound up with a variety of different medias, formats and configurations. Weihong Bao proposes “an interpretive model of media analysis beyond a causal account,” when she tackles the role of media during the Japanese‐Chinese war in the 1930s and 1940s, especially how television was conceptualized before it became what we now assume it to be (or rather: what we thought it was until the recent reconfiguration of the televisual under the conditions of digital networks).

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Underlying her case study is the question of how to reconcile hermeneutic approaches and anti‐hermeneutic approaches, or, put differently: how to think about the ­distinction between content and infrastructure. In its recent shift toward becoming a part of media studies, film studies risks losing its specialized knowledge of the cinema as an institution, economic factor and art form. Bao uses her material “to explore the thorny issue of propaganda, not simply as an integral yet understudied part of documentary film history but also as a challenge to the methodological impasse of media archaeology.” Bao’s contribution thus not only demonstrates how media archaeology can be productively applied to documentary film history, but it also proposes a reorientation of media archaeology as a field. Yvonne Zimmermann concentrates on the “film essay,” as conceptualized by Hans Richter in his seminal text first published in 1940. Whereas Richter’s use of the term has been co‐opted for a history of the “essay film” (Rascaroli 2009; Corrigan 2011; Alter and Corrigan 2017), Zimmermann argues in a revisionist vein that this is a misunderstanding because Richter aimed at something different, namely “the invisible world of imagination, thoughts, and ideas.” Her investigation relates the principle of media archaeology to discursive facts, thus shifting the focus from material concerns which often take precedent in media archaeology, back to Michel Foucault’s original conceptualization of an archaeology of knowledge (Foucault 1972), which was meant to expound what could be said at a given point in time. Zimmermann offers close and contextualized readings of Richter’s ideas because texts and arguments can be understood as technologies of thinking. The almost exclusive concentration of much of actual media archaeology on material technology as the ontology of media is implicitly expanded to include discourse as well. Steven Jacobs gives an overview of nonfiction films dealing with art, concentrating on the European context from the 1920s until the present. Jacobs puts special emphasis on the necessarily intermedial nature of such works since a film transposes a work of art from its original format (painting, sculpture, architecture, video, etc.) onto film. The examples of art documentaries he deals with consciously work this problem into their aesthetic structure and thus deal with the confrontation of different media, uses, and formats. Therefore, these films can be seen as “media‐archaeological constructions [. . .] that [. . .] invoke older forms of mediating art such as the color slide lecture, the illustrated art book, the museum, and the art exhibition as well as its panoply of devices including pedestals, frames, scenographies, lights, and guided tours.” At the same time, Jacobs is interested in the pragmatic dimension of how a work of art can be put on film. In this respect, he is searching for frictions and breaks within the documentary logic, calling attention to the question whether a film presents the complete (and finished) work, a detail or the process of creation. The nonfiction film, therefore, emerges in this perspective as a case in point for researching the intersection of diagrammatic visuality and animation with more traditional film forms. Taken together, these essays demonstrate the productivity of a media archaeological approach to the documentary and nonfiction film. Rather than claiming the stability and durability of the form, they look not only for the breaks and fissures, but



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rather for the contact zones and adhesive joints at which new formations emerge and new concepts are born. These essays help to see the documentary as a historically and culturally contingent form which reflectively questions its own premises. In this sense, the section highlights how a history of documentary has to approach the form as situated, multiperspectival and self‐reflexive.

Note 1 Wanda Strauven (2013) has characterized four approaches to media historiography: the old in the new, the new in the old, recurring topoi, and ruptures and discontinuities. While I find her conceptualization reasonable and useful, it is too fine‐grained for my purposes here.

References Acland, C. and Wasson, H. (eds.) (2011). Useful Cinema. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Alter, N.M. and Corrigan, T. (eds.) (2017). Essays on the Essay Film. New York: Columbia University Press. Balsom, E. and Peleg, H. (eds.) (2016). Documentary Across Disciplines. Berlin: Haus der Kulturen der Welt/Cambridge, MA and London: Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Corrigan, T. (2011). The Essay Film. From Montaigne, After Marker. New  York: Oxford University Press. Curtis, S. (2015). The Shape of Spectatorship. Art, Science, and Early Cinema in Germany. New York: Columbia University Press. Elsaesser, T. (2014). The New Film History as Media Archaeology. Cinémas. Revue d’etudes cinématographiques, vol. 14 (2‐3), 75–117. Elsaesser, T. (2016). Film History as Media Archaeology. Tracking Digital Cinema. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Foucault, M. (1972). The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Pantheon (French original: 1967). Hertogs, D. and de Klerk, N. (eds.) (1997). Uncharted Territory. Essays on Early Nonfiction Film. Amsterdam: Nederlands Film Museum. Parikka, J. (2011). Operative Media Archaeology: Wolfgang Ernst’s Materialist Media Diagrammatics. Theory, Culture and Society, vol 28(5), 52–75. Parikka, J. (2012). What Is Media Archaeology? Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity. Rascaroli, L. (2009). The Personal Camera. Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film. London and New York: Wallflower Press. Strauven, W. (2013). Media Archaeology: Where Film History, Media Art, and New Media (Can) Meet. In Noordegraaf, J., Saba, C.G., Le Maître, B., and Hediger, V. (eds.) Preserving and Exhibiting Media Art. Challenges and Perspectives, pp. 59–79. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

13

A Concise History and Theory of Documentaries on the Visual Arts Steven Jacobs

Ghent University

Introduction If a “documentary” is understood as a nonfictional film that documents some aspect of reality and attempts to present “life as it is” or show “life caught unaware,” art documentaries are a contradiction in terms as they focus primarily on the artificial. Whereas a documentary mode usually cherishes the small coincidences of the every­ day and the fleeting appearances of the world, art documentaries rather focus on the stable, contrived, and ready‐made “realms” of artworks. In so doing, art documenta­ ries are intermedial constructions as they inevitably juxtapose themselves to the artistic media (painting, sculpture, etc.) of the artworks being filmed. Many of the more successful or interesting art documentaries play emphatically on this tension between the dynamic and temporal medium of film and the static and spatial media of painting and sculpture. In this play of intermedial relations and confrontations, many art documentaries are also media‐archaeological constructions in the sense that, as this chapter aims to demonstrate, they invoke older forms of mediating art such as the color slide lecture, the illustrated art book, the museum, and the art exhi­ bition as well as its panoply of devices including pedestals, frames, scenographies, lights, and guided tours. Moreover, developing new forms of audiovisual analysis that are different from verbal forms of scholarship, art documentaries often combine the traditional notion of artistic contemplation with the optical paradigms of ­industrial modernity such as a more unfocused and decentered mode of perception offered by the cinema (cf. Kracauer’s notion of “distraction”) as well as its capability to discover hitherto unknown or unconscious aspects of reality (cf. Benjamin’s notion of the “optical unconscious”). Furthermore, art documentaries are a perfect example

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of new media remediating old media in the sense that they are usually not merely documenting, recording, or representing artworks despite the fact that vague and naïve ideas on the nature of the film image also marked discussions on the art docu­ mentary. Some art documentaries, for instance, have been denounced because they transformed the artworks in one way or another  –  at the third conference of the Fédération Internationale du Film d’Art in Amsterdam in 1950, an art critic even argued for the obligation for filmmakers to show the art work entirely and in color at the beginning of the film (Bolen 1953: 7). Such considerations ignore the basic quali­ ties and possibilities of art documentaries, which not only “represent” artworks but also reproduce, duplicate, reconfigure, reimagine, or remediate them with the help of the cinematic or audiovisual devices such as close‐ups, montage, camera movements, etc. In the process, art documentaries transform or translate the original artworks from one medium to another, creating a new hybrid. Details of a painting, for instance, which are seen simultaneously by the beholder facing the original, are in a film unfolded in time by means of camera movements and editing techniques. But even when a shot attempts to record a painting entirely, the artwork as a Gestalt is lost by definition because, almost always, the proportion of the painting does not com­ pletely coincide with the aspect ratio of the film screen. The filmmaker, consequently, has to crop the image or the frame comprises a part of the world that falls outside the painting. Strikingly, in the most interesting art films, filmmakers deal in a highly conscious way with their framings and create new visual balances and tensions within them. The juxtaposition between the frames determined the scope of one of the major essays André Bazin dedicated to the relation between painting and cinema (Bazin 2007a). According to Bazin, the fixed frame of painting encloses a world that entirely exists by and for itself; it draws the attention in a centripetal way on a static composition. The frame of the film camera, by contrast, is mobile and implies a cen­ trifugal space extending beyond its edges into the smallest and most remote corners of everyday life. When we show a part of a painting on a film screen, the space of the painting loses its orientation and it is presented as something that extends beyond the frame. According to Bazin, art documentaries are therefore hybrid works. On the one hand, they cannot simply be considered as documentary registrations of another art form because the material provided by the other medium is transformed. On the  other hand, they are not autonomous films since they remain dependent on other arts. This hybridity does not only mark each individual art documentary; the entire history of the genre is inherently connected with mediations, transpositions, or translations of different artistic media. Inspired by some of the insights of media archaeology that stimulates the identification of technical and cultural remnants of previous media in more recent manifestations, this chapter will situate the phenom­ enon of the art documentary in a history of various forms of reproduction and trans­ position of artworks through other means of communication. After all, the development of the art documentary throughout the twentieth century cannot be disconnected from changes in the visual arts themselves, marked by the introduction and dissemination of new media such as photography and video. Furthermore, the



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art documentary rearticulates older mediations or transpositions of artworks such as the age‐old tradition of ekphrastic writings consisting of verbal descriptions of visual works of art. In addition, the development of the art documentary is unmistakably marked by various earlier forms of visual reproduction such as prints (woodcuts, etchings, lithography, etc.) and photography. Last but not least, art documentaries are also indebted to the ways artworks have been presented to the public in museums and framed and mediated by exhibitions or illustrated art books.

Origins and Prewar Developments Scenics and travelogues made in the late 1910s featuring the sights and monuments of historical cities are probably the earliest examples of films focusing on artworks. Having the advantage that they could be filmed in natural light, architecture and monumental sculpture are the preeminent subjects of early films on art.1 Moreover, these public sculptures could be viewed from different or even shifting viewpoints, mobilizing the static artwork. Another way to mobilize or “animate” immobile works of art was to show them as part of some sort of activity. Made at the time when museums were supplementing their lantern slide collections with motion pictures, many films on art of the 1920s and 1930s focus on decorative arts and show, for instance, how to make pottery, how to weave baskets, how to make a metal plaque, how Indians made their blankets, and so forth.2 In so doing, these films contributed to the development of the educational film tradition, in which the arts would play an important role throughout the twentieth century (Loukopoulou  2012). Similarly, the world of fine arts saw the emergence of films showing famous artists at work. Already in 1915, Sacha Guitry made Ceux de chez nous (Those of Our Land), a 22‐minute film on leading French writers and artists including Degas, Monet, Renoir, and Rodin. Two decades later, in the United States in the late 1930s, Elias Katz made a series of shorts consisting of simple 10‐minute glimpses of artists such as Lynd Ward, William Groper, and George Grosz at work. Unmistakably, the most impressive early film project dealing with artists at work originated in the Berlin Institut für Kulturforschung, which was founded in 1919. Under the direction of art historian Hans Cürlis, this “Institute for Cultural Education” was one of the first organizations that favored film as a mediator for art.3 Together with cinematographer Walter C. Türck, Cürlis started in 1922 the land­ mark film cycle Schaffende Hände (Creating Hands) using “over the shoulder” shots showing prominent artists such as Liebermann, Corinth, Kollwitz, Pechstein, Kandinsky, Dix, and Grosz at work. More interested in the process of artistic crea­ tion, Cürlis considered paintings and drawings themselves unfilmisch. Sculptures, by contrast, are the subject of another series of films by Cürlis, which he had already started in 1919. Containing shots of sculptures filmed in natural light, the films were grouped under titles such as “Heads,” “Negro Sculpture,” “Old‐German Madonnas,” “Small Sculptures,” or “Indian Crafts.” Emulating nineteenth‐century display techniques, each sculpture was put on a pedestal and slowly rotated on its

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axis in front of a static camera – a way of representing sculptures that proved highly popular throughout the history of the art film. Showing the sculpture in movement first and foremost had to emphasize the plastic qualities of the sculptures as well its ­expressive powers – a feature also prominent in the documentary shorts on “Nazi sculptors” Arno Breker and Joseph Thorak that Cürlis made together with Arnold Fanck in the 1940s. Apart from Cürlis’ Institute, smaller studios as well as UFA, Germany’s major stu­ dio, produced films on visual arts during the interwar period. UFA even comprised a unit that produced popular educational shorts for both theatrical and nontheatri­ cal release and listed art subjects in its catalogs as early as 1922. An often noted UFA Kulturfilm was Steinerne Wunder von Naumburg (Stone Wonders of Naumburg, 1935) by Rudolph Bamberger and Curt Oertel, in which the camera explores the architec­ ture and the sculpted Gothic figures of Naumburg cathedral. Described by Arthur Knight (1953: 10) as the first film “that suggested the possibility of granting an art experience through the medium of motion picture,” the film has its verbal informa­ tion restricted to a minimum and it first and foremost delivers its message visually.4 Oertel went on to make a few more art documentaries, including the landmark Michelangelo: Das Leben eines Titanen (1938), a feature‐length film telling the story of Michelangelo’s dramatic life, which is evoked without depending on reenact­ ments, but by the spectacular visualization of his art. By means of location shots, vivid montages, light and sound effects, camera movements, and point‐of‐view shots, Oertel carries us along through intrigues, conspiracies, and civil wars in renaissance Florence and Rome. Gliding over Michelangelo’s frescoes and sculptural surfaces, Oertel’s camera evokes the dramatic tension of Michelangelo’s works, which are beautifully captured through chiaroscuro lighting. The creation and history of the statue of David (1501–1504), for instance, is evoked through a series of images. First, we see the statue’s face luring from behind bars, as if it is still in Michelangelo’s studio, but further shots suggest that the statue is traveling through Florence. Later, an attack on Florence is evoked as we see a missile falling and ­shattering the arm of the statue, followed by dramatic close‐ups of David’s face and  shattered marble pieces. Turning the contemplation of art into a thrilling cinematic experience, Oertel’s film was re‐edited in 1950 by Richard Lyford under the supervision of Robert Flaherty and Robert Snyder. Distributed as The Titan: The Story of Michelangelo, the film won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Other internationally acclaimed art documentaries released shortly before the Second World War were produced in Belgium – in 1950, Design Review noted that “Belgium’s contribution to the art film was out of all proportion to its limited geo­ graphical surface area” (Mirams  1950: 39–41).5 Thèmes d’inspiration (Themes of Inspiration, 1938) by Charles Dekeukeleire “animates” static artworks by showing painted images that are interwoven with footage of the world that inspired Flemish painters. A highly lyrical film, Thèmes d’inspiration juxtaposes details of paintings of Old and Modern Masters with footage of real landscapes, faces, and objects, evoking the world that inspired the artists. Marked both by the impressionist avant‐garde (to  which Dekeukeleire had contributed earlier with film poems inspired by



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Germaine Dulac and a series of montage films) and by the new documentary trends of the 1930s, Thèmes d’inspiration focuses on the telluric alignment of characters in paintings by Breughel, Patinir, Jordaens, and Permeke. The most influential prewar Belgian art film, however, was André Cauvin’s L’Agneau mystique (The Mystic Lamb, 1939), which deals with the famous fifteenth‐ century altarpiece by Jan and Hubert Van Eyck. In this short film, the verbal narra­ tive is confined to a minimum in favor of a visual exploration of the painting. Scanning the altar’s panels, the camera moves slowly so that there is time to contem­ plate the many details rendered in close‐up. For the first time, an art film draws attention to the aesthetic coherence of a single piece of art enabling the viewer to make a formal analysis. Together with Cauvin’s similar film on Memling (1939), The Mystic Lamb was commissioned by the Belgian government for its pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair where it made a lasting impression. Arthur Knight (1953: 11) described The Mystic Lamb as “probably the first of the new art films on an adult level to be seen by any considerable audience in America.” Writing in 1952, Iris Barry stated that The Mystic Lamb “has not even now, after so many other ­cinematic studies of paintings, been surpassed” (2).

“The Golden Age,” Europe 1940–1960 and FIFA The groundbreaking films by Oertel, Dekeukeleire, and Cauvin paved the way for a veritable bloom of the genre after World War II, when literally hundreds of art docu­ mentaries were produced. The 1940s and 1950s, no doubt, can be considered as a golden age of the art documentary – not only because of the sheer quantity, but also because of the high quality and highly innovative or experimental nature of many of these films. Leading filmmakers such as Willard S. Van Dyke, Robert Flaherty, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Jean Grémillon, Henri‐Georges Clouzot, and Henri Alekan con­ tributed considerably to the development of the genre, which also became a perfect training ground for younger, emerging filmmakers such as Luciano Emmer, Alain Resnais, and Chris Marker.6 In the late 1940s and early 1950s, art documentaries received a lot of attention at film festivals and several of them won major film awards.7 In addition, prominent critics and film theorists such as André Bazin, Pierre Francastel, Henri Lemaître, Siegfried Kracauer, and Rudolph Arnheim8 paid attention to the phenomenon, which was also discussed extensively at international conferences, in professional film and art journals such as Sight and Sound, Bianco e nero, Burlington Magazine, and College Art Journal, and in publications of profes­ sional associations such as the American Federation of Arts and the International Art Film Federation. This postwar bloom of art documentaries and its cultural impact, no doubt, can be linked to the conditions of a society recovering from the traumas of World War II. After the barbarism of Nazism and the devastation of war, film, in its capacity as a mass medium, was called in for the accomplishment of a humanist ideal of cultural emancipation through education. Art came to be seen as a necessary and

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even a fundamental part of education for all. These changing attitudes about the place of the visual arts in education, culture, and society were unmistakably ben­ eficial for the production and exhibition of films on art (Loukopoulou 2012: 357). Considered to be an efficient device for the proliferation, democratization, and popularization of high culture, the art documentary developed in tandem with an expanding participation of the middle and lower classes to the sphere of art and culture. This ideal of social and cultural emancipation also inspired the foundation of UNESCO in 1945. International cultural organizations such as UNESCO and the Fédération internationale des Archives du Film (FIAF) played an important role in the support of the production, distribution, and critical contextualization of art documentaries, which were presented as devices for cultural and educational pro­ gress. This was also the aim of several other international organizations such as IAFF (International Art Film Federation), CIDALC (Comité Internationale pour la Diffusion des Arts et des Lettres par le Cinéma), and IIFA (International Institute of Films on Art). Under the auspices of UNESCO, leading filmmakers, artists, producers, museum officials, and film archivists founded FIFA (Fédération ­ Internationale du Film sur l’Art) in 1948. FIFA organized three International Art Film Congresses, which took place at the Louvre in Paris in 1949, at the Palais des Beaux‐Arts in Brussels in 1950, and at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1951 respectively. Throughout the 1950s, FIFA would become an important plat­ form for the debates on art films, facilitating their international distribution.9 Although, in many cases, nationalist agendas, economical protectionism, or just a pride of a local cultural heritage made the production of such films possible, most if not all of the mid‐twentieth‐century art documentaries were first and foremost inspired by this belief in the possibilities of cultural exchange and international understanding through culture and education.

Major Figures: Emmer, Storck, and Resnais The major figures in the 1940s and 1950s were Luciano Emmer, Henri Storck, Paul Haesaerts, and Alain Resnais, working in Italy, Belgium, and France – countries with a rich artistic (particularly pictorial) past (Jacobs  2011b). Italian painter Luciano Emmer already joined forces with Enrico Gras in the late 1930s and early 1940s to produce a series of innovating and commercially successful short art documentaries such as Racconto da un affresco (1938), Cantico delle creature (1943), Fratelli miracolosi (1946), Il Dramma di Cristo (1948), L’Invenzione della croce (1948), and La Leggenda di S. Orsola (1948).10 In the first place, Emmer and Gras attempted to transpose the narrative aspects of paintings into film. In many paintings, within the confines of a single frame or by means of a cycle of scenes, a story is told and some­ times main characters are even depicted more than once. Emmer was convinced that cinema had inherited the narrative functions that painting once exercised. Not coincidentally, most of Emmer’s films deal with the rich tradition of trecento and quattrocento painting by artists such as Giotto, Piero della Francesca, Vittore



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Carpaccio, and Fra Angelico among others, who replaced the iconic stasis of the medieval and Byzantine tradition with a more dynamic and an openly narrative character. Rather than documentaries on art, Emmer created narrative films that use painted images instead of actors, sets, props, and locations. Hence, Il Dramma di Cristo (1948) is not about Giotto but about the life of Christ, told with the help of Giotto’s frescoes of the story. Emmer revealed the narrative and dramatic potential of paint­ ings, thereby subjecting them to a reinterpretation through specifically cinematic techniques. In order to do so, Emmer isolated details of the paintings in succession, almost evoking classical continuity. After a shot of a landscape, for instance, Emmer cuts into the picture with a medium shot on an isolated fragment, followed by a close‐up reaction shot of a character, in its turn succeeded by close‐ups of bystand­ ers or significant objects. Using camera movements to point out details, creating rhythm through editing to impart action to the static actors, and working very closely with the musical score (often composed by Roman Vlad) and the minimal commentary, Emmer transformed static paintings into stories. Most of the shots of an Emmer film focus on narrative elements in the paintings – elements that painters had used themselves in order to create a narrative such as gestures or facial expres­ sions of the characters. As in a feature film, however, Emmer uses inserts of details from the painting with no narrative function – a bird on a tree, a vase on a window sill – but that help to create an atmosphere and a setting for the story. Frequently, Emmer introduces a kind of cinematic suspense, for instance when he first shows the feet of a person before showing the character in its entirety, contradicting the logics of the painting displaying all its details simultaneously. Although unmistaka­ bly based on the narrative organization of the paintings, Emmer’s films present themselves as translations or transpositions rather than reproductions. Another major mid‐twentieth‐century contribution to the development of the art film was made by Henri Storck, who had already directed Regards sur la Belgique ancienne in 1936. In the late 1940s, he made landmark films on artists such as Delvaux and Rubens. In contrast with Cauvin’s film on the Van Eycks’ “Mystic Lamb” and most of Emmer’s films, Storck did not base his films on individual paintings, but rather on a collage of details from various works. In so doing, Storck exceeded Emmer’s ambi­ tions by putting film at the disposal of a formal analysis of the artwork. While Emmer wanted to tell stories that were also the subject of his filmed paintings, Storck rather developed film essays that were aesthetic treatises. As the title suggests, Le Monde de Paul Delvaux (The World of Paul Delvaux, 1946), which Storck made in collaboration with poet and essayist René Micha, deals with surrealist painter Delvaux’ entire oeuvre rather than with his biography or a specific painting. Delvaux’s famous nudes and uncanny cityscapes merge with other figures, objects, and fragments from differ­ ent paintings crystallizing into an oneiric, melancholy, and desolate universe. In order to achieve this effect, Storck and Delvaux did away with the frames of the pic­ tures and in some cases lined them up, one next to the other so that Storck’s camera could pass without interruption between them (Davay  1949). Accompanied by a poem by Paul Eluard and music by André Souris, Le Monde de Paul Delvaux

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animates static images, the film medium itself almost magically contributing to the “Pygmalionist” dimension of Delvaux’s petrified nudes in nocturnal cityscapes. Besides Italy and Belgium, the art documentary in the late 1940s flourished in France, where its production was encouraged by a decree obliging cinema owners to include short features in their programs. Moreover, producers such as Anatole Dauman (Argos Films) and Pierre Braunberger (Les films de la Pleiade) cherished documenta­ ries by experimental filmmakers.11 A key figure in the development of the postwar French art documentary was Alain Resnais, who would become one of the major auteurs of French postwar cinema. After having made a series of small film portraits of painters such as Hans Hartung, César Doméla, and Max Ernst in 1946–1947, Resnais created Van Gogh (1948, in collaboration with Robert Hessens), which was commissioned by the Amis de l’Art, a circle founded with the purpose of stimulating the proliferation of art by means of lectures and films. This society was presided by art historian Gaston Diehl, who asked Resnais to make a film “in the style of Luciano Emmer” and who would write the film’s commentary.12 The film tells the tragic story of the life of Vincent Van Gogh, who already had become the perfect embodiment of the romantic myth of the artist as an unrecognized, tormented, self‐destructive, and tragic individual.13 Strikingly, Resnais tells this myth by means of a cinematic manipu­ lation of Van Gogh’s paintings. On the whole, the film consists of a masterful succes­ sion of 207 shots of details of paintings, evoking the continuity of a feature film. In the first place, Resnais constructs a drama with the help of montage effects, a wide variety of transitions (from straight cuts to slow lap dissolves), and all kinds of camera move­ ments. Given this perspective, the film is more in line with Van Gogh biopics (such as Vincente Minelli’s 1954 Lust for Life) than with most of the many art documentaries that have been dedicated to the painter. In doing so, Resnais masterfully combined the innovations introduced earlier by Curt Oertel (telling the biography of an artist through the illustration of his works), Luciano Emmer (creating narrative and drama by means of a continuity of shots showing details of paintings), and Henri Storck (­mixing parts of different paintings, presenting the artist’s entire oeuvre as a single vast painting). As in Storck’s film on Delvaux, a mobile camera and an eye‐catching mon­ tage reveal the essence of the formal language of the artist. The story is rather told from within the painter’s mind and the world is seen through the eyes of Van Gogh. This interest in the construction of narrative links between images of an internal and men­ tal world would become the basis of Resnais’s feature films, in which both characters and spectator are immersed in the labyrinth of memory by means of shock‐like suc­ cessions and seamless transitions of images. After the success of Van Gogh, Resnais made similar films on Gauguin (1950) and Picasso’s Guernica (1950).

Education and Research Versus Artistic Autonomy The mid‐twentieth‐century art documentaries by Emmer, Storck, Resnais, and many others had unmistakably educational ambitions. They attempted to take the visual arts outside the museum, bringing them to wider audiences. What’s more,



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with their close‐ups, tracking shots, montage effects, and split screens, art documen­ taries enable us to look at artworks in unprecedented ways. As a result, art documen­ taries were frequently presented as instruments of learning and even as new models of art historical scholarship. Strikingly, leading art historians such as Gaston Diehl in France, Roberto Longhi and Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti in Italy, or Paul Haesaerts in Belgium, participated in the production and even direction of these films. Their involvement in the production surpassed their traditional role of advisor or author of the commentary. The Belgian art historian and critic Paul Haesaerts collaborated with Henri Storck on the landmark film Rubens (1948), which first and foremost gives a formal analy­ sis of the works by the baroque painter. In order to do so, Haesaerts and Storck employed the entire repertory of the film medium. Irises, close‐ups, camera move­ ments, and even rapidly rotating images reveal Pieter Paul Rubens’s predilection for spiral‐shaped structures. Animated lines point out the characteristics of Rubens’s compositions whereas dissolves to footage of water, clouds, and flames evoke Rubens’s idea of a fertile universe in motion. By means of split screens, Haesaerts and Storck compare Rubens with other artists. Two years later, Haesaerts uses simi­ lar diagrams, split screens, and animations in De Renoir à Picasso (1950) to make statements about modern art in general, tracing three inspirational sources: the so‐called sensual or carnal (Renoir), the cerebral (Seurat), and the instinctual or passionate (Picasso). For Haesaerts (1950: 26), conventional art criticism and art history are outdated and unadjusted to their objects. “Let the image now replace the word, let discourse become an eloquent succession of images.”14 Calling cinema a “new instrument of investigation and thinking” that enables us to comprehend the artworks, Haesaerts (1947/1948) developed a concept of “cinéma‐critique.” Likewise, in Italy, art historian Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti developed the concept of the critofilm, which he saw as a form of art criticism “made through cinematographic means instead of words.”15 His series of about 20 critofilms started in 1948 with a now lost film on Lorenzo Il Magnifico and concluded in 1964 with a film essay dedicated to Michelangelo, the longest of the series. As an author of writings on cinema as a visual art form since the 1930s, Ragghianti was strongly convinced that our understanding of visual language could be improved if we use images instead of words in order to “decode” artworks. Unlike many of their colleagues, Haesaerts and Ragghianti went beyond the traditional role of expert or author of the text, taking the full responsibil­ ity of the film’s construction. Despite these educational purposes, many art documentaries of the era also dis­ played self‐consciously artistic and cinematic ambitions. According to Siegfried Kracauer (1960: 198), Rubens by Haesaerts and Storck “is neither pure cinema nor merely a teaching instrument. It is a glamorous hybrid.” Although some stated that the medium of film remained “predominantly a machine for seeing better, a remote cousin of the magnifying lens, a periscope, a pair of opera glasses,” filmmakers such as Alain Resnais, Henri Storck, and Luciano Emmer presented their “documenta­ ries” not as mere registrations or reproductions of artworks (Barry 1953: 1). A film on art had to be an interesting art film, investigating the tensions between

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movement and stasis, the two‐ and three‐dimensional, narrative and iconic images, and the real and the artificial. This autonomization of the film vis à vis the original artwork was an important subject for debate in those years. FIFA itself embodied this ambiguity as the two last letters of the abbreviation were defined as films sur l’art on some occasions and films d’art on others. Many of these films were screened as part of film programs combining art documentaries with experimental films by art­ ists such as Norman McLaren, Hans Richter, or Fernand Léger. In a 1991 survey of art documentaries many of these films are considered “dated” and “too arty,” but their “arty” dimension precisely contributes to their poetic dimension, intellectual depth, astounding visuals, and their exceptional quality, which surpasses those of most later art documentaries answering to the standardized “illustrated lecture” for­ mat (Montgomery and Covert 1991: 1). The experimental art documentaries of the 1940s and early 1950s developed in tandem with the so‐called essay film, which combined the look of a documentary with a personal perspective and a highly reflexive dimension. The essay film at least partly derived from the art documentary and its productive tension inherent in the translation of painting, sculpture, or architecture into film. Resnais’s early art documentaries on Van Gogh (1948) and Guernica (1950) paved the way for his essay films of the 1950s. His Les Statues meurent aussi (with Chris Marker and Ghislain Cloquet, 1953) about African art and the effect of colonialism on its reception is a perfect example of an essay film characterized by a self‐reflexivity that can be found in the works by Dziga Vertov and Jean Rouch. Les Statues meurent aussi prefigures several later art documentaries such as Ways of Seeing (John Berger, 1972) or Cézanne: Dialogue avec Joachim Gasquet (Jean‐Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet 1989), which, akin to the new deconstruc­ tivist methods of art history, subverted voices of authority and, inspired by a Brechtian aesthetics, questioned the illusionistic possibilities of film (Wechsler 1991: 10–11).

Artists and Acts of Creation Showing a static artwork in the dynamic medium of film has often been consid­ ered an uninteresting or unchallenging task by filmmakers. That’s why so many art documentaries have shifted their focus from the finished artwork to its process of creation, i.e. the development of the artwork through time. Long after Cürlis’ 1920s series of Schaffende Hände (Creating Hands), the motif of the artist at work remained important throughout the art documentary’s entire history. In the 1940s and 1950s, it acquired a greater importance in the light of artistic currents such as lyrical abstraction, action painting, or COBRA, which favored energetic brush­ work and focused on the physical act of painting. The act of creation itself became the subject of key films such as Visite à Picasso (Paul Haesaerts, 1949), which contains a remarkable sequence showing Picasso painting various forms (a bird, a vase with flowers, various zoomorphic figures) on a sheet of plexiglass mounted between himself and the camera. The effect is striking  –  shown against a dark



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background, it looks as if Picasso draws white lines into the space in front of him. The use of a glass pane in order to show the creation process itself was adopted by several other landmark art documentaries of the 1950s such as the highly influen­ tial Jackson Pollock (Paul Falkenberg and Hans Namuth, 1951). As Pollock’s large‐ format drippings can be understood as an almost seismographic registration of his bodily movements, the effect on film is very powerful. Similarly, The Reality of Karel Appel (Jan Vrijman, 1962) features the artist flicking paint at the camera, peeping through a hole in the canvas. The most famous variation of the artist painting on a glass pane is the feature‐length Le Mystère Picasso (The Mystery of Picasso, 1956) by Henri‐Georges Clouzot.16 Noirish black and white shots of Picasso at work alternate with long takes in color of a porous white screen on which Picasso paints or draws. Clouzot’s long takes reproduce the duration of the painting process. The screen is filmed frontally from behind so that the artist remains invisible. As a result, the screen becomes a kind of automatic painting transforming, for instance, the initial image of a flower into a fish, then a hen, a human face, and finally the head of a faun. Following the famous examples by Haesaerts, Falkenberg & Namuth, and Clouzot, many later art documentaries include entire sequences of artists at work – ­interesting examples are Luc de Heusch’s films on COBRA artists Alechinsky d’apres nature (1970) and Dotremont: Les logogrammes (1972), Emile de Antonio’s Painters Painting (1972), and many films by Michael Blackwood. On the one hand, these films con­ tributed to a demystification of the notion of the artistic genius as the artworks are presented not so much as the result of a divine inspiration but rather as the product of the struggle between the artist and his material. On the other hand, such films seem to be unable to deconstruct the mythic image of the artist as demiurge. Thanks to the film medium, the artists acquire an almost shamanistic power. Focusing on the act of creation, these films contribute to an “extreme fetishization of the actual moment of creation” (Hayward 1988: 7). In the later twentieth century, the motif of the artist at work was also used in con­ texts in which the process of artistic creation does not involve the physical action or virtuoso drawings emphasized in the films on Picasso or Pollock. In Magritte, ou la leçon de choses (Luc de Heusch, 1960), the stereotypical image of the artist struggling with paint and brushes in an untidy studio is exchanged by footage of the famous Surrealist dressed in suit and tie, who works in the homely living room of his house –  his “work”, however, seems only to consist of moving and manipulating frames and canvasses as well as giving titles to already finished paintings. Likewise, evoking the slow pace, fragmented narrative, and episodic structure of European modernist art house cinema, A Bigger Splash (Jack Hazan, 1974) focuses on the existential and emotional difficulties David Hockney is facing when making a painting. The mun­ dane and painstaking preparations of the creation of a painting are also the subject of Victor Erice’s El Sol del membrillo (1992), which deals with realist painter Antonio López García’s attempts to make a painting of a quince tree in the small walled gar­ den of his studio house. Paint and paintings are even absent in Jack Bond’s Dali in New York (1965), which focuses entirely on Dali’s persona.

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The focus on the artist or the artist’s biography, which marks both traditional art historical scholarship as well as popular stories about art, also inspired the entire tradition of biopics on artists, the fictionalized accounts of the life (or parts of it) of artists.17 This practice also penetrated documentary cinema in the form of “docu­ dramas” or the use of dramatized vignettes of key incidents in an artist’s life. This formula proved particularly popular in the United Kingdom where Ken Russell, already in the early 1960s, gradually introduced fictional elements and conventions from narrative cinema into his documentaries on artists who were no longer alive and could not be shown at work (Adriaensens and Jacobs 2015). Later, BBC pro­ ducer Leslie Megahey used reenactments frequently, for instance in the Artists and Models series (1983). Using actors playing the artist’s family and acquaintances, Peter Schamoni’s Caspar David Friedrich: Grenzen der Zeit (1986), set in the period immediately following Friedrich’s dead (hence not a “biopic”), is an interesting vari­ ation that confronts Friedrich’s landscapes with the sites they depict. More recently, Simon Schama included scenes with reenactments in the BBC series Power of Art (2006), which deals with masterpieces by Caravaggio, Bernini, Rembrandt, David, Turner, Van Gogh, Picasso, and Rothko.

Art Book and Museum From a media‐archaeological perspective, art documentaries are not only interest­ ing because they combine film with other artistic media. They also often show earlier devices of display and means of mediating art works, such as prints, pho­ tography, books, and museums. Moreover, the proliferaton of art documentaries in the aftermath of World War II coincided with the breakthrough of the illustrated art book, epitomized by the successes of publishers specialized in high‐quality art books such as Skira. In addition, the late 1940s and early 1950s was also the era in which André Malraux developed his Musée imaginaire.18 According to Malraux, the traditional physical museum could be exchanged by a kind of virtual all‐ encompassing photographic archive, embodied in the phenomenon of the illus­ trated art book. In contrast to the traditional museum, which stimulated the contemplation of unique and isolated master pieces, the Musée imaginaire was rather based on the juxtaposition of artworks of divergent styles, periods, and cul­ tures. Whereas, according to Walter Benjamin, photography and film had destroyed the aura of the traditional work of art, for Malraux, modern techniques of mechan­ ical reproduction had a rather ambivalent role. Photography was unmistakably capable of disconnecting the work of art from its original context but could also reinforce its aura by emphasizing its affinity with other artworks or with human creativity as such. Strikingly, for Malraux, the medium of photography supplies the materials for the art book but it is cinema that provides its organizational model. According to Malraux, the art book was, just like a film, a succession of images arranged on the basis of a technique of montage.19 Like many art books, many art documentaries can be considered as virtual museums; they are cinematic



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equivalents of a curatorial endeavor: creating successions of artworks and isolating masterpieces through montage, camera movements, light, etc. Strikingly, the pro­ duction of numerous high‐quality art documentaries and Malraux’s project of the Musée imaginaire also coincided with important museological innovations. The late 1940s saw the establishment of the International Council of Museums (ICOM), which had ambitions to introduce new curatorial practices. Right from its incep­ tion, ICOM showed great interest in the art documentaries and museums were often involved in their production. Museum collections and major exhibitions have also been the subject of early newsreels and seminal art documentaries. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, for instance, figured prominently in the self‐produced films – it already adopted film in 1925, showing its own movies at the museum (Wasson 2011). The Metropolitan also produced Behind the Scenes: The Working Side of the Museum (1928), an early example of the popular subgenre of behind‐the‐scenes looks at museums. Hans Cürlis contributed to this subgenre as well with Kurgäste hinter Museumsmauern (1934) and Heilbehandlung von Kunstwerken (1939), which deal with the conservation laboratories of Berlin museums. In the 1930s, Cürlis also made other films focusing on collection highlights of a single museum or several museums in films such as Aus Berliner Museen (1937) and Schatzkammer Deutschland (1939).20 The Louvre, too, became an important producer of films, videos, and television programs such as the series of video programs Palettes (1989), analyzing famous paintings with the help of scientific methods and video effects, and the 60‐part series One Hundred Seconds for a Work of Art (1990–1991) including episodes made by Alain Fleischer and Anne‐Marie Miéville, among others. Moreover, the famous Paris museum also features in numerous documentary films with various approaches and perspectives. Some of these films, such as Images de l’ancienne Egypte (Maurice Cloche, 1951), show artworks isolated from their context without the disturbing details that might thwart an intimate encounter with the artworks during a real museum visit. Others, such as Les Pierres vives (Fernand Marzelle, 1951), though bringing works together from different galleries, evoke an actual museum visit as the camera goes from one room into the other, approaching the exhibits from an oblique angle. Several interesting museum documentaries not only deal with a museum’s artworks but also with the way they are put on display and how they are looked at. This is the case in The Louvre: A Golden Prison (Lucy Jarvis & John Sughrue, Jr., 1964), which contains an entire sequence of visitors looking at the artworks. Looking at and framing artworks is also an important topic in Une Visite au Louvre (Jean‐Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, 2002) and La Ville Louvre (Nicolas Philibert, 1990). Philibert uses a Foucauldian perspective to inves­ tigate the institutional context of the museum, evoking Frederick Wiseman’s earlier documentaries on social institutions. Wiseman himself tackled the phenomenon of the museum in National Gallery (2014), and similar echoes can be found in Das Grosse Museum (Johannes Holzhausen, 2014) and Het nieuwe Rijksmuseum (Oeke Hoogendijk, 2014).

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Television: Standardization and Deconstruction The landmark art documentaries by Oertel, Emmer, Storck, Haesaerts, and Resnais of the late 1930s and 1940s preceded the breakthrough of the medium of television in their countries of origin. In the decade following World War II, the mid‐twentieth‐­ century experimental art documentary was first and foremost a phenomenon that found its fertile base in a culture of ciné clubs, art societies, museums, and schools. From the 1950s onwards, television became the most important medium of pro­ duction and distribution for art documentaries. It should be noted, however, that television’s relationship with the visual arts surpasses the format of the art documen­ tary as the arts also became occasionally the topic of newsreels, talk shows, and other types of programs. Moreover, television’s relation with the arts has been largely defined by the relay as many programs were live or recorded transmissions of events from a television studio or an outside broadcast location. However, television became a major (co‐)producer of films on art, which now could reach a far greater audience than ever before. The first major advances in the 1950s were made in Great Britain where John Read made seminal films on contem­ poraneous British artists such as Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland, and Stanley Spencer. Impressed by Emmer’s films and convinced that “the educational is implicit in the artistic,” Read focuses on a direct encounter with the artists. His films, in the words of John Wyver (2007: 22), “can feel strikingly ‘open’ for the viewer to bring his or her own responses.” Some interesting films on art were also produced within the context of Monitor (1958–1965), television’s first art magazine. Noteworthy are Ken Russell’s portraits of composers such as Elgar and Debussy and Pop Goes the Easel (1962), his account of the development of Pop Art in Britain using a kind of collage‐ aesthetics echoing the works of the artists being discussed. Directed at a mass audience without a specialist knowledge, television contrib­ uted largely to the standardization of the art documentary taking the format of a historical tour with an on‐camera host whose words are sometimes juxtaposed with footage of artworks. This format was developed by Kenneth Clark, who created art programs from the late 1950s onwards and who became famous with the highly suc­ cessful 13‐part series Civilisation: A Personal View (1969). In Civilisation, Clark delivers his lectures in magnificent settings all over western Europe thanks to a budget that enabled location shooting. Combining the art history lecture with a Grand Tour travelogue, Civilisation harmoniously combines frequently spectacular images with music and a narration marked by “the effortless confidence” of Clark’s judgments (Wyver 2014: 1124). This on‐camera presence of an expert also marked many similar series for decades, from Robert Hughes’s Shock of the New (1979) to Simon Schama’s Power of Art (2006). However, television has occasionally also offered possibilities to question or deconstruct the standardized format of an authoritative voice speaking on‐ or off‐ camera and giving an art history lecture supported by a camera exploring the art­ works. John Berger’s landmark four‐part series Ways of Seeing (1972) not only deals with art but also addressed the very process of its perception by the mass media.



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Inspired by Marxist art theorists such as Frederick Antal and Walter Benjamin (to whom Berger explicitly refers in the first program) as well as by the “new art history,” Berger demystifies traditional notions of art, revealing its hidden ideologies. Dealing with the phenomena of reproduction, the female nude, the role of clients, and the seduction of advertising, Ways of Seeing relates both art and popular visual culture to social and economic reality. Likewise, the six‐part series State of the Art (1986), which was written by Sandy Nairne, directed by Geoff Dunlop, and produced by John Wyver, made no attempt at a unified analysis, favoring a variety of (sometimes conflicting) voices making statements on the art world of the 1980s. Considered a “postmodern documentary,” State of the Art resolutely focused on the artworks (by Beuys, Sherman, Basquiat, and Gormley, among others) and associated ideas and opinions, rejecting any discussion of the artists’ biographies or life style. Avoiding a single narrator, the result was a disjunctive juxtaposition of quotations, footage of interviewees speaking directly to the camera, and shots of galleries and exhibitions. From the 1960s to the late 1980s, state television in many European countries facilitated the production of experimental and highly self‐reflexive art documenta­ ries such as productions by Jean‐Christophe Averty in France, Gerry Schum in Germany, and Jean‐Paul Tréfois, Jef Cornelis, and Stefaan Decostere in Belgium.21 Unmistakably, the medium of television was at its best when dealing with contem­ porary issues. More or less coinciding with the breakthrough of video art in the late 1960s, television became an important channel of production for many vanguard artists. Gerry Schum’s Fernsehgallery or TV Gallery contains an episode entitled Identifications (1970) showing performances or interventions by Joseph Beuys, Gilbert and George, and Richard Serra among others. Likewise, artists such as Peter Weibel, Valie Export, Maria Lassnig, and Arnulf Rainer were able to create works for/on Austrian art programs such as Kontakt or Impulse in the early 1970s. Although they “documented” artworks in a certain sense, these programs presented them­ selves as artworks in line with new conceptions and definitions of “art objects” among the vanguard art currents of the late 1960s and 1970s.

From the Neo‐Avant‐Garde to Post‐Cinema In the 1960s and 1970s, phenomena such as happenings, performance art, and body art shifted the emphasis of visual arts toward time‐based forms that  put further emphasis on film, television, and video. As most of the happenings and p ­ erformances are unique and elusive, they became heavily dependent on their “registration,” “recording,” or “documentation” on photography, film, and video. Although several performance artists have become the subject of conventional documentaries, many films and videos showing artists such as Bruce Nauman, Joseph Beuys, or Chris Burden are artworks in themselves, not merely representations or documentations. In many instances, the result hovers between these two poles. The World of Gilbert and George (Philip Haas, 1981), for instance, is definitely a work on film by the art­ ists, not simply a film about them. Strikingly, the proliferation of happenings and

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performances was indebted to the aforementioned documentary Jackson Pollock (Paul Falkenberg and Hans Namuth, 1951). According to Caroline Jones (1996: 72), the film Jackson Pollock was more influential than Pollock’s paintings “in the sense that no one could copy Pollock’s dripped skeins of paint…without committing for­ gery, while the implications of his painting method were widely and consciously pursued by younger artists active in performance art, happenings, body art.” Apart from performance and body art, other artistic currents and phenomena of the late 1960s and 1970s such as Land Art, Process Art, or Conceptual Art decon­ structed the notion of the artwork as a contained, material object that can be exhib­ ited, moved, or sold. These new art practices, too, became highly dependent on documentation by means of texts, maps, photographs, videos, and films. Famous pieces of Land Art, for instance, became the subject of a number of interesting films. Gerry Schum’s Fernsehgallery included the episode Land Art (1969), showing works by Richard Long, Dennis Oppenheim, Jan Dibbets, Barry Flanagan, Robert Smithson, Marinus Boezem, Walter De Maria, and Michael Heizer. Also noteworthy are the films by direct cinema representatives David and Albert Maysles focusing on the projects by Christo such as Christo’s Valley Curtain (1973), Running Fence (1976), Islands (1986), Christo in Paris (1990), and The Gates (2005), which show the artist’s gigantic interventions in natural and urban landscapes as well as their extensive preparations and construction implying the involvement of numerous collaborators and external experts. Stones and Flies: Richard Long in the Sahara (Philip Haas, 1988), by contrast, focuses on Long’s small‐scale interventions in the desert, such as the elusive drawings made by dripping water on the sand. Robert Smithson’s The Spiral Jetty (1970) documents the construction and the appearance of Smithson’s own eponymous environmental sculpture in a lake in Utah. However, illustrating the themes central in Smithson’s oeuvre and mimicking the spiral‐shaped structure in the camera movements, this poetic film is rather an extension of the original art­ work than a documentary. In so doing, Smithson’s film can be situated in a tradition of “sculptural films” including seminal works such as Ein Lichtspiel Schwarz – Weiss  – Grau (László Moholy‐Nagy, 1930), which can be conceived as a documentary on the artist’s own kinetic Light/Space‐Modulator. However, Ein Lichtspiel is not so much a portrait but rather a filmic extension of the sculptural construction. Light and movement, which are crucial elements in the original sculpture, are also the basic elements of the film medium. Employing close‐ups, multiple exposures, as well as the combination of positive and negative images in order to alienate the spec­ tator, the film shows sculptural volumes that merge with their surrounding space and masses that dissolve into a spatial continuum. Given this perspective, Moholy‐ Nagy’s Lichtspiel prefigures many films that are inherently connected with the art­ works they deal with in the sense that the one is unthinkable without the other. Without the artwork, there would not be a film. Without the presence of the camera or the possibilities of audiovisual media, the artwork would be inconceivable. This was not only the case in the avant‐gardes of the 1960s and 1970s (Body Art, Fluxus, Land Art), but also applies to recent practices involving performance, site‐­specific interventions, participatory strategies, and relational art as illustrated in the use of



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film by artists such as Gillian Wearing, Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno, and many others. Some documentaries on major contemporary artists even became highly successful films screened in art house cinemas such as Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present (Matthew Akers and Jeff Dupre, 2012) or Exit Through the Gift Shop (Banksy, 2010). Finally, new interconnections between art and the documentary emerged with the proliferation of the moving image in museums and exhibitions since the 1990s when major artists such as Douglas Gordon, Matthew Barney, Steve McQueen, and Christian Marclay started making feature‐length films marked by high production values while established filmmakers such as Jean‐Luc Godard, Chantal Akerman, and Peter Greenaway created moving image installations. Turning the “white cube” of the museum into a black box, this condition of “post‐cinema” did not only result in new forms of fiction but also new documentary practices. Contemporary art increasingly appropriated techniques and discourses from visual anthropology and ethnography, resulting in new documentary modes that became prominent in the early years of this century  –  Documenta 11 (2002), curated by Okwui Enwezor (2008), marked this tendency clearly, including documentary video essays charac­ terized by a reflexivity reminiscent of Vertov, Godard, Marker, and Rouch.22 Documentary films by Harun Farocki, Renzo Martens, and Patrick Keiller – to name just a few – are increasingly exhibited in museum spaces instead of theatrical venues. These films can be single‐screen projections or can be conveyed in the form of an installation, as a kind of “expanded documentary.” This display of documentaries in an art context (instead of art as a subject of a documentary) indicates the ongoing intermedial connections between documentary and the arts: the importance of aes­ thetic and artistic notions for the pioneers of documentary cinema such as Grierson and Vertov; the impact of artistic currents such as Surrealism, Pop Art, or Minimal Art on the evolution of documentary cinema; the close interconnections between “films on art” and “art films” in postwar Europe; and the ongoing production of films that not only “document” artworks but that are rather cinematic extensions or integral components of the artworks being filmed.

Notes 1 See Jens Thiele (1976: 14). 2 See Arthur Knight (1953: 8–9). 3 See Thiele (1976: 15–18); Reiner Ziegler (2003: 35–40, 45–54, and 302–309); Ulrich Döge (2005); and Rainer Ziegler (2005). 4 See also Ziegler (2003: 290–291 and 315–317). 5 See also Steven Jacobs (2013). 6 See, for instance, The Photographer (Willard van Dyke 1948), Thorvaldsen (Carl Theodor Dreyer 1949), Les Charmes de l’existence (Jean Grémillon and Pierre Kast 1950), La Maison aux images (Jean Grémillon 1955), André Masson et les quatre éléments (Jean Grémillon 1958), Le Mystère Picasso (Henri‐Georges Clouzot 1956), and L’Enfer de Rodin (Henri Alekan 1959).

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7 In 1950, Resnais receives the Oscar for “Best Short Subject” for Van Gogh whereas Flaherty won the Academy Award for “Best Documentary Feature” for The Titan. Other films on art such as 1848 (Marguerite de la Mure and Victoria Mercanton) and Rembrandt: A Self‐Portrait (Morrie Roizman) were nominated as best documentary shorts in 1949 and 1954 respectively. Several art documentaries also won major awards at the Venice film festival: Oertel’s The Titan and Charles De Keukeleire’s Thèmes d’inspiration in 1938; Van Gogh by Resnais, Rubens by Paul Haesaerts and Henri Storck, and Landsbykirken by Carl Theodor Dreyer in 1948; Haesaerts also won an award in 1950 with Visite à Picasso. For the importance of art documentaries for the Venice Film Festival, see Luisella D’Alessandro, La Mostra del cinema di Venezia e la fortuna del documentario d’arte in Italia (BA Thesis, University of Teramo, 2007). 8 The two most important texts by André Bazin (2007a) on this topic are “Peinture et cinéma” (supposedly written between 1943 and 1951) and “Un Film Bergsonien: Le Mystère Picasso” (1956). See also Rudolph Arnheim (1997); Siegfried Kracauer (1960: 195–201); Pierre Francastel (1951: 13–16); and Henri Lemaître (1956). 9 See the volumes published by UNESCO such as Films on Art (1949); Films on Art (1951); and Francis Bolen (1953). 10 On Emmer, see Lorenzo Codelli (2006); Luciano Emmer and Enrico Gras (1947); Francis Koval (1951); Herbert F. Margolis (1947); Paola Scremin (2005); Lauro Venturi (1949). 11 See R. Odin (1998); and Dominique Bluher and François Thomas (2005). 12 See Suzanne Liandrat‐Guigues and Jean‐Louis Leutrat (2006: 212). In the interview included in this volume, Resnais mentions that he started Van Gogh before having seen a film by Emmer. He recognizes the latter’s influence though on Guernica. 13 See Griselda Pollock (1980); and Griselda Pollock (2000). 14 See also Céline Maes (2015). 15 On Ragghianti, see Marco Scotini (2000). 16 See Bazin (2007b); Douglas Smith (2004); and Philippe Fauvel (2009). 17 On artists biopics, see Steven Jacobs (2011a). 18 Le Musée imaginaire was originally published in 1947 as the first volume of Psychologie de l’art (Genève: Skira) and was later adapted to become a part of Les Voix du silence (Paris: Gallimard, 1951). In 1965, the text was republished as Le Musée imaginaire (Paris:  Gallimard). The three volumes of Le Musée imaginaire de la sculpture mondiale (Paris: Gallimard) were published in 1952–1954. 19 See Smith (2004). 20 See Bénédicte Savoy (2014). 21 See Revision: Art Programmes of European Television Stations (1987). 22 See also Anna Raczynski (2013).

References Adriaensens, V. and Jacobs, S. (2015). Celluloid Bohemia? Ken Russell’s Biopics of Visual Artists. Journal of British Cinema and Television 12 (4): 479–495. Arnheim, R. (1997). Painting and Film. In: Film Essays and Criticism, 86–92. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press.



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Barry, I. (1953). Pioneering in Films on Art. In: Films on Art 1952 (ed. W.M. Chapman), 2. New York: The American Federation of Arts. Bazin, A. (2007a [1943/1951]). Peinture et cinema. In: Qu’est‐ce que le cinéma? 187–192. Paris: Editions du Cerf. Bazin, A. (2007b [1956]). Un Film Bergsonien: Le Mystère Picasso. Qu’est‐ce que le cinéma?, pp. 193–202. Paris: Editions du Cerf. Bluher, D. and Thomas, F. (eds.) (2005). Le Court métrage français de 1948 à 1968. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Bolen, F. (1953). Le Film à la rencontre des arts plastiques. Le Film sur l’art: Panorama 1953. Paris: Unesco. Codelli, L. (2006). Un Sandwich par jour: Entretien avec Luciano Emmer. Positif 543: 100–105. Davay, P. (1949). Compelled to See. In: Films on Art, 16–17. Paris: UNESCO/Brussels: Editions de la connaissance. Döge, U. (2005). Kulturfilm als Aufgabe: Hans Cürlis (1889–1992). Berlin: CineGraph Babelsberg. Emmer, L. and Gras, E. (1947). The Film Renaissance in Italy. Hollywood Quarterly 2 (4): 353–358. Enwezor, O. (2008). Documentary/Vérité: Bio‐Politics, Human Rights, and the Figure of “Truth” in Contemporary Art. In: Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art #1: The Greenroom (eds. M. Lind and H. Steyerl), 62–103. Berlin: Sternberg Press. Fauvel, P. (2009). Le Mystère Picasso: De la Tyrannie de la réalité, en peinture, à la litanie de la peinture, en réalité. Positif: 96–99. Films on Art (1949). Paris: UNESCO. Films on Art (1951). Paris: UNESCO/Brussels: Les Arts plastiques. Francastel, P. (1951). A Teacher’s Point of View. Films on Art. Paris: Unesco/Brussels: Les Arts plastiques. Haesaerts, P. (1947/1948). Arts plastiques et camera. Festival (Cahier 4) Brussels. Also ­published in Arts de France 23–24 (1948), 25–31. Haesaerts, P. (1950). Sur la critique par le cinema. Le Film sur l’art 1950. Paris: UNESCO. Hayward, P. (1988). Introduction. In: Picture This: Media Representations of Visual Art and Artists (ed. P. Hayward). London: John Libbey. Jacobs, S. (2011a). Vasari in Hollywood: Artists and Biopics. In: Framing Pictures: Film and the Visual Arts, 38–64. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Jacobs, S. (2011b). Camera and Canvas: Emmer, Storck, Resnais and the Post‐war. In: Art Film. Framing Pictures: Film and the Visual Arts, 1–37. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Jacobs, S. (2013). Art & Cinema: Belgian Art Documentaries. Brussels: Cinematek. Jones, C.A. (1996). Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Knight, A. (1953). A Short History of Art Films. In: Films on Art 1952 (ed. W.M. Chapman), 8–9. New York: The American Federation of Arts. Koval, F. (1951). Interview with Emmer. Sight and Sound 19 (9): 354–356. Kracauer, S. (1960). Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lemaître, H. (1956). Beaux‐arts et cinema. Paris: Editions du Cerf. Liandrat‐Guigues, S. and Leutrat, J.‐L. (2006). Alain Resnais: Liaisons secrètes, accords vagabonds. Paris: Cahiers du cinéma.

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Loukopoulou, K. (2012). Museum at Large: Aesthetic Education through Film. In: Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States (eds. D. Orgeron, M. Orgeron and D. Streible), 356–376. New York: Oxford University Press. Maes, C. (2015). Paul Haesaerts et le film sur l’art: pour un cinéma‐critique. In: Le film sur l’art: Entre histoire de l’art et documentaire de creation (eds. V. Robert, L. Le Forestier and F. Albera), 153–164. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes. Margolis, H.F. (1947). Luciano Emmer and the Art Film. Sight and Sound 16 (61): 1–3. Mirams, G. (1950). Art and the Cinema. Design Review 3 (2): 39–41. Montgomery, H. and Covert, N. (1991). Art on Screen: Films and Television on Art: An  Overview. In: Art on Screen: A Directory of Films and Videos About the Visual Arts (ed. N. Covert). New York: The Metropolitan Museum. Odin, R. (1998). L’Age d’or du documentaire, vol. II. Paris: L’Harmattan. Pollock, G. (1980). Artists Mythologies and Media Genius: Madness and Art History. Screen XXI 3: 57–96. Pollock, G. (2000). Crows, Blossoms, and Lust for Death: Cinema and the Myth of Van Gogh the Modern Artist. In: Looking Back to the Future: Essays on Art, Life and Death. London: Routledge. Raczynski, A. (2013). The Moving Image: Expanded Documentary Praxis in Contemporary Art. Sztuka i Dokumentacja 9: 125–133. Revision: Art Programmes of European Television Stations. (1987). Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Savoy, B. (2014). Vom Faustkeil zur Handgranate: Filmpropaganda für die Berliner Museen 1934–1939. Köln: Böhlau Verlag. Scotini, M. (ed.) (2000). Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti and the Cinematic Nature of Vision. Milan: Charta. Scremin, P. (2005). Luciano Emmer: Récits sur l’art. Zeuxis: 55–62. Smith, D. (2004). Moving Pictures: The Art Documentaries of Alain Resnais and Henri‐ Georges Clouzot in Theoretical Context (Benjamin, Malraux and Bazin). Studies in European Cinema 1 (3): 163–173. Thiele, J. (1976). Das Kunstwerk im Film: Zur Problematik filmisher Präsentationsformen von Malerei und Grafik. Bern: Herbert Lang/Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Venturi, L. (1949). Italian Films on Art. In: Films on Art, 32–41. Paris: Unesco/Brussels: Editions de la connaissance. Wasson, H. (2011). Big, Fast Museums/Small, Slow Movies. In: Useful Cinema (eds. C. Acland and H. Wasson), 178–204. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wechsler, J. (1991). Art History and Films on Art. In: Art on Screen: A Directory of Films and Videos About the Visual Arts (ed. N. Covert). New York: The Metropolitan Museum. Wyver, J. (2007). Vision on: Film, Television and the Arts in Britain. London: Wallflower Press. Wyver, J. (2014). Television. In: Kenneth Clark: Looking for Civilisation (eds. C. Stephens and J.‐P. Stonard). London: Tate. Ziegler, R. (2003). Kunst und Architektur im Kulturfilm 1919–1945, 2003. Konstanz: UVK Verlaggesellschaft. Ziegler, R. (2005). Schaffende Hände: Die Kulturfilme von Hans Cürlis über bildende Kunst und Künstler. In: Geschichte des dokumentarischen Films in Deutschland. Band 2: Weimarer Republik 1918–1933 (eds. K. Kreimeier, A. Ehmann and J. Goergen), 219–227. Stuttgart: Reclam.

14

Documentary in the Age of Mass Mobility

Minzu wansui and the Epic Gesture of Ethnographic Propaganda Weihong Bao

University of California

I have a compound last name called wireless (wuxian) and my first name is ­electricity (dian). In 1895 Marconi delivered me to this world, In 1867 Maxwell already told my fortune In 1884 Hertz gave a thorough examination of my body. Young as I am, I have great ambitions. I often feel the constraint of the universe Within one second I can circle the earth seven times But how obnoxious is the Fata Morgana (ionosphere) in the sky It blocks my journey and forces me back to the earth. —Fan Houqin, “Autobiography of the Wireless”

Introduction A Chinese poem of 1942 titled “Autobiography of the Wireless” provides a vivid portrayal of wireless technology as a young and ambitious medium with mutating identities and a boundless future that finds only the sky, annoyingly, to be its limit (Fan et al. 1942).1 Professing eagerness to serve others, the medium, speaking in first person, boasts its versatility to deliver mail, broadcast music, report events, and, most amazingly, allow people to see the world from thousands of miles away. This latest metamorphosis of wireless technology, adding to its earlier manifestations as telegraph, telephone, and radio, is called dianshi (television), or qianliyan (thou­ sand‐mile eyes), as if the Daoist god of penetrating vision has now concretized itself A Companion to Documentary Film History, First Edition. Edited by Joshua Malitsky. © 2021 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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in a treasure box of vacuum tubes. Intriguingly, as our wireless protagonist proudly reveals television’s secrets and tricks, it takes great care not to address its senior col­ league, cinema, as a potential competitor. However, as it poses as a tool to expand cinema by broadcasting it everywhere, a subtle change of no small consequence is taking place. The ostensible neutral and dutiful vehicle of delivery has turned cin­ ema into its content and its extension. In this McLuhanist subversion of medium content from a matter of semantics to a mise‐en‐abyme of media whose material externality now becomes the content per se, the servant television (server) stands ready to repurpose its master/client cinema as a communications medium. As I write in the reign of the digital, a similar scenario is facing film scholars. The rise of new media has stimulated a simultaneous forward and backward swoop in media history, which folds film studies into a new constellation. Whereas this shifting context opens new scholarly vistas beyond charted territories in film studies, in its humbled reassessment in relation to and identification with other media, film studies is noticeably moving away from aesthetic inquiries to the externality of media, from semantic content to the material infrastructure of media. In the pursuit of multiple origins and heterogeneous identities of media, media archaeology has become a recog­ nizable branch of film studies. Partly inspired by early film studies, it aspires to inherit, as Thomas Elsaesser (2016) observes, a militancy of counterhistory in its resistance against the dominating logic of the digital despite its unwitting service as its ideology by reifying the new in celebrating the obsolescence of the old. However, the inherited militancy against such dominating logic has rarely gone beyond the black box of a vertical history. The primal scene of media competition in effect displaces the very real political, social, and institutional transformations ­taking place. In this context, an inquiry into the case of wartime Chongqing can be useful in helping us to rethink our own positions in participating in the discursive construct of media archaeology. Television turned out not to be the medium at work in wartime China to annihilate distance. A remote reality, television appeared more in news about places afar than as an everyday reality at home. Yet the poem, written in the midst of the prolonged Sino‐Japanese War, harnesses the desire of the time for a plastic, metamorphosing, and interconnected medium overcoming vast distance when the nation was put on the move. In reality, such a desire to cater to and cultivate mass mobility with media mobility was materialized by repositioning cinema in relation to a media ensemble of simultaneous communication. By introducing television not as a technical medium with a singular identity but as one stage or one aspect of a multifaceted, evolving, plastic medium that includes cinema, the poem suggests an alternative genealogy of cinema already in practice in wartime China, both in discourse and in practice. This essay will trace the changing conceptions and practice of cinema in China’s wartime hinterland to reframe an understudied chapter in documentary history. As I canvass in broad strokes the transformation of film production and exhibition practices that foreground an alternative genealogy of cinema in relation to electro­ magnetic media and an infrastructural model of cinema, the essay is meant to incite a critical rethinking of media archaeology’s methodological purchase and impasse. More specifically, I am interested in addressing two sets of issues: one concerns



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media archaeology as both method and (historical) ideology beyond the concern of  the digital; the other, which is much more challenging, is an experiment to bridge the ostensibly irreconcilable gap between hermeneutic and anti‐­hermeneutic approaches. The anti‐hermeneutic approach, now gaining ascendance in film ­studies, has incited a shift from aesthetic “content” to “infrastructure” as its object of inquiry. Although such a methodological shift places documentary film at its center and allows us to address a vast history of nontheatrical films hitherto eclipsed by our exclusive focus on theatrical cinema, it brings into question the extent to which the increasingly estranged film aesthetics and representation can be made relevant to this line of inquiry. I will attempt to bring together these two sets of concerns and place them in dia­ logue. Whereas I only outline in rough sketches the seismic shifts in hinterland film practices in wartime China, I fill them in with a more intimate case study to assess these changes on an experiential level. The case study centers on the making of a feature‐length ethnographic propaganda film by Zheng Junli, Minzu wansui (Long Live the Nation, 1943), long considered lost but recently rediscovered, that opens a unique window into the politics and poetics of documentary in China during the Sino‐Japanese War. By following the production of the film through the diary of the filmmaker, in conversation with cultural discourses and practices of propaganda and documentary, my essay will explore how Zheng’s film and diary entries both document and participate in traveling propaganda and reflect on the limit of its grand design. I tease out such a possibility of reflection by mapping the film’s “epic gestures,” a heuristic concept of reflexivity in dialogue with media theorists Niklas Luhmann and Vilem Flusser. Tracing their neocybernetic and phenomenological reconceptions of medium, form, and meaning that destabilizes the distinction between the aesthetic and material‐technological, I reconsider “content” not as a static message but a tem­ poral process of situated encounter entailing plural possibilities of reflexivity. The “epic gesture” of the film illustrates one of such reflexivities, an aesthetic construct allowing insight into the design and fissures of propaganda built on a didactic and performative mode of reflexivity. By combining these critical reconceptions with attention to the film’s form and situation of production, I experiment with an inter­ pretive model of media analysis beyond a causal account. This essay thus builds on and beyond a case study in an effort to bring the insight of media archaeology to aesthetic practices and vice versa.

The Age of Documentary The Sino‐Japanese War no doubt marked a watershed in Chinese film history. If Shanghai was the center of film production and exhibition up to 1937, the eruption of the war split China into roughly five geopolitical zones under Japanese, British‐ American, British, Communist, and Nationalist regimes, each cultivating a distinct film culture centered respectively in Manchuria, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Yan’an, and

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Chongqing. The Nationalist government relocated its capital from Nanjing to Chongqing, a treaty port (opened in 1891) upstream along the Yangtze River that quickly emerged as a new center of film culture radiating over the vast hinterland in southwest and northwest China. In the wartime hinterland, documentary film rose to prominence. Following the retreat of the Nationalist regime from the coastal cities to the hinterland, the film industry, now owned by the state, transformed its pro­ duction from commercial‐oriented films to state‐sponsored wartime propaganda. Documentary films – encompassing newsreel, science and educational films, ­military training films, and ethnography – constituted the great majority of film production. These films, bringing news from the battlefield and images of ethnic frontiers, scenes of industrial production, education, and scientific research, and clips of mass parades and political rallies, were frequently screened alongside feature films in the city as well as in the countryside, in the military and abroad, enabled by civilian and military mobile projection teams that spread across the country reach­ ing the remote areas of China. The rise of documentary under the Nationalist regime is indebted to a number of factors not the least of which is a mixed legacy of commercial, military, and educa­ tional cinema that places documentary in the spotlight.2 The three studios in Chongqing – the Central Film Studio (Zhongdian), the China Motion Picture Corporation (Zhongzhi), and the Educational Studio (Zhongjiao, established in 1941) – all originated from military or educational cinema affiliated with the state under the direction, respectively, of the Central Information Bureau, the Political Department of the Military Commission, and the Ministry of Education. The Central Film Studio and the China Motion Picture Corporation evolved from two prewar military filming groups under the Nationalist Party in Nanjing (1933) and Hankou (1935) devoted to newsreel and documentary production and traveling film projection within the military (Jiang 1941: 70; Zheng 1941: 51). The Educational Studio, for its part, solidified the thread of educational cinema that emerged in China in the late 1910s and gained cultural recognition in the 1930s, culminating in the Ministry of Education’s sponsorship of film production and itinerant film exhi­ bition in the hinterlands beginning in 1935.3 In addition to these three studios, Jinling University relocated inland and expanded its pioneering audiovisual educa­ tion program that began in the early 1920s to comprehensive programs in film engi­ neering, production, and mobile projection. These state studios and cultural institutions, with their military and educational origins as well as their experience in documentary production and traveling exhibitions, changed the nature and out­ come of film production and exhibition in the Nationalist hinterland. Commercial cinema was now filtered through the rising prominence of military and educational cinema, an area of film history long considered a “minor” tradition escaping scholarly attention. In their wartime expansion and retreat inland, both Zhongdian and Zhongzhi absorbed a substantial number of filmmakers and drama­ tists from the commercial film industry and the dramatic stage. Fifteen hundred employees from the Shanghai film industry – directors, screenwriters, actors, pro­ jectionists, and stage hands – migrated to the hinterland (Lo 1943). The two studios



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made a small number of feature films, but their collaboration with filmmakers from the commercial industry was a conflict‐ridden process. Negotiating different train­ ing, interests, and political orientations, such collaborations combined utopian impulses with a highly instrumental use of film while subjecting film productions to in‐house censorship and the material, technological, and financial constraints of wartime. Under the wartime imperative of mass mobilization, a profound transformation of cinema was taking place in the hinterlands. The wartime slogan calling for c­ inema to “go to the countryside, join the army, and travel abroad” testifies to the ambition for broad reach and the challenge that entailed. The main challenge arose from propaganda’s diverse audience as well as its plural agenda serving military defense, mass enlightenment, national citizenship, and international alliance. The goal of propaganda was threefold: to get the message across, to move the masses emotionally and transform them into agents of action, and to physically reach the civilians and military personnel dispersed in cities, the countryside, and abroad. These seemingly simple demands on cinema’s capacity to signify, affect, and circulate entailed a rather complex negotiation with the conventions of cinema in terms of film language, aesthetics, and modes of exhibition. Challenging classic Hollywood cinema’s intelligibility for a large and diverse audi­ ence and reflecting on the legacy of Shanghai cinema, filmmakers in Chongqing experimented with alternative film aesthetics and techniques, debated the priority between urban and rural audiences, and searched for a “cinematic Esperanto” that could garner international sympathy4 and bridge disparate audiences (Xu 1941: 34). To get their message across, filmmakers, critics, and exhibitors sought an alternative to Hollywood in reaching the widest audience, not by standardizing modes of exhi­ bition and spectatorship, but by making them flexible enough to accommodate the greater diversity of viewers. Live narration and subtitling in Chinese characters helped overcome the distinct dialects of the audience group; use of documentary footage and long takes helped audiences to understand dramatic situations; recy­ cling of folkloric narratives and generic elements from earlier popular films helped ground the popularity of the films. To move the audience emotionally, the filmmak­ ers resorted to striking imagery, scenes of brutal violence, and expressive modes of performance and editing. These demands on cinema’s message and affective impact saw the convergence of documentary and feature film, facilitated by the conflict‐ridden symbiosis of com­ mercial, military, and educational cinema. Feature films tilted heavily toward docu­ mentary style and reconstruction of historic events. Babai zhuangshi (Eight Hundred Heroes; dir. Ying Yunwei, 1938), for instance, was based on the Shanghai battle of November 1937, whereas Shengli jinxingqu (Marches of Victory; dir. Shi Dongshan, 1940) was based on the 1939 battle in northern Hunan. The latter film was shot at the site of the battle with fictional episodes based on interviews with local people conducted by famed dramatist Tian Han (1981), the author of the screenplay. From time to time, documentary shots of Nationalist officers who served in the war were spliced into the film; one newspaper review calls the film a “documentary on a grand

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scale” (daxing jilupian) (Ling 1941). The conflation of documentary and fiction film was embraced by film publicity campaigns. In photographic advertisements pro­ duced by Zhongzhi and Zhongdian, film stills from documentary and feature films were deliberately juxtaposed with captions highlighting their convergence: “The fake Mongolian woman Li Lili in Saishang fengyun (Trouble in the Frontier)” was contrasted with “the real Mongolian woman in Minzu wansui”; the “fake Japanese in Riben jiandie (Japanese Spy)” was compared with “the real Japanese in Dongya zhiguang (The Light of East Asia)” (Zhongguo dianying, 1941).5 Amidst the rising popularity and significance of documentary in the wartime hin­ terland, a distinct approach to documentary called “epic documentary,” or jilushi shide dianying, emerged in documentary theory and practice. Reappropriating epic poetry as a trope of documentary, epic documentary cut across fiction and docu­ mentary film to combine poetic narration with the authority and authenticity of documentary image serving the state‐building project of mass enlightenment, mili­ tary defense, and political mobilization. The writer Ji Nazhe (1941) observed that documentary film is different from newsreels and educational film. Whereas he compares educational film to illustrated textbooks and considers newsreels (xinwen dianying) the cinematic equivalent of radio and newspapers, hence better suited for television broadcasting given their time value, documentary film, he states, should feature topics of more durable interest with a distinctive and deliberate perspective and systematic organization through more versatile camera work and editing. These films should not only document the present but also include the past and anticipate the future to give the audience a sense of historical continuity. It was in this context that he proposed the “epic documentary” as a promising new type of documentary combining documentary and dramatic film.6 Similarly, the filmmaker and engineer Luo Jingyu coined the compound term “newsreel documentary” to propose a highly constructed documentary that allows radical manipulation of space and time, expressive editing, and use of found footage to produce a documentary that is both “truthful and moving” to serve as affectively charged, ideologically effective propa­ ganda in the service of the war.

The Dream of Mass Mobility: Wireless Propaganda In addition to its signifying and affective desire to get the message across and move the masses, propaganda’s third target, to physically reach the masses, involved a fun­ damental transformation of cinema in terms of distribution and exhibition. For propaganda to achieve the broadest reach possible not only to urbanites but also to those who remained stuck in rural and remote areas, those residing in regions beyond the Nationalist regime, and those living overseas, mass media itself had to become increasingly mobile, moving beyond existing institutional confines and conventional spaces of exhibition. Propaganda in this sense is a theory and practice of circulation, addressing mass media’s core concerns of reproducibility and mobil­ ity as a product of modern industrial technologies of reproduction and circulation.



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Two vocal advocates of nontheatrical film distribution and exhibition were closely related to the history of military and education cinema, on one hand, and wireless technology, on the other. Luo Jingyu, a sound and wireless engineer from prewar Shanghai who was made vice president of Zhongzhi in wartime Chongqing, pro­ posed a new conception of cinema as infrastructure. Luo believed that cinema should be treated as a state‐owned enterprise similar to railways, the telegraph, grain, and the water supply (Luo 1941: 78). Placing cinema in the same category as transportation, communication, and energy dispersal, Luo understood cinema as “spiritual food” to be transmitted across space but also as the very infrastructural medium that made the movement across space possible, thus effectively construct­ ing a space of the nation, linking the city to the country across the hinterland. Luo thus transforms the focus of cinema from the individual text to ubiquitous content and a vehicle of mobility. Luo’s conception was intimately related to his earlier experience in wireless ­technology and military cinema. Trained in Shanghai in the 1920s in wireless com­ munications and engineering, Luo worked alongside his fellow provincial Zheng Yongzhi as a journalist in 1931 and published extensively on wireless technology, including an exposition on wireless technology in Shanghai.7 In 1933, he followed Zheng to Jiangxi province, where Zheng headed a Film Section established under the Nanchang Field Headquarters Political Training Office (Nanchang xingying zhengxunchu), to produce and exhibit anticommunist and military training films as well as commercial films from Shanghai.8 Luo took charge of the Film Technology Department and followed Zheng in 1935 first to Lushan (Jiangxi), and then to Wuchang (Hubei), to continue producing newsreel and military training films and film exhibitions. In this process, the Film Section expanded and developed into a fully‐fledged film studio in 1935, with facilities and spaces for film shooting, sound recording, printing, and exhibition. The studio, renamed China Motion Picture Corporation (Zhongzhi) in 1937, appointed Zheng as its president and Luo its vice president and relocated to Chongqing the next year, becoming the major film studio in Chongqing. Luo’s role as a wireless technician and military film exhibitor contributed to his vision of wartime cinema as he himself became a techno‐bureaucrat. The emphasis on the transmission and mobility of film that gives priority to cinema’s infrastruc­ tural set up over its semantic content is inseparable from his experience with wire­ less technology and military mobility, both of which exercise power through spatial conquest and annihilation of distance. After the Pearl Harbor attack, Luo would stay in the United States for four years to aid China’s war effort through exhibiting and lecturing on Chinese films while purchasing film production and projection equip­ ment as well as making and importing military training films. Complementing Luo’s conception of cinema as infrastructure, a new understand­ ing of cinema as a broadcast medium was proposed in connection with wireless tech­ nology. In 1942, Sun Mingjin, an early participant in Jinling University’s audiovisual program as educator, engineer, and filmmaker, founded the journal Dianying yu boyin (Film and Broadcasting), which explicitly linked the two media together.

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The son of a Jesuit missionary who projected films for spreading religious propa­ ganda in the early 1900s, Sun promoted science and educational cinema in the 1930s and excelled in filmmaking, winning a prize for his documentary Nongren zhichun (Farmers in Springtime, 1937) at the Brussels International Exposition. An enthusi­ ast of television who helped assemble the first television set in China in 1934, Sun carried his fervor for this new technical medium into the wartime hinterland. Film and Broadcasting published around 28 articles on television, many of which were translated from English‐language sources. In these writings and translations, Sun and his fellow educators shared their ambivalence with their international colleagues about television’s ontological and operational relationship with cinema. Like the poem “Autobiography of the Wireless” published in Film and Broadcasting and that begins this essay, they pose the novice medium alternately as cinema’s challenge and its extension. In an elaborate essay on television that Sun translated from the British technical writer M. G. Scroggie, ­television was seen as fundamentally different from cinema. Television, as Sun explains in a translator’s note, was “distant seeing” (yuanshi) etymologically. As Scroggie elaborates, television was an enabling medium of simultaneous transmis­ sion allowing, paradoxically through the medium of wireless technology, “direct access” to events from distant places. In contrast, film was considered a medium of storage and retrieval (Sun 1943: 7). Whereas television was recognized for its medi­ ated immediacy, cinema was marked by its mixed temporality, made at one moment but enlivened by the future. This distinction between television and film as simultaneous versus virtual media sits at the heart of the claim of “liveness” of televisual media that, as Jane Feuer and John Caldwell forcefully argue, is more the combined effect of technological perfor­ mance, industrial‐institutional discourse, and audience interpretation and construc­ tion (Feuer 1983: 14, 16; Caldwell 1995: 28–29).9 However, the ideology of liveness has resurged in the renewed dichotomy in today’s conception of media in terms of technics of time. Bruce Clarke, for instance, distinguishes communication technol­ ogy that operates in real time (synchronous and sequential temporality) from media technology that constructs ­virtual time. The latter involves processes such as “inscrip­ tion, storage, and retrieval” that could “suspend or manipulate the time of commu­ nication” (Clarke 2010: 135). Similarly, Lev Manovich separates “representational technologies” (film, audio, video, and digital storage formats) from “real‐time com­ munication technologies” (everything starting with tele‐, such as telegraph, telephone, television, telepresence). While Clarke recognizes that such a distinction cannot be maintained by contemporary digital media, which both transmit and store infor­ mation, the distinction was historically always fraught, more an industrial and com­ mercial ideology than the reality of actual operation. “Real‐time communication technologies” such as radio and television had routinely edited and broadcasted prerecorded material despite their claim of liveness, and “representational” technolo­ gies such as film had crafted an identity of real‐time communication since the 1900s through visual tropes and aesthetic strategies. Film and television historians in North America and Europe are identifying a long history and an alternative genealogy of



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film as a medium of simultaneity and live transmissions, using aesthetic strategies to evoke the effects of telephone, telegraph, radio, and ­television in such a way that, as Michael Cowan points out, they “helped to fashion a horizon of ‘televisual expectations.’”10 China had alternative medium aspirations as well. As early as 1929, films such as Xuezhong guchu (Orphan of the Storm; dir. Zhang Huimin, 1929) were already con­ cocting live audiovisual broadcasting through cross‐cutting and film within a film.11 In the 1930s, a number of films – Sange modeng nüxing (Three Modern Women; dir. Bu Wanchang, 1933), Xin nüxing (New Woman; dir. Cai Chusheng, 1935), Dushi fengguang (Scenes of City Life; dir. Yuan Muzhi, 1935), Yasui qian (New Year Coin; dir. Zhang Shichuan, 1937) – fashioned cinema after radio broadcasting and the telephone, through editing, mise‐en‐scène, and soundscape, as figures of cinema’s aspired‐for identity as telecommunications media. These interests carried over into wartime, although with a more pronounced ide­ ology. If films from the interwar period explore the spontaneous formation of a commercial horizon, wartime hinterland films explicitly exploit such wireless aspi­ rations for the consolidation of a nationalist community. In 1938, the docudrama Babai zhuangshi featured an elaborate montage sequence showing news of Shanghai’s temporary triumph against Japanese invasion spreading through a variety of media from daily papers to various modes of telecommunication. The frantic superimposi­ tions and dissolves of news dissemination – moving from revolving printers to Chinese and English newspapers to newspaper vendors on the street, as well as to telephones, telegraphs, and radios – harness the frenzy and urgency to conjoin the manual, mechanical, and electronic forces of the modern institution of the news media, from shouting to paper‐based newspapers, to contemporary communica­ tions media, into a conglomerate media force reshaping reality. The news media was portrayed as both directional and spherical, moving from various hands yet forming an overwhelming environment to forge a nationalist community. These constructions of cinema as an invisible glue and magical processor to con­ join media old and new provide media‐conscious intertexts to feature films such as Bao jiaxiang (Defending Our Hometown; dir. He Feiguang, 1939), where modern media technology remains hidden but operates as an organizational principle. Shot on location with natural light, frequent use of long shots and long takes, and a mix of professional and nonprofessional actors, the film’s documentary realism is sus­ tained by its consistent construction of communal seeing and communication through an aesthetics of relay and simultaneity. In one sequence, the usual arrange­ ment of point‐of‐view shot is replaced with successive shots staging the scenes of watching, perpetually deferring the object from the subject’s and spectator’s gaze. The relay of watching prevents the suturing of an individual subject in favor of ­forming a collective body of constantly renewed perception; this resistance against closure, interestingly, is compensated by another scene when shots of a ringing tri­ angle, a rural and old form of “wireless” communication, is intercut with shots of villagers assembling from various directions under the bell of warning. On one hand, Bao jiaxiang’s creative use of film editing and camera movement, especially

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tracking and panning shots, establishes a continuous space through consistent direc­ tionality that resists a sense of closure and totality; on the other, the cross‐­cutting between the vibrating triangle and the onrush of people creates a summoning albeit hollow center. The dual organizational modes of relays and simultaneity create a paradoxical time–space as ever unfolding yet centripetal, betraying the gap between two models of wireless communication. One of such models is linear and based on an epistolary conception of communication as a unidirectional t­ ransmission of the message from the sender to the receiver; the other model is environmental, con­ ceiving wireless communication as a sphere of dissemination and convergence to summon a community as a shared, simultaneous, and relational space. For Sun and his fellow educators, the crucial connection between film and televi­ sion/wireless technology is film exhibition. A model of broadcast media was in prac­ tice which repositioned cinema in relation to other media in terms of simultaneous dissemination and instantaneous transmission. Beyond theatrical exhibition in the cities, mobile projection units became a more flexible and widespread mode of film presentation, shown often in conjunction with slide shows, live performances, ­phonograph demonstrations of musical recordings, and radio broadcasting. Just as poetry recited at mass rallies, drama performed on the street, paintings, cartoons, and writings put up on public walls, and photographs dropped from airplanes, cin­ ema was embedded in a media ensemble of heightened mobility, constituting a propaganda sphere like radio waves permeating the air. Wireless technology, in a literal and figural sense, provided the technological trope and master metaphor for an intense remediation between old and new media for the widest reach and vastest mobility.12 These substantial transformations placed documentary at the crossroads of two different conceptions and practices of cinema. In terms of film language and aes­ thetics, feature film and documentary converged in favoring indexical realism to enhance their affective impact and intelligibility. In film distribution and exhibition, however, documentary overlapped with feature films for very different reasons. The hitherto minor tradition of nontheatrical exhibition closely associated with military and education cinema now gained wide application given its advantage in cost, ­flexibility, and reach beyond established theatrical chains limited to urban centers. In effect, documentary and feature films converged in exhibition format regardless of their content. To say nontheatrical cinema was a minor tradition is to reify the dominant narrative that privileges theatrical film exhibition by discounting the his­ tory of itinerant film exhibition that persisted as a vehicle of both commercial and noncommercial cinema even after the institutionalization of theatrical exhibition. To be more precise, the emphasis on exhibition now laid bare cinema’s infrastruc­ tural nature, previously considered functional background, as the de facto material support. If propaganda operates around its tripartite goal of realizing a medium’s message, affect, and transmission, the question of transmission potentially disrupts the established dichotomy and the hierarchy between content and form/material support in questioning what constitutes the content itself. We are arriving at a posi­ tion much closer to McLuhan in supplanting the content by the medium. Or, in Luo



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Jingyu’s infrastructural model, cinema is not just the ubiquitous “spiritual food” or representation, but the infrastructure itself, the material modes of exhibition. These two distinct approaches to cinema, seen with historical hindsight, corre­ spond to two paradigms of film and media studies, one emphasizing media signifi­ cation, the other media presence. Or, put more polemically, the rise of media studies, now credited to figures such as Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan, signaled a shift from inquiries of representation to those of the material constituents of media. McLuhan’s famous notion of medium as the message, or a medium’s content as another medium, seeks to deprive the “interiority” of a medium by supplanting rep­ resentational content with medium externality and ecology. This approach has been embraced by later generations of media scholars in the fields of media archaeology and new media studies. From Kittler’s anti‐hermeneutic approach that resists inquir­ ies of “meaning” to new media scholars’ claims such as “there is no content.”13 The most recent attempts at a “post‐hermeneutic” approach, as embodied by the German brand of “cultural techniques,” has yet to define its clear departure from the anti‐­ hermeneutic. Despite its critique of Kittler, cultural techniques equally distance themselves from the interpretive approach to meaning in favor of a causal account via technical processes in place of the technological hardware.14 The increasing ­distancing from hermeneutic approaches now constitutes part of the reorientation of film studies as media studies. Interest in exhibition studies, nontheatrical cinema, and infrastructural and ecological approaches is gaining footing and opening up a wide horizon of research as our field transforms. Interestingly, such a reorientation of film as media seems to reify the distinction between Manovich’s “representational” and “real‐time communications” media. What, then, do we do with historical practices that complicate such distinctions, and how do we understand such complications that leave room for reflections on politi­ cal and institutional constitutions of changing conceptions and practices of film? What do we do with the “representational contents” of these historical products, and how do they relate to our concerns on technology? Neither Luo Jinyu’s infrastruc­ ture proposal nor Sun Mingjin’s model of broadcast media says much about film’s content or aesthetics which cannot be disimbricated from their material constitu­ ents yet not reduced to them. For these questions, I find the wartime making of the feature‐length documentary Minzu wansui (1943) to be a richly complex case that affords us the opportunity to consider how a hermeneutic and a nonhermeneutic approach could be placed in a meaningful relationship.

Minzu wansui (Long Live the Nation): Diary of an Artist Filmmaker In April 1939, Zheng Junli (1911–1969), a famed stage and screen actor from Shanghai, joined a military education troupe heading toward the multiethnic region of northwest China. The veteran actor, who was trained in dramatist Tian Han’s

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famed Southern Art Society in Shanghai in the 1920s and starred in celebrated left‐ wing films such as Huoshan qingxue (The Blood of Passion on the Volcano; dir. Sun Yu, 1932), Dalu (The Big Road; dir. Sun Yu, 1933), Ye meigui (The Wild Rose; dir. Sun Yu, 1933), and Xin nüxing (The New Woman; dir. Cai Chusheng, 1934), had followed the westward exile of Shanghai filmmakers to Wuhan and Chongqing. Zheng sought a position under the Nationalist government’s Military Affairs Commission (MAC), whose Political Department had sheltered many such filmmakers, dramatists, and artists by organizing them into a new cultural force for wartime mass mobilization. As part of a propaganda team dispatched by the MAC to mobilize the ethnically diverse and politically complex regions in northwest China, Zheng, hoping to hone his filmmaking skills, had proposed to Zhongzhi to make a documentary along the way. Armed with one 35 mm three‐lens Eyemo camera and a meager film stock of 2000 feet to start with, the small film crew consisted of one director, two cinematog­ raphers (Yao Shiquan and Gu Bingzhi), one sound engineer (Luo Jizhi), and one assistant. The troupe, a total of 33 people when they departed from Chongqing, including dramatists, artists, and musicians, plodded across five provinces (Shanxi, Gansu, Ningxia, Qinghai, and Inner Mongolia) in the northwest and returned nine months later after having exhausted their resources. The documentary mission was widely publicized during their travel and gained additional support, allowing the crew to return to the northwest in 1940. The film crew further expanded their expe­ dition to southwest China and eventually ventured abroad to India and Burma. The film Minzu wansui was completed and shown in 1943 and quickly gained broad acclaim, warranting an obligatory albeit cursory treatment in Chinese documentary film history after the film’s long absence. The film’s recent rediscovery, along with Zheng Junli’s newly published diary, which documents the first nine months of film shooting, lends an intimate view of the experience of the propaganda team in its encounter of racial and ethnic tensions, political and military strife, material and technological constraints, and personal and physical challenges during the film’s production (Zheng 1939).15 Reading the diary against the rediscovered film in conversation with cultural discourses and practices of propaganda and documentary, we can remap the dreams and fissures of “wireless” propaganda by attending to their layered tensions, contradictions, and complexities. This exercise reveals the gap between technological design – a domi­ nant focus in media archaeological approaches – and its historical operations that resist clean‐cut paradigmatic shifts and are intricately interwoven with the dynamic of politics and power, race, and ethnicity. Zheng and his team set out not on a singular mission of film production, but as a multimedia propaganda team that conjoined film projection, dramatic and musical performance, poster painting, and the inscribing of slogans on the wall. During the film shooting, Zheng was also busy translating Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares (1936) from English to Chinese while consulting the Russian version using a Russian‐English dictionary. On a productive day (especially early in his journey), he would be involved in the quadruple task of film shooting, writing, and disseminating propaganda slogans in a designated area, film screening and



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evening meetings for the propaganda team, and nightly translation of Stanislavski. On less productive days, especially as time progressed and the work became increasingly delayed owing to shortage of film stock and confinement at warlord Ma Bufang’s military headquarters, Zheng became involved with local perfor­ mance scenes, especially by promoting modern drama as director of the Children’s Drama Troupe and of local amateur drama societies. His days would be filled with voracious reading, letter writing, script writing and revision, and learning Russian, flavored with heavy drinking, eating, and spending time with his fellow musician and artist friends. Shortage of film stock and the suffering of disease, boredom, homesickness, and loneliness made the long journey a daily struggle. If the team’s multimedia mission was able to realize the dream of “wireless” propaganda by conjoining old and new technologies, these difficulties reveal the fissures between the design and the actual practice of propaganda of which the documentary was an integral part. Perhaps the biggest contrast to the smooth design of “wireless” propaganda in annihilating distance was the physical challenge of crossing over these distances made up of treacherous lands, rivers, mountains, grasslands, and deserts. Zheng’s teammate, artistic designer Han Shangyi (1991: 141), accounts for the medley of vehicles through which they covered such distances: feet, oxen‐pulled carts, camels, boats, and floats made of sheep skins. Even the modern vehicle, the truck, constantly broke down for reasons of mechanics, gas supply, road conditions, and labor dis­ putes. The troupe, affiliated under the MAC’s “Northwest Mobile Education” (Xibei xunhui jiaoyu) section, experienced the dangers and thrill of mobility from the moment they departed from Chongqing with 3500 kilograms of equipment to trans­ port under the threat of aerial bombing. Riding with his team members on a Soviet‐ made truck loaded with grenades and forbidden to smoke, Zheng thought to himself, “Everything might as well explode!” (Zheng 1939: 4). The physical challenges of transportation, or jiaotong, a term that also applies to modern communications technology, are often masked by the final product of the film, which approximates the fraught notion of mobile media and the ideological fantasy of wireless propaganda through its aesthetic construction. This construct of facile mobility is seen from the very beginning of Minzu wansui, which flaunts cin­ ema’s ability to traverse and reorganize vast time and space into a simultaneous nation sharing the same mythical origin. The film indeed showcases a variety of means of transportation, opening the credits with a montage sequence of a camel train traveling through the desert, followed by shots of the film crew walking across the Gobi Desert and riding on galloping camels, and later with images of a bamboo float crossing the river and Chinese sailing boats (junks) dotting a harbor. Intercut with sublime landscapes and iconic historical sites and buildings – the religious tem­ ples in Yunnan, Hangzhou (Liuhe Pagoda), and Beijing (Hall of Heaven) – these aestheticized shots display the pleasure and beauty of movement, underscoring the miraculous reach of mobility rather than its physical challenges, rendering film ­editing as an analogous technique of wirelessness linking diverse landscapes in a simultaneous space.

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Despite the frontier imagery of the desert that sets the scene for the credit sequence, the film’s first sequence opens with the Great Wall. Framed by one of its archways, the winding wall serves to gird the ensuing shots of travel across distinct cultural and natural landscapes, curving back at the end of the sequence to a staged scene of a man tolling a bell before dissolving to shots of the Tomb of the Yellow Emperor, allegedly the ancestor of Han Chinese. These last two scenes, both staged and shot in the studio, gesture to anchor the ever‐expanding landscape at a fictional site and time long mythologized as the origin of ethnic Han Chinese. The Great Wall and the Yellow Emperor Tomb thus provide a spatial and temporal frame of national unity, while the ancient bell awakens the slumbering people and land to the present, marked as a time of crisis. This spatial and temporal frame both subsumes the shots of boundless landscape and travel and positions them in tension with the frame, rendering them simultaneously meaningful and excessive, inciting a desire for both containment and wandering, like the marvelous cloud, a ubiquitous and metamor­ phosing image of mobility that floats quietly across the sky and across almost each frame. The cloud eventually crosses over to the next sequence with the camera pan­ ning over the landscape that introduces Chiang Kai‐shek speaking on the wireless radio receiver, literalizing wireless technology as remediated human voice (one of the oldest distant communication technologies), a mythical presence in a simultane­ ous space–time now subsumed under a nationalist ideology. This elaborate opening of the film characterizes Minzu wansui as a highly con­ structed documentary whose complex temporality and spatial imagination are caught in the tension between simultaneity, circularity, and linearity, motion and stasis, unity and disparity, containment and excess. The film’s triple orders of nature, culture, and cosmos as well as its shuttling between location and studio shots, docu­ mentary record and dramatic reenactment, mark the film’s construct as akin to the aspirations of “epic documentary” discussed above: a poetic document between fic­ tion and documentary that takes full advantage of aesthetic possibilities – image selection and composition, narrative construction, editing, and postproduction effects – unconstrained by parameters and dogmas of indexical realism. To be sure, we could easily dismiss the film as a piece of propaganda not atypical of documentaries produced in the same period across Europe, North America, and Asia, across Allied and Fascist regimes, whose entanglement with modernist and avant‐garde art runs deep and yet whose unabashed aesthetic manipulations against the grain of indexical realism and its ethical claims become particularly problematic in light of these films’ service to explicit ideological agendas and masculinist grandi­ osity. What interests me, however, is how the film’s “epic gestures,” its complex aes­ thetic construct – which I will discuss in detail – affords the opportunity to explore the thorny issue of propaganda, not simply as an integral yet understudied part of documentary film history but also as a challenge to the methodological impasse of media archaeology. In this sense I would like to explore the two‐way traffic between media archaeological and aesthetic approaches to film. If conceptions of propaganda as “valueless” or “empty” content potentially justifies the media archaeological and  infrastructural approaches to such documentaries, whose “meanings” are



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determined by the material operations of film exhibition networks, their aesthetic form questions such assumptions and the sets of binary distinctions they presup­ pose. To begin this exploration, I would like to consider propaganda in relation to form and meaning reconceived through systems thinking and phenomenology.

The Gesture of Filming: Medium, Form, Meaning Although propaganda has often been associated with ideological “content,” I try to reconceive it through the wartime mass mobilization in China, as a triple problem­ atic of message, affect, and mobility.16 This affords us the opportunity to complicate the distinctions between technology and techniques, semantic content and materi­ ality of technology, aesthetic layout and infrastructural configuration. My point of entry is to revisit aesthetics as a matter of technics that reconnects the two sides of these rather entrenched distinctions despite our common dispositions to align aes­ thetics with the ephemeral side. Seen in this light, the film’s aesthetic construct opens up plural possibilities of reflexivity both because of the intimate connections across these pairs of distinctions and their tangible gaps, thus allowing glimpses of the material operation of propaganda and its opaque transparency through which other aspects of reality emerge. My approach to the film’s “content” is thus not in terms of a static entity or a “message” but as a mobile operation, a plural gesture, epic in outlook but pregnant with tensions and contradictions. My understanding of form is not as a static and rigid structure but as a mobile operation that connects medium on the one hand and meaning on the other. Niklas Luhmann provides a particularly useful conception to unsettle the distinctions between medium, form, and meaning, precisely because their difference is not a matter of essence but of distinction itself. For Luhmann, the distinction between medium and form is internal – both share the same distinction as a coupling of ele­ ments and differ only by degrees, one (form) being a tighter and the other (media) a looser coupling of elements (Luhmann  1995: 102–103). Light as a medium, for instance, is for Luhmann nothing but a construct to distinguish between lightness and darkness. In this sense, Luhmann argues, medium is always already a form, a distinction. This conception of medium and form thus makes it possible to consider their mutual convertibility: form can turn into medium if form can provide a space and environment as in the case of a play script allowing multiple renditions; con­ versely, a medium can turn into form if the medium transforms into elements of distinction and thus introduces a difference (Luhmann  1995: 108–109). In other words, medium becomes mediation (of form) instead of an object. Under such a neocybernetic conception, it makes no sense to consider form in terms of the distinction between material and ephemeral, intrinsic and extrinsic. The flexible medium/form distinction thus serves as a radical alternative to our habitual distinctions – substance/accidence, object/properties, internal/external, subject/object (Luhmann 1995: 102). As Luhmann suggests, “No form ever expresses the ‘essence’ of the medium – what matters is the distinction of medium/form,

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which  itself is a form with two‐sidedness, one of which (form) contains itself ” (Luhmann 1995: 104). By breaking down the essential distinction between form and medium to a matter of distinction and a changing coupling of elements for different functions, we can thus debunk the dominant approach of media studies that dis­ places “content” by material externality and operation, and thus reify the binary between matter and form. Instead, “content” itself needs to be rethought so that it is not viewed as manifest and static “meaning,” an object interior to its material exte­ rior. Meaning, Luhmann argues, is nothing but “temporal processing.” The world, as he observes, is never accessible as a unity, whole, “all at once” but “available only as a condition and domain for the temporal processing of meaning” (Luhmann 1995: 107). In this sense, Luhmann (1995: 107) considers meaning the most general medium “that makes both psychic and social systems possible and is essential to their functioning.” Meaning, in other words, is not outside or the effect of form or medium, but the operation of them as such. In this sense, it is useful to consider form/meaning as a kind of gesture, a ­movement in time that establishes a dynamic, changing relationality. Such a notion of meaning as gesture is akin to that of Vilém Flusser, who, mindful of the neocybernetic dis­ course of systems theory such as Luhmann’s, reconceives medium, form, and mean­ ing with a similar debunking of the Cartesian notion of object. Flusser, however, approaches the questions from a phenomenological perspective that investigates technical media with a strong humanist interest in the questions of futurity and freedom. Perhaps it is for this reason Flusser investigates meaning in terms of the gesture, that is, embodied movement increasingly attached to technology that com­ plicates intention with codified signs and technical process. Flusser thus maintains a degree of ambiguity between the human body and technological apparatus. Although he asserts the human in terms of intentionality and freedom, he ­recognizes that intentionality is not a pregiven but realized only through a material process of execution. For Flusser, who considers meaning as technologized, embodied movement that involves not only technical media but also ancient techniques of speaking, writing, painting, and everyday techniques such as smoking and shaving, gesture calls for a theory of interpretation beyond a causal explanation. Gesture, as he puts it, “is the movement of a body or of a tool connected to the body for which there is no satisfac­ tory causal explanation” (Flusser 2014: 2). If gesture, as a node or network of dynamic movement, connects the question of intentionality with that of “significance” and interpretation, meaning has to be discovered. In other words, Flusser explains, ges­ ture as symbolic, not just codified movement inserts a wedge in the causal link – a gesture of pain in its codified form of pain, for instance, makes the fact and causality of pain doubtful. Conceived beyond a causal account, the symbolic movement of gesture concerned with meaning/significance and representation is that of expression and articulation as active rather than passive movement. To Flusser it is crucial to consider the mode of temporality for gesture, or mean­ ingful movement, as a future‐oriented tendency contained in each separate phase and as a whole not exhausted by causal explanation. Painting, for instance, is for



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Flusser such a gesture – the gesture is both tendency and act of articulation in time and the end result. In other words, this futurity is the source of “freedom” for gesture in the sense that it is a free movement whose meaning only comes from the future (Flusser 2014: 63–64). I would push Flusser’s argument further by adding that, in contrast to a teleology, futurity should be seen as plural and undetermined as the movement’s destinations are. These include not only the end product of film but how it can reach different audiences and interpretations and become available for different times, space, and social groups as well as conceptual frameworks. Flusser’s conception of meaning in relation to movement, technology, and time echoes Luhmann’s account of meaning as temporal processing but complements it by reengaging the human in the concrete situation of the human‐technological encounter as simultaneously a symbolic process. Such an understanding includes form, meaning, and interpretation as vital components of media analysis and liber­ ates us from a determinist or causal framework. To a large extent, the infrastructural paradigm does not so much challenge technologically determinist understanding as displace hardware with its technical process as the cause of change. In this sense, the so‐called post‐hermeneutic approach shares a certain continuity with the Kittlerian anti‐hermeneutic approach in its deterministic or causal account. In contrast, Flusser sees interpretive or what he calls “semantic analysis” as different in attitude from a causal analysis. Whereas a causal analysis treats a phenomenon as a problem to be solved and terminated through analysis, a semantic analysis treats a phenom­ enon as an enigma; the analysis enriches the experience of engaging it rather than exhausting it. “It permits a phenomenon to unfold its meaning in the course of the analysis. Through analysis, it becomes richer” (Flusser 2014: 65). Flusser’s interpretive method suggests a new way to approach propaganda as a case of media analysis that combines both infrastructural and formal analysis to treat meaning as the unfolding of a gesture, a temporal processing in which humans and technology are mutually implicated in a material and symbolic process. Yet both the human and technological aspects are multifaceted, as is the symbolic movement itself. We can thus modify Flusser’s artist/individual‐centered (with the artist as the prototype of a free individual) approach to consider these elements of meaning at multiple levels, taking into consideration the process of filmmaking and the actual film itself while making accountable the viewers/scholars active interpre­ tation. This also allows us to tease out the tension and contradictions within the filmmaking process and the films themselves, thus complementing the infrastruc­ tural account which often neglects the uneven execution and material constraints of infrastructure.17 The artist’s intention was not unified to start with. In the making of Minzu ­wansui, the ideological imperative for mass mobilization had to be negotiated with the filmmakers’ own desires and interpretations, contingent on the process of film­ making, which involved not only technological and physical challenges but com­ plex dynamics in the ethnic encounters. Zheng’s romantic and masculinist longings toward the northwest as an exotic frontier with rustic landscape, pure people, wild  animals, and inclement weather would soon be gnawed away by acutely

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experienced confrontation and alienation. And his own artistic and filmmaking interests would be informed and adjusted by the pitfalls and failures of the mass mobilization films that his mobile education troupe witnessed as they exhibited these films and encountered the audience’s responses in person (Zheng  1939: 49, 149).18 The film shooting was a challenging process involving location scouting, negoti­ ating with locals to arrange and perform desired scenes, waiting for the best lighting and scenery, and coordinating the ethnic group’s performance of their everyday life. With a small film crew and one 35 mm three‐lens Eyemo camera that had a 100‐feet capacity, which only lasted about 1 minute at 24 frame/second, the filmmakers hand‐cranked the camera, and each roll of film would last only a few shots before they had to change the film magazine (Han 1991: 142). In order to shoot the track­ ing shots, the filmmakers tied two bicycles side by side and placed a wooden plank on the vertical bars of the bike on which to mount the camera. Sometimes when they could find only one bike, the cameraman would ride on the bike carrying the camera while four people pushed the bike forward or backward from both sides. Negotiations with locals complicated the filmmaker’s intentionality through ­linguistic, political, and religious mediations. Zheng relied on translators, who often interpreted his directions at will, resulting in his film subjects’ reacting and per­ forming differently from his expectations. Tensions between Han and ethnic groups along the ethnic frontiers were further complicated by the conflict between Nationalist armies and military warlords. As a result of their interventions, both the Nationalist military leader Fu Zuoyi and local warlords such as Ma Bufang featured prominently in the film. Fu Zuoyi even asked Zheng to focus on how the enemy (the Japanese) tried to interfere in the relationship between Mongolians and Han – the scene of Mongolians helping wounded soldiers was shot at Fu’s request. When shooting the ritual dance sequence for the Tibetan Buddhist religious cer­ emony, because the dancers were the embodiment of the gods, the filmmakers could not approach any closer than 50 feet, which made close‐up or closer shots impos­ sible. After much negotiation, they were finally granted the privilege of entering the dance square, yet owing to their reliance on only one camera with such a short foot­ age capacity, they could not accommodate both long shots and closer shots simulta­ neously. As a result, some of the scenes were taken in long shot in the first year, and the closer shots were taken the next year (Zheng 1939: 360). Similarly, because of the aniconism of Islam – the proscription against the creation of images of sentient living beings – the Muslims were reluctant to be photographed, particularly during the Islamic Friday worship ritual, when no one was allowed to move in the direction of their prostration ceremony. In shooting the Friday worship ritual, the filmmakers had to exercise a tremendous amount of persuasion in order to gain access to the site (Zheng 1939: 360–361). Not only is the artist’s intention plural and tension ridden, making a unified sub­ ject problematic, a degree of reflexivity or self‐analysis comes at each level of gesture. In painting, Flusser argues, every brushstroke is a self‐analyzing movement that involves particular ways of seeing and presenting, and ways to change the world.



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This is even more so when it comes to photographing and filming, which involves a triadic process of searching for a place to observe the situation, manipulating the situation, and obtaining a critical distance from such observation and manipulation. It is thus important to recognize the tension of a gesture as both directionality/­ intention and reflective distance from it (Flusser  2014: 76–77). Such tension, as manifested in the first step of search for a place – in the double dialectic between goal and situation and between various perspectives on a situation – is the driving force of the search and thus characterizes the gesture of photography as the “­movement of a doubt” (Flusser 2014: 79). Such movement of a doubt is exacerbated when it comes to manipulating the ­situation, especially when the photographer is confronted by the anthropological situation where the people in front of the camera, as Flusser observes, react to the manipulation. Zheng Junli vividly recollects his frustrations when he tried to cap­ ture the gestures of his ethnic subjects through either a documentary or a dramatic approach: “I tried to show them how they should perform. The more they tried to imitate it, the stiffer it looked” (Zheng 1939: 359). It took Zheng three full hours to shoot a person from the Luo (Yi in Yunnan) ethnic group waving at a friend with a smile. With a hundred people waiting and Zheng venting frustration, the person was stunned and could act no further. Zheng had to experiment with another method, trying to shoot the person’s activity without his noticing, which cost much more footage. This was even more challenging when shooting close‐ups, where it was impossi­ ble not to catch the person’s attention: “they are always looking stealthily at the cam­ era, and then they turn to me as if asking, ‘Am I right in doing so?’” (Zheng 1939). Zheng had to leave the camera and walk over to his documentary subject, trying at his wit’s end to “stimulate real reactions” while making a secret gesture toward his cameraman to start shooting. Yet once the subject heard the noise of the camera, “his attention immediately collapsed” (Zheng 1939). Zheng Junli’s account illustrates how the photographer/filmmaker simultane­ ously affects and is affected by the situation, creating a mutual transformation that reframes the anthropological situation as two‐way traffic. This is because, Flusser would explain, “it isn’t a real object but someone sharing the same situation with the photographer” (Flusser 2014: 82). Such a situation, Flusser observes, evokes a com­ plex mesh of actions and reactions that lead to betrayal of the photographer’s picto­ rial motif. For the photographed subject, it creates “affected behavior” – “a mixture of reserve and exhibition (produced by an awareness of being the center of an objec­ tifying attention)” (Flusser 2014: 82). For the photographer, this leads to “a sensation of troubled conscience” reflected in his gestures: “He tried to surprise his motif in an unguarded moment so as to turn it into an object. To the extent that photographing appears to be a dialogue, he, too, betrays the motif ” (Flusser 2014: 82). This tension between goal and situation, between the photographer and his sub­ ject, and between plural intentions and their material execution, I would argue, lends a particularly reflexive grain to the film. In other words, these sets of tensions are not simply registered in the process of photographing/filming and the actual

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product of the film, but they serve as the very art form itself – the movement of the multiple elements that make up the gesture, or the meaning, of the film. To under­ stand the film is thus to tease out these multiple threads and their movement, and to see how their interactions and tensions make the ideological imperative of the film possible and legible, allowing us to reflect on the meaning of a propaganda film that itself embeds its reflexivity and self‐analysis.19 Such a reflexivity is not reducible to indexical realism or machinic or modernist reflexivity per se, which accords either the materiality of the photographic medium or the artist himself to be the sole agent of reflexivity. Instead, I call it an “epic gesture” of the film that alludes to multiple elements and their movements that enable both a didactic reflexivity and a p­erformative mode of reflection.

The Epic Gesture of Documentary Let me now sum up what I mean by “epic gestures.” Epic, as in the case of “epic docu­ mentary,” evokes the historical genre of epic poetry as a technique of recording as recounting, a narrative mode, or a chronotope – a distinct configuration of time– space. Epic recreates history through an episodic temporal structure subsumed under the hero’s adventure as a historical subject of ethnic or cultural unity marked by vast narrative scope and stylistic hyperbole.20 The wartime discussion and ­practice of “epic documentary” inherits this tradition of documenting and recount­ ing, and, in the case of Minzu wansui, the film is orchestrated through the epic chronotope, documenting a diverse range of ethnic groups (Tibetan, Mongol, Muslim, Yi, Miao, Yao, and others) in individual episodes as collective heroes con­ tributing to the war effort against the Japanese invasion. Whereas the narrative mode of the epic is appropriated as an ideological technique for national unity and ethnic subordination, this epic time–space is realized through editing and postpro­ duction that evoke techniques and cultural imaginations afforded by wireless ­technology and elemental media such as the cloud. In terms of style, the film is clearly marked by its epic ­character in its elevated style, temporal and spatial sweep, extensive use of poetic voice‐over and frequent use of reenactments. My point, however, is not so much to identify such stylistic flourishes and tempo­ ral technics as to access the reflexivity of the film’s material, technological, and polit­ ical conditions of possibilities. I thus use “gesture” to convey two kinds of distinct yet related reflexivities. By way of Flusser, the gesture is a temporal unfolding of history happening and becoming; epic gesture thus connotes an intrinsic tension between design and realization, between intention as a prior idea and its actualization as a complex, interconnected, and dynamic process, between the filmic text and the situ­ ation of photographing and filming as a social situation. Such a notion of gesture corresponds to Brecht’s conception of Gestus, a distinct performance construct of social attitude and social relationship that invites critical reflexivity. Gestus in its broadest sense ranges from the actors’ bodies to stage configu­ rations and group illustrations of the social body (Pavis 2008: 180). Crucial for Brecht’s



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Gestus, which sets it apart from pantomime, gesturality, and conventional or illustra­ tive gestures, is its mediating role to simultaneously bridge and highlight the gap between individual and social, story and history, text and gesture, the shown (said) and the showing (saying) (Brecht 2008: 216–226, 219–220). Thus, Gestus embodies the dual tasks of being physical gesture and attitude in one, acting as both an activity and a commentary, the showing of an attitude through the showing of showing. In this sense, both Flusser’s gesture and Brecht’s Gestus recognize a degree of reflexivity that comes with the production of an artwork in its broadest sense as media performance. Flusser, on the one hand, sees such reflexivity intrinsic to the gesture as a material process of execution that realizes but complicates intentionality in a Heideggerian sense of spatial embeddedness and varying modes of temporaliza­ tion.21 Brecht’s Gestus, on the other hand, considers reflexivity to be the moral obli­ gation of a Marxist didacticism and enables it through conscious constructions of performance that bring us insight into social behavior and social relationships. If Flusser understands the gesture of media as mapping the gap between intentionality and the mediated process of execution, hence arguing for an interpretive approach to media, Brecht’s Gestus, akin to Flusser in terms of the mediation between charac­ ter and actor, allows us to examine the formal production of reflexivity through “the radical separation of elements” (Brecht 2008: 219). Seen together, these two notions of reflexivity, one performative, one didactic, push us to consider both the process of filming and the actual film product as sites of insight into a material situation more complex than the infrastructural‐technological setup. The epic gesture thus highlights epic documentary’s narrative, stylistic, and ideo­ logical identification with epic poetry while making room for revisionist thinking that regards propaganda’s gesturality as both the embodiment and the deconstruc­ tion of such ideologies. Such a duality is seen in both aesthetic practice and material construction, which are made inseparable through Luhmann’s rethinking of medium, meaning, and form, and Flusser and Brecht’s conceptions about gestures as enabling reflexivity. I will now return to Minzu wansui, focusing on the material and aesthetic execution of the film’s ideological construction that simultaneously pro­ vides insight into the technics of time and the power dynamic (linguistic, religious, political) involved. The “epic gesture” I want to concentrate on is the film Minzu wansui’s distinctive use of voice, which creates a striking separation of aesthetic elements and intensifies the gap between image and sound, observation and expression, “natural” environ­ ment and symbolic inscription. If wartime documentary made in the Nationalist regime was dominated by authoritative voice‐over narration, Minzu wansui is an interesting affirmation and aberration of such a tradition (Nichols 1983). The voice‐ overs were divided between the lyrical and the expository, using different modes of address (first, second, and third person, singular and plural), moods (subjunctive and indicative), and genders (male and female). Upon the film’s completion in 1943, Zheng Junli himself reflected on the use of voices in Minzu wansui. Resisting the drab and monotonous voice‐over of newsreel, Zheng suggests, “it is best that the film nurtured out of my hands use her own voice to speak” (Zheng 1943: 363).22

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Zheng mentions three different kinds of voices used in the film: the voice of expo­ sition, poetic recitation, and the words presumably spoken by various ethnic groups (in both male and female voices) so as to “render to the audience their specific thoughts and emotions.” By alternating between these three different kinds of voices, however, the film undercuts their authenticity and highlights each of them as dra­ matic reenactment. This aporia is made even more manifest when perceived in rela­ tion to the images. In one scene, for instance, while the voice of the famed actress Shu Xiuwen enacts an inner monologue of a Tibetan woman professing her love, the camera indulges in its own exploration, capturing a scene of joyous celebration by tracking in and out of the faces and bodies of dancing women and panning around the spectating men, occasionally fixating on a frivolous detail or catching a moment of vérité as when a male spectator freezes his laughter upon recognizing the camera. If the woman’s voice serves to suture these disparate images to a narrative of love and heroism in the patriotic war, the disconnect between the voice and the image reaf­ firms them as external to each other and further removed from the ethnic bodies they try to authenticate. The film’s own vacillation between the dramatic and docu­ mentary modes further lays bare its showing of a showing, like the man’s frozen laughter, which both vouches for the film’s authenticity and exposes its device, ­marking a reflexive dimension in terms of both a Gestus and a Flusserian reflexive gesture that documents the dynamic interaction at the filming situation. More complex is the entanglement of these different voices when they slide into each other. The expository voice often assumes poetic diction, and enactments of a filmed subject’s voice may carry lyrical flourishes; these “personal” voices often describe the scene while also expressing the subjects’ interiority. The voices could be both descriptive and expressive, internal monologue and external exposition, paral­ leling the shift of the camera eye between ethnographic observation and subjective camera angles, image compositions, and constructivist editing. Throughout the film, the three different kinds of voices are enacted by three celebrated stage and screen actors: Tao Jin, Chen Tianguo, and Shu Xiuwen. Their own star status adds a further extradiegetic layer to the voices they inhabit. The complexity of the voices in the film, each separate yet ambivalent, heightens a didactic reflexivity that both fulfills and unsettles the goal of propaganda. In a tell­ ing scene shot in Mongolia, the narrator assumes the voice of a local resident trying to make sense of the new entertainment at the temple fair. Speaking in the first per­ son singular, the disembodied resident‐onlooker invites viewers to explore with him, pointing to various propaganda performance sites while posing rhetorical questions and answering them. With his direct address and deictic expressions, his voice transforms to that of the poetic expositor. Closer to home, the voice evokes the illustrated lecturer, a ubiquitous figure in wartime propaganda, whose onsite lec­ tures accompanying film and visual exhibitions served to bridge diverse audiences with distinct dialects and cultural backgrounds. The voice‐over (by actor Tao Jin) eventually converges with the illustrated lectures onsite, when the camera, following the deictic voice, cuts to a stunning scene of an array of lecturers speaking in front of gigantic paintings and portraits. Gesticulating with didactic expressions and



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teaching sticks, these lecturers, dressed in military uniforms, embody the “mobile education troupe” in action. While actor Chen Tianguo’s voice enacts those of the illustrated lecturers, his voice, moving from one lecturer to another – as the camera pans and cuts in and out of the lecturers and the paintings – strives to merge the film expositor and the illustrated lecturers into one continuous voice despite their glaring gaps. The painted screens and the film screen eventually collapse into one. As the onlookers and the lecturers disappear from the frame, the teaching stick insistently stays on to navigate our vision. As if the stick were not enough to illustrate the showing of a showing, the camera quickly cuts back to an extreme long shot of the scene, with the lecturers standing in front of the paintings hung between an array of Lama pagodas. Along with Nationalist flags and leader portraits, these portable painted screens stand against the mountain­ ous background as a new surround that forges an alliance, albeit violently, with the religious cultural landscape. We are witnessing not simply the work of the illustrated lecturer, but the infrastructure of propaganda, a media ecology, indeed, that conjoins chorus singing, painting, lectures, and religious architecture to fulfill the dream of “wireless” propaganda – a seamless, simultaneous, mobile environment. Yet if the voice serves as an ideal figure for wirelessness – an “immaterial” mode of communication that annihilates distance in the seemingly effortless forging of a community with its mythical presence – we are shown both the material operation of such infrastructure and the violence it exerts. What matters is not simply the insertion of the human in the network of old and new media, an infrastructural model of medium as environment that complicates assumptions of technological and human agency. More important, we are shown the technics of power in opera­ tion: while apparently calling for the ethnic others to join the fight against Japanese invasion, such an affirmation of sovereignty itself is realized by a propaganda infra­ structure of environmental invasion – by physically occupying and inscribing the ethnic space, especially in sacred or religious spaces where competition for symbolic orders is most fierce. The propaganda surround does not so much spell out the con­ tradiction between medium and message but illustrate the message itself as a tempo­ ral process of infrastructural operation. The message, in other words, is a reflexive one, necessitated by the didactic mode of operation and the temporal process of media performance. The film expositor’s voice, while turning us into the audience for the painting that momentarily fills the screen, leaves its legible mark precisely because it cannot operate without such reflexivity.

Notes 1 All translations are mine. 2 The distinctive film culture under the Nationalist regime is usually called “Chongqing cinema” or “hinterland cinema.” It was built on several main hubs such as Chongqing, Chengdu, and Kunming in southwest China. Hinterland cinema originated in Hankou, where the government was temporarily stationed in 1937 before the move to Chongqing.

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3 Educational cinema, broadly constructed, ranges from education‐oriented documen­ tary films of the 1910s to the rise of science and educational cinema as part of the global educational film movement that made its way to China from the late 1920s onwards. 4 For more details about the film debates in wartime Chongqing, see Weihong Bao (2009). 5 Film publicity inserts, Zhongguo dianying 1941, no page number. 6 The author calls jilushi shide dianying “epic film” in English, although I have provided a more literal translation to avoid confusion with what is currently understood as epic film. The author’s example was the Soviet film The Great Citizen (dir. Fridrikh Ermler, 1938). Interestingly, the film was made as the first Soviet TV movie. 7 See, for instance, Luo Jingyu (1933: 18–21); Luo Jingyu and Zheng Yongzhi (1933: 12). Both Zheng and Luo belonged to the Amateur Wireless Society. 8 Field headquarters (xingying) were powerful political organizations with local branches established by Chiang Kai‐shek in 1933 to consolidate his power when he headed the Military Affairs Commission. These field headquarters, especially the one based in Nanchang and headed by Chiang himself, played an important role in politicizing the military and training bureaucrats and officers. See Hans Van Der Ven (2003: 140–141). 9 For a useful summary of the discussions of “liveness” and the discourse’s contemporary relevance, see Karin van Es (2017). 10 See Tom Gunning (1991); Paul Young (2003); William Uricchio (2004); Michael Cowan (2014). 11 For more on television in 1920s China and filmic aspirations of televisuality, see Weihong Bao (2015: Chapter 2). 12 For more details, see Weihong Bao (2015: Chapter 6). 13 On anti‐hermeneutic approaches, see David Welbury (1990); Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (1994). On Galloway and Thacker’s claim that “there is no content,” see Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker (2007: 144). 14 On cultural techniques and the post‐hermeneutic approach, see Bernhard Siegert (2015). For a detailed discussion and critique, see Weihong Bao (forthcoming). 15 I am grateful to Zheng Dali, Zheng Junli’s son, who preserved and published the diary, for granting me an extended interview in December 2014. 16 For discussion of the historical notion of propaganda (xuanchuan) in modern China, see Bao (2015: Chapter 5). 17 For an excellent critique of the fallacies of infrastructure, see Hu Tung‐hui (2015). 18 Zheng not only witnessed the failures of films, but also accounted for the volatile nature of such mobile exhibition. During one film screening, for instance, a soldier’s gun mis­ fired and injured his own foot, which happened a few feet from the filmmaker (149). 19 Although I have been analyzing reflexivity from the production’s end, one cannot dis­ count the fact that the viewer’s knowledge and the situation of screening could both inform and be informed by these films, hence turning the question of the reflexivity into the quandary of a “hermeneutic circle.” Yet the hermeneutic circle is precisely what is at stake here, if we take into consideration Heidegger’s notion of “understanding” in rela­ tion to the circular structure of knowledge. For Heidegger, such a circle is not vicious or tautological, but the temporal process through which prior understandings projected onto the entities as possibilities become fully realized in their own terms through the totality of their involvement in the world. This, to me, is precisely what Flusser means by gesture in terms of a “movement of a doubt,” which is interpretation itself. See Martin Heidegger (1962: 191–195, 383–389, 403–408). 20 Harmon and Holman define epic poetry as “a long narrative poem in elevated style presenting characters of high position in adventures forming an organic whole through



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their relation to a central heroic figure and through their development of episodes important to the history of a nation or race.” William Harmon and C. Hugh Holman (1999: 171). For a critical rethinking of epic and chronotope, see Rachel Falconer (1997). 21 Although Flusser never explicitly acknowledges Heidegger, he frequently evokes Heidegger’s notion of “being‐in‐the world” and the three temporal modes of having been, making pre­ sent, and futurity. On the three modes, see Martin Heidegger (1962: 383–389). 22 This is a manuscript written around March 1943 and included in Zheng’s recently pub­ lished diary. Italics mine. Noticeably, Zheng uses “her” to refer to the documentary.

References Bao, W. (2009). In Search of a “Cinematic Esperanto”: Exhibiting Wartime Chongqing Cinema in Global Context. Journal of Chinese Cinemas 3 (2): 135–147. Bao, W. (2015). Fiery Cinema: The Emergence of an Affective Medium. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bao, W. (forthcoming). Archaeology of a Medium: The (Agri) Cultural Techniques of Paddy Farm Films. Boundary 2. Brecht, B. (2008). The Modern Theatre Is the Epic Theatre. In: Modern Drama, vol. 4 (ed. M. Puchner). New York: Routledge. Caldwell, J. (1995). Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Clarke, B. (2010). Communication. In: Critical Terms for Media Studies (eds. W.J.T. Mitchell and M. Hansen), 131–144. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cowan, M. (2014). The Realm of the Earth: Simultaneous Broadcasting and World Politics in Interwar Cinema. Intermédialités 23. Elsaesser, T. (2016). Media Archaeology as Symptom. New Review of Film and Television Studies 14 (2): 181–215. Falconer, R. (1997). Bakhtin and the Epic Chronotope. In: Face to Face: Bakhtin in Russia and the West (ed. C. Adlam), 254–273. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Fan, H. et al. (1942). Wuxiandian zishu (Autobiography of the Wireless). Dianying yu boyin 1 (7–8): 2. Feuer, J. (1983). The Concept of Live Television: Ontology as Ideology. In: Regarding Television: Critical Approaches—An Anthology (ed. E.A. Kaplan), 12–22. Los Angeles: The American Film Institute. Flusser, V. (2014). Gestures (trans. N.A. Roth). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Galloway, A. and Thacker, E. (2007). The Exploit: A Theory of Networks. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press. Gumbrecht, H.U. (1994). A Farewell to Interpretation. In: Materialities of Communication (eds. H.U. Gumbrecht and K.L. Pfeiffer), 389–402. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Gunning, T. (1991). Heard over the Phone: The Lonely Villa and the De Lorde Tradition of the Terrors of Technology. Screen 32 (2): 184–196. Han, S. (1991). Huiyi yu Zheng Junli zai daxibei pai Minzu wansui (Recollections on the Making of Long Live the Nation in the Northwest). Qinghai Wenhua Shiliao 1: 141–144. Harmon, W. and Holman, C.H. (1999). Handbook to Literature. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time (trans J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson). New  York: Harper and Row. Hu, T. (2015). A Prehistory of the Cloud. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Ji, N. (1941). Dianying zhonglei de fenye (Categories of Film). Zhongyang ribao. Jiang, S. (1941). Zhongdian shi zengyang chengzhang de: guoying zhipian jiguan shikuang baogao zhi er (How Did Zhongdian Grow Up: Second Truthful Report of the State‐Run Film Unit). Zhongguo dianying (Chinese Film, Chongqing) 2: 70–76. Ling H. (1941). Tan Shengli jinxingqu yu huode xili (On Marches of Victory and Baptism by Fire). Xinshu bao. Chongqing: New Sichuan Newspaper. Lo, T.Y. (1943). China’s Motion Pictures in Wartime. National Board of Review 4 (8): 4. Luhmann, N. (1995). Art as a Social System. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Luo, J. (1933). Wuxiandian duanbo zhi yanjiu (Research on Wireless Shortwave). Wuxiandian zazhi 2 (2): 18–21. Luo, J. (1941). Lun Dianying de guoce (On the National Policy of Film). Zhongguo dianying. Chongqing: Chinese Film 2: 78. Luo, J. and Zheng, Y. (1933). Wu xiandian zhanlan (Radio Exposition). Shidai 3 (6): 12. Nichols, B. (1983). The Voice of Documentary. Film Quarterly 36 (3): 17–30. Pavis, P. (2008). On Brecht’s Notion of Gestus. In: Modern Drama: Critical Concepts, vol. 4 (ed. M. Puchner). New York: Routledge. Siegert, B. (2015). Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real (trans. G. Winthrop‐Young). New York: Fordham University Press. Stanislavski, K.S. (1936). An Actor Prepares (trans. E. Hapgood). New York: Routledge. Sun, M. (1943). Dianying de lingyu (The Field of Television) (trans. M. Sun from M. G.Scroggie (1935), Television. Dianying yu boyin 2(2), 7–10). U.: Blackie & Son. Tian, H. (1981). Yingshi zhuihuai lu (Memories of Events in Cinema), 54–61. Beijing: Zhongguo dianying. Uricchio, W. (2004). Storage, Simultaneity, and the Media Technologies of Modernity. In:  Allegories of Communication: Intermedial Concerns from Cinema to the Digital (eds. J. Fullerton and J. Olsson), 123–139. Eastleigh, UK: John Libbey. van Es, K. (2017). Liveness Redux: On Media and Their Claim to Be Live. Media, Culture, & Society 39 (8): 1245–1256. van de Ven, H. (2003). War and Nationalism in China, 1925–1945, 140–141. London: RoutledgeCurzon. Welbury, D. (1990). Foreword. In: Discourse Networks, 1800/1900 (trans. M. Meteer and C. Cullens). (ed. F. Kittler), vii–xxxiii. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Xu, C. (1941). Dianying de jixian (The Limit of Cinema). Zhongguo dianying (Chongqing) 2: 32–34. Young, P. (2003). Media on Display: A Telegraphic History of Early American Cinema. In: New Media 1740–1915 (eds. L. Gitelman, W. Pingree and G.B. Pingree), 229–264. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Zheng, J. (1939). Minzu wansui: Zheng Junli riji, 1939–1940 (Long Live the Nation: Zheng Junli Diary, 1939–1940). Shanghai: Shanghai wenhua. Zheng, Y. (1941). Sannian laide Zhongguo dianying zhipianchang (The China Motion Picture Corporation in the Past Three Years). Zhongguo dianying (Chinese Film, Chongqing) 1: 51–55. Zheng, J. (1943). Women zenyang zhizuo Minzu wansui (How we Made Minzu wansui). Minzu wansui: Zheng Junli riji, 1939–1940 (Long Live the Nation: Zheng Junli Diary, 1939–1940), 353–363. Shanghai: Shanghai wenhua.

15

Documentary Plasticity

Embryology and the Moving Image Oliver Gaycken

University of Maryland

Evolution is one long sermon on the text of the infinite plasticity of living matter. —Julian Huxley, What I Dare Think (1931) So, more than a substance, plastic is the very idea of its infinite transformation… . It is less a thing than the trace of a movement. —Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1957)

Introduction The documentary tradition has engaged science filmmaking peripherally, at best. Lewis Jacobs’s eponymous compilation, for example, does not include any entries that foreground the intersection of science and documentary filmmaking. Jacobs acknowledges his book’s lacunae: “Certain omissions should be explained. I have not included those documentaries commonly classified as industrials, educationals, art and architecture, training films, and other types of sponsored films primarily aimed at instructing, improving public relations, or increasing sales.” These omissions, however, which constitute nothing less than the lion’s share of nontheatrical cinema, are not explained beyond being stated. As Jacobs continues, “I have selected only those films which seem to me to best illuminate the artistic and social concerns of their times and which had the most influence in advancing the genre” (Jacobs 1971: n.p.). The principles of selection, in other words, are subjective (“seem to me”) and retrospective (“had the most influence”). Not only are certain categories omitted from Jacobs’s survey but the films that do constitute his canon are also entangled A Companion to Documentary Film History, First Edition. Edited by Joshua Malitsky. © 2021 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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with those categories he claims to have left out: why not designate Nanook, accurately, as a sponsored film and thus omit it? Films with links to various sciences permeate Jacobs’s compilation. Anthropology figures most prominently, with entries by Robert Gardner on Dead Birds, Richard Griffith on Grass and Chang, John Grierson on Moana, and Marie Seton on Song of Ceylon. Documentaries that engage other sciences appear as well: Bosley Crowther on Jacques Cousteau’s The Silent World, James Francis Crow’s review of Pare Lorentz’s The Fight for Life, and Arthur Knight’s brief appreciation of Arne Sucksdorff, for instance. And Jacobs himself worked in the nontheatrical field, making a number of films about art, e.g. From Tree Trunk to Head (1939), about the sculptor Chaim Gross; A Sculpture Speaks (1952); Fibers and Civilization (1959); as well as sponsored films, for example, a short about plastics (for Monsanto), The World That Nature Forgot (1956). Jacobs’s stated aim was to highlight “artistic and social concerns” as well as films that had had “the most influence in advancing the genre,” but a problematic presupposition lurks in the notion that science exists apart from art and society. Such a view mistakenly takes the rhetoric of objectivity at face value, but as recent work in the history of science has demonstrated, objectivity has a history.1 Applying this insight to documentary studies, Joshua Malitsky (2012) has noted, “the question of whether ‘the scientific’ is in fact anything more than a convenient caricature is borne out by a consideration of actual science films, whose multiplicity and nuance provide ample evidence to refute the supposition of a monolithic positivistic scientific culture” (240). Kirsten Ostherr makes a similar argument in a critique of Bill Nichols’s separation of “document” and “documentary,” which allows him to exclude science films from the body of documentary. Ostherr (2015) writes, “this distinction nonetheless has the surprising effect of accepting the self‐presentation of many science films as objective products of sterile laboratory environments that can be taken at face value as evidence of ‘truth’” (285). And Scott MacDonald (2016) responds to a similar argument about science as a monolithic culture advanced by Nichols, writing: “But the moment a nature filmmaker begins to construct a particular film, there is no escaping point of view: filmmakers must choose what to show us and determine a filmic structure that exhibits a particular set of conclusions, whether they are those of an individual scientist, a group of scientists, or science‐interested laypeople. The presumption of objectivity in science film is simply a particular instance of the aura of objectivity that documentary nearly always carries with it, and which, as Nichols has so often made clear in other contexts, must be qualified by the point of view that is explicit/implicit within any specific documentary” (970). Indeed, a burgeoning body of research has begun to trace cinema’s sustained and multifarious imbrication with scientific inquiry.2 This essay will consider a selection of moving images from embryology, a field whose prominent engagement with imaging has been the focus of recent scholarship.3 As Nick Hopwood (2009) has noted, however, “rich histories” remain to be told (285). One source for these histories is embryology’s intersection with moving‐ image media, which ranges from similarities between embryological imaging and



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certain forms of cinema, in particular animation, to an array of films produced about embryology that range from research documents to teaching tools to popular‐ science films. Taken together, these examples from embryology are emblematic of the alternate media histories that emerge when scientific visualization is treated not just as a precursor to cinema proper but as a vital tradition in its own right. In other words, this essay aims not just to fill in a blank space on the map of documentary history but also to reorient our understanding of what documentary has been and can be. Plasticity is a keyword for a number of reasons. On the one hand, it has a specific connotation within embryology, describing both the embryo’s rapid growth and manifold changes as it develops from a homogenous mass of cells into differentiated layers as well as how some embryological imaging practices replicate solid forms (modeling techniques that often have recourse to serial imaging) (Hopwood 2004). On the other hand, plasticity has a broader scientific meaning, namely, “responsiveness to environmental inputs,” which includes both developmental and evolutionary change (West‐Eberhard 2003).4 This essay will trace both the specific similarity – embryological modeling using serial imagery and how that indicates a media tradition that connects scientific and documentary practice – as well as the broader similarity – how malleability conceived of as a sensitivity to environment can serve as a model for media studies. Plasticity thus emerges as both a concrete media form that travels between scientific and other fields as well as a model for an expansive approach to media history that incorporates excluded imaging traditions and reveals previously unacknowledged kinships among imaging practices. Ultimately, the links that this essay traces will connect not only embryological to documentary history but also will underscore links between the embryological tradition and the image‐ making practice of the historical avant garde. Plasticity’s ability to expand existing media history resonates with approaches that have come to be grouped under the umbrella of “media archaeology,” a multivalent methodology encapsulated in the strategically vague phrase “a traveling discipline based on a mobile set of concepts.”5 As with plasticity, of course, media archaeology’s flexibility is not boundless—plasticity, after all, names the adaptability of an organism within the limits of identity. Specifically, then, the core media‐archaeological concepts that are pertinent to this essay and that will be elaborated in its course are: the importance of intermediality; and the interest in unsettling of the newness of “new media,” primarily via a focus on nonlinear history as well as through attention to recurring topoi. My adoption of media archaeology as a method proceeds in the spirit of modesty as suggested in Malte Hagener’s introduction to this section, questioning “media boundaries” and showing “an interest in the marginal practices and technologies that are often overlooked” because the future is often limned in the margins of the past. Embryological imaging exemplifies how an understanding of the moving image in the service of science benefits from a media‐archaeological method that encompasses both cinema and media history as well as the history of science. The recovery of early cinema after the 1978 Brighton FIAF conference and the resulting

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“new film history” are one research area where the aforementioned concepts gained prominence in cinema and media studies.6 While the initial impetus of this re‐examination of cinema history focused on narrative filmmaking, an examination of early nonfiction film history soon followed.7 Within the history of science, the late 1970s saw a turn toward previously ignored elements of the scientific process – media of inscription, popularization – which frequently involved visual media. As Jennifer Tucker (2006) notes, “The study of images and image production in the history of science is a rapidly expanding area of inquiry. Its rise, in turn, reflects growing interest in larger questions about the changing relations between scientific practice and theory, pictures and truth claims about natural phenomena, seeing processes and scientific instrumentation, and science and its multiple publics” (111).8 This widening of the field’s purview aligns with Jim Secord’s call for a shift to what he terms “knowledge in transit,” which requires attention to “understanding science as a form of communication.” The emphasis of such an approach to “processes of movement, translation, and transmission” calls attention to phenomena that are similar to the “traveling” qualities at the heart of media‐ archaeological inquiry (Secord 2004: 654).9

“The Unique Impression of Continuity” Plasticity is an idea of living matter that is also a practical approach to it. —Hannah Landecker, Culturing Life (2007) Chronophotography, or serial photography, it often has been asserted, was cinema’s immediate precursor. Cinema incorporated chronophotography’s basic apparatus that allowed for the production of a photographic moving image, but chronophotographic records, with their brief duration and analytic orientation, had to be transformed in order to serve the needs of mass culture. Thus, according to the biological metaphor of the lifecycle, cinema was born in the laboratory, technically, but grew up on the fairground and soon developed into a cultural, and primarily narrative, institution.10 Chronophotography’s status as a precursor to cinema, however, is not straightforward, at least not in terms of following a linear logic of progression, in part because chronophotography was not a singular imaging practice.11 Although scientists often used chronophotography as a method for observing temporal phenomena, an alternate use of serial imaging sought to record spatial information. Such noted chronophotographers as Etienne‐Jules Marey, Ludwig Braun, and the team of Wilhelm Braune and Otto Fischer all used serial images to create plastic models. Marey, for example, fashioned plastic zoetropes based on chronophotographic sequences; Braun investigated how chronophotographic images of a beating heart allowed for the measurement of spatial displacements; and Braune and Fischer constructed wire‐frame models based on measurements taken from their chronophotographic series. The supposed flatness of cinema was only one facet of how scientists employed



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the serial image. These examples demonstrate chronophotography’s role in generating three‐dimensional models.12 Nineteenth‐century embryologists made extensive use of the microtome, an instrument whose crucial attribute was the ability to create precise, extremely thin sections of tissue samples. Frequently the structures being investigated were minute, so the fixing and slicing of the sample was part of a multistep process that then involved magnification and reproduction via graphical means. A specific example of a device involved in this process is Pohlman’s Zeichentafel, an apparatus for drawing images of embryo sections (Figure 15.1). A sliding door mounted on a track allowed for lateral and horizontal movement of the drawing surface while rolls of paper provided a continuous sheet on which to draw serial images. Carbon paper inserts allowed for the duplication of drawings (Peter 1906). Pohlman’s device was used in conjunction with an embryograph, an aid for drawing similar to a camera lucida but allowing for additional and finer adjustments. The drawings of sections were used to create either volumetric images or as an intermediate stage in the construction of models (Figure 15.2). The analysis and synthesis inherent in this imaging process gave embryologists working knowledge of tiny structures; the models they created were plastic representations that could be investigated in ways actual tissues could not. Considered as a representational medium, embryological models were made up of precision technical images akin to the cinematic image. The registration system employed in these procedures consisted of notches on one edge of the plate that were used to keep the plates in alignment. This system functioned similarly to both the perforations in film stock as well as the peg‐and‐perf system that was a significant part of the technical system of cel animation (Figure 15.3). By emphasizing these systems’ reliance on precise registration, an analogy between embryology and cinematography emerges; both systems allowed for the creation of precisely separated images. The space between the images on the perforated film stock is similar to the thickness of the individual embryological slices cut by the microtome, with the difference that interstices between the individual images on a filmstrip are temporally separated while the spaces between microtome slices are spatial.13 The isomorphism between a sectioned embryological structure and cinematography was operationalized soon after cinema’s emergence. In 1903 Robert Kelly, the Robert Gee fellow in anatomy at the University College at Liverpool, wrote a brief note on the “cinematograph principle” and the “serial section.” Kelly began by noting the similarity between the specimen sectioned by the microtome and an object filmed by a cinema camera: “An interesting comparison can be drawn between the pictures on a cinematograph film and a series of sections in a paraffin ribbon. Each picture on the film presents a general resemblance to its neighbours, though differing from them in minute details. The result is a moving picture. In the paraffin ribbon the series presents similar likenesses and difference” (Kelly 1903: 312–13). Kelly put this observation into practice by mounting 700 serial sections of a six‐ day‐old chick embryo on clear celluloid film. “What will be the effect of viewing them on the cinematographic principle?” he asked his readers, and then he

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Figure 15.1  Pohlman’s Zeichentafel (Peter 1906).



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(b)

(a)

Figure 15.2  (a) A volumetric image (of an embryonic lizard brain) created by assembling tomographic slices; (b) Side views of the stacked slices (Peter 1906) (b)

(a)

Figure 15.3  Registration systems: (a) the peg‐and‐perf system in cel animation and (b) registration notches (left) to keep microtome slices aligned in embryological imaging (Lutz 1920; Peter 1906).

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provided the following answer: “The result was extremely interesting and curious, for the impression produced is that of travelling through the embryo. The eye, for instance, appears first as a dot; this changes to a ring, the ring enlarges, then near the periphery another dot appears. This is the lens; it gets larger, takes on its proper shape, then diminishes and fades away; the ring gets smaller, and the eye finally disappears as a dot” (Kelly 1903: 312). At the conclusion of his note, Kelly claimed the following advantages for this method: “1. The ease with which a series of sections can be demonstrated to an audience. 2. The unique impression of continuity” (Kelly 1903: 313). The first advantage of how this particular combination of embryological imaging and cinema made observations shareable with an audience was common to many forms of projected media. The “unique impression of continuity” that Kelly claimed for this imaging process designates an aspect of serial imaging largely overlooked in nonfiction media history. The impression of “travelling through” resulted from the temporal experience of a spatial object; a voyage through space, not time. Plasticity here is atemporal; what is reproduced in these instances is the solid rather than the fleeting. While novel, Kelly’s use of the “cinematographic principle” extends an existing scientific visual practice crucial for embryology. Prior to the employment of cinematographic technology, other visualization techniques were proposed for investigating embryological objects by similar means. In 1887 Hans Strasser considered the possibilities of the “stroboscopic method” for animating his serial sections. Strasser (1887) remarked about the possibilities of such a visualization: “then the opportunity presents itself actually to touch the object with the eye in the various spatial directions, as if a fully transparent diagram were before one” (208).14 Strasser’s mention of how the eye could here “touch” the object underscores the importance of how these visualizations functioned as part of embryologists’ production of what Sabine Braukmann (2012) has termed “mental imagery,” a mode of perception that “relies upon a visual/tactile experience” (215). Nick Hopwood (2005, 2006) has similarly stressed the conjunction of the mental and the tangible, noting the significance in embryology of “mental participation in drawing as a means to understanding,” and as he notes elsewhere, “embryology was considered to depend on illustration to an unusual degree … Together with wax models, drawings and drawing were supposed to teach students how to see.”15 This process where cinema functions as a virtual modeling device results from the combination of the visual and the tactile in the service of cultivating an expert eye. Almost 30 years later, Kelly reflected on his experiment in the context of a discussion of the value of cinema to surgical education. “It was a rather quaint and ingenious device, of use … in the teaching of anatomy … but no one appeared to have taken any notice” (Kelly 1932: 718).16 Kelly’s somewhat wistful and dismissive recollection, while perhaps true with regard to his own publication, does the technique a disservice, however, since the conjunction of serial sections and film was taken up as a research method by several subsequent researchers.17 Furthermore, the technique of serial sectioning to model an object is central to a wide field of more recent imaging devices, especially CT and MRI.18



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Kelly’s own use of visual media at this meeting is instructive as well. Although he brought a number of surgical films, his embrace of film as a medium of instruction was not without qualification. “Professor Kelly made it plain that he did not advocate the cinematograph as an easy or desirable way of learning surgery. It could never replace clinical instruction, but he thought it had its value, particularly in showing unusual cases or procedures which the student in the ordinary course might miss …. During his own teaching career he had made a plan of collecting all kinds of photographs, book illustrations, and water‐colour drawings, with the idea of using them in his talks to students; only in this way could he avoid the textbook lecture” (Kelly 1932: 718). As the next section of this essay will demonstrate, this positioning of cinema as one medium among many typifies its use in medico‐scientific practice. Finally, Kelly’s temporalization of a solid object bears a categorical similarity to another established visualization technique in embryology: the developmental series. As Hopwood notes, “More than any other science, embryology has organized its objects in developmental series. During the nineteenth century, visual representations of development became more prominent than textual descriptions, and in embryology perhaps especially central” (Hopwood 2005: 240). Emblematized as the so‐called normal plates, these images were temporal, depicting the major stages of embryonic growth, and their inheritor in the domain of cinematic imaging are time‐ lapse images.19 The topoi of the “cinematograph principle” thus allowed for a novel experience related to cinema’s spatio‐temporal fungibility – either the compression of extended periods of time or the ability to “travel through” a solid object. These imaging modes allowed embryos to exist in different temporal dimensions  –  either slowed down, speeded up, or forever frozen. The fly‐through and time‐lapse are specific and atypical uses of cinema that we can assign to the domain of what André Gaudreault has termed the “cultural series kinematography” (Gaudreault 2011). A significant amount of material corresponding to the cultural series “cinema” has not been reflected in existing histories of embryology either, however. These films were produced primarily to illustrate embryological concepts to a range of audiences (general, high‐school, university). These pedagogical uses of film often featured a mixture of imaging modes, ranging from microcinematography to animation as well as time‐lapse and fly‐through imaging. Cinema in the service of embryology thus functioned only occasionally as a novel device for visualizing phenomena; more often, it worked in conjunction with other kinds of visualization, providing a plastic media envelope capable of containing an array of imaging techniques.20

Hans Elias and Educational Embryological Cinema As the previous section demonstrated, there are scientific imaging traditions that have not been reflected in traditional documentary history, and a media‐ archaeological method can aid in recovering these traditions. This section will

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provide an account of Hans Elias’s early films, which parallel and occasionally intersect with the rise of the traditional documentary film movement. An excavation of Elias’s films both expands and enriches documentary studies by underlining the overlaps between scientific visualization traditions, modern educational practice, and documentary film history. Elias’s career takes up the interest in plasticity at the level of imaging outlined in the previous section, leading both to extraordinary films as well as to a sustained reflection on the role of cinema in research and education. Born in 1907, Elias was a German Jewish anatomist who received his PhD in 1931 for a dissertation about the coloring of frog skin. Shortly thereafter, he made his first films at the Botanical Institute in Darmstadt depicting the development of flowers. He emigrated to Italy in 1933, where he made a film about the embryonic development of the European tree frog, based on an idea from an embryology course he took in Berlin from Richard Weissenberg. He then worked on an educational film about the development of amphibian embryos, Evolutio Ovi Amphibiorum (1935) at the ETH Zürich, in its Institute for Scientific Photography under the direction of Ernst Rüst. In 1937 Elias became the director of the Laboratory for Scientific Cinematography and Histology at the Italian Research Council and worked as a consultant to the International Educative Cinematography Institute of the League of Nations.21 Elias realized that staying in Italy was becoming dangerous, and he began to make arrangements to emigrate to the US while continuing to work with cinema at the Biological Laboratory of the Atheneum Pontificium Lateranese in the Vatican State under Guiseppe Reverberi. When he arrived in the US, he taught at Middlesex University (now Brandeis), then took a job with the CDC in Atlanta, and finally became a professor of anatomy at the Chicago Medical School in 1949.22 This outline of Elias’s early career indicates that his development as a scientific filmmaker proceeded rapidly. Elias is also an unusual scientific filmmaker because of his wide range of interests: he majored in biology and mathematics with minors in physics and education, and he also had a lifelong commitment to the fine arts, particularly painting and sculpture. Taken together, this range of concerns indicates an interdisciplinary mindset and an interest in novel forms of visual experience. Of particular note for the present arguments, Elias was particularly interested in “creating scientific images that could convey the plasticity of the three dimensions in space” (Hildebrandt 2012: 288). Elias’s (1931) dissertation led to his initial use of cinema via his research into the structure of melanophores, i.e. the black or brown color cells, of the Apennine yellow‐bellied toad. Elias had reported that there were no passages (anastomoses) underneath the melanophores, but his initial paper only included a “half‐schematic drawing.” In a subsequent paper, he wanted to “prove” his observations about melanophor structure “objectively, photographically” (Elias 1935: 424).23 In order to do so, Elias first measured the thickness of the preparation and, beginning at the top, took four single‐frame exposures at 0.5 micron intervals; he then repeated the process from the bottom to the top. He joined the ends of the film in order to form a loop (Ringfilm). “The film thus produced psychologically replaces the preparation,” he declared (424).



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The word psychologically may seem peculiar, but Elias used it to indicate the labor of interpreting a series of images produced by the microscope, the mental synthesis of images that only provide the sought‐after information when considered together. As Elias noted, his use of cinema built on the visualization technique of wax‐plate modeling, which directly relates it to the work of Strasser and Kelly. The modification lay in Elias’s utilization of the microscope’s depth of field to optically section the preparation and the use of cinema to record the serial images.24 Individual film frames could be projected onto graph paper (Millimeterpapier), which allowed for the creation of graphic and plastic reconstructions; the final model was similar to what would have resulted from working with tomographically sliced preparations (Figure 15.4). The notion that the film constituted a virtual preparation extended to its projection as well, with Elias noting that the use of an analytic projector (a machine capable of stopping and reversing the film in addition to forward projection) could simulate the use of a microscope’s fine‐focus knob. Cinema, in other words, becomes an intermedial extension of the microscope. More generally, Elias’s notion of cinematic technology (film + projection) functioning as a replacement for a physical object suggests an understanding of documentary ontology distinct from (a)

(b)

Figure 15.4  (a) 16mm film frames of the melanophores of the Apennine yellow‐bellied toad created using “optical sectioning”; (b) The final model created using the serial images (Elias 1935).

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more familiar notions of representation and figuration. And rather than a conception of a naïve or straightforward realism, which the invocation of “objective photography” might suggest, Elias took care to distinguish his images from reality, scrupulously noting their limitations and distortions (a topic to which he would return and that I will address below). Objectivity here should be understood as a protocol instead of an inherent value. The next phase of Elias’s (1937) filmmaking practice involved what he described ­ imension, as “a continuation of the method of wax‐plate modeling … into the fourth d 25 time” (507). Instead of optically sectioning a solid that could then be reconstructed, Elias went on to create stop‐motion‐animation models to show the developmental processes that take place within the bud of a flower. His continuation involved not only cinema but also the same modeling material he used for the melanophore model, plasticine.26 The two films were Entwicklung der Blüte, Tollkirsche (Atropa belladonna) [Flower Development, Belladonna (A. belladonna)] and Entwicklung der Blüte, Allium fallax [Flower Development], A. fallax (mountain garlic).27 Elias presented the films at conferences, first at the German botanical congress in Berlin‐Dahlem in 1932, and later at the second congress of the Association pour la documentation photographique et cinematographique dans les sciences in October, 1934.28 These presentations indicate Elias’s involvement in the flourishing international scene devoted to cinema in the fields of science and education, which developed in tandem with the Griersonian model of documentary film.29 Exhibition on the conference circuit was a preliminary step for films that Elias designed as teaching tools. He noted that he made the films following a suggestion by the botanist Friedrich Oehlkers, who was serving as Ordinarius at the TU Darmstadt in the early 1930s, where Elias wrote his dissertation. Elias also acknowledged Dr. Walter Schwarz, of the TU Darmstadt’s Botanical Institute as his collaborator on the films.30 Elias (1933) pointed out that universities in Freiburg, where Oehlkers had in the meantime taken over the chair in botany, and in Stuttgart, where Heinrich Walter taught, were using the films as part of botany lectures. While Elias’s flower films remediated the earliest generation of time‐lapse motion pictures, where blooming flowers figured prominently, his films went beyond the spectacular display that characterized this generation of time‐lapse plant‐growth photography. Elias’s films revealed processes that take place within the bud as it develops, thus demonstrating developmental processes that were inaccessible to direct observation.31 This emphasis on visualizing the invisible was coupled with the vocabulary of a well‐ developed discourse in German pedagogy, that of Anschauung, which put a premium on sensory experience over verbal description. Elias (1932) wrote about the films using the keywords of this discourse: the films showed the process of development “in a vivid fashion” and “the films should demonstrate [veranschaulichen] to students the concept of development” (232).32 Elias’s films thus should be understood as part of a longer tradition in the life sciences that privileged visual educational methods.33 Atropa shows the stages of flower development using plasticine stop‐motion animation in combination with intermittent arrows and captions. The film begins with the formation of sepals (Kelchblätter) from the vegetative cone (Vegetationspunkt),



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proceeding to the development of the petals (Kronblätter), the stamens (Staubblätter), and finally the carpels (Fruchtblätter). The second section of the film consists of an animated “schema,” a sequence of cutout animation, that condenses the process while making certain structural qualities (particularly symmetries) more obvious. The third and final section repeats the time‐lapse plasticine sequence without interruptions or captions (Figure 15.5). The film’s repetitive structure is due to a “didactic principle” that Elias articulated as: “introduction with explanation, repetition for understanding.”34 This overt reflection about pedagogical methods indicates that the film is part of the larger narrative of the use of media in pedagogy, and more particularly the use of cinema, which accelerated over the course of the 1920s and 1930s while also recalling earlier discussions around the educative potential of moving images.35 Elias returned to the analogy of the microscope, this time using it to enumerate the limitations and distortions of his images. He described two “errors” (Fehler) that the films committed “for didactic reasons”: (1) the flower was shown open and (2) the flower remained at a constant size even though the bud initially was quite small and then became significantly larger. Elias (1933) argued that these errors were not different from the “errors the microscopist makes by 1. making preparations of the flower buds and 2. at first using strong and then in the final stages weaker magnification to observe the developmental stages” (232). Here again, other priorities took precedence over objectivity; in fact, the term that Elias used more frequently in his descriptions of the films was “true‐to‐nature” (naturgetreu), which demonstrates the overlap among Daston and Galison’s “epistemic virtues.”36 Ultimately, the flower films served as an intermediate stage for Elias’s animation method, which would reach its fullest expression with Elias’s next film about the development of amphibian embryos. Elias made Evolutio Ovi Amphiborium (1936) at the ETH in Zurich at the Institute for Scientific Photography, which was under the direction of Ernst Rüst. Evolutio is unusual for several reasons, beginning with its title, which attests to Elias’s lifelong enthusiasm for Latin. Evolutio probably stands alone in the history of documentary cinema as bearing the label “pelliculam factam.” Evolutio built on Elias’s prior use of animation to provide an understanding of biological development, but it is more than five times as long as Atropa, introducing new layers of complexity to Elias’s filmmaking. Evolutio begins with several sequences of time‐lapse microcinematography: first segmentation in the axolotl (Amblystoma mexicanum), then gastrulation and neurulation in the European green frog (Rana esculenta). As Elias (1939) pointed out, however, these sequences were insufficient for understanding the developmental process: “All these processes and others not mentioned cannot be observed in normal motion pictures taken from the living subject because they show only the surface of the embryo. Also, they cannot be explained completely by a drawn trick‐film which would show only the developing median section for the embryo is a three‐dimensional object and it develops in all directions” (103). The solution to the problem of how to show three‐dimensional processes below the surface is a nearly five‐minute sequence of time‐lapse plasticine animation of the development of the European tree frog embryo (Hyla arborea) from segmentation through neurulation (Figure 15.6). Not only was the sequence longer than those in

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Figure 15.5  Video stills from Entwicklung der Blüte, Tollkirsche (Atropa belladonna) (Hans Elias, 1932) [Lichtspiel Kinematek Bern].



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Figure 15.6  Video stills from Evolutio ovi Amphibiorum (Hans Elias, 1939) [Lichtspiel Kinematek Bern].

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the flower‐development films, but it also required additional techniques. Whereas the flower films only required adding small amounts of plasticine to build up the model, modeling the embryo’s development meant adding as well as deforming (pressing‐in), bending, and blending.37 A detail that emerges out of this description is how development and modeling mirror one another  –  invaginating material becomes stretched, and Elias noted that this stretching would happen “all by itself ” by running a finger over the moving parts.38 After the stop‐motion animation sequence, in another example of Elias’s emphasis on repetition, the film reprises the opening time‐lapse microcinematographic sequences.39 The film then concludes with a second plasticine sequence that focuses on a specific structure, the frog’s brain (“Evolutio encephali reconstructio Rana esculenta”). Significantly shorter than the first animation sequence, it begins in a visually arresting and novel way, as an exterior layer peels away to reveal the neural structure beneath. This demonstration of how the process of visualization intervenes in the object being viewed is similar to how scissors introduce the moment where the visualization becomes a cut‐away view in the longer animation sequence. Both moments acknowledge the manipulation involved in creating the view and as such recall the hand‐of‐the‐animator trope that recurs with regularity in the history of animation, while also recalling scientific traditions of intervening into an image (e.g. textual markers such as labels, a pointer that indicates details of an image, a clock face in time‐lapse films to indicate temporal scale).40 (Figure 15.7) Finally, Elias again acknowledged how his animation departed from a strict reproduction of reality. He justified the film’s “errors” with recourse to the discourse of Anschauung, “for the heightening of visibility [Anschaulichkeit], the following errors were made,”41 primarily related to the rhythm of embryonic development (Elias, 1937: 509). Elias pointed out that cell division in the frog embryo occurs in a fixed rhythm: at 13C, a division, which takes 4 minutes, will occur every 40 minutes. The film, however, omitted much of the time of the interval, and it also did not reflect the slower rhythm that occurs after the tenth

Figure 15.7  Obvious interventions into the image from Evolutio (Lichtspiel Kinematek Bern).



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division. So while Elias took care to embed his stop‐motion reconstruction in established observations, explicitly mentioning his reliance on a series of preparations, plate models, normal plates, and the work of Walther Vogt (1929), he also realized the importance of creating a film tailored to engage students’ attention.42 And Evolutio seems to have been successful in its solicitation of attention, both receiving distribution through the Schweizerische Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Unterrichtskinematographie (SAFU), and winning a trophy at the International Competition for Scientific Cinematography in Como in 1936. Elias also mentioned that it was incorporated into the curriculum at several universities.43 As this elaboration of Elias’s filmmaking demonstrates, his films figured prominently in the domain of documentary filmmaking; furthermore, they trace the contours of a largely forgotten tradition of scientific filmmaking that has the potential to illuminate not only nontheatrical histories of cinema but also the historical importance of scientific visualization in myriad forms. Evolutio deserves to be recognized as a significant addition to the history of documentary animation, joining, among others, Percy Smith’s occasional forays into insect animation and animated battle maps from World War I for Charles Urban.44 Not long after completing Evolutio, Elias emigrated to the US, where he found a position teaching anatomy at Middlesex University (now Brandeis), and then, after the birth of his children, a position at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta as a producer of medical films. There, while making a film strip about the structure of the mammalian liver, he made a discovery that revised a fundamental tenet about the liver’s structure, shifting the conception from the so‐called liver cords to a laminar structure. As he wrote, “It was the problem of stereographic screen projection of liver anatomy which stimulated a re‐examination of the architecture of this organ” (Elias 1949). Thus not only did the production of a visual teaching tool lead to the production of new knowledge, but the need for plastic visualization created the insight. Elias amplified this argument a few years later in an essay that summarized his thoughts about pedagogical filmmaking. The core argument – the transformation in understanding when visualizing something plastically – clearly drew on his discovery about the structure of the liver. Elias emphasized how effective educational filmmaking could come about only after the insights into the phenomenon being communicated had been gathered using other teaching methods: “Only repeated efforts to explain certain phenomena or processes to students give the teacher insight into more effective and more instructive ways of explanation. Blackboard drawings, improved from year to year, models and the demonstration of experiments and cases are the preliminary steps for the creation of teaching films of truly instructive value” (Elias 1950: 336). Furthermore, he drew a clear distinction between traditional methods of explanation and cinema, distinguishing between the “verbalism” of the textbook or lecture and film’s “visual and dramatic impact”: “Verbal descriptions and discussions, such as provided by textbooks and lecturers, have great flexibility of thought. This is a strength, but also a weakness; for textbooks and lectures can, unfortunately, afford to be vague in many instances, can cover gaps of

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knowledge with plausible words” (Elias 1950: 333). The phenomenon of a parasite entering the liver provided Elias with an extended example of this difference: As an example, we may mention a textbook of parasitology which states that a cercaria penetrates the skin, shedding its tail, and finally reaches the liver. The words “penetrates,” “shedding” and “reaches” seem satisfactory descriptions of a specific process to the author and the reader, to the lecturer and to his audience. In a film or film strip, when pictures have to tell the truth, these verbalisms do not help. The film must be specific and exact. “Penetrates” becomes a series of boring movements, of lytic gland activity, of tearing and of peristalsis. “Reaches” becomes an animated chart of the vascular system, pointing out the exact route and the mode of locomotion of the metacercaria; and here we are at a loss; the exact route is not yet known, nor is the manner of locomotion. Equally unknown is the mechanism of “shedding” the tail. (Elias 1950: 333)

“When pictures have to tell the truth,” an array of visualizations appears – specific and exact records of movement, an animated chart, and, finally, no pictures at all, since the knowledge that they are asked to provide does not in fact exist. As Elias concluded: “This example may illustrate the fact that a teaching film cannot be produced by compiling data from the literature because, by virtue of its visual nature, it must be more specific and more exact than textbooks and even monographs… . Thus, film production, undertaken for the simple purpose of teaching, with the intention only of visualizing well established matters, inevitably leads to discovery of new and often important facts. It may lead automatically to the clarification of large fields of knowledge” (Elias 1950: 333). This contention challenges typical hierarchies of knowledge by reversing the diffusionist logic; here pedagogy, instead of forming a downstream copy of elite science, is a method for producing new knowledge. Elias’s filmmaking, which allowed images conceived of as educational to circulate into the domain of research, can serve as an example of both “knowledge in transit” and the media archaeology concept of traveling knowledge.45 A detail of Elias’s discourse about his films can provide a conclusion for this account of his early filmmaking career as well as functioning as a bridge to this essay’s final section. Elias repeatedly used the term Trickfilm to describe his stop‐motion animation work, and this association opens up the many connections between special effects and science film. Placing Elias’s films into this context opens up a wider horizon for thinking about the links among animation, scientific visualization, and documentary. A number of moments create connections between Elias’s films and animation history. As already mentioned, Elias’s use of text and pointers within the image constitutes a functional equivalent to the “hand‐of‐the‐artist” trope. Relatedly, animators from Windsor McCay onward have taken pride in highlighting the labor involved in their craft, and Elias was no exception, making sure to mention that the animation sequence in Evolutio required 3 months of 10‐hour days (Elias 1937: 508). He also noted, “The process is extremely simple, albeit very laborious,” and indirect evidence of Elias at work appears in Atropa, where the dark paper behind the model becomes smudged with bits of white plasticine (this type of artifact only occurs once; Elias evidently was learning as he went) (Elias 1933: 232).46 (Figure 15.8)



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Figure 15.8  White smudges on the background paper as evidence of the animation process; from Evolutio ovi Amphibiorum (Hans Elias, 1939) [Lichtspiel Kinematek Bern]

Relatedly, Elias provided extended discussions of his animation process, anatomizing his work by the number of images per section. This method partakes of the so‐called operational aesthetic that has always had a strong presence in animation and that is particularly prominent in the domain of special‐effects animation via the “making‐of ” featurette, a mode that is shared by the natural‐history documentary as well.47 Elias occasionally commented on specific qualities of the images he produced, which taken together indicate what Yuri Tsivian, writing about early cinema audiences, termed “medium‐sensitive” spectators.48 Elias (1933) noted, for example, the particular quality of movement that is inherent to stop‐motion animation using plasticine, noting, “Due to small irregularities during the modeling, the film obtains a certain liveliness” (232).49 He also praised his films’ white‐on‐black appearance, comparing it to a particular technique for creating preparations and advancing an art‐critical opinion: “The appearance of a Semperized flower bud is an aesthetic pleasure of the first order” (233).50 Other strands of evidence connect Elias with traditional animation history. Elias was familiar with mainstream animation; he recounted seeing Snow White in Rome on the 8th of May 1938, a viewing made particularly memorable by running into Hitler’s and Mussolini’s motorcade on the way to the cinema. He also mentioned having made a stop‐motion version of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice shortly after getting married.51 Elias was married on 11 October 1936, and this foray into fiction animation came on the heels of his attendance at a congress of the Association pour la

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documentation photographique et cinematographique dans les sciences in Paris. Elias had previously attended the second Congrès in 1934, where he exhibited his flower films; it is likely that he exhibited Evolutio at the 1936 meeting. One of the key organizers of the Association was Jean Painlevé, and it would be surprising if Elias and Painlevé had not discussed plasticine animation, not only because of Elias’s work but also because Painlevé at the time was embarking on his own experiment with plasticine fiction animation, which resulted in Blue Beard (1936–1938). The historical juxtaposition of Elias and Painlevé signals a broader resonance, the elaboration of which will constitute this essay’s conclusion.

Plasticity, the Avant Garde, and Digital Technics The kinship that this essay has traced between embryological imaging and traditional animation may seem far removed from animation’s celebrated plasticity as it relates to the graphic traditions of stretch‐and‐squash cartoon bodies. Scott Bukatman summarizes the understanding of Sergei Eisenstein’s concept of the plasmatic, which was primarily derived from his enthusiasm for early Walt Disney animation: “Comics and cartoons are bastions of plasmatic and animistic energies and, under the guise of their implied address to children, are one of the most significant repositories of such ‘primitive’ beliefs in the modern world. While instrumental reason had little use for such fantasies of metamorphosis and expanded possibility, these marginal media allowed them free rein” (Bukatman 2012: 13). Eisenstein’s praise of traditional animation’s “plasmatic” qualities, however, does contain a link between animation and “instrumental reason,” i.e. scientific imaging. The plasmatic for Eisenstein primarily described the metamorphic bodies of Disney’s early cartoons, but as James Cahill has pointed out in a revelatory discussion, the plasmatic also owes a significant debt to Eisenstein’s friendship with Jean Painlevé and his enthusiastic appreciation of Painlevé’s filmmaking. Eisenstein’s plasmatic, in other words, was significantly indebted to a scientific optic. As Cahill explains, “Eisenstein’s fascination with protoplasm was nourished by two sources: the ‘proper’ scientific definition as the living substance of cells (the cytoplasm, nucleus, organelles, etc.) and the more general use of the term for a gelatinous, primordial substance that formed the substrate for all living processes and was characterized by a seemingly infinite plasticity.”52 Furthermore, an understanding of animation that emphasizes its plastic capacities can, as Yuriko Furuhata has written about a certain strand of Disney’s reception in Japan, be extended by an appreciation of the material processes of production. As Furuhata writes about the Japanese film theorist Hanada Kiyoteru, “In essence, I would suggest that we can extrapolate from Hanada’s reading of Disney a conception of plasticity as a kind of dialectical process of formation and transformation. Plasticity understood in this manner allows us to extend its relevance from the image itself to the material process of image production” (Furuhata 2011: 33–34). Animation, in other words, can be thought of as related to the plastic qualities of its basic apparatus, the ability to model and shape form – the specific material that Hanada used to illustrate his theory is sand, which is often used in modeling procedures. When considered as a



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“material process of image production,” embryological imaging emerges as a closely related albeit unacknowledged analogue of more traditional animation practices. This link between traditional animation and embryology can serve as an intermediate step toward making a final connection to the contemporary media landscape. Here we can recall a tenet of media archaeology, “all archaeological excavations into the past are meant to elaborate our current situation” (Parikka 2012: 6). Our current situation is dominated by the emergence of digital imaging, so how might this excursion into embryological animation inform an understanding of digital imaging techniques?53 Alexander Galloway has written about polygraphic photography, an imaging mode that shares key features with embryological modeling. Galloway argues that this kind of imaging should be understood as part of the history of computing: “The goal, then … will be to reconstruct a genealogy not for the moving image but for the information model, not for serial animation but for parallel animation, not for the linear but for the multiplexed—in short not for cinema but for the computer,” an argument that is condensed into a single word when he makes the claim that this tradition is “acinematic” (Galloway 2014: 54–67, at 56). But rather than separating these imaging modes from cinema, we might insist instead on how they, according to the logic of plasticity, enlarge what we consider cinema to be. Consider, as another example, Vannevar Bush’s automatic microtome. As described by Graham Burnett, Bush’s device is “a dead end, finally, in the history of technology,” and yet, he admits consideration of it prompts a “tissue of suggestive allusions (Eadweard Muybridge’s time‐and‐motion studies, Duchamp’s infra‐mince, the notorious ‘baloney‐ man’ of Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry, the ‘Visible Human Project,’” Justine Cooper’s MRI sculpture Rapt, etc., etc.)” (Burnett 2010) (Figure 15.9). It is precisely such

Figure 15.9  Vannevar Bush’s automatic microtome (Bush 1952).

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a web of filiations in which Elias is enmeshed. Furthermore, Bush’s status as the father of the Internet (Memex), his position as a key thinker of cybernetics, makes this mid‐century moment of embryological cinema a station on the path to digital cinema.54 In an essay about contemporary CGI, Tom Gunning (2006) traces the etymology of the word golem, which reveals a link to the notion of the embryo and plasticity. “Golem most likely meant ‘unformed, amorphous’ (or according to Moshe Idel ‘embryo’), a meaning that becomes fixed in later texts such as the Talmud, which uses it to describe the formless nature of Adam before his final creation by God” (323). For Gunning, part of what Gollum and his imbrication in the technics of CGI represents is the plasticity of the digital moving image. “But little in the Gollum recalls the figure of Jewish legend – at least, little did until the conjunction of modern computer and cinematic technology transformed the literary character into a cinematic figure whose very ontology challenges us to rethink the limit between the animate and the inanimate, the human and the synthetic, not only raising issues relevant to the newest technology but invoking the oldest sources of the cinema” (Gunning 2006: 324).55 In this sense, cinema, especially when pushed to assume the fuller parameters of its employments in the domains of science and medicine, names something metamorphic, something always defined primarily by the question: What is?

Notes 1 See Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison (2007). 2 See Lisa Cartwright (1995); Hannah Landecker (2007); Tim Boon (2008); Kirsten Ostherr (2012); Scott Curtis (2015); and Oliver Gaycken (2015). For an overview of this area of scholarship, see Jesse Olszynko‐Gryn (2016: 279–86, esp. 279–80); and Jean‐Baptiste Gouyon, “Science and Film‐making,” Public Understanding of Science 25, no. 1 (2016): 17–30. 3 See Nick Hopwood (2015) and Janina Wellmann (2017). 4 For an engagement with (neuro) plasticity in the domain of philosophy, see Catherine Malabou (2009). 5 As Parikka (2012) explains, the embedded reference here is to Mieke Bal (2002). See also Simon Ganahl (2016). 6 See Thomas Elsaesser (2004). 7 See Thierry Lefebvre (1995); Tom Gunning (1997); Paula Amad (2010); Jennifer Peterson (2013); Johathan Kahana (2016). 8 Jennifer Tucker (2006). 9 Jim Secord (2004: 654). See also Miriam Hansen (1999). 10 For a representative account, see Georges Sadoul (1946/1950‐75). Charles Musser’s (1990) concept of the history of “screen practice” provides an alternative conceptualization of cinema’s origins that leaves space for a consideration of an expanded role for scientific imaging. 11 See Deac Rossell (2013). 12 See E.‐J. Marey (1894: 303); for an account of Braune and Fischer’s work, see Scott Curtis (2015: 44–62). See also Florian Hoof (2015: 212–215); and Scott Curtis (2009: 85–99), for brief discussions of the use of stereoscopic imaging in Gilbreth’s business consulting practice.



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13 An initial version of this argument appears in my “‘A Living, Developing Egg Is Present Before You’: Animation, Scientific Visualization, Modeling,” in Karen Beckman (2014: 68–81). For an account that makes a similar connection between the microtome and film and links it to the work of the cinematic avant‐garde, see Flora Lysen (2015: 90–99). 14 Hans Strasser (1887: 208): “dann ergibt sich die Möglichkeit, das Object thatsächlich mit dem Auge in den verschiedenen Richtungen des Raumes abzutasten, als ob man ein vollkommen durchsichtiges Diagramm vor sich hätte.” 15 Hopwood (2005: 240); Nick Hopwood (2006: 265). 16 My thanks to Benjamin Schultz‐Figueroa for bringing this note to my attention. 17 See Karl Reicher (1907); Marie Imchanitzky (1910: 229). 18 See Lisa Cartwright and Brian Goldfarb (1992), 190–201; Lisa Cartwright (1998); and Catherine Waldby (2000). 19 Ernst Mach (2016), in an early discussion of time‐lapse imaging, mentions “the growth stages of a plant, the stages of an embryo’s development, the limbs of the Darwinian genealogical tree of the animal branch” as potentially “invigorating” time‐lapse scenes. Mach’s vision of time‐lapse’s potential use connects with an important understanding of plasticity in contemporary biology is the development of species. 20 It is an instance of what Tom Gunning (1994: 423) observed about the appearance of cinema at the St. Louis World’s Fair: “The World’s Fair provides one of the richest instances of the visual and technological culture that emerged in industrialized countries from the middle of the nineteenth century into the twentieth. Cinema moves within this culture less as its culmination than as a parasite, drawing upon both its forms and its themes but initially remaining relatively neglected, seeming like a pale shadow of richer, more vivid, forms.” 21 On the latter organization, see Zoë Druick (2007). The details of Elias’s work as a consultant for the IECI requires further research, and as Druick notes, writing about the involvement of Rudolph Arnheim, Laszlo Maholy‐Nagy, and Germaine Dulac at the Institute, “The involvement of these people not only indicates the wide variety of individuals who contributed to the life of the Institute, but also the degree to which Italian Fascism accommodated ideological and cultural diversity” (88). 22 These facts about Elias’s career come from Sabine Hildebrandt (2012). 23 “Um diese Behauptung aber objektiv photographisch zu beweisen, bediente ich mich der Kinematographie.” 24 Elias was not the first to adopt these techniques; he cited the previous work of Peacock, P.R. and Price, L.W. (1932); and Saxl, E. (1927) (on optical sectioning). 25 Elias (1937): “eine Weiterausbildung der Methode der Wachsplattenmodelle … und zwar eine Weiterausbildung in Richtung einer vierten Dimension, der Zeit.” 26 Plastilin is a trade name for an oil‐based modeling clay patented in Germany by Franz Kolb in 1880. It is similar to Plasticine, a trade name for an oil‐based modeling clay invented in 1897 by William Harbutt, known to today’s media consumers via its use by animation artists to create such characters as Gumby and Wallace and Gromit. 27 My thanks to Yvonne Zimmermann, who alerted me to a copy of Evolutio Ovi Amphoborium (dir. Hans Elias, 1936) at Lichtspiel Kinemathek, Bern; and to Brigitte Paulowitz from Lichtspiel, who provided access to Evolutio and to the existing flower film, Atropa belladonna. Allium fallax does not seem to survive. 28 His presentation was published as Hans Elias, “Sur le développement des fleurs”. For an account of the Association, see Roxane Hamery (2005). The conference was organized by Jean Painlevé, Dr. Charles Claoué, and Michel Servanne.

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29 For an account of Jean Comandon’s time‐lapse plant‐growth films for Albert Kahn in the 1920s, see Paula Amad (2010); and Béatrice de Pastre and Thierry Lefebvre (2012). For recent work on educational cinema, see Devin Orgeron, Marsha Orgeron, and Dan Streible (2011); and Charles Acland and Haidee Wasson (2011). 30 Schwarz, who was Oehlker’s assistant at the time, emigrated to Israel where he changed his name to Michael Evanari and worked at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He made important contributions to modern Israeli agriculture. 31 See Oliver Gaycken (2012, 2015). 32 Elias (1932: 232); and Elias (1934: 51): “Die Filme sollen den Studenten den Begriff der Entwicklung veranschaulichen und Verständnis für Entwicklungsvorgänge wachrufen.” 33 For an account of Anschauung and media, see Henning Schmidgen (2004). 34 “Einführung mit Erklärung, Wiederholung zur Klärung,” Elias (1937: 510). Elias mentions the work of Jean Benoit‐Lévy and Dr. Gosset, in particular their film L’appendicetomie (1932), a 35 mm sound film that was presented on the first day of the conference that begins with a schematic demonstration followed by sequence of “direct photography.” For the context of Benoit‐Lévy’s film, the Comité français d’études medico‐chirugicales par le cinématographie, see Valérie Vignaux (2004); on Benoit‐Lévy’s career as a documentarian, see also Vignaux (2007). 35 For an overview of educational cinema in America see “Introduction,” in Orgeron, Orgeron, and Streible (2011); Acland and Wasson (2011); Gaycken (2011). 36 According to Daston and Galison (2007) “truth‐to‐nature” becomes displaced by “objectivity” during the nineteenth century and is closely related to the rise of photography. 37 Elias described how the additional techniques were necessary to show developmental processes: “Beim Vordringen des Entodermkeils muß man ansetzen, bei der Senkung des Furchungshöhlenbodens muß man eindrücken, bei der Erweiterung des Urdarms muß man wischen” (Elias 1937: 508). 38 “Es ist bekannt, daß das invaginierende Material eine allmähliche Streckung erfährt. Diese Streckung der Materialteile wird ganz von selbst dadurch erreicht, daß man vor jeder neuen Aufnahme ganz leicht mit dem Finger über die dem Urmund benachbarten Teile in der Einwanderungsrichtung streicht.” (Elias 1937: 508). 39 The second sequence substitutes the gastrulation in the Apennine yellow‐bellied toad (Bombinator pachypus) for the European tree frog. 40 For a discussion of the “hand‐of‐the‐animator” trope, see Don Crafton (1993). 41 “Zur Erhöhung der Anschaulichkeit wurde folgender Fehler gemacht” (Elias, 1937: 509). 42 Vogt also made films about amphibian development that were part of the Institut für den Wissenschaftlichen Film’s catalogue: Entwicklung des Molches I, II, III (IWF C271, C272, C273). 43 The details about the film’s distribution come from Elias (1939). For a brief history of the SAFU, see Anita Gertiser (2011). 44 For an overview, see Annabelle Honess Roe (2013). For a more specific look at silent‐era nonfiction animation, see Mihaela Mihailova (2019). Mihailova also notes the analogy between the pointer and Crafton’s identification of the trope of self‐figuration (33–34). 45 In Elias’s later career he pioneered a new mode of imaging that he called stereology, writing his first paper on the subject in 1952 and helping to establish of the International Society of Stereology in 1961. As Sabine Hildebrandt (2012) explains, “By this time he had long been fascinated by the challenge of creating scientific images that could convey



46

47 48 49 50 51 52

53 54 55

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the plasticity of the three dimensions in space. During his studies on the architecture of the liver he had worked with serial cuts of tissue, a highly time‐consuming process. He assumed that it should be possible to evaluate two‐dimensional images mathematically in a way that would help predict the three‐dimensional structure of the tissue. In collaboration with mathematicians he developed geometric formulae that enabled him to predict structures from the two‐ to the three‐dimensional space, a science he called stereology” (288). “Das Verfahren ist äußerst einfach, wenn auch sehr mühselig. Another glimpse of Elias’s experiences with the materiality of cinema came when the projector failed at the Dahlem botanical conference, preventing the films from being screened. On the (in)visibility of animation labor, see Hannah Frank (2019). For an account of the “making‐of ” genre in the nature documentary, see Jean‐Baptiste Gouyon, (2019). For the concept of the medium‐sensitive viewer, see Yuri Tsivian (1994). “Durch kleine Unregelmäßigkeiten beim Modellieren bekommt der Film eine gewisse Lebendigkeit” (Elias 1933: 232). “Der Anblick einer gesempterten Blütenknospe ist in ästhetischer Genuß allerersten Ranges” (Elias 1933: 233). Hans Elias (n.d.); 3/24 (Snow White) and 3/28 (The Sorcerer’s Apprentice). See James Cahill (2018: 136–48; quotation at 140). Eisenstein’s writings on Disney did not appear together in his lifetime; they have been collected posthumously in Sergei Eisenstein (1988). The films that were central to Eisenstein’s photographic plasmatic were L’Œuf de l’épinoche, de la fécondation à l’éclosion / The Stickleback’s Egg, From Fertilization to Hatching (Jean Painlevé 1927–1929) and Eisenstein’s Swiss educational film Frauennot/Frauenglück (1929). For an account of contemporary practices of time‐based embryological imaging that exist exclusively in the domain of digital imaging, see Janina Wellmann (2017). See Vannevar Bush (1945). See also Julie Turnock (2015: 16). Particularly relevant is Turnock’s focus on the interchange between mainstream and avant‐garde filmmaking practices and practitioners, how “experimental filmmaking taught mainstream filmmakers like Lucas and Spielberg how to build virtual environments out of movement, animation, and graphic dynamism. Feature filmmakers, often with the help of underground filmmakers, combined these experimental techniques with traditional optical special effects and animation techniques to increase the plasticity of previously ‘inflexible’ live‐action photography, an approach I call ‘optical animation’” (17).

References Acland, C. and Wasson, H. (eds.) (2011). Useful Cinema. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Amad, P. (2010). Counter‐Archive: Film, the Everyday, and Albert Kahn’s. Archives de la Planète, 226–260. New York: Columbia University Press. Bal, M. (2002). Traveling Concepts in the Humanities. Toronto: Toronto University Press. Beckman, K. (ed.) (2014). Animating Film Theory, 68–81. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Boon, T. (2008). Films of Fact: A History of Science in Documentary Films and Television. New York: Wallflower Press. Braukmann, S. (2012). On Fate and Specification: Images and Models of Developmental Biology. In: The Educated Eye: Visual Culture and Pedagogy in the Life Sciences (eds. N. Anderson and M.R. Dietrich), 213–234. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press. Bukatman, S. (2012). The Poetics of Slumberland: Animated Spirits and the Animating Spirit. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Burnett, D.G. (2010). The Thin Film: Vannevar Bush and Vision by Incision. The Slice: Cutting to See. http://cabinetmagazine.org/events/TheSlice_Catalogue_AASchool_2010. pdf. Bush, V. (1945). As We May Think. Atlantic Monthly. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ archive/1945/07/as‐we‐may‐think/303881. Bush, V. (1952). Automatic Microtome. Science 115 (2998): 649–652. Cahill, J. (2018). Zoological Surrealism: The Nonhuman Cinema of Jean Painlevé. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Cartwright, L. (1995). Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Cartwright, L. (1998). A Cultural Anatomy of the Visible Human Project. In: The Visible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Gender, and Science (eds. P.A. Treichler, L. Cartwright and C. Penley). New York: New York University Press. Cartwright, L. and Goldfarb, B. (1992). Radiography, Cinematography and the Decline of the Lens. In: Incorporations (eds. J. Crary and S. Kwinter), 190–201. New York: Zone. Crafton, D. (1993). Before Mickey: The Animated Film, 1898–1928. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Curtis, S. (2009). Images of Efficiency: The Films of Frank B. Gilbreth. In: Films that Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media (eds. V. Hediger and P. Vonderau), 85–99. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Curtis, S. (2015). The Shape of Spectatorship: Art, Science, and Early Cinema in Germany. New York: Columbia University Press. Daston, L. and Galison, P. (2007). Objectivity. New York: Zone Books. Druick, Z. (2007). The International Educational Cinematograph Institute, Reactionary Modernism, and the Formation of Film Studies. Canadian Journal of Film Studies 16 (1): 80–97. Eisenstein, S. (1988). Eisenstein on Disney (ed. J. Leyda) (trans. Alan Upchurch). London: Methuen. Elias, H. (1931). Die Entwicklung des Farbkleides des Wasserfrosches (Rana esculenta). Zeitschrift für Zellforschung 14: 55–72. Elias, H. (1933). Entwicklungsgeschichtliche Trickfilme, nebst Bemerkungen über die Verwendung des Semper‐Präparates in der Botanik. Beiträge zur Systematik und Pflanzengeographie 41 (71): 232–233. Elias, H. (1934). Sur le développement des fleurs. Compte Rendu de l’association pour la documentation photographique et cinématographique dans les sciences, IIe Congrès, Paris, 4–11 October 1934, 51–52. Paris: Librarie Maloine. Elias, H. (1935). Ausgleich und Auswertung des Mangels an Schärfentiefe mittels der Kinematographie. Zur Frage der Anastomosen der Epidermis‐Melanophoren. Zeitschrift für Wissenschaftliche Mikroskopie und für mikroskopische Technik 52 (4): 424–427. Elias, H. (1937). Plastisch‐kinematographische Rekonstruktion. Archiv für experimentelle Zellforschung 19: 507–510.



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Elias, H. (1939). A Plastic Trick Film of Embryological Development. Journal of the Biological Photographic Association 7 (3): 102–104. Elias, H. (1949). The Liver Cord Concept After One Hundred Years. Science 110 (2862): 470–472. Elias, H. (1950). Principles of Scientific Teaching Film Production with Special Reference to the Medical Film. Journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges 25 (5): 333–337. Elias, H. (n.d.). Abenteuer in Emigration und Wissenschaft, ein Beitrag zur Aufklaerung des Krebsproblems. Unpublished manuscript. M. E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives. University Libraries, University of Albany, New York. Elsaesser, T. (2004). The New Film History as Media Archaeology. Cinémas 14 (2–3): 75–117. Frank, H. (2019). Frame by Frame: A Materialist Aesthetics of Animated Cartoons. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Furuhata, Y. (2011). Rethinking Plasticity: The Politics and Production of the Animated Image. Animation 6 (1): 25–38. Galloway, A.R. (2014). Polygraphic Photography and the Origins of 3D Animation. In: Animating Film Theory (ed. K. Beckman). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ganahl, S. (2016). From Media Archaeology to Media Genealogy: An Interview with Erkki Huhtamo. Le Foucaldien 2 (1) https://doi.org/10.16995/lefou.17. Gaudreault, A. (2011). Film and Attraction: From Kinematography to Cinema (trans. T. Barnard). Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Gaycken, O. (2011). “The Swarming of Life”: Moving Images, Education, and Views through the Microscope. Science in Context 24 (3): 361–380. Gaycken, O. (2012). The Secret Life of Plants: Visualizing Vegetative Movement, 1880–1903. Early Popular Visual Culture 10 (1): 51–69. Gaycken, O. (2015). Devices of Curiosity: Early Cinema and Popular Science. New York: Oxford University Press. Gertiser, A. (2011). Die Schweizerische Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Unterrichtskinematographie: Hüterin des “reinen” Lehrfilms. In: Schaufenster Schweiz: Dokumentarische Gebrauchsfilme, 1896–1964 (ed. Y. Zimmermann). Zurich: Limmat Verlag. Gouyon, J.B. (2016). Science and Film‐making. Public Understanding of Science 25 (1): 17–30. Gouyon, J.B. (2019). BBC Wildlife Documentaries in the Age of Attenborough. London: Palgrave. Gunning, T. (1994). The World as Object Lesson: Cinema Audiences, Visual Culture and the St. Louis World’s Fair, 1904. Film History 6 (4): 422–444. Gunning, T. (1997). Before Documentary: Early Nonfiction Films and the “View” Aesthetic. In: Uncharted Territory: Essays on Early Nonfiction Film (eds. D. Hertogs and N. de Klerck), 9–24. Amsterdam: Stichting Nederlands Filmmuseum. Gunning, T. (2006). Gollum and Golem: Special Effects and the Technology of Artificial Bodies. In: From Hobbits to Hollywood: Essays on Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings (eds. E. Mathijs and M. Pomerance), 319–349. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Hamery, R. (2005). Jean Painlevé et la promotion du cinéma scientifique en France dans les années trente. 1895. Mille huit cent quatre‐vingt‐quinze, 47. http://journals.openedition. org/1895/328; DOI: 10.4000/1895.328. Hansen, M. (1999). The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism. Modernism/modernity 6 (2): 59–77.

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Hildebrandt, S. (2012). The Anatomist Hans Elias: A Jewish German in Exile. Clinical Anatomy 25: 284–294. Hoof, F. (2015). Engel der Effizienz: Eine Mediengeschichte der Unternehmensberatung, 212–215. Konstanz: Konstanz University Press. Hopwood, N. (2004). Plastic Publishing in Embryology. In: Models: The Third Dimension of Science (eds. S. de Chadarevian and N. Hopwood), 170–206. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press. Hopwood, N. (2005). Visual Standards and Disciplinary Change: Normal Plate, Tables and Stages in Embryology. History of Science 43: 240. Hopwood, N. (2006). Pictures of Evolution and Charges of Fraud: Ernst Haeckel’s Embryological Illustrations. Isis 97 (2): 260–301. Hopwood, N. (2009). Embryology. In: The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 6 (eds. P.J. Bowler and J.V. Pickstone), 285–315. New York: Cambridge University Press. Hopwood, N. (2015). Haeckel’s Embryos: Images, Evolution, and Fraud. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Imchanitzky, M. (1910). Reconstitution cinématographique des séries de coupe. Travaux de l’Association de l’Institut Marey 2, 229. Paris. Jacobs, L. (1971). Preface. In: The Documentary Tradition: From Nanook to Woodstock, selected, arranged, and introduced by Lewis Jacobs. New York: Hopkinson and Blake, n.p. Kahana, J. (ed.) (2016). The Documentary Film Reader: History, Theory, Criticism, 52–63. New York: Oxford University Press. Kelly, R.E. (1903). Preliminary Note on the Application of the Cinematograph Principle to the Study of Serial Sections. British Medical Journal 2 (2223): 312–313. Kelly, R.E. (1932). Teaching Surgery with the Cinematograph. British Medical Journal 1 (3719): 718. Landecker, H. (2007). Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lefebvre, T. (ed.) (1995). 1895, revue d’histoire du cinéma, no. 18. Images du réel. La non‐fiction en France (1890–1930). Paris: Association française de recherché sur l’histoire du cinéma. Lutz, E.G. (1920). Animated Cartoons: How They Are Made, Their Origin, and Development, 1920. New York: Charles Scribner’s Son. Lysen, F. (2015). Grey Matter and Colored Wax. In: Textures of the Anthropocene: Grain Vapor Ray (eds. K. Klingan, A. Sepahvand, C. Rosol and B.M. Scherer), 90–99. Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press. MacDonald, S. (2016). Up Close and Political: Three Short Ruminations on Ideology in the Nature Film. In: The Documentary Film Reader: History, Theory, Criticism (ed. J. Kahana), 970. New York: Oxford University Press. Mach, E. (2016). Remarks on Scientific Applications of Photography (trans. D. Bowles). Science in Context 29 (4): 441–442. Malabou, C. (2009). Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity (trans. C. Shread). Cambridge: Polity Press. Malitsky, J. (2012). Science and Documentary: Unity, Indexicality, Reality. Journal of Visual Culture 11 (3): 237–257. Marey, E.‐J. (1894). Le movement, 303. Paris: G. Masson. Mihailova, M. (2019). Before Sound, There Was Soul: The Role of Animation in Silent Nonfiction Cinema. In: Drawn from Life: Issues and Themes in Animated Documentary Cinema (eds. J. Murray and N. Ehrlich), 31–46. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.



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Musser, C. (1990). The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen until 1906. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Olszynko‐Gryn, J. (2016). Film Lessons: Early Cinema for Historians of Science. British Journal for the History of Science 49 (2): 279–286. Orgeron, D., Orgeron, M., and Streible, S. (eds.) (2011). Learning with the Lights off: Educational Film in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press. Ostherr, K. (2012). Medical Visions: Producing the Patient through Film, Television, and Imaging Technologies. New York: Oxford University Press. Ostherr, K. (2015). Animating Informatics: Scientific Discovery Through Documentary Film. In: A Companion to Documentary Film (eds. A. Juhasz and A. Lebow), 285. London: Wiley. Parikka, J. (2012). What Is Media Archaeology? 15. Malden, MA: Polity Press. de Pastre, B. and Lefebvre, T. (eds.) (2012). Filmer la science, comprendre la vie: le cinéma de Jean Comandon. Paris: CNC. Peacock, P.R. and Price, L.W. (1932). On the Cinematographic Examination of Serial Sections as an Aid to Histology. Journal of the Royal Microscopical Society 52, 265–268. Peter, K. (1906). Die Methoden der Rekonstruktion. Jena: Gustav Fischer Verlag. Peterson, J. (2013). Education in the School of Dreams: Travelogues and Early Nonfiction Film. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Reicher, K. (1907). Kinematographie in der Neurologie. Verhandlungen der Gesellschaft Deutscher Naturforscher und Ärtzte 79 (2): 235–236. Roe, A.H. (2013). Animated Documentary. New York: Palgrave. Rossell, D. (2013). Chronophotography in the Context of Moving Pictures. Early Popular Visual Culture 11 (1): 10–27. Sadoul, G. (1946/1950‐1975). Histoire générale du cinéma, Tome 1–2. Paris: Denoël. Saxl, E. (1927). Extremste Mikroskopie. Photographische Correspondenz 63, 131–137. Schmidgen, H. (2004). Pictures, Preparations, and Living Processes: The Production of Immediate Visual Perception (Anschauung) in Late‐Nineteenth‐Century Physiology. Journal of the History of Biology 37: 477–513. Secord, J.A. (2004). Knowledge in Transit. Isis 95 (4): 654–672. Strasser, H. (1887). Über die Methoden der plastischen Rekonstruktion. Zeitschrift für wissenschaftliche Mikroskopie und mikroskopische Technik 4 (2): 168–208. Tsivian, Y. (1994). Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tucker, J. (2006). The Historian, the Picture, and the Archive. Isis 97: 111–120. Turnock, J. (2015). Plastic Reality: Special Effects, Technology, and the Emergence of 1970s Blockbuster Aesthetics. New York: Columbia University Press. Vignaux, V. (2004). Contribution à une histoire de l’emploi du cinéma dans l’enseignment de la chirurgie. 1895 Mille huit cent quatre‐vingt‐quinze, 44. http://journals.openedition. org/1895/305; DOI: 10.4000/1895.305. Vignaux, V. (2007). Jean Benoit‐Lévy ou le corps comme utopie, une histoire du cinéma éducateur dans l’entre‐deux‐guerres en France. Paris: AFRHC. Vogt, W. (1929). Gestaltungsanalyse am Amphibienkeim mit örtlicher Vitalfärbung: II. Teil. Gastrulation und Mesodermbildung bei Urodelen und Anuren. Wilhelm Roux’ Archiv für Entwicklungsmechanik der Organismen 120 (1): 384–706. Waldby, C. (2000). The Visible Human Project: Informatic Bodies and Posthuman Medicine. New York: Routledge.

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Wellmann, J. (2017). The Form of Becoming: Embryology and the Epistemology of Rhythm, 1760–1830 (trans. K. Sturge). New York: Zone Books. West‐Eberhard, M.J. (2003). Developmental Plasticity and Evolution, 34. New York: Oxford University Press.

16

Hans Richter and the Filmessay

A Media Archaeological Case Study of Documentary Film History and Historiography Yvonne Zimmermann

Philipps University Marburg

Introduction In 1940, while in exile in Switzerland, German avant‐garde artist and filmmaker Hans Richter published a short article in a Basel daily newspaper in which he announces “a new type of documentary film” that he terms Filmessay.1 The Filmessay, Richter explains, visualizes that what cannot be seen: “the invisible world of imagi­ nation, thoughts, and ideas” (Richter 2017: 91). Unlike manufacturing processes or the workings of a machine, thoughts and ideas cannot just be reproduced by the camera, but need to be produced; that is, rendered visible and thus understandable, with the specific techniques of film. For this purpose, the Filmessay according to Richter can draw from an incomparably larger reservoir of expressive means than the “straight” documentary. He writes: Since in the Filmessay, the filmmaker is not bound by the depiction of external phe­ nomena and the constraints of chronological sequences, but, on the contrary, has to enlist material from everywhere, the filmmaker can bounce around freely in space and time. For example, he can switch from objective representation to fantastic allegory and from there to a staged scene; the filmmaker can portray dead as well as living things, and artificial as well as natural objects – as long as they serve the purpose of making visible the fundamental idea. (Richter 2017: 91–92)

In studies on the essay film that have increasingly emerged since the early 1990s, Richter’s article on the Filmessay is widely recognized as being (among the) first to formally articulate the genre.2 Together with Alexandre Astruc, Richter is generally acknowledged as the founder of the essay film. In the first English‐language book on A Companion to Documentary Film History, First Edition. Edited by Joshua Malitsky. © 2021 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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the essay film published in 2009, Laura Rascaroli states that the contributions by Richter and Astruc, among others, “anticipated or paralleled the emergence of a modernist and, in some cases, truly avant‐garde practice of first‐person filmmak­ ing” (Rascaroli 2009: 6). For Timothy Corrigan, Richter’s text on the Filmessay was “prophetic,” announcing a new direction in film practice that would create films that “rethink the self as a function of a destabilized public sphere” (Corrigan 2011: 63). And Nora M. Alter purports that Richter had called in 1940 for “a type of post­ documentary filmmaking that would, in effect, broach the problem of the im/­ perceptible” (Alter 2017: 138). While the question of perception and the making visible what is invisible to the human eye with the help of the camera had been among the key impulses of docu­ mentary film theory and practice for the cinematic avant‐garde in the interwar period, among them Dziga Vertov and Jean Epstein, it is surely correct to include Richter in this tradition that Malcolm Turvey (2008) has called the “revelationist tradition.”3 Like Vertov and Epstein, Richter saw in cinema an epistemological tool to reveal the true nature of reality. And he shared the belief in the capacity of cinema to open the eyes of the “masses.” The interpretation of Richter’s Filmessay as a type of “postdocumentary” film practice, though, raises a general question about the temporalities of film history and historiography when considered together with Thomas Elsaesser (2017, 243) and Timothy Corrigan’s (2011) observation that the essay film “proper” does not emerge until the postwar period when it was first developed as a means to break with propagandistic nonfiction films after World War II by auteurs belonging to the French nouvelle vague such as Alain Resnais and Chris Marker. It is only in this post­ war period that subjectivity itself faces a crisis and becomes one of the distinct fea­ tures of the essay film (Corrigan 2011). Obviously, from this perspective, Richter’s allegedly “postdocumentary” is at the same time part of a “prehistory” of essayistic tendencies in the interwar period that is said to include also works by D. W. Griffith, Sergej Eisenstein and Humphrey Jennings (Corrigan 2011: 70). Seen in this light, Richter serves as a precursor in the “incubation period” of the essay film “proper” that can easily be included in a diachronic history of the essay film’s development into a genre and as a genre (despite the genre’s hybridity and notoriously fuzzy and overlapping genre boundaries). The creation of a retroactive genealogical pedigree of the essay film is linked to the search for prestigious ancestors. Here, Richter comes in handy to align the essay film with the notable tradition of avant‐garde cinema. In what follows, I wish to revisit and fundamentally question Richter’s assigned place in this history of the essay film (Alter 2018: 28). Studies of early cinema evoked a profound skepticism toward teleological accounts of linear developments and progress as well as toward the search for inventors and birthplaces. The notion of Richter being part of a “prehistory” of the essay film is similar to an understanding of early cinema as a “pre‐classical” period out of which Hollywood and classical narrative cinema developed. The presumption of early cinema as being the anteroom of classical cinema has convincingly been rebutted since at least the 1990s. In a somewhat similar vein, I wish to examine the place of Richter’s Filmessay in the



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“prehistory” of the essay film “proper.” To begin with, this means to study Richter’s ­concept of the Filmessay in its own right, and it includes taking historical terminology seriously. For that reason, I use the German term Filmessay – the term Richter uses in his 1940 article – throughout this chapter when referring to Richter’s theory and prac­ tice of documentary and essayistic filmmaking. And I will pay particular attention to shifts in terminology during the transatlantic trajectory of Richter and to the adaptation of the concept of the Filmessay upon his emigration to the US in 1941. Early cinema studies are useful as a methodological template in yet another aspect: as André Gaudreault has pointed out, the early days of film and cinema might be the late period of certain other phenomena, quoting Jacques Deslandes who claims that Georges Méliès was not a film pioneer but the last man of the féerie (Gaudreault 2012: 40). This instance points to the probability that Richter’s Filmessay may belong to a different tradition of the documentary film than the essay film emerging in the post­ war era. It also points to potential noncinematic antecedents, such as literature, but also to picture sheets or broadsides (as will be discussed later). Therefore, I examine Richter’s theory and practice of the Filmessay not in the context of a diachronic development of the essay film, but in a synchronic perspective that considers the Filmessay in relation to the discourses and practices of documentary filmmaking in the late 1930s and early 1940s. In doing so, I privilege, as Gaudreault has suggested, a retrospective viewpoint over a prospective. This means that I consider what “old” documentary was when Richter proclaimed the Filmessay as a “new” type of docu­ mentary. This argumentation implies a move away from a genealogical model of historiography and a move toward media archaeology instead, with Richter’s theory and practice of the Filmessay serving as the object for a media archaeological excava­ tion that detaches the object of investigation from the development of the essay film in order to mine its own entangled transatlantic trajectory. This includes a retro­ spective study of the actors and their agendas, the objects and discourses, and the networks and politics involved in the propagation of what Richter termed “a new type of documentary film.” I will argue that Richter’s Filmessay in its time of origin was more of a dead end than a precursor of the essay film, and that it turned into the latter only in scholarship on the essay film since the 1990s. It is this process of doing, undoing and redoing documentary film history that I wish to excavate with the help of Richter’s Filmessay. Thus, this chapter is not about the essay film, but about the entangled history and historiography of documentary film in which practitioners, critics, museums, archives, and scholars have equally been involved. The media archaeological approach I follow is in line with scholars like Thomas Elsaesser (2004,  2016) and Erkki Huhtamo (2004,  2012), who draw on Michel Foucault’s (2002 [1969]) notion of “discourse as practice” as described in Archaeology of Knowledge and follow the call for questioning “the already‐said at the level of existence” rather than searching for a beginning.4 Unlike the technofetishist, non­ hermeneutic media archaeologies of Friedrich Kittler (1985) and his disciples like Wolfgang Ernst (2013), my approach sees media archaeology as cultural history and considers the place of the social and the political when studying the conditions of the emergence and transformation of discourses.

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Documentary Film, Useful Cinema and the Filmessay The description of Richter’s Filmessay that I gave at the beginning is the standard account in academic studies, and the text passage included is by far the most cited. It is the passage that portrays the aesthetic features of the Filmessay, and this focus on aesthetics surely is the most productive for any formal analysis of filmic texts. However, such textual focus detaches aesthetics from historically specific produc­ tion and exhibition contexts. It de‐historicizes aesthetics and turns aesthetics into a kind of “immutable object” that can travel through time and space. As genre theorist Steve Neale (2012 [1990]: 191) has underlined, genre definitions are always histori­ cally relative and therefore historically specific; hence the importance of historiciz­ ing generic terms and genre definitions. Elsaesser (2017: 255) has argued that rather than looking to define the essay film, it may be more productive to study the con­ texts and conditions that have led to this form. Even though my attempt is to write Richter’s Filmessay out of the tradition of the essay film “proper,” Elsaesser’s call to study the contexts and conditions is equally helpful in order to learn more about the cultural and political backgrounds that led to Richter’s proclamation of the Filmessay. In the first paragraph of his essay on the Filmessay, Richter situates his discussion in the Swiss film industry and in relation to Swiss feature film that, for the first time in history, was in full bloom in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The short‐lived eco­ nomic boom is to be understood against the backdrop of National Socialist and fascist threats and Swiss audiences’ equally short‐lived preferences to see their national culture, lifestyle and vernacular dialects reflected on the screen – a niche that only the domestic film industry could serve (Zimmermann  2005). Richter (2017: 89) argues, in a similar vein, that the documentary offers possibilities for development, and that to research these possibilities is “an especially rewarding task.” Before going into any aesthetic details, Richter addresses the specific economic logic of documentary film production: Financing documentaries through advanced sales and rental contracts is only rarely feasible. Feature film has an advantage in this regard. Documentary film survives mainly due to commission. And those who have commissioned the film, whether it be the state, a club, or a private person – that is, those who represent public interests, such as national defense, fatigue duty, the postal service, radio, forestry; or represent special interests, such as advertisements for transit, manufacturing, and the like – all make different demands. Some are satisfied by the common type of documentary film – ­others are not. (Richter 2017: 190)

Richter’s description of the conditions of documentary film production is essential to an understanding of documentary film culture at that time. Professional documentary filmmaking depended upon sponsorship from public or private ­ organizations. Switzerland was no exception but the rule. In all countries, no matter the political system, documentary films were sponsored films; commissioned on specific occasions to perform specific tasks on specific audiences. Documentary



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film culture was useful cinema culture, as we would say today. And it was within useful cinema culture that Richter developed the Filmessay. Or, to be more precise, Richter developed the Filmessay as a new type of useful cinema – a type of useful cinema that can meet a specific demand of commissioners. Obviously then, the Filmessay obeys different production logics and pragmatics than the essay film emerging in the postwar period. And it is based on different ideas of “authorship” and (non‐) uses of features such as personal expression, subjectivity and reflexivity that scholars consider as primary markers of the essay film – a point that I will return to.5 To remain with the demands of the sponsors for a moment: “simple” tasks would be, as Richter explains, all topics that can be portrayed by accurate reproduction or chronological sequencing of visible stages of development. As examples, he men­ tions, among others, films about landscapes and winter sports or how paint is extracted from tar. This is an indirect reference to Richter’s own films (which may explain that Richter describes also films with “simple” tasks as documentaries in the essay) that contemporary readers interested in film and cinema, and especially those living in Basel, most probably understood. In 1939, a year before the proclamation of the Filmessay, Richter directed Die Geburt der Farbe (The Birth of Color), a pres­ tigious process film on the industrial production of coal tar dyes shot in black‐and‐ white and Dufay color sponsored by the four Basel based chemical corporations Ciba, Durand & Huguenin, Geigy and Sandoz. The film reached a large audience on the occasion of its screening at the Swiss National Exposition in Zurich in 1939, which was a major public event that attracted 10.5 million visitors (the country had a total of 4 million inhabitants then). Richter also made a film on winter sports that was shown on the same occasion, namely Rivalen auf Parsenn (Rivals at Parsenn, 1938) about skiing in Davos.6 In total five of the seven sponsored films Richter made for Swiss corporations and associations during his exile in Switzerland 1937 to 1941 were screened at the Swiss National Exposition. Richter (2017: 90) then goes on to describe a different kind of task sponsors would come up with, using the example of the function of the stock exchange as a market, by which the documentary film is given “the task of visualizing notions of the imaginary.” With this, Richter again alludes to one of his own films, to Die Börse als Barometer der Wirtschaftslage (The Stock Exchange as a Barometer of the Economic Situation, 1939). The film was commissioned by the Stock Exchange Zurich on the occasion of the Swiss National Exposition and was awarded “best film” at the event. It explains in 20 minutes the evolution, functioning and ­importance of the stock exchange. The original brief of the film was to restore the confidence of private investors in the institution of the stock exchange that had been shaken by the Great Depression.7 Later on in his essay, Richter lists films from international documentary produc­ tion that intimate the possibilities for a development of this “new” type of film, among them the works by British documentarians following the filmmakers Alberto Cavalcanti, Basil Wright, and John Grierson, the French filmmakers led by Jacques Brunius, and the Belgian group following Henri Storck. Richter also mentions two

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of his own films as examples for the Filmessay: Inflation (1928) and Die Börse als Barometer der Wirtschaftslage. What drew these films together according to Richter was their quality to make an entertainment seeking audience, saturated by feature fiction films, be involved, think for itself and empathize. All these films had learned, as Richter (1938: 50) argues elsewhere, from Robert Flaherty and Dziga Vertov’s cinematic studies “of true content, realistic and readily understandable representa­ tion of human conditions.” Besides attesting to Richter’s obviously excellent insights into the national and international documentary film production (due to his lively exchange with film­ makers and film societies as well as his participation at international film festivals and film exhibitions), this account also demonstrates Richter’s attempt to inscribe himself into the documentary film tradition. This is to argue that, with the Filmessay, Richter neither imagined nor attempted to initiate a genuinely new film genre, but wished to develop the documentary film within the given framework, that is, within useful cinema culture, based upon his own experience in sponsored filmmaking. Clearly, Richter’s theoretical thoughts on the Filmessay are based on practical experi­ ences; the Filmessay, then, as a concept, is reflexive in the sense that it points to Richter’s filmmaking. Whether the cinematic practice that Richter calls Filmessay is reflexive of itself is another, intricate question to be discussed in the following.

The Filmessay in Practice and the “Problem” with Die Börse Moving from the theoretical conception of the Filmessay to the practical and mate­ rial realization of it, Die Börse presents itself as a pièce de resistance for it defies ret­ rospective incorporation into an essay film tradition that celebrates first‐person narration, subjectivity, and reflexivity as the key markers of the genre. This may explain why in academic writings, Die Börse has hardly ever been seriously consid­ ered. In‐depth contributions on Richter’s Filmessay written in English, as informed as they are in many regards, ignore Die Börse; David Oscar Harvey (2012) gives a detailed account of Inflation instead while Alter (2007, 2018) focuses on Richter’s postwar compilation films as examples of “essays films.” This omission cannot be explained by lack of access to the film since it has been included (if only in a short­ ened version) in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) Film Library in New York since 1943.8 The two in‐depth analysis of Die Börse in German indirectly testify to the film’s precarious place in the essay film genre, not least because they come to two fundamentally different conclusions. Thomas Tode (2002: 103) in his highly inform­ ative, but rather overlooked contribution on Richter’s Filmessay, dismisses the film as a naïve affirmation of modern capitalist economy, claiming that Die Börse cor­ rupts Richter’s own political ideas and “does no credit to a filmmaker who once was a secretary of education of a republic of councils.”9 Urs Stäheli and Dirk Verdicchio (2006), for their part, upon analyzing the gestures of hands in the film, celebrate Die Börse as an instance of formal resistance and implicit critique of capitalism. Their appraisal derives form a textual analysis that does not consider Richter’s concept of



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the Filmessay in regard to the essay film “proper.” Both interpretations are based on a tacit understanding of sponsored filmmaking as inevitably creating a moral, political and/or artistic constraint that forces the filmmaker to either compromise or resist (which by the way is also a common feature of politically informed film criti­ cism). And both judge Die Börse against the standards of postwar auteur cinema. To accuse Richter of betraying his revolutionary ideals from the late 1910s and early 1920s is to forget that the avant‐garde’s “revolutionary frame of mind” changes “according to changing historical conditions.”10 I will return to this point later. What is the “problem” with Die Börse then? All in all, it is a rather conventional documentary with a dominant and omniscient voice‐over narration typical of the expository mode, the prevailing mode of the documentary at the time.11 Practical implementation of Richter’s theory of the Filmessay can be found in the first half of the film in which heterogeneous visual material illustrates the development of trade from barter to immaterialized finance wordily narrated by the commentator. To ren­ der visible and intelligible the history and workings of the stock market, Richter compiles still images of paintings, drawings and engravings, historical reenactments, double exposures of emblematic images, original documentary footage, and stock footage both from third‐party documentaries and newsreels as well as from his own earlier films, among them images from Everything Turns, Everything Revolves (1929). Due to the verbosity of the commentary and the illustrative function of the images, the montage sequence is reminiscent of a straightforward instructional film. The second part of the film, which depicts an exemplary stock exchange transac­ tion, includes the most remarkable moment of the film. The commentary is sus­ pended and the bids and offers of the traders during a ring trading session grow increasingly loud and finally turn into the deafening noise of hysterical traders. The unexpected switch from voice‐over narration to location sound is striking. Even more remarkable, however, is the asynchrony of sound and image that undermines a naturalistic reproduction of the trading activity. Since the introduction of sound film, and very much in line with the 1928 manifesto “A Statement [on Sound]” by Soviet directors Sergej Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Grigory Aleksandrov (1985), Richter had denounced synchronous sound in favor of asynchronic, ­contrapuntal sound that would counterpoint the images. Sound for Richter was a new type of montage material and thus expanded the artistic means of expression.12 Richter’s asynchronic treatment of sound and image in Die Börse could be inter­ preted as a reflexive moment. In art, literature and cinema studies, reflexivity is usu­ ally understood, with Bertolt Brecht, as a critical method to draw attention to the constructed nature of a text and to create “alienation effects” that open those texts to audience dialogue and criticism. Following this line, one may read the scene of crazed traders with their open‐mouthed faces and eyes wide open screaming and flailing out of sync as an implicit critique of the capitalist economic system. However, one could also argue that the contrapuntal montage of sound and image produces an arresting moment that provides a certain intense experience of reality but does not necessarily point to the filmmaking process. The contrapuntal montage rather serves as a means to stylize the cinematic rendition of reality. “Reality” in this scene

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is not reproduced, but produced and thus made visible, audible, and intelligible with the help of the specific means of cinema. It is this production of reality that, accord­ ing to Richter (1951), turns the documentary into “an original art form.” In his 1929 book Filmgegner von heute – Filmfreunde von morgen (Film Enemies of Today – Film Friends of Tomorrow), Richter describes how cinematic means can be used to intensify natural movements by multiplying single objects through a prism or mul­ tiple exposures in order to render visible and perceptible the typicality of an action or event. With the help of multiple exposures, Richter (1981 [1929]: 76) explains, a screaming baby is thus turned into “cries of children per se.” Richter had used this cinematic technique of increasing expression in Rennsymphonie / Race Symphony (1928) and Alles dreht sich, alles bewegt sich! / Everything Turns, Everything Revolves (1929), among others, and uses it again in Die Börse to provide intense experiences also in a rather rational‐driven film. This instance draws attention to the continuity in Richter’s filmic work in the interwar period and, together with Richter’s persistent emphasis on montage, may be interpreted as a signature of his authorship. This sig­ nature, then, was not suppressed in his commissioned films during exile, but on the contrary cherished by sponsors who wished to cultivate their image with the name of an internationally acclaimed director. This brings us back to the question of reflexivity: If we still want to interpret this moment as reflexive, then the gesture is less of a critical one than a prestige one in pointing to Richter’s approach, which then is the stylistic flourish. Either way, both lines of argumentation – reflexivity versus arresting moment – run counter to a smooth incorporation of Die Börse into the essay film tradition. The important question, however, is not whether Richter compromised or resisted, for this question ignores the specific historical circumstances and misses the self‐conception of the European avant‐garde in the interwar period. The inter­ view Richter gave to French journalist Serge Lang shortly before he left for the United States may illustrate this point. In the interview, Richter reflects on the time he spent in exile in Switzerland: My sojourn was marked by some beautiful years of work. I made a certain number of documentaries, among them Conquest of the Sky, which met with a nice success in Paris in early 1939; then some scientific films about biological and chemical subjects, but most notably some short films of the genre that interests me most: the Filmessay. (. . .) It is still the essay that, together with the grotesque and the fantastic film, attracts me most. I readily admit that I much prefer to deal with a topic [as in] The Stock Exchange or Inflation, rather than with some more‐or‐less stupid subject for a com­ mercial production. What do you want, I will always remain avant‐garde in this respect. (Lang 1941)

In Richter’s self‐perception, making a sponsored film like Die Börse is a truly avant‐ garde preoccupation, and one that stands in opposition to what Richter calls “com­ mercial production.” This statement can be helpful to overcome a misunderstanding that is related to the notion of “independence” – a notion that the interwar film avant‐garde would proclaim incessantly. The avant‐garde strove for independence



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from “commercial production,” which means independence from the film industry. The anti‐institutional attitude that theorists of the avant‐garde like Peter Bürger (1984) consider as a key feature of the movement was directed against the commer­ cial film industry and the commodities it produced, and not necessarily against other institutions that operated – like most representatives of the avant‐garde – beyond commercial cinema in nontheatrical circuits and that produced films that were not conceived as commodities, but as instruments for social intervention. Among these institutions were corporations from the non‐film industry, educational and nonprofit organizations, and the state. Independence from the film industry was to be found in the 1930s, i.e. after the coming of sound, only in the noncommercial sector, in documentary film production, and in cooperation with commissioning bodies. This is not to negate that many avant‐garde filmmakers, especially in France, but also in Germany, worked for the film industry, among them Walter Ruttmann, but also, at times, Hans Richter. The question of independence is according to Malte Hagener (2007) one of four aporias of the interwar avant‐garde, the others being elitism, abstraction, and politics.13 Still, as paradoxical as it may seem, making adver­ tising films and sponsored documentaries did not, in the self‐conception of the interwar European avant‐garde, corrupt the self‐proclaimed principle of independ­ ence. It only did so in the context of an emerging postwar experimental film move­ ment in the United States that was opposed to any utilitarian use of the medium, be it commercial, educational, or ideological, and that celebrated personal expression instead14 – and to whom Richter would also serve as “founding father.” These post­ war avant‐garde discourses have retrospectively overshadowed and obscured the nature of the avant‐garde in the 1930s. They also influenced Richter’s postwar writ­ ings about the European interwar avant‐garde and his own work in exile, making him clean up aspects that he considered no longer central or favorable. The important question rather is: Why does Richter proclaim a “new” type of documentary film in 1940? What is the motivation behind the announcement of the Filmessay as a form? On the one hand, the impulse to establish a new genre can be seen as an answer to John Grierson, who coined the term documentary. Grierson, whom Richter had met in London in 1929 for the first time, was the leader of the British documentary film movement and possibly the most influential spokesman for the documentary internationally. Against this backdrop, it is remarkable that in Richter’s contemporary writings, Grierson’s name is widely absent. The essay on the Filmessay is the exception to the rule. In Richter’s Der Kampf um den Film / The Struggle for the Film: Towards a Socially Responsible Cinema, a manuscript he wrote between 1934 and 1939 (not published until 1976 shortly after Richter’s death and not in English until 1986), Grierson’s name does not surface once. Instead, the docu­ mentary movement is represented by Flaherty, Paul Rotha, Joris Ivens, Walter Ruttmann, Storck and Richter himself. It is hard to tell whether Richter’s effacing Grierson’s name was a strategy to eliminate the most prominent rival in the field of documentary in an attempt to take over the leading position as the spearhead of the “advanced” type of the documentary termed Filmessay. But one can certainly say that Grierson was Richter’s hidden sparring partner.

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On the other hand, the answer can be found in an understanding of cinema as having a social function rather than being a means of self‐expression – an under­ standing that Richter shared with Grierson (which makes it even more remarkable that Richter silences Grierson in his writings and which supports the assumption of a hidden sparring partner relationship). Or, as Richter (1986: 24) states in Der Kampf um den Film, “The question ‘What is cinema?’ can only be answered properly if a second question is asked, too: ‘What social purpose does the cinema serve?’” Social responsibility and audience education were the two main impulses that Richter shared with the British documentary film movement: both saw in cinema a tool for social reform and an instrument for civic education. Grierson’s evaluation of the relation between art and education is exemplary also for Richter’s understanding of art and cinema’s social function in the interwar period: The documentary film movement has been widely noted as representing a develop­ ment in film technique and it has perhaps been too much thought of as a contribution to the art of the motion picture. [. . .] But the “art” of the documentary is, as always with art, only the by‐product of an interpretation well and deeply done. Behind the docu­ mentary film from the first was a purpose, and it was the educational purpose which we have been dealing. (Grierson 1979 [1946]: 150)

Richter was heavily influenced by Paul Rotha’s 1935 book Documentary Film: The Use of the Film Medium to Interpret Creatively and in Social Terms the Life of the People as It Exists in Reality, but dismissed Rotha’s understanding of propaganda and education as being the same. In The Struggle for the Film, he puts special emphasis on the documentary. His attempt is to turn the documentary into an instrument of enlightenment – in determined opposition to Nazi propaganda, that is. If the man­ date of the “official cinema,” as Richter (1986: 133) calls the mainstream products of the film industry, is to “anaesthetize” audiences, there is a need for the so‐called “progressive cinema” to seek a method, a dramaturgy that – according to Brecht’s dictum – in an entertaining way would activate audiences to think. If the documen­ tary had been developed in Great Britain as a method – and not as a style – to educate for citizenship, Richter’s Filmessay is to be understood as a somewhat similar effort to refine the documentary as a method for democratic audience education. In the wake of fascism and the outbreak of WWII, Richter’s impulse is to develop a cine­ matic method that is able to teach democracy and make audiences immune to totali­ tarian propaganda. Unlike Grierson, however, whose thoughts were heavily influenced by the American progressive educational movement and figures like Walter Lippmann and John Dewey who criticized the belief in the capacity of the “masses” to make reasonable decisions as “mythical democracy,” Richter in a liberal democratic tradition following the legacy of the Enlightenment believes in the men­ tal capacities of humans to think.15 Seen in this light, the Filmessay is a genuinely aesthetic experiment with a ­pedagogical and social purpose developed within the framework of sponsored doc­ umentary and useful cinema. If we understand the Filmessay as an educational tool



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for democratic citizenship, Die Börse no longer seems so “problematic,” especially in view of the fact that democratic education in cinema (and elsewhere) has always gone hand in hand with capitalist consumer education. Die Börse, together with Richter’s other corporate sponsored films from the late 1930s, are exemplary for the intersections of the avant‐garde, the documentary and sponsored film and for the shared notion of film as being a pedagogical tool to educate audiences in (primar­ ily) nontheatrical exhibition circles. As such, Richter’s films and contemporary writings, including his essay on the Filmessay, are helpful to overcome “a false divi­ sion” between the avant‐garde and documentary that according to Bill Nichols (2001: 581) obscures their necessary proximity. They are also helpful to overcome equally “false dichotomies” that Jan‐Christopher Horak (2008: 35) has addressed, namely those between film art and aesthetics and “film genres that also serve a utilitarian purpose.” For Richter, working for corporate sponsors barely contra­ dicted or conflicted with his avant‐garde ideals. Rather, his involvement with spon­ sored documentaries can be seen as the ultimate form of rejecting artistic autonomy. Or, as Richter said in an interview with Léo Sauvage in 1937, “I explore aesthetic problems not in isolation, but in relation to the realities posed by life.” In that sense, to use Bürger’s (1984: 50) terms again, Richter’s working for corporate sponsors could be interpreted as a way of integrating art and life. Even if Richter’s sponsored documentaries from an aesthetic point of view qualify as “real” avant‐gardist works only to a certain extent, they are, in the self‐understanding of the interwar avant‐ garde, authentic manifestations of avant‐garde cinema – a fact that Richter would insist on throughout his career. As he recalls in the late 1950s, “We embarked at that time, like Sindbad the Sailor, on discoveries in the realm of abstract, fantastic and documentary film. They were all ‘Avantgarde’ at that time” (Mekas 1957: 5, empha­ sis in original).

The Transatlantic Trajectory of the Filmessay Richter’s theory and practice of the documentary and the Filmessay are the link between Richter’s 1920s montage films made in Germany and his compilations and anthologies as well as his documentary teaching in the US. I wish to stress the notion of continuity here, since Richter’s years in exile in Switzerland (after fleeing Germany in 1933 and passing through France and the Netherlands) to his 1941 emigration to New York, have long been either absent or set aside in scholarship as a negligible inter­ mittence, thus suggesting a disruption of activities, at least of “notable” ones. As a consequence, scholars have viewed Richter’s emigration to the US as a significant rup­ ture in his career that, as Alter (2007: 225) puts it, “enacted a profound transformation on his filmic theory and production.”16 This standard notion of exile as rupture and loss, displacement and alienation that underlies such estimates has been challenged by recent scholarship on film exile.17 Richter’s transatlantic trajectory lends itself to reframe exile as a particular form of exchange in the sense of a histoire croisée (Werner and Zimmermann 2002, 2004) or entangled history (Conrad and Randeria 2002) that

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examines exchange as a multidirectional process of transferring, transforming, and adapting theory and history, material and practice, and personnel/personality across the lands and seas. In Richter’s case, the Filmessay can be considered the theoretical and practical conduit between Europe and the United States, while Richter’s private collection of European avant‐garde films and of abstract films in particular was the material con­ duit: he would exchange part of his collection against the help from Hilla von Rebay, the curator at the Museum of Non‐Objective Painting (later the Guggenheim Museum), to get a visa.18 Richter was anticipated and received in New  York as a European avant‐garde artist of the past, a witness to the origins of art cinema and venerated as the noble ancestor of the emerging US experimental film movement – a role that Richter readily assumed. At the same time, Richter introduced himself to the US East Coast as an active documentary filmmaker. Immediately after his arrival in New York, in April 1941, he became a member of the Association of Documentary Film Producers and was welcomed in Documentary Film News, their organ of ­publication, as “one of our newest and most illustrious members.”19 Continuing the lecturing activities he performed in Switzerland, Richter (1941: 3) gave talks at the Museum for Non‐Objective Painting and at Columbia University. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he lectured on “The Documentary Film as Art.”20 Richter was also asked to speak to members of the Documentary Film Producers Association in June 1941. According to Richter’s recollections in 1971, the meeting was planned and organized by Jay Leyda, whom Richter calls “a former pupil of Eisenstein and mine,” and who allegedly helped Richter with writing the talk (Gray 1971: 49).21 In the audi­ ence was Irving Jacoby, the founder of the Institute of Film Techniques at the City College of New York (CCNY), who offered Richter a teaching job. Richter joined the faculty in late 1941 and was appointed director in 1948, yet was more or less in charge from about 1942 when Jacoby left the Institute to serve as film producer for the Office of War Information. The Institute of Film Techniques was established in 1941 as part of the CCNY evening session with the immediate goal “to provide prac­ tical instruction in the production and use of educational and public‐service motion picture” (Jacoby 1943). The Institute’s initial objective was to fill the Government’s need for trained technicians to produce wartime information films, and its program was built exclusively to train people in how to make and how to use documentary films. The list of teachers and guest lecturers reads like a “who’s who” of interna­ tional documentary filmmaking: Robert J. Flaherty, John Grierson, Leo Hurwitz, Joris Ivens, John Ferno, Alice M. Keliher, Stuart Legg, Willard van Dyke, Leo Seltzer, and Albert Hemsing, the head of the overseas nontheatrical operations of the Office of War Information. Cinema critics and film historians Arthur Knight and Lewis Jacobs also belonged to the group.22 The Institute became part of the regular day ses­ sion curriculum of CCNY in 1948 and was the only motion picture school in the US that exclusively focused on documentary and educational films.23 Whereas Richter continued and successfully institutionalized his activity in teach­ ing documentary in the US, he tried but failed to establish himself as a professional educational and documentary filmmaker. In both instances, the Filmessay played a



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crucial role. An unpublished typescript dating from May 1941 entitled “American Picture Sheets” reflects Richter’s effort to further develop and adapt the concept of the Filmessay to the US context.24 The picture sheet is presented as “a new formula for a new situation” and a new method to teach the history of the US and the funda­ mentals of democracy. With the picture sheet, Richter draws on the forgotten mass medium of the European broadsides of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, and promotes it as a formula that expresses “an idea or a theme in a series of picture (. . .) as forcefully as [sic] convincingly as possible.”25 This formula, so Richter claims, can be used in film as well. Richter refers to Inflation and Stock Exchange as examples of the method that he earlier called “Film Essay” to distinguish it from other forms.26 Richter’s description of the picture sheet resembles very much the concept of the Filmessay, with the difference that more emphasis is put on history and historical topics as subject matters for the present: The Picture Sheet draws on every kind of film style from slapstick to documentary, from realistic acting to stylized images. And in treating an historical theme, engrav­ ings, documents, monuments, paintings, furniture, uniforms can all be used with tell­ ing effect. For, set in proper and dramatic relation to each other, as only the camera can do, the past can be made intimate with the future and the full force of the theme brought to bear on an audience. (. . .) And sound can be used with the same eclectic freedom. But the whole must be disciplined by rhythm of sound and picture. (. . .) For the Picture Sheet is not simply reportage, but interpretation and actualization. It is the essay and the feature story made alive and vital.27

The numerous unpublished typescripts in the Hans Richter Archive deposited at the MoMA Archives about the picture sheet as a “new formula especially suitable to visualize complicated problems and ideas,” about “the form of the ‘Essay’ film” and about “the chances to make good historical shorts” with the help of the “Essay” tes­ tify to Richter’s unsuccessful attempt to introduce the Filmessay in the US documen­ tary film theory, practice, and critic.28 Finding sponsors was probably the main goal of the typescripts in the first place, but Richter’s efforts to seek financial backing for his documentary film projects were fruitless. The “Index to the Creative Work of Two Pioneers: I. Robert J. Flaherty II. Hans Richter” compiled by film critic Herman G. Weinberg (1946, 14), as a Special Supplement to Sight and Sound of the British Film Institute in 1946, lists three planned, but unrealized documentary film projects in New York in 1941, all labeled “Film Essays:” “The Monroe Doctrine,” in collabo­ ration with Kenneth White, “The Four Freedoms,” which should have consisted of “four historical film essays,” and “The Role of Women in America,” listed as “another projected film‐essay on a phase of democracy.” “The Story of the Unicorn,” a “lyrical film‐essay on the legendary unicorn,” was planned in 1945. This index, revised and reprinted in the influential New York film magazine Film Culture, started by Richter’s mentees Adolfas Mekas and his brother Jonas Mekas in 1954, has been formative for the reception of Richter’s cinematic œuvre in the Anglo‐American world (Weinberg  1957). While nearly all scroll paintings and films get a separate entry and a description in the index, industrial and advertising

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films are treated differently. The three industrial films Richter made for Philips in the Netherlands are summarized under the entry of another (also sponsored) film, New Living / Die neue Wohnung, a 1930 film for the Swiss Werkbund.29 Planned, but not realized feature film projects, in contrast, do get separate entries. Like the Philips films, Richter’s late 1930s sponsored films are listed under “Baron Munchhausen,” a planned feature film project. The term “essay‐film” (mainly, but not always set in quotation marks) is first mentioned in relation to Inflation as hav­ ing set the pattern for Richter’s later “essay‐films (semi‐documentaries to express ideas),” and then again to describe Die Börse, here entitled “Stock Exchange as Market,” as a film form that uses “stills of paintings, old prints, engravings, and other historical documents (.  .  .) as an integral part of the film as ‘arguments’” (Weinberg 1946: 11, 13). What is most striking about Weinberg’s index is the hierarchy that underpins the listing of the films, for this hierarchy has not only been formative for scholar­ ship on Richter, but in a larger perspective is also exemplary for prioritization in film archives and in academic film historiography. This prioritization includes the preference of avant‐garde and art cinema over advertising and sponsored film, the preference of fiction over nonfiction, the preference of features over shorts, and the preference of theatrical over nontheatrical films. It is likely that Richter him­ self, together with Weinberg, one of his earliest and closest American friends (Starr 1996), helped to compile the index and approved of the prioritization, which is understandable against the background of a postwar reorientation, the emerg­ ing US experimental film movement and Richter’s role as adopted forefather and mentor. Weinberg’s index has been the most visible trace of Richter’s attempt to intro­ duce the Filmessay in the Anglo‐American world – albeit without success. But he also aimed to do so through his teaching at the Institute of Film Techniques. In the first years at the Institute, Richter tried to implement the concept of the Filmessay as a “special technique in the visualization of ideas” and had students choose a topic for an “essay film” that would be produced in workshops super­ vised by Richter (1943: 2). Until 1943–1944, three films were made in this way: Education for Democracy, a film about the importance of liberal art education, It’s Up to You, an educational film about the black market sponsored by New York’s Office of Price Administration, and How to Cut a Film, a training film about film editing.30 Until Richter’s retirement from the Institute in 1956, about 20 films were made in workshops under Richter’s supervision, many of them produced by notable documentary figures such as Lewis Jacobs, Leo Seltzer and Alexander Hammid (aka Hackenschmied). However, after the war, they were no longer labeled “essay film.” In the postwar period, the term surfaces less and less often in Richter’s writings and when it does, it describes a theory and practice of the past rather than of the present. Even though the term had remained idiosyncratic, Richter would continue to insist on the social and political implications of the Filmessay and the documentary film in general, namely the need to “make it [the documentary film] a useful



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instrument of a democratic society.”31 In an outline of his teaching concept at CCNY, Richter writes in 1946: We insist that they [the students] understand the social and political implications of the documentary film, that they understand not only the How but the Why. They learn that the documentary film is an instrument of great social importance, that it must be used for better living and the better understanding of problems of our society, that it is a fighting weapon (10).

Richter remained true to his conviction of the documentary film’s social role that he had developed in the interwar period also in the postwar US and in a cultural c­ limate that increasingly saw film as a means of artistic self‐expression. Whereas the ­network of the European interwar avant‐garde overlapped and intersected with useful cin­ ema culture – which is why, as Thomas Elsaesser (2009: 30) has put it, “[t]he history of the avant‐garde film can (. . .) no longer be written without reference to the his­ tory of the Gebrauchsfilm,” – art cinema and useful film culture were rather separate fields in the postwar US. In this situation, it is noteworthy that many representatives of the European interwar avant‐garde who found themselves in New York – besides Richter also Hammid and Amos Vogel, the initiator and director of Cinema 16, the most influential film society in the US – equally appreciated experimental and edu­ cational films and worked in both fields. They were border‐crossers and served as links between different networks of film culture. Austrian born Vogel shared not only the devotion for both documentary and avant‐garde films with Richter, but also the concern to use cinema as a means to develop democracy.32 This effort, paired with American liberalism, would find its prolongation and adaptation in the 1940s and 1950s in what Fred Turner (2013) has described as The Democratic Surround, a period ripe with examples of multi‐image and multi‐sound‐source media environ­ ments that were considered the democratic answer to single‐source mass media. Cinema 16 also cosponsored, together with the Institute of Film Techniques, the annual Robert J. Flaherty Award for the best documentary film of the year that Richter founded in 1948 (Starr 1996).

Instead of a Conclusion: The Aftermath of The Filmessay Even though Richter tried hard upon his arrival in New York, he failed to establish the Filmessay as a term and as a “new” documentary film form in theory and prac­ tice in the US, but stayed faithful to the idea behind it. Among the postwar intellec­ tuals and scholars in the US, only two make references to Richter’s concept of the Filmessay in their own books, one very briefly, the other in more detail. Siegfried Kracauer in his influential 1947 volume From Caligari to Hitler describes Richter’s Filmessay in passing as “sagacious pictorial comments on socially interesting topics” (194). According to Tode (2002: 103, footnote 10), Kracauer likely took notice of the Filmessay from Richter’s 1940 publication in the Basel National‐Zeitung, for one of

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Kracauer’s articles was published in the very same issue. It is also possible that Kracauer learned of it (again) from Richter in person when their paths crossed at MoMA’s Film Library during the war. Another occasion would have been their col­ laboration on the film project “The Accident” (1945–1946) on race discrimination, produced for the American‐Jewish Committee (Weinberg  1946: 14). Kracauer’s short description of the Filmessay resonates very much with Richter’s account of the picture sheet and less with the 1940 outline. Jay Leyda in his seminal 1964 study Films Beget Films on the compilation film quotes Kracauer’s explanation of Richter’s Filmessay and translates parts of Richter’s original writing on the Filmessay, choosing, as later scholars would, those passages that are dedicated to its aesthetic features. In his account, Leyda puts forward the notion of “collage” to describe Richter’s Filmessay as a technique that uses heteroge­ neous visual material from various sources to make an argument. Collage or compi­ lation also best describes Richter’s own cinematic practice in the US. Films such as 30 Years of Experiment (1951), 40 Years of Experiment. From Dada to Surrealism (1961), Dadascope Part I (1956–1961) and Dadascope Part II (1968) are first and foremost anthologies compiled of historical European avant‐garde films and Dada poems. From this perspective, these compilation films can be interpreted as being the result of a profound transformation and adaptation of the 1940 concept of the Filmessay to Richter’s “independent” and “experimental” film practice in the US. Alter, in her latest book on the essay film, suggests a different interpretation of Richter’s compilation films. She takes this body of work as her argument to chal­ lenge the standard narrative that postwar Paris was the “birthplace of the cinematic essay,” claiming instead that the development of this genre started in New York with Richter’s 1947 compilation film Dreams That Money Can Buy (Alter 2018: 28). With this twist, Richter serves no longer “just” as precursor of the genre, but is selected as its inventor. While I disagree with all attempts to single out “birthplaces” and “inven­ tors” for the emergence of media technologies or genres in general, in this specific case, it should be taken seriously that neither Richter nor any contemporary critic ever uses the term film essay or essay film to describe Richter’s postwar experimental films. If the narrative of Richter as precursor of the essay film presents an ahistorical, decontextualized incorporation of the concept of the Filmessay into the essay film genre, the chronicle of Richter as inventor of the essay film uses as its argument a concept developed within sponsored useful cinema culture in 1940 Europe to explain “experimental” cinematic art heritage practice in 1947 US. In Richter’s anthologies, collages or compilation films, as they would be labeled at the time, the main idea is no longer visibility as a tool to teach democracy, that is to render visible thoughts and ideas to make an argument with the purpose to produce enlightened citizens. The key issue is presence instead, that is the filmic animation of a past art movement and the cinematic production of a historical artistic practice in the present – with the aim to preserve and keep alive the heritage of the European interwar avant‐garde. What connects the Filmessay to Richter’s later anthologies is the concern with history, a concern that increased with Richter’s transatlantic trajectory.33



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Richter’s interwar Filmessay had a short material comeback in September 1954, when upon the occasion of a retrospective of Richter’s filmic oeuvre at the Summer Film Festival at New York’s Thalia Theatre, a shortened English version of Die Börse was screened under the title Stock‐Exchange.34 This version, probably made by Richter himself for the occasion, is equipped with a new musical accompaniment and stripped of all reenactment scenes. The opening credits claim that the film is “a documentary using for the first time paintings, engravings and drawings to interpret a story: the development of the stock‐exchange as a market.”35 Whether this claim holds true or not (it most probably does not) is not the point here. Rather, it is nota­ ble that the opening credits do not announce the film as an “essay film.” Critic Vernon Young in his review of the Richter retrospective calls Stock‐Exchange “the most trenchant film of them all” and provides a detailed description of the out‐of‐ sync sequence of stock‐market bidding. He also holds, as suggested in the opening credits, that the film includes the earliest use of a sequence of engravings used as continuity.36 The term essay film does not surface in the review. The run of a new version of Die Börse remained a marginal note. It was without a doubt Leyda’s mention of Richter’s concept of the Filmessay in his influential book that has kept it alive and made it retrievable for later generations of scholars inter­ ested in compilation and found footage film – among them scholars who inaugu­ rated the discourses around what came to be known as essay film. In this chapter, I have suggested to take Richter’s Filmessay seriously as a media archaeological object on three different levels: as a theoretical concept, as a practice (which includes lecturing and teaching), and as a material and aesthetic object (films). Such an approach allows to reinsert and recontextualize Richter’s transatlan­ tic activities in contemporary discourses and practices. Studying the Filmessay in such a way illuminates Richter’s decisive role in the history of useful cinema and the documentary in Europe and the United States – despite the fact that the Filmessay was a dead end. This role has long been underexposed in scholarship for reasons of preference and prioritization of which Weinberg’s index is exemplary. Richter’s Filmessay disappeared from discourses precisely at the moment when the essay film “proper” emerged. If its historical specificity is taken into account, the Filmessay as a media archaeological object allows us to excavate the continuities in Richter’s transatlantic involvement in the theory and practice of the documentary film. At the same time, it brings to light the breaks and discontinuities in the genre’s history.

Notes 1 Hans Richter (1940 [1992]). In the following, I quote from the English translation of Richter’s article (2017: 89–92). Unlike the English translation, I keep the original German term Filmessay instead of using “essay film.” The reasons for this will be explained later on. 2 Hanno Möbius (1991); Christa Blümlinger and Constantin Wulff (1992); Nora M. Alter (2002); Nora M. Alter (2007: 223–243); Laura Rascaroli (2009).

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3 Turvey counts Vertov, Epstein, Béla Balázs and Siegfried Kracauer among the revela­ tionist tradition, but does not consider Richter. 4 See also Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka (2011). 5 See for example Michael Renov (2004: 31); Laura Rascaroli (2009: 32); Timothy Corrigan (2011: 4). 6 The film remains lost until today. On Richter’s films at the Swiss National Exposition see Yvonne Zimmermann (2014). 7 See “Hans Richter: Stock‐Exchange” (MoMA Archives, Hans Richter, C.IX.5). 8 See “Hans Richter Collection” (MoMA, Department of Film Archive, Richter Hans A‐401970‐). A complete 35 mm print of Die Börse was preserved by the Swiss Film Archive in 2006. The film was screened at the 8th Orphan Film Symposium in New York in 2012. 9 On this critique and on Richter’s activities in useful cinema culture during exile in Switzerland in general see Pierre‐Emmanuel Jaques (2005); Yvonne Zimmermann (2013). 10 This is a quote from an Open Letter attacking the International Experimental Film Congress held in Toronto in the Spring of 1989 in which members of the 1980s experi­ mental film generation rebelled against former avant‐garde discourses and practices. Quoted in William C. Wees (2002: 18). 11 On Nichols’ typology of documentary modes see Bill Nichols (1992). 12 See Richter’s remarks on the topic in Hans Richter (1981 [1929]: 117; 1929 [2003]: 43–45). 13 On Ruttmann’s sponsored films and work for the film industry see Michael Cowan (2014). 14 See Jan‐Christopher Horak (2002). 15 On similarities and differences regarding the notions of propaganda and education with Rotha, Grierson, and Richter and their democratic educational theories see Yvonne Zimmermann (2021). 16 For a similar interpretation see Helmut G. Asper (1998). 17 See for example Noah Isenberg (2004); Alastair Phillips and Ginette Vincendeau (2006); Gerd Gemünden (2008); Gerd Gemünden (2014); Johannes von Moltke (2016). 18 Richter contributed Viking Eggeling’s Symphonie diagonale (1924) and his Rhythmus 21 along with works by Walter Ruttmann and Oskar Fischinger to The Museum of Non‐ Objective Painting’s film collection that originated in the early 1940s. On this and Richter’s film deposit negotiations with MoMA see Malte Hagener and Yvonne Zimmermann (2019). 19 See Documentary Film News 1, no. 6 (September 1941), 3. 20 The lecture took place on November 16, 1941. 21 This episode is also circulated in filmmaker, producer and writer Cecile Starr’s review of Richter’s career in the US in 1996. 22 See teaching programs of the Institute in The City College Bulletin, College of the City of New York (CCNY Archives) and the teaching programs preserved at The Getty Research Institute Santa Monica Los Angeles (Hans Richter Papers, 1929–1968). 23 The Institute of Film Techniques at CCNY is not mentioned in the two most notable contributions on the history of film studies in the US, namely Dana Polan (2007); Haidee Wasson and Lee Grieveson (2008). For the situation in Europe, see Malte Hagener (2014).



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24 Hans Richter, “American Picture Sheets,” unpublished five‐page typescript, May 1941 (MoMA Archives, Hans Richter, C.IX.9). 25 Hans Richter, “American Picture Sheets,” unpublished five‐page typescript, May 1941, 3 (MoMA Archives, Hans Richter, C.IX.9). 26 Hans Richter, “American Picture Sheets,” unpublished five‐page typescript, May 1941, 4 (MoMA Archives, Hans Richter, C.IX.9). 27 Hans Richter, “American Picture Sheets,” unpublished five‐page typescript, May 1941, 4–5 (MoMA Archives, Hans Richter, C.IX.9). 28 See MoMA Archives, Hans Richter C.IX.9. 29 On New Living see Andres Janser and Arthur Rüegg (2001). That New Living is also a sponsored film shows the inconsistency of the classification and labeling in the index. 30 Hans Richter, “How to Train Documentary Film People,” unpublished five‐page typescript, [1943 or 1944], 4–5 (MoMA Archives, Hans Richter, C.XIV.5). Of the three films only It’s Up to You is preserved in a 16 mm print in the CCNY Archives. The film was screened, together with Die Börse, at the 8th Orphan Film Symposium in New York in 2012. 31 Hans Richter, “How to Train Documentary Film People,” unpublished five‐page type­ script, [1943 or 1944], 5 (MoMA Archives, Hans Richter, C.XIV.5). 32 See Scott MacDonald (2002). 33 It is not the place here, but this aspect definitely deserves a chapter of its own. 34 See Vernon Young (1954: 54). Leaflets advertising 30 Years of Experiment and 40 Years of Experiment state that the films include excerpts from “The Stock Exchange” and “Stock Exchange” respectively (see MoMA, Department of Film Archive, Clipping Files, Hans Richter). In the reprint “Film as Modern Art” from College of Art Journal (January 1953), “The Stock Exchange” is announced as “Essay‐Film” (in quotation marks) “using for the first time works of art for filmic interpretation.” Whether excerpts of “The Stock Exchange” were included in 30 Years of Experiment is unclear, for no print is available in the MoMA Film Library. The print of 40 Years of Experiment available on the spot does not include an excerpt from “Stock Exchange.” 35 The film is in the possession of Erik de Bourbon‐Parme, the rights holder of the Hans Richter estate. The English version is identical with the German version deposited at the MoMA Film Library. 36 See Vernon Young (1954: 54).

References Alter, N.M. (2002). Projecting History: German Nonfiction Cinema, 1967–2000. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Alter, N.M. (2007). Hans Richter in Exile: Translating the Avant‐Garde. In: Caught by Politics: Hitler Exiles and American Visual Culture (eds. S. Eckmann and L. Koepnick), 223–243. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Alter, N.M. (2017). The Political Im/Perceptible in the Essay Film: Farocki’s Images of the World and the Inscription of War. In: Essays on the Essay Film (eds. N.M. Alter and T. Corrigan), 143–160. New York: Columbia University Press. Alter, N.M. (2018). The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Horak, J.‐C. (2008). A Neglected Genre: James Sibley Watson’s Avant‐Garde Industrial Films. Film History 20 (1): 35–48. Huhtamo, E. (2004). Elements of Screenology: Toward an Archaeology of the Screen. ICONICS: International Studies of the Modern Image 7: 31–82. Huhtamo, E. (2012). Screen Tests: Why Do We Need an Archaeology of the Screen? Cinema Journal 51 (2): 144–148. Huhtamo, E. and Parikka, J. (eds.) (2011). Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications. Oakland: University of California Press. Isenberg, N. (2004). Perennial Detour: The Cinema of Edgar G. Ulmer and the Experience of Exile. Cinema Journal 43 (2): 3–25. Jacoby, I. (1943). Statement Concerning the Film Institute and Unit at the City College. Unpublished 2‐pages typescript, February 1943 (CCNY Archives, Institute of Film Techniques, Vertical File 353). Janser, A. and Rüegg, A. (2001). Hans Richter: New Living: Architecture, Film, Space. (trans. S. Lindberg). Baden: Lars Müller. Jaques, P.‐E. (2005). L’Ovomaltine et un cinéaste d’avant‐garde. Hans Richter et le film de commande en Suisse. Décadrages: Cinéma, à travers champs 4 (5): 154–166. Kittler, F.A. (1985). Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900. Munich: Fink. Kracauer, S. (1947). From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lang, S. (1941). Quelques instants avec Hans Richter avant son depart pour l’Amérique. La revue de l’écran 387‐B: 5. MacDonald, S. (2002). Cinema 16: Documents Toward a History of the Film Society. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Mekas, J. (1957). Hans Richter on the Nature of Film Poetry. Film Culture 3 (11): 5–8. Möbius, H. (ed.) (1991). Versuche über den Essayfilm: Filme von Chris Marker, Alexander Kluge, Hartmut Bitomsky. Special issue Augenblick 10. von Moltke, J. (2016). The Curious Humanist: Siegfried Kracauer in America. Oakland: University of California Press. Neale, S. (2012 [1990]). Questions of Genre. In: Film Genre Reader IV (ed. B.K. Grant). Austin: University of Texas Press. Nichols, B. (1992). Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Nichols, B. (2001). Documentary Film and the Modernist Avant‐Garde. Critical Inquiry 27 (4): 580–610. Phillips, A. and Vincendeau, G. (eds.) (2006). Journeys of Desire: European Actors in Hollywood, a Critical Companion. London: British Film Institute. Polan, D. (2007). Scenes of Instructions: The Beginnings of the U.S. Study of Film. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rascaroli, L. (2009). The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film. London, New York: Wallflower Press. Renov, M. (2004). The Subject of Documentary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Richter, H. (1929 [2003]). Der absolute Film braucht die Industrie: Ein Gespräch mit Hans Richter. Film‐Kurier, no. 6. Reprinted in: Hans Richter: Film ist Rhythmus. Kinemathek 40(95), 43–45. Richter, H. (1938). Kulturfilm als Kunst. Der Geistesarbeiter/Le Travailleur intellectual 17: 49–55.

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Richter, H. (1940 [1992]). Der Filmessay: Eine neue Form des Dokumentarfilms. National‐ Zeitung, 192. Reprinted in Blümlinger, C. and Wulff, C. (eds.) Schreiben Bilder Sprechen: Texte zum essayistischen Film, pp.  195–198. Christa Blümlinger and Constantin Wulff. Vienna: Sonderzahl. Richter, H. (1941). Film Theory. Film News: World Wide News of the Information Film 2(8). Richter, H. (1943). Workshop for Democracy: Students Set Up Principles of Democratic Education in Experimental Movies. The Voice of Youth, 2. Richter, H. (1946). The Institute of Film Techniques. Film News: World Wide News of Documentary and Educational Motion Pictures 7(5). Richter, H. (1951). The Film as an Original Art Form. College Art Journal 10 (2): 157–161. Richter, H. (1981 [1929]). Filmgegner von heute – Filmfreunde von morgen. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Richter, H. (1986). The Struggle for the Film: Towards a Socially Responsible Cinema (trans. B. Brewster) (ed. J. Römhild). Aldershot, UK: Wildwood House Ltd. Richter, H. (2017). The Film Essay: A New Type of Documentary Film. In: Essays on the Essay Film (transl. M.P. Alter) (eds. N.M. Alter and T. Corrigan), 89–92. New York: Columbia University Press. Rotha, P., Road, S., and Griffith, R. (1968 [1935]). Documentary Film: The Use of the Film Medium to Interpret Creatively and in Social Term the Life of People as it Exists in Reality. London: Faber and Faber. Sauvage, L. (1937). Hans Richter: Un des maîtres de l’avant‐garde allemande voudrait colla­ borer avec Méliès. Cinémonde, no. 458. Stäheli, U. and Verdicchio, D. (2006). Das Unsichtbare sichtbar machen: Hans Richters Die Börse als Barometer der Wirtschaftslage. Montage AV 15 (1): 108–122. Starr, C. (1996). Notes on Hans Richter in the USA. Film Culture, no. 79, 17–26. Tode, T. (2002). Ein Bild ist ein Argument: Hans Richter und die Anfänge des Filmessays. Navigationen 2 (2): 99–108. Turner, F. (2013). The Democratic Surround: Multimedia & American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties. Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press. Turvey, M. (2008). Doubting Vision: Film and the Revelationist Tradition. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Wasson, H. and Grieveson, L. (eds.) (2008). Inventing Film Studies: A Genealogy of Studying Cinema. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wees, W.C. (2002). The Changing of the Garde(s). Public, no. 25, 10–26. Weinberg, H.G. (1946). An Index to the Creative Work of Two Pionieers: I. Robert J. Flaherty; II. Hans Richter. Special Supplement to Sight and Sound, index series no. 6, 14. Weinberg, H.G. (1957). An Index to the Creative Work of Hans Richter. Film Culture, 8‐page supplement. Werner, M. and Zimmermann, B. (2002). Vergleich, Transfer, Verflechtung: Der Ansatz der Histoire croisée und die Herausforderung des Transnationalen. Geschichte und Gesellschaft 28: 607–636. Werner, M. and Zimmermann, B. (eds.) (2004). De la comparaison à l’histoire croisée. Paris: Seuil. Young, V. (1954). The Fantasies of Hans Richter. Arts Digest 29(1). Zimmermann, Y. (2005). Bergführer Lorenz: Karriere eines missglückten Films. Marburg: Schüren.



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Zimmermann, Y. (2013). A Missing Chapter: The Swiss Films and Richter’s Documentary Practice. In: Hans Richter: Encounters (ed. T.O. Benson), 108–119. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Zimmermann, Y. (2014). The Avant‐Garde, Education and Marketing: The Making of Nontheatrical Film Culture in Interwar Switzerland. In: The Emergence of Film Culture: Knowledge Production, Institution Building, and the Fate of the Avant‐Garde in Europe, 1919–1945 (ed. M. Hagener), 199–224. Oxford, New York: Berghahn. Zimmermann, Y. (2021). Advertising and Avantgardes: A History of Concepts, 1930–1940. In: Advertising and the Transformation of Screen Cultures (co-authored with B. Florin, P. Vonderau and Y. Zimmermann). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Part V

Audiences and Circulation

Introduction

Audiences and Circulation: The Spaces of Reception Brian Winston

Lincoln University

At the outset of the de facto establishment of documentary studies as a discrete area of media scholarship in the 1990s, Bill Nichols suggested that it was “the separation between an image and what it refers to [that] continues to be a difference that makes a difference” between the fictional and nonfictional screen (Nichols 1991: 7). This truth persists even into the age of digital image manipulation and its implicit undercutting of image integrity. But there is another such difference to be found in the reception of documentaries that has also always made a difference. This is not a question of the viewers of nonfiction film as a medium of recorded evidence in, say, science. Nor is it a matter of films’ impact in formal educative spaces, its classroom and training potential having been early noticed and fitfully exploited ever since (e.g. Martinez  1992: 131–161; Hediger and Vonderau 2007; Orgeron et al. 2012). Nor are we here concerned with the audience exposed to public filmed communications specifically designed to affect behavior change, as in health campaigns (e.g. Bonah et al. 2018). But these spaces apart, the documentary’s claim on the real implies not just a semiotic difference but also an albeit unpredictable potentially different reception by its audience. With fictional cinema, as Sammy Goldwyn – allegedly – put it: “if you want to send a message, call Western Union,” i.e.: movies must be frivolities. He was in the entertainment business: “the action of occupying [e.g. the movie‐goer’s] attention agreeably” [OED]. From bread and circuses through all the arts to the video‐game, amusement has been always an opiate. Play Civilization and an element in your victory will be determined by how well you stick to “the old principle” of holding your population in check. How best to do this? “Keep people entertained,” the game’s Wiki advises, “and distract them with shiny baubles to make them forget their A Companion to Documentary Film History, First Edition. Edited by Joshua Malitsky. © 2021 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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problems!” (Anon (Civ5) n.d.). But Hollywood is a bauble manufacturer whose purposes are, implicitly and explicitly, far from being merely “agreeable.” Goldwyn’s “amusements” actually (to quote Solanas and Getino) align the masses with “the ideological and economic interests of the owners of the film industry, the lords of the world film market” (Solanas and Getino  1976 [1971]: 44). Beyond turning a profit, though, these intentions are disguised, as is the case – in Barthes’ opinion – with all bourgeois ideology. They are “ineffable,” even to those few who are consciously aware of them (Barthes 1973: 142–143). Conversely, especially in the Anglosphere, the documentarist’s purpose is no mere matter of providing such distraction. Rather, as far as John Grierson was concerned, sending messages – even giving sermons – was exactly the point of moviemaking. As he (assuredly) said, “I look upon cinema as a pulpit, and use it as a propagandist” (Rotha 1966 [1935]: 42). For the Griersonian, the documentary ought to be – always – a stimulant. In the Anglosphere, as Wikipedia has it: A documentary film is a nonfictional motion picture intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction, education, or maintaining a historical record.

This includes the poetical/pictorialist and other ostentatiously non‐socio/political, traditions of documentary. Disney’s True-Life Adventures series of anthropomorphic nature films, say, were strenuously marketed as educational (Mitman  1999: 113). Essentially, documentary was never a lot of laughs. It was a “discourse of sobriety,” (Nichols 1991: 3) defined by an assumption of the seriousness of its intention. Leave aside the work of deconstruction inevitably involved in all reception – even of amusements – the cultural positioning of documentary film as such a stimulating “discourse” implicitly expects more of its audience than de facto quiescence. It solicits increases in understanding – at times requiring significant analytical efforts, but at the least, “consciousness raising.” Grierson had no Goldwynian ambition to offer, as he put it, “novelty or sensation to knock a Saturday night audience cold.” For all that he acknowledged that “quick takings” at the box‐office “are a guarantee of immediate public interest and are therefore important,” he argued that, with documentary, “the persistence of a film’s effect over a period of years is more important still, the ‘hang‐over’ effect is everything” (Grierson 1979: 48). Grierson needed to justify to his funders the failure of his “sermons” to attract a mass audience. Suggesting documentary’s spectators might be few in number but be more profoundly affected by what they saw on the screen was an obvious rhetorical ploy. But it was also one that aligned with producers, filmmakers, and critics across the globe. Never mind, however, that little externally verifiable evidence of “‘hang‐over’ effect” – aka: “impact” – has ever been produced to balance the commercial screens’ “BOFFO BIZ!” head and cash‐counting norms. Current demands from funders might ever more overtly require that documentary filmmakers demonstrate “impact,” but a century of sociological investigations into media effects has yielded little that can be used as a basis for doing this (Winston  2015: 227–232). Almost



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always, the general noise of the social sphere, if nothing else, makes claims for ­specific effects arising from any one film probably unsustainable. Agreed, perhaps, that what should matter – at least for documentaries in the mainstream Anglophone tradition of socially engaged filmmaking – are the responses a film occasions in the social sphere “after,” as the pioneering activist documentarist George Stoney put it, “the lights go up” (Helfand 2012). But small in number were targeted committed audiences who might be moved to activism and more generally the marginalized viewers of the Griersonian mainstream, however much empathetically moved, ­seldom took action. However, our historical understanding of viewers’ responses is trapped between the limitations of positivist social science and, essentially, anecdotage. Evidence of “impact” is still not much more grounded in externally verifiable data about actual social change than was Grierson’s original rhetoric. Nevertheless, although there might be no Oscar for “impact,” producing it is deeply embedded in the act of documenting as a desirable outcome; and, as such, the documentary industry, ignoring the crudities of box‐office, new‐platform income streams, and ratings, does give awards for it. The difficulties of assessing it are set aside, for example, by the Doc Impact awards outfit who are – its web‐page assures us – “a great gang of international organization partners, with deep collective experience in film and social change” (Anon [Doc Impact] 2017). “Impact” becomes, in essence, an aggregation of positive liberal critical responses, not even measured by fund‐raising from the audience or the like, much less more revolutionary outcomes. Moreover, given the state of the world, the cynic might yet ask of Doc Impact and its fellow shills: What social change is that? But, without question, what such acknowledgements do indicate is a valuing of “hang‐over effects” spotlighting a crucial mark of the documentary’s audiences’ difference. Equally data‐free is the basis for the one area of documentary study which has considered the audience in recent decades. A crucial element in the gathering scholarly concern with documentary that was to come to fruition in the 1990s, was the question of the spectators’ ability to recognize the necessary prism through which the filmmaker was viewing the word and deconstruct the images they present accordingly; to see, in fact, that spectators were being presented with not the story of the world but a story of the world, “a shared historical construct” (Nichols 1981: 7, 109). In a positively Orwellian reversal of meaning, this effort was glossed by conservatives wishing to preserve the “objective” authority of mass media factual image making as a slur on the “savviness” of the audience coming from elitist scholars careless of common wisdom (Pantinga 1996: 324). Nichols and those who coalesced around the new agenda (most obviously in the Visible Evidence community) were dismissed as “extreme post‐modern skeptics.” The charge was conservative and beside the point. The argument, although ­persisting into the present century, was essentially sterile in that there was not much evidence either way (Winston et al. 2017: 18–21). The best justification for skepticism about the general reality of “savviness” itself is, perhaps, the perennial print press’s hysteria whenever even the usual subterfuges involved in filming come to light. (Pity poor David Attenborough when his newborn polar bear cubs were

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revealed as having been filmed in a Berlin Zoo rather than at the North Pole! “Frozen Planet scandal: Sir David Attenborough defends fake polar bear footage” screamed the British tabloids (e.g.: Taylor 2011). More fruitful study of the documentary audience remains, as it has been from the outset, somewhat suppressed. The intention of this section is to indicate some lines of enquiry whereby this omission might start to be redressed. In “Nonfiction Film in and out of the Moving Picture Theater: Roosevelt in Africa (1910),” Gregory Waller’s focus is on the factual film’s foundational moments as, to use Charles Musser’s phrase, a “screen practice” (Musser 1990: 17). The received history of the development of the cinema, Musser reminds us, begins “with a technology not a cultural practice.” Conventionally, cinema is seen as the product of magic lantern + optical toy + photography. But this, crucially, ignores the theater and, in consequence, blurs how the technology came to present the factual when that fictional dramatic inheritance came to dominate. As the Phantasmagoria or the Diorama, slide shows – especially in fairground booths – were once aimed at a mass audience; but by the end of the nineteenth century, they came rather to persist more soberly as illustrated lectures. With exotic travel as a staple, they were positioned as a refined, respectable bourgeois entertainment to be had in assembly rooms or even church halls. But while the movies, escaping from the Kinetoscope, crept into the theater (where slide shows were anyway) as a replacement vaudeville act, in the “improving” environment of the lecture halls a degree of co‐existence persisted between still (or marginally animated) slides and the nonfiction film. Waller’s exploration rebalances the received opinion that such material in these venues was “disappointing” to the audience (Mitman  1999: 7). Outside the screens of the Nickelodeon, the vaudeville theater and, of course, in the emerging dedicated cinema, audiences were attending lectures which now also contained moving images, at least to a certain (and certainly overlooked) extent. The importance of the slide‐show to the cinema was not a matter of technology where, clearly, it had soon become obsolescent. The content of the illustrated lecture, on the other hand, conditioned nonfiction films’ agenda – and it did so far more than did any aping of the press. Film technology was never to become swift enough at producing screenable images to match journalism’s obsession with the perishability of news, but the consanguinity of the lecture and the nonfiction film was another matter. The subjects of the lecture became the content of early nonfiction film. This inheritance, however, did not ensure popularity. On the contrary, in the context of a popular fictional cinema for the masses, the illustrated lecture’s bourgeois roots marginalized nonfiction’s box‐office appeal. But, as with the slides at the outset of the twentieth century, so with nonfiction film between the two World Wars. It too enjoyed a life outside the mainstream cinema. The extent to which this compensated for a lack of popularity was largely glossed over at the time and its reality remains very much unattended to. In “The Marginal Spectator,” I suggest that the question of the audience for the documentary canon that emerged in the later 1920s and 1930s is long overdue for fuller investigation. The extent of scholarship on the audience is slight, but using the British experience as a template and brief indicative case studies of the USA, France and Germany



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(to  1933), the chapter offers an overview of the variegated contexts in which ­documentary was seen. Today, arguably, the upsurge in big‐screen exhibition of documentary that began with the undercutting of direct cinema’s hegemony in the 1990s offers another opportunity for documentary to establish itself at the box office. But, the question remains as to how much this means that the documentary spectator’s marginalization has really been corrected. Mariano Mestman addresses another unexplored line of inquiry, one that connects back with the unpredictability of the documentary audience: what impact do considerations of the circumstances of reception have on an audience’s understanding of a film. There is an ethical dilemma when, for instance, an otherwise marginalized – for whatever reason – social group is given a platform. The result might be exploitative of the group for the general audience, merely enhancing stereotypes; but for other members of the subgroup, it could be affirming. There is also a crude distinction to be made between an indigenous or national spectator and an international viewer. But the most extreme factor affecting reception can be said to be under conditions of total repression. The Junta that seized power in Argentina in 1966  moved quickly to censor all forms of expression that “harmed the interests of the fundamental institutions of the state” (King 2015: 93). In “‘Every Spectator is Either a Coward or a Traitor’: Watching The Hour of the Furnaces,” Mestman explores the impact of this on the initial exhibition and reception of the canonic The Hour of the Furnaces, the revolutionary film released in defiance of this law by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino and the Cine Liberación Group in 1968. The film’s reception outside Argentina at film festivals and by radical groups has been documented but the circumstances of viewing within the country have not been studied in English. Mestman not only accounts for the film’s reception between 1968 and 1972; he also provides the text of an internal report to the Group by the mobile film unit charged with arranging screenings in the city of Rosario, the third largest in country, in 1970. Common sense suggests that here is an instance where to watch with the threat of military and/or police disruption is to experience “impact” in ways not duplicated in a more liberal circumstance. The case of La Hora raises a crucial issue for documentary studies. Not only does the context of a film change through time, its meanings obviously mutating; these also change under the conditions of reception, issues that are highlighted by collective experiences of viewing. Cognizance of these factors is another aspect of documentary audience study that warrants exploration. And tomorrow’s documentary’s audience? The hyperbole is overwhelming: we are now confronting an “empathy machine” which (yet again) is going to have a transformative impact on the field. In many ways, documentary has never been more popular. Certainly the coming of virtual reality signals a potential step‐change for the film audience. For one thing (and for sure), the present stage of development with its viewing conditions, returns them, one viewer at a time, to the conditions of the Kinetoscope. Much is afoot but William Uricchio contextualizes the current possibilities in terms of engaged as opposed to supposedly passive media audiences – an issue as well established as their propensity to absorb change‐making impact. From

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“Media Effects to the Empathy Machine: The Nature of the Audience and the Persistence of Wishful Thinking” indicates that we are not in a situation without precedent and that the full exploration of the potential of documentary media requires an understanding of how audiences actually operate as much with old technologies as with new. Assuming that the spaces of reception of the documentary do indeed indicate a difference that makes a difference, these four chapters reflect a largely unexplored agenda as to what that might be. What characterized documentary film’s initial reception? How extensive was (and is) its audience, and with what consequences? What are the realities of different conditions of reception? What will condition the documentary audience of the future? These are but four agenda items. They indicate lacuna in documentary scholarship that need to be further explored.

References Anon (Civ5) (n.d.). Happiness. CIV5. http://civilization.wikia.com/wiki/Happiness_(Civ5) (accessed 14 September 2017). Anon (Doc Impact) (2017). The Big Idea. Docimactawar. http://www.docimpactaward.org/ big‐idea (accessed 7 December 2017). Barthes, R. (1973). Mythologies (trans. A. Lavers). London: Paladin. Bonah, C., Cantor, D., and Laukötter, A. (eds.) (2018). Health Education Films in the Twentieth Century. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. Grierson, J. (1979). Grierson on Documentary (ed. F. Hardy). London: Faber and Faber. Hedger, V. and Vonderau, P. (2007). Filmische Mittle, industrelle Zwecke: das Werk de Industriefilme. Berlin: Verlag Vorwerk 8. Helfand, J. (2012). As Thoughts of George Rise Up. POV Blog. http://www.pbs.org/pov/blog/ povdocs/2012/08/as‐thoughts‐of‐george‐rise‐upjudith‐helfand‐on‐long‐time‐mentor‐ george‐stoney/#.VpwOjSnZfdk (accessed 8 March 2015). King, J. (2015). Argentina: Film. In: Censorship: A World Encyclopedia (ed. D. Jones). London and New York: Routledge. Martinez, W. (1992). Who Constructs Anthropological Knowledge? Toward a Theory of Ethnographic Film Spectatorship. In: Film as Ethnography (eds. P. Crawford and D. Turton). Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Mitman, G. (1999). Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film. Cambridge: MA: Harvard University Press. Musser, C. (1990). History of the American Cinema: The Emergence of Cinema, the American Screen to 1907. New York: Scribner’s. Nichols, B. (1981). Ideology and the Image: Social Representation in the Cinema and Other Media. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Nichols, B. (1991). Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Orgeron, D., Orgeron, M., and Streible, D. (eds.) (2012). Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press. Pantinga, C. (1996). Moving Picture and the Rhetoric of Non‐Fiction Film: Two Approaches. In: Post Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (eds. D. Bordwell and N. Carroll). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.



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Rotha, P. (1966 [1935]). Documentary Film. London: Faber. Solanas, F. and Getino, O. (1976 [1971]). Towards a Third Cinema. In: Movies and Methods II (ed. B. Nichols). Berkeley: University of California Press (trans. of: “Cine militante: una categoría interna del Tercer Cine” reprinted in Solanas, F. and Getino, O. (1973) Cine, cultura y descolonización. Buenos Aires, Siglo XXI). Taylor, R. (Daily Mirror) (2011). BBC “Fakes Wildlife Shots All the Time”: Veteran Cameraman Claims Species “Smaller Than Rabbits” Are Filmed on Custom‐Built Sets. Daily Mail. www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article‐2450381/BBC‐fakes‐wildlife‐shots‐time‐ veteran‐cameraman‐claims.html. Winston, B. (2015). The Martian Invasion and the Sociological Imagination. In: Stretching the Sociological Imagination: Essays in Honour of John Eldridge (eds. A. Smit, M. Dawson, B. Fowler, et al.). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave McMillan. Winston, B., Vanstone, G., and Chi, W. (2017). The Act of Documenting: Documentary Film in the 21st Century. New York: Bloomsbury.

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Nonfiction Film in and out of the Moving Picture Theater Roosevelt in Africa (1910) Gregory A. Waller Indiana University

The cinematographist [sic] to‐day is an intrepid explorer, huntsman and sport. Wherever there is light sufficient for his work he goes if public interest goes with him. “How the Cinematographer Works and Some of His Difficulties,” Moving Picture World (1907a) No exploring party to‐day is complete without a moving picture outfit … Arctic ­expeditions. African hunting, private exploring parties in the old world and the new, are always equipped with moving picture cameras. “Exploration and the Picture,” Moving Picture World (1910)

Introduction During 1907–1910, moving pictures became a ubiquitous aspect of public life in the United States, thanks to the rapid spread of inexpensive theaters, the centralization of distribution, and the consolidation of the industry driven by the creation of the Motion Picture Patents Company.1 The emerging commercial film business was overwhelmingly committed to the regular production of fiction films that were almost never longer, and often much shorter, than one reel (1,000  feet, approximately 15–20 minutes of screen time). This chapter offers a fine‐grained examination of the uses of nonfiction film in and out of the movie theater during these formative years, concluding with a discussion of Roosevelt in Africa (1910), which is noteworthy both as an important early example of what Gregg Mitman calls “America’s romance with wildlife on film” and also as an attempt to produce and market a nonfiction “feature” film as a headline attraction in American moving A Companion to Documentary Film History, First Edition. Edited by Joshua Malitsky. © 2021 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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­ icture shows (Mitman 1999). To tell this story, I draw particularly on public print p discourse, most notably, the advertising, news coverage, and editorial commentary in North America’s first trade magazine focused on moving pictures and aimed ­specifically at exhibitors, Moving Picture World [MPW], whose inaugural issue appeared on March 9, 1907.

Nonfiction and Multipurpose Cinema Judging from MPW, by 1907 the cinema in the US had become largely, if not ­exclusively, a commercial enterprise dependent on the presence across America of nickelodeons – low‐cost, high‐visibility venues operated day‐in day‐out as moving picture shows. The regularly scheduled “variety” programming in these theaters prominently featured fictional moving pictures typically marketed as comedies, thrilling adventures, or historical dramas. Also in the mix were a small number of nonfiction titles identified as scenics (providing “armchair” travel), topicals (offering views of current events or personages), or industrials (detailing manufacturing ­processes).2 Yet as early as its third issue (March 23, 1907), MPW also highlighted various “novel uses” for the medium, uses that were quite distinct from the basic role of moving pictures as profitable commodity for the thousands of theaters that had so quickly appeared across the country. For MPW it was the possibilities for nonfiction film that marked cinema’s usefulness, its potential as a valuable multipurpose medium. Appearing on the magazine’s editorial page, an article entitled, “Novel Uses of Moving Pictures,” briefly surveyed an intriguing gamut of practices: US government‐produced “moving picture representations of the daily life of the soldier and sailor” exhibited during recruitment campaigns; footage shot for instructional purposes of a rowing crew in training, “patients in epileptic fits,” and a “crack” kicker punting a football; a film showing the production of a dynamo at the Westinghouse Company; and moving picture “records” of “the remaining herds of wild animals in the West” and of “the daily life of many Indian tribes which are rapidly becoming extinct” (Anon 1907b). As surveyed by MPW in this March 1907 commentary, useful nonfiction cinema included corporate‐ and government‐sponsored self‐representation (a form of public relations and advertising), instructional material shot for quite specific pedagogical purposes, and visual records captured for posterity. These ways of deploying moving pictures did not aim at appealing to habitual moviegoers and generating monetary profit; putting the medium to “novel uses” meant taking advantage of the fact that multipurposable cinema was also multisited, capable of being exhibited in a host of different locations and occasions, well beyond the theater. The nonfiction moving pictures mentioned by MPW targeted and served a multiplicity of different audiences: Westinghouse Company officials at a banquet held in New York City’s posh Waldorf‐Astoria hotel, potential young recruits to the US Army and Navy, and students, athletes, soldiers in training, and other more‐or‐less captive spectators (Anon 1907b).3



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Charles Urban (1907a,  1907b,  1907c,  1907d,  1907e) would elaborate on these claims for the extraordinary promise of nonfiction cinema in “The Cinematograph in Science and Education,” a series of five articles that ran in MPW during July– August 1907. As becomes evident thanks to Luke McKernan’s (2013) invaluable biography of Urban, these articles were part of Urban’s ongoing efforts to promote the circulation of nonfiction cinema in the service of education. Micro‐cinematography, time‐lapse films, and records of surgical operations received particular attention from Urban (1907b), but he argues in these MPW articles that “the extensive usefulness” of moving pictures reaches much further, since the cinematograph offers the opportunity to show “the whole world of industries,” military and zoological subjects, “present‐day events,” and countries and peoples “from Peru to China.” Taking full advantage of the medium’s immense and varied utility requires, Urban (1907e) insists, that the moving picture apparatus becomes standard equipment in a innumerable different sites beyond the theater, a “vital necessity in every barracks, ship, college, school, institute, hospital, laboratory, academy and museum.” Urban’s articles forecast nothing less than the edifying, enlightening prospect of a world documented and then screened for a broad array of audiences through the technology of cinema.

Illustrated Lectures and Lecturettes For MPW, whose very existence was dependent on the commercial film business, the notion of multisited, multipurpose cinema was linked to, if not synonymous with, nonfiction film screened outside of theaters. But every issue of this magazine offered clear evidence that certain forms of nonfiction film had a place in the modular programming of nickelodeons, which booked various films of not more than 1,000 feet, often along with live performances, typically of popular songs illustrated with projected lantern slides.4 According to MPW, theatrically screened nonfiction films during 1907 included scenics like Biograph’s A Caribou Hunt, shot “in the barrens of Newfoundland,” as well as many titles distributed by Urban, like Irish Scenes and Types, advertised as a “descriptive” that promised both to “illustrate with wonderful clearness and photographic perfection the City of Dublin” and also to provide “a complete demonstration of the Irish Peat Industry.”5 More directly topical nonfiction fare included Essanay’s The Unveiling Ceremonies of the McKinley Memorial and Edison’s Scenes and Incidents, Panama Canal, which at 1355 feet (including 100 feet of “Jamaican Natives doing a ‘two‐step’”) had the added distinction of being one of the longest individual titles screened in American movie theaters that year.6 MPW also took note of another prominent form of nonfiction screen exhibition widely available in the US in 1907: the feature‐length illustrated lecture that paired a spoken commentary with projected lantern slides (typically photographic images, often hand‐colored) and, increasingly, that incorporated moving pictures as well, underscoring what Jennifer Peterson (2013: 24) calls the “multimedia hybridity” of this type of performance event. Indeed, the title page of the inaugural issue of MPW

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promised to offer “all the news of the Lantern Lecture Field and Moving Picture World,” reflecting the fact that the original name of this trade magazine was The Moving Picture World and View Photographer.7 While “View Photographer” was dropped from this periodical’s name after May 4, 1907, the MPW’s masthead continued to proclaim until July 4, 1908 (the first issue of volume 3) that it was “The Only Independent Weekly Journal published in the interests of Manufacturers and Operators of Animated Photographs and Cinematograph Projection, Illustrated Songs, Lantern Lectures and Lantern Slide Makers.”8 The most high‐profile Illustrated lecturers noted by MPW in 1907 were acclaimed performers like Burton Holmes and Dwight Elmendorf, whose extensive national tours were typically scheduled season after season, booked into large urban concert halls, legitimate theaters, and opera houses, with up to five lectures in a series and ticket prices that could rival touring stage companies. Holmes’ purportedly eyewitness account of the 1906 eruption of Mt. Vesuvius – complete with film of “many exciting episodes of the eruption” – merited attention in MPW, as did Elemendorf ’s equally topical “illustrated travel talk” with motion pictures on the building of the canal in Panama.9 Holmes’ lecture on Vesuvius was one of 10 “travelogues” he presented at large venues, like, for example, the 1,100‐seat Columbia Theatre in Washington D.C. during January–February 1907,10 while Elmendorf ’s tour brought him to the same city in October–November of that year, performing at the 1,600‐ seat New National Theater, with illustrated lectures on Panama, Old Mexico, the Grand Canyon, the Pacific Coast, and Yellowstone Park (Washington Post 1907b: 4). Any account of illustrated lectures in 1907 would doubtless have mentioned luminaries like Holmes and Elmendorf. However, MPW’s interest in this format went deeper. The magazine paid attention also to lectures deploying moving pictures as well as slides that were presented in a variety of venues outside of commercial theatrical spaces, including the Jamestown Exposition, Manhattan’s Waldorf‐Astoria Hotel, the Normal School in Bloomfield, Pennsylvania, the Brooklyn Institute, and the Central Presbyterian Church in Denver, Colorado (Culver 1907: 41).11 The availability of illustrated lectures across a range of sites and occasions proved to be of less interest to MPW after 1907 as the magazine focused increasingly on the still‐expanding commercial film industry.12 But the lecture as an audiovisual format for presenting nonfictional material remained noteworthy for MPW as a potential component of the nickelodeon program. Even more prominent was the practice of “lecturing with moving pictures,” that is, the theatrical exhibition of a film accompanied by the words of a live speaker (“Trade Notes,” 1908). W. Stephen Bush, who began advertising in 1908 for work as a “lecturer on great subjects in moving pictures,” regularly proselytized on the pages of MPW for the uplifting, artistic potential of what he called the “living voice as creative aid to moving picture entertainment,” by which he largely meant films adapted from literary classics and the Bible (Bush 1908a, b). Only with the aid of a lecturer, declared another MPW article from February 1908, could spectators  –  even the distractible “peanut fiend” wolfing down his snacks – actually “understand what they see” on screen, especially when it comes to historical, travel, or religious subjects (Lee  1908).13 This comment



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suggests that “lecturing with moving pictures” was promoted as a way to boost the cultural legitimacy and broaden the audience for picture shows. There is no telling just how common lecturers were in nickelodeons in 1908–9, but at least one prominent production company, Kalem, which had been founded in 1907 and was part of the Motion Picture Patents Company, placed a particular premium on lectures. Throughout 1909, Kalem offered to mail exhibitors free lectures to accompany all its weekly releases, including a few nonfiction titles like The Making of a Champion Pugilist (on African American boxer Jack Johnson), Sporting Days in the South (on cockfighting), A Trip to the Wonderland of America (on Yellowstone Park), and Mardi Gras in Havana (Kalem  1909b: 179; Kalem  1909c: 415). For example, Kalem advertised The Sponge Fishers of Cuba (released January 15, 1909) as “unquestionably the greatest travel and educational film ever issued, and the lecture which is sent free to all applicants is as complete and thorough as any by Elmendorf or Holmes” (Kalem  1909a: 43). “The reason we keep talking about our lectures,” Kalem (1909d: 583) announced, “is because we know that every Nickelodeon Manager will want them.” A search of local US newspapers does turn up various screenings across the country of a Kalem title like The Sponge Fishers of Cuba, billed as an “educational” or an “industrial” and slotted alongside other films, live performances, and illustrated songs, yet I have found no explicit mention of any theater actually exhibiting this film accompanied by someone using Kalem’s “descriptive lecture.”14 The Sponge Fishers of Cuba (running 965 feet) and Kalem’s other releases were designed to fit the modular format of virtually all day‐to‐day film exhibition in the US, which by 1908 almost never included films that were longer than 1,000 feet. But how could the nonfiction illustrated lecture with slides and moving pictures, which was typically designed to last at least an hour and often longer, be tailored to fit into the highly structured logic of nickelodeon programming?15 Projecting lantern slides was, itself, not a problem, since it was extremely common for nickelodeons to make use of such slides for announcements and advertisements and for projecting images to accompany the performance of popular songs.16 In fact, every issue of MPW in 1908 contained ads for purveyors of “song slides.” Williams Brown & Earle in Philadelphia, for instance, offered “30,000 Lantern Slides for Sale or Rent,” including “artistically colored” song slides as well as “announcement slides” and “travelog sets of slides for rent.” (This company also marketed what it called “Moving Picture Travel Talks,” more full length‐programs that included 2,000 feet of film, 50 slides, and a lecture [Williams Brown and Earle  1908: 266.)17 These illustrated lectures, using from 12 to 40 slides, were predominately nonfiction tours of various regions or localities with commentary by a speaker working from a script provided by the slide manufacturer and distributor.18 In 1909, the New England Lantern Slide Company (1909a: 275), for instance, regularly announced new slide sets identified explicitly as “travelogues,” such as Among the Chinese (with 39 slides) and In and Around Cuba (with 34 slides), although this company’s offerings extended to other forms of nonfiction, as suggested by slide sets with titles like Wild Animals, Wild  Birds, U.S. Coast Artillery in Practice, and California’s Infant Industries

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(New  Travelogues  1909: 218). Other firms specialized in more explicitly topical, newsworthy subjects. For example, within a few weeks after a disastrous fire that claimed 259 miners in Cherry, Illinois, on November 13, 1909, various firms were offering to sell or rent a slide set complete with lecture on this front‐page story, billed as the “greatest catastrophe of the age” (Rice‐McNew  1909: 864; T. R. Woodburn and Company 1909: 803). Similarly, the Hudson‐Fulton Celebration (a lavish event commemorating the history of New York City) was quickly covered by slide manufacturers, including the Excelsior Slide Company (1909: 620), which advertised a $5.00 set of slides that featured the “lecture [printed] on slides saving the cost of a lecturer.” As early as March 1908, a New York firm was offering a similar economical and standardized alternative to the live performer: “lecture sets with the description printed on the slide, specially adapted for Moving Picture Theatres” (George J. Coldthorpe and Company 1908: 273). While Thomas Bedding (1909: 868) in the MPW could claim in June that “slowly but surely the moving picture for educational purposes is driving the lantern slide from the field,”19 for a time, brief lectures illustrated with slides seemed prominent and useful enough to warrant their own generic name  –  the lecturette, meaning, according to a MPW editorial in December 1908, “a short illustrated lecture sandwiched between films, with good slides.” The “crisp and informing” lecturette, this editorial counseled, can work as an “added attraction  …  part of the educational value which is inherent in all picture shows” (Lecturette 1908: 471).20 (And the lecturette could accomplish this lofty end without the potential problems posed by the booking of vaudeville acts – though, as Variety noted with some amusement in 1907, the illustrated lecture using moving pictures could even turn up at a New York City vaudeville theater.)21 The term was taken up more widely, at least for a brief period. The Orpheum Theatre in Ogden, Utah, for instance, advertised as part of its regular bill a “Lecturette on Rome,” which it described as “not a tedious lecture, but a short, terse announcement while the picture is on the screen,” while at a nickelodeon in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, “an illustrated lecturette on Our Navy” was booked for two nights, taking the place of the illustrated song (Lewisburg [PA] Chronicle 1909: 1; Ogden [UT] Standard  1909: 6). By May 1909, Cunby Bros. slide company was offering “Mr. Nickelodeon Manager” a veritable “lecturette library” with over 50 ­different slide sets (Lecturette Library 1909: 560). Although slide manufacturers continued to supply theaters with advertising, announcement, and song slides, judging from the trade press, by 1910 the lecturette seems to have run its course as a nonfiction attraction for moving picture theaters. (And the phenomenon of “lecturing the movies” in theaters lasted at most three years more.) But this relatively short‐lived experiment did not mean the end of attempts to profit commercially from nonfiction moving pictures over the next several years. Well beyond the ongoing success of travelogues from Burton Holmes and Dwight Elmendorf, the full‐length lecture illustrated with slides and moving pictures remained a mainstay at large public auditoria, opera houses, and theaters not dedicated exclusively to motion pictures. Likewise, scenics, industrials, and other nonfiction films remained a regular – if proportionally minor – component of the



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programming at many moving picture theaters, with newsreels like Pathé’s Weekly (1911) and Mutual Weekly (1912) soon filling an even more prominent and standardized role for exhibitors. And, as the American film industry moved toward the regular production and exhibition of self‐styled “feature” films of more than three reels, the multireel nonfiction title figured significantly as a widely screened, potentially lucrative product in and out of the movie theater, a trend clearly evident in the commercial roll‐out of films focusing on hunting expeditions like Roosevelt in Africa, Lassoing Wild Animals (1911), and Paul J. Rainey’s African Hunt (1912).

Roosevelt in Africa Bemoaning the fact that a well‐known photographer had lost a valuable “opportunity” by neglecting to bring along a moving picture camera on a recent trip to East Africa in search of “wild and rare animals,” a MPW editorial in October 1909 declared: “Whenever a scientific or geographical expedition is to be undertaken we would put in a claim for the presence of the moving picture camera in the equipment  …  it now remains for the private individual, the traveling photographer, explorer, geographer, and the like never to undertake his journeys without a moving picture camera, as he is always sure to find a market for his pictures and interest a large section of the public.” As an endorsement of moving as opposed to still photographic images for the purposes of documenting “rarities of scenery and life,” this editorial was one more pitch for the educational potential of film as a medium. But MPW’s call for a full awareness of the commercial viability of nonfiction moving pictures – driven by what it assumed to be “enormous public interest” – was directed particularly at former President Theodore Roosevelt, then on a high‐profile African safari: “it is not clear,” the trade magazine declared, “whether a moving picture camera figures in Mr. Roosevelt’s equipment. We hope it does, and the distinguished ex‐President’s results will be publicly shown” (“Another Lost Opportunity,”  1909: 519).22 It would have been difficult at this date to imagine a more potentially profitable nonfiction topic, given the almost nonstop American newspaper coverage of Roosevelt’s African adventure, which was touted by a sympathetic chronicler as “one of the most noteworthy expeditions ever organized to hunt big game and make scientific investigations among the animals of perhaps the most important zoological division of the earth” (Seymour 1909: v). The MPW’s wish was realized, for this expedition brought back to the U. S. from Africa moving pictures and still photographs as well as what a newspaper account breathlessly referred to as “300 casks and bales of trophies and a menagerie of living things” (Curtis 1910: 3).23 Out of this footage came Roosevelt in Africa, which was released theatrically on April 10, 1910. But the highly topical subject of Roosevelt and his African adventures had appeared on moving picture theater screens well before this date. As early as May, 1909, a company in Los Angeles was offering Ahead of Col. Roosevelt to Africa, a set of “12 beautiful stereopticon slides with descriptive matter.” When Roosevelt in Africa began its run, the Cosmopolitan Slide Makers was

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advertising a set of 15  hand‐colored slides covering the expedition, as was the Topical Slide Company, whose ad announced: “Beat Your Competitors to It—Colonel Roosevelt in Africa,” 15 sides and lecture for $12.00. In fact, a columnist for MPW declared in April 1910 that “the ‘Roosevelt in Africa’ pictures seem to have become a fad, for nearly every manufacturer of slides is supplying them to dealers” (Moving Picture World 1909, 1910a, 1910b, 1910c).24 The most prominent screen version of this safari before the release of Roosevelt in Africa, however, was the Selig Polyscope Company’s 950‐feet Hunting Big Game in Africa, shot entirely in Chicago with a real lion and a Roosevelt impersonator and released May 23, 1909, almost a year before the official moving pictures of the expedition. “For topical interest,” the MPW reviewer declared, “this Selig picture takes rank as one of the films of the week. It is a clearly audacious mixture of the real and unreal … all very cleverly done” (Hunting Big Game 1909a: 712). Advertisements in local newspapers identified Hunting Big Game in Africa as a “scenic” and underscored the “real” as opposed to the “unreal” attractions of Selig’s timely product, which was sometimes also billed as Teddy in Jungleland. “The eyes of the world are centered in Africa now because Roosevelt is there,” claimed one promotional notice, and Hunting Big Game in Africa “gives vivid, close‐range pictures of the scenes in the African jungle … wonderful representations of African animals and scenes.”25 An ad for a theater in Leavenworth, Kansas lauded the film as “A 1,000 foot picture showing the actual hunt and killing of a big lion. See how it is accomplished by Teddy Roosevelt” (Hunting Big Game 1909b: 3). Hunting Big Game in Africa was sold as much for its topicality and its special status as a “feature film” as for its realism: this “feature film is entitled ‘Hunting big game in Africa,’” announced the Fitchburg [MA] Sentinel, “one of the most timely as well as most interesting pictures shown for some time, as the presence of Theodore Roosevelt in this country gives added interest to everything connected with the ‘Dark Continent’” (Promotional Notice 1909b: 6). Such claims are casually reflective of deeply racist and jingoistic assumptions about America’s place in the geopolitics of the twentieth century and become all the more striking given the information provided in a fascinating illustrated account of the production of this film that originally appeared in the Sunday magazine section of the Chicago Tribune on May 23 and was reprinted in the MPW two months later. The Tribune’s article described the “manufactured jungle” set and the performance of the actor impersonating “Teddy.” But it most emphasized the “realism” achieved and the dangerous process of “lion hunting a’ la moving picture plant,” as the cornered lion’s “movements became wilder and more natural,” especially after it was shot not once but three times in the head before dying (“Hunting Big African Game,” 1909: 156). Costumed actors, “colored” extras, constructed sets – all these “unreal” elements did not, for the Tribune writer, detract from the realistic spectacle of a dangerous beast that “could have been no wilder under any circumstances” (“Hunting Big African Game,” 1909: 156). As Selig realized, the combination of Roosevelt and a lion hunt offered audiences both topicality and sensationalism. Hunting Big Game in Africa followed on the



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heels of 1907 titles like Polar Bear Hunt, The New Stag Hunt, and The Great Lion Hunt, with Bear Hunt in Canada and Hunting Deer to come in 1908. “Hunting scenes,” Biograph would declare in advertising A Caribou Hunt (1907), “have ever been a leading feature in motion pictures since their inception” (Synopsis  1907a: 221), while Kleine marketed The New Stag Hunt as “the most magnificent hunting picture ever produced. Full of startling interest and wonderfully thrilling episodes” (New Stag Hunt 1907: 369). Filmed on location in Canada, Hunting Deer was said to “show every portion, as a herd of young deer is shown, also the picture shows very plainly the hunters firing and bringing down their game. Among the pictures is a view of the skinning and dressing of the hides and horns” (Synopsis 1908: 517). As these claims suggest, hunting pictures were typically promoted on the basis of their graphic realism, informational content, not‐yet‐civilized natural locales, and “thrilling episodes.” There is no telling the extent to which the all‐important (and inevitably “thrilling”) hunting scenes in these pictures were staged or incorporated into conventional narrative structures, but films like Polar Bear Hunt and The Great Lion Hunt could be said to constitute a potential model for commercial nonfiction film quite distinct from what scenics and industrials typically had to offer nickelodeon patrons.26 Unlike Selig’s Hunting Big Game in Africa, the footage that became Roosevelt’s African Hunt was all shot on location by British photographer and filmmaker Cherry Kearton, who was lauded by Variety even at this early date as an “expert with the camera in the field of natural history” (“Roosevelt Hunting Pictures,” 1909: 15).27 After Kearton (1909a,  1909b) screened selections of his African footage at the Alhambra Theater in London in December 1909,28 Roosevelt’s African Hunt was acquired by a combination of the manufacturers comprising the Motion Picture Patents Company.29 MPW reported that “several thousand feet of negative has been pruned and trimmed by Pathé Frères until there is not an uninteresting foot in the two reels. Without doubt it is the most expensive negative ever printed from” (Roosevelt in Africa 1910a: 500). The Nickelodeon claimed that Kearton was asking $65,000 for the negative and received “a price that would stagger an ordinary camera man working on salary and expenses.” As a result, this trade magazine claimed that exchanges were charged up to $400 a print, with the high costs passed on to exhibitors (That Roosevelt Picture 1910: 168). After previewing Roosevelt’s African Hunt in Pittsburgh on April 2, the MPPC released the two‐part, two‐reel production nationally on April 10, with much fanfare.30 The 2,000‐foot length of Roosevelt in Africa in itself heralded the importance of this early nonfiction film. Other nonfiction titles that year were even longer, though these were films that were straightforward records of events – a championship prizefight, the final tour of the Buffalo Bill Wild West show, and the Cowboy and Indian Frontier Celebration in Cheyenne, Wyoming.31 But of the 273 titles released for exhibiting in theaters in the United States between March 15 and April 30, 1910, Roosevelt in Africa was the only film of more than 1,020 feet.32 Significantly, even with its “feature” length and uniquely exploitable subject matter, Roosevelt in Africa was not presented as a standalone event but was slotted into the modular exhibition format that

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had been regularized by the MPPC. For example, at the Ideal Theater in Kokomo, Indiana, Roosevelt in Africa  –  complete with a lecturer and “special music”  –  was booked for two days, paired the first day with a comedy, an Edison drama, and an “industrial” about deep‐sea fishing and the second day with a ­different comedy and D.W. Griffith’s one‐reel The Thread of Destiny (1910) (Ideal Theater 1910: 2). According to the promotional material for Roosevelt in Africa that appeared in the trade press and local newspapers, the film’s exceptionally long running time was warranted not simply because it offered “pictures taken from life.” The key selling point was that these were moving pictures of Roosevelt  –  “the world’s hero” – “amid the man‐eating monsters of the wild African jungle.”33 Clearly, the MPPC was banking on the ex‐president’s unmatched public visibility and his well‐ established heroic persona. Beyond Roosevelt’s own first‐person series of illustrated articles for Scribner’s Magazine (October 1909–August 1910), the expedition served as the subject for innumerable newspaper reports and postcards, as well as lengthy books rushed into print like Hunting Big Game in the Wilds of Africa (1909), which promised to contain not only “Thrilling Adventures of the Famous Roosevelt Expedition,” but also “a Vast Treasury of all that is Marvelous and Wonderful in Darkest Africa” and Roosevelt in Africa (1909), pitched as a “graphic account of the world’s most renowned hunter in the wilds of Africa. His unerring aim and wonderful ability as a hunter. Encounters with lions, tigers, elephants and other wild beasts of the jungle” (Miller 1909; Seymour 1909). Could the MPPC’s Roosevelt in Africa compete with the popular press when it came to recounting Roosevelt’s “thrilling adventures,” picturing “wild beasts,” and documenting the natural “marvels and wonders” of Africa? Although the complete two‐reel film is apparently not extant, the Library of Congress has made available 13:00 of the footage from Roosevelt in Africa, comprising 15 scenes, complete with intertitles [https://www.loc.gov/item/mp76000261]. All of these scenes correspond directly with sections of the film as described in a lecture that Kearton prepared to accompany Roosevelt in Africa, with the subheadings he provided for the lecture appearing as intertitles in the Library of Congress footage. Promotional material likewise suggests that the content and structure of Roosevelt in Africa as initially released is reflected in Kearton’s lecture, which describes the film as comprised of 36 separate scenes.34 Only six scenes directly feature Roosevelt, as he is being carried across a river, for example, or watching a Zulu celebration. The actual hunting expedition figures in but four scenes, with no footage of the hunters firing their weapons or confronting dangerous wild beasts. The other 26 scenes in the film, not fully knit into an ongoing narrative trajectory or included for their images of Teddy, focus on aspects of native life (i.e. “Native Amusements at Mombasa,” “Natives Drawing Water from a Well,” “Zulu War Dance”) and on African birds, lizards, insects, and wildlife. In addition, the spoken commentary in Kearton’s lecture frequently draws attention to his own role as the camera operator, for example, explaining that he was beset by boys wanting their picture taken or that he spent “many days” “hiding under a screen with the tropical sun beating down” to capture footage of a rhinoceros. Given the difficulties and



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dangers of Kearton’s task, declared MPW, acquiring this footage of Africa “from every aspect must be considered a triumph of opportunist moving picture photography” (Lux Graphicus 1910: 751). In the short term, Roosevelt in Africa benefitted commercially from the authenticity of its African footage and, particularly, from the drawing power of the ex‐president.35 Here were “two reels of exceptionally fine pictures of the most popular man in the world engaged in the most interesting work he ever did,” declared The Nickelodeon (That Roosevelt Picture  1910: 168). “The Roosevelt  –  the genuine Roosevelt pictures – are the sensation of the hour in the United States,” announced MPW on May 7, 1910 (Lux Graphicus 1910: 751). Yet a theater owner in Bridgeton, New Jersey felt compelled to project a slide before the screening that read: “The Roosevelt in Africa pictures are not of the usual high standard that this house likes to exhibit. They are, however, the authentic films of the expedition, photographed under the most extraordinary difficulties, conditions not under the photographer’s control, and the audience in their criticism are kindly asked to take these matters into consideration” (Bridgeton Evening News  1910: 2).36 Variety agreed that the photography was sometimes “very poor,” though it found Roosevelt in Africa to be “enjoyable” as well as “educational and instructive,” notwithstanding the fact that Roosevelt himself “has not been caught in the act of shooting anything, wild or tamed” and only appears in “a couple of hundred feet” of the film (Roosevelt in Africa 1910b: 16). (By staging the action in Chicago, Selig had solved this problem in Hunting Big Game in Africa, and boasted of “showing the greatest lion hunt ever produced, the camera catching ‘Our Teddy’ in the act of killing his first lion” [American Theater 1909: 14].) The Nickelodeon similarly highlighted the “crush to see the ‘Teddy’ films,” while also noting that “one criticism seems general of the ‘Roosevelt’ pictures – there’s too many colored people and dead animals and too little of ‘Teddy’” (Little Items 1910: 228). Creating a commercially viable two‐reel film using Kearton’s available footage meant finding a workable ratio between images of anonymous black Africans and the celebrated white hunter, as well as between “dead animals” and the “act of shooting” dangerous beasts in the wild. Such choices, needless to say, had deep ideological implications, particularly given Roosevelt’s status as probably the most celebrated embodiment of white, native‐born, American masculinity, a veritable “Apostle of Strenuousness,” to use MPW’s honorific (Picture Man 1910: 920). At the same time, the reviews in Variety and The Nickelodeon cited above suggest that Roosevelt in Africa, no matter how “opportunistic” Kearton might have been in seizing the filmable moment, could not fully deliver on its promise of narrative spectacle and did not provide enough footage featuring Roosevelt, thereby shifting the weight of the film toward the more informational (and quasi‐anthropological or zoological) sections not directly concerned with the hunt or the ex‐president but with African peoples and animals. Variety’s complaint was not that “colored people” had been included in Roosevelt in Africa but that the film, in filling its two reels, had not satisfactorily prioritized its different components. It is worth noting, however, that exhibitors would have had ready access to the Kearton’s lecture, which was

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printed in full in The Nickelodeon on April 1, 1910 (and a similar scene‐by‐scene description appeared in MPW on April 2). The words of a lecturer could have significantly shaped the presentation of Roosevelt in Africa by, for instance, creating narrative suspense, explaining the exotic world on display, and offering reminders of Roosevelt’s central role even when he himself was nowhere to be seen.37 In providing a lecture for the film, Kearton was attempting to position the two‐reel Roosevelt in Africa much closer to the format of the feature‐length illustrated lecture than to the standard MPPC nonfiction titles, which were often generically recognizable films running well under 1,000 feet, like A Ramble through the Isle of Sumatra (241 feet) or Touring the Canary Islands (478 feet), both released, like Roosevelt in Africa, in April 1910 (Licensed Releases 1910: 662).

Conclusion Whether or not the Motion Picture Patents Company’s considerable investment in Roosevelt in Africa paid off in print rentals, ticket sales, and good publicity for the still emerging industry, this 1910 film is historically significant. Drawing on ­elements from scenics and topicals as well as from spectacular melodrama and “hunting pictures,” Roosevelt in Africa offered a flexible and inclusive model for producing and marketing a nonfiction feature film aimed at the theatrical exhibition. It combined different attractions: topicality (Roosevelt’s eminently newsworthy adventures), glimpses of a far‐distant environment (African animals and native life), and narrative spectacle (in the promised encounter with “man‐eating monsters”), all made visible in authentic “pictures taken from life” shot under difficult, even dangerous, conditions. In taking this approach to commercially viable nonfiction, Roosevelt in Africa is very much a product of 1907–1910 American commercial cinema, even as it foreshadows later feature films aiming at box‐office success that were released during what Kenneth M. Cameron (1990: 47) calls the “golden age of the recreational safari,” including the two‐reel Lassoing Wild Animals (1911), featuring the exploits of American cowboy, Buffalo Jones, who frequently lectured with this film, and Paul J. Rainey’s African Hunt (1912), which had remarkable commercial success in New York City and in wider distribution during 1912–1914 as a two‐hour program with and without a lecturer.38 Roosevelt in Africa points not only toward these and other safari films circulated theatrically and nontheatrically but also toward various ways that nonfiction figured in American cinema during the 1910s and beyond: in the screen life of presidents and ex‐presidents, in the shedding of cinematographic light on the “darkness” of East Africa, and in the filming of supposedly still‐wild natural environments, as well as in lecture tours recounting ambitious expeditions to the “ends” of the earth. As such, Roosevelt in Africa and, more generally, the practices, strategies, and commentaries that marked the formative period I have examined constitute an important chapter in what we might think of as an inclusive, industry‐based history of nonfiction cinema during the years before documentary (as referring to a type of film) came into common use in the mid‐1920s.



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Notes 1 Formed in 1908, the Motion Picture Patents Company was an effort led by Edison and Biograph to dominate the production, distribution, and exhibition of film in the United States. My sense of the 1907–1912 period is informed by a wealth of research, including, most notably: Eileen Bowser (1990); William Uricchio and Roberta Pearson (1993); Richard Abel (1999); Alison Griffiths (2002); Charlie Keil and Shelley Stamp (2004); Lee Grieveson (2004); Richard Abel (2006); Jan Olsson (2008); and Jennifer Lynn Peterson (2013). Essential in this regard is also the rich range of material presented at the biannual conferences of Domitor: The International Society for the Study of Early Cinema, which is represented in a series of edited volumes: Frank Kessler and Nanna Verhoeff (2007) and Kaveh Askari et al. (2014). 2 Abel (2006: 171–182) surveys the attention given in a range of American newspapers to nonfiction titles screened in moving picture theaters during 1911–1914. 3 I discuss what I am calling multisited, multipurpose cinema during the silent era in, for example, Waller (2012: 81–95,  2016b: 55–72; and  2016a: 40–53). See also Patrick Vonderau (2016: 1–18). 4 Not part of regular nickelodeon modular programming were so‐called fight films, that is, nonfiction multiple‐reel motion pictures of high‐profile boxing matches round‐by‐ round, sometime along with footage of the lead‐up to the event and the ringside ­environment. These longer film attractions flourished in the nickelodeon period and often proved to be extremely profitable, as Dan Streible (2008: 164–194) explains. A fight film like the O’Brien‐Burns Contest (1906) could be screened in movie theaters not on the regular bill but as a “special attraction,” as was the case at the Theatre Royal in Bisbee, Arizona, for example (Bisbee Daily Review 1908: 5). 5 On scenics, see Peterson (2013). 6 Ad for A Caribou Hunt (1907: 210); ad for Irish Scenes and Types (1907: 427); ad for The Unveiling Ceremonies of the McKinley Memorial (1907: 515); ad for Scenes and Incidents, Panama Canal (1907: 210); see footage count in “Latest Films of All Makers” (1907c: 654). 7 Moving Picture World (1907c: ix) advertised in Electrician and Mechanic for new subscribers by claiming to be “a weekly journal devoted to the interests of Cinematograph Projection, Illustrated Songs, Lantern Slides and Lectures.” For background on what I am calling the nonfiction multiple‐media lecture that relied on moving pictures, see X. Theodore Barber (1993: 68–84); Rick Altman (2007); Genoa Caldwell (2006); Peterson (2013); Musser and Nelson (1991); Richard Abel (2010: 366–388); Jeffrey Ruoff (2006); Gregory A. Waller (2014: 150–159). 8 The masthead as of July 4, 1908 identified the periodical as “The Moving Picture World with Which is Incorporated The Exhibit” (Masthead 1908). 9 See, on Holmes, Moving Picture World (1907a: 155); on Elmendorf, Moving Picture World (1907b: 485). 10 On this tour Holmes offered two “courses” with five “travelogues” each on Sunday evening and Monday and Tuesday matinees: (A) Cairo, The Nile, Athens and the Olympic Games, Naples, Vesuvius Eruption; and (B) Japan, Port Arthur, Ireland, Tyrolean Alps, Switzerland. Washington Post (1907a: 27). 11 See also, Daily Press (1907: 1). Marshall P. Wilder (1907: 58); Alfred Patek (1907: 137); see also, Daily News (1907: 6). Frank A. Perret (1907: 538); Albert Earl (1907: 121); see also, The Columbian (1907: 8).

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12 MPW for a time continued to run informational articles, like Burton H. Albee’s (1908a, 1908b) “Illustrating a Lecture” and “Delivering a Lecture” – neither of which contained any reference to moving pictures. The Nickelodeon, a competing trade magazine took a different tack, offering, for example, quite detailed coverage of the use of moving pictures by lecturers at what we might call a nontheatrical theater run by the US government and housed in the Hawaiian Building at the Alaska‐Yukon‐Pacific exposition in Seattle. See Theodore T. King (1909) “Motography in the Government Service.” 13 See Altman (2007: 133–144). 14 See, for example, ad for the Star Theatre in Ottawa, Kansas (1909: 4) or the ad for the Gem Family Theatre in Austin, Minnesota (1909: 3), which actually lists the 11 scenes in The Sponge Fishers of Cuba – information which could well have come from Kalem’s “descriptive lecture.” 15 The only new films over a single reel listed among MPW’s current releases for 1908 were two religious pictures, The Holy City and Jerusalem in the Time of Christ. Promotional notice for The Holy City (1908: 374–375); ad for Jerusalem in the Time of Christ (1908: 341). 16 By June 1909, advertisements also appear in MPW for firms specializing in producing advertising slides for use in movie theaters. See ad for Novelty Slide Company (1909: 796). 17 A single Travel Talk, the company advised, could be used for “an unbroken show of two hours … or divided into sections of from fifteen‐minutes to half hour” ad for Moving Picture Travel Talks (1908: 528). 18 See, for instance, the notice for “Simpson’s Saunterings” (1908: 522). 19 See also “Nights with Knowles” (1909: 561), which argues that replacing the “old lantern slides” with film for all illustrated lectures would further underscore the role of the moving pictures as an “integral part of the entertainment programme of the American public.” 20 The term appears earlier in “The Illustrated Lecture” (1908: 431) in reference to the practice of using “brief ” illustrated lectures “between the reels.” See also “Observations by Our Man About Town” (1909: 251), which claims that “among the features that may be looked for during the coming season in the picture field are lecturettes.” In this ­context, it is worth noting that for Peterson one of the defining aspects of the travel film in this period – in contrast to Holmes’ illustrated lectures - is precisely “the lack of a narrator” (Peterson 2013: 36). 21 Review of “Kemp’s ‘Tales of the Wild’ Travelogue,” Variety 5.11 (February 23, 1907), 8. 22 Two years earlier an experienced amateur hunter planning a trip to the Arctic Circle to hunt caribou and polar bear had told the MPW: “I shall attempt to obtain good specimens of game, but one of the interesting features of the expedition will be the taking of moving pictures” (“Moving Pictures of Polar Bear Game,” 1907: 247). 23 Curtis’s syndicated article originally appeared in the Chicago Record‐Herald. 24 Roosevelt’s international travels after the African safari were also regularly covered by commercial film companies, with titles like Great Northern’s Roosevelt in Denmark, showing “the ex‐President’s big reception in Denmark,” (Moving Picture World 1910d: 919); Ambrosio’s Roosevelt at Messina and Lester’s Roosevelt Reception, both included in an ad for the Empire Film Company (1910a: 621); and Roosevelt in Cairo (Empire Film Company 1910b: 788). 25 Teddy in Jungleland or Hunting Big Game in Africa is how the film was advertised in the News Journal (1909: 1); promotional notice (1909a: 1); the film was billed as a scenic at,



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for example, the Theatorium, Concord [NC] Daily Tribune (1909: 4); and it was listed as a scenic in MPW’s listing of “latest films” (1909: 732). Both of these films were released by the Miles Bros. Synopsis of Polar Bear Hunt (1907b: 187); advertisement for The Great Lion Hunt (1907: 416), billed as “the most magnificent hunting picture ever produced. Full of startling interest and wonderfully thrilling episodes.” Thirty years later, Kearton (1941) was still making reference to his experiences filming the Roosevelt expedition in his memoir. Kearton (1910: 12904) held the copyright for Roosevelt in Africa. See the ad for Roosevelt in Africa (1910a: 500) announcing this effort by the “licensed manufacturers co‐operating.” The MPPC previewed the film in Pittsburgh, April 2, 1910. “Pictures of Roosevelt” (1910: 21). These films were all sold on state rights basis. See the advertisements for the 4,000‐foot Nelson‐Gans Fight Pictures (1909: 236); the 3,000‐foot film of the final tour of Buffalo Bill Wild West with Pawnee Bill’s Far East (1910: 661); and for the 3000‐foot Cowboy and Indian Frontier Celebration (1910: 672). Abel (2006: 177) notes that 1910–1912 saw several “multiple‐reel films purporting to document cowboy life.” Based on the “Record of Current Films” (1910: 221–222). During 1909–1910, the only other film from a MPCC company that rivaled Roosevelt in Africa in terms of length was Drink, an adaptation from Zola, released by Pathé on October 22, 1909. Vitagraph released each part of its five‐part Life of Moses individually, between December 4, 1909 and February 22, 1910. Similarly, each part of its three‐reel version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was released on different days in July 1910. The only 2,000‐foot film in 1909–1910 from an “independent” company, outside of the MPCC, was the 2,000‐foot Iona the White Squaw, released by the New York Motion Picture Company in October 1909. See, for instance, ad in Billboard (1910: 25) and sample newspaper ad (1910: 2). One of the first films actually advertised in the Moving Picture World and View Photographer was Biograph’s Jamestown Exposition (1907: 158), “a series of most interesting scenes of the opening ceremony of this great tri‐centennial,” a film that prominently featured then President Roosevelt. For example, an ad for a screening at the Sandusky Theatre (1910: 6) in Sandusky, Ohio actually reprints verbatim the list of scenes identified by Kearton. Examples of the purely topical interest in Roosevelt, include Great Northern’s Roosevelt in Denmark (1910: 919), showing “the ex‐President’s big reception in Denmark”; Ambrosio’s Roosevelt at Messina and Lester’s Roosevelt Reception, both included in an ad for the Empire Film Company (1910a: 621); and Roosevelt in Cairo, released by George Kleine (Empire Film Company, 1910: 788). “The Vitagraph Pictures of the Roosevelt Reception” (1910: 22) notes that this company had 24 camera operators on different boats to capture Roosevelt’s return, yielding a 450 foot film. Roosevelt also made a very brief appearance in In Africa (1910), which Variety panned as a “willful deception of the public” since it was advertised as a “’Roosevelt picture’” designed to exploit the interest in Roosevelt in Africa (Review of In Africa 1910: 16). “Every allowance must be made for the difficulties which encountered Kearton on his work,” (Lux Graphicus 1910: 751). A commentator for MPW in fact suggested that a lecturer would definitely have improved the screenings he attended at a working class theater in New Jersey and at a

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more upscale house on Broadway in Manhattan, especially when it came to the scenes involving African birds and insects (Hoffman 1910: 682–683). 38 See also Mitman (1999); Derek Bousé (2000); Palle B. Petterson (2011); Amy J. Staples (2006); and Jan‐Christopher Horak (2006).

References Abel, R. (1999). The Red Rooster Scare: Making Cinema American, 1900–1910. Berkeley: University of California Press. Abel, R. (2006). Americanizing the Movies and “Movie‐Mad” Audiences: 1910–1914. Berkeley: University of California Press. Abel, R. (2010). Charge and Countercharge: “Documentary” War Pictures in the USA, 1914–1916. Film History 22 (4): 366–388. Albee, B.H (1908a). Illustrating a Lecture. Motion Picture World, 2(2), 19–20. Albee, B.H. (1908b). Delivering a Lecture. Motion Picture World, 2(21), 452–453. Altman, R. (2007). Silent Film Sound. New York: Columbia University Press. American Theater. (1909, May 20). Advertisement. Anaconda Standard, 14. Anaconda, MT. Anon. (1907a). How the Cinematographer Works and Some of His Difficulties. Moving Picture World, 1(14), 213. Anon. (1907b). Novel Uses for Moving Pictures. Moving Picture World and View Photographer 1(3), 39–40. Anon. (1907c). Latest Films of All Makers. Moving Picture World. 1(40), 654. Anon. (1908). The Moving Picture World with Which Is Incorporated the Exhibit. Moving Picture World, 3(1), 1. Anon. (1910). Exploration and the Picture. Moving Picture World, 7(17), 917. Another Lost Opportunity. (1909). Moving Picture World, 5(16), 519. Askari, K., Curtis, S., Gray, F. et  al. (eds.) (2014). Performing New Media. London: John Libbey. Barber, X.T. (1993). The Roots of Travel Cinema: John L. Stoddard, E. Burton Holmes and the Nineteenth‐Century Illustrated Travel Lecture. Film History 5 (1): 68–84. Bedding, T. (1909). The Modern Way in Moving Picture Making XV‐Educational. Moving Picture World, 4(26), 868. Billboard. (1910). Advertisement. Billboard, p. 25. Bisbee Daily Review. (April 5, 1908), 5. Bousé, D. (2000). Wildlife Films. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bowser, E. (1990). The Transformation of Cinema: 1907–1915. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Bridgeton Evening News. (1910, May 3), 2. Bridgeton, NJ. Buffalo Bill Wild. (1910). Advertisement. Moving Picture World, 6(12), 661. Bush, W.S. (1908a). Advertisement in Moving Picture World, 3(5), 89. Bush, W.S. (1908b). Lectures on Moving Pictures. Moving Pictures World, 3(8), 136–137. Caldwell, G. (ed.) (2006). Burton Holmes Travelogues. Hong Kong: Taschen. Cameron, K.M. (1990). Into Africa: The Story of the East African Safari, 47. London: Constable. Caribou Hunt. (1907). Advertisement in Moving Picture World, 1(13), 210. Concord Daily Tribune. (1909, September 11), 4. Concord, NC. Cowboy and Indian Frontier Celebration. (1910). Advertisement. Moving Picture World, 6(13), 672.



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Culver, E.C. (1907). Lecture on Yellowstone Park. Moving Picture World, 1(3), 41. Curtis, W.E. (1910). Roosevelt Is Rival of Biblical Nimrod: 6,000 Hunt Trophies to Smithsonian Institution. Daily State‐Times, 3. Daily News. (1907, April 21), 6. Denver, CO. Daily Press. (1907, September 4), 1. Newport News, VA. Earl, A. (1907). Natural and Industrial Niagara Falls. Moving Picture World, 1(8), 121. Empire Film Company. (1910a). Advertisements for Ambrosio’s Roosevelt at Messina and Lester’s Roosevelt Reception. Moving Picture World, 6(9), 621. Empire Film Company. (1910b). Advertisement for Kleine’s Roosevelt in Cairo. Moving Picture World, 6(19), 788. Excelsior Slide Company. (1909). Advertisement. Moving Picture World, 5(18), 620. Gem Family Theatre. (1909, February 17). Advertisement. Austin Daily Herald, 3. Austin, MN. George J. Coldthorpe and Company. (1908). Advertisement. Moving Picture World, 2(13), 273. Great Lion Hunt, The. (1907). Advertisement. Moving Picture World, 1(26), 416. Grieveson, L. (2004). Policing Cinema: Movies and Censorship in Early Twentieth‐Century America. Berkeley: University of California Press. Griffiths, A. (2002). Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn‐of‐the‐Century Visual Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Hoffman, H.F. (1910). The Roosevelt Pictures. Moving Picture World, 6(17), 682–683. Horak, J.‐C. (2006). Wildlife Documentaries: From Classical Forms to Reality TV. Film History 18 (4): 459–475. Hunting Big African Game in the Jungles of Chicago. (1909). Moving Picture World, 5(5), 156. Hunting Big Game in Africa. (1909a). Advertisement. Moving Picture World, 4(22), 712. Hunting Big Game in Africa. (1909b, May 22). Advertisement in Leavenworth Times, 3. Leavenworth, KA. Ideal Theater. (1910, May 4 and 6). Advertisement. Kokomo Daily Tribune, 2. Kokomo, IN. Illustrated Lecture, The. (1908). Moving Picture World, 20(2), 431. Irish Scenes and Types. (1907). Advertisement in Moving Picture World, 1(27), 427. Jamestown Exposition. (1907). Advertisement. Moving Picture World and View Photographer, 1(10), 158. Jerusalem in the Time of Christ. (1908). Advertisement. Moving Picture World, 3(18), 341. Kalem. (1909a). Advertisement for The Sponge Fishers of Cuba. Moving Picture World, 4(2), 43. Kalem. (1909b). Advertisement. Moving Picture World, 4(7), 179. Kalem. (1909c). Advertisement for A Trip to the Wonderland of America. Moving Picture World, 4(14), 415. Kalem. (1909d). Advertisement. Moving Picture World, 4(19), 583. Kearton, C. (1909a). Shows Roosevelt Hunting. New York Times, 1. Kearton, C. (1909b). Pictures of the Roosevelt Hunt. Moving Picture World, 5(25), 871. Kearton, C. (1910). Roosevelt in Africa. Catalogue of Copyright Entries, Musical Compositions, 4(5), 12904. Kearton, C. (1941). Cherry Kearton’s Travels. London: Robert Hale. Keil, C. and Stamp, S. (eds.) (2004). American Cinema’s Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kessler, F. and Verhoeff, N. (eds.) (2007). Networks of Entertainment: Early Film Distribution, 1895–1915. London: John Libbey. King, T.T. (1909). Motography in the Government Service. The Nickelodeon, 2(3), 72–74. Latest Films. (1909). Moving Picture World, 4(22), 732.

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Latest Films of All Makers. (1907). Moving Picture World, 1(40), 654. Lecturette Library from Cunby Bros. (1909). Advertisement. Moving Picture World, 4(18), 560. Lecturette, The. (1908). Moving Picture World, 3(24), 471. Lee, V.C. (1908). The Value of a Lecture. Motion Picture World, 2(6), 93–94. Lewisburg Chronicle. (1909, April 10), 1. Lewisburg, PA. Licensed Releases. (1910). Moving Picture World, 6(16), 662. Little Items Gathered in the East. (1910). The Nickelodeon, 3(9), 228. Lux Graphicus. (1910). On the Screen. Moving Picture World, 6(18), 751. Masthead. (1908). Moving Picture World with Which Is Incorporated the Exhibit. Moving Picture World, 3(1), 1. McKernan, L. (2013). Charles Urban: Pioneering the Non‐Fiction Film in Britain and America, 1897–1925. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Miller, J.M. (1909). Hunting Big Game in the Wilds of Africa Containing Thrilling Adventures of the Famous Roosevelt Expedition. Philadelphia, PA: National Publication Company. Mitman, G. (1999). Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film, 5–20. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Moving Picture Travel Talks. (1908). Advertisement. Moving Picture World, 3(26), 528. Moving Picture World. (1907a). Moving Picture World, 1(10), 155. Moving Picture World. (1907b). Moving Picture World, 1(31), 485. Moving Picture World. (1907c). Advertisement in Electrician and Mechanic, 18(3), ix. Moving Picture World. (1909). Moving Picture World, 2(22), 721. Moving Picture World. (1910a). Moving Picture World, 6(15), 623. Moving Picture World. (1910b). Moving Picture World, 6(16), 630. Moving Picture World. (1910c). Moving Picture World, 6(16), 639. Moving Picture World. (1910d). Moving Picture World, 6(22), 919. Moving Pictures of Polar Bear Game. (1907). Moving Picture World, 1(16), 247. Musser, C. and Nelson, C. (1991). High‐Class Moving Pictures: Lyman H. Howe and the Forgotten Era of Traveling Exhibition, 1880–1920. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Nelson‐Gans Fight Pictures. (1909). Advertisement. Moving Picture World, 4(9), 236. New Stag Hunt, The. (1907). Advertisement. Moving Picture World, 1(24), 369. New Travelogues. (1909). Advertisement for New England Lantern Slide Company. Moving Picture World, 4(8), 218. News Journal. (1909, May 20), 1. Wilmington, DE. Nights with Knowles. (1909). Moving Picture World, 5(17), 561. Novelty Slide Company. (1909). Advertisement. Moving Picture World, 4(24), 796. Observations by Our Man About Town. (1909). Moving Picture World, 5(8), 251. Ogden Standard. (1909, February 9), 6. Ogden, UT. Olsson, J. (2008). Los Angeles Before Hollywood: Journalism and American Film Culture, 1905–1915. Stockholm: University Library of Sweden. Patek, A. (1907). Lecture on Panama. Moving Picture World, 1(9), 137. Perret, F.A. (1907). Terrors of Vesuvius in Moving Pictures. Moving Picture World, 1(8), 121. Peterson, J.L. (2013). Education in the School of Dreams: Travelogues and Early Nonfiction Films. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Petterson, P.B. (2011). Cameras into the Wild: A History of Early Wildlife and Expedition Filmmaking, 1895–1928. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company. Theodore Roosevelt: The Picture Man. (1910). Moving Picture World, 7(17), 920. Pictures of Roosevelt (1910). Pittsburgh Post‐Gazette, vol. 21. PA: Pittsburgh.



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Polar Bear Hunt. (1907). Moving Picture World, 1(12), 187. Promotional Notice. (1908). The Holy City. Moving Picture World, 2(17), 374–375. Promotional Notice. (1909a, May 29). Daily News, 1. Mount Carmel, PN. Promotional Notice. (1909b, June 15). Hunting Big Game in Africa. Fitchburg Sentinel, 6. Fitchburg, MA. Record of Current Films. (1910). Advertisement. The Nickelodeon, 3(8), 221–222. Review of In Africa. (1910). Variety, 18(7), 16. Rice‐McNew. (1909). Advertisement. Moving Picture World, 5(24), 864. Roosevelt Hunting Pictures. (1909). Variety, 17(2), 15. Roosevelt in Africa. (1910a). Advertisement. Moving Picture World, 6(13), 500. Review of Roosevelt in Africa. (1910b). Variety, 16. Roosevelt in Denmark. (1910). Moving Picture World, 6(22), 919. Ruoff, J. (2006). Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sample Newspaper Ad. (1910, April 16). Elkhart Truth, 2. Elkhart, IN. Sandusky Theatre. (1910, May 1). Advertisement. Sandusky Register, 6. Sandusky, OH. Scenes and Incidents, Panama Canal. (1907). Advertisement in Moving Picture World, 1(13), 210. Seymour, F. (1909). Roosevelt in Africa, p. v. New York: D.B. McCurdy. Simpson’s Saunterings. (1908). Advertisement. Moving Picture World, 3(26), 522. Staples, A.J. (2006). Safari Adventure: Forgotten Cinematic Journeys in Africa. Film History 18 (4): 392–411. Star Theatre. (1909, March 10). Advertisement. Ottawa Daily Republic, 4. Ottawa, KS. Streible, D. (2008). Fight Pictures: A History of Boxing and Early Cinema, 164–194. Berkeley: University of California Press. Synopsis. (1907a). A Caribou Hunt. Moving Picture World, 1(14), 221. Synopsis. (1907b). Polar Bear Hunt. Moving Picture World, 1(12), 187. Synopsis. (1908). Hunting Deer. Moving Picture World, 2(24), 517. T.R. Woodburn and Company. (1909). Advertisement. Moving Picture World, 5(23), 803. That Roosevelt Picture. (1910). The Nickelodeon, 3(7), 168. The Columbian. (1907, May 23), 8. Bloomfield, PA. Trade Notes. (1908). Moving Picture World, 2(2), 23. Travelogues New England Lantern Slide Company. (1909). Advertisement. Moving Picture World, 4(10), 275. Unveiling Ceremonies of the McKinley Memorial. (1907). Advertisement in Moving Picture World, 1(32), 515. Urban, C. (1907a). The Cinematograph in Science and Education. Moving Picture World, 1(21), 324. Urban, C. (1907b). The Cinematograph in Science and Education. Moving Picture World, 1(22), 341–342. Urban, C. (1907c). The Cinematograph in Science and Education. Moving Picture World, 1(23), 356–357. Urban, C. (1907d). The Cinematograph in Science and Education. Moving Picture World, 1(24), 372–373. Urban, C. (1907e). The Cinematograph in Science and Education. Moving Picture World, 1(25), 388–389. Uricchio, W. and Pearson, R. (1993). Reframing Culture: The Case of the Vitagraph Quality Films. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Vitagraph Pictures of the Roosevelt Reception. (1910). Moving Picture World, 7(1), 22.

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Vonderau, P. (2016). Introduction: On Advertising’s Relation to Moving Pictures. In: Films That Sell: Moving Pictures and Advertising (eds. B. Florin, N. de Klerk and P. Vonderau), 1–18. London: Palgrave. Waller, G. (2012). Locating Early Non‐Theatrical Audiences. In: Audiences: Defining and  Researching Screen Entertainment Reception (ed. I. Christie), 81–95. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Waller, G. (2014). The Multiple‐Media Lecture: Racing with Death in Antarctic Blizzards (1915). In: Performing New Media (eds. K. Askari et al.), 150–159. London: John Libbey. Waller, G. (2016a). International Harvester, Business Screen and the History of Advertising Film. In: Films that Sell: Moving Pictures and Advertising (eds. B. Florin, N. de Klerk and P. Vonderau), 40–53. London: Palgrave. Waller, G. (2016b). Search and Re‐search: Digital Print Archives and the History of Multi‐ Sited Cinema. In: The Arclight Guide to Media History and the Digital Humanities (eds.  E. Hoyt and C.R. Acland), 55–72. Sussex: REFRAME Books. Washington Post. (1907a, January 1), 27. Washington Post. (1907b, October 1), 4. Wilder, M.P. (1907). Lecture on Japan delivered at Waldorf‐Astoria. Moving Picture World, 1(4), 58. Williams Brown and Earle. (1908). Advertisement. Moving Picture World, 2(13), 266.

18

The Marginal Spectator Brian Winston

Lincoln University

“Lights please.” shouted a voice over the babble of laughter and children’s voices. “Listen children,” said the man operating the movie projector, “for the second time I  must remind you that this is a free show given by the Ministry of Information. If you cannot keep quiet you will have to leave”… . The hall was ice cold, and the chairs were hard. The projector squeaked and rattled. (Forman 1982: 229)

Introduction It is a given that documentaries are perceived as, in Metz’s word, marginaux to the fictional film; and, it can be argued, nowhere is this marginality better seen than in the size of the audiences that, until very recently, they normally attracted. Evidence, both quantitative or qualitative, is sparse but there is little reason to doubt the typicality of Helen Forman’s anecdote for the nontheatrical audience;1 nor, indeed, that its negativity does not reflect more generally on documentary’s usual relative unpopularity in the cinema as a whole. Initially, though, this reality was far from being an obvious outcome of film’s development as a mass medium. Under capital, as with (all?) other modes of cultural expression, movie‐going was inflected by class‐based preferences. It is not surprising that, as cinema cut (eventually) a rapid path, at the turn of the nineteenth century, from lab through fairground and peep‐show into the vaudeville house, attendance at screenings was soon deemed by society’s curtain‐twitchers to be a socially improper activity, of a piece with frequenting other popular entertainment forms. But, on the other hand, the public instructional lecture illustrated with slides had been a A Companion to Documentary Film History, First Edition. Edited by Joshua Malitsky. © 2021 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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successful, and respectable, nineteenth century entertainment spawning “an enormous educational industry” for the pleasurable edification of the bourgeoisie (Mannoni 2000: 85). In America, a “documentary tradition matured” in the second half of that century, its staple (often expensively ticketed) travelogue slide shows (Musser 1990: 39). “The propriety of illustrated lectures appealed to two important cultural groups in American life: the refined culture associated with Harper’s Weekly and polite literature,” and the second consisting of “church‐based institutions” (Musser 1990: 41–42). Prima facie, there was no reason to expect the cinematograph would not satisfy both these markets, popular and “refined.” It was possible that the binaries between fiction versus factual or between entertainment versus edification (with entertainment on the side, as it were) would not be reflected with the cinema. And, indeed, at the outset there were indicators that this might turn out to be the case. Cinema begins with the actual: “interests.” The “phantom ride” movie, a shot taken from the front of a moving vehicle, for example, proved popular with the first paying audiences. And, despite the triumph of more complex narratives (and, concomitantly, fiction) over this cinema of nonfictional attractions, some cinematographic pioneers, notable Charles Urban, nevertheless established profitable independent businesses producing and screening films documenting, for example, microscopic life forms. He did so after he had, in Luke McKernan’s phrase, “discovered education.” In effect, he exploited the lecture tradition in the new medium substituting a program of short movies for a sequence of lantern slides. For Urban: “Motion pictures undoubtedly amused [but] they could also have a higher purpose and this need not make them any less appealing or less profitable” (McKernan 2013: 31). On occasion, his understanding was to be dramatically confirmed. In 1916, for example, in the UK, The Battle of the Somme, filmed with enlisted troops, was a “tremendous financial success” (McKernan 2013: 154), booked that year 2,000+ times, generating – according to the press – a box‐office profit of £30,000 (some US$4+ million in today’s money) and a claimed audience of 20  million (Reeves 1986: 225). For many middle‐class British spectators, seized with the cultural snobbery of the era, this was the first film deemed respectable enough to permit the buying of a cinema ticket (Reeves  1986).2 The slides and the prejudice persisted, though. Sir Ernest Shackelton’s audience watched a film of his failed expedition to the South Pole but as an illustration to his lecture on the adventure.3 Three years later, in the cinema rather than the lecture hall, finally a compelling popular demonstration of the factual film’s commercial viability occurred. Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North – “A Story of Life and Love in the Actual Arctic” as it was billed (emphasis added)  –  took a respectable $252,000 on its initial US release – $3.7 million today – for a production cost one fifth of that (Murphy 1978).4 John Grierson averred that the film had ran continuously in Paris for 12 years after it opened (Grierson 1979: 177). All this was enough for Hollywood mogul, Jessie Lasky, to invite Flaherty to repeat this trick in Samoa (Moana, 1926).5 Lasky also bought another nonfiction feature, Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life (1925), shot in Persia (Iran), from its makers Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack.6



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He then dispatched the pair to repeat their trick in the jungles of Siam (Thailand) – Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness (1927).7 However, none of these yielded Nanook‐level returns; but the box‐office for Cooper and Schoedsack’s next commission did – and more. Working for RKO in 1933, the pair shot a fictional jungle film, in Griffith Park, San Pedro Harbor, and Culver Studios in Los Angeles. King Kong’s initial receipts – $120 million in 2017 dollars – dwarfed the earnings of all the “natural dramas” (as Cooper and Schoedsack had called them), highlighting for Hollywood how much safer a box‐office bet was fiction than fact, however exoticized.8 The box‐office evidence of unpopularity grew in tandem with the industry’s evolving exhibition practices. At the outset of the twentieth century, film exhibition had quickly settled into screenings at specially‐built theatrical venues. These cinemas became the site of its first major mass audience. Post–World War I, public taste was usually met with shows that offered a feature and fillers: e.g. a newsreel, a cartoon and a factual short. Feature documentaries, though, were not much further explored. Travelogues, the “improving” Victorian slide‐show reimagined for the cinema, were favored as factual short fillers. Beyond newsreels, and anyway unprotected by clear public demand, the commercial exhibition of documentary material from other sources faltered. For exhibitors, buying‐in fillers made little business sense. And, for all the producers of such materials – much of it close to advertising in the broadest sense – distributing films was confused by the basic question of who was to pay whom for them. Especially, officially funded factual films were seen by the industry as rivals taken programming time from their own production efforts. So, although the cinema was the obvious place for factual film to find an audience, access to it was frustrated. This was exacerbated with the development in the 1930s of the double‐feature which anyway curtailed the need for fillers. The marginalization of the documentary for film’s first audience becomes almost inevitable. But the value of factual film as a communication technique remained an area to be explored outside of the cinemas in nontheatrical venues. For purposes from state information and propaganda through commercial and industrial public relations (beyond advertising) to political or charitable appeals, factual film developed in a variety of directions. The cinema, after all, had begun in a fairground booth and images could be projected anywhere. They did not need a custom‐built venue and cinemas did not have a perfect monopoly of even of fictional entertainment. Cumulatively, a second audience, primarily for factual film, was assembled in nontheatrical venues everywhere from factory canteens to church halls or any other public facilities, including open‐air locales. Various fleets of vans equipped with projectors toured more than one country.9 There was even a (minuscule) element in this ­audience whose enthusiasm for film as an art form was not met in the commercial cinema. Aficionados coalesced into film societies for the screening of material  –  ­fictional and well as documentary – otherwise unavailable in mainstream cinema. Some of these cinéastes even essayed the making of their own documentaries. And there was a third audience, also sustained by official and other sponsors, to be found in schools, universities, and training facilities. Spectators watched much of

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the same material as did the second audience, but they were distinct from it (and from cinema spectators) in that they had no choice in the matter of attendance. Some independent producers and companies were able to sustain themselves making film documentaries and other factual visual materials solely for this audience. In all this, of course, the average and cumulative sizes of these gatherings were wildly discrepant; but nowhere did these second and third audience venues match the seating capacities of the commercial cinema. However, not a little because of the paucity of data, the extent of their reach has not been much explored. For this necessarily brief and limited survey, I begin by suggesting the British reception of factual film prior to World War II affords something of a template for an examination of documentary’s marginality. I do so because, arguably, nowhere did the factual, in the form of documentary, loom larger as a supposedly significant element in national film culture than in Britain.

Template: The UK to 1939 In the UK, the government and other public authorities were to play a central role in the development of a “Documentary Movement,” and these funders initially “intended that documentary films should mainly be distributed theatrically, as any other shorts” (Anon 1947: 57). An ambition to have official documentary find favor with the cinema’s paying audience was a distinguishing mark of British cinematic aspirations pre–World War II. The state‐sponsored Empire Marketing Board (EMB) film unit under John Grierson became the first focus of this attempt. Statistics on how well the plan progressed are difficult to come by but in 1932, the board claimed 1,873 bookings resulting in 4,380 screenings (Aitken 1990: 2). The numbers, though, are curious and cannot be easily mapped on the cinema statistics of the time. “Booking” presumably means individual dispatches to cinemas but, if so, 4,380 “screenings” means each cinema showed the film only twice – unlikely given weekly program changes and several shows a day. Looked at another way, an average audience size of 500 could yield 2,000,000+ spectators but that requires such a “full‐house” at every one of the 4,380 “screenings.” What is clear, though, is that, whatever the effectiveness of this initial effort, it was not maintained. Whether sponsored by official organizations such as the EMB’s successor film unit at the General Post Office (GPO), or by commercial and industrial bodies, or produced by the film industry itself, the overall the number of factual films licensed for commercial exhibition in the UK fell from 31 hours a year to 11 as the 1930s unrolled. Leaving aside questions as to documentaries’ popularity, critical in this was the introduction of double‐billing which ensured that all program‐“fillers” – cartoons, newsreels as well as “shorts” – fell from 6% [of screen time] in 1934 to 2.25% in 1939 overall (Swann 1989: 72). Despite the place of many of the titles involved as canonical documentaries, contemporary critics, e.g. some radicals, often did not see them in that way (Winston 2008: 37). The films were, it would seem, anyway generally unpopular with audiences. What soon became the movement’s dominant focus on social problems and society’s victims



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“could seem patronizing to the working class” (Dickinson and Street 1985: 28, 66). Undeterred, in 1934 Grierson and the GPO were still planning six theatrical releases a year; but, by 1936, only one such film had been seen in the cinemas – Night Mail.10 Nonofficial commercial and industrial sponsors constituted the other main funding source for the movement. Paul Rotha was among the first to seize the opportunity they offered. He recalled that, as early as 1931, he had had the thought: “‘Well, Grierson’s got government sponsorship …. where else is there sponsorship?’ and I  said to myself ‘Well, obviously industry’” (Marris  1982: 10). Ad hoc occasional factual filming for publicity purposes gave way to a more structured approach best exemplified by the Shell Oil Company’s film unit established in 1934. Its first production, Airport, was, like Night Mail, made for general release.11 The claimed audience figures for the commercial bookings of these films, public and corporate, amount to several millions but that must be put in the context of nearly 1 billion cinema admissions a year in the 1930s (Anon n.d.). The slim possibility of a seven‐figure audience, which did not improve in the changing programming environment, represented but a small percentage of the cinema audience. Grierson squared the circle by, justifiably, pointing to the double‐bill as a factor in this failure. But, inescapably, it was also the fact that, simply, documentary shorts were not popular enough to maintain their claim on the commercial screen. Prewar, Night Mail was the last to try. Documentary’s potential as a staple of the cinema’s mass appeal had been stifled during the decade by UK industry hostility, popular antipathy and residual bourgeois disdain for the movies. The movement, necessarily seeking an audience to survive, turned elsewhere. It was to be found in the “ice cold” halls with “the hard chairs” and the squeaking, rattling projectors. This picture of discomfort might be overstated but what cannot be denied is that the second nontheatrical audience in the 1930s and 1940s never experienced “plush seats, mural decorations, super organs, and beautifully attired usherettes,” the amenities of what the British then called “picture‐houses” (Hogenkamp  1986: 77). Nor could the audience numbers be matched. Between 1929 and 1932, some 72 organizations booked films with the EMB. Even with repeated screenings and audiences of several hundred, which the record does not suggest was the common experience, the numbers can, at best, be only counted in tens of thousands not the millions the cinema attracted. Nevertheless, the claim for the nontheatrical audience grew to four million a year, again a figure difficult to substantiate. In 1938, the gas industry’s PRs announced that a million people saw its movies and the GPO estimated 3.5 million watched theirs. The following year, 1939 the overall figure claimed had more than doubled to 10 million (Swann 1989: 76, 103, 16). But, at best, the total capacity of the nontheatrical venues cannot be considered – in the context of cinema‐going, radio, or the press – as sufficient to sustain a mass‐medium at their levels. And, anyway, the entire trajectory of claimed audience numbers is suspect. Nicholas Pronay suggests Grierson’s four million, for example, were more likely closer to 400,000 (Pronay 1989: 235). Cadbury, the chocolate company, estimated the audience for its publicity films at 350,000,  which seems more feasible (Swann 1989: 96).

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Necessity as much as mendacity was driving the Documentary Movement’s rhetoric. Continued funding depended, not unnaturally, on demonstrating that the films were being seen, especially after documentary virtually disappears from the cinema screen. Grierson’s small‐but‐beautiful (as it were) defense was to assert, without much evidence, that in the matter of raising consciousness documentaries seen outside the cinemas had a “‘hang‐over’” effect and this was “more important” than the feature film’s power “by novelty or sensation to knock a Saturday night audience cold” (Grierson 1979: 48). The paymasters were not convinced, although corporate sponsors, who were more culturally attuned to the expenses involved in the amorphous business of reputation building, proved to be more forgiving than the state organizations. Basically, the movement as a whole boxed itself into a corner – first by offering to deliver an audience without the agreement of the cinema owners who controlled access to that audience. Whether the public preferred the film industry’s travelogues, say, to the movement’s efforts was never really tested. But, secondly, despite opportunity, the documentary had failed to make a case in popular reception terms that would have given the exhibitors pause. Grierson had written in 1935 that, “As I see it, the future of the cinema might not be in the cinema at all” (Grierson 1979 [1935]: 69) but, in the event, he was being proved very wrong. The alternative was too intermittent, incoherent and small‐scale to offer any sort of challenge to the stability and scope of the general releasing structure. This second, nontheatrical audience, contained a further element. Also serving it were other producers who did not entertain general releasing as an objective. Downplaying mere audience size, they eschewed being placed in some sort of competition with the commercial cinema to seek instead other measurable “hang‐over” effects (as it were) as indicators of film’s effectiveness. They were after externally verifiable impact, e.g. raising money for charity or joining a political campaign or organization. From the Save the Children Fund to the Seaman’s Mission, from political parties to the trade union and co‐operative movements – all explored the possibilities of film as a tool in their work. Grierson had spoken of his ambition at the EMB: “[t]o command, and cumulatively command, the mind of a generation” in the interests of the British Empire (Grierson 1979: 48). The audience for nonofficial/ noncorporate–industrial films better demonstrated what this “command” might mean in practice than did reactions to, and consequences of, the movement’s documentaries. After all, these audiences consisted of those already committed to one cause or another or of those more generally susceptible to appeals for charity, etc. Potentially, this was not an insignificant pool of citizens. There were, for example, over four million trade unionists (Dorey  1995: 33). The UK Labour Party in the 1930s had 450,000 members. (Ryan 1983). This was but a smallish percentage of the general population (say 1%) – and the audiences drawn from these affiliations might have been small in comparison to the size of this pool itself – but attention and outcomes were sufficient, despite limited resources, to sustain (erratically) production. Films were shown at meetings held in these various interests; and there were enough filmmakers who supported Communism to coalesce, with that party’s support, into a (Workers) Film and Photo League: WFPL (Hogenkamp 1986: 105: 136). Many small filmmaking organizations were also created. Don Macpherson counted



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over 30 (Macpherson and Willemen 1980: 212). In the decade from 1929, it has been estimated that one radical film a month was being produced. Even at the rate of no more than 50 in an audience, perhaps as many as between 2,300,000 and 4,600,000 a year saw them (Ryan 1983: 122–5). Such figures are scarce safer than the Griersonian numbers but the activity cannot be dismissed as entirely inutile. And, finally, there was one other element in this second nontheatrical audience which shared with the first nothing more than a thirst for entertainment. A small number of more receptive cinéastes joined film societies where features deemed by the trade to hold few attractions for the mass audience, as well as the documentaries they also spurned, were screened. This phenomenon was better established on the continent but a London Film Society was founded in 1925  –  at which, famously, John Grierson’s Drifters was screened with Sergei Eisentstein’s Battleship Potemkin in November, 1929 – was something of an exception to this rule.12 The Royal Arsenal Co‐operative Society was another. It screened Eisentstein’s The General Line a number of times in the early 1930s, eventually accumulating a claimed audience of 40,000 (Hogenkamp  1986, p.  75).13 The numbers involved were miniscule and, as this instance reveals, the films were not all documentaries but the possibility of some long‐term impact on film culture in general should not be ignored. There is little evidence that either commitment or pleasure underpinned documentary’s third audience. Apart from the 73 organizations booking official documentaries in 1932, there were also 294 schools – out of a total of around 30,000 – that did so (Bolton 2012). Another educational arena was a dedicated 332‐seat noncommercial London screen in the Imperial Institute. This was very largely used by schoolchildren. The claimed attendance figure (which, I note, would have required every seat be filled on every day of the four years between 1929 and 1932 at least three times) was an unfeasible 1.5 million (Aitken 1990: 2). As Ian Aitken – charitably – points out, “these statistics are not totally reliable.” Leave aside the conservatism of educationalists and trainers, the medium was not to be readily deployed. Although the smallest silent 35 mm projectors could fit into a suitcase, the film stock was highly inflammable. Safety film had been available from 1904 but the industry and the authorities remained wedded to the danger of nitrate celluloid as a justification for licensing for the latter which worked as a barrier‐to‐entry for the former (Theisen 1933; Winston 1996: 60–61). Screenings were inhibited because of the persistence of nitrate. The introduction of a “safe” 16 mm stock by Kodak in 1923 did little to correct this. By the end of the 1930s only 1700 silent and 400 sound 16 mm projectors were to be found in the nation’s schools – 0.5% (Anon 1947: 21). And only as a medium for recording, where appropriate, scientific experiments or in the hands ethnographers and the like was film to be found in the universities as a form of record. But it could also be used for training. At the very outset Urban had seen, aside from the popular, scientific factual film as a business opportunity and its educational potential, film’s training potential – for instance in medicine. In 1907, he suggested film would allow for “the preservation in documentary form” of the demonstration of surgical techniques (Urban 1907: 33,

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emphasis added).14 Another early British writer on film’s affordances, Frederick Talbot, also thought film could be used to train medics in “various hospitals throughout the world” (Talbot 1913: 184). This was not to happen. Nor did film get taken up not for training but to “improve” industrial efficiency – another of Talbot’s ideas: “The workmen are never permitted to see the moving‐picture record of their work” (Talbot  1913: 181). Despite these public suggestions, nowhere in the developed world was film to become a common training tool, and nowhere was it to be less deployed as much than in Britain.15 It is, also, no wonder that, at the outset of World War II, the Ministry of Information, needing to enlist the cinema in the war effort, turned to the newsreel companies, not the Documentary Film Movement (Aldgate and Richards 2008: 5). Newsreels are siloed in film scholarship on the somewhat spurious grounds that they are not (a) journalism nor (b) documentary; but, on the contrary, they are clearly journalism (however poorly they meet expectations of it) and, equally clearly, they do not differ from documentary in that, as a fundamental, they claim the real. Grierson might have dismissed their “speedy snip‐snap” (Grierson 1979: 73), but the reels did have the factual film’s greatest audience in cinemas. They survived the double‐bill and provided therefore, de facto, factual film’s largest audience. Newsreels, with their studied bias toward the establishment, were also seen as politically safer, as far as authority was concerned, than was the movement with its fondness for (at the very least) radical rhetoric  –  never mind the more committed radicalism of the filmmakers to its left. But evidence as to the acceptability of the newsreels with the general public is varied. Ad‐hoc response data suggests a significant minority of serious objectors to them felt they presented “no news” (Lewis 1977: 69; Aldgate  1979: 62). Nevertheless, according to Mass Observation, on the eve of hostilities, something just under two‐thirds of the people asked expressed “sentiments distinctly favourable” to the newsreels (Richards and Sheridan 1987: 212). The wartime Ministry of Information was not irrational in its initial decision to turn to them. Despite the hype and the sustained good critical opinions of the Documentary Film Movement as the acme of the British contribution to world cinema, the truth of its failure to find significant audiences across these three spheres of cinema, nontheatrical screenings, and in educational or training settings, ensured its marginality. It would seem reasonable to suggest that, whatever the achievements of British documentary in the 1930s, the creation of a mass audience was not among them. This pattern of marginalization prior to World War II was not, by any means, unique to the UK. But the UK is only something of a template as the relative salience of various elements  –  from production resources to exhibition venues, as well as popularity – significantly differ country to country.

Case: The USA to 1941 Walt Disney released Snow White and the Seven Dwarves over Christmas, 1937 in a double bill with a 31‐minute black and white documentary, Pare Lorentz’s The River, made for the US Government Farm Settlement Administration. This coupling was



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without precedent. The River was as lonely a documentary occupant of the cinema screen in the 1930s as Night Mail in the UK – lonelier, in fact. In the United States, after the exploration of feature documentary had faltered in the sound era, Hollywood vigorously resisted the exhibition of any footage shot outside its purview. Prior to World War II, little was done to challenge this and no entities as prolific as the GPO and the production companies it spawned appeared. Overall, the number of official films commercially released for cinema exhibition was even sparser than in Britain. Given the power and hostility of Hollywood, it was not until the later 1930s that anything was put in place to approach Griersonian ambitions. Then President Roosevelt had appointed the film critic Pare Lorentz to make films for general release in support of the New Deal, but he had fared no better than did Grierson in the UK. In the event, The River, was the exception that proved this rule (Snyder 1968: 79). After Lorentz had made five films in as many years, Washington’s attempts to become a documentary film producer were abruptly curtailed by Congress on the eve of America’s entry into the war in 1941, choking off all funding. The ­factual film only occupied American screens in the form of newsreel, a number produced by arms of the print industry. Time‐Life’s effort - the March of Time series - took the form of single stories, running between 20 and 30 minutes and widely distributed in theaters. To  all intents and purposes these were documentaries, the most widely seen by the American cinema audience. It must, though, be acknowledged that the Republican‐led hostility against Rooseveltian documentary was not merely a protectionist gesture toward the Hollywood industry. It was grounded in a not‐unfounded perception about the political bias of factual films, newsreel apart. As in Britain, “[f]rom its outset American documentary was deeply involved with political positions, generally on the left” (Ellis and McLane 2006: 77). The US Communist Party was deeply involved in the development of documentary (and more usually newsreel) production for use with the second nontheatrical audience gathered in political and works venues. More overtly than in Britain, the American Farmer-Labor Party’s (FLP) efforts were supported by Comintern’s Internationale Arbeiterhilfe (Workers’ International Relief  –  WIR), an organization Lenin had created in 1921 (Campbell  1977; Alexander 1981: 4, 65). Without question, the Red connection tainted (as it were) government film work, and probably encouraged (nonpress) corporate indifference but it did not otherwise prevent ­documentary and alternative newsreel production. Disproportionately foreign‐born and never counting more than a few thousand members, of itself the CPUSA’s membership constituted a very small base but the institutions of organized labor did give the FLP and its comrade organizations (as well any film units they themselves might have produced even on an amateur basis) potential access to several million spectators. In the 1930s, trade union members tripled to some 12,000,000. In the first four years of the decade, this sustained the production of some of 65 titles  –  mainly newsreels, two‐thirds made in New York – (Campbell and Alexander 1977: 33). One radically inclined cinema in the city was dedicated to screening them occasionally. But, as in Britain, the numbers involved are magnitudes less than Hollywood attracted.

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In some way then, nontheatrical exhibition was to a certain extent balanced differently between the UK and the US. Official production fared better comparatively in the UK than did filmmaking to its left. In the US, the reverse was true  –  the American FLP far exceeded its British equivalent in productivity and ambition. And there is another UK/US distinction. Although the White House came late to public sponsorship, Washington had had a long history with the third educational and training audience, beyond that found in Whitehall. There was a tradition of official factual filmmaking – never intended for general release – at both federal and state levels, most fully articulated in the Federal Department of Agriculture. This had involved all media in the practical education of farmers since the American Civil War and it readily absorbed factual film in the silent era as another communication tool. The department released its first production in 1908, and it is not surprising that, three decades later, the agency where Lorenz found himself was the Film Settlement Administration. Some 16 other federal agencies also had filmmaking traditions: Whatever the size of the audience, “[q]uantatively the record is surprising” (MacCann 1973: 53, 44). Outside of government there was also noticeable activity. In among the Library of Congress’ collection of 50,000+ amateur and advertising films in this period are a large number of titles made for corporate training and educational purposes. Apart from vast advertising spends, America’s manufacturing giants  –  General Electric, Chevrolet for example – used corporate films for training personnel, from sales staff through engineers to managers. The extent of this activity is opaque but the films exist (Vonderau 2009: 51–62). The educational use of film is better documented. In 1910, as a commercial enterprise, a catalog offering 1,065 “Educational Motion Pictures” was published in New  York and a commercial films service for schools was proposed (Saettler 2004: 98). Reaching out to a more receptive educational establishment than in Britain, a number of companies established successful businesses servicing the sector. Most notably, Bell and Howell, who had developed (with Kodak) the 16 mm gauge safety stock in the 1920s, in the 1930s established a number of film‐libraries round the country. Not only did these come to list, by 1939, 1,000+ silent and some 200 sound films, the company could also provide a package with a projector and screen (Saettler  2004: 100). One can further note such greater receptivity could be found in university anthropology departments. Franz Boas, the pioneering modern anthropologist, was filming dance ceremonies of the Kwakiultal in 1930 but purely as “record‐footage.” Despite his status, it was not widely taken up as a tool. In sum, this general pattern – cinema/nontheatrical/educational and training – is repeated across the Anglosphere in the prewar period. Proponents of the use of film talked of millions of spectators a year outside the cinema; others suggested tens of thousands at best. Millions, though, did see factual film in the cinema – if only in the form of the newsreel.



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Case: France to 1939 There are some indications that cinema‐going in France was never as popular as elsewhere. Prewar, it could be that, with similar populations of around 40 million, the British went to the movies around four times as often as did the French, a difference not entirely to be accounted for by Britain’s greater concentration of people in industrial cities and despite the shorter French 40‐hour week (Sims 2004: 162).16 If anything, the attractiveness of cinema was somewhat reversed, the French bourgeoisie went more than the workers. And, as the class prejudices that told against the cinema in Britain was nothing like as present, this was to documentary’s benefit. The French fur company, Revillon Frères, had sponsored Nanook, which had nowhere enjoyed greater commercial success than in Paris. André Citröen, partly to show off his cars but also to celebrate the French Empire, mounted expeditions in Africa and paid for them to yield distributable features – Le Traversé du Sahara au auto‐chenille/Crossing the Sahara in Half‐track Cars (1923) and La croisière noire/ Black Journey (1925)17: documentaires romancés, they (and Nanook) were called. The term documentaire, however, was not generally used in French despite the fact that, in 1898, “un observateur perspicace” (Gauthier 2011: 15), Bolesław Matuszewski, had noted film’s potential to record matters of “d’un intérêt documentaire” (Matuszewski 1898: 6). Instead, “documentary” was subsumed in a category defined by its length: court‐métrage – which, in essence, ignored the divide between fact and fiction. Any film lasting less than 59 minutes was deemed court and, as elsewhere, was used in the French cinemas to supplement features. Although, as elsewhere, the feature documentary disappeared, the short‐film (including documentaries) – ­protected by regulation prohibiting double‐features – were integral to commercial distribution and so reached the millions of the mass audience. The extent of documentary’s exposure in this context, however, cannot be known as no official count of its presence in the mix were kept. Clearly, however, factual court‐ métrage films did embrace a wide variety of tones, less constrained by the journalistic than English‐speaking shorts. For example, in 1934, Pathé released Painlevé and L’hippocampe with music by Darius Milhaud.18 Painlevé and L’hippocampe specialized in close‐up studies of the natural world. He called his production company Cinégraphie Documentaire, but the films he produced were far more surreal than scientific. Not all Painlevé and L’hippocampe work was commercially released but it was seen widely nontheatrically. This did not much include the third educational and training audience where French activity was “meagre” (Vignaux  2009). Rather, within the second audience, more than in the Anglosphere, a veritable “network” of flourishing ciné‐clubs grew through the 1920s and came to constitute “an alternative system of exchange more or less independent of the dominant film industry” (Abel 1993: 324). Although numbers are not in hand, it is clear that the factual short was more experimental in its forms and its audience, if only because of these cinéphiles, was less “marginaux” than in Britain or America. As a symbol of differing taste, note that Painlevé’s L’Hippocampe was released in the USA …. in 2008.

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Case: Germany to 1933 The European dictatorships, of course, distort documentary’s trajectory, but, tantalizingly, the history of the nonfiction film in Germany also prior to 1933 suggests that it was possible for documentary to find a mass cinema audience. Some 250 films a year were made during the Weimerian period, and among them were occasional documentary features reflecting the move toward a new realism  –  neue Sachlichkeit. Examples would be: Walter Ruttmann’s somewhat dehumanized Berlin: Symphonie of a City (1927) and, more experimentally People on Sunday (1930), a neue Sachlichkeit master work: “a film without actors” where amateurs play parts written by Billy Wilder in scenes inserted in to observational footage of Berliners at play in the Wannsee Park. Both were successful at the box office.19 But even more surprising is the acceptability of documentary shorts. As in France, the term documentary was eschewed. Instead, Kulturfilm was the term used, which, like court‐métrage, ignored the fact/fiction divide and was also short. But, if in France documentary took advantage of this in turning toward the poetic and experimental, in Germany it adopted the somber tones of science – although it yet retained its place on the cinema program. Urban and Taylor’s thought about medical training films are foundational to this. UFA had begun producing such films in the last months of World War I, building a catalog of titles which were successfully distributed commercially to medical schools in Germany and beyond. This attention to the scientific meshed with the well‐established late nineteenth century movement in Germany which placed healthy living at the center of Bürgerliche Kultur (Hau 2003). In the peace, films, both generally educational and more specifically focused on this cult, proved to be so popular with cinema audiences that UFA made a successful case to the Weimerian authorities to actively encourage the production of such Kulturfilme (Bock and Töteberg 2002: 132). On the basis of this history, it can only be something of a tantalizing possibility to suggest that a public taste for documentary could be sustained in the popular cinema. But not only does Kulturfilm not map exactly onto the concept of documentary in the Anglosphere, it was also rather too uncomfortably primed to mesh with Nazi sensibilities. The naked athletes at the start Olympia – Fest der Schönheit/Festival of Beauty have deep roots in the German cinema.20 The question of Kulturfilme’s attractiveness to the audience becomes moot. Eventually, Goebbels was locking audiences in the cinemas forcing them to watch the Wocheshau newsreels (Welch 1983: 200).

The Return of the Suppressed? In 1988 an out of work journalist, Michael Moore, decided to make a film about his home town. He used the money from a successful wrongful dismissal action and a remortgage of his home. The result, Roger & Me, was a theatrical sensation on US mall cinema screens achieving an audience of millions.



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During World War II, among the Allies, feature‐length documentaries were screened in cinemas and, nontheatrically, shorts were distributed as morale boosters to factories and other social spaces. Millions more in the armed forces were also compelled, for morale or training purposes, to watch. However, these millions were still marginal. The highest figure claimed for the UK – 18 million nontheatrical spectators in 1943 – represents three days’ worth of the commercial cinema’s audience. Postwar, the documentary returned to the status quo‐ante: an Anglophone ghetto of world sporting event movies (as pioneered by the Nazis), animal movies (as exploited by Disney), and grotesqueries (the Mondo Cane franchise). In France, the pressure Groupe des Trente kept the double bill at bay and allowed a whole new generation of directors – they were to be the Nouvelle vague of the 1960s – to cut their teeth on poetic documentaries. But everywhere, the nontheatrical documentary spluttered into even greater obscurity as the public switched on their televisions. There, documentary enjoyed greater exposure and a more stable production base than it ever had before and an audience, albeit still one markedly smaller than that for the most popular TV genres, was nevertheless also greater than ever before and large enough to sustain it. Then came Roger & Me. It cost $160,000 to make and took half that sum on its opening weekend in the US mall cinemas. Warner’s had given him $3  million to distribute it – a good deal for both parties as its box‐office now stands at $7.7 million worldwide. And, unlike Nanook, it has proved not to be a stand‐alone freak. In the first 15 years of this century the total take of the top 100 documentaries tracked by Box‐Office Mojo has accumulated to $610 million. Of course, this is still a pittance when compared with the greatest Hollywood grossers. And only one film, Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) has taken nine figures – $119 million. Only three more are over $70 million and just 11% of the 1500 titles in the table made over $1 million. The tail is long and the returns for most films remain meager. But, overall, after nearly a century, documentary, without question, claims a mass audience – ­especially when other screens are added (Winston et al. 2017: 2,5–6; Anon (2017). Except on an individual basis, where we have paid proper attention to question of image authenticity and audience gullibility (e.g. for TV: Hill 2005, 2007; and cinema: Austin, 2007), we have largely ignored the realities of documentaries’ quantitative reception. Consideration has been repressed, perhaps in the face of the overall lack, or uncertainty, of the data at hand; or, perhaps, because of a sensitivity that the object of study – the documentary – despite the hype that now surrounds it, might be of less significance in the world it purports to reflect than warrants attention. Whatever the reason, the time for such inhibition is now surely passed. Audience studies – quantitative audience studies – should be no longer suppressed.

Notes 1 Helen Blondel de Mouilpied (Lady Forman, d. 1987) was deputy head of the UK Ministry of Information’s Non‐Theatrical Distribution Operation during World War II. 2 Geoffrey Malins, The Battle of the Somme, UK, 1916.

434 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20

Brian Winston Frank Hurley, South ‐ Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Glorious Epic of the Antarctic, UK, 1919. Robert Flaherty, Nanook of the North, France/Canada, 1922. Robert Flaherty, Moana, USA, 1926. Merian Cooper & Ernest Schoedsack, Grass: A Nations Struggle for Life, USA, 1925. Merian Cooper & Ernest Schoedsack, Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness, USA, 1927. see Richard Jewel (1994: 39). In Soviet Russia, special trains and river boats were equipped with them augmented the paucity of cinemas. Harry Watt/Basil Wright, Night Mail, UK, 1936. Roy Lockwood, Airport, UK, 1934. John Grierson, Drifters, UK, 192; Sergei Eisenstein, Бронено́сец «Потёмкин» (Bronenosets Patyomkin), Battleship Potemkin, USSR, 1925. Sergei Eisenstein, Старое и новое (Staroye i novoye), The Old and the New (aka The General Line), USSR, 1929. Urban in 1908 and Edward Curtis in 1915 (Holm and Quimby 1980: 113) both used the term “documentary,” prior to received understanding of Grierson’s use in 1926.The French were earlier yet (see below). I am grateful to Luke McKeirnan and Mark Terry for guidance on this. Anne Heymer and Partick Vonderau’s exhaustive “Analytical Bibliography” of the ­literature on industrial films internationally (Heymer and Vonderau  2009: 405–462) indicates no significant activity in this area taking place the UK. 250 million annual visits in France in the 1930s as against nearly a billion in the UK. The populations were similar, around 40 million in both countries. Paul Casteinau, Le Traversé du Sahara au auto‐chenille/Crossing the Sahara in Half‐track Cars, France, 1923; Léon Poirier, La Croisiere noire/Black Journey, France, 1925. Jean Painlevé, L’hippocampe (The Seahorse), France, 1934. Walter Ruttmann, Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt/Berlin: Symphonie of the City, Germany, 1927; Robert Siodmak & Edgar Ulmer, Menschen am Sonntag/People on a Sunday, Germany, 1930. Leni Riefenstahl, Olympia – Fest der Schönheit / Festival of Beauty, Germany, 1938.

References Abel, R. (1993). French Film Theory and Criticism: 1907–1929 vol 1. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Aitken, I. (1990). Film and Reform. London: Routledge. Aldgate, A. (1979). Cinema and History: British Newsreels and the Spanish Civil War. London: Scolar. Aldgate, A. and Richards, J. (2008). Britain Can Take It: The British Cinema in the Second World War. London: I.B.Tauris. Alexander, W. (1981). Film on the Left: American Documentary Film from 1931 to 1942. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Anon. (2017). Genres: Documentary. Box Office Mojo, https://www.boxofficemojo.com/genres/chart/?id=documentary.htm (accessed 5 October 2017). Anon. (n.d.). Launching Films. Film Distributors’ Association, https://www.launchingfilms. com/release‐schedule (accessed 16 September 2017).



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Anon (Arts Council) (1947). The Factual Film. London: PEP/Geoffrey Cumberlege at the OUP. Bock, M. and Töteberg, M. (2002). A History of UFA. In: The German Cinema Book (eds. T. Bergfelder, E. Carter and D. Göktürk). London: British Film Institute. Bolton, P. (2012). Education: Historical Statistics. University College London, http://dera.ioe. ac.uk/22771/1/SN04252.pdf (accessed 1 October 2017). Campbell, R. (1977). Introduction: Film and Photo League Radical Cinema in the 30s. Jump Cut, 14, 23–25, https://ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC14folder/FilmPhotoIntro.html. Campbell, R. and Alexander, W. (1977). Film and Photo League Filmography. Jump Cut, 14, 33, https://ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC14folder/FPhotoFilogy.html. Dickinson, M. and Street, S. (1985). Cinema and the State: The Film Industry and the British Government 1927–1984. London: British Film Institute. Dorey, P. (1995). The Conservative Party and the Trade Union. London: Routledge. Ellis, J. and McLane, B. (2006). A New History of Documentary Film. New York: Continuum. Forman, H. (1982). The Non‐Theatrical Distribution of Films by the Ministry of Information. In: Propaganda, Politics, and Film 1918‐45 (eds. N. Pronay and D.W. Spring), 221–233. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Gauthier, G. (2011). Le documentaire: un autre cinema. Paris: Armand Colin. Grierson, J. (1979). Summary & Survey 1935. In: Grierson on Documentary (ed. F. Hardy). London: Faber and Faber. Hau, M. (2003). The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany: A Social History, 1890–1930. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hediger, V. and Vonderau, P. (eds.) (2009). Films That Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Heymer, A. and Vonderau, P. (2009). Industrial Films: An Analytical Bibliography. In: Films That Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media (eds. H. Hediger and P. Vondereau), 405–462. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Hill, A. (2005). Reality TV Audiences and Popular Factual Television. London: Routledge. Hill, A. (2007). Restyling Factual TV: Audiences and News, Documentary and Reality Genres. London: Routledge. Hogenkamp, B. (1986). Deadly Parallels: Film and the Left in Britain 1929–1939. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Holm, B. and Quimby, G. (1980). Edward S. Curtis in the Land of the War Canoes. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Jewel, R. (1994). RKO Film Grosses: 1931–1951. Historical Journal of Film Radio and Television 14 (1): 55. Lewis, J. (1977). Before Hindsight. Sight and Sound, 44(2). MacCann, R.D. (1973). The People’s Films: A Political History of the US Government Motion Pictures. New York: Hastings House. Macpherson, D. and Willemen, P. (eds.) (1980). Traditions of Independence: British Cinema in the Thirties. London: British Film Institute. Mannoni, L. (2000). The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Marris, P. (ed.) (1982). Paul Rotha: BFI Dossier #16. London: British Film Institute. Matuszewski, B. (1898). Une nouvelle source de l’histoire. Paris: March 28, 1898. McKernan, L. (2013). Charles Urban: Pioneering the Non‐Fiction Film in Britain and America, 1897–1925. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Murphy, W. (1978). Robert Flaherty: A Guide to References and Resources. Boston: G.K. Hall.

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Musser, C. (1990). History of the American Cinema: The Emergence of Cinema, the American Screen to 1907. New York: Scribner’s. Pronay, N. (1989). John Grierson and the Documentary – 60 years on. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 9 (3): 227–246. Pronay, N. and Spring, D.W. (1982). Propaganda, Politics and Film, 1918–45. London: Macmillan. Reeves, N. (1986). Official British Film Propaganda During the First World War. London: Croom Helm. Richards, J. and Sheridan, D. (eds.) (1987). Mass Observation at the Movies. London: RKP. Ryan, T. (1983). “The New Road to Progress”: The Use and Production of Films by the Labour Movement, 1929–39. In: British Cinema History (eds. J. Curran and V. Porter), 113–128. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Saettler, P. (2004). The Evolution of American Educational Technology. Greenwich, CT: IAP. Sims, G. (2004). The French Cinema Book. London: British Film Institute. Snyder, R. (1968). Pare Lorentz and the Documentary Film. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Swann, P. (1989). The British Documentary Film Movement 1926–1946. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Talbot, F. (1913). Practical Cinematography and its Applications. London: William Heinemann. Theisen, E. (1933). History of Nitrocellulose as a Film Base. Journal of the SMPE 20 (3): 259–262. Urban, C. (1907). The Cinematograph in Science, Education, and Matters of State. London: The Charles Urban Trading Company. Vignaux, V. (2009). The Central Film Library of Vocational Education: An Archeology of Industrial Films Between the Wars in France. In: Films that Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media (eds. H. Hediger and P. Vondereau), 315–328. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Vonderau, P. (2009). Vernacular Archiving: An Interview with Rick Prelinger. In: Films That Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media (eds. H. Hediger and P. Vondereau), 51–61. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Welch, D. (1983). Propaganda and the German Cinema 1933–1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Winston, B. (1996). Technologies of Seeing: Photography, Cinematography and Television. London: British Film Institute. Winston, B. (2008). Claiming the Real II. London: British Film Institute. Winston, B., Vanstone, G., and Chi, W. (2017). The Act of Documenting: Documentary in the 21stCentury. New York: Bloomsbury.

19

“Every Spectator Is Either a Coward or a Traitor” Watching The Hour of the Furnaces Mariano Mestman

Universidad de Buenos Aires

Introduction A history of the audiences of the film movement known as Third Cinema requires extensive research into the countries where it took place, given the diverse film­ makers who aimed to produce a cinema of “cultural decolonization” in Africa, Asia, and Latin America (and even in the First World, until the Third‐Worldist influence) in the 1960s and 1970s. This essay focuses on the screening experience of The Hour of the Furnaces (hereafter referred to as The Hour; Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, Cine Liberación Group, 1968), one of the most important films of the ­movement. In other works, I have discussed how The Hour circulated at political film festivals and among militant groups post‐1968 in Europe and North America, showing the great number of countries where the movie was included in the catalogs of alternative film groups (Mestman 2018). In the pages that follow, in contrast, I will be focusing on the film’s outreach among militant audiences in Argentina from 1968 to 1972. I consider this film and its spectators a singular case of militant film for three principal reasons: first, because it introduces the theory of Third Cinema (1969). Secondly, unlike the international films produced under governments put into power by revolutionary processes during “the long 60s” – in Algeria postindepend­ ence, or in Cuba after 1959, to mention only two emblematic cases – The Hour is a film made to oppose the military government in power in Argentina (1966–1973). Under an Argentine dictatorship, the screenings  –  a clear act of resistance to the regimes  –  were subject to varying levels of clandestinity (depending on specific ­circumstances), and it is only after Peronism’s return to power in 1973 that the film

A Companion to Documentary Film History, First Edition. Edited by Joshua Malitsky. © 2021 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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obtains a theatrical release. A third compelling aspect of this film is that, due to its length (more than four hours, divided into three parts), its sections were screened separately and combined in different ways depending on the audience. What is more, in some cases, certain sequences were cut or others selected especially for their political use in specific situations, in both Argentina and other countries. In this context, the notes that follow reveal how the Cine Liberación Group conceived of the militant outreach of The Hour between 1968 and 1972. I will then examine the actual screening experience. In order to provide further insight into these practices, an internal group document by one of the “Mobile Film Units” responsible for screening the film is appended here. I believe this document is unique because of its detailed description of militant screening events (at homes, high schools, universities, neighborhood centers, and union offices, or during factory conflicts); of film debates held in conjunction with the screenings, and of the different audiences of workers, students, or the middle classes (professionals and intellectuals). It provides insight into the type of audiences that came to see The Hour during the military regime in Argentina, and reveals certain aspects of the experience of both those who screened the film as well as those who came to watch it. The document provides a type of information on that experience that is absent (or only hinted at) in the texts that the Cine Liberación Group itself released. In fact, the group’s most widely disseminated and reprinted document, “Towards a Third Cinema,” though fundamental in its history, was published very early on, in October 1969. Due to the fact that it covers only the earliest period of the militant screenings, its overview of the workings of alternative screening venues and the spectators who dared to attend is limited to some degree. As I will show, later public documents released by Cine Liberación describe some of these aspects but do not cover the hands‐on tasks associated with exhibitions as described by the groups that actually screened the film. This information was only detailed in testimonials or internal documents like the one reprinted in its entirety at the end of this essay.1

Militant Cinema and the “Film‐Act” in the Writings of the Cine Liberación Group Cine Liberación made its public appearance when The Hour premiered at the IV Pesaro Film Festival (Italy) in June of 1968. Following the event, the group began working on the process for film screenings in Argentina and abroad. To assist them in this work, the group’s founding members (Fernando Solanas, Octavio Getino, and Gerardo Vallejo) gradually recruited other filmmakers, cultural activists, and politi­ cal militants. In the different texts it released, the Cine Liberación Group analyzed the film industry and audiences both in Argentina and abroad, reflecting on its own experience and drafting a political‐cultural proposal. If all of the documents pub­ lished by the group between 1968 and 1973 are analyzed, it is possible to conclude that the group had achieved a systematic approach to militant film by 1971. That year,



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in the document “Militant Cinema: An Internal Category of Third Cinema” the group defined the concept as follows: Militant Cinema refers to film that is wholly assumed to be an instrument, comple­ ment, or support for certain politics and for the organizations pushing these politics, regardless of the diverse goals the actual movie may seek – to provide the real story, increase awareness, rile people up, recruit members, etc. (…) The ideology or the aim of the producer or director – or a connection between the ideas expressed in the film and a revolutionary theory valid in certain contexts – does not make a film militant and revolutionary. What makes a militant film is what that film unleashes in its target audience, that which the film sets off as recoverable material for the process of ­liberation in a specific historical setting.

In that same document, militant film is defined as the “most advanced” category of Third Cinema. Although Third Cinema itself is broadly considered part of “­cultural decolonization,”2 militant film is seen as a tool for more immediate, time‐ specific interventions. In this context, if the search for a Third Cinema addressed the creation of a new (decolonizing) language, militant film in Argentina focused ­particularly on an alternative circuit for political screenings by the opposition. Years later, in 1979, Octavio Getino would remember the 1971 document as an attempt to clarify “certain inaccuracies” that he and Solanas had noted in “Towards a Third Cinema” and other early texts by the group: specifically, issues arising from the lack of a clear definition of concepts like guerrilla film, revolutionary film, and even Third Cinema and militant film. Getino (1981) suggests that the variations in the way these concepts were defined in the group’s early writings (1968–1970) and in its later texts (from 1971 onward) could mainly be attributed to the lessons learned in the actual screenings of The Hour. In fact, although various Cine Liberación texts addressed the difficulties of building an alternative/noncommercial distribution network during the first 12 months after the film’s premier, most of the documents mention 1970 as the year in which the screening experiences acquired meaning and significance in several cities.3 One key idea is that of the “Film‐Act” (or “Film‐Event”). Militant films were expected to foster a debate on their themes or on issues the participants proposed in order for the screening to then become a “political act.” Thus the name of the second part of The Hour, “Act for Liberation,” and the quote borrowed from Frantz Fanon, “every spectator is either a coward or a traitor,” were ways to provoke and transform the spectator (in the traditional film sense of the term) into a protagonist of the screening and a militant “actor” in the political process. The origin of the Cine Liberación concept of the film‐act is connected to certain trends in experimental cultural production in those years, amply described in the literature, whose ultimate aim was spectator participation in the works; but it is, on the other hand, also related to the recent history of the group itself. In his autobiog­ raphy, Gerardo Vallejo (1985: 139) recalled that when Solanas and Getino traveled to the province of Tucumán (in northern Argentina) in 1967 to invite him to join them in making The Hour, they handed him surveys (“more than one thousand

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sheets of paper,” in Vallejo’s telling) conducted with spectators who had seen their short film, Las cosas ciertas/The Real Situation (1964). This anecdote reveals that the search to establish a noncommercial screening (and distribution) network for films lay at the very origins of the Cine Liberación project. In the section on the “Film Act,” the manifesto “Towards a Third Cinema” offers an extensive overview of prior experiences screening films and conducting surveys/holding talks with those who attended, placing these practices at the forefront of the film‐act. At the same time, the manifesto also notes the limited experience of screenings of The Hour to date (October 1969) in Argentina. While “Towards a Third Cinema” does mention the different types of screenings held, police raids, security issues, etc. reflections on the screening‐act become more nuanced in the public documents the group released in the following years. The aforementioned “Militant Cinema” (1971), for example, analyzes the practice of “outreach‐instrumentalization” with certain information on what occurred in Argentina, an analysis to which the group returns in later texts. Yet in all of these writings  –  including the so‐called “Cine Liberación notes,” which provided detailed instructions on militant screenings, including technical aspects – the actual experiences of exhibiting the film are men­ tioned only in passing, and in general, merely as examples to conceptualize or prob­ lematize certain aspects of the practice of disseminating the film. So, is it possible to recover the screening experiences of The Hour if only certain traces of them remain in the group’s public writings? Testimonies, along with certain internal (private) documents of the groups entrusted with the film’s outreach pro­ vide a more systematic overview of part of that experience. Though it is difficult to find this type of document, as is the case with other militant film collectives world­ wide (because the texts were lost in the ensuing repression or simply because there were no written accounts of the experience), such documents as are available ­provide important insights.

The Rosario Mobile Film Unit Starting at the end of 1968, as Cine Liberación worked on other film projects, “Mobile Film Units” were being formed to disseminate The Hour Although these were generally small groups with informal ties to Solanas and Getino, and their work was not entirely systematic, there was a certain degree of coordination among them. It is difficult to say precisely how many of these groups existed in the country. Solanas and Getino mentioned that collectives had formed between 1969 and 1973 in the cities of La Plata, Rosario, Santa Fe, Córdoba, and Tucumán. More than one of these groups existed in Buenos Aires and perhaps in a handful in other cities as well as well. The Rosario Mobile Film Unit was formed by Grupo Pueblo, and it organized screenings of The Hour with a certain regularity from the second half of 1969 until 1972. Founded after the popular uprisings known as the Rosariazo, which took place in May and September, 1969, Grupo Pueblo came together around an initial



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artistic‐political initiative on July 26 of that year – the anniversary of Eva Perón’s death, in 1952 – which consisted in splattering red paint on important monuments in downtown Rosario as a symbol of the reigning oppression. One of the splattered statues was that of Ovidio Lagos, the founder of La Capital, a newspaper viewed as a cornerstone of the Argentine media since its founding a century earlier. The main members of Grupo Pueblo were artists and university students who had participated or collaborated in the rupture with the “institution of art,” an experimental move­ ment involving Rosario’s artistic vanguard in 1968 which had since moved on to political art. The members of Grupo Pueblo included Carlos Schork, Lía Maisonave, and Noemí Escandell (and their respective partners), along with Humberto Barroso (a visual arts student who knew the founding members) and Jorge Jäger (who was exploring ways of making film). They played a key role in putting together the ­distribution network for The Hour. In December 1970, during the II Plenary Meeting of Cine Liberación Groups (GCL), the Rosario Mobile Film Unit presented an overview of the political activi­ ties it had carried out that year, structured around the screenings of The Hour for  three “sectors” or “groups”: (1) intellectual groups (artists and professionals); (2) ­student groups (high school and university students); (3) worker groups (neigh­ borhoods and slums; workers and youth) and union groups.4 The report focused on different aspects of the screenings with each sector: the audience, the sites where the screenings took place, the security measures, the proceeds, the way the screening was handled, the results obtained, and some “special situations.” The section of the report covering the “proceeds” is interesting because it reveals a feature of this type of distribution organization in different areas of the country, one particularly emphasized in this case: the groups’ autonomy with respect to the founding members of the Cine Liberación Group (Solanas and Getino). This is because the proceeds (especially from the screenings organized for middle‐class audiences, who had more available income, according to the report) were used to pay off what the group owed Cine Liberación for the projec­ tor and the copy of the film. Octavio Getino would later recall that Cine Liberación made a large purchase of Víctor projectors, which were handed over to screening groups along with copies of the film. Members of the Rosario group remember that they purchased both around 1969, and surely other groups around the coun­ try had done the same. The groups generally had to pay Cine Liberación back for the equipment and print. Like other units that screened the film across the country, though to varying extent, Grupo Pueblo organized its own political‐cultural activities in Rosario.5 Yet unlike some of the other screening groups, the Rosario Mobile Film Unit did not make its own films. It was, however, planning a national newsreel for 1971, a film project coordinated with groups in Buenos Aires, Córdoba, Santa Fe, Tucumán, La Plata, and Mar del Plata; and a film (or audiovisual production) on the history of the Peronist resistance in Rosario, where the worker struggle had been strong ever since the coup that ended Perón’s presidency in September 1955. As the report details, these projects were to be done “in conjunction” with these other groups, provided an

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“agreement” was reached with the Cine Liberación group. This, and the debt incurred for the projector and print, reveal the group’s “autonomy” with regards to Cine Liberación. The local Mobile Film Units were more than just subgroups formed for the film’s outreach. Yet, although terms such as “Rosario Mobile Unit,” “overview of political activities,” and “Plenary Meeting of Cine Liberación Groups” could perhaps indicate that there was an institutionalized, orderly national organization, film outreach (by  this group and others) took shape only gradually. The people involved were committed to systematic work, but the rigorous organization or formality that the terms above might suggest were largely absent in many cases. At the same time, although the Rosario Report is not necessarily representative of the activities of all of the Cine Liberación Mobile Film Units, many of the aspects mentioned here are present in testimonies I have gathered from members of ­similar groups. One common element is the selective screening of The Hour (i.e. the ­exhibition of different parts or sequences from the film) depending on the type of audiences or spectators. ­

Militant Screening Audiences The Rosario Mobile Film Unit screened Parts I and II of The Hour,6 along with a short interview with Perón in exile in Madrid that had been shot by a member of Cine Liberación during the second half of 1968. Comparing the screenings with the different sectors mentioned above, the Rosario Report notes that for middle‐class audiences, “only” Part I (the most appealing from the cinematographic perspective; and the least Peronist, we could say) was shown. Both parts were shown for student audiences; and for workers, Part II was screened in its entirety along with the afore­ mentioned interview with Perón. Although there were surely exceptions to this “rule,” it highlights a certain way of using the film (a trend, so to speak) that has been described by other testimonies of groups from the period but which is explicit in the Rosario Report. The Rosario information is significant because the only other existing refer­ ences to the differential use of a film’s parts in public documents are about a col­ lective film by the Realizadores de Mayo group, Los caminos de la liberación/The Path of Liberation on the popular uprisings which took place in mid‐1969 – espe­ cially the emblematic protest that became known as the Cordobazo, an uprising led, by both Peronist and leftist/Marxist worker delegates with strong support from local student organizations. Maybe this film was easy to exhibit as “separate films” or “modules” because it was comprised of several shorts that could be screened separately, independently, or in an order chosen by those who organized the screening. Yet while the Realizadores de Mayo group had explicitly approved of this use of its film in a public statement in 1969, there are no known public texts by Cine Liberación that refer to the use of The  Hour in this way7  –  except the Rosario Report.



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As to the “sectors” or types of audiences chosen for screenings, this instrumentali­ zation of The Hour reveals different strategies and objectives to be achieved in the political work with each audience. Comparing the different sectors, in addition to specifying which parts of the film were shown, the report’s section on the middle‐ class/intellectuals clarifies that there was always an entry fee for the event, while students were only occasionally charged and workers, almost never. Similarly, the security measures were tightest in the screenings for the first group and more relaxed in the screenings for the student or worker movements. The audience size for these screenings, which were often clandestine, varied for small groups (15–30) to larger groups (at unions, from 60 to 150 people) and even crowds (on the street of a work­ ing‐class neighborhood, for example, or at schools within the university, between 200 and 600 people). These differences are specified in the full report along with the actual workings of the film‐act and the debates among different types of audiences. Before examining this aspect, however, I will turn to the selection of material for audiences comprised of workers and the coordination of screenings by the Rosario Mobile Film Unit and the union/political groups that gathered the spectators. As part of their joint coordination, the principal objectives of each screening were defined and in many cases which parts of the film to be shown were selected.8 For example, the report details a screening for workers in the throes of a union conflict held in Bajo Saladillo, a Rosario neighborhood. The material for the screening had been selected after conversations with the local Peronist group prior to the event in which Grupo Pueblo was informed of the situation of the workers from the local Swift beef processing plant. The screening was held on the street, where an olla ­popular9 had also been organized as part of the conflict with the company. On this occasion, the first half of Part II of the film was shown (the history of Perón’s government from his rise to power in 1946 until the military coup supported by certain civil sectors in 1955), the brief 1968 “Interview with Perón” referred to above, and the episode entitled “Factory Occupations,” from the second half of Part II. I will focus for a moment on the first two materials shown (the history of Peronism and the Interview with Perón). According to the Mobile Film Unit’s Report, worker audiences were generally moved by Part II, which caused “a profound impact, especially during the scenes of the Peronist presidency (tears, whispering, applause when Evita and Perón appeared on screen, etc.)”; while the interview, in which Perón expressed his strong opposi­ tion to the military government, “contributed to consolidating Perón’s image.” The selection of sections from The Hour – interview and images – were moving these Argentine audiences 15 years after the leader had been driven into exile. The interest in emphasizing these sections in the screenings can be attributed to the political juncture in which the image became an important communicational tool of Peronism during the last phase of the banning of Perón’s political party and his exile. By recovering Perón’s image and historic Peronist iconography, as well as providing an “update” with the brief 1968 interview, the militants could resolve a “problem” present in what the scholars Silvia Sigal and Eliseo Verón (1986: 100–101) have referred to as the “condition of limited circulation of the Peronist discourse” between 1955 and 1972.

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Sigal and Verón (1986: 109–110) noted that these conditions of restricted circula­ tion (the result of censorship and the persecution of Perón and his movement) led to doubts about “authenticating” some of the messages the leader was claimed to have sent from exile. The question of the way Perón was characterized in Argentina, his emissaries, and the authenticity of the letters that each of them received and displayed were a topic of discussion and conflict in political spheres during the years after Peronism was banned (starting in 1955). Moreover, the internal tensions sparked by doubts as to who was the “legitimate” representative in Argentina of the exiled leader can be particularly understood considering Perón’s “fluctuating” stances which ranged from the more radical to the more conservative depending on who was in power and on the internal workings of his own political movement. Peronism’s “third way” (Tercera Posición/Third Position) articulated a political philosophy close to Third Worldism, hostile to both capitalism and communism. The former, of course, was the reason for his overthrow by the military, but the latter often meant hostility from the internationalist left despite the Peronism’s popular socialist orientation of those years. This basic political ambiguity, which reduced the possibility of the mes­ sages actually conveying information, would lead to what the authors referred to as the “inflation of discursive materiality.” In other words, while the letters Perón sent from exile acquired value from their “material existence” – legitimizing the bearer and affirming his connection to the leader, the evidence of contact – there is also an “intensified search for signs closer to the enunciative act, signs that could prove that Perón had truly uttered the message.” Therefore, given the limitations (in terms of the reliability of the source) first of the letters and later of the audio recordings Perón sent, documentary films could prove the leader’s authorship of the discourse. For that reason, an image of Perón relaying his messages was the ideal medium. It could be said that hands‐on experiences screening the brief 1968 interview (and other sequences from Part II of The Hour including Peron’s historical discourses) made the Cine Liberación group realize how an extensive interview with the ousted former president could serve as a means of communicating with his followers in Argentina. Its emotional impact justified the lengthy film interviews with Perón subsequently conducted by Solanas and Getino in Madrid. These interviews were to serve as the basis for two feature‐length documentaries, La revolución justicialista/ The Justicialist Revolution and Actualización política y doctrinaria para la toma del Poder/Doctrinal Update for the Taking of Power, both from 1971. Although these films are not nearly as well‐known as The Hour, they are equally important to Cine Liberación history because they point to the group’s definitive alignment with Peronism and were even used in the campaign to allow Perón to return to Argentina, a goal ­ultimately achieved in 1973. So, although Sigal and Verón were referring to these lengthy interviews, the inter­ pretation of their importance could also apply to the brief 1968 interview. Moreover, the images of Perón’s first administrations  –  albeit archive images from news­ reels – could further fulfill the Rosario group’s objective of “consolidating Perón’s image” in this final period of the Peronist resistance. The quotes from the Rosario Report above refer to the emotional response of the workers who saw these images



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during the 1970 screenings and I heard similar testimonies in my interviews with members of other groups. Although these could be considered ad hoc stories, part of building a militant discourse to rally support for Peronism among the lower classes, there is no reason to doubt their “veracity” given the fact that upon his return to Argentina in 1973, Perón won the election by a landslide (62% of the votes). These images were not only used for the screenings with workers, but also with students. At this moment in history, broad sectors of youth (neighborhood and stu­ dent organizations) had begun to view Peronism as the “national path” to socialism or revolution. By selectively screening The Hour Grupo Pueblo of Rosario was able to establish contacts with the core political groups of Peronism within the university, where spectators were generally invited to the events by student groups that were part of the so‐called “national faction” (that is, Peronists or others in the process of becoming Peronists). In its summary of the reactions of these audiences of univer­ sity students, the Rosario Report states that they “have mainly been limited to repu­ diation (whistling, booing, cursing, etc.) when gorilas10 appeared on screen and approval (applause, laughter, etc.) in scenes showing victories for the people.” As already mentioned, the Rosario group screened only Part I among intellectual and professional audiences. It was the group’s own decisions but it was also due, as detailed in the report, to a lack of interest among the spectators when, after watching Part I, they found out what Part II was about (the history of Peronism), and “there were not enough viewers to justify a screening.” The Rosario Report reveals a certain initial contempt about the political outreach that could be achieved with this type of audience, which was considered a priori less engaged and less sympathetic to Peronism. (This “bias” against the middle classes is backed by historical facts, though it can also be attributed to some political and intellectual perspectives and practices during the period, i.e. so called “anti‐intellectualism”). However, the Rosario group appears to acknowledge its own limitations in this regard when it notes that more efforts could have been made with these groups, opening the possibility (initially scoffed at) of “Peronizing” progressive or left‐leaning intellectuals or professionals from the middle classes. For these audiences, the report suggests, watching Part II of the film could have proved useful as well. This notion of “Peronizing” progressive or leftist (Marxist) audiences through the screenings and debates is reiterated in the testimonies of other screening groups. It is important here to recall that the Cine Liberación group’s affiliation with Peronism was a topic of debate among leftist critics of the film worldwide whenever it was shown at international film festivals. Perhaps as a result of these criticisms, only Part I of the film was shown at many screenings. At others, segments consid­ ered “too” Peronist in Part II were cut, as the Third Worldist critic Guy Hennebelle recalled when discussing the film’s first screenings in France (Hennebelle 1979: 642). However, the Cine Liberación group made its Peronist affiliation clear right from the start. The emphasis on Part I of the film in its international screenings probably explains why it is much more prevalent in the literature than Part II, which often goes unmen­ tioned by scholars. In fact, were it necessary to choose a single image or sequence

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from the film that had the greatest impact on viewers and which lasts in people’s memory of it even today, it would likely be the shots of Che Guevara’s corpse at the end of Part I. Part II, however, has images and even entire segments that made a strong impact in those years, such the section entitled “Factory Occupations” (in the second half of Part II, dedicated to the persistent Peronist resistance to anti‐Peronist governments after the ousting of the president in 1955). The militant French film­ maker Marin Karmitz even included the full 10 minutes of this segment in his fiction film Camarades (1970). He filmed a group of French activists and workers debating factory conflicts in France after a typical militant screening of The Hour, which is represented in the French film by precisely this episode from the Argentine film.

Factory Occupations The Rosario Mobile Film Unit Report spoke of the selection (or “cut” from Part II) of the segment “Factory Occupations” for its screening during the worker conflict at the Swift plant. This was also an episode of the film which viewers found particu­ larly interesting when Part II was shown in its entirety. As recounted in the report on the screenings for students in the city of Córdoba, the reaction to the scenes of the factory occupations was “most intense,” since the Córdoba student audiences were “most involved with worker struggles.” This was clearly a reference to the “Cordobazo” incident. The appeal of factory occupations at the end of the 1960s can be seen in the quan­ tity of militant films that dealt with the occupations either directly or indirectly in several countries across the world. However, it is interesting to examine the precise role factory occupations played in Argentina’s recent history, a role that led Cine Liberación to consider them, as The Hour says, “the summit (of the struggle) reached by the [Peronist] resistance.”11 In addition to strikes and mobilizations, the occupation of factories and other workplaces became one of the direct measures available to Argentina’s working class after the fall of Peronism in 1955. In particular, by May/June 1964, workers had come up with a unique plan for factory occupations: it was qualitatively different from the prior actions due to its massive, nationwide scale, with centralized leader­ ship, a high level of planning, a common agenda and – in spite of the involvement of the highest echelons of union bureaucracies, who were also negotiating with busi­ nessmen and military officers – included underground activities along with radi­ calization and acts of violence.12 This type of union action was not only emphasized by Cine Liberación in The Hour. The film group also stressed the importance of occupations in later films such as El camino hacia la muerte del viejo reales / Old Man Reales’s Way Toward Death by Gerardo Vallejo (1968–1971) and Los hijos de Fierro / Children of Fierro by Solanas (1972–1975). The “Factory Occupations” section of The Hour presents the testimonies of work­ ers at two factories, both in Greater Buenos Aires, in two of the most mobilized industrial sectors in the 1960s workers’ movements: metalworks and textiles.



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The first factory occupation is at the SIAM factory in Monte Chingolo. On camera, a former union delegate remembers how the occupation was organized, how the workers prepared to defend themselves in the case of a possible police raid to evict them (partially recreated with actors), and how the neighborhood came out in soli­ darity to support them. Second, two young women workers from La Bernalesa retell the textile factory’s occupation, emphasizing one aspect that made this particular case stand out: continued production at the factory under female worker‐control. It is difficult to directly align these reconstructed episodes in the film with precise historical events, but it is interesting that the mass media had noted that the CGT’s “agitation plan” (1963–1965) was in full swing at both SIAM and La Bernalesa, among other places (Schneider 2005: 222–223 and 243). As these occupations occurred a few months before shooting began on The Hour at the end of 1965, they likely influenced the way factory occupations were depicted in the film. And they could have evoked recollections among some of the working‐class audiences at screenings just a few years later. Yet “Factory Occupations” is not the only episode that addresses worker experi­ ence which comes up in other sections of the film as well. Although factory occupa­ tions before and after the one mentioned are included, generally the “agitation plan” from the mid‐1960s is emphasized because of its broad reach and the extensive repercussions it had, as explained in the voice‐over narration: 11,000 establishments occupied, 3 million workers involved. To illustrate this experience, The Hour does include “generic” archive images, with the typical visual and audio signifiers of other international films from the period: closed factory doors and entrances; police out­ side the plants; workers huddled together behind the gates or fences; signs with worker demands or the phrase “occupied factory”; roaring multitudes; wailing sirens, etc. The “specific” images of the film, however, refer to concrete historic events like the ones mentioned. In spite of the importance (a process of “worker de‐alienation,” according to the film) and the force attributed to this experience (“the summit reached by the [Peronist] resistance,” as noted above), the later episode (“The Limit of Spontaneity”) of the second part of the film warns of a “critical moment” for “spontaneous resist­ ance” and notes the reduction in the “political effectiveness” of unions. This is illus­ trated with archive materials of police entering an occupied factory to evict the workers, and the repression of street protesters. Thus, the film proposed the need to channel the initiative taken by the masses toward revolutionary action. Along these same lines, the final chapter, “The War Today,” returns to the idea that in the face of a national army (“the true occupational forces,” “neocolonial,” etc.), political‐union organizations did not suffice. According to the film’s argument, there was a need to assume the “language of weapons,” and build an “army of the people” for a “long and painful war of liberation.” This is not the only Argentine film from this era that constructs an “almost natural” connection between union strug­ gles, politics, and armed actions. In this context, the factory occupations of the CGT “agitation plan” from 1963 to 1965 were also criticized (both at that time, and in the subsequent literature) as part of the strategy of “integration” to the political system

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on the part of the Peronist union bureaucracy, i.e. “strike to negotiate.” Nevertheless, Cine Liberación focused on the radical nature of the strikes (resisting eviction, con­ tinuing production without the boss, etc.), seeing them as part of a longer, historic series of actions of worker resistance that escalated into more radical measures to challenge the military dictatorship. To a certain extent, the most radical aspects of that experience from the mid‐ 1960s were aligned with the new political situation in the country after the riotous worker‐student protests of 1969. Toward 1970, most of the audiences of The Hour were already engaged in activism or in the process of becoming militants. In the episode on “Factory Occupations” and other similar sections from Part II of the film, they were able to identify the collective subject that was “starring” (as it were) in this historical transformation. At the same time, the film offered suggestions for a debate on the path and the methods to achieve it, an opportune discussion for Argentina’s political agenda at the time.

Debates The main goal of screening The Hour at this time was to radicalize spectators and facilitate their recruitment by whatever Peronist political organization coordinated the film’s exhibition. For the Rosario Mobile Film Unit, the screening it arranged in the neighborhood Bajo Saladillo was the “most impressive” they had to report, both because of the number of viewers and “the way they reacted to the material” (i.e. the “Factory Occupations” episode). The report suggests that this was an important achievement in political terms.13 The same had occurred when the film was viewed by large groups of students. Considering that the sheer size of the audience created a certain climate, the screening could have turned into a major political act had a police raid ensued, according to the Rosario Report. When the film was shown in San Nicolás (an industrial zone near Rosario) – with a more heterogeneous audience comprised of worker‐priests, industrial technology students and some workers, and a “lengthy debate” after Parts I and II – the local group that had coordinated the event reported that it had been positive for the influence and operations of the group. Yet what happened during the debates that the Rosario group planned to have with audiences during or after each screening? The idea behind the concept of film‐act is stated several times when the film’s nar­ rator or the intertitles invite audiences of The Hour to debate the issues that the film has touched on. In fact, in some cases the film was paused in the middle of the screening as indicated in the intertitles or when the voice‐over tells the comrades (compañeros) to turn the projector off and discuss what they have seen. At the begin­ ning of the section on “The Resistance,” for example, Solanas and Getino address the spectator (in a voice‐over): “Compañeros: this is not just a film screening nor is it a show. It is, above all else, an ACT, an act of Unity, an act of anti‐imperialist Unity. (…) The film is a pretext for dialogue, for seeking and finding will. It is a Report that we submit for your consideration, for you to debate after the screening. The



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conclusions you reach as the true authors and actors of this story are important. (…) What matters most is the action that can be born from these conclusions, the Unity that can be shaped from the facts. For this reason, the film stops here, and opens up for you to continue it.” The performative nature of the film‐act and the narrator’s invitation to engage, however, is not indicative of the film’s scope or achievements. In one early approach to the film, Robert Stam (1990: 253) referred to the two dimensions of The Hour as a film “open” to proposals such as these but “closed” in relation to its unnuanced account (with unequivocal messages) of Argentine and Latin American history. Similarly, several sections of the Rosario Mobile Film Unit Report are indicative of militant discourses from the period, often generalizing experiences that are in fact more contradictory. For example, as with the documents authored by Solanas and Getino, a critical distance can be seen with regards to the progressive (but decidedly non‐Peronist) middle classes, along with a critique of the “commitment” of progres­ sive intellectuals. Certain authors have referred to this as “anti‐intellectualism.” In fact, at the time The Hour was being disseminated, most of the members of Grupo Pueblo switched their political affiliation from the Marxist left to Peronism, particu­ larly the more progressive or revolutionary factions. As part of this same movement, the Rosario Report reveals that the Group was closely affiliated with the “national” or “pro‐Peronist” organizations of the student movement, and offered a more posi­ tive assessment of the experience of the screening with workers. The group’s inter­ pretation of its own experience reflects this, as does its name (Grupo Pueblo). However, these identity stances of Grupo Pueblo do not necessarily simplify or idealize their accounts or their interpretations of the actual experience of dissemi­ nating the film in 1970. On the contrary, the Rosario Report reflects several times on the difficulties of instigating debate at the screenings. With a few notable exceptions of “fervent discussion,” discussions were generally not started with the groups of intellectuals, artists, and professionals because the screenings ended late and for security reasons. Yet the report immediately clarifies that it was due to the unit’s inability to get the debate started and its lack of experience (given that the screenings with these middle‐class groups were the first it organized). Another contributing factor was that only Part I was shown at these screenings, the part of the film viewed by the Rosario Mobile Film Unit as the “least debatable and least controversial.” In general, the reactions of the spectators served merely to confirm their existing political stance, including those of the “intellectual left” (i.e. variations on Marxism) and those of the “national left” (i.e. Peronists or in the pro­ cess of becoming Peronist). This also limited the possibilities of debate.14 Although the postfilm debate also remained a challenge at the student screenings, according to the Rosario Report, small groups did form for discussions on some occasions. At other times, the film was paused to debate it (as outlined above). These experiences were considered “pretty successful.” The report also notes that the scenes of worker activism allowed the groups of Peronist Youth that had jointly organized the screening with Grupo Pueblo to expand their sphere of influence through debates or talks with those who had attended.

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While the Rosario Unit itself organized its first round of screenings among intel­ lectuals, the audiences at the screenings held for students or workers were generally invited by the “national” groups or Peronists. These groups were also entrusted with getting the debates underway; but “most of the talking was done by the compañeros who had organized the screening.” This question of which of the joint organizers (Grupo Pueblo or the group that had extended the invitations to the screening) played a more prominent role at the events varied according to the type of audiences and the circumstance, as noted by members of other groups or Mobile Film Units in the country. By way of conclusion, I would like to emphasize the particular contribution of this type of documentary source (the Rosario Report) in view of certain interpretations in the literature that later took issue with militant film, from both a general perspec­ tive as well as a more specific analysis in the case of The Hour. According to one common critique in the literature, militant film was only for people who were already politically engaged; in other words, it was impossible for this type of film to reach broader audiences. This is true to a certain degree, due to the language and contents of such films, and also, because the screenings were to some extent clandes­ tine and involved strict security measures, the act of watching the film was in and of itself an “initial” engagement. Yet at the same time, it is a well‐known fact that many people became politically engaged as the result of films like The Hour of the Furnaces or The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966), among other influences.15 There are many testimonies in this regard and this has also been acknowledged by those who criticize militant film, its arguments or its Manichean depiction of Argentine history. Another common critique among scholars is that those who attended screenings of The Hour behaved like mere “spectators” in spite of the fact that this was a “film‐ act” that was meant to encourage debate and action: “if there is one type of film that is not controversial a priori, it is political‐militant film” (Schwarzbock 2011: 20–21). In terms of the debates proposed as part of the film, another author has claimed they were centralized (i.e. they had only a limited potential for democratic, participative processes) due to the “role of the mediator” played by the “intellectual‐filmmaker” (Bonvecchi 1993). From my perspective, the problem of interpreting militant films in this way lies in the difficulty of establishing what “a priori” means for a cinema that is configuring its meaning through the actual screening experience. Similarly, it is difficult to reach sweeping conclusions on the actual scope of the debate and how they were organ­ ized. Although, as noted earlier, the Rosario Report is not necessarily representative of the experience of other groups in the country (in some aspects it is, in others, it is not), it at least reveals that in many cases the screenings varied according to the audiences, a revelation that should discourage generalizations and invite scholars to delve deeper into historically specific cases. As noted here, the debates were not always carried out as planned and did not always attain the established objectives. It is important to consider that the semi‐ clandestine nature of the exhibitions often meant it was impossible to remain at the



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location discussing the film after the screening or pause the film in the middle when the intertitle or the voice‐over indicate to do so. Although it didn’t happen often, there were cases where the police came, arrested people, or confiscated the film For that reason, the political work (debate, discussion) with those present, espe­ cially at the screenings with more numerous audiences or at public locations (uni­ versities, streets, places of work), was left for a later date, for discussion at the workplace or school/university, or for ad hoc meetings. The ultimate objective, of course, was for those who saw the film to subsequently engage in militant activism. In other words, it is hard to imagine that the film’s version of Argentine history – with its critique of the limits of Perón’s first two presidencies  –  and of the period of Peronist resistance, unions, and the armed struggle would not have sparked intense debate during this critical historic moment at the end of the 1960s in which the revo­ lution appeared within reach not only in Argentina but worldwide. Documents like the report by the Rosario Mobile Film Unit should help scholars avoid generaliza­ tions and contribute to a better understanding of the scope and limits of this experience.

Document Report Presented to the II Plenary Meeting of Cine Liberación Groups (GCL) ‐ December 1970 Political Overview of the Activities of Rosario’s Mobile Film Unit in 1970 ‐ Plans for 197116 This Report is limited to the activities of the Mobile Film Unit over the course of 1970 and therefore will exclusively focus on the political tasks associated with film screenings. As a methodology for political analysis  –  and for organizational pur­ poses – we have established the following three basic sectors to disseminate our work: • Intellectual groups (artists and professionals) • Student groups (high school and university students) • Worker groups (neighborhoods and slums: workers and youth). Union groups. When analyzing each of the groups, we will emphasize the most important political experiences. In each section, we will also highlight whenever possible the elements that demonstrate political progress that the mobile unit members capitalized on.

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It is important to clarify that when the film screenings began, we had little knowledge of the tasks they involved and therefore, the scope of the work was adapted after each event. Once we had the film and the projector, the screenings were organized with one goal in mind: to pay off our debt before embarking on the true political work with the people. This is why we chose the most affluent group as our target audience: the intellectuals, the professionals. Due to a situation that arose at the beginning and lasted only a short time, and because we are mem­ bers of the middle class ourselves, we were doubtful about the extent of the political work possible within this sector. Later, once we had some experience, we began to recognize certain mistakes in terms of the political work done with this social segment.

The work approach with each group 1. Intellectuals (artists and professionals) Our goal: to raise money. Generally screenings organized by the Mobile Film Unit. The audience: As we mentioned, selected based on its affluence, this ­audience mostly consisted of fairly radicalized intellectuals. Screening location: With a few exceptions which we will describe in detail towards the end of the document, these screenings were organized in places we ourselves provided (a family home, a room at an educational institution, or something similar). Security measures: In keeping with the Cine Liberación security guide, all security measures were strictly implemented. Quantity of people: Always as many as possible (to maximize the proceeds). There were cases where the screening was postponed because not enough peo­ ple had come. How the screening was organized: A brief talk was given on the film’s formal aspects, explanations of the contents of each of the parts, its making, etc. The need for a debate at the end of the film was mentioned but with only a few exceptions, the debate didn’t take place because the screenings ended late and also because of “security reasons,” though in fact the real reason was our ina­ bility to get the debate going. Proceeds: People were charged between $500 and $1,000. In many cases, the fundraising objective was the determining factor in admitting people, who were charged before the screening to make sure no one did a number on us.



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RESULTS In terms of the proceeds, we made between $7,000 and $30,000 per screening. At the political level – and just to reiterate, our lack of experience in this regard – it was always difficult to get the debate started and then mediate once it was underway. An additional factor was that we were only watching the first part, that is, the least debatable and controversial, so practically all of the intellectual left and the national left17 were in agreement. People often eluded the debate with statements like “everyone knows that,” “what else is there to say,” “it’s all been said already,” etc. It almost felt like the intellectuals had become jaded. Participants often resorted to aesthetic musings (on the language, form of expression, shots, montage, etc.) or technical aspects (how long the shoot lasted, whether there were copies in 35 mm., the disregard for the directors of Tire die and Faena because of the choppy cuts taken from these films), etc.18 There were cases when fervent discussion ended in Fellini‐like interpreta­ tions, like the time someone said that the final shot of “El Che” symbolized martyrdom, represented abandonment and other baloney of the sort. In the cases where viewers were radicalized, it was generally towards the far left, not towards the national context19 and when they found out what Part II was about, their interest waned and there were not enough viewers to justify a screening. Special situations: A few special situations merit a note. One was a screening held at a philoso­ phy and literature study center for approximately 35 intellectuals from these fields. During the debate, which was intense at times, a Communist Party member began arguing with an intellectual who revealed a radical nationalist leaning for the first time, though in the past he had been entirely Marxist.

2.‐ Students (university and high school) Our objective: The principle objective in this case has been political. It is important to consider that the experience from the other screenings allowed us to make contacts with the political groups within Peronism like the National Student Front (FEN) and the Student Union for Liberation (UEL). There was less emphasis on the economic aspects (in this regard, the situation had improved considerably). The film – and this is worth noting – served as the best safe conduct we could have had, giving us access to the groups at the vanguard of Peronism. It could be said that our first true political experience began here.

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The audience: generally national student groups invited students to attend. Screening location: the students themselves provided locations, including boarding houses, family homes, religious high schools and universities. Security measures: generally more lax for two reasons: a) greater political engagement on the part of viewers, which implied more responsibility than in the cases of the intellectuals, for example; and b) it was impossible to imple­ ment strict guidelines in screenings for such large audiences. Quantity of people: Our aim was for audiences to be as large as possible not strictly to increase proceeds in this case but to also make the most of the screening efforts and take full advantage of the film’s useful life. For most of the screenings  –  with the exception of those organized for large groups  – ­audiences numbered between 20 and 40. How the screening was organized: The introduction to the film was similar to the one provided for intellectuals, but after describing the formal aspects of the film, we also shared certain concepts related to the firm’s political stance, aspects which – we announced – would be discussed in the debate following the film. In some cases, the film was paused at the part where the narrator invites the audience to discuss the issues and one of us offered an update as recommended in the film. These experiences were generally pretty successful. RESULTS The reactions during the screening have mainly been limited to repudiation (whistling, booing, cursing, etc.) when gorilas20 appeared on screen and approval (applause, laughter, etc.) in scenes showing victories for the people. The final reaction has been warm satisfaction, applause, and enthusiasm in some cases, though initiating the post‐film debate remains a challenge, as if the film had said it all. The people generally stand up and want to leave, though in other cases small groups form to discuss certain aspects of the film. From our work in this area, we have made numerous political contacts and discussed possibilities for joint efforts in other areas (not just screenings). We also took advantage of the screenings to display and distribute other types of materials (cassette tapes, written documents, etc.). Special situations: two experiences with numerous audiences at the univer­ sity should be mentioned. These were organized in the School of Mathematics and Engineering and the School of Philosophy. At both schools, Part I was shown twice and Part II was shown once. More than 400 people attended each screening. At the first screening in the School of Mathematics, over 650 people attended. Due to this situation – the sheer quantity of people – the climate was totally new, and had the fuzz appeared, the screening could have turned into a major political act. In general, there was no trouble of any sort and with the exception of a few sound glitches, all went well. Two hundred people attended the screening at the University of Technology.



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The screenings of Parts I and II with a highly heterogeneous audience in San Nicolás21 also deserves mention. The audience consisted of worker‐priests, industrial technology students and a few workers, and the lengthy debate on both parts of the film was politically rich in spite of the fact that most of the audi­ ence did not hold radical views. Since this experience, the group has been work­ ing very well together and has the potential to embark on some serious projects. Another enriching experience was the one organized with students from Córdoba, who – on their own accord and unanimously – expressed their sup­ port for the film’s contents (Parts I and II), with the exception of the students of philosophy and medicine, some because they were ultra‐leftists and others because they held more bourgeois views. In the case of Córdoba, the reaction to “Factory Occupations”22 was most intense; we believe this is because these students have been most involved with worker struggles.

3. Worker groups (neighborhoods and slums: workers and youth). Union groups. Our goal: essentially political, we rarely charged for these screenings and when we did, the price was around $100, and mainly to structure the event. The audience: invited through the militant groups that did political work at each screening location. In almost all cases, we screened the second part of The Hour in its entirety and the Perón interview.23 Screening location: provided by the organizers, factories, metal‐work plants, unions, homes of workers, shanties in the slums, on the street. Security measures: totally flexible but also with an eye to maintaining basic security in terms of transporting the film separately, etc. Quantity of people: from 15–30 people on average, with the exception of the screenings at unions (60–150) and on the street (approx. 400 people). How the screening was organized: Unlike the other screenings, and given that only the second part was shown, the formal aspects were not empha­ sized. We limited ourselves to an explanation of the chronological contents of the film. Most of the talking was done by the compañeros24 who had organized the screening. In cases when a clarification was necessary, we would turn off the projector and one of the compañeros (or one of us) would clarify (for example, explaining the Unión Democrática25 to youth from the slums, who were unaware of that story within the Peronist process). The film had a profound impact, especially during the scenes of the Peronist presidency (tears, whispering, applause when Evita and Perón appeared on screen, etc.). The interview mainly contributed to consolidating Perón’s image.

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RESULTS The organizers, who were workplace activists, generally reaped the benefits of the screenings, given their familiarity with the terrain and their regular politi­ cal work there. Though we were a bit amazed at first, we noted that beyond the political contents, there was an emotional factor that came out quite spontane­ ously. Over time and based on the experiences we had with the first few screen­ ings, we also began to amass the political experience of disseminating The Hour. This also led us to understand the total lack of availability of material of this sort, which greatly facilitates the tasks of the compañeros and this is when the panorama became clearer. The need to produce material like The Hour became a concrete, straightforward objective. This continued to become clearer with each new experience and we could say that it culminates with the screening in the middle of a slum (Bajo Saladillo) with workers from the Swift factory, in the street with loudspeakers inviting people to attend the screening and things of that sort.

SPECIAL SITUATIONS It is important to note that by organizing the screenings in conjunction with worker organizations, we noted that at certain points, the film’s language is not easy to understand and that certain situations are not always entirely clear for the viewers. We also noted during this new experience that the segment of “Student Organizations” is not entirely aligned with the rest of the film because of the vague concepts expressed in the segment and the lack of a more militant image of students. The form of the Reporting in and of itself is passive and it makes the student movement look pusillanimous. Roberto’s statements26 are quite questionable at this juncture. There have been many noteworthy screenings, but we would like to empha­ size the screening in Bajo Saladillo, given that we believe that it was the most impressive in terms of the sheer size of the audience, the way they reacted to the material, etc. For this screening – and as agreed previously with the organ­ izers – the plan was to screen the first segment of Part II (Section A),27 “Factory Occupations,” because of the current situation of the Swift workers, and the Perón interview. The place chosen for the screening was the patio where the  Peronist soup kitchen operated. Because of the features of the location, the screening was basically done on the street, with loudspeakers that could be heard eight blocks in any direction and thus significantly increased the size of the audience. The details of the screening will be recounted verbally if considered relevant for discussion at the meeting.



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One immediate political repercussion: the group that organizes the soup kitchen recruited 40 new members (compañeros) and the people in the area (a  great number of large families) came away with a positive image of the Juventud Peronista‐South and the serious, positive work they are doing. This is a detailed Report of the work carried out by our Mobile Film Unit. If deemed relevant, we can give a verbal presentation on the other tasks our group is carrying out.

PLANS FOR 1971 Due to time constraints, we will not provide a further description of the pro­ jects but will list the tasks planned for 1971 to be done in conjunction with the Cine Liberación group. Within the tasks the group has planned, there are two that have already been discussed and elaborated on, and which will be carried out, provided an agree­ ment is reached with the Cine Liberación group. This is because of the features of the works planned; the positive, accessible experience of film in terms of the potential image and sound provide; and the ease of disseminating the materi­ als, which would involve the existing Mobile Film Units. The two works would include a newsreel carried out as a joint project with Buenos Aires, Córdoba, Santa Fe, Tucumán, La Plata and Mar del Plata; and another film or audiovisual about the Peronist resistance in Rosario, its strug­ gles, its protagonists, its milestones, etc. Further information on these works will be provided along with the plan to carry them out and finance them.

Notes 1 I initially presented this document at a Conference in 1999, after a copy was provided to me by one of the group’s members, Jorge Jäger. Later, I released it in Spanish (Mestman 2008). Here I will return to sections of these prior works and reexamine this document, a particular type of source material that provides insight into how The Hour and other political films configured meanings as part of the actual screening experience. Part of the aim of this work is additionally to engage in a debate with certain interpretations of mili­ tant film as “moot points” because their proposals – according to some scholars – are “closed off ” to debate. I do not agree with this criticism against militant cinema. 2 As its name suggests, Third Cinema was politically affiliated to groups that had seen Third Worldism develop during the 1960s. Another well‐known feature of Third Cinema, as laid out by Cine Liberación, was to establish an alternative to Hollywood film (“first cinema,” which treated spectators as the passive consumers of big spectacles) and a search to overcome the limits attributed to “auteur film” (“second cinema”).

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3 Solanas and Getino (1971) alluded to more than 25,000 spectators attending screenings of The Hour in only eight months of 1970. While that figure may not necessarily be accurate, given the difficulty of verifying the circulation of the film, there is no doubt that 1970 was a very important year in relation to the organization of Cine Liberación in Argentina. See both texts (Solanas and Getino 1971; Getino 1979) translated into eng­ lish in Buchsbaum and Mestman, 2021. 4 Naturally, in many of the screenings, the audience was highly diverse. 5 In addition, Grupo Pueblo also produced its own mimeographed materials, Ediciones del Pueblo, which included an analysis of issues such as the political situation or union bureaucracy. (Though unions were also aligned with Peronism, younger and more mili­ tant Peronists increasingly viewed them as complacent.) There were also documents produced by organizations like the Peronist Armed Forces, and interviews with Perón that were often available as audio recordings (“Audiciones de la Liberación,” or “Freedom Recordings”). Similarly, the group collaborated with Norman Brisky and Grupo Octubre’s teatro villero (slum theater) in Rosario’s peripheral neighborhoods. Toward 1972, Grupo Pueblo disbanded and most of its members joined one of the many revolu­ tionary Peronist organizations. (Author’s interviews with Jäger, Barroso and Escandell, August, 21 1993). 6 Part III of the film was rarely screened in Argentina or abroad. 7 In a prior text (Mestman 2011) I quoted some references by Solanas and Getino (1971) to this practice: “To whom do we intend each film in particular? (…) A militant film must be directed toward a much more concrete audience: the urban working class, the rural proletariat, the student movement, the comrades in a factory or a region in conflict, publics in other countries, the cadres of a political organization, etc. (…) For example, Part II of The Hour (The Resistance), was conceived for a concrete audience: the urban Argentine proletariat, but at the same time it served to transmit information and open discussion on the experience of struggle in certain sectors, such as students and intel­ lectuals in the process of radicalization. What is important is to specify the concrete or principal audience for which it will be pertinent for the most part.” (Solanas and Getino 1971: 150–151). Yet, we do not have more references to this question in Solanas and Getino’s writings. 8 In fact, there were cases in which certain sequences of the film were cut because they were not considered relevant for a certain setting. 9 An olla popular is a community event/political rally usually held outdoors and organ­ ized around a free meal, generally some variation on stew cooked up in an enormous pot (olla). 10 A term used to refer to anti‐Peronists and to the representatives of the ruling class. 11 “El punto más alto alcanzado por la Resistencia.” 12 Factory occupations were the second of five phases of an “agitation plan” drafted by the Confederación General del Trabajo (Trade Union Confederation, or CGT). See: Cotarelo and Fernández (1997), Bisio and Cordone (1989), Bourdé (1978), Schneider (2005, 2009). 13 “The group that organizes the soup kitchen recruited 40 new members (compañeros) and the people in the area (a great number of large families) came away with a positive image of the Juventud Peronista‐South and the serious, positive work they are doing.” (Rosario Mobile Film Unit Report). 14 In this section of the report, there is a clearly negative bent against this “intellectual” spectator who resorted to “aesthetic musings […] or [remarks on] technical aspects.”



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15 This was not limited to this type of screening, since once Peronism returned to the ­government in 1973, The Hour and other militant films were screened in traditional theaters. 16 Document provided by Jorge Jäger, a member of the Mobile Film Unit of Cine Liberación and Grupo Pueblo in Rosario (province of Santa Fe, Argentina). Underlings are taken from the original document. The footnotes have been added by Mariano Mestman for clarification purposes. 17 The idea of a “national” left dates back to the 1960s and refers to a certain trend in politi­ cal thought and action. It differs from the classic Marxist left (mainly communist and socialist) and re‐legitimates national identity (along with class identity) as well as the revolutionary role of the Peronist working class in Argentina’s history. 18 Tire dié, Fernando Birri, 1958–1960; Faena, Humberto Ríos, 1961. The Hour uses excerpts from both Argentine films as “film quotes,” an acknowledgment of previous films that convey the “cultural values” which Cine Liberación wishes to recover. 19 See note 17. 20 See note 10. 21 An industrial area in the province of Buenos Aires close to the city of Rosario (province of Santa Fe). 22 Chapter from the second half (entitled “The Resistance”) of Part II of the film. 23 A reference to a brief film interview with former President Perón during his exile in Madrid, shot during the second half of 1968 by a member of the Cine Liberación group. It preceded a series of long interviews with Perón conducted by Solanas and Getino in Madrid in 1971. 24 Literally translated as “comrades,” the word compañero refers to fellow Peronists or in this case, the group of militants that coordinated each screening in conjunction with the Rosario Mobile Film Unit. 25 Unión Democrática was a conservative group of several parties (Unión Cívica Radical, Partido Socialista, Partido Comunista, Partido Demócrata Progresista, and several other small parties) that formed an alliance in the hope of defeating Perón in the 1946 elections. 26 The reference is to Roberto Grabois, FEN leader. This segment (Student Organizations) is a chapter in the second half (“The Resistance”) of Part II of The Hour. 27 Refers to the first half of Part II of The Hour, on the history of Peronism in power (1946–1955).

References Bisio, R. and Cordone, H. (1989). El Plan de Lucha de la CGT en 1964. Justicia Social 5 (8). Bonvecchi, A. (1993). Liberación por la pantalla. Notas sobre el cine en la praxis revolucion­ aria. In: Decorados. Apuntes para una historia social del cine argentino (eds. H. González and E. Rinesi). Buenos Aires: Manuel Suárez. Bourdé, G. (1978). La CGT argentine et les occupations d’usines de mai‐juin 1964. Le Mouvement Social 103. Buchsbaum, J. and Mestman, M. (2021). Documenting the Third Cinema (1968-1979). Overlooked and little-known documents around the Third Cinema. Framework 62, 1. Cotarelo, M.C. and Fernández, F. (1997). La toma de fábricas en argentina, 1964. Razón y Revolución 3.

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Getino, O. (1981 (1979)). Algunas observaciones sobre el concepto del Tercer Cine. In: A diez años de “Hacia un Tercer Cine”. Hennebelle, G. (1979). L’influence du Troiséme Cinéma dans le monde (dossier of Cinéma Action). Revue Tiers Monde XX (79). Mestman, M. (2008). Raros e inéditos del grupo Cine Liberación. A 40 años de La hora de los hornos. Sociedad 27: 27–79. Buenos Aires: Prometeo. Mestman, M. (2011). Third Cinema / Militant Cinema: At the Origins of the Argentinian Experience. Third Text. Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Art & Culture 25 (1): 29–40. London: Routledge. Mestman, M. (2018). Tracing the Winding Road of The Hour of the Furnaces in the First World. In: A Trail of Fire for Political Cinema, Chapter  7 (eds. J. Campo and H. Pérez‐ Blanco). London: Intellect Ltd. Schneider, A. (2005). Los compañeros. Trabajadores, izquierda y peronismo, 1955–1973. Buenos Aires: Imago Mundi. Schneider, A. (2009). Trabajadores. Buenos Aires: Herramienta. Schwarzbock, S. (2011). La posibilidad de un arte sin Estado. El cine después de internet. Kilómetro 111: 9–28. Sigal, S. and Verón, E. (1986). Perón o Muerte. Buenos Aires: Legasa. Solanas, F. and Getino, O. (1973 [1971]). Cine militante: una categoría interna del Tercer Cine. In: Cine, cultura y descolonización (eds. F. Solanas and O. Getino). Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI. Stam, R. (1990 [1980/81]). The Hour of the Furnaces and the Two Avant‐Gardes. In: The Social Documentary in Latin America (ed. J. Burton), 251–266. University of Pittsburgh Press. Vallejo, G. (1985). Un camino hacia el cine. Buenos Aires: El Cid Editor.

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From Media Effects to the Empathy Machine

The Nature of the Audience and the Persistence of Wishful Thinking William Uricchio

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Introduction “[Virtual reality] connects humans to other humans in a profound way I’ve never before seen in any other form of media, and it can change people’s perception of each other,” Milk says in a Ted Talk. “That is why I think virtual reality has the potential to actually change the world”. (Alsever 2015) Chris Milk might be forgiven for his claim. After all, his Clouds Over Sidra (2015), a virtual reality documentary about the Syrian refugee crisis created together with Gabo Aurora, was commissioned by the United Nations and premiered at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. It not only reached the planet’s power elite: its members actually waited in line to see it. And it created quite a buzz at Davos, in the process, generating significant donations. Alas, as of this writing, the tragedy of Syrian refugees continues as depressingly as the discourse around virtual reality as “empathy machine.” The narrative of media’s potential to change the world is an ancient one. We can find traces in the history of pedagogy, hints in the world’s great religions and their insistence on the work of sacred texts, and claims to the power of the word in incantations sacred and profane. We’ve long prepared for the causal narratives that would greet the coming of the modern media, narratives accelerated by the coincident growth and concentration of urban populations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and by the emergence of mid‐century mass movements, whether motivated by reform or conquest. And while these narratives are often taken as evidence of the workings of media, they can as usefully be read as providing

A Companion to Documentary Film History, First Edition. Edited by Joshua Malitsky. © 2021 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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insights into our assumptions regarding the human subjects at the receiving end. Are they as pliable as these recurrent tales of media agency suggest? Or creative and resistant, subverting texts to their own purposes? Could they even be generative, contributing substantially to media, texts, and popular meanings? And what to make of “the audience” in the era of individuated and algorithmically curated textual delivery systems? This essay will focus on the audience and the shifting and often contradictory claims made for it, particularly in light of the documentary project. These claims require disambiguation: • As noted, they are often tangled with claims regarding the power of media – claims embedded in our language. Take “viral media,” where our language suggests that agency lies within the media artifact, not the humans responsible for its spread.1 • The audience is bound up with the public. The public is a key site of governance, and the discourse attending it often takes the form of anxieties and policies regarding the readers of the press, viewers and auditors of broadcasts, and consumers of “fake news.” While conceptually distinct, publics and audiences as real‐world entities overlap and even determine one another in various ways, creating considerable confusion (Livingstone 2005). • As these examples suggest, audiences are also defined by particular media forms, some deemed more insidious than others, and some even requiring guidelines and legal constraints. A free press is enshrined in nations like the United States, yet cinema may be subject to censorship and restricted by age – and historically, by gender and ethnicity as well, with children, women, and immigrants being conflated as “vulnerable” and “panicky” audiences in places like New York City during the early nickelodeon years (ca. 1906–1909). Media such as virtual reality and algorithmically-targeted texts, whether social media or interactive narratives, raise new questions about the medium‐audience relationship that this essay will explore. • And of course, from a media industries perspective, audiences represent the bottom line: the subscribers, the “bums in the seats,” the argument for an additional season, and the carefully filtered demographic selection that is bought and paid for by advertisers. These perspectives on the audience represent but several of the vantage points that have shaped and modified the meaning of the term, and struggled for dominance over the years. The audience is a conceptual construct and a contested one at that. It is a metric that reveals something of the speaker’s understanding of media and how they work. It is a statistical aggregate, at once garbed in quantitative precision and carefully skewed to reflect social and economic biases. It is a site of simmering contestation: the history of Nielsen Media Research, the world’s dominant head‐counter, reveals a long‐term tug‐of‐war between the competing interests of broadcasters and advertisers, with an ever‐shifting resolution asserted as a statistically objective rendering of reality (Meehan  1984). And in the world of the academy, torn between



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social science (mass communications) and humanistic (media studies) perspectives, subject to ever‐shifting theoretical trends, and complicated by the moving target of new media technologies, it serves as a small cottage industry fed by rivers of ink. Perhaps most importantly for the documentary, the audience – and with it, various assumptions regarding its definition, susceptibilities, character, and its relationship to the public – serves as a raison d’être. The notions of audience reach long associated with the film and broadcast media have given way to concerns with audience engagement and impact. Broadly speaking, the shift from quantity to quality reflects the increasing fragmentation of media channels, the availability of new tools and metrics, and the steady creep of neoliberalism in an era of deeply divided partisan politics. Today’s documentary funders want more than a good idea and a socially relevant cause: they want an impact strategy. They want to know more than how many people will be reached and even which people will be reached: they want to know how people will be changed. And implicit in that desire – as always – are theories of audience. Theories of the audience are plentiful, and that’s only considering the explicit ones. Boiled down to their essence, we can find theories that assume audiences are largely passive – taking what’s given, buying and believing on command, changing their perceptions based on exposure to the medium du jour; we have theories that assume audiences are active – creatively interpreting or rejecting arguments, selectively using information for their own purposes, and more; we have theories that consider the productive work of audiences, whether by assembling their own texts from interactive environments, or by contributing stories and footage, and even co‐ creating texts; and, on the near horizon, we have emerging theories of the audience that are bound up in responsive, algorithmically designed systems. Of course, terms like passive, active, productive, and algorithmic are broad to the point of caricature, but they and their far more nuanced cousins inform the creative work of documentary makers, motivate the choice of whether to appeal to reason and argument, or to manipulate and seduce, or to develop frameworks for participation, or to design selectively responsive algorithms. Finally, while these different perspectives on the audience have appeared over time, they have not replaced one another but have rather accrued. All of them currently have adherents.

The Pliable Audience: Mass and Media Effects The film medium took form in a world of change. A rapid increase in urban inhabitants helped along by migratory populations; concentrated industrial development and with it unequal distributions of resources; new ideologies and challenges to inherited social norms: all these and more rendered the state and its primary ­beneficiaries precarious. And that precarity, in turn, encouraged a project of both physical and cultural domination. This backdrop explains the deep concern that accompanied the sudden popularity of the nickelodeon – a concern great enough that on Christmas 1908, the mayor of New York shut down the city’s approximately

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600 film venues, with waves of censorship, zoning and architectural regulation, and audience control to follow in cities across America, and indeed, the world. After an inconsequential first decade, the moving picture suddenly found itself recast as complicit with the period’s problems. What happened? It’s complicated. But for the purposes of this essay, two things stand out: a shift in film content and a change in the composition of cinema’s audiences. In terms of content, the actualité – documentary films in the form of panoramas, street scenes, and factory interiors that dominated copyrighted production during the medium’s first decade – increasingly gave way to fictional fare in the nickelodeon period. Education and, in the period’s parlance, uplift, gave way to comedies, crime stories, and romance. At the same time, the “respectable” audiences associated with film’s initially expensive venues (music halls, for example) gave way to anyone who could afford five cents. This new ­audience became an issue for reasons both quantitative and qualitative, triggered by the established classes’ fears of masses with an uncertain master, by men and women together in the dark, and by the volatile mix of “impressionable youth,” “excitable women,” and “panicky foreigners” together in front of flickering images of unknown provenance (Uricchio and Pearson 1993). Implicit in these alarmed reactions to the motion picture as a popular new cultural form were assumptions about its audience. At a literal level, the audience was bound in a synecdochic relationship to the teeming urban populations. Just as education could help to “lift” the unruly mass into responsible citizenship and dime novels could debase it, so too the motion picture. The audience was deemed “impressionable” in the language of the day and responsive to whatever content was placed before it. And some audience cohorts were at significantly greater risk than others. Researchers attempted to map the patterns of how various audiences encountered film, among them, fledgling sociologists from Columbia University in New  York who sought an understanding of class, gender, ethnicity, and cultural activities such as filmgoing. By the 1920s, this research tradition would culminate in the Payne Fund Studies, a comprehensive examination of film and American youth rooted in the University of Chicago’s Sociology Department, and carried out at universities ranging from Yale to Penn State. The Payne Fund Studies, published in eight volumes between 1933 and 1935, managed simultaneously to demarcate audience research as a sociological concern, to portray a causal link between “mass” audiences and “mass media,” and to rearticulate the moral crusade of its guiding spirit, Reverend William Short, into scientific language and gadgetry (including the psycho‐galvanometer). The intertwined understanding of audiences as pliable subjects, media texts as irresistibly persuasive, and sociology as the instrument par excellence for assessing the mix, took hold for a number of reasons. Mass movements, whether the mobilizations of World War I or the Bolshevik Revolution, benefited enormously from propaganda and indoctrination campaigns. But so, too, did the branded products pitched at an increasingly concentrated consumer market. Both domains shared a persuasive agenda. The scientific language and even gadgets that would surface in the Payne Fund Studies were in fact rooted in these precedent practices together with



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the relatively new disciplines of sociology and psychology, and served as instruments that could be deployed as easily to “sell” new ideas as to diagnose the sociopathic behavior of urban youth led astray by demoralizing film content. This mechanistic view grosso modo characterizes the period’s understanding of film, advertising, and the German Reich’s propagandistic use of media after 1933, with its concomitant “effect” of “ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer” confirming the template. But the story has a twist relevant for the documentary: the journalistic ethos. Journalism’s relationship to the documentary may not at first glance seem self‐ evident. After all, journalism is professionalized and bound by tradition, codes of ethics, and institutional frameworks. Inscribed in the First Amendment to the US Constitution and invoked by Thomas Carlyle as the Fourth Estate, journalism plays a fundamental role in governance. By contrast, documentary is a relative newcomer, generally lacks sustained institutional support, and documentaries can afford to take the form of one‐offs, to use experimental techniques, to address topics far from the breaking news, and to do so artfully. But differences notwithstanding, the two forms share similar commitments to truth, reality‐based storytelling, sense‐making, and explaining, despite their different institutional settings. And in this, they share overlapping concerns, audiences, and conceptions of audience. In contrast to the “call and response” notions of the media‐audience dyad that accompanied film’s popularization and the concomitant rise of mass advertising, journalism’s leading theorists took up the larger issues of information and governance. Philosopher John Dewey (1922, 1925, 1927) and writer Walter Lippmann staked out two poles of a debate regarding the audience that continues to resonate in the present. Writing in the mid‐1920s, Dewey saw the press as offering its readership the means to make collective decisions. Access to the relevant facts and a spectrum of views regarding their implications would enable sharing, collaboration, political deliberation, and self‐governance. Lippmann (1922, 1925), by contrast, concerned by the just mentioned assertions of audience manipulability, was an adherent of top‐ down, beneficent, technocratic control. His notion of the “manufacture of consent,” later picked up by Noam Chomsky, spoke to the need for a responsible political class to use media to shape public opinion, and the dangers of laisse‐faire alternatives. For documentarians charged with imparting information and views of the world, these two notions of the audience – one educable and ultimately deliberative and the other reactive and prone to persuasion – offered very different paths. Before discussing views of the audience that share something with Dewey’s notion of redeemable, creative, and even critical modes of reception, it is worth noting one additional argument that relates to the “impressionable” formation of the audience we have been considering in this section. Critical theory, associated with the Frankfurt School and perhaps best known from the pens of theorists such as Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno, effectively argued that the audience was a sitting duck, targeted by the forces of capitalism and deluded into perpetuating their own alienation and entrapment in an inequitable system. How else to explain the willing embrace of consumerism and wage slavery? The standardized formats of music and film masked their industrialized nature and industrializing message,

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Horkheimer and Adorno argued. Although apparent textual variations were celebrated as innovative and even rebellious, in fact these systems worked to entrap their audiences ever more deeply into an ideological bind. While ideologically at odds with the perspectives discussed thus far, Critical Theory’s view of the media and its audiences essentially concurred with their mechanical logics, thus prompting the question of how to circumvent the problem. The century’s first three decades are remarkable as much for their already noted social aggregations (urbanization, mass movements, war); as for the rise of an economy of signs in the form of mass marketed brands, politics included; as for transformations of the mediascape with the introduction of amplified sound (radio, sound film, loudspeakers) and new image transmission and printing technologies. Audiences, as surrogates for the larger public, enjoyed a specificity lacking their more amorphous referent. And particularly the audiences gathered together by as yet poorly understood media forms seemed symptomatic of – if not causally related to – the invisible forces reshaping society. As such, they offered insights and explanations, while generating concern and fear. Audiences were pathologized and dissected; targeted and addressed; objectified and used to explain what was askew with the world. Marketing specialists and academics alike developed media effects theories, each distinguished by varying degrees of media causality and audience agency. The names of scholars such as Lasswell (1927), Lazarsfeld et al. (1944), and Klapper (1960) have been cemented into the foundations of mass communications as a ­discipline, and their ideas continue to circulate, even if implicitly, when discussing virtual reality as “empathy machine.”

The Active and Engaged Audience In the world of media, theories of the active audience began to percolate with ever‐ growing agitation in the postwar years. Whether Zeitgeist or an as yet unexplored causality, the curious thing is that similar moves were afoot in adjacent fields. Shortly after Katz and Lazarsfeld (1955) began to explore the role of complicating factors – like other people – in explaining widely varying responses to media messages, scholars such as Hans Robert Jauss (1967) and Wolfgang Iser took up the role of the reader in interpreting texts. Their work in Konstanz aligned with the questions being asked in different ways by Roland Barthes (1967), Michel Foucault (1980), and Umberto Eco (1984), to name but three of the most frequently cited scholars in this space, who interrogated the death of the author, the birth of the reader, and the open text. And more generally, this move coincided with the fracturing of the grand explanatory narratives inherited from the nineteenth century. In each of these cases, it was the audience member who brought meaning to the text, not the other way around. It’s strange that it took so long to acknowledge the agency of the audience. After all, despite the best endeavors of media producers and marketers, audiences have always decided whether or not to attend films or read particular books. Audiences decided whether or not they enjoyed the experience, and even what they got from it. And it was



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clear – as much to those charged with promoting texts as those tasked with reviewing them as those counting the receipts – that audiences were and remain unpredictable. This is consistent with John Dewey’s earlier mentioned notion of newspaper readerships: an audience composed of sense‐makers, people who read, converse, exchange information and views, agree or not, and broadly construct consensus. Documentaries, just as fictional dramas, have exercised different appeals and elicited radically different responses from their viewers. In those cases where we have some sense of audience response, the evidence is clear. Walter Ruttmann’s 1927 Berlin: Die Symphonie der Grosßstadt, for example, was embraced by some on the political left for its directness and realism; critiqued by others who saw in it ideological ambivalence; praised as a celebration of the city; read as evidence of urban decadence; and categorized variously as documentary, avant‐garde, and a quota‐quickie. This spectrum of interpretive responses suggests little of the deterministic effects discussed in the previous section. Rather, cultural framing, paratexts, individual interest, and even arbitrary associations, not to mention Lazarsfeld and Katz’s “other people,” all played a role in what people saw and what the film meant to them. This is not to deny the existence of patterns in active audience behavior, or that we might broadly be able to distinguish among various types of appeal, response, or meaning. Interpretive frames and meanings are ultimately bound, even if they have wide latitude, as Stanley Fish (1980) argued. Stuart Hall (1980), using a more ­ideologically attuned frame, proposed three broad reading possibilities: preferred (aligning with authorial intentions), negotiated (a position that takes up some aspects of a text’s intended meanings, while introducing views of one’s own), and oppositional (disagreeing with what one takes to be the intended meaning). Each of these positions requires an active choice, and each offers plenty of interpretive ­latitude; yet, as an ensemble, they spare us an interpretive free‐for‐all. Hall’s schematic and the claims of the various other active audience advocates seem, in the light of lived experience, somehow obvious. If audiences have always been fickle, and if their opinions have always differed as to what texts “mean,” let alone what genre they inhabit, and whether they are worth one’s time, why did it take until well after World War II for theories of the active audience to compete successfully with the more deterministic views that this essay started with? Again, it’s complicated, but two developments stand out in this shift in perspective, one related to the changing constellation of the period’s dominant medium, television; and the other related to the emergence of a particular approach to the study of culture in the form of British Cultural Studies. When, in March 1973, Raymond Williams visited Miami and experienced the “flow” that would be inscribed in Television, we can reasonably assume that he had something like five or possibly six channels available, no cable and no VCR (Williams 1975). Williams experienced a historically specific form of television, and at least in the United States, he witnessed the final days of “big‐three” hegemony. In this sense, he was privileged to participate in (and thus write about) a particular generational experience, a distinct clustering of technologies and practices. Months before Williams’s arrival, the Federal Communications Commission issued several

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important guidelines that, while protective of established interests, opened the door for a fundamental reordering of the broadcasting environment that would take place shortly after Williams’s departure. New regulations for the diffusion of cable service in urban areas coupled with guidelines for cable operators as distributors and ­producers of programming transformed cable from a community service into a business (Cable Television 1972).2 That same year, the Domestic Communication Satellite Rules allowed private satellite distribution, ending the monopoly of the Communications Satellite Corporation (Domestic Communication  1972). This change allowed the interconnection of distribution points and linkage with nationwide cable systems without the prohibitive expense of AT&T’s land lines or ComSat’s service. Cable, together with the video recorder and remote control device, would be used to fragment the television environment fundamentally, with direct implications for the conception and measurement of the audience. Statistically driven metrics regimes like the Nielsen ratings were designed for mass audiences and struggled to extend their paradigm to ever‐smaller audience segments. Fortunately for them, the adequacy of their metrics was less important than their monopoly status as a fulcrum between the competing interests of publishers and advertisers. But the steady erosion of once centralized program distribution thanks to the Internet and “over‐ the‐top” services like Netflix continued, and with it growing demand for more qualitative metrics. Philip Napoli (2011) has provided a lucid portrait of the ensuing conceptual and methodological shift from “exposure” to “engagement,” a shift that mirrors the reconceptualization of the audience from “mass” to “active agent,” and as we will see, one that seeped into the world of documentary financing. At the same time, British Cultural Studies, with scholars such as Williams and Hall in the mix, brokered a space between social scientific and humanistic approaches to media and culture generally with their concern with texts, power, and social dynamics. Qualitative and empirically grounded, yet critical and concerned with reading practices and ideology, Cultural Studies researchers explored media subcultures, audience interpretative strategies, and even the industry’s own discourse regarding audiences. By straddling aspects of mass communications and media studies, they opened a generative new space for understanding media in action, which is to say, the work of contextualized media producers and audiences. The text‐ transforming work of soap opera viewers, popular culture fans, and sports audiences all served to shift analytic attention away from ideologically weighted texts of the kind pathologized by the Critical Theorists, and toward the act of reappropriation in the hands of the active audience. Together, a fast‐fragmenting media ecosystem and a critical orientation that skewed toward the bottom‐up work of audiences provided the stimulus and means to fan the sparks of reception studies into an institutional orthodoxy regarding the active audience. Or at least, so it seemed within the walls of the academy. Outside those walls, on the terrain of the advertising industry, on the agendas of reformers concerned with representations of violence, pornography, terror, and the crisis du jour, and on the minds of some involved with sponsoring the production of



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documentaries, the effects of media texts on audiences remained core business. This interest was often nuanced, informed by and even imbued with notions of the active audience; but the institutional assumption of directional causality, of media’s impact on the audience, remained something of an idee fixe. “Engagement” and “impact” have emerged as two crucial terms in the world of documentary, terms that embrace audience activity but still attempt to chart the workings of media texts on their users. A growing body of research has attempted to parse the distinction between “outputs” and “impacts” and between “media effects” and “media impact” in order to account for user activity, but also to reframe the question in a way that addresses, for example, changes in public policy rather than simply reaching or informing target audiences (Napoli  2014). In an era of search engine optimization (SEO), this has in part been driven by the availability of new data‐shedding tools such as social media that can be used by audiences to “act” in traceable ways that not only count as “engagement,” but that can be quantified and measured. Organizations such as the Harmony Institute have developed tools like StoryPilot (Harmony Labs n.d.), drawing on various metrics (trailer views, social media shares, related Wikipedia searches, political mentions) to gauge potential impact. Sparkwise, now defunct thanks to its sources’ ever‐changing APIs, offered users an “impact dashboard” derived from Google searches, Tweets, Facebook mentions and the rest, as well as tips on “turning data into action.”3 Harvis gathered audience responses during the screening of the film, even pausing it “at discrete moments” to allow the audience to answer questions, offering an interactive visualization of the harvested responses at the film’s end (A Fourth Act n.d.). The Participant Index (TPI) joined market researchers and academics together on a mission to gain insights into audience knowledge, attitudes, behaviors, and actions, again, by aggregating its own special blend of social media conversations, viewership information, and audience opinion data. The list goes on. Two things stand out in these developments: first, there is considerable churn on the methodology front, with different tools drawing on different data sets, different disciplines, and even different understandings of engagement, impact, and their timelines. These systems are contingent and malleable to the point of being ephemeral. Second and not surprisingly, there is considerable consternation in the field as claimants for ineffable aesthetic qualities and measurable effects square off. But, at least it has been a productive confrontation, with foundations from Ford to Fledgling, festivals from Tribeca and Sundance, and universities from American to MIT reflecting on these developments.4 These initiatives and many other online datacentric tools have addressed a need created by key funders of documentaries in search of evidence that their money is responsibly spent. While there are doubtless many contenders for an “origin story” for this need, the Theory of Change that emerged from the Aspen Institute Roundtable on Community Change in the 1990s and early 2000s stands out because of its close association with philanthropic organizations (Center for Theory of Change n.d.).5 Those foundations that supported social change movements, documentaries included, reasonably inquired into not only whether the intended intervention was plausible and feasible, but whether it was testable. The notion of testability that they

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deployed revealed the movement’s roots in organizational psychology, sociology, and political science – a similar disciplinary mix as that used in the “effects” research discussed earlier. Add to this the general discursive shift toward greater audience agency and the coincident rise of the Internet, and conditions were perfect for yet another quantitative assertion of audience behaviors, this time more tempered. One is, however, struck by the structural similarities of this well‐intended discourse with that of consumer‐sector marketing departments. The metrics of engagement “buzz” take similar form in a conceptual order where “impact” may be the sale of a Coca‐ Cola or a socially progressive act. The engaged audience, actively searching for and exchanging information, sharing views, forming opinions, and so on, is recognizably related to John Dewey’s earlier discussed notion of newspaper readerships, but with a twist. As the site of active reading shifts increasingly to connected digital platforms, it is leaving data traces. How those traces are collected and brokered, what they mean and enable and for whom, become defining distinctions for today’s active audiences.

The Productive Audience A palimpsest of sorts, the current mediascape mixes analog, digital, and hybrid media forms; centralized distribution operates through networked logics; and texts, audiences, and organizations move across multiple platforms in ways described by Henry Jenkins (2006) as “convergent.” In this churn, terms like “productive” can take on different meanings. The just described data‐shedding character of our social media certainly produces corporate profits, and indirectly, sustains funders’ interests in documentary production. Is it productive? If so, this in turn frames those who visit the box‐office or who are counted as viewers or listeners by Nielsen, or indeed, the most passively constructed of paying audiences, as all in a way, “productive.”6 But I use the term in a more specific sense to refer to the production of texts. That is, I mean to refer to processes such as navigation within interactive environments, thus creating a particular trajectory through a database; or crowd‐sourced images and stories that populate a documentary framework; or project co‐creation through participation in the conception and completion of a documentary project. These and related activities contribute materially to the structure of the text, going beyond the active interpretations that we considered in the previous section. Technology in the form of the Internet has played an enabling role in our ability to create, collaborate, circulate and connect with one another. In an age when citizen science initiatives, participatory action research, and Yochai Benkler’s (2006) notion of “commons‐based peer production” are finding increasing traction, it’s little wonder that the potential for participation has generated considerable excitement. Broadly speaking, participation takes many forms, from crowd‐sourcing and user‐ generated content, to community‐based design and co‐creation. For audiences, this includes a spectrum of participatory activities including comments, blogs, tweets, wiki contributions, videos and other materials that users share online (YouTube is



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currently posting 300 hours of video per minute). As we will see, this participatory behavior can also be brokered into the production of documentaries. Of course, participation, even in these senses, is not entirely new or restricted to the digital. Our languages, our religious traditions, our cities, stories and songs have emerged over the millennia thanks to the participation of countless anonymous people. How did we ever forget? We might blame the appearance of the heavy industry of media at the end of the nineteenth century, and with it, the passive notion of the audience discussed earlier in this essay. Cultural production and distribution were centralized, industrialized, and iron‐clad in copyright, relegating centuries of participatory culture to the newfound shadows of “folk” and “amateur” culture. Of course, industrial media have always had production‐enabling domestic counterparts: home letterpress sets, small format moving picture cameras, audio and video tape recorders, technologies eagerly embraced by great numbers of ­people who proceeded to tell their own stories and document their own lives. Alas, the double identity of producer and audience usually extended little farther than the individual and her closest circle of friends. The mantle of amateurism that accompanied these efforts only receded when widespread distribution allowed these producers to stand shoulder‐to‐shoulder with the dominant industries. Consider the editorial pages that afforded readers an opportunity, however ­selective and abbreviated, to express their opinions in print, or their broadcast counterparts. Or consider television when, starting in the 1960s, people began experimenting with the Porta‐Pack and public access television stations provided “indie” media groups with a means of putting their work on the air. One of the best‐known examples in the United States was Downtown Community Television in New York City, an organization that generated community‐focused programs, documentaries among them, for 40 years, while also educating its audiences in the use of technology and storytelling techniques. New  York was also the home of Paper Tiger Television, an underground video collective that created a nationwide network of community television. In the documentary space, the National Film Board of Canada’s Challenge for Change initiative put cameras directly in the hands of communities, inspired by the belief that by telling their own stories, people would unearth shared concerns and issues that could lead to lasting, community‐generated solutions. Its Fogo Island Project, a set of 27 films that focused on a small island community in Newfoundland, was exemplary in the sense that it helped to empower members of the community, encouraging them to find their voice, make their case, and have targeted impact on the legislative agenda. The participatory practices tested in these films, such as resident interviews and community screenings, set the standard for Challenge for Change during its 13‐year run (1967–1980). In each of these cases – newspaper editorials, public access television, and Challenge for Change – participatory media production gained access to mainstream distribution. Digital environments certainly accelerated the just mentioned forms of participation, but the point is that their history is a long one.

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With these traditions in mind, we can turn to the digital documentary scene, one that currently offers three distinct modes of “producerly” audience participation: navigational, contributory, and co‐creative. Interactive documentary, aka web‐docs or i‐docs, can be quite variegated in form and interface, but that said, many are built upon databases that in turn ­enable the user to make navigational choices and follow their interests. These choices, delimited by the system’s designers and framed and guided by the user’s motivations, provide the basis for a narrative experience. Although some critics such as Lev Manovich (2001), hewing to a traditional literary definition, have argued that the database and narrative are structurally incompatible, games, ­tourism, and painting have all demonstrated the potentials of alternate models of narrativity.7 Regardless, the navigational choices made by a user construct an actual and experienced text from an environment of possibilities. That act of ­textual realization, of articulating a strand of coherence from myriad possibilities by actively making choices, is generative. The choices one makes in navigating Katerina Cizek’s Out My Window, or Elaine McMillion’s Hollow, or David Dufresne’s Fort McMoney, are constitutive, even if the wherewithal has been carefully crafted by the project’s maker. Contributory documentaries rely on more than user navigation: they require audiences to provide data, stories, sounds, and images to a framework that the documentary’s makers have provided. Terms such as crowd‐sourcing describe a subset of these activities, as exemplified by The Guardian’s The Counted: People Killed by Police in the US. People provide information to the team, which in turn vets and formats it for the project. Whether scraped data (any blogs using the term “we feel” for Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar’s We Feel Fine), or user‐submitted and vetted videos (Jigar Mehta and Yasmin Elayat’s 18 Days in Egypt), or even data surreptitiously pulled from the user’s computer (Brett Gaylor’s Do Not Track), the substance of the documentary depends on the audience’s contributions. One might extend this logic to funding mechanisms such as Kickstarter.com and feedback systems such as Juntobox.com, both of which, besides providing their stated services, are also useful community‐builders and resonators to help get the word out on projects. Finally, co‐creation, a methodology used by Katerina Cizek in her Highrise series, goes beyond harvesting content from participants to working with them as collaborators and creative partners throughout the production process. Conceptually related to a broader set of initiatives that includes Participatory Action Research and community‐based program design, Cizek’s work hearkens back in a specific way to the earlier mentioned NFB Challenge for Change program. In the case of a project like Witness.org, media makers, lawyers and activists work with imperiled peoples (witnesses) to help them document injustice and “create human rights change.” In the case of Chicago radio broadcaster WBEZ’s and Localore’s Curious City, the public proposes and selects topics for investigation, then participates in the ensuing research, offering another variant of the co‐creation methodology. Models of co‐ creation abound! This is not to suggest that co‐creation is a creative free‐for‐all or a state of consensus. Cizek describes it as a condition of respecting each other’s



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expertise: editorial control can still reside with a maker, but the audience plays a fundamental role in the production (Miller and Cizek 2010).8 As one might expect with an emergent area, considerable definitional and taxonomic latitude prevails; but navigation, contribution, and co‐creation point to three distinguishable modes of productive participation in the documentary space, each backed by a considerable number of projects.9 As new technologies and techniques take up the documentary project, we will doubtless refine or perhaps fundamentally change these categories. How might we consider the work of the viewer in virtual reality of the real‐time capture variety, for example? In these settings, the viewer’s gaze triggers the system’s algorithms to transform a fixed data (the point cloud) into a potentially unique image (rather than simply displaying a pre‐rendered image as in the case of 360° video). Similarly, on‐demand data visualizations require user queries in order to yield results, suggesting a slightly different pas de deux between the generative user and data base. The “productive audience” is not (yet?) a familiar moniker, but the term nevertheless describes a crucial dimension not captured by the more familiar “passive” and “active” audience configurations. Moreover, the productive audience is generatively bound to a new textual regime in which authorial responsibility is complicated by participation; in which the text is inherently unstable thanks to its often unique instantiations; and in which shared and intersubjective experiences are the exception rather than the rule. Of course, this audience is prone to leave digital traces and is thus subject to the same impulse of engagement quantification and assessment that we saw with the active audience. And this leads to an interesting dilemma. On one hand, existing metrics systems generally fail to account for the new conditions just outlined: different users will generate different paths through interactive documentaries; the contributory process is ongoing, with different textual possibilities existing at different moments; and the work of co‐creation, like the work of ­navigation and contribution, requires a different level of commitment than viewing a traditional documentary. But on the other hand, precisely these differences should enable a more personalized experience as users pursue their interests, and perhaps even a more engaged and connected sense of participation as they become part of the production process. Will this yield qualitatively distinctive modes of engagement and impact? The verdict is still out.

Looking Ahead Before concluding this essay, it is worth speculating about a fast‐emerging audience form that for want of a better term I’ll call “algorithmic.” Algorithmic audiences currently take two forms: as individually targeted receivers of texts; and as indirect generators of texts. In the first case, visible in the operations of companies such as Facebook and Cambridge Analytica and the debates surrounding alleged Russian influence of the 2016 US elections and the UK Brexit vote, particular texts are vetted and directed to particular users, based on algorithmic assessments of the

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user’s profile. One might say that the audience is algorithmically curated on a level approaching the individual. The textual composite that we see – the mix of advertisements, news articles, postings from friends, and so on – bears little resemblance to what is “transmitted” (if we can even speak in these terms given the overabundance and nonsequential nature of the feed). Rather, past is prologue in a system in which our accreted behaviors inform the textual selection process, and our responses to that selection are incorporated in real time adjustments by a recursive system that privileges factors unknown to the user. To the extent that the system is responsive, strategic, and adaptive, we might consider it intelligent. Alas, that intelligence serves another master, even if it exists in a constitutive relationship to its audience. The second notion of algorithmic audience generates texts‐on‐demand for the user. It is related in a way to the previous discussion of the productive audience, particularly as manifest in navigational work of interactive documentaries. But rather than the user deciding where to go and what to view, the algorithm, again using backlogged user data, anticipates user interests and makes the decision preemptively. It acts as a third party, standing between the audience and the text, and brokering the two by extrapolating insights from user data using it to construct the text. The audience simply experiences a made‐to‐measure linear text, a text that generally masks the fact that it has been compiled on‐the‐fly algorithmically. Lab experiments have recently focused on what might best be described as branching narratives in virtual reality settings. VR goggles equipped with pupil‐trackers calculate what the user is viewing and even extrapolate an assumed level of user interest by observing pupillary dilation and heartrate. These data points add a responsive layer to the more predictive data set acquired from past behaviors, combining to construct an “appropriate” experience for the algorithmically extrapolated audience member. Obviously, this scenario is riddled with significant ethical challenges regarding agency and privacy. The agency issues are currently being played out in the domain of self‐driving cars; but the privacy issues, in which our gaze and ­biomarkers are datafied, interpreted, and presumably monetized as signs of interest, go far beyond the familiar data trails that we are still struggling to contain in policy terms. As mentioned, the curation of the audience‐text relationship is already manifest in various ways with Facebook, music prediction systems like Pandora, and film and television services like Netflix (Uricchio 2017). But the algorithmic creation of texts‐ on‐demand for individual users is here as well, notably in the realm of print. Companies such as Narrative Science, Yseop, and Automated Insights mine and analyze data, using natural language processing to deliver it to the user as story. Although still primarily deployed in business settings, or by the press for structured data sets (sports and finance), they are perfectly capable of reporting on baseball games from the perspective of each of the individual players, targeting uniquely configured stories to each participant. And video production companies such as Magisto aren’t far behind, analyzing shots for content and emotional register, and suggesting edited sequences. Still nascent, these responsive textual systems with



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their algorithmic mediation of the audience pose a new order of questions that will be as relevant to documentary as other media forms. Even if – to the algorithm – the audience appears as both a highly individuated data set and a responsive rule set for textual construction, it nevertheless yields flesh‐and‐blood audiences by recursively producing real‐world texts. It breaks the audience‐text binary by introducing an intermediary element that determines both, and in so doing, marks out a new dynamic that we will have to grapple with. *** James Carey (1989), with a nod to the Lippmann‐Dewey debate, wrote that communication could be conceptualized as transmission, with getting a message from point “a” to point “b” as efficiently and completely as possible.10 And indeed, like Lippmann imagining the technocrats giving the public what it needs to know to maintain symbolic reality, this basic model and its countless variations have ­preoccupied both the academic field and media industry. But Carey offered a second conceptualization: ritual – the sharing, exchanging, and maintaining of symbolic reality. More in line with Dewey’s notions, it’s what people tend to do with the day’s news when standing around the coffee machine, and it has not generally been as central a concern of media scholars or producers. Networked digital media – social media – have done much to change that. Consider the 2014 sale of the Washington Post print and broadcast empire to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos for $250 million (the newspaper itself was closer to only $60 million), and that same year, WhatsApp’s sale to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg for $19 billion. The well‐respected, researched, and written content of the Post was worth a mere fraction of a contentless platform that merely connected and enabled sharing and exchange. To the extent that money reveals cultural priorities, ritual trumps transmission in this brave new world. The historical progression of audience forms from “passive,” to “active,” to “productive,” and even “algorithmic,” can be read in terms of this insight. Documentary makers, consciously or not, make a choice from among these audiences, algorithmic excepted, reflecting their historical moment, their institutional setting, and their vision of human agency. The understanding of audiences as “passive” does best when simple transmission models of communication dominate. The more agency the audience gains, the more tweaking the transmission model needs; and at a certain point, active audience behaviors make better sense when understood as “ritual.” The view of audiences as “productive” generally informs settings where users are expected to work together on a common project, contributing, collaborating, and sharing – a clear case for the ritual model. “Algorithmic” audiences seem to operate differently, recursively inscribing audience activity back into a project of optimized transmission, all while “productively” generating a text. They don’t quite return us to the simple determinism of the passive audience, given their need to individuate and incorporate the individual’s actions. But they do promise a rejuvenated form of effect, often in the form of affect, that has been laying low for a few decades. And like a canary in a coal mine, they alert us of the return of a particular mindset.

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Notes 1 See Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, Joshua Green, Spreadable Media (2013). 2 For a broader discussion of this point in the context of RCDs, see Robert Bellamy, Jr. and James Walker (1996 : 20–21). 3 Sparkwise’s fate is a reminder of the ephemeral and proprietary nature of many new data sources, not to mention the challenge of keeping up with ever‐changing APIs. 4 But one example of the outcomes: Diana Barrett, Sheila Leddy, Emily Verellen Strom (2014) and, founded that same year, the Fledgling Engagement lab (Fledgling Fund n.d.). 5 The Center for Theory of Change represents the latest evolutionary turn of these efforts. 6 These distinctions are hardly clear cut. The availability of platforms such as Kickstarter that enable participation through direct funding and community building might be seen as a form of co‐creation. In this portion of the essay, I am primarily interested in distinguishing the text‐making possibilities of the audience. 7 See also Marie‐Laure Ryan (2004). 8 Radically different examples populate this space, and it is worth noting the Center for Investigative Reporting’s Off/Page and Storyworks projects are each based on partnerships with nontraditional players (YouthSpeak, a literary nonprofit, and Tides Theater, respectively), to report news stories in ways that speak to particular communities. And the Oakland Tribune’s Oakland Voices (with sister projects in Sacramento and Jackson, Mississippi) trains local resident to become multimedia storytellers, expanding the stories told and the community of listeners. 9 For more examples of each, please visit the MIT Open Documentary Lab’s docubase https://docubase.mit.edu, a curated collection of interactive and immersive documentary projects. 10 James Carey, Communication as Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989).

References A Fourth Act. (n.d.). Harvis. http://www.afourthact.com/harvis. Alsever, J. (2015). Is Virtual Reality the Ultimate Empathy Machine?. Wired (November 2015). https://www.wired.com/brandlab/2015/11/is‐virtual‐reality‐the‐ultimate‐empathy‐machine. Barrett, D., Leddy, S., and Verellen Strom, E. (2014). Fledgling Response to Impact Measurement Debate. http://www.thefledglingfund.org/impact‐resources/impact‐measurement‐debate. Barthes, R. (1967). The Death of the Author. Aspen 5–6. Bellamy, R. Jr. and Walker, J. (1996). Television and the Remote Control: Grazing on a Vast Wasteland, 20–21. New York: Guilford Press. Benkler, Y. (2006). The Wealth of Networks. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Cable Television Report and Order, 36 FCC2d 143 (1972). Carey, J. (1989). Communication as Culture. New York: Routledge. Center for Theory of Change. (n.d.). Center for Theory of Change: Setting Standards for Theory of Change. http://www.theoryofchange.org. Dewey, J. (1922 [1983]). Review of Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann. In: John Dewey: The Middle Works 1899–1924, vol. 13, 1921‐1922 (ed. J.A. Boydston), 337–344. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Dewey, J. (1925 [1983]). Practical Democracy: Review of Walter Lippmann’s Book The Phantom Public. In: John Dewey, Philosophy and Democracy: The Later Works 1925–1953, vol. 2, 1925‐1927 (ed. J.A. Boydston), 213–220. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.



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Dewey, J. (1927). The Public and Its Problems. New York: Holt. Domestic Communication Satellite Facilities, 35 FCC2d 844 (1972). Eco, U. (1984). The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Fish, S. (1980). Is There a Text in This Class? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fledgling Fund. (n.d.). The Fledgling Engagement Lab. http://www.thefledglingfund.org/ engagement‐lab. Foucault, M. (1980). What Is an Author? In: Language, Counter‐Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault (ed. D.F. Bouchard). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hall, S. (1980). Encoding/decoding. In: Culture, Media, Language (eds. S. Hall, D. Hobson, A. Lowe and P. Willis), 128–138. London: Hutchman. Harmony Labs. (n.d.). StoryPilot: The Impact of Documentary Media. https://harmonylabs. org/storypilot. Jauss, H.R. (1967). Literaturgeschichte als Provokation der Literaturwissenschaft. Konstanz: Verlag der Druckerei und Verlagsanstalt Konstanz Universitätsverlag GmbH. Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence Culture. New York: NYU Press. Jenkins, H., Ford, S., and Green, J. (2013). Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York: NYU Press. Katz, E. and Lazarsfeld, P. (1955). Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. Klapper, J.T. (1960). The Effects of Mass Communication. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Lasswell, H. (1927). Propaganda Technique in the World War. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lazarsfeld, P., Berelson, B., and Gaudet, H. (1944). People’s Choice. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce. Lippmann, W. (1922). Public Opinion. New York: Macmillan. Lippmann, W. (1925). The Phantom Public. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co. Livingstone, S.M. (ed.) (2005). Audiences and Publics: When Cultural Engagement Matters for the Public Sphere. London: Intellect Press. Manovich, L. (2001). The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Meehan, E. (1984). Ratings and the Institutional Approach. A Third Answer to the Commodity Question. Critical Studies in Mass Communication 1 (2): 216–225. Miller, L. and Cizek, K. (2010). Filmmaker‐in‐Residence: The Digital Grandchild of the Challenge for Change/Société nouvelle Legacy. In: Challenge for Change: Activist Documentary at the National Film Board of Canada (eds. T. Waugh, M.B. Baker and E. Winton), 430. Montreal: McGill‐Queens. Napoli, P. (2011). Audience Evolution: New Technologies and the Transformations of Media Audiences. New York: Columbia. Napoli, P. (2014). Measuring Media Impact. Los Angeles: The Lear Center Media Impact Project. Ryan, M.‐L. (2004). Narrative Across Media: The Languages of Storytelling. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Uricchio, W. (2017). Data, Culture and the Ambivalence of Algorithms. In: The Datafied Society (eds. M.T. Schäfer and K. van Es), 125–138. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press. Uricchio, W. and Pearson, R.E. (1993). Reframing Culture: The Case of the Vitagraph Quality Films. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Williams, R. (1975). Television: Technology and Cultural Form. New York: Schocken Books.

Index

Abe Kōbō, 60 Abenteuer des Till Eulenspiegel, Die (Bold Adventure) (Philipe), 277 Abramovic, Marina, 307 Abstraction‐Creation (group), 64 Academy Awards, 294, 308n “Accident, The” (Richter and Kracauer), 382 Accidents, double‐hit videos, 132–136 Across the Krasnodar Region (Po Krasnodarskomu kraiu) (Stepanova), 88 Activism, 217–237 advent of “then‐new” media and, 219 Arab Spring and, 214, 217, 219–220 Bonus March documentary and, 219, 221, 228, 231 cinema verité approach to, 221 confusion between “two worlds” (real and virtual) in, 219–220 digital, in “democracy” movements, 232n Eisenstein’s “agitational spectacle” concept and, 218 as a “Facebook revolution,” 220, 222, 232n, 233n Ghonim’s online presence in Egyptian protests and, 223–226, 227

“magical powers” of documentary and, 217–218 permanence of online uploads about, 232 social media use in, 222, 226, 230, 231, 232n, 233n Soviet Socialist legacy of, 218–220 Storck’s Misere au Borinage and, 218–219 Tahrir Square protest, Cairo (2011), and, 220–221, 222, 223–225, 226 Workers Film and Photo League movement and, 219, 220–221 Actor Prepares, An (Stanislavski), 322, 323 Actuality distinction between reality and, Tsumura’s films, 52–54, 55, 57–58, 61 Grierson’s creative treatment of, 49, 97, 130, 189, 201n Hanada’s films and, 62–64 rise of digital media and, 144 Rotha’s creative dramatization of, 49, 52, 62n, 64 Actualización política y doctrinaria para la toma del Poder (Doctrinal Update for the Taking of Power) (Solanas and Getino), 444

A Companion to Documentary Film History, First Edition. Edited by Joshua Malitsky. © 2021 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

480 Index Aday, Sean, 233n Adorno, Theodore, 197, 203n, 465–466 Adventures of Marco Polo, The (Mayo and Ford,), 242 Advertising art’s influence on, 305 competing claims of audiences and, 462 French industrial films as, 157, 163n Aerial photography, in Soviet geography documentaries, 75, 82, 83, 86 Africa, Ivens’s Das Lied der Ströme scenes in, 268, 274 African Americans CAD small‐town documentaries on, 19–21, 24n facial recognition software and, 136, 143n racial factors in unmanned capture recognition and, 136–138 racialized surveillance of, 138–141 Warsaw ghetto tour by, in Cold War documentary, 263 African Democratic Assembly (Rassemblement Démocratique Africain, RDA), 32, 33, 44n African students in Paris, Afrique sur Seine on, 27–28, 35–43 Afrique 50 (Vautier), 5–6, 27, 28–35, 36, 38, 39, 40, 41–42, 43n, 44n Afrique occidentale française, L’ (AOF), 29, 43n. See also French West Africa Afrique sur Seine (Africa on the Seine) (Sarr and Vieyra), 27–28, 35–43, 45n life of black African students in Paris portrayed in, 27–28, 35–43 meaning of “Afrique sur Seine,” 35–36, 44n “Agitational spectacle” concept (Eisenstein), 218 Agneau mystique, L’ (The Mystic Lamb) (Cauvin), 295 Agre, Philip, 127, 128–130, 132, 138 Airport (Lockwood), 425 Aitken, Ian, 212, 427 Akerman, Chantal, 307 Akers, Matthew, 307

Akhmatova, Anna, 87 Alcoholism (Jackson), 112 Alechinsky d’apres nature (de Heusch), 301 Alekan, Henri, 161n, 295, 307n Aleksandrov, Grigory, 373 al‐Fergany, Abdel Magid, 124 Allan Memorial Institute, Montreal, 113, 119 Alles dreht sich, alles bewegt sich! (Everything Turns, Everything Revolves) (Richter), 373, 374 All Union Congress of Soviet Writers (1934), 260 Al‐Saleh, A., 233n Alternora, M., 368, 372, 377, 382 Althusser, Louis, 228 Altman, Rick, 78 Alvarez, Santiago, 278 Ambrosio film studios, 244, 414n American Federation of Arts, 295 American‐Jewish Committee, 382 American life Hollywood portrayal of, 10, 12–13, 14, 23n post‐war small‐town propaganda films on, 9–11, 15, 21–22 American Psychological Association, 116 American Scene, The (film series), 9 Amis de l’Art, 298 Anderson, Lindsay, 212 Anderson, Robert, 112, 114, 120n Andrew, Dudley, 242 Angelico, Fra, 297 Animation Disney and plastic qualities of, 356 Eisenstein’s concept of the plasmatic and, 356 Elieas’s use in embryological imaging and, 356–357 Painlevé fiction experiments using, 356 stop‐motion, 348–349, 353, 354, 355 Ankersmit, Frank, 198–201 Anthropological filmmaking, 252 Anthropological turn, 213, 240–241, 247, 248–249, 252

Index Anticolonial documentary, 28 Ivens’s Das Lied der Ströme as, 272–273, 274 participatory ethnography in, 248 Vautier’s Afrique 50’s denunciation of colonial atrocities as, 27, 28–35, 41–42, 43n Vieyra’s Afrique sur Seine’s use of scenes from, 40–41 Anti‐historicism, 227, 228 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 247 Anxiety, mental health films on, 114 Appel, Karel, 301 appendicetomie, L’ (Benoit‐Lévy and Gosset), 360n Aprà, Adriano, 241 Arab Spring Big Data analysis of, 219, 226, 227 misuse of term, 217 online activism in, 214, 217, 219–220 shared activist legacy and, 217 Argos Films, 298 Ariane Productions, 277 Armenfilm, 88 Armenia, Soviet survey film on, 5, 6, 77, 84, 88 Arnheim, Rudolf, 48, 295, 359n Art books, 302–303 Art documentaries, 288, 289, 291–310 acts of creation portrayed in, 293, 300–302 artists biopics in, 240, 298, 302 as cinematic art films, 299–300 documentation of artworks as part of, 306–307 education and, 283, 295–296, 298–300 experimental, 295, 298, 300, 304, 305 Golden Age of, 295–296 happenings and performance art and, 305–306 illustrated art books and, 302–303 major figures in, 296–297 moving image installations and, 307 museum collections and exhibitions recorded in, 303

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new media remediating old media in, 292 origins and prewar development of, 293–295 reproduction in, 292–293 scenics and travelogues as, 293 sculptural films in, 306 television and, 304–305 Artist film genre, 161n Artists art documentaries portraying acts of creation by, 293, 300–302 biopics of, 240, 298, 302 Artists and Models series (Megahey), 302 Asahi Shinbun, 50 Associated Press, 124, 125 Association of Documentary Film Producers, 378 Association pour la documentation photographique et cinematographique dans les sciences, 348, 355–356 Astruc, Alexandre, 247, 367–368 Atelier Collectif de Création, 248 Atget, Eugène, 199 Atlantic Films, 241 Atsugi Taka, 48, 51, 52, 67n Attenborough, Sir David, 395–396 Audiences, 393–398 active and engaged aspects of, 466–470 algorithmic, as receivers or generators of, 473–475 Chinese film industry and, 315 claims and perspectives about, 462 class‐based preferences of, 421–422 communication as transmission and, 475 competing interests of broadcasters and advertisers and, 462 current mediascape and productive aspect of, 470–473 documentaries and, 396–397 documentary funders and impact on, 463 double‐hit video and “human flesh search engines” reactions of, 134 French experience to 1939 with, 431

482 Index Audiences (cont’d) German experience to 1933 with, 432 Hollywood and, 393–394 The Hour of the Furnaces and, 397, 437–438 hunting films and, 408–409 illustrated lectures and, 396, 405 media effects and pliability of, 463–466 militant cinema and, 439, 442–446 question about image authenticity and gullibility of, 395–396, 433 range of theories about, 463 Rosario, Argentina, Mobile Film Units for, 440–442 specially‐built postwar venues for, 423 stop‐motion animation and, 355 types of films for first, second, and third audiences, 423–424 UK experience to 1939 with, 422, 424–428 US experience to 1941 with, 428–430 Au pays des mages noirs (Rouch), 247 Austria, propaganda films for occupation of, 10, 12–13 Auteur film French films and, 147, 149, 159, 298, 368 industrial films and, 148, 149 politique des auteurs in, 149, 150, 156, 157–158 Rossellini and, 239, 242, 252 Third Cinema as alternative to, 457n Author‐Network Theory (AuNT), xvi, 101 Aurora, Gabo, 461 Authorship, 97–105 automatic cameras and, 103, 123–146 corporate films and, 102–103, 147–164 creative responsibility of a film and, 99–100 disputes over legal definitions of, 100–101 Doyen case about image rights of films and, 98–99 Filmessay and, 371 Grierson on documentary and, 97–98, 102 Journées Européenes du film technique et industriel lectures on, 152–154, 159

politique des auteurs in, 149, 150, 156, 157–158 Shub’s invisibility of, in Soviet compilation films, 165–166, 175, 176, 177, 180, 183 state and institutions as, 103, 107–120 “Autobiography of the Wireless” (Fan), 311, 318 Automatic cameras, 103, 123–146 camera consciousness in, 125–126, 127, 142n capture model in, 123, 127–128, 130 cognitive assistance in, 129 double‐hit video examples of, 132–136 drone warfare and, 131–132 free indirect image in, 126–127 gatekeeping in, 125, 136, 142 governance and control in, 128–129 increase in capturability of our actions and worlds in, 129–130 interventional gaze in, 125 photo within a photo of Gaddafi’s capture and, 124–125, 126, 142 racial factors in recognition in, 136–141 role of agency and, 125 witnessing and, 124, 125, 126, 127, 130, 131, 132, 134, 135, 141–142 Automatic microtome, 357–358, 361 Avant‐garde art documentaries and, 110, 294–295 Astruc on, 247 cinema culture intersecting with, 381 Hanada’s influence on, 50, 60, 63–66 Japanese, 324 plasticity and, 339 Vertov’s connections with, 190, 196, 197, 204n Avant‐garde documentary, 189, 467 Hanada on, 64, 65–66 microtome in embryology films and, 359n Avant‐garde film, 361n. See also Experimental film Elsaesser on study of, 149 French, 97 postwar emergency of, 187, 189

Index Richter and, 368, 373, 374–375, 381 Soviet, 190, 195, 196, 197, 204n Avant‐garde film societies, 119 Avant‐garde playwrights, Russia, 167 Avant‐scène cinema, L’, 148, 149, 160 Averty, Jean‐Christophe, 305 Babai zhuangshi (Eight Hundred Heroes) (Ying), 315, 319 Baku Film Studio, 90 Balázs, Béla, 48, 123, 384n Ivens and, 257 period of “visual culture” and, 58 war documentary and, 125–126 Balibar, Étienne, 230 Ballets Africains, 34–35 Ballon Rouge, Le (Lamorisse), 151 Balsom, Erika, 130 Bambach, Charles, 228 Bamberger, Rudolph, 294 bambini ci guardano, I (The Children are Watching Us) (De Sica), 243 Bandera, La (Duvivier), 62 Banksy, 307 Bao, Weihong, 287–288, 311–336 Bao jiaxiang (Defending Our Hometown) (He), 319 Barandi, Lara, 232n Barbe‐bleue (Painlevé), 246 Barney, Matthew, 307 Barroso, Humberto, 441 Barry, Iris, 295 Barthes, Roland, 228, 337, 394, 466 Basquiat, Jean‐Michel, 305 Battle of Algiers, The (Pontecorvo), 450 Battle of Chile, The (Guzman), 125 Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein), 56, 67n, 183n, 273, 427 Bazin, André, 102, 162n, 242, 247, 292, 295 BBC, 275, 302 Becker, Jacques, 31 Bedding, Thomas, 406 Behind the Scenes (Metropolitan Museum of Art), 303 Bélanger, Jean, 153, 154

483

Belcher, Patrick, 15, 16 Bell and Howell, 430 Bellon, Yannick, 161n, 277 Belorussia, Soviet survey film on, 80, 82–83, 85, 86 Ben‐Ghiat, Ruth, 242 Ben‐Hur (Wyler), 242 Benjamin, Walter, 109–110, 199–201, 228, 291, 302, 305 Benoit‐Lévy, Jean, 360n Bentham, Jeremy, 139, 143n Berger, John, 300, 304–305 Beria, Lavrentii, 89 Berlin: Symphonie of a City (Berlin: Die Symphonie der Grossstadt) (Ruttman), 240, 432, 467 Berliner Museen (Cürlis), 303 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 302 Bershen, Wanda, 279 Best Years of Our Lives (Wyler), 113 Beuys, Joseph, 305 Bianco e nero (journal), 244, 295 Biberman, Herbert, 275 Big Data Arab Spring analysis using, 219, 226, 227 unmanned capture collection of, 136–137 Bigger Splash, A (Hazan), 301 Billboard (magazine), 415n Biloxi, Mississippi, CAD film on, 15, 19–21 Biograph Studios, 403, 409, 413n, 415n Biopics, 240, 298, 302 Birth of A Nation, The (Griffith), 18 Black African students in Paris, Vieyra’s documentary on, 27–28, 35–43 Black Americans. See African Americans Black Camera, xiv Blackwood, Michael, 301 Blanchard, André, 150–151, 152 Bliokh, Iakov, 89 Bloch, Ernst, 217 Blue Beard (Painlevé), 355 Boezem, Marinus, 306 Bond, Jack, 301 Bondanella, P., 241 Bonnardot, Claude‐Jean, 161n

484 Index Bonus March, Washington, (1932), 219, 221, 222 Bonus March (Seltzer), 219, 221, 228, 231 Börse als Barometer der Wirtschaftslage, Die (The Stock Exchange as a Barometer of the Economic Situation) (Richter), 371, 372–375, 377, 379, 380, 383, 385n Bosenko, Valeriy, 184n Bossak, Jerzy, 257 Bourbon‐Parme, Erik de, 385n Brand, and French industrial films, 159–160 Bras de la Seine, Les (Bonnardot), 161n Braunberger, Pierre, 157, 298 Braun, Ludwig, 340 Braune, Wilhelm, 340 Breakdown (Anderson), 112, 120n Brecht, Bertolt, 257, 271, 330–331, 373, 376 Breker, Arno, 294 Breughel, Pieter, 295 Brik, Lilya, 177, 184n Briskynorman, 458n British documentary film movement, 3, 67n, 211–212, 244, 424–426 Broadcast medium, linking cinema to, 317–321 Brody, Sam, 221 Brookes (slave ship), 138–139 Browne, Simone, 136–139 Brunetta, G.P., 241 Brunette, Peter, 251 Brunius, Jacques B., 31, 371 Bruzzi, S., 234n Bryan, Julien, 9, 10, 11, 15 Bukatman, Scott, 356 Bulgaria, and Ivens’s The First Years, 259–263 Bull, Lucien, 243 Buñuel, Luis, 64–65 bunka eiga (culture film), 47, 51, 67 Burden, Chris, 305 Bürger, P., 377 Burlington Magazine, 295 Burnett, Graham, 357 Busch, Ernst, 271

Bush, Vannevar, 357–358, 361 Bush, W. Stephen, 404 Bu Wanchang, 319 Bystander effect, 133, 136 Bystander videos, 123, 124–125, 129, 142 Cadbury (company), 425 Cahiers du Cinéma, 242, 247 Cahill, James Leo, xvi, 97–105, 246, 356 Cai Chusheng, 319, 322 Caldwell, John, 318 Camarades (Karmitz), 446 Camera and I, The (Ivens), 281n Camera consciousness, 125–126, 127, 142n Cameras, unmanned. See Automatic cameras Camera‐stylo of filmmaking, 247 Cameron, Kenneth M., 412 Caminati, Luca, xvi, 209, 213, 214, 239–254 caminos de la liberación, Los (The Path of Liberation) (Realizadores de Mayo), 442 Campbell, Russell, 221, 222 Canolle, Jean, 161n Cantagrel, Marc, 154 Cantico delle creature (Emmer), 296 Capitalism, Die Börse as critique of, 372–373 Capra, Frank, 23n Capture, with automatic cameras. See Unmanned capture Capture model, in surveillance, 123, 127–128, 130 Caravaggio, 302 Caribou Hunt, A (Biograph), 403, 409, 413n Caristan, Georges, 36 Caristan, Robert, 36 Carpaccio, Vittore, 296–297 Caspar David Friedrich: Grenzen der Zeit (Schamoni), 302 Castells, M., 232n Casteinau, Paul, Sahara expedition film of, 431 Cauvin, André, 295, 297 Cavalcanti, Alberto, 214, 257, 277, 371 “Propaganda Documentaries” essay, 214, 239–245, 252n

Index Cavarero, Adriana, 142 CCTV, and unmanned capture, 129, 132, 134 Cell phones. See Mobile phones Censorship documentaries on decolonization struggle in French West Africa and, 28, 37–38, 39, 43, 44n editing for, 168, 170 of Ivens’s Das Lied der Ströme, 272 Japanese left in prewar Japan and, 56 prewar Soviet films and, 67n, 75–76, 87, 89, 90, 168, 170, 240, 260 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 346, 353 Central Committee of the Communist Party, 73 Central Film Studio (Zhongdian), Chongqing, China, 314–315, 316 Central Studio of Documentary Film (CSDF, Tsentral’naia studiia dokumental’nykh fil’mov), Soviet Union, 73, 75, 76–77, 78, 80, 82, 84, 87 Centre d’études des problems Humaines du Travail, 153 Centre National de la Cinématographie (CNC), 159 Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, 244, 252n Césaire, Aimé, 41 Ceux de chez nous (Those of Our Land) (Guitry), 293 Cézanne: Dialogue avec Joachim Gasquet (Straub and Huillet), 300 CGI (computer‐generated imagery), 358 Chabrol, Claude, 212 Chalet, Laurent, 100 Challenge for Change programnational Film Board of Canada, 471, 472 Chambre Syndicale des Fabricants de Tubes en Fer et en Acier, 150 Chang (Schoedsack and Cooper), 240, 244, 338, 423 Change Mummified (Rosen), 101 chant du styrene, Les (Resnais), 149, 161

485

Charbonnages de France, 151 Chen Tianguo, 332, 333 Chiang Kai‐shek, 324, 334n Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, 357 Chicago Tribune, 408 China double‐hit and bystander videos in, 132–135, 143n–144n impact of Sino‐Japanese War on, 313–314 Ivens’s visit to, 277–278 television’s introduction in, 311–312 China – Land zwishchen Gestern und Morgen (China, Land between Yesterday and Tomorrow (Huisken), 272 China Motion Picture Corporation (Zhongzhi) Chongqing, China, 314–315, 316, 317, 322 Chinese film Chinese Nationalist regime and, 314, 333n cinema as a broadcast medium and, 317–321 convergence of documentary and feature film in, 315–316 educational films in, 317, 319, 334n epic documentary (ilushi shide dianying) approach in, 316, 324, 330, 331, 334 epic gestures in, 313, 330–333 making of Minzu wansui (Long Live the Nation) and, 321–325 mass mobility and wireless propaganda in, 316–321 physical challenges of shooting in, 323, 328–329 reconstruction of historic events in, 315–316 Shanghai cinema and, 313–314, 315, 317, 322 studios in Chongqing and, 314–315 voices used in, 331–333 wartime propaganda produced by, 314, 315, 316–321 Chongqing cinema, 333n. See also Chinese film

486 Index Chow, Rey, 132 Chris, Cynthia, 100 Christensen, Jerome, 148–149 Christo in Paris (Maysles and Maysles), 306 Christo’s Valley Curtain (Maysles and Maysles), 306 Chronicle of a Summer (Rouch), 44n Chronophotography, 340–356 models constructed with measurements from, 340–341 as precursor to cinema, 340 Chuvashia, Soviet survey film on, 73 Ciba, 375g Cine Liberación Group, 397, 437, 438 Perón interview by, 459n “Towards a Third Cinema” manifesto of, 438, 439, 440 Cinema, chronophotography as precursor to, 340 Cinéma et l’Afrique, Le (Vieyra), 38 Cinéma africain: des origines a 1973, Le (Vieyra), 38 Cinéma‐critique concept, 299 Cinégraphie Documentaire, 431 Cinematographic principle, and imaging in, embryology 341–344 Cinema Journal, xiv Cinema 16, 119, 381 Cinematic Thinking (Eigateki shikō) (Hanada), 61 Cinema verité, 6, 37, 221 “Cinema without Borders” retrospective, 279–280 Cinétest, 102, 150–152, 158, 159, 160 Citizenship mental health and, 111 psy‐disciplines and, 111–112 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 160 Citröen, André, 431 City College of New York (CCNY), Institute of Film Techniques, 378, 380, 381, 334n “City symphony” films, 23n

Civilian Affairs Division (CAD), US Army, 9–10, 12, 13–15, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23n, 24n Civilisation: A Personal View (Clark), 304 Claiming the Real (Winston), xi Clair, Rene, x Clark, Katerina, 83 Clark, Kenneth, 304 Clarke, Bruce, 318 Clément, René, 58, 64 Clert, Claude, 154, 155 Clinical training films, 116–117. See also Mental health films Cloche, Maurice, 303 Cloquet, Ghislain, 37, 40, 248, 300 Close‐ups in art documentaries, 292, 294, 295, 299, 306 in Chinese film, 328, 329 in decolonization struggle in French West Africa, 33–34 in Emmer’s narrative films, 297 in French nature films, 431 in historical films, 242 in post‐war propaganda films, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21 Clouds Over Sidra (Milk), 461 Clouzot, Henri‐Georges, 295, 301, 307n “Club of Cinetravellers, The” (Klub kinoputeshestvennikov) (television show), 90 Coalface (Cavalcanti), 244 COBRA artists, 300, 301 Cognitive assistance, in unmanned capture, 129 Cognitive mapping, 91 Cohen, Jared, 224, 233n Coles Robert, xii Colette (Bellon), 161n Collage Richter’s use of, 382 Russell’s Pop Art film using, 304 Storck’s art films using, 297 Collecting Visible Evidence (Gaines and Renov), xiv

Index College Art Journal, 295 Comandon, Jean, 243, 360n Combat Systems Officers, 131 Comédiens ambulants (Canolle), 161n Comité du Film Ethnographique, 36 Comité Internationale pour la Diffusion des Arts et des Lettres par le Cinéma (CIDALC), 296 Comment Yukong deplaca les montagnes (How Yukong Moved the Mountains) (Ivens), 272, 279–280 Communication, as transmission, 475 Communist Party French (PCF), 29, 30, 32 Soviet, 58, 73, 88, 192 US (CPUSA), 279, 429–430 Community Chest (US Army Civilian Affairs Division), 24n Comolli, Jean‐Louis, 219, 234n Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, A (Juhasz and Lebow), ix–x Compilational editing method, 168, 170, 174, 175 Compilation films, 45n Ivens and, 255, 258, 259, 260, 263, 266, 269, 270 Richter and, 372, 382, 383 Shub and, 165–167, 169, 170, 177–178, 182–183 Snowdon’s The Uprising and, 232 wartime documentaries using, 258 Computer‐generated imagery (CGI), 358 Comte, August, 60 Conceptual Art, 306 Condottieri (Trenker), 241 Congres de l’association pour la documentation photographique et cinematographique dans les sciences, 348, 355–356 Conquerors of the Sea (Pokoriteli moria) (Karmen), 90 Conquest of the Sky (Richter), 374 Cooper, Justine, 357 Cooper, Merian C., 240, 244, 422–423 Copland, Aaron, 11

487

Copyright cultural production and distribution under, 471 French industrial films under, 150, 156–157, 158, 162n Corinth, Lovis, 293 Cornelis, Jef, 305 Corporate films, 102–103, 147–164 conflicts about authorial control in, 152–156 corporate brand and, 159–160 corporate strategy in, 148–149 Elsaesser’s three As in study of, 148 French copyright law and, 150, 156–157, 158 French film d’entreprise and, 147, 148, 160 Ivens and, 258–259 Journées Européenes du film technique et industriel lectures on, 152–154, 159 new film‐producer–sponsor relationship in, 155–159 politique des auteurs and, 149, 150, 156, 157–158 “quality cinema” approach and, 157–158 questions about nature of authorship in, 147–150 SNPA–Cinétest relationship in 1950s and, 150–152 trade papers coverage of, 154–155 various “authors” in, 149–150 Corrigan, Timothy, 368 cosas ciertas, Las (The Real Situation) (Solanas and Getino), 440 Cosmopolitan Slide Makers, 407–408 Cossacks of the Kuban (Kubanskie kazaki) (Pyryev), 87, 88 Coulibaly, Ouezzin, 33 “Course of Realism, The” (Grierson), 202n Courtot, Robert, 150–151, 159, 160 Cousteau, Jacques, 338 Council on Inter‐Cultural Affairs, 9 Couretnilo, 191, 203n Cowan, Michael, x, 319 Crafting Truth (Spence and Navarro), ix Crafton, Don, 361n

488 Index Cramer, Michael, 239, 240 Crary, Jonathan, 130 Crime ne paie pas (film), 241 Critical realism, 203n Critofilms, 299 Critique of Pure Reason (Hegel), 62 Croce, Benedetto, 241 Croisière Noire, La (The Black Journey) (Poirier), 240, 244, 431 Crow, James Francis, 338 Crowther, Bosley, 338 CSDF (Central Studio of Documentary Film), Soviet Union, 73, 75, 76–77, 78, 80, 82, 84, 87 Cullnicholas J., 22n Cultural forms and producers documentaries on decolonization struggle in French West Africa and, 34–35 Cultural identity, and colonization of French West Africa, 28 Cultural institutions, colonization of French West Africa and, 27, 28 Cultural life, French anticolonial movement and, 30–31 Cummington Story, The (Grayson), 10–12, 22, 24n Cunby Bros., 406 Cürlis, Hans, 293, 294, 303 Curtis, Edward, 434n Czech national cinema, 3, 259 Czechoslovakia, and Ivens’s The First Years, 259–263 Dadascope Part I and Part II (Richter), 382 Dali in New York (Bond), 301 Dalu (The Big Road) (Sun), 322 Damico, Justin, 140 Damned, The (Les maudits) (Clément), 58, 64 Daniélou, Alain, 251 Danto, Arthur, 193, 200, 203n Daphe (Unfinished) (Rossellini), 243 Daquin, Louis, 33 D’Arboussier, Gabriel, 33

Dark Matter (Browne), 138 Das Gupta, Sonali, 251 Dassin, Jules, 58, 64 Database cinema digital cinema and, 109 subject catalog and numbered title of government films as, 109 Database documentary, government use of, 103 Dataveillance, 139 Datlowe, Samuel, 19 Dauman, Anatole, 298 David, Jacques‐Louis, 302 Dead Birds (Gardner), 338 de Antonio, Emile, 301 Debord, Guy, 160 Debussy, Claude, 304 De Castro, Josué, 250 Decolonization, documentaries on struggle for, in French West Africa, 27–46 Decostere, Stefaan, 305 DEFA (Deutsche Film‐Aktiengesellschaft), 257, 263, 264, 265–266, 269, 274, 277, 280n Degas, Edgar, 293 de Heusch, Luc, 301 Dekeukeleire, Charles, 294–295 Deleuze, Gilles, 126, 142n, 200, 204n Delvaux, Paul, 297–298 De Maria, Walter, 306 De Mayerling à Sarajevo (Faurez), 151 Democracy belief in cinema as a means for developing, 381, 382 impact of unmanned capture on, 142 post‐war propaganda films portraying, 11, 13–14, 15–16, 17, 18, 19–22 Richter’s Filmessay as educational tool for, 376, 380–381 Depression, mental health films on, 112, 114, 116, 117–119 Depressive States: 2 (Mental Symptoms No. 7), 112, 117–119 De Renoir a Picasso (Haesaerts), 299 Deriabin, Aleksandr, 170–171, 184n

Index Derrida, Jacques, 198 De Seta, Vittorio, 247 De Sica, Vittorio, 247 Design Review (journal), 294 Deslandes, Jacques, 369 Deutsche Film‐Aktiengesellschaft (DEFA), 257, 263, 264, 265–266, 269, 274, 277, 280n Dewey, John, 376, 465, 467, 470, 475 d’Hauteville, Georges, 150–151, 152 Dianying yu boyin (Film and Broadcasting) (journal), 317–318 Diawara, Manthia, 44n Dibbets, Jan, 306 Diehl, Gaston, 298, 299 Digital cinema, 109, 358 Digital culture impact of overuse of, 134–135 unmanned culture and, 127 Direct cinema, xiii, 6, 211, 258, 266, 306, 397 Discourse (journal), xiv Disney, Walt, 245, 356 Disney Studios animations of, 243, 244, 356 animal movies of, 245, 246, 433 Eisenstein’s writings on, 361n Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, 355, 428–429 True‐Life Adventures, 100, 245, 394 Displacement, in Vieyra’s Afrique sur Seine, 35–43 Di Vittorio, Guiseppe, 265 Dix, Otto, 293 Doc Impact awards, 395 Documenta 11 art exhibition (2002), 307 Documentality government production of mental health films and, 107–120 Steyerl’s concept of, 103, 197 Documentaires romancés, 431 Documentarians as caretakers, 165–186 Documentaries annual Robert J. Flaherty Award for, 381 Cavalcanti’s articles on, 239–245

489

compilation films as, 45n first use of the word by Grierson, 187–188, 375, 203n, 240 documentary movement and, 211, 212, 307 Grierson’s definition of, xi–xii, 49, 187–188, 189, 190, 191, 348, 394 Nichols’s definition of, xi prominent role in the contemporary zeitgeist of, ix Richter on social role of, 375, 376, 381 substantial growth in scholarship on, ix–x Documentary activism. See Activism Documentary Film (Rotha), 48, 49, 50–51, 54 Documentary Film Book, The (Winston), ix, 211 Documentary Film News, 378 Documentary Film Producers Association, 378 Documentary Film Reader, The (Kahana), ix Documentary Moment, The (Malitsky and Sjoberg), ix Documentary Movement, United Kingdom, 3, 67n, 211–212, 244, 424–426 “Documentary Producer, The” (Grierson), 97, 201n Documentary seriality, 108, 120 Doing Documentary Work (Coles), xii Dolidze, S., 73 Doméla, César, 298 Domitor, 413n Dotremont: Les logogrammes (de Heusch), 301 Double‐hit videos, 132–136 D’ou vient‐il? (Zecca), 197 Doyen, Eugène‐Louis, 98–99, 100, 104n, 203n Dramma di Cristo, Il (Emmer and Gras), 296, 297 Dreams That Money Can Buy (Richter), 382 Dreyer, Carl Theodor, 295, 308n Drifters (Grierson), 427 Drone porn, 127

490 Index Drone warfare, 131–132, 139, 143n Drug Addict (Anderson), 112 Druick, Zoë, 3, 102, 103, 107–120 Drums Along the Mohawk (film), 141 Du und mancher Kamerad (You and Many a Comrade) (Thorndike), 269 Dulac, Germaine, 243, 295, 359n Duchamp, Marcel, 357 Dumaitre, André, 161n Duncan, Catherine, 257, 259, 261, 269 Dunlop, Geoff, 305 Dupre, Jeff, 307 Durand & Huguenin, 371 Dushi fengguang (Scenes of City Life) (Yuan), 319 Duvivier, Julien, 62, 242 Ediciones del Pueblo, 458n Editing authorial status of, 167, 175, 176, 177 as caretaking, 167, 180–183 Chinese film and, 319–320, 323 collective labor aspect of women’s work in, 175–180 Eisenstein on creative authorship aspect of, 178 gendered aspect of women’s role in, 166, 167, 175–177, 180, 181–182, 184 of Ivens’s Das Lied der Ströme, 269–270 montage and, 166, 167, 174 photographer as gatekeeper in, 125 as revision and preservation, 167–174 Richter’s film on, 380 role of montagesses in, 167, 182, 183 Shub’s compilational approach to, 168, 170, 174, 175 Editors as caretakers, 167, 180–183 gendered aspect of women’s role as, 166, 167, 175–177, 180, 181–182, 184 as montagesses, 167, 172, 175–176, 179, 182, 183, 185n Education art documentaries and, 283, 295–296, 298–300

Elias’s use of embryological cinema in, 346–356 progressive, and Richter’s Filmessay, 376–377 Vautier’s Afrique 50 on French West Africa made for use in, 29, 30 Vieyra’s Afrique sur Seine on life of black African students in Paris, 27–28, 35–43 Educational filmmaking Chinese film and, 317, 319, 334n Chinese Nationalist regime and, 314–315 European avant‐garde filmmakers in New York and, 381 National Film Board of Canada and institutionalization of, 107–108 Educational Studio (Zhongjiao), Chongqing, China, 314 Education for Democracy (Richter), 380 Eggeling, Viking, 384n Egypt Ghonim’s online presence during protests in, 223–226, 227 Tahrir Square protest (2011) in, 219, 220–221, 222 Eisenstein, Sergei, x, 48, 67n, 102, 368 “agitational spectacle” concept of, 218 Battleship Potemkin, 56, 67n, 183n, 273, 427 “Laocoön” manuscript, 178, 180 October, 169, 171 plasmatic concept of, 356, 361n Richter as student of, 378 Rotha’s dialectical approach and, 49, 57 Shub’s editing and, 165, 166, 167, 168–169, 171, 177–179, 180, 181, 184n, 191 sound in film and, 373 Strike, 183n, 218 writings on Disney, 361n Eisler, Hanns, 257 Electrician and Mechanic (magazine), 413n Eleventh Hour, The (Vertov), 171 Elgar, Edward, 304 Elias, Hans, 360n

Index educational embryological cinema and, 346–356, 359n Evolutio Ovi Amphibiorum, 346, 349–356, 351, 352, 355 stereology imaging used by, 361n stop‐motion animation used by, 348–349, 353, 354, 355 teaching career of, 345, 353 Elmendorf, Dwight, 404, 406 Elsaesser, Thomas, 149, 312, 368, 369, 370, 381 Eluard, Paul, 297 Elliptical imagination (daen gensō) concept, 66 Elmahdawy, Hadeer, 233n Elsaesser, Thomas, 149, 312, 368, 369, 370, 381 Elton, Arthur, 240 Embryology devices for drawing serial images in, 341, 342 drawing of sections in, 341, 343 golem etymology related to, 358 microtomes used in, 341–342, 357–358, 359n similarities between cinematograph film images and, 341–344 visualization techniques in, 344–345 wax‐plate modeling in, 344, 348, 352 Embryology films, 287, 338–366 animation and, 356–357 Elias and development of, 346–356, 359n fly‐through images in, 345 history of, 338–339 media‐archaeological method in, 339–340 media boundaries in, 339 plasticity in, 339, 356–358 reliance on different formats in, 287 time‐lapse images in, 345, 348–349, 359n Emmer, Luciano, 295, 296–297, 298, 299, 304, 308n Empire Film Company, 414n, 415n Empire Marketing Board (EMB), United Kingdom, 3, 4, 98, 102, 244, 424–425, 426

491

Enrico, Robert, 148 Ensink, Ella, 266–267, 269 Entwicklung der Blüte, Allium fallax (Flower Development, A. fallax) (Elias), 348 Entwicklung der Blüte, Tollkirsche (Atropa belladonna) (Flower Development, Belladonna) (Elias), 348–349, 350, 354 Enwezor, Okwui, 307 Epic documentary (ilushi shide dianying), China, 316, 324, 330, 331, 334 Epic gestures, in Chinese documentaries, 313, 330–333 Epstein, Jean, 48, 148, 368 Erice, Victor, 301 Ermler, Fridrikh, 334n Ernst, Max, 298 Ernst, Wolfgang, 369 Escandelnoemí, 441 Esprit (journal), 273 Essanay Studios, 403 Essay films, 6, 367–374. See also Filmessay art documentaries as, 300 development of early cinema and, 368–369 Richter and, 288, 367–368 Shub’s compilation films as, 166 ETH Zürich, Institute for Scientific Photography, 346, 349 Et la neige n’était plus . . . (Samb‐ Makharam), 36 Europa ‘51 (Rossellini), 242 Evolutio Ovi Amphibiorum (Elias), 346, 349–356, 351, 352, 355 Excelsior Slide Company, 406 Exit Through the Gift Shop (Banksy), 307 Experimental cultural production, and Cine Liberación concept, 439 Experimental film, 40, 187, 189, 190. See also Avant‐garde film art documentaries as, 295, 298, 300, 304, 305 Japanese, 47, 50, 66, 68 mainstream filmmakers learning from, 361n

492 Index Experimental film (cont’d) Richter and, 382 Soviet, 191–192, 193, 194, 197, 202n US, 375, 378, 380, 381, 382 Export, Valie, 305 Extraordinary Encounters (Neobyknovennye vstrechi) (Ovanesova), 90 Fabiani, Henri, 150, 151 “Fabrika Faktov” (Vertov), 184n Facebook, Egyptian protestors’ use of, 223, 225, 226, 233n “Facebook revolution,” Middle East protests as, 220, 222, 232n, 233n Facial recognition software, 136, 143n “Factory Occupations” section, The Hour of the Furnaces (Solanas and Getino), 446–448, 455, 456 Fahrenheit 9/11 (Moore), 433 Falkenberg, Paul, 301, 306 Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, The (Shub), 169–170, 171, 172–174 Family of Man, The (Steichen), 274 Fan Houqin, 311, 318 Fanon, Frantz, 41, 439 Fantasia sottomarina (Undersea Fantasy) (Rossellini), 242, 243, 244–246 Farcy, Jean, 154 Farocki, Harun, 232, 307 Fascism, Italian, 241–242, 246–243, 246, 324, 359n Faurez, Jean, 150, 151, 152, 159–160, 161n Fédération des étudiants d’Afrique noire en France (FEANF), 44n Fédération internationale des Archives du Film (FIAF), 296, 339 Fédération Internationale du Film sur l’Art (FIFA), 296, 300 Fédération Internationale du Film d’Art, 292 Feeling of Hostility, The (Mental Mechanisms series), 114, 120n Feeling of Rejection, The (Mental Mechanisms series), 112, 113–114, 115, 117, 119 Feelings of Depression (Mental Mechanisms series), 114

Fellini, Federico, 247 FEPACI (Fedération Panafricaine des Cinéastes), 37 Ferno, John, 378 Fernsehgallery (Schum), 305, 306 FESPACO, 38, 45n Festival international du film industrial (1960), Rouen, 158 Feuer, Jane, 318 FIAF (Fédération internationale des Archives du Film), 296, 339 Fibers and Civilization (Jacobs), 338 FIFA (Fédération Internationale du Film sur l’Art), 296, 300 Fight films, 413n, 415n Fight for Life, The (Lorentz), 338 Fighting Soldier (Fumio), 47 Fileri, Paul, 5–6, 27–46 Film and Broadcasting (Dianying yu boyin) (journal), 317–318 Film Culture (magazine), 379–380 Film d’entreprise and film fonctionnel, 147, 148, 160 Filmessay, 367–369, 378 aftermath of, 381–383 attempts to further develop and adapt, 379 aesthetic features of, 370 as an educational tool for democratic citizenship, 376–377, 381 examples of, 371–372 noncinematic antecedents of, 369 references to, in US books, 381–382 Richter on as a “new” type of documentary, 369, 371–372, 375, 381 Richter on “straight” documentary compared with, 367 Richter’s contribution to founding of, 367–368 Richter’s Die Börse and, 371, 373–375, 383, 385n Richter’s picture sheet to be used with, 379, 382 Richter’s teaching with, 380

Index as type of “postdocumentary” film practice, 368 unrealized documentary film projects and, 380 use of term, 369, 383n Film Form (Eisenstein), 281n Film History (journal), xiv Film Law, Japan, 47, 48, 50 Film production companies film genres shaped by, 78 French industrial films and, 149, 152, 159 Film Quarterly, xiv Film Sense (Eisenstein), 281n Film Settlement Administration, United States, 434 Films Caravelle, Les, 155 Films de la Pleiade, Les, 298 Films Ganayssa, 153 Films Jean Mineur, Les, 151, 161n Film Theory (eiga no riron) (Iwasaki), 59 Film till Now, The (Rotha), 3 Film War (Tsumura), 50 “First Principles of Documentary” (Grierson), 49, 97, 201n First Spring, The (Pervaia vesna) (Medvedkin), 90 First Years, The (Pierwsze lata) (Ivens), 255, 257, 259–263, 262, 264, 267, 276 Fischer, Otto, 340 Fischinger, Oskar, 384n Fishermen of the Caspian Sea (Rybaki Kaspiia) (Bliokh), 88 Fiske, John, 123, 139, 142 FitzPatrick, James A., 78 FitzPatrick, Sheila, 87 Fitzpatrick Travelogues (film series), 241 Flaherty, Robert, 239–240, 243, 252n, 258, 295, 372, 375, 378, 379 Moana, 97, 203n, 240, 244, 338, 422 Nanook of the North, xiii, 102, 149, 239–240, 244, 338, 422, 431 Richter and, 381 The Titan, 294, 308n Flaherty Award, CCNY, 381 Flanagan, Barry, 306

493

Flashback technique, in mental health films, 113, 114 Fleischer, Alain, 303 Flusser, Vilém, 313, 326–327, 328–330, 331, 332, 334n, 335n Fly‐through images, in embryology, 345 Fodéba, Keita, 34, 41, 44n Fogo Island Projectnational Film Board of Canada, 471 Fontaine, David, 100 Ford, John, 242 Ford Foundation, 469 Formalism, Russian, 210 Forman, Helen, 421, 433n Form of Film Art, The (Eiga geijutsu no keishiki) (Imamura), 55, 61 40 Years of Experiment (Richter), 382, 385n Foucault, Michel, xvi, 108, 110–111, 117, 128, 143n, 198, 228, 288, 369, 466 400 Million, The (Ivens), 267 Francastel, Pierre, 295 France. See also French documentary cinema audience experience to 1939 in, 431 decolonization struggle in West Africa and, 27–46 Franju, Georges, 147, 148, 161n Frankfurt School cultural theory, 217, 465 Fratelli miracolosi (Emmer and Gras), 296 Frauennot (Frauenglück) (Eisenstein), 361n Freddi, Luigi, 242 Free Cinema movement, 212 Free indirect discourse, 42, 126 Free indirect image, 126–127 Free indirect subjective, 126 Freeman, Morgan, 100 French Communist Party (Parti Communiste Français, PCF), 29, 30, 32 French documentary cinema film d’entreprise and film fonctionnel in, 147, 148, 160

494 Index French documentary cinema (cont’d) decolonization struggle in West Africa in, 27–46 denunciation of colonial atrocities in Afrique 50 in, 27, 28–35, 41–42 life of African students in Paris in Afrique sur Seine in, 27–28, 35–43 French New Wave, 213 French Resistance, 35 French West Africa, 27–46, 267 denunciation of colonial atrocities in Afrique 50 in, 27, 28–35, 41–42 documentaries on decolonization struggle in, 27–46 life of African students in Paris in Afrique sur Seine on, 27–28, 35–43 political organization of, 28, 43n Freundschaft (Friendship) (Ivens), 264, 265–266, 281n Friedensfahrt (Peace Tour) (Ivens), 264, 265, 266 Friedman, Thomas L., 232n Friedrich, Caspar David, 302 Friendship (Freundschaft) (Ivens), 264, 265–266, 281n From Caligari to Hitler (Kracauer), 210, 381 From Tree Trunk to Head (Jacobs), 338 Frunze Newsreel Studio, 76 Furuhata, Yuriko, 53, 356 Fu Zuoyi, 328 Gadamer, Hans‐Georg, 198 Gadassik, Alla, 100, 101–102, 103, 165–186 Gaddafi, Muammar, 124–125, 126, 142 Gaines, Jane M., xvi, 209, 213, 214, 217–237 Gallagher, T., 250 Gallone, Carmine, 241, 242 Galloway, Alexander, 357 Gan, Alexei, 167, 183n Ganda, Oumarou, 42 Gardner, Robert, 338 Garner, Eric, 140 Gatekeeping, in unmanned capture, 125, 136, 142 Gates, The (Maysles and Maysles), 306

Gaudreault, André, 345, 369 Gauguin (Resnais), 298 Gaumont‐British Magazine (film series), 241 Gavrilina, Zoia, 90 Gaycken, Oliver, 287, 337–366 “Gaz de Lacq, Le” (Faurez), 151 Geburt der Farbe, Die (The Birth of Color) (Richter), 371 Geertz, Clifford, 249 Geigy, 371 General Line, The (Eisentstein’), 427 General Post Office (GPO) Film Unit, United Kingdom, 18, 244, 245, 424, 425, 429 Geographical documentary, 5, 71–93 aerial and landscape shots in, 75, 82, 83, 86 growth in number made, 71–72 institutions and studios producing, 76–79 nature and travel films (vidovoi) in, 72, 73, 74, 77–79, 80–81, 83, 85, 89–90, 91 patriotism theme in, 73, 75, 84–86 political climate and, 87–88 soundtrack in, 83–84, 90 Stalin’s personality cult and, 88–89 survey (obzornye) films and, 73–75, 80, 81–83, 89 topographical aesthetic of, 5, 75–76, 90–91 Zhdanovism and, 5, 75–76, 78, 86–87 Georges de la Tour, peintre oublié (Faurez), 161n Georgia, Soviet survey film on, 5, 73, 77, 80, 82, 86, 88 Gerasimov, Sergei, 277 Germany audience experience to 1933 in, 432 small‐town propaganda films for occupation of, 10, 12–13, 15 Germany Year Zero (Rossellini), 242 Gerstner, David, 100 Gestus, Brecht’s theory of, 330–331 Getino, Octavio, 394, 459n Cine Liberación Group and, 438, 441

Index The Hour audiences and, 437, 440–441, 444, 448, 449, 458n The Hour production by, 397, 439–440 “Towards a Third Cinema” manifesto of, 438, 440 Ghonim, Wael, 223–226, 227, 233 Gilbert and George, 305 Gillette, Pierre, 151, 159 Gimme Shelter (film), 125 Giornate del cinema muto, 192 Giotto, 296, 297 Glass Eye, The (Brik), 177 Godard, Jean‐Luc, 147, 148, 157, 228, 252, 307 Goebbels, Joseph, 432 Goldwyn, Sammy, 393, 394 Good Samaritan laws, 133, 135 Gordon, Douglas, 307 “Gorgon Stare” video capture platform, 131 Gorky, Maxim, 79 Gormley, Antony, 305 Goskino Film Factory, 168, 172n, 183n Gosset, Dr., 360n Governmentality, and documentary, 110–111 Government documentary. See State‐sponsored documentaries Grande illusion, La (Renoir), 62 Grande Lutte des mineurs, La (Daquin), 33 Grass (Schoedsack and Cooper), 240, 244, 338, 422 Gras, Enrico, 296 Gray, Freddie, 138 Gray, Jonathan, 102 Grayson, Helen, 11 Great Citizen, The (Ermler), 334n Great Lion Hunt, The (Miles Bros.), 409, 415n Great Northern, 414n, 415n Greenaway, Peter, 307 Gregory, Derek, 131 Grelier, 269–270, 281n Grémillon, Jean, 295, 307n Grenadiers de Lessach, Les (Faurez), 161n Griaule, Marcel, 36, 45n Grierson, John, 338, 371, 378, 428

495

account of first film seen by, 202n audience and, 394–395, 426 authorship and, xv, 97–98, 102 Cavalcanti’s relationship with, 244 ”The Course of Realism,”, 202n creative treatment of actuality and, 49, 97, 130, 189, 201n definition of documentary by, xi–xii, 49, 187–188, 189, 190, 191, 348, 394 documentary movement and, 211, 212, 307 “The Documentary Producer,” 97, 201n documentary used for propaganda by, 240 Drifters, 427 Empire Marketing Board (EMB), 48, 98, 102, 244, 424–425, 426 “First Principles of Documentary,” 49, 97, 201n first use of the word documentary by, 187–188, 375, 203n, 240 GPO Film Unit and, 425 Japanese documentary film theory and, 48, 49, 52, 54, 66 on Moana, 338 National Film Board of Canada, 98, 102 on Nanook of the North‘s success, 422 Richter’s work and, 375–376 sponsored films and, 258, 425 Grieveson, Lee, 4 Griffith, D. W., 19, 368, 410 Griffith, Richard, 338 Grigor’ev, Roman, 90 Grigoriev, R., 74 Grimshaw, Anne, 240 Gronas, Mikhail, 179 Groper, William, 293 Gross, Chaim, 338 Grosse Museum, Das (Holzhausen), 303 Grosz, George, 293 Groupe Africain du Cinéma, 27–28, 35, 36–39, 41–42, 43 Groupe Octobre, 31, 35–43 Groupe des Trente, 154, 433 Grupo Pueblo, 440–441, 443, 445, 449–450, 458n, 459n

496 Index Guazzoni, Enrico, 242 Gu Bingzhi, 322 Guernica (Resnais), 298, 300 Guevara, Che, 446 Guglielmi, Jean, 148 Guitry, Sacha, 293 Gunning, Tom, 358, 359n Guzman, Patricio, 125 Haas, Philip, 305, 306 Haesaerts, Paul, 296, 300, 301, 304 Haffner, Pierre, 45n Hagener, Malte, x, xvi–xvii, 278, 285–289, 339, 375 Hammid, Alexander, 380, 381 Hanada Kiyoteru, 6, 50, 53, 60–65, 66, 67, 356 Haniya Yutaka, 60 Hankinson, Michael, 112, 113 Hansen, Mark B. N., 224–225, 226, 227, 229 Han Shangyi, 323 Happenings, 305 Harmon, William, 334n–335n Harney, Stefano, 141 Hartung, Hans, 298 Harvey, David Oscar, 372 Hazan, Jack, 301 He Feiguang, 319 Hegel, G.W.F., 53, 60, 62, 67n Heidegger, Martin, 228, 331, 334n, 335n Heilbehandlung von Kunstwerken (Cürlis), 303 Heizer, Michael, 306 Hemingway, Ernest, 269 Hemsing, Albert, 378 Henabery, Joseph, 19 Heroes for Sale (Wellman), 52 Hessens, Robert, 298 Het nieuwe Rijksmuseum (Hoogendijk), 303 Heusch, Luc de, 301 hijos de Fierro, Los (Children of Fierro) (Solanas), 446 Hildebrandt, Sabine, 361n Hinterland cinema, 333n. See also Chinese film

hippocampe, L’ (The Seahorse) (Painlevé), 246, 431 Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, xiv Hockney, David, 301 Holder, Eric H. Jr., 140 Holliday, George, 142 Hollywood film audiences and, 393–394 emergence of, 188 racial aspects of colonial settlement portrayed by, 141 ropaganda films for occupied countries and, 10, 12–13, 14, 16 Third Cinema as alternative to, 457n Holman, C. Hugh, 334n–335n Holmes, Burton 404, 406, 413n Holzhausen, Johannes, 303 hommes de la nuit, Les (Fabiani), 151 Hoogendijk, Oeke, 303 Hopwoodnick, 338, 344, 345 Horak, Jan‐Christopher, 377 Hostility, mental health film on, 114, 120n Houphouet‐Boigny, Félix, 33 Hour of the Furnaces, The (La hora de los hornos) (Solanas and Getino), 397, 437 audience debates after screening of, 448–451 reception for “Factory Occupations” section of, 446–448, 455, 456 Rosario Mobile Film Units for, 440–442, 448, 449, 450 Rosario Report, 449, 450, 451–457 of Cinema, Moscow, 75, 81, 84 Hoveyda, Fereydoun, 251 How to Cut a Film (Richter), 380 Hughes, Robert, 304 Huhtamo, Erkki, 369 Huillet, Danièle, 300, 303 Huisken, Joop, 257, 266, 272 “Human flesh search engines” reaction to double‐hit videos, 134 Hunting Big Game in Africa (Selig), 408–409, 410, 411

Index Hunting Deer (film), 409 Huoshan qingxue (The Blood of Passion on the Volcano) (Sun), 322 Hurwitz, Leo, 275, 378 Huston, John, 112, 113, 120n Huxley, Julian, 337 Huyghe, Pierre, 307 Hysteron proteron, 195 Iampolski, Mikhail, 204n Ibrahim, Lam, 44n Idel, Moshe, 358 IDHEC (Institut des hautes etudes cinématographiques), 28, 36, 152, 157, 158 IECI (International Educative Cinematography Institute), 350. 359n Image et son (Ivens), 271 Image grabbing, 125 Images de l’ancienne Egypte (Cloche, 303 Imamura, Taihei, 6, 49, 52, 55–60, 61, 62, 68n Impulse program, Austria, 305 INCOM (Industrie Corto Metraggi), 242–243, 245 India, Rossellini’s trip to, 247, 249–252 India Matri Bhuma (Rossellini), 247, 251 India vista da Rossellini, L’ (Rossellini), 247, 249 Indonesia Calling (Ivens), 255, 259, 267 Industrial Film Festival (1958), Rouen, 159 Industrial films. See Corporate films Industrials, in programming, 402 Inflation (Richter), 372, 374, 379, 380 Innis, Harold, 321 “Inscribing Ethical Space” (Sobchack), 125 Institut des hautes etudes cinématographiques (IDHEC), 28, 36, 152, 157, 158 Institute for Scientific Photography, ETH Zürich, 346, 349 Institute of Film Techniques, CCNY, 378, 380, 381, 334n Institute of Peace (USIP), 226, 227 Institut fur Kulturforschung, Berlin, 293

497

International Art Film Congresses, 296 International Art Film Federation (IAFF), 295, 296 International Competition for Scientific Cinematography, Como (1936), 353 International Council of Museums (ICOM), 303 International Democratic Women’s Federation (IDFF), 277 Internationale Arbeiterhilfe (IAH), 220–221, 429 International Educative Cinematography Institute (IECI), 346, 359n International Experimental Film Congress, Toronto (1989), 384n International Institute of Films on Art (IIFA), 296 International Society of Stereology, 361n Interventional gaze, 125 Invenzione della croce, L’ (Emmer and Gras), 296 Irish Scenes and Types (Urban), 403, 413n Islands (Maysles and Maysles), 306 Isou, Isidore, 40 Istanbul Film Festival (2012), 234n Italian film, 239–254 Fascism and, 241–242, 246–243, 246, 324, 359n neorealism and, 210, 239, 240, 241–242 Rossellini’s early animal documentaries and, 242–244 Rossellini’s narrative documentaries and, 244–246 Italy, ropaganda films for occupation of, 10, 12–13 It’s Up to You (Richter), 380, 385n Ivens, Joris, x, 31, 217, 255–280, 375, 378 censorship and, 272 China visit of, 277–278 Cold War background to, 256–257 collaborators of, 257–258, 259, 266–267 compilation used by, 255, 258, 259, 260, 263, 266, 269, 270 congress film cycle of, 213–214, 257–258, 263–264

498 Index Ivens, Joris (cont’d) “event film” commissions for, 262–263 The First Years, 255, 257, 259–263, 262, 264, 267, 276 Freundschaft (Friendship), 264, 265–266, 281n IDFF commissions for, 277 Indonesia Calling, 255, 259, 267 Misere au Borinage, 218–219, 267 Peace Tour (Friedensfahrt), 264, 265, 266 Peace Will Win (Pokój zdobędzie świat), 255, 263–264, 265, 266, 267 personalization used by, 260, 261 Power and the Land, 4, 23n, 260 socialist realism and, 256, 258–264 Song of the Rivers (Das Lied der Ströme), 40, 91, 214, 255–256, 258–259, 260, 267–270, 271, 272, 273 Iwasaki Akira, 59–60, 61 Jackson, Stanley, 112 Jackson Pollock (Falkenberg and Namuth), 301, 306 Jacobs, Lewis, 337–338, 378, 380 Jacobs, Steven, 288, 291–310 Jacobson, Brian R., 102–103, 147–164 Jacoby, Irving, 378 Jacquet, Luc, 99–100 Jäger, Jorge, 459n Jaguar (Rouch), 248, 249 J’ai fait un beau voyage (Rossellini), 247, 249 James, William, 15 Jameson, Fredric, 204n, 228, 240 Jamestown Exposition (Biograph), 415n Japan, propaganda films for occupation of, 10, 12–13, 15–16, 19, 21 Japanese documentary film theory, 47–70 avant‐garde documentary and, 64, 65–66 debates on the Griersonian conception of documentary in, 48, 49, 52, 54, 66 film critics’ interpretation of Rotha’s work in, 49–50 Hanada’s sur‐documentary in, 50, 60–65

Imamura’s influence in, 55–60 introduction of term documentary to, 48 Rotha’s theories and, 6, 48–57, 59, 61–64, 67–70 signal events in, 47 Tsumura’s influence in, 50–54 Jarvis, Lucy, 303 Jeannot, Fred, 158 Jeniček, Jiři, 3, 4 Jenkins, Henry, 229, 470 Jennings, Humphrey, 368 Jewish Anti‐Fascist Committee, Soviet Union, 87 Jézéquel, Sydney, 148 Ji Nazhe, 316 Jinling University, 314, 317 Johnson, Jack, 405 Johnson, Martin, 4–5, 9–25 Jones, Caroline, 306 Jones, Buffalo, 412 Jordaens, Jacob, 295 Jordan, G., 264, 265, 266, 269, 270, 272, 273, 280n Journal of the American Medical Associations, 115 Journal of Visual Culture, xiv Journées Européenes du film technique et industriel (1958), Rouen, 152–154, 159 Joy of Difficult Paths, The (Schast’e trudnykh dorog) (Grigor’ev and Posel’skii), 90 Juhasz, Alexandra, ix–x, xi Kahana, Jonathan, ix, xi, 4, 23n, 202n Kahn, Albert, 358n Kalatozov, Mikhail, 78 Kalem Company, 405, 414n Kalinin, Mikhail, 84 Kamchatka, Soviet film on expedition to, 80, 81, 83 Kamei Fumio, 47 Kampf um den Film, Der (The Struggle for the Film), (Richter), 375, 376 Kandinsky, Wassily, 293 Kane, Jacques Mélo, 36

Index Kapchinskii, Mikhail, 87 Karel Appel (Vrijman), 301 Karmen, Roman, 73, 77, 82, 89, 90 Karmitz, Marin, 446 Kastelinnikolai, 79 Katz, Elias, 293 Katz, E., 466, 467 Kaufman, Mikhail, 177 Kazakhstan, Soviet films on, 77, 80, 81, 82, 86, 90 Kearton, Cherry, 409, 410–412, 415n Keiller, Patrick, 307 Keliher, Alice M., 378 Kelly, Robert, 341–345, 347 Khmara, Leonid, 84 Khrushchevnikita, 90, 276 Kill discoursenormalization of, 127, 143n King, Rodney, 138, 142 King Kong (Cooper and Schoedsack), 423 Kino‐Glaz (Kino‐Eye) (Svilova), 193, 194–197, 200, 240 Kino‐Nedelia (Vertov), 101, 192–194, 203n Kirghizia, Soviet newsreel on, 76 Kiselev, Fyodor, 72, 82 Kitamura, Hiroshi, 12 Kittler, Friedrich, 321, 369 Kleine, George, 409, 415n Knight, Arthur, 294, 295, 338, 378 Know Your Enemy Japan (Ivens), 258 Kodak, 427, 430 Kollwitz, Käthe, 293 Koloschin, Anatoly, 266 Komsomol (Ivens), 260, 276 Komsomol (Young Pioneers), 194–195 Kontakt program, Austria, 305 Kopalin, Il’ia, 88 Korea, propaganda films for occupation of, 10, 12–13, 15 Korolevich, Vlad, 176, 183 Korsh‐Sablin, Vladimir, 82 Koselleck, Reinhart, 222–223 Kozulin, Anatolii, 90 Kracauer, Siegfried, 57, 109–110, 210, 291, 295, 299, 381–382, 384n

499

Kraevedcheskii documentary films, Soviet Union, 72–73 Kravchunovskii, Il’ia, 82 Ku Klux Klan, 281n Kuleshov, Lev, 167, 176, 183n Kulturefilme, 432 Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, 303 Kurgäste hinter Museumsmauern (Cürlis), 303 Kuroki Kazuo, 47 Kuvshinchikova, Tatiana, 166, 172 Kyoto School of philosophy, 60 L’Afrique occidentale française (AOF), 29, 43n. See also French West Africa L’Agneau mystique (The Mystic Lamb) (Cauvin), 295 Lagos, Ovidio, 441 Lake Ritsa, Soviet film on, 80, 81–82, 88 Lake Seliger (Ozero Seliger), 80, 81–82 Lamb (Vieyra), 45n Lambert, H. M., 19 Lamorisse, Albert, 151 Land Art, 306 Land Art (Schum), 306 Landecker, Hannah, 340 Land of Promise (Rotha), 258 Landscape photography small‐town propaganda films with, 11, 12, 16, 17 Soviet geography documentaries with, 79, 81, 82, 83 Lang, Serge, 374 Lantern lectures, 403–404, 414n, 422 Lantern slide collections, 293 “Laocoön” manuscript (Eisenstein), 178, 180 L’appendicetomie (Benoit‐Lévy and Gosset), 360n Lasky, Jessie, 422–423 Lassnig, Maria, 305 Lassoing Wild Animals (film), 407, 412 Latour, Bruno, 101 Latvia, Soviet survey films on, 72, 73, 80, 82, 83, 86 Laval Decree, 30, 32, 36, 38–39, 43

500 Index L’Avant‐scène cinéma, 148, 149, 160 Lazarsfeld, P., 466, 467 Lazzarato, Maurizio, 128 League of Nations International Educative Cinematography Institute (IECI), 346, 359n League of Teaching (Ligue de l’Enseignement), 29, 30, 33 Lebow, Alisa, ix–x, xi Le Chanois, Jean‐Paul, 31 Leenhardt, Roger, 154–155, 162n Left and leftist movements Cold War documentaries and, 256, 257, 258, 261, 263, 266, 268, 278–279 digital activism with “democracy” movements and, 232n films on political themes and, 24n, 27, 211, 261, 268, 272, 273, 276, 280, 429 Léger, Fernand, 300 Legg, Stuart, 378 Leggenda di S. Orsola, La (Emmer and Gras), 296 Legrand, Jean A., 153 Lehmann, Heinz, 117–118, 119 Leibnicht, Karl, 192 Lemaître, Henri, 295 Lenin, Vladimir, 65, 86, 184, 220, 276, 429 Leningrad Sanatorium (Leningradskaia zdravnitsa), 80, 81 Leningrad Studio of Popular‐Scientific Films, 80 Lermontov, Mikhail, 86 Lesage, Julia, 211 Leslie, Esther, 166, 168 Lester films, 415 Let There Be Light (Huston), 112, 113 Levit‐Gurevich, Solomon, 87 Leyda, Jay, 45n, 165, 269, 281n, 378, 382, 383 Lichtspiel Schwarz, Ein – Weiss – Grau (Moholy‐Nagy), 306 Liebermann, Max, 293 Lied der Ströme, Das (Song of the Rivers, Ivens), 40, 91, 214, 255–256, 260,

258–259, 267–268, 272, 269, 270, 271, 273 Li Gang Incident, 143n Life of Moses (Vitagraph), 415n Light/Space‐Modulator (Moholy‐Nagy), 306 L’hippocampe (The Seahorse) (Painlevé), 246, 431 L’India vista da Rossellini (Rossellini), 247, 249 L’Invenzione della croce (Emmer and Gras), 296 Lippmann, Walter, 376, 465, 475 Lithuania, Soviet survey film on, 5, 77 Lithuanian Film Studio, 77 Litvak, Anatole, 113 Litvinov, Aleksandr, 77 Lockwood, Roy, Airport directed by, 425 L’Œuf de l’epinoche, de la fecondation a l’eclosion (The Stickleback’s Egg, From Fertilization to Hatching) (Painlevé), 361n London Film Society, 427 Long, Pierre, 154, 155 Long, Richard, 306 Longhi, Roberto, 203 Longue durée theory of revolution, 222 López García, Antonio, 301 Lorentz, Pare, 12, 13, 23n, 339, 430 The Fight for Life, 338 The Plow That Broke the Plains, 3, 23n The River, 23n, 428–429 The Rural Co‐Op, 24n Lorenzo Il Magnifico (Ragghianti), 299 Louvre, Paris, 303 Louvre, The: A Golden Prison (Jarvis and Sughrue), 303 Loridan‐Ivens, Marceline, 257, 272 Love and Duty, or Carmen (Brik), 177 Lovejoy, Alice, xv, 3–7, 23n LUCE (L’unione Cinemtografica Educuativa), 242, 243, 244 Luhmannniklas, 313, 325–326, 327, 331 Lukács, Georg, 197, 203n Lumière, Louis, 202n

Index Lumière brothers, 148, 239, 286 Luo Jingyu, 317, 320, 321, 334n Luo Jizhi, 322 L’uomo della croce (The Man with a Cross) (Rossellini), 243 Lust for Life (Minelli), 298 Luxembourg, Rosa, 192 Lye, Len, x Lyford, Richard, 294 Lyon, David, 139 Lyotard, Jean‐François, 204n Ma Bufang, 323 MacDonald, Scott, 338 MacDougall, David, 240, 249 Machalz, Alfons, 277 Mach, Ernst, 359n MacKay, John, 197, 202n, 203n Macpherson, Don, 426–427 Madison, Indiana, von Sternberg film on, 11–12, 23n “Magical powers” of documentary, 217–218 Magnin, Marc, 153–154 Magritte, ou la leçon de choses (de Heusch), 301 Maisonave, Lía, 441 Maison, Jérôme, 100 Maison de verre, La (magazine), 154–155 Maîtres Fous, Les (Rouch), 248, 249 Making of a Champion Pugilist, The (Kalem), 405 Malevich, Kazimir, 190 Malitsky, Joshua, ix–xvii, 175, 191, 197, 202n, 203n, 209–215, 338 Malraux, André, 302–303 Mangini e Lino Del Fra, Cecilia, 247 Manic depressive psychosis, training film on, 117–118 Manovich, Lev, 109, 191, 318, 321 Man with a Movie Camera, The (Vertov), 67n, 181, 181, 183, 194, 195, 200 Mao Zedong, 276, 280 Marche de l’empereur, La (March of the Penguins) (Jacquet), 99–100

501

March of Time (film series), 241 Marclay, Christian, 307 Mardi Gras in Havana (Kalem), 405 Marey, Etienne‐Jules, 243, 340 Mariaud de Serres, Robert, 154, 155, 162n Marie Antoinette (Van Dyke and Duvivier), 242 Marina Abramovic (Akers and Dupre), 307 Marker, Chris, 37, 40, 232, 248–249, 266, 295, 300, 307, 368 Martens, Renzo, 307 Martin, Terry, 85 Martin, Trayvon, 137 Marx, Karl surplus concept value and, 270 theories of revolution and, 222, 223 Marzani, Carl, 275 Marzelle, Fernand, 303 Matsubayashi Yōju, 67n Matsumoto Toshio, 47, 50, 60, 65, 68n Matuszewski, Boleslas, 98, 431 Maurice, Clément, 98 Maysles, David and Albert, 306 Mayo, Archie, 242 Mazzetti, Lorenza, 212 McCarthy, Anna, 17, 111 McCarthy, Joseph, 279, 280 McCauley, Anne, 162n McClure, Robert, 13–14, 21 McKernan, Luke, 403, 422 McLarennorman, 300 McLuhan, Marshall, 320, 321 McQueen, Steve, 307 Media archaeology, 285–289 art documentaries as, 291–310 illustrated art books and, 302–303 museum collections and major exhibitions and, 303 Richter’s films and, 369, 383 Medvedkin, Alexander, 90 Megahey, Leslie, 302 Mein Kind (My Child) (Ivens), 276, 277 Mekas, Adolfas, 379 Mekas, Jonas, 379 Méliès, Georges, 369

502 Index Melodie du Monde, La (Melody of the World) (Ruttman), 240 Melville, Jean‐Pierre, 161n Memling (Cauvin), 295 Ménégoz, Robert, 148, 150, 266 Menschen am Sonntag (People on a Sunday) (Siodmak & Ulmer), 432 Mental health Canadian government’s interest in, 111 citizenship and, 111 neurotic citizen and, 111 psy‐disciplines and, 111–112 wartime films on, 113 Mental health films, 107–120 developing forms of film‐storytelling for, 112 flashbacks used in, 113, 114 government mental‐health policies and production of, 111–112 institutional and corporate entities as authors of, 102, 103 Mental Mechanisms film series in, 103, 112–119 narrators used in, 113–114, 115, 117 National Film Board of Canada and, 103, 108, 112, 113, 120 neurotic citizenship and, 111, 120 psychiatrists consulted during development of, 113, 115–116 reactions to screenings of, 115, 116 training uses of, 116–118 visits with psychiatrists portrayed in, 113–114, 115, 117–118, 120n Mental Mechanisms series (Anderson), 103, 112–119 Mental Symptoms series (Jackson), 103, 112, 116, 119 Mestman, Mariano, xvii, 397, 437–459 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 303, 378 Metz, Christian, 421 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 167 Meyers, Sidney, 275 MGM, 149 Michelangelo (Ragghianti), 299

Michelangelo: Das Leben eines Titanen (Oertel), 294 Michelle, Marion, 257, 258, 259, 261, 262, 266, 263 Michelson, Annette, 194–195, 196, 199 Microtomes, in embryology, 341–342, 357–358, 359n Middle East uprisings (2011). See Arab Spring Miéville, Anne‐Marie, 303 Mihailova, Mihaela, 361n Miles Bros., 415n Milhaud, Darius, 431 Militant cinema audience for, 439, 442–446 Cine Liberación Group and, 438–439 “Militant Cinema” (Cine Liberación Group), 439, 440 Military cinema Chinese Nationalist regime and, 314–315 Luo’s conception of wireless propaganda and, 317 Milk, Chris, 461 Miller, P., 110, 111 Mill Hill Neurosis Centre, England, 112, 120n Million and One Nights, A (Ramsaye), 188 Minamata series (Tsuchimoto), 47 Minelli, Vincente, 298 Mineur, Jean, 161n Minh‐ha, Trinh T., 249 Minzu wansui (Long Live the Nation) (Zheng), 313, 316, 321–325 Misere au Borinage (Ivens and Storck), 218–219, 267 Mitman, Gregg, 245, 401–402 Mnemonic literary culture, 179 Moana (Flaherty), 97, 203n, 240, 244, 338, 422 Mobile (cell) phones discriminatory policing recorded on, 140–141 fatal shootings recorded on, 138 impact of overuse of, 134–135

Index Tahrir Square protest, Cairo (2011), recorded on, 222 unmanned capture and, 127 Modernity, and documentary, 109–110 Moholy‐Nagy, László, 306, 359n Moi, un noir (Rouch), 42, 249 Momism, 113 Mon chien (Franju), 161n Monde de Paul Delvaux, Le (The World of Paul Delvaux) (Storck), 297–298 Mondo Carne film series, 433 Monet, Claude, 293 Monitor (television series), 304 Monroe, New York, CAD film on, 15, 17–19 Monsanto, 338 Montage art books with, 302–303 art documentaries using, 294, 295, 298, 299 Bonus March documentary and, 228 documentaries on decolonization struggle with, 28, 31, 33–34, 37, 44n Eisenstein on creative authorship aspect of, 177–178 Ivens’s Das Lied der Ströme with, 275–276 Richter’s use of, 373–374, 377 role of editing assistants (montagesses) in, 167, 172, 175–176, 179, 182, 183, 185n sound used as, 373 Soviet approach to, 167, 168, 171 Zheng’s Minzu wansui and, 323 Montagesses, editors as, 167, 172, 175–176, 179, 182, 183, 185n Moore, Henry, 304 Moore, Michael, 432, 433 Moretti, Franco, 107 Morin, Edgar, 217–218 Mori Tatsuya, 67n Morris, Errol, x, xiii Moscow House of Cinema, 75, 81, 84 Moscow Scientific Film Studio (Mosnauchfilm), 77, 80, 87 Mosfilm, 75, 77, 78, 87 Mosnauchfilm, 77, 80, 87

503

Moten, Fred, 141 Mother (Mot) (Pudovkin), 67n, 269 Motion Picture Herald, 12 Mount Vernon, Ohio, film series (Bryan), 10, 11 Moussinac, Léon, 68n Mouton, Pierre, 154 Mouvement syndical mondial (journal), 265 Moving Image, The, xiv Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC), 401, 405, 409, 410, 412, 413n Moving Picture World (MPW) (magazine), 402–409, 411, 412, 414n, 415n, 416n Mubarak, Hosni, 233n Münsterberg, Hugo, 48 Murray, Andrew, 141 Musée de l’Homme, Paris, 36, 37, 41 Musée imaginaire, 302–303 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) Film Library at, 372, 382 Hans Richter Archive at, 379 Museum of Non‐Objective, Painting, New York, 378, 384n Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago, 357 Museums art documentaries on collections and exhibitions of, 303 moving image installations in, 307 useful cinema in, 287 video programs by, 303 Music in art documentaries, 297, 304 in documentaries on decolonization struggle, 34, 41, 44n in Ivens’s Das Lied der Ströme, 271–272 in mental health films, 114 in Richter’s films, 383 in Rossellini’s films, 245, 246, 251 Musser, Charles, xii, 269, 274–275, 358n, 396 Mussolini, Benito (Il Duce), 242, 243, 253n, 355 Mutual Weekly newsreels, 407 Muybridge, Eadweard, 357

504 Index Mystère Picasso, Le (The Mystery of Picasso) (Clouzot), 301 Naiman, Eric, 76 Nairne, Sandy, 305 Naked City, The (Dassin), 58, 64 Namuth, Hans, 301, 306 Nanook of the North (Flaherty), xiii, 102, 149, 239–240, 244, 338, 422, 431 Narration. See also Voice‐over techniques Chinese film and, 315, 316, 320, 330, 331, 332 mental health films in, 113–114, 115, 117 neorealism and, 240 Soviet geography documentaries and, 75, 79, 81, 82–83, 84 Narrative aspect of paintings, in art documentaries, 296–297 Narrative films Emmer’s, 297 Rossellini’s, 247 National Film Board (NFB) of Canada, 107–108 as authoring agent, 98, 102 Challenge for Change program of, 471, 472 documentary seriality and, 108 government mental‐health policies and, 111–112 institutionalization of educational filmmaking by, 107–108 research on sample a set of films made by, 108 two main series of mental health films at, 112, 113, 120 voice‐over in films of, 113 National Film Theatre, London, 212 National Gallery (Wiseman), 303 National Gallery, London, 303 Nationalist regime, China conflicts between local warlords and, 328 film culture under, 333n film studios under, 314 rise of documentary under, 314, 331 Sino‐Japanese War and, 313–314

wartime propaganda produced under, 314, 315, 316–321 Natural gas industry, French industrial film on, 150–152 Nauman, Bruce, 305 Navarro, Vinicius, ix nave Bianca, La (The White Ship) (Rossellini), 243 Neale, Steve, 368 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 250 Neorealism, 258 dubbing and, 251 Italian film and, 210, 239, 240, 241–242 observational practices and, 240 Rossellini’s films and, 213, 242, 247, 252 Nesbit, Molly, 156–157 Nesting, of documentary images, 125 Neuro‐Psychiatry (Hankinson), 112, 113, 120n Neue Sachlichkeit, 432 Neuroses citizenship and management of, 111, 120 mental health films on, 111, 113, 115 Neurotic citizenship, 111, 120 Neue Sachlichkeit, 432 Neves, Joshua, 103, 123–146 New Deal, 3, 4, 22n, 44n, 428 New England Lantern Slide Company, 405 New Film History, 149, 286 New Left, 261, 279 New Living (Die neue Wohnung) (Richter), 380, 385n News of the Day (Novosti dnia) newsreel, 78 Newsreel documentary, 316 Newsreels French, 202n Chinese, 314, 316, 317, 331 documentary film versus, 316 Italian, 242, 243, 245 Japanese, 13, 63 montage use of, 37, 169, 171, 192 museum exhibitions of, 303 Soviet, 76–77, 78, 168–169, 170, 192, 194 New Social Movement, 261 New Stag Hunt, The (film), 409

Index New Wave French Nouvelle Vague, 213, 248, 368 Japan, 415nese, 60 New York Motion Picture Company New York Times, 115, 135, 140, 232 NFB. See National Film Board of Canada NHK television station, 67n Nichols, Bill, xi, 3, 130, 210, 278, 338, 377, 393, 395 Nickelodeon, The (magazine), 409, 411, 412, 414n, 415n Nielsen Media Research, 462, 468, 470 Night Mail (Watt and Wright), 3, 18, 244, 425, 429 Nikolai II, Tsar of Russia, 182 Nishiwaki Junzaburō, 61 Nitzschmann, Erich, 266 Nizhne‐Volzhsk Film Studio, 88 Noce, Daniel, 13 Noda Shinkichi, 49 Nornes, Abé Mark, 48, 49 Notari, Guido, 246 Nouvelle Vague (New Wave), 213, 248, 368 Nowell‐Smith, Geoffrey, 212–213 NTV television station, 67n Nongren zhichun (Farmers in Springtime) (Sun), 318 Nykino, 31 Objectivity, of science films, 338 Observational Cinema (Grimshaw and Ravetz), 240 Observational mode, 240 Obzornye (survey) films, Soviet Union, 73–75, 80, 81–83, 89 Occupied countries selection of American films for, 23n October (Eisenstein), 169, 171 October (journal), xiv Oehlkers, Friedrich, 348 Oertel, Curt, 294, 295, 298, 304, 308n Œuf de l’epinoche, de la fecondation a l’eclosion, L’ (The Stickleback’s Egg, From Fertilization to Hatching) (Painlevé), 361n

505

Office of the Coordinator of Inter‐American Affairs (CI‐AA), 10, 21 Office of War Information (OWI), United States, 9, 10–11, 12, 13, 14, 21, 23n, 378 Ogawa, Shinsuke, 47 Ohio Town series (Bryan), 9, 10, 11, 15 Okamoto Tarō, 60, 64, 65 O’Leary, Alan, 241 Olmi, Ermanno, 247 Olympia (Riefenstahl), 59, 197, 264, 266, 432 Omegna, Roberto, 243–244 One Hundred Seconds for a Work of Art series (Louvre), 303 On Film Policy (Tsumura), 50 On Lake Ritsa (Na ozere Ritsa), 80, 81–82, 88 “On the Concept of History” (Benjamin), 199 Ophuls, Max, 149, 151 Oppenheim, Dennis, 306 Optical sectioning, 347 ORFT, 249 Ossessione (Obsession) (Visconti), 243 Ostherr, Kirsten, 114, 338 Our Russian Front (Ivens and Milestone), 258 Ovanesova, Arsha, 77, 84, 90 “Overcoming Modernity” debates, 50 Over‐Dependency (Mental Mechanisms series), 114, 115, 116 Pabst, G. W., 52 Painlevé, Jean, 148, 241, 243, 246, 356, 360n Painters Painting (de Antonio), 301 Painting, art documentaries on, 291–298 Paisan (Paisá) (Rossellini), 58, 242 Palettes series (Louvre), 303 Pallavicini, Sandro, 242 Panopticon, 128, 130, 143n Pantaleo, Daniel, 140 Paranoid conditions, training film on, 118–119 Paris, life of black African students in, 27–28, 35–43

506 Index Paris 1900 (Vedrès), 40 Parnaland, Ambroise‐François, 98–100 Parreno, Philippe, 307 Parti Communiste Français (PCF, French Communist Party), 29, 30, 32 Pathé, 415n, 431 Pathé Frères, 409n Pathé’s Weekly newsreels, 407 Patinir, Joachim, 295 Patriotism, in Soviet geography ­documentaries, 73, 75, 84–86 Paul J. Rainey’s African Hunt (film), 407, 412 paura La (Fear) (Rossellini), 247 Payne Fund Studies, 464–465 Pays du Scalf, Le (The Amazon Head Hunters) (Wavrin), 240 Peace Tour (Friedensfahrt) (Ivens), 264, 265, 266 Peace Will Win (Pokój zdobędzie świat) (Ivens), 255, 263–264, 265, 266, 267 Pechstein, Max, 293 Peng Yu Incident, 133 Penzer, Jean, 161n People on a Sunday (Menschen am Sonntag) (Siodmak & Ulmer), 432 People’s Commissariat of Education Theater Department (TEO), 167, 183n Performance art, 305–306 Permeke, Constant, 295 Perón, Evita, 443, 455 Perón, Juan, 441, 442, 443–444, 445, 451, 455–456, 458, 459 Peronism and Peronists, 437–438, 443–451, 453, 455, 456, 458n, 459n Peronist resistance, 441, 444, 446, 447, 451, 457, 459n Personality cult of Stalin, and film, 76, 82, 88–89, 280 Personalization, in social realism, 260, 261, 278 Peterson, Jennifer, 403–404, 414n Petit a Petit (Rouch), 44n Philibertnicolas, 303 Philipe, Gérard, 257, 277, 280 Philips, 380

Photography. See also Automatic cameras camera consciousness in, 125–126, 127, 142n free indirect image in, 126–127 image grabbing in, 125 interventional gaze in, 125 movement of a doubt in, 329 naturalism of, 203n photo within a photo of Gaddafi’s capture and, 124–125, 126, 142 witnessing‐agency and, 126–127, 131 Piavoli, Franco, 247 Picasso, Pablo, 257, 298, 299, 300–301, 302 Picon‐Borel, Raymond, 161n Picture sheet, with Filmessay, 379, 382 Piero della Francesca, 296 Pierres vives, Les (Marzelle), 303 Pierwsze lata (The First Years) (Ivens), 255, 257, 259–263, 262, 264, 267, 276 pilota ritorna, Un (A Pilot Returns) (Rossellini), 243 Pioneriia newsreel, 77 Pittsfield, Vermont, CAD film on, 15–17 Plant‐growth films, 348, 359n, 360n Plasmatic, Eisenstein’s concept of, 356, 361n Plasticity animation and, 357–358 CGI (computer‐generated imagery) and, 358 embryology films and, 339, 356–357 Plamper, Jan, 88 Plasmatic, Eisenstein’s concept of the, 356 Plasticine stop‐motion animation, 348–352, 354, 355, 356, 359n Plow That Broke the Plains, The (Lorentz), 3, 23n Podgoretskaia, Olga, 77 Pohlman’s Zeichentafel, 341, 342 Poirier, Leon, 240, 244 Pokój zdobędzie świat (Peace Will Win) (Ivens), 255, 263–264, 265, 266, 267 Poland, and Ivens’s The First Years, 259–263 Polanski, Roman, 212 Polar Bear Hunt (Miles Bros.), 409, 415n Political conditions

Index decolonization in West Africa and, 30–35 leftist movements and films on, 24n, 27, 211, 261, 268, 272, 273, 276, 280, 429 Soviet documentary films and, 87–88, 218 voice‐over and montage techniques used in response to, 28 Politique des auteurs, 149, 150, 156, 157–158 Pollock, Jackson, 301, 306 Polygraphic photography, 357 Pontecorvo, Gillo, 277, 450 Pop Art, 304, 307 Pop Goes the Easel (Russell), 304 Popular Front, 31, 250, 281n Porcile, François, 148, 161n Posel’skii, Iosif, 90 Posel’skii, Mikhail, 82 Power and the Land (Ivens), 4, 23n, 260 Power of Art (Schama), 302, 304 Pozner, Vladimir, 257, 266, 267, 269–271, 275, 272–273, 274, 276–277 Prague Spring (1968), 232n Pravda, 88 Predator drones, 131 Présence Africaine (journal), 37, 39, 44n Prishvin, Mikhail, 79 Process Art, 306 Procinex, 151, 152, 161n Productions Ariane, 277 Profondeur 4.000 (Faurez), 150, 151–152, 159–160 Projection of England, The (Tallents), 4 Projections of America (film series), 9, 10 Proletarian Film League (Prokino), 47 Pronaynicholas, 425 Propaganda Cavalcanti’s essay on, 214, 239–245, 252n Chinese Nationalist regime and, 314, 315, 316–321 epic gestures of, 313, 330–333 government agencies producing post‐war films for, 9, 22n local view in small‐town films for, 4–5, 9–25

507

making of Minzu wansui (Long Live the Nation) in China and, 321–325 mass mobility in China and, 316–321 US Office of War Information (OWI) and, 9, 10–11, 12 “Propaganda Documentaries” (Cavalcanti), 214, 239–245, 252n PSV‐Films foundation, 45n Psychiatrists films portraying visits with, 113–114, 115, 117–118, 120n forms of film‐storytelling and, 112 series of mental health films developed with, 113, 115–116 Psy‐disciplines, and mental health, 111–112 Public relations, and French industrial films, 151, 152, 154, 159, 162n Pudovkin, Vsevolod, 67n, 68n, 89, 210, 242, 269, 373 Pushkin, Alexander, 86 Pyryev, Ivan, 87, 88, 89, 257 Qualculation, 129, 131, 132 Quality cinema, and French industrial films, 157–158 Quiet One, The (Meyers), 275 Qinyue, Liu, 135 Quo Vadis? (Guazzoni), 242 Racconto da un affresco (Emmer and Gras), 296 Race discrimination, Richter’s project on, 382 Racial factors, in unmanned capture recognition, 136–141 Racialized surveillance, 138–141 Radical documentary political image‐making during Arab Spring and, 231–232 potential nontheatrical audiences for, 426–427 role of the “international” in, 4 Vautier’s Afrique 50 and, 30–31 Ragghianti, Carlo Ludovico, 299 RAI, 249

508 Index Rain (Regen) (Ivens), 266 Rainer, Arnulf, 305 Rainey, Paul J., 407, 412 Ramsaye, Terry, 188–189, 190 Rancière, Jacques, 223 Rapt (Cooper), 357 Rascaroli, Laura, 368 Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA), 32, 33, 44n Ravetz, Amanda, 240 Realizadores de Mayo, 442 Read, John, 304 Recorded music, in documentaries on decolonization struggle, 34, 44n Red Diaper Productions, 279 Reel Nature (Mitman), 245 Refugees post‐war, in Cummington small‐life documentary, 10–11 Syrian, in virtual reality documentary about, 461 Regards sur la Belgique ancienne (Storck), 297 Regen (Rain) (Ivens), 266 Reisz, Karel, 212 Rejection, mental health film on, 112, 113–114, 115, 117, 119 Rembrandt van Rijn, 302 Remote sensing, 127, 143n Renault, 154 Rennsymphonie (Race Symphony) (Richter), 374 Renoir, Jean, 31, 50, 52, 68n Renoir, Pierre Auguste, 293, 299 Renov, Michael, 55, 103, 202n Reorientation Branch, US Army Civilian Affairs Division (CAD), 9–10, 12, 21 Repas de bébé (Lumière), 202n Resnais, Alain, 37, 40, 147, 148, 248, 266, 295 art documentaries by, 304 Les chant du styrene, 149, 161 Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) and, 368 portraits of painters by, 298, 299, 300, 308n

Revelationist tradition, 368, 384n Reverberi, Guiseppe, 346 Revillon Frères, 102, 149, 431 revolución justicialista, La (The Justicialist Revolution) (Solanas and Getino), 444 Revolution documentary activism and, 222–223 longue durée theory of, 222 social media use in, 222, 226, 230, 231, 232n, 233n Revolutionary romanticism, 261 Revolution 2.0 (Ghonim), 223, 225 R.F.D. (US Army Civilian Affairs Division), 18 Rhythmus 21 (Richter), 384n Richardson, Tony, 212 Richter, Hans, 288, 300, 367–389 avant‐garde in the interwar period and, 368, 373, 374–375, 381 description of documentary film production by, 370–371 Die Börse (The Stock Exchange), 371, 372–375, 377, 379, 380, 383, 385n economic logic of film production and, 370 emigration to the US by, 377–378 Filmessay and See Filmessay film workshops supervised by, 380 Grierson’s theories and, 375–376 increasing expression technique of, 374 index of unrealized documentary film projects of, 379–380, 383 Inflation, 372, 374, 379, 380 later screenings of Die Börse, 383, 384n lecturing activities of, 378 media archaeological approach to, 369, 383 retrospective of films of, 383 Rotha’s influence on, 376 social role of documentary films and, 375, 376, 381 soundtrack as montage used in Die Börse by, 373, 383 sponsored films of, 371, 373, 374, 375, 377, 380

Index teaching activities of, 377, 378, 380 Riefenstahl, Leni, 263–264 Olympia, 59, 197, 264, 266, 432 Triumph of the Will, 3, 264 Rien que les heures (Cavalcanti), 240 Riga Film Studio, 72 Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 303 Riskin, Robert, 10, 23n Rivalen auf Parsenn (Rivals at Parsenn) (Richter), 371 River, The (Lorentz), 23n, 428–429 RKO, 423 RKO Pathe, 17 Roberts, Graham, 171 Robeson, Paul, 257, 271, 272, 278 Robin, Régine, 260, 262, 278 Rodin, Auguste, 293 Roger & Me (Moore), 432, 433 Rome Open City (Rossellini), 242 Rorty, Richard, 198 Rosen., 110, 111 Rosen, Philip, xii, 100, 101, 102, 187–205 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 428, 429 Roosevelt, Theodore, 407, 408, 410, 411, 412, 414n Roosevelt in Africa (Kearton), 396, 401, 407–412, 415n Roosevelt in Denmark (Great Northern), 414n, 415n Rosario, Argentina, Mobile Film Units, 440–442, 448, 449, 450 Report of, 450, 451–457 Rossellini, Isabella, 242 Rossellini, Roberto, 58, 209, 213, 242–252 early animal documentaries and, 242–244 Fantasia sottomarina (Undersea Fantasy), 242, 243, 244–246 Idea di un isola (Idea of an Island), 240 J’ai fait un beau voyage, 247, 249 L’India vista da Rossellini, 247, 249 Intervista a Salvador Allende, 240 made‐for‐television biopics of, 240, 242 narrative documentaries of, 244–246 neorealism and, 213, 242, 247, 252

509

new approaches during trip to India by, 247, 249–252 Paisá (Paisan), 58, 242 The Rise to Power of Louis XIV, 240 Rouch’s work and, 247–249 Rotha, Paul, 3, 6, 240, 275, 375, 425 British documentary film movement and, 3, 48–49 Hanada’s commentaries on, 61–64 Imamura’s support for theories of, 55–57, 59 Japanese documentary film theory, 6, 48–57, 59, 61–64 Land of Promise, 258 Richter and, 376 Tsumura’s critique of, 50–54 Rothko, Mark, 302 Rouch, Jean, 36, 38, 44n, 241 Jaguar, 248, 249 Moi, un noir, 42, 249 Rossellini and, 213, 239, 247–249 Vieyra and, 45n work with African makers by, 42, 44n Rouchier, J. P., 151 Royal Arsenal Co‐operative Society, 427 Rubens (Haesaerts and Storck), 299 Rubens, Pieter Paul, 297, 299 Running Fence (Maysles and Maysles), 306 Rural Co‐Op, The (Lorentz), 24n ruscello di Ripa Sottile, Il (The Brook of Ripa Sottile) (Rossellini), 243, 246 Russell, Catherine, 240 Russell, Ken, 302, 304 Russian formalism, 210 Rüst, Ernst, 346, 349 Ruttmann, Walter, x, 240, 375, 384n, 432, 467 Sadoul, Georges, 43n, 203n Said, Edward, 240 Sa’id, Khaled, 223, 228, 233 Saillant, Louis, 265 Salazkina, Masha, 67 Salt of the Earth (Biberman), 275, 276 Samb‐Makharam, Ababacar, 36

510 Index Sandoz, 371 Sange modeng nuxing (Three Modern Women) (Bu), 319 Sangree, Carl, 23n Sanrizuka series (Ogawa), 47 Sarkisova, Oksana, 84 Sarr, Mamadou, 5, 27, 36, 45n Sasa Genjū, 48 Sauvage, André, 99 Sauvage, Léo, 377 Scenics, 293, 402 Schaffende Hände (Creating Hands) film cycle (Cürlis), 293, 300 Schama, Simon, 302, 304 Schamoni, Peter, 302 Schatz, Jacques, 153, 154, 158 Schatzkammer Deutschland (Cürlis), 303 Scheer, Maximilian, 266 Schizophrenia, training film on, 119 Schmidt, Eric, 224, 233n Schoedsack, Ernest B., 240, 244, 422–423 Schoots, Hans, 257, 259, 262, 264, 273, 277, 280n Schork, Carlos, 441 Schradie, Jen, 230–231 Schum, Gerry, 305, 306 Schwarz, Walter, 348, 360n Schweizerische Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Unterrichtskinematographie (SAFU), 353 Schwep, Charles, 15 Science art analysis using, 303 Hanada’s book on major figures in, 60 observational mode drawing on, 240 Roosevelt’s African adventure and, 407 Soviet geographical films and, 77, 78, 86, 91 Soviet popular‐scientific (vidovoi) films and, 79–82, 87, 90 Science films Chinese, 314, 318, 334n documentary tradition in, 51, 52, 98, 201 Elias’s career in, 346–356 embryology films and, 287, 337–366 German, 432

Jacobs’s compilation of films with links to, 337–338 Mental Symptoms series as, 119 objectivity of, 338 Omegna’s production of, 244 Painlevé’s films as, 243, 246 Rossellini’s early nonfiction work as, 252 Rouch’s approach to, 249 Soviet studios for, 5, 71, 72, 73, 74, 76, 77 Urban’s articles on, 403, 427 Scipio Africanus (Scipione l’africano) (Gallone), 241, 242 Scott, Keith, 140–141, 140 Scott, Robert Falcon, 126 Screen (journal), xiv Scribner’s Magazine, 410 Scroggie, M. G., 318 Sculptural films, 306 Sculpture Speaks, A (Jacobs), 338 Sedgwick, E.K., 279 Selig Polyscope Company, 408–409, 411 Seltzer, Leo, 221, 221, 234n, 378, 380 Sembène, Ousmane, 36, 249 Semenovn. K., 79 Sengshor, Léopold Sédar, 40 Serial imaging, 339, 340–341, 344, 351. See also Chronophotography Seriality, documentary, 108, 120 Serial sections, 341, 344, 361n Serra, Richard, 305 Seton, Marie, 338 Seurat, Georges, 299 Shackleton, Sir Ernest, 126, 422 Shanghai cinema, 313–314, 315, 317, 322 Shcherbakov, Dmitrii, 78 Shengli jinxingqu (Marches of Victory) (Shi), 315 Shell Oil Company Film Unit, 425 Sherman, Cindy, 305 Sherwood, Robert, 22n Shi Dongshan, 315 Shinzenbisha, 61 Shklovsky, Viktor, 81 Shneiderov, Vladimir, 77, 78, 79–80, 81, 84, 90

Index Shock of the New (Hughes), 304 Short, William, 464 Shostakovich, Dmitri, 257, 271–272 Shpikovskiinikolai, 82 Shub, Esfir, 101–102, 165–186, 191, 202n compilation documentaries of, 165–167, 169, 170, 180, 183 Eisenstein and, 165, 166, 167, 168–169, 171, 177–179, 180, 182, 184n, 191 The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, 169–170, 171, 172–174 focus on role of women in editing process by, 175–180 “The Work of Montagesses,” 175, 182 Shu Xiuwen, 332 Shyness (Anderson), 112, 114 Sidenova, Raisa, 5, 71–93 Sigal, Silvia, 443–444 Sight and Sound (journal), 295, 379 Signoret, Simone, 278, 280 Silent World, The (Cousteau), 338 Sino‐Japanese War, 313–314 Sjoberg, Patrick, ix Skira, 302 Small‐town films, 4–5, 9–25 American values promoted using, 9–10, 10–11, 15, 21–22 categories of life covered in, 13–14 The Cummington Story and, 10–12 democratic tradition portrayed in, 19–22 five counties as audience for, 9–10 Hollywood films versus, 10, 12–13, 14, 16 local communities’ use of, after screening, 22 local‐view focus of, 9 participation of local citizens in, 10–11 Social Change in Democracy on Biloxi, Mississippi, and, 19–21 A Town Solves a Problem on Pittsfield, Vermont, town meetings and, 15–17 US Office of War Information (OWI) and, 9, 10–11, 12 Women and the Community on Monroe, New York, and, 17–19

511

Smith, Percy, 353 Smithson, Robert, 306 Smulyan, Susan, 13 Smychka (union or alliance), 78, 203n Snake Pit, The (Litvak), 113 Snowdon, Peter, 231, 232 Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (Disney), 355, 428–429 SNPA (Société National des Pétroles d’Aquitaine), 102, 150–152, 158, 159, 161n Snyder, Robert, 294 Sobchack, Vivian, 125 Social Change in Democracy (US Army Civilian Affairs Division), 4, 15, 19–21 Socialist Unity Party (SED), East Germany, 265 Social media audience’s participatory activities on, 470–471 Middle Easter protestors’ use of, 222, 226, 230, 231, 232n, 233n Social realism Ivens’s films and, 256, 258–264 personalization in, 260, 261, 278 Social role of documentary films, Richter on, 375, 376, 381 Société Cinétest, 102, 150–152, 158, 159, 160 Société Films et Relations Publiques, 155, 158 Société National des Pétroles d’Aquitaine (SNPA), 102, 150–152, 158, 159, 161n Solanas, Fernando, 446, 459n Cine Liberación Group and, 438, 441 The Hour audiences and, 437, 440–441, 444, 448, 449, 458n The Hour making by, 397, 439–440 “Towards a Third Cinema” manifesto of, 438, 440 Sol del membrillo, El (Erice), 301 Son et Lumière, 98, 151, 152, 155, 158, 202n

512 Index Song of Ceylon, The (Wright), 338 Song of Stone, The (Ishi no uta) (Matsumoto), 68n Song of the Forests (Shostakovich), 272 Song of the Rivers (Das Lied der Ströme) (Ivens), 40, 91, 214, 255–256, 260, 258–259, 267–268, 272, 269, 270, 271, 273 Song slides, 405, 406 Sorcerer’s Apprentice, The (Elias), 355 Soundtracks. See also Music; Voice‐over techniques documentaries on decolonization struggle with, 28, 30–31, 34–35, 37, 40, 41, 43, 44n Richter’s Die Börse and, 373–374 Richter’s use of as montage, 373, 383 Rossellini’s films and, 242, 244–245, 248, 251–252 Soviet geography documentaries and, 83–84, 90 Souris, André, 297 Soviet Academy of Sciences, 78 Soviet Armenia (Sovetskaia Armeniia) (Varlamov), 5, 6, 77, 84, 88 Soviet Belorussia (Korsh‐Sablin et al.), 80, 82–83, 85, 86 Soviet Chuvashia, 73 Soviet documentary film activist legacy of, 218–220 aerial and landscape shots in, 75, 82, 83, 86 censorship policies and, 67n, 75–76, 87, 89, 90, 168, 170, 240, 260 Eisenstein’s “agitational spectacle” concept and, 218 French anticolonial films drawing on methods and principles of, 31 geographical documentary in, 5, 71–93 institutions and studios producing, 76–79 kraevedcheskii films in, 72–73 nature and travel films (vidovoi) in, 72, 73, 74, 77–79, 80–81, 83, 85, 89–90, 91 patriotism theme in, 73, 75, 84–86

political climate and, 87–88 soundtrack in, 83–84, 90 Stalin’s personality cult and, 88–89 survey (obzornye) films and, 73–75, 80, 81–83, 89 topographical aesthetic of, 5, 75–76, 90–91 Zhdanovism and, 5, 75–76, 78, 86–87 Soviet Geographical Society, 78 Soviet Georgia (Sovetskaia Gruziia) (Dolidze and Karmen), 5, 73, 77, 80, 82, 86, 88 Soviet Kazakhstan (Sovetskii Kazakhstan) (Karmen), 77, 80, 81, 82, 86 Soviet Kirghizia newsreel, 76 Soviet Latvia (Kiselev), 72, 80, 82, 83, 86 Soviet Lithuania (Sovetskaia Litva) (Podgoretskaia), 5, 77 Soviet Union geographical documentary in, 5, 71–93 Ministry of Cinema of, 73, 77, 78, 79, 71–72 Shub’s compilation documentaries in, 165–186 survey (obzornye) films of regions in, 73–75, 80, 81–83, 89 Theater Department, People’s Commissariat of Education (TEO) of, 167, 183n Soviet Tadjikistan, 73 Soviet Tatarstan, 73 Soviet Turkmenistan (Sovetskii Turkmenistan) (Karmen), 5, 73, 77 Soviet Yakutia (Grigoriev), 74, 80, 82, 86, 88 Special‐effects animation, 354, 355, 361n Spence, Louise, ix Spencer, Stanley, 304 Spieker, S., 109 Spiral Jetty, The (Smithson), 306 Sponge Fishers of Cuba, The (Kalem), 405 Sponsored documentaries. See also Corporate films; State‐sponsored documentaries Richter on dependance on, 370 Sporting Days in the South (Kalem), 405

Index Stäheli, Urs, 372–373 Stalin, Joseph, 276 film and personality cult of, 76, 82, 88–89, 280 Stam, Robert, 449 Stanislavski, K.S., 322, 323 “Statement [on Sound], A” (Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Aleksandrov), 373 State‐sponsored documentaries authorship of, 103 in China. See Chinese film developing forms of film‐storytelling for, 112 government mental‐health policies and production of, 111–112 Ivens and, 258–259 local participation in, 23n mental health films and, 107–120 Statues meurent aussi, Les (Statues Also Die) (Resnais, Marker, and Cloquet), 37, 38, 300 Steichen, Edward, 274 Steinerne Wunder von Naumburg (Stone Wonders of Naumburg) (Bamberger and Oertel), 294 Stepanova, Lidiia, 88 Stereology, 361n Steyerl, Hito, 103, 107 Stigma (Jackson), 112 Stock Exchange as a Barometer of the Economic Situation, The (Die Börse als Barometer der Wirtschaftslage) (Richter), 75, 372–375, 377, 379, 380, 383, 385n Stock Exchange Zurich, 371 Stogdill, Charles, 115, 116 Stollery, Martin, 165 Stones and Flies (Haas), 306 Stoney, George, 395 Stop‐motion animation, 348–349, 353, 354, 355 Storck, Henri, 31, 296, 297, 298, 299, 304, 313n, 371, 375 Misere au Borinage, 218–219 Storm over Asia (Pudovkin), 67n

513

Story film, 49, 51–52, 188 Strange Victory (Hurwitz), 275 Strasser, Hans, 344, 347 Straub, Jean‐Marie, 300, 303 Strauven, Wanda, 289 Strike (Eisenstein), 183n, 218 Stromboli (Rossellini), 242, 248 Studies in Documentary Film, xiv Studios in Chongqing, and Chinese Nationalist regime, 314–315 Soviet documentary film production in, 5, 76–79 Sucksdorff, Arne, 338 Sughrue, John, Jr., 403 Sugiyama Heiichi, 68n Suicide attempts, training film on, 118 Sun Dial Films, Inc., 19 Sun Mingjin, 317–318, 321 Sun Yu, 322 Sur‐documentary, in Hanada’s theory, 50, 60–66 Surgical education, cinema in, 344–345 Surrealism, 61, 64–65, 241, 243, 301, 307 Surveillance CCTV and, 129, 132, 134 racial factors in recognition in, 138–141 unmanned. See Unmanned capture Survey (obzornye) films, Soviet Union, 73–75, 80, 81–83, 89 Susumu Hani, 47 Sutherland, Graham, 304 Svilova, Elizaveta, 166, 183, 194–195 Swann, Paul, 244 Swiffen, Amy, 109 Swiss National Exposition, 371 Swiss Werkbund, 380 Symphonie diagonale (Eggeling), 384n Symphony of a Great City (Symphonie d’une grande ville) (Ruttman), 240, 432, 467 tacchino prepotente, Il (The Bullying Turkey) (Rossellini), 243

514 Index Tadjikistan, Soviet survey film on, 73 Tahrir Square protest, Cairo (2011), 222, 223–225, 226 Talbot, Frederick, 428 Tale of the Caspian Sea Oil Workers, A (Povest’ o neftianikakh Kaspiia (Karmen), 90 Tallents, Stephen G., 4, 240 Tao Jin, 332 Target for Tonight (Watt), 258 Taris (Vigo), 197 Tashkent Film Studio, 76 Tatakau heitai (Kamei), 47 Tatarstan, Soviet survey film on, 73 Tati, Jacques, 161n Taussig, Michael, 232n Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, England, 119 Taylor, Richard, 178, 191, 432 Tbilisi Film Studio, 73 technicien du film, Le (newspaper), 154 technique cinématographique, Le ­(newspaper), 154 Technoutopianism, 232n Teddy in Jungleland (Selig), 408, 414n–415n Tedesco, Jean, 97, 104n Television art documentaries and, 304–305 Chinese poem on introduction of, 311–312 Chinese propaganda and, 316–321 Rossellini’s dramas for, 240, 242 Rossellini’s reportage for, 247, 249–250 Soviet, first film made for, 334n Terrorismnormalization of kill discourse in, 127, 143n Teshigawara Hiroshi, 50 Thalia Theatre, New York, Summer Film Festival, 383 Theater Department, People’s Commissariat of Education (TEO), 167, 183n Théâtre du Vieux Colombier, Paris, 97, 104n Thèmes d’inspiration (Themes of Inspiration) (Dekeukeleire), 294–295

Theory of Animated Film (Manga eigaron) (Imamura), 55, 61 Theory of Film (Balázs), 124 Therapeutic authority, 110, 120 Therapeutic films. See also Mental health films flashbacks used in, 113 Thin Blue Line, The (Morris), xiii Third Cinema, 437, 439–440, 457n “Third way,” in Peronism, 444 Third Worldism, 437, 444, 457n 30 Years of Experiment (Richter), 382, 385n Thorak, Joseph, 294 13,000 Feet Underground (Faurez), 151 Thread of Destiny, The (Griffith), 410 311 (Matsubayashi, Mori, Watai, and Yasuoka), 67n Thorndike, Andrew, 257, 269 Thriftnigel, 129, 132 Tian Han, 315, 321–322 Time‐lapse images, in embryology, 345, 348–349, 359n Time‐Life newsreels, 429 Tisse, Eduard, 177 Titan, The: The Story of Michelangelo (Lyford), 294 Tobak, Esfir, 166 Tobing‐Rony, Fatimah, 240 Tode, Thomas, 372, 381 Tolstoy, Lev, 182 Topicals, 402 Topical Slide Company, 408 Topographical aesthetic, in Soviet ­documentary films, 5, 75–76, 90–91 Tosaka Jun, 48 To Serve the Mind (Jackson), 112 “Towards a Third Cinema” (Solanas and Getino), 438, 439, 440 Town, The (von Sternberg), 11–12, 23n Town Solves a Problem, A (US Army Civilian Affairs Division), 4, 6, 15–17, 24n Training mental health films for, 116–118

Index surgical films in, 344–345 Travel films films focusing on artworks as, 293, 304 Grierson on documentary and, 97, 188, 189 patriotism in, 84–85 vidovoi) films in Soviet Union as, 72, 73, 74, 77–79, 80–81, 83, 85, 89–90, 91 Travelogues as art documentaries, 293 audiences for, 423 Travels across the USSR (Puteshestviia po SSSR), 71–75, 77, 78, 81, 82, 91 Treatise on Venom and Eternity (Traité de Bave et d’éternité) (Isou), 40 Tréfois, Jean‐Paul, 305 Trenker, Luis, 241 Trickfilm technique, 354 Trip to the Wonderland of America, A (Kalem), 405 Traversé du Sahara au auto‐chenille, La (Crossing the Sahara in Half‐track Cars) (Casteinau), 431 True‐Life Adventure series (Disney), 100, 245, 394 Triumph of the Will (Riefenstahl), 3, 264 Truffaut, Francois, 157, 212, 247, 248 Tseitlin, Mark, 169, 183n, 184n Tsivian, Yuri, 168, 192, 194, 196, 355 Tsuchimoto Noriaki, 47 Tsumura Hideo, 6, 49, 50–54, 55, 57, 59, 61 Tucker, Jennifer, 340 Tulsa, Oklahoma (US Army Civilian Affairs Division), 14, 24n Türck, Walter C., 293 Turin, Victor A., 67n Turkle, Sherry, 135–136 Turkmenistan, Soviet survey film on, 5, 73, 77 Turksib (Turin), 67n Turner, Fred, 381 Turner, J. M. W., 302 Turnock, Julie, 361n Turovskaya, Maya, 75 Turvey, Malcolm, 368 TV Gallery (Schum), 305

515

UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles), 123, 127, 131 UFA (Universum Film‐Aktien Gesellschaft), 52, 294, 432 United Kingdom audience experience to 1939 in, 422, 424–428 documentary film movement in, 3, 67n, 211–212, 244, 424–426 UK Empire Marketing Board (EMB), 3, 4, 98, 102, 244, 424–425 UK General Post Office (GPO) Film Unit, 18, 244, 245, 424, 425, 429 UK Ministry of Information, 421, 428 UNESCO, 4, 274, 275, 296 United Nations, 461 Film Board, 108 United States, audience experience to 1941 in, 428–430 US Army Civilian Affairs Division (CAD), 9–10, 12, 13–15, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23n, 24n Reorientation Branch, CAD, 9–10, 12, 21 US Film Service, 4 US Film Settlement Administration, 434 US Information Agency (USIA), 9, 22n United States Institute of Peace (USIP), 226, 227 US Library of Congress, 410, 430 US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), 15, 24n US Navy, 113 US Office of War Information (OWI), 9, 10–11, 12, 13, 14, 21, 23n, 378 US State Department foreign propaganda offices in, 22n Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), 123, 127, 131 Unmanned capture, 103 capture model in, 127–128 cognitive assistance in, 129 definition of, 124 definition of documentary and, 130–131

516 Index Unmanned capture (cont’d) double‐hit video examples of, 132–136 drone warfare and, 131–132 gatekeeping in, 125, 136, 142 governance and control in, 128–129 increase in capturability of our actions and worlds in, 129–130 qualculation in, 129, 131, 132 racial factors in recognition in, 136–141 witnessing and, 124, 125, 126, 127, 130, 131, 132, 134, 135, 141–142 Unmanning definition of, 123 real‐time data analytics in, 134 Unveiling Ceremonies of the McKinley Memorial, The (Essanay), 403 Uprising, The (Snowdon), 231, 232 Urban, Charles, 353, 402, 422, 427–428, 432, 434n Uricchio, William, xvii, 397–398 Useful cinema, 287 vacances de M. Hulot, Les (Tati), 161n Vallejo, Gerardo, 438, 439–440, 446 Valley of the Geysers (Dolina geizerov) (Mosnauchfilm), 80, 81, 83 Van Dyke, Willard S., 242, 295, 378 Van Eyck, Hubert, 295, 297 Van Eyck, Jan, 295, 297 Van Gogh (Resnais), 298, 300, 308n Van Gogh, Vincent, 298, 302 Varda, Agnes, 248 Variety (newspaper), 406, 409, 411, 415n Varlamov, Leonid, 88 Vautier, René, 5–6, 27, 28–35, 36, 38, 39–40, 43, 43n, 44n Vedrèsnicole, 40 Venice Film Festivals, 243, 308n Verdicchio, Dirk, 372–373 Verdun Protestant Hospital, West Montreal, 116, 117 Verón, Eliseo, 443–444 Vertov, Dziga, x, 31

The Eleventh Hour, 171 Human with a Movie Camera, 67n, 181, 181, 183, 194, 195, 200 Kino‐Nedelia, 101, 192–194, 203n revelationist tradition and, 384n Richter and lessons from, 372 Shub and, 165–166, 167, 169–170, 177, 180, 184n smychka (union or alliance) idea and, 203n Vesna, V., 109 Veynerovich, I. N., 87–88 Viaggio in Italia (Voyage to Italy) (Rossellini), 247 Viany, Alex, 277 Vidovoi (nature and travel) films, Soviet Union, 72, 73, 74, 77–82, 83, 85, 87, 89–90, 91 Vie est a nous, La (Renoir et al.), 31 Vierny, Sacha, 266 Vieux‐Colombier programming, 97, 104n Vieyra, Paulin Soumanou, 5–6, 27–28, 35–43, 45n Vieyra, Stéphane, 45n Vigo, Jean, 197 Vilardebo, Carlos, 148 Villard, André, 161n Ville Louvre, La (Philibert), 303 Vincendeau, Ginette, 210–211 Vingt‐quatre heures de la vie d’un clown (Melville), 161n Virtual reality, 397, 461, 462, 466, 473 claims for, 461 documentary in, 461 Visconti, Luchino, 243, 247 Visible Evidence community, xiv, 395 Visite à Picasso (Haesaerts), 300–301 Visite au Louvre, Une (Straub and Huillet), 303 Vispa Teresa, La (Lively Teresa) (Rossellini), 243, 246 Visual culture, Balázs on, 58 Visualization techniques, in embryology, 344–345 Vitagraph, 415n

Index Vlad, Roman, 297 Vogel, Amos, 381 Vogel, Raymond, 28–30, 32–33 Vogt, Walther, 353, 361n “Voice of Documentary, The” (Nichols), 130 Voice‐over techniques Chinese film and, 330, 331–333 documentaries on decolonization struggle with, 28, 31–32, 34, 35–36, 37, 38, 40–42, 44n French industrial films with, 151, 152 Ivens’s Das Lied der Ströme, 269–270, 281n narrators in mental health films and, 113–114, 115, 117 Richter’s Die Börse and, 373 Soviet films and, 75, 83–84, 86, 88 Voices, in Minzu wansui, 331–333 Volkskrant (newspaper), 273 von Rebay, Hilla, 378 Von Sternberg, Josef, 11–12, 149 Voyage dans le ciel (Painlevé), 246 Voyage in Italy (Rossellini), 242 Vrijman, Jan, 301 Vygodskii, Ruvim, 84 Waller, Gregory A., xvii, 396, 401–420 Walt Disney Studios. See Disney Studios Wang Yue, 132–133, 137 Ward, Lynd, 293 War documentaries, 125 Warner Brothers, 149, 433 Washington Post, 137–138, 475 Watai Takeharu, 67n Watt, Harry, 240, 258 Night Mail 3, 18 Waugh, Thomas, xvi, 44n, 209, 211, 213–214, 255–282 Wavrin, Marquis de, 240 Wax‐plate modeling, 344, 348, 352 Ways of Seeing (Berger), 300, 304–305 Wearing, Gillian, 307 Weavers of Nishijin, The (Nishijin) (Matsumoto), 68n

517

Weibel, Peter, 218, 305 Weigel, Helene, 277 Weimerian period, Germany, 432 Weinberg, Herman G., 379–380, 383 West Africa. See French West Africa Wellman, William A., 52 White, Kenneth, 379 Wigoder, Meir, 124–127, 131, 142, 142n Wilder, Billy, 432 Williams, Linda, xiii Wilson, Darren, 137 Windrose, Die (The Windrose) (Cavalcanti et al.), 276, 277, 280 Winston, Brian, ix xvii, 191, 201n–202n, 212, 393–399, 421–436 Wiseman, Frederick, 303 Witnessing, and unmanned capture, 124, 125, 126, 127, 130, 131, 132, 134, 135, 141–142 Witness.org, 472 Women, collective labor aspect of editing work of, 175–180 Woman in Film (Korolevich), 176, 183 Women and the Community (US Army Civilian Affairs Division), 4, 15, 17–19, 20 Woolfs, Bruce, 241 Workers Ex‐Servicemen’s League, 221 Workers Film and Photo League (WFPL), 31, 214, 219, 220–221, 230, 234n, 426 Workers’ International Relief (WIR), 220–221, 231, 429 “Work of Montagesses, The” (Shub), 175, 182 World Economic Forum, 461 World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), 91, 265, 280n World of Gilbert and George, The (Haas), 305 World That Nature Forgot, The (Jacobs), 338 World Without End (Wright and Rotha), 275 World War II

518 Index mental health films associated with, 113 small‐town propaganda films for occupied countries after, 4–5, 9–25 Wright, Basil, 3, 18, 240, 371 Wu Kuo‐Yin [, 277 Wyler, William, 113, 242 Wylie, Philip, 113 Wyscic Pokóju Warszawa‐Berlin‐Praga (Friedensfahrt / Peace Tour) (Ivens), 264, 265, 266 Wyver, John, 304, 305 Xin nüxing (New Woman) (Cai), 319, 322 Xuezhong guchu (Orphan of the Storm) (Zhang), 319 Yakutia, Soviet survey film on, 74, 80, 82, 86, 88 Yamagata International Film Festival, 47 Yamamotonaoki, 47–70 Yamanaka Sadao, 68n Yao Shiquan, 322 Yasui qian (New Year Coin) (Zhang), 319 Yasuoka Takaharu, 67n Ye meigui (The Wild Rose) (Sun), 322 Yerevan Film and Newsreel Studio, 77 Ying Yunwei, 315 Yoshimoto Takaaki, 60 Young and the Damned, The (Los olvidados), (Buñuel), 64–65 Young Pioneers (Komsomol), 194–195

YouTube audience’s participatory activities on, 470–471 Egyptian protestors’ use of, 226, 232 Yuan Muzhi, 319 Zabunyan, Dork, 232 Zecca, Ferdinand, 197 Zeichentafel, 341, 342 Zeniakin, Arkadii, 82 Zhang Huimin, 319 Zhang Shichuan, 319 Zhdanov, Andrei, 75, 87, 260, 261, 280n Zhdanovism, 5, 75–76, 78, 86–87, 272 Zheng Junli, 313, 317 Minzu wansui (Long Live the Nation), 313, 316, 321–325 Zhongdian (Central Film Studio), Chongqing, China, 314–315, 316 Zhongjiao (Educational Studio), Chongqing, China, 314 Zhongzhi (China Motion Picture Corporation) Chongqing, China, 314–315, 316, 317, 322 Zika, Damouré, 44n Zimmerman, George, 137 Zimmermann, Yvonne, 288, 367–389 Zoological surrealism, 246 Zoshchenko, Mikhail, 87 Zuiderzee (Ivens), 266