A Companion to Documentary Film History

Joshua Malitsky, Joshua Malitsky

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781119116301
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Historia y crítica cinematográficas

This volume offers a new and expanded history of the documentary form across a range of times and contexts, featuring original essays by leading historians in the field

In a contemporary media culture suffused with competing truth claims, documentary media have become one of the most significant means through which we think in depth about the past. The most rigorous collection of essays on nonfiction film and media history and historiography currently available, A Companion to Documentary Film History offers an in-depth, global examination of central historical issues and approaches in documentary, and of documentary's engagement with historical and contemporary topics, debates, and themes.

The Companion 's twenty original essays by prominent nonfiction film and media historians challenge prevalent conceptions of what documentary is and was, and explore its growth, development, and function over time. The authors provide fresh insights on the mode's reception, geographies, authorship, multimedia contexts, and movements, and address documentary's many aesthetic, industrial, historiographical, and social dimensions. This authoritative volume:

• Offers both historical specificity and conceptual flexibility in approaching nonfiction and documentary media
• Explores documentary's multiple, complex geographic and geopolitical frameworks
• Covers a diversity of national and historical contexts, including Revolution-era Soviet Union, post-World War Two Canada and Europe, and contemporary China
• Establishes new connections and interpretive contexts for key individual films and film movements, using new primary sources
• Interrogates established assumptions about documentary authorship, audiences, and documentary's historical connection to other media practices.

A Companion to Documentary Film History is an ideal text for undergraduate and graduate courses covering documentary or nonfiction film and media, an excellent supplement for courses on national or regional media histories, and an important new resource for all film and media studies scholars, particularly those in nonfiction media.

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 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 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 newsreel 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 colonial documentary, to whose form the films respond. Africa 50 and Africa on the Seine do not re...