A New History of British Documentary

J. Chapman

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780230392861
• eBook ISBN: 9780230392878
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

A New History of British Documentary is the first comprehensive overview of documentary production in Britain from early film to the present day. It covers both the film and television industries and demonstrates how documentary practice has adapted to changing institutional and ideological contexts.

1

Documentary Before Grierson

My interest has always been to find anything new which has practical value, especially of an instructive character, develop and exploit [the] same for general use. I saw great instructive value in the motion picture as an educational factor … Throughout my entire connection with the motion picture industry I have specialized in educational subjects of science, travel and topical episodes, now referred to as ‘documentary’ films.

Charles Urban¹

In most standard film histories the emergence of documentary is generally understood as an international process in the 1920s when a number of films across different national cinemas – including Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) in America, Alberto Cavalcanti’s Rien Que les Hueres (1926) in France, Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a City (1927) in Germany, Dziga Vertov’s The Man With a Movie Camera (1929) in the Soviet Union and John Grierson’s Drifters (1929) in Britain – gave rise to a new type of film that eschewed the melodramatic antics of the fiction film in preference for social observation and authenticity in the representation of real people and locations.² The films cited above all demonstrated, in different ways, Grierson’s notion of documentary as ‘the creative treatment of actuality’. Hence documentary came to be seen as a progressive mode of film practice characterized by aesthetic innovation and social purpose. However, as early film historian Stephen Bottomore has pointed out, the association between documentary and progressive aesthetics has led to the eclipse of an older tradition of non-fiction film in Britain and elsewhere: by ‘implying that the documentary is art or it is nothing’ the standard historiography posits ‘that no “real” documentaries were made before 1920’.³ Since the late 1970s the critical ‘rediscovery’ of early cinema has seen the emergence of a revisionist historiography that has comprehensively redrawn the historical map of film production and exhibition during the medium’s formative decades. Early cinema is no longer regarded as a primitive mode of film practice from which emerged – through a process of trial and error – the ‘classical’ cinema of Hollywood and other nations, but rather as a period of innovation and rapid transformation characterized by a wide and diverse range of film styles, genres and practices.⁴ While the chief beneficiary of this historical revisionism has been the fiction film, the discovery of significant collections such as the films of Mitchell and Kenyon has also brought the non-fiction film into the spotlight.

Early British non-fiction film

It is important to understand the contexts of early film production and exhibition in order to appreciate the place of non-fiction film in the formative years of British cinema. For the first decade or so film production was something of a cottage industry. The pioneers of British film-making – including men such as R. W. Paul, James Williamson and Cecil Hepworth – saw themselves as businessmen rather than creative artists: their business was making and selling films to satisfy the public’s interest in the new medium of moving pictures. Early cinema has been described as a ‘cinema of attractions’: its appeal was posited on ‘an exciting spectacle – a unique event, whether fictional or documentary, that is of interest in itself’.⁵ This is evident in the response to the first public screening in Britain by Birt Acres at the Royal Photographic Society on 14 January 1896, which included a one-shot film entitled Rough Sea at Dover. According to a review in The Photogram:

The most successful effect, and one which called forth rounds of applause from the usually placid members of the ‘Royal’, was a reproduction of a number of breaking waves, which may be seen to roll in from the sea, curl over against a jetty, and break into clouds of snowy spray that seemed to start from the screen.⁶

As well as being a cottage industry, film was also very much a local enterprise. This was as true of exhibition as it was of production: until the establishment of permanent cinemas from around 1910, most film shows took place in fairgrounds and music halls or were held in rented spaces that functioned as temporary cinemas. The role of travelling showmen in film exhibition during the Edwardian period has only tardily been recognized but it was this practice that fuelled the market for films with a specifically local interest.⁷ The largest collection of non-fiction film in Britain before the First World War comprises over 800 titles by the Lancashire film-makers Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon: the majority of these were local subjects such as parades and sporting events shot mostly across the north of England. The economic contexts of early cinema favoured local films: they were cheap to produce and process, while exhibitors could hire cameras for the day to film local items for their patrons. However, the tradition of local film-making declined with the rise in the later 1900s of companies such as the British Mutoscope and Biograph Company and the Warwick Trading Company, which operated as producer-distributors on a national level.⁸

In Britain, as elsewhere, early film exhibition was notable for its diversity: a wide range of fiction and non-fiction films co-existed alongside each other. Until the emergence of the long ‘feature’ film as the primary attraction in the 1910s – a process that coincided with and was to some extent an outcome of the advent of purpose-built permanent cinema sites – film shows would consist of a mixed programme of shorter subjects that might include travelogues and ‘topicals’ (films of newsworthy events) alongside story films and ‘trick’ films exploring the medium’s potential for artifice and illusion. The early cinematographers often made films across different genres. Cecil Hepworth, for example, is best known as the director of early story films such as Alice in Wonderland (1903) and Rescued by Rover (1905) but he also shot many ‘actualities’, including films of the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race of 1898 and the funeral of Queen Victoria in 1901. In his memoir, Came the Dawn, Hepworth recalled that his camera caught the attention of the new king, who ‘halted the procession so that posterity might have the advantage of the cinematograph record’.⁹

The idea of film as a record of contemporary events was prominent in the discourses around early cinema. As early as 1898 the Polish cinematographer Boleslas Matuszewski had described film as ‘a new source of history’ and had predicted that ‘animated photography … will give a direct view of the past’: ‘Perhaps the cinematograph does not give history in its entirety, but at least what it does deliver is incontestable and of absolute truth … One could say that animated photography has a character of authenticity, accuracy and precision that belongs to it alone.’¹⁰ Matuszewski’s claim for the ‘absolute truth’ of the filmic image may now seem rather naive but it should be borne in mind that, like other early cinematographers, he was seeking to legitimate the young medium as being something more than a fairground attraction. In fact it is evident that by the turn of the century the first ‘fakes’ purporting to be actuality film had been made. Indeed Mitchell and Kenyon – now known for their extensive archive of genuine non-fiction subjects – were responsible for staging fiction films of scenes from the Boer War (Winning the VC, 1900) and the Boxer Rebellion in China (Attack on a China Mission, 1901). To be fair to early film-makers their intention was not necessarily to deceive, and such dramatic reconstructions were often acknowledged as such. R. W. Paul, for example, produced a series of topical films entitled Reproductions of Incidents of the Boer War and claimed in the sales catalogue that they had been ‘arranged under the supervision of an experienced military officer from the front’.¹¹

In the early days of film production and exhibition there was no distinction made between fiction and non-fiction film: all films were ‘attractions’ and were marketed as such. However, the growing popularity of story films from around 1905 saw some film-makers turn to non-fiction subjects as a conscious strategy of product differentiation. This was the aim of the Charles Urban Trading Company when it issued a series of films of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904–1905. Its sales catalogue declared:

Every Russo-Japanese War picture listed by us is absolutely genuine and should not be confounded [sic] with the disgraceful series of fakes, eminating [sic] principally from French sources, which have, by their exhibition, misled the public and cast a doubt as to authenticity of the results obtained at great risk and expense by the conscientious Film Maker.¹²

Urban had sent cameraman Joseph Rosenthal to the Far East to cover the war, though most of the footage he obtained was of troop movements rather than actual combat. For all the hyperbole of its catalogue, the Urban Trading Company was not averse to perpetuating the same sort practices it accused others of: The Bombardment of Port Arthur (1905) was re-enacted at a British naval training base near Portsmouth.

It would be misleading to see early non-fiction film as a prototype of the documentary form that emerged later. Early topical films are perhaps better understood as precursors of the newsreels that began in France with Pathé Journal (shown in Britain as Pathé Gazette) in 1910. The prevalence of naval subjects – exemplified by films such as The Launch of HMS ‘Albion’ at Blackwall (1898) and King Edward VII Launches HMS ‘Dreadnought’ (1906) – suggests that such films may have been intended to impress the might of the Royal Navy upon audiences both at home and abroad. Another characteristic of early non-fiction film is its obsession with travel and, especially, with new forms of transport. The first batch of films offered by the Warwick Trading Company in 1898 included numerous examples of a genre known as ‘phantom rides’ – films shot from the front of a moving vehicle such as a train or a tram, which create an impression of movement. These films were often promoted on the basis of their pictorial qualities: the description of View from an Engine Front – Entering Tavistock (1898) points out that ‘the picture includes viaducts and arches and numerous curves on the line besides the beautiful natural scenery inherent to this part of the country’.¹³

The most important figure in the history of early British non-fiction film was Charles Urban. Urban was an American-born salesman who had developed a projector known as the Bioscope, which reduced the distraction of the ‘flicker’ effect. Moving to Britain in 1897, Urban became manager the following year of the newly formed Warwick Trading Company, which specialized in topical and scientific films. Urban’s commercial acumen turned around the fortunes of the company, which became the most successful producer-distributor of the early 1900s. It scored a particular success with its films of the Boer War, which were shown in Britain only three weeks after being shot in South Africa. In 1903 Urban left Warwick to set up his own business, the Charles Urban Trading Company, another successful enterprise that combined film production, distribution and equipment sales. While Urban produced some fiction subjects, such as Walter Booth’s The Airship Destroyer (1909), a proto-science-fiction drama in the style of the acclaimed French pioneer Georges Méliès, he focused on the non-fiction film. It has been estimated that Urban was responsible for half of all non-fiction films produced in Britain between 1905 and 1910.¹⁴ Urban’s preference for non-fiction film ran against the trend towards story films that was emerging by this time: his success was due in large measure to astute marketing as well as the superior quality of his films.

Yet Urban was more than just a successful producer: he also developed an interest in the social utility of cinema. He was quick to spot the potential of film to serve the needs of education and preceded John Grierson as an advocate of a more socially purposeful cinema. As he declared in 1907:

I consider that the kinematograph business has arrived at its present stage principally through the catering for the entertainment and amusement of the public, and that while the ‘amusement’ branch of the business will constantly increase, the future mainstay of the business will be through the development of its most important fields, viz., the scientific, educational, and industrial branches, and in matters of State.¹⁵

The same year, Urban published a booklet entitled The Cinematograph in Science, Education and Matters of State, which argued that ‘[the] entertainer has hitherto monopolised the Cinematograph for exhibition purposes, but movement in more serious directions has become imperative’.¹⁶ He recalled Matuszewski in acclaiming the ‘accurate and truthful eye’ of the cinematograph and in calling for ‘motion pictures of current events … to be treasured as vital documents among the historical archives of our museums’.¹⁷ In particular, Urban advocated the use of film by the military (recording tactics and manoeuvres) and in science and medicine (for example in recording surgical procedures for teaching students). And finally he also anticipated Grierson in recognizing the potential of showing films outside the usual exhibition spaces, arguing that ‘the Cinematograph has to become, not – as some people imagine it – a showman’s plaything, but a vital necessity for every barracks, ship, college, school, institute, hospital, laboratory, academy and museum; for every traveller, explorer and missionary’.¹⁸

What distinguished Urban from his contemporaries was his combination of business sense and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Critical and Historical Perspectives on British Documentary
• 1. Documentary Before Grierson
• 2. Documentary in the 1930s
• 3. Documentary at War
• 4. Post-War Documentary
• 5. Television and Documentary
• 6. Alternative and Oppositional Documentary
• Conclusion: British Documentary in Context
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index