GRIERSON GROWS IN STATURE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 397, 31 January 1947, Page 12

GRIERSON GROWS IN STATURE

NSTEAD of reviewing any films this week, I intend to review a book about films. But even that is not strictly accurate, for there are whole pages, and even whole sections, in Grierson On Documentary* in which the words "film" or "cinema" are not once mentioned. John Grierson’s name is one of the most famous and significant in the cinema; and yet, as this selection of his writings, contributed to a variety of journals over the past two decades, makes abundantly clear, he is far from being only a film-man, though he has, he tells us, "been associated in the making of maybe a thousand films or more : . . and has also had something to do with the machinery of their financing and distribution in different parts of the world, which is a greater labour still." In addition, Grierson has been, or is, an able journalist, a shrewd critic of the commercial cinema (of which he is, in general, fairly contemptuous), a hard- , headed and practical civil servant, a lecturer, an organiser, a businessman, a propagandist, a political philosopher, and above all an educationist. Almost a jack of all trades, he is, it would seem, master of most. We in New Zealand, of course, have a special interest in him, and owe him a considerable debt, as the man. who; as the result of his visit here in 1940, was largely responsible for launching the National Film Unit along the right lines, and whose philosophy has profoundly influenced its development. Those members of our Film Unit who may occasionally have a sense of frustration and a feeling that they might get further faster under other conditions might perheps take special note of this statement by him: "As I know after many years, no service is so great or inspiring, and particularly for film-makers, as a service which detaches itself from private profit. It frees one’s feet for those maturing experiences whch are vital to the new art. It makes a daily bravery of what (under British. commercial film conditions) is a dull little muddle of private interests and all too personal vanities." : ; In presenting the many aspects and interests of Grierson’s phenomenally energetic career, Forsyth Hardy has done a good job, supported by fine printing and 92 illustrations. though one could wish that he had included more references to the dates and sources of the excerpts he has chosen. The temptation to a reviewer of the book to quote extensively from it is very strong; and this is, indeed, perhaps the best way to give an indication of the contents and of Grierson’s philosophy of the film. * * $s, IRST, Grierson the critic. Nobody. I should think, has ever written more pungently, vigorously, and perceptively about ordinary cinema enterta nment than he did in reviews contributed to several journals after his return to Britain about 1930 from~-the U.S.A. (where he had gone on a Rockefeller Research Fellowship in Social Science) and nobody has made a better statement of what should be the true duty and purpose of the film critic and of the standards he should serve. Of every film

and of every film talent, he asked a modicum of revelation: It may be a novelty of fact, or an angle of beauty, or an efficiency of technical demonstration. These will serve in the absence of better things . . . It is my old-fashioned opinion that nothing less will serve us finally in our attention on cinema . . . Even a medium of professedly popular entertainment cannot quite escape that demand. As I understand it, the first job of a critic is to stand as sensory instrument to the world of creation, and register this revelation as it comes along, and point people to it, and, it may even be, do something to underline or elucidate it. I look to register what actually moves: what hits the spectator at the midriff: what yanks him up by the hair of the head or the plain boot-straps to the plane of decent seeing. I see no reason why, because a film is. made for the populace and made for money, we should exempt it from the ordinary duties of art . To any body of men interested in the better shaping of the world, the cinema’s influence is a serious matter. By romanticising and dramatizing the issues of life, even by choosing the issues it will dramatize, it creates or crystallises the loyalties on which people make their decisions. This, in turn, has a great deal to do with public opinions. I do not mean that the critic must examine in every film its social implication or lack of it. It is enough if the critic is conscious of the general question and does his utmost to have the honours of life decently distributed. That profession of critical faith comes early in the book, as it came early in Grierson’s career, yet as one reads on one finds it consistently mainta.ned: though it is restated differently, it is the basis of his creed of the realistic film, the documentary. What is most str.king, however, about the reviews of old films reprinted in the first part cf the book is their immediacy, their relevance even after 10 to 15 years, and above all the almost prophetic insight revealed in his assessment of various d:rectors and stars who were, for the most part, new to the cinema at that time. His writings about Chaplin, the Marx ‘Brothers, von Sternberg, William Wyler, Alfred Hitchcock, Lubitsch, Clair, and others, reveal a perceptive understanding of the permanent values in their work: he was able to discern what was gold and what was dross, For instance: "I am all for this William Wyler; he has a taste for the greater gestures and is still steering them past the hokum they so easily invoke" (that was written well before Wyler made Dead End). And this about Hitchcock: "I believe the highbrows, in their praise

of him, have sent Hitchcock off in ‘the wrong direction, as they have sent many another: Chaplin for example. They have picked out his clever little pieces, stressed them and analysed them till they are almost everything in his directorial make-up." * * * VELL, it is interesting to have such evidence that Grierson was as exXpert in crit.cising films as he later became in producing and inspiring them. However, this book is Grierson On Documentary and it is, of course, with the documentary movement that it is most concerned, that movement founded and guided by Grierson to provide "a kind of educational shorthand which will somehow give people quick end immediate comprehension of the highly complex forces which motivate our: complicated society." The story of that movement and Grierson’s part in it is probably pretty well-known in outline already, but it has never been better or more clearly told than in his own writings and lectures on the subject, for he is a lucid as well as a tireless expositor of his creed. However... ; It is worth recalling that the British documentary group began not so much in affection for film per se as in affection for national education. If I am to be counted as the founder and leader of the movement, its origins certainly lay in sociological rather than aesthetic aims. Many of us after 1918 (and particularly in the United States) were impressed by the pessimism that had settled on Liberal theory. We noted the conclusion of such men as Walter Lippmann, that because the citizen, under modern conditions, could not know everything about everything all the time, democratic citizenship was therefore impossible. We set to thinking how a dramatic apprehension of the modern scene might solve the problem, and we turned to the new widereaching instruments of radio and cinema as necessary instruments in both the practice of government and the enjoyment of citizenship. Succeeding articles tell how Grierson and his team of brilliant young filmmakers worked at first for the Empire Marketing Board, and later for the G.P.O. in Britain, and then how he him--self went to Canada to become Governmént Film Commissioner. Less and less he becomes interested in films for their own sake; greater and greater grows his impatience with the purely aesthetic concept of the cinema: ("the self-con-scious pursuit of beauty, the pursuit of art for art’s sake to the exclusion of jobs of work"); more and more he rides his hobby-horse of education and social ‘purpose. And yet to call it a hobbyhorse perhaps implies a rather unfair criticism: it is not he so much as the editor of this collection of his articles who is respons ble here for taking it so often out of the stable. Similarly, in his impatience with the aesthetes, it has > be remembered that his outlook was at least partly dictated by the necessity of making films, and plenty of them, to to a particular propagandist job during war-time. Even his vocabulary reflected the urgency of the situation. So... — Since it is a question of giving people.a pattern of thought and feeling about highly complex and urgent events, we give it as well as we know, with a minimum of dawdling over how some poor darling happens to react to something or other . . . If our films pretend to be certain, it’s because people need certainty . . . If we bang them out one a fortnight and no rege eye of sitting six months on our fannies cuddling them to sweet smotheroo, it’s bdcause a lot of bravos in Russia and Japan and Germany are banging out things too and we’d maybe better learn how, in time, _If the manner is objective and hard, it’s because we believe the next phase of human development needs that kind of mental approach,

ET, however ruthless and violent _ Grierson may sometimes seem to be in his ideas and his expression of them, there is always vision behind them; an expanding vision, too, widening beyond national boundaries to the international sphere. And Constantly the note of social purpose is sounded: We were reformers open and avowed: con-cerned-to use the old jargon-with "bringing alive the new materials of citizenship," ‘‘crystallizing sentiments" and creating those "new loyalties from which a progressive civic will might derive." Take that away and I'd be hard put to it to say what I have been working for these past fifteen years . . . The documentary idea was not basically a film idea at all, and the film treatment it inspired only an incidental aspect of it. The medium happened to be the most convenient and most exciting available to us. The idea itself, on the other hand, was a new idea for public éducation: its underlying concept that _ the. world was in a phase of drastic change affecting every manner of thought and practice, and the public comprehension of the nature of that change vital. There it is, exploratory, experimental and stumbling, in the films themselves: from the dramatization of the workman and his daily work to the dramatization of modern organisation and the new corporate elements in society to the dramatization of social problems: each a step in the attempt to understand the stubborn raw material of our modern citizenship and wake ‘the heart and the will to their mastery. Where we stopped short was that, with equal deliberation, we refused to specify what political agency should carry out that will or associate ourselves with any one of them. Our’ job specifically was to wake the heart and the will: it was for the political parties to make before the people their own case for leadership. * % Bd "HESE articles by Grierson take us through the war and into peace; and his preoccupation now with a world view of the problems of education, and the | use which the film should serve in pro--ducing educated "world citizens," is reflected in his decision, in October 1945, to resign from his position as Canadian Film Commissioner, and in 1946 to launch two enterprises, International. Film Associates, and The World To-day Inc, for the production of 40 films a yearfilms with a world outlook for world distribution. "What determined my decision to extend the range of documentary," he says, "was the realisation that our work could not depend on a single national sponsorship, however strong, but only on the international reality created by the common interests of the common people everywhere." This conception of documentary as a force, for internationalism is perhaps even more precisely stated in the following quotation: I have been for a long time interested in propaganda and it is as a propagandist I have been from the first interested in films; I remember coming away from the last war with the very simple notion in my head that somethow we had to make peace exciting, if we were to prevent wars. Simple notion as it is, that has been my propaganda ever since-to make peace exciting. In one form or another I have produced or initiated hundreds of films; yet I think behind every one of them has been that e@ idea, that the ordinary affairs of people’S lives are more dramatic and’ more vital than all the false excitements you can muster. That has seemed to me something worth spending one’s life over. _I suppose there is a likelihood that anybody as interested in the film as I am will tend to exaggerate the stature of such a man as Grierson. Even so, I suggest that this book reveals him, not only as one of the most vital forces in the cinema to-day, but also as an important world figure and as one of the men likely to play a dominating part in shaping the new age. He is still only 49 years old. What he is doing at present is well enough in its way, but there would’ seem now to be only one job big enough for him; he should be given control] of the cinema section of United Nations, or, perhaps, of UNESCO. For some such task his experience, his commonsense practicality, and his idealism eminently fit him.

*Grierson On Documentary.-Edited by Forsyth Hardy. Collins.