Conference Report
Breaking the Boundaries – the Stirling Documentary Conference: an international conference on documentary.
University of Stirling, Scotland, 28-31 January, 1999.
Uploaded 16 April 1999
The Conference was dedicated specifically to the study of documentary film, TV, video, and new technologies, both historical and contemporary. The emphases were on the emergence of new types of TV documentary (eg., video diaries, docu-soaps, docu-drama), and the influence of new technologies such as the World Wide Web on form, content and reception. The blurring of the divide between fact and fiction was a key theme.
Two full sessions were devoted to an appraisal of the influence of Stirling-born John Grierson, a key facilitator of the British Documentary Movement of the 1930s and, indeed, internationally. Grierson was also consulted in one way or another during the late 1940s on the establishment of national film boards in Canada (which he managed for a while), India, South Africa, and he submitted a report to the Australian government. Grierson’s influence pervaded just about every presentation made at the Conference, whether historical or contemporary. I shall concentrate on this aspect of the Conference in my report, as it is Grierson’s work as a film maker, theorist and consultant to governments, which coincides with my own interest. This interest also coincides with the next issue of Screening the Past on the worldwide influence of Grierson, edited by Ina Bertrand.
Thematic Highlights
Much of the discussion was on new forms of British TV documentary, made possible by new portable technologies permitting intimate subject-generated programming, and easy public access. This information was new to most delegates from outside the UK. These are:
a. Very short stories of a few minutes duration told by ordinary people videoing themselves (Video diaries, Video nation).
b. Half-hour programmes where ordinary family and other units are videod by small professional crews in cinéma vérité style. These were labelled as ‘docu-soaps’ – documentaries on ordinary working life and daily events which are generated in terms of the narratives of soap operas. These “reinvigorated documentaries”, as Richard Kilborn called them, speak to audience in everyday language. The programme’s subjects collude with the crews in revealing their lives, relationships and dramatic happenings.
c. Docudramas, where a true story is animated and reconstructed via narrative conventions, discussed by Derek Paget.
d. Documentary journalism, which according to John Corner is the animating of the social within inquiry – a discourse of sobriety, as Bill Nichols describes it. The journalistic emphasis makes a “viewing offer” to the audience, and narrates the inquiry as an inquiry (in addition to the product) (Corner).
e. Continuously updated multimedia essays uploaded onto the Web.
f. Other papers were on audience studies, legal issues, and script pitching. Faking of scenes in documentaries and the ethical and legal implications of this practice or errors on the part of documentary directors was discussed at length, in the light of a recent UK court decision.
John Grierson and After
Two sessions on Grierson discussed his influence on film makers in the UK, Australia and Denmark. His work for the South African government between 1949 and 1954 was discussed by myself and Edwin Hees. He proposed a national film board, and was excited at the vigorousness of political debate that he encountered, within the white population at least. Blacks, he understood, still needed to “break through”. Abé Mark Nornes’ work on the reception in pre-War Japan of Paul Rotha’s seminal book, Documentary Film, to which Grierson had written an introduction, discussed how the five separate translations had been rewritten in terms of the prevailing conservatively political Japanese perspectives of the time. John Gray, well into his seventies, who had worked with Grierson while at the GPO Film Unit, offered a theory of lyrical documentary, typical of the 1930s, and was engagingly interviewed on his experiences while working with Grierson. Gray’s prime assumption was that “hagiology” had crept into assessments of Grierson and that a re-assessment was required. He iterated time and again that Grierson was not a film maker; rather that he was a facilitator; and that Grierson was at his most effective when advising governments. Like Nornes, Gray argued that it was Rotha and Alberto Cavalcanti who taught the theory and practice of film making which had been so influential within the British Documentary Movement.
John Corner described Grierson’s understanding of documentary as a “celebration of the real”, rather than offering inquiry, while Michael Chanan, drawing on Jürgen Habermas’s theory of the public sphere, located Grierson’s work as a form of communicative action within this domain. Two papers on the impact of the international Documentary Movement on Australian film, and one on Danish documentary, were offered. Grierson made a report to the Australian government on the possibility of the establishment of a government film production agency, but his report was ignored. Deane Williams presented a revisionist position, questioning the extent of Grierson’s actual role in the eventual establishment of the Australian Films Division. He suggested that other film makers, such as Harry Watt and Joris Ivens, had wielded more influence. Grierson never did work in Australia, despite his continuing influence on the work of Stanley Hawes, who managed the Film Unit, a subject dealt with by Ina Bertrand. Finally, a paper from a Public Relations scholar, Jaquie L’Etang, revealed the early public service origins (now often forgotten) of this field. She discussed the seminal influence of both Grierson and his boss, Secretary of the Empire Marketing Board, Sir Stephen Talents, on both the documentary movement and early PR theory. This is a very important study for it expands current discussion of Grierson into other areas of public communication not known, if at all, within film study circles.
A Personal View
My visit to Stirling gave me the opportunity of consulting the Grierson Archives at the University prior to the Conference. Here I found a number of unpublished documents on, and references to, his South African and African trips in 1949. The personal information gleaned filled the gaps in my own assessment of Grierson’s interpretation of the intentions of the new apartheid National Party government. The ambience of Stirling, the University’s Department of Film and Media Studies, and the conference, gave me a feel for Grierson’s pervasive influence and decisive impact on the theory and history of documentary film worldwide. We even visited the house where he lived until the age of 16, now a national monument in Stirling. This subjective information I included in my presentation. Previously, my relationship with Grierson was conducted at a distance; it was a purely analytical one, derived from reading his own writing and commentaries on him, studying the films he made, and those made about him. My presentation thus connected the personal and ideological dots, especially with regard to the rather intriguing relation between this radically liberal Scotsman, and the emergent apartheid Afrikaner government. I tested my new-found ideas of the empathy revealed by Grierson for South Africa on the audience, and those who knew Grierson personally such as John Gray. Gray especially confirmed my inferences, and related them to his own presentation. Briefly, Grierson, a Calvinist, believed that the new apartheid government, a staunchly Calvinist one, had the will and energy to use film in the pursuit of democracy, one in which blacks would be eventually incorporated.
The experience was very helpful in revising my original analysis and adding subjective depth to what was until then a rather dry discussion of Grierson’s 1954 proposals for a South African national film board. Though my original study of Grierson had been published in Cinema Canada in 1985, the article failed to find a ready audience. (Perhaps the fact that the journal closed shortly after was a factor.) The Stirling Conference thus provided the ideal opportunity to: a) offer a revisionist version of my (and Edwin Hees’s) earlier analyses (to be published in the next issue of Screening the Past); b) connect with similar studies being conducted in Australia, the UK and Denmark; and c) find publication in a refereed theme issue on the topic. The Conference thus animated previous research done by both Hees and myself.
The Conference was exceptionally well organised. Matthew Hibbard, especially, is to be commended. Most of the delegates were British. Others came from Australia, Germany, Denmark, and the USA. Individuals from Italy, Switzerland, Israel, Finland and South Africa attended. Both academics and practitioners participated. Some had actually worked with Grierson, and one, Stephen Peet, had worked in the Central African Film Unit established in 1948. 110 delegates were recorded, with 85 being the largest attendance at a plenary panel. Amongst those participating were internationally seminal theorists and documentary film makers such as Brian Winston, Alan Rosenthal, Roger Graef, and so on. These, and those mentioned above, are some of the people who established and consolidated documentary film, TV and video as a field of analysis and aesthetic development internationally, from the 1930s to the present.