Uploaded 1 July 1999
It was a wonderful time to be alive and involved in what is still often seen as the apogee of British Documentary making. But the past is another country, and things were certainly done differently then.

To appreciate that period it is useful to treat it under three aspects. These are the attitude and purpose of the creation of these documentaries, the people involved, and the technical facilities available.

Documentaries did not suddenly start with Grierson in London and Drifters (1929). In the great days of silent cinema, in Russia with Dziga Vertov, in Germany with the “Street” films, with Robert Flaherty and with early natural history films such as Chang (1927), there had been a considerable outpouring of what were called “realist” films. The big difference between what was done then and in the thirties, and what is done today, is that the films were celebratory rather than investigative. Even before the coming of sound they had a lyrical quality. Indeed this can be well described as the time of the “lyric documentary”. Cameras were pointed at things at which cameras had never been pointed before. From today’s viewpoint it is easy to think of them as bland and naive, and to accuse their makers of ignoring political and social problems. That is to treat them out of social context. It is true that in Arthur Elton’s Housing Problems (1935) and Alberto Cavalcanti’s Coalface (1935) there is no accusatory enquiry as to why there were slums, or why the mining industry exploited the miners. These films did not, however, seek to hide what was the position. They extolled the individual person, and their triumph in living against the odds. This lyric quality is evidenced not only in what was being produced in Britain, but in the work of people such as Joris Ivens with Rain (1929), in the Netherlands, and of Pare Lorentz with The River (1937) in the USA. It is also noticeable that, from the beginning, the commentary was often in verse, and the music was conceived and worked out to an extent before shooting started. The most obvious example is of course Night Mail (1936), on which Harry Watt worked so closely with W.H. Auden and Benjamin Britten. In a different way Humphrey Jennings, possibly the supreme “lyricist”, made Spare Time (1937). The pity is that the sound track of this work has so deteriorated that it is now impossible fully to appreciate what he did. Who first used the term “documentary” as applied to film is open to debate. It is immaterial, but worth noting that at the time the term “realist” was used just as much.

In short, the aim of the film makers at that time was to reveal and it was up to the audience to draw their conclusions. There was no standard approach. Each film was very much the work of one individual working with his, or very occasionally her, close colleagues. It was more the work of a poet than of an investigative reporter. In a sense the movement was very much of its time, reflecting a perhaps over-idealist slightly left wing, middle class utopianism.

This leads naturally to an assessment of the people concerned. They were a relatively small, and often fissiparous collection. John Grierson is the best remembered figure, and undoubtedly he had a great influence, but perhaps he is remembered for the wrong reasons. He was an idealist, and a theoretician. His later series of television broadcasts for Scottish Television in the 1960s, entitled This Wonderful World, is in many respects the epitome of Grierson. Other than Drifters, which relied to a great extent on the cameraman, Grierson did not make films: he created an organisation for making films. His enthusiasm secured the finance and backing of such as Sir Stephen Tallents, initially at the Empire Marketing Board, and subsequently at the GPO. He held court at Soho Square, the offices of the GPO Film Unit, but was rarely seen at Bennett Park in Blackheath, south east London, where the studios were. Grierson commanded public attention, both in Britain and worldwide. He contrived to ensure a relative stability of income for his unit, but those who worked in the GPO Film Unit at the time learned the craft of film making above all from Cavalcanti, and from Harry Watt. Nor was the GPO Film Unit the only group of “documentary” film makers. There was Paul Rotha and his colleagues in Associated Realist Film Producers: these included such as Basil Wright of Song of Ceylon (1937), Edgar Anstey, Arthur Elton and many others. Though there was rarely open hostility between these film makers and Grierson, there were certainly tensions. Grierson, who in many respects was akin to his fellow Scot, John Reith, not only believed that film should be a public service, but that it should be publicly financed. The film makers of ARFP were quite prepared to take commercial sponsorship, and in general this was no more editorially inhibiting than governmental pressure. One of the dullest films coming for the GPO Film Unit, possibly one of the dullest films ever made, was A.G.D. This described the work of the Accountant General’s department of the Post Office! The Accountant General authorised the payments to the GPO Film Unit, so, if he wanted a film, he got it!

There are indeed many who believe that Rotha was a more considerable figure that Grierson: his The Film Till Now (1929) was a seminal study. Eccentric in some ways, he was also more genuinely creative than Grierson. As indicated as far as the GPO unit is concerned, Cavalcanti was the inspiring genius. Unlike Grierson, he came to London from Paris with a background and reputation in both feature and documentary film making. He lived to make films, not to study them or theorise about their potentiality educationally and socially. There were tensions between Grierson in Soho Square and “Cav” usually at Bennett Park, and in part this may have been due to Grierson’s realisation of their differences. Cavalcanti involved artists from outside the rather narrow film world. He brought in such as Dr. Massingham, who, when the studio was not otherwise engaged, produced some charming but telling comedy shorts. He encouraged Norman McLaren to do his painting on film, derived in some ways from the work of Len Lye who also worked as an independent for the GPO Film Unit. As Norman used to work in the second cutting room painting his tracks on blank stock whilst smoking a cigarette, quite often a week’s work went up in flames, and the fire extinguisher had to be handy. Thank heavens it was not nitrate stock!

Most of those concerned were young, often less that thirty years old. They were largely from a middle class professional background, and to an extent had private means or relied on parental support. The present writer, working as an assistant sound recordist, received the vast sum of £1.12.6 per week! (Admittedly digs with breakfast cost only ten shillings a week!). There were informal coteries for ever and for ever discussing film either in the Pillars of Hercules, the local pub just around the corner from Soho Square, or when in funds at the Caff Royal, where you could have a drink until 1a.m. – but only if you were having a meal. This gave rise to the waiter asking when you ordered a ham sandwich, which legally was a meal, “Do you want it for eating, sir?”

There was a downside, however, to the middle class club-like atmosphere. Despite the superficial left wing leanings of most of those who were “producers”, the cameramen (Jonah Jones, Chick Fowle, and “The Boy Gamage” – boy because he was the youngest of the three), and even more so the projectionist and the studio general hands were rather outside the circle, and trade unionism was not viewed with favour. So much for the avowedly “socialist” leanings of the bosses.

It was a coterie, for whom film making was a vocation more than a profession or a business, and this applied just as much to those in AFRP as those in the GPO Film Unit. The very early days of television had something of the same characteristics and enthusiasm, and, as with television, it was a time of tremendous technical innovation and development.

This was an incredibly different world from today’s world of lightweight camcorders, and advanced post-production techniques. Most people working in film had grown up with, or worked in, silent films. It was a time of huge technical change, necessitating a basic rethink of how films had been made. Most films were now made in the studio: whilst the silent camera had begun to go outside the studio, the sound camera was pretty well confined to the studio. The sound camera was big and heavy, and had to be on a stand of some sort, and heavily bliimped to avoid the microphones picking up camera noise. Synchronisation of picture camera and sound recording camera was through three-phase Selsyn motors. Huge cables joined one with the other, the sound camera operator calling “up to speed” when the cameras locked. Outside the studio, the standard silent camera was the clockwork driven Newman Sinclair – a weighty piece of equipment, but if dropped from a height, as long as it was not onto the lens, you could just pick it up and go on shooting. There were no turret lenses, let alone zooms, so in pre-production the lens for each shot had to be decided in advance. Outside the studio, the sound gear was in a three and a half ton truck, and the sound camera could not be more that 300 metres from the truck and linked by cable. There was relatively little synch shooting outside the studio. A close examination of films such as Night Mail and North Sea (1938) show how dialogue shots were rarely photographed straight on, so that the sound track could be recorded and synced afterwards, often with a voice other than that of the apparent speaker. This is one of the reasons why there is so much commentary. For all these reasons, the documentary films of the time put an emphasis on realism rather than reality. If you could not shoot on the spot, you recreated it. For instance, all the synch shots on board the trawler in North Sea were done in studio using an immense rocker set for the cabin. It was indeed another world. It did mean that there was more attention to pre-production than to post-production, which at that time was really confined to editing. As against tape or especially digital recording, film stock was expensive and shooting ratios of more than four to one were regarded as excessive. There was no immediate playback: on location it might be forty-eight hours before you could see the rushes… Perhaps the onset of World War II saw the end of this period of lyric documentarism. The film makers tended to be drawn into either war reporting or propaganda films, of which Cavalcanti’sWent the Day Well? (1942) is an outstanding example. After the war the coming of television and the development of light weight equipment totally changed ways of working.

It is pointless to look back with nostalgia for those days, great though they were. It is, nevertheless, perhaps a pity that the term “documentary” is now almost exclusively used to mean work in the field of current affairs, and investigative journalism. Natural History films are in a way documentaries in the celebratory tradition. Many arts programmes and science programmes are in their own way “documentaries” , and would certainly have been considered so by the filmmakers of the 1930s. As O’Shaughnessy wrote: “We are the musicmakers, .. We are the movers and shakers of the world forever it seems.” The survivors of the 1930s recognise that the world has changed, but hope there is still a place for the poet and for the truly lyric documentary.