The Use of Projected Images for Documentary Purposes - Essay Example

Robert Flaherty’s “Nanook of the North” Introduction The term 'documentary' did not come into popular use until the late 1920s and 1930s. It was initially applied to various kinds of 'creative' non-fiction screen practice in the post-First World War, classical cinema era. Originating films in the category have typically included Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922), which blurred the line between fact and fiction, various Soviet films of the 1920s such as Dziga Vertov's The Man with the Movie Camera (Chelovek s kinoapparatom, 1929) etc. Yet 'documentary' cinema has roots that lie further back in the reworking of a vital and long-established form that had flourished throughout the second half of the nineteenth century the illustrated lecture. Early documentarians used the magic lantern to create complex and often sophisticated programmes out of a succession of projected photographic images accompanied by a live narration, with an occasional use of music and sound effects. By the turn of the century, films were gradually replacing slides while inter-titles usurped the function of the lecture; changes that eventually gave rise to the new terminology. The documentary tradition preceded film and has continued into the era of television and video, thus being redefined in the light of technological innovations, as well as in the context of shifting social and cultural forces. Origins The use of projected images for documentary purposes can be traced back to the mid-seventeenth century, when the Jesuit Andreas Tacquet gave an illustrated lecture about a missionary's trip to China. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, the magic lantern was often used to give audio-visual programmes on science (particularly astronomy), current affairs, travel, and adventure (Hayward, 2000). The ability to transfer photographic images on to glass and project them with the lantern was a crucial leap forward in documentary practice. Lantern slide images not only achieved a new ontological status but became much smaller and easier to produce. Frederick and William Langenheim, German-born brothers then residing in Philadelphia, achieved this result in 1849 and showed examples of their work at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851. By the mid-1860s the use of these slides in travel lectures had become popular in eastern cities of the United States, with an evening's programme typically focusing on a single foreign country. In June 1864, for instance, New York audiences could see The Army of the Potomac, an illustrated lecture on the Civil War using photographs taken by Alexander Gardner and Mathew Brady. Although the magic lantern had been used primarily to evoke the mystical or fantastic in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, by the late 1860s it was being used predominantly for documentary purposes and was assigned new names as a result; the 'stereopticon' in the United States and the 'optical lantern' in England (Barnouw, 1974). These documentary-like illustrated lectures flourished in Western Europe and North America. In the United States, several exhibitors toured the principal cities, giving a series of four or five programmes which changed from year to year. In the last three decades of the nineteenth century, many noteworthy documentary-like programmes were given by adventurers, archaeologists, and explorers. Programmes on the Arctic were particularly popular from 1865 onward, and often displayed an ethnographic bent. Lieutenant Robert Edwin Peary interrupted his efforts to reach the North Pole by presenting travelogue-style lectures in the early and mid-1890s. Displaying 100 lantern slides in his 1896 lecture, Peary not only recounted his journey from Newfoundland to the Polar ice cap in heroic terms but offered an ethnographic study of the Inuit or 'Esquimaux'. From 'Illustrated Lecture' To 'Documentary' After the war, illustrated lectures continued to be widespread, but many were eventually turned into straight documentaries with inter-titles replacing the lecturer. Former President Theodore Roosevelt had given a slide film lecture, The Exploration of a Great River, in late 1914. In 1918 this material was given a more general release as Colonel Theodore Roosevelt's Expedition into the Wilds. Martin E. Johnson, who had begun his career giving illustrated lectures, released his documentary Among the Cannibal Isles of the South Pacific (1918), which played S. F. Rothapfel's Tivoli Theater. Robert Flaherty had filmed the Inuit of northern Canada between 1914 and 1916 and subsequently used this material in an illustrated lecture The Eskimo (1916). When the possibility of turning it into an intertitled documentary was lost when the negative went up in flames, Flaherty, with sponsorship from the French furriers Revillon Frères, returned to northern Canada and filmed Nanook of the North (1922). The term 'illustrated lecture' had obviously become an inadequate label for the many non-fiction films that were being distributed and shown with inter-titles rather than live narration. Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922) The term 'documentary' to those programmes that displayed a marked cultural shift, rather than simply to all non-fiction programmes that embraced a shift in production and representational practices. The illustrated lecture typically took the western explorer or adventurer (who was often also the presenter standing by the screen) as its hero. Nanook of the North switched its centre of attention from the film-maker to Nanook and his Inuit family. To be sure, Flaherty was guilty of romanticization and salvage anthropology (western influence was effaced as the Eskimos were dressed in traditional clothing they no longer used). The Eskimos he depicted as naïve primitives mystified by a simple record player actually fixed his camera, developed his film, and actively participated in the film-making process. Nanook is a highly contradictory film: it exhibits strong elements of participatory film-making that has been celebrated by innovative and progressive film-makers of the present day. In many respects it was an inter-cultural collaboration, but collaboration between two men for whom the daily life of women is of marginal interest. The desperate search for food, synonymous with male hunting activities, provides the most elaborate scenes, which are woven throughout the film. Confining the film-maker's voice to the inter-titles and keeping him behind the camera made the film appear more 'objective' than earlier practices, even though the film-maker had, in fact, become more assertive in shaping his materials. In many respects Nanook appropriated the techniques of Hollywood fiction film-making, operating on the borderline between fiction and documentary, and turning ethnographic observations into a narrativized romance. Flaherty constructs an idealized Inuit family and gives us a star (Allakariallak both 'plays' and 'is' Nanook; an attractive personality the equal of Douglas Fairbanks) and a drama (man versus nature). Despite this evident fictionalization, however, its long-take style was subsequently applauded by André Bazin for the respect Flaherty gave to his subject and phenomenological reality. The transformation of the adventure-travel film is inscribed within Grass (1925), made by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack. The documentary starts out by focusing on the film-makers, but then shifts its attention to the Bakhtiari people as they struggled to cross the rugged mountains and Karun River of south-western Persia (Iran) during their annual migration. Despite the shift that Nanook and Grass represented, conventional travel films, with the white men as protagonists, continued to be made throughout the 1920s. For his second feature-length documentary, Moana (1926, shot on the South Sea island of Samoa), Robert Flaherty kept his small American crew behind the camera. To provide the necessary drama in a land where survival was easy, Flaherty induced the local inhabitants to revive the ritual of tattooing-a male puberty rite. Less participatory and more opportunistic as film-making than Nanook of the North, Moana also lacked a comparable success at the box-office. Cooper and Schoedsack followed Grass with Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness (1927), a story of a farmer and his family's struggle to survive at the end of a jungle in Siam (Thailand). Here the documentary impulse gave way to Hollywood story-telling, pointing towards the filmmakers' later success King Kong (1933). Political Documentary in the West Non-fiction film-making of an overtly political nature also went on in the United States and Western Europe after the First World War. Short news and information films on strikes and related activities were made by unions and leftist political parties in many countries. In the United States, Communist activist Alfred Wagenknecht produced The Passaic Textile Strike (1926), a short feature that combined documentary scenes with studio re-enactments, while the American Federation of Labour produced Labour’s Reward (1925). In Germany, Prometheus, formed by Willi Münzenberg, produced such documentaries as The Document of Shanghai (Das Dokument von Shanghai, 1928), which focused on the March 1927 revolutionary uprisings in China. The German Communist Party subsequently produced a number of short documentaries, including Slatan Dudow's Zeitproblem: wie der Arbeiter wohnt ('Contemporary problem: how the worker lives', 1930). Large corporations, right-wing organizations, and government also used non-fiction film for purposes of propaganda. In contrast to these breaks with pre- First World War non-fiction screen practices, the new documentary appeared late in Britain, and in a modest form; John Grierson’s Drifters (1929), a fifty-eight-minute silent documentary about the fishing process. It focuses on a fishing boat that drifts for herring, and the people who pull in the nets and pack the fish in barrels for market. It combines a Flaherty-style plot of man versus nature with partially abstracted close-ups and a rhythmic editing pattern learned from careful scrutiny of Eisenstein's Potemkin (1925). As Ian Aitken has remarked, Grierson was seeking to express a reality that transcended specific issues of exploitation and economic hardship. Nevertheless, Grierson relegated the people who did the actual work to his film's periphery, even as he synthesized the familiar narrative of a production process with modernist aesthetics. The film enjoyed a strong critical success, suggesting the extent to which the British documentary had lost its way in the years since the First World War, but also the potential for renewal in the 1930s and beyond (Brownlow, 1979). During the 1920s, documentary film-makers struggled either at the margins of commercial cinema or outside it altogether. Despite the comparatively inexpensive nature of documentary production, even the most successful films did little more than return their costs. The general absence of profit motive meant that documentarians had other reasons for film-making, and often had to rely on sponsorship (as Flaherty did with Nanook), or self-financing (Jacobs & Brace, 1939). Although conventional travelogues had a long-standing niche in the market-place, outside the Soviet Union there was little or no formal or institutional framework to support more innovative efforts at production. Conclusion Despite their low returns, in the industrialized nations non-fiction programmes were shown in a wide range of venues. In the United States, films such as Nanook of the North, Berlin: Symphony of a City, and The Man with the Movie Camera enjoyed regular showings at motion picture theatres in a few large cities and so were reviewed by newspaper critics, with varying degrees of perspicacity ( Berlin was considered to be a disappointing travelogue by New York critics). Films such as Manhatta were sometimes shown as shorts within the framework of mainstream cinema's balanced programmes, and avant-garde documentaries were often shown at art galleries. In Europe, the network of ciné clubs provided an outlet for many artistically and politically radical documentaries (Jacobs, 1979). Cultural institutions and political organizations of all types screened (and occasionally sponsored) documentaries as well. Even in the Soviet Union, prominent documentaries quickly departed town-centre theatres for extended runs at workers' clubs. Because most non-fiction programmes generally had some kind of educational or informational value, they penetrated into all aspects of social life and were shown in the church, the union hall, the school, and cultural institutions like the Museum of Natural History (New York). By the end of the 1920s, then, documentary was a broadly diffused if financially precarious phenomenon, characterized by its diversity of production and exhibition circumstances. Bibliography Aitken, Ian (1990), Film and Reform: John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement. Barnouw, Erik (1974), Documentary. Brownlow, Kevin (1979), The War, the West and the Wilderness. Hayward, Susan (2000), Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts. Routledge, 2000. Jacobs, Lewis. Brace, Harcourt (1939), The Rise of the American Film: A Critical History. Jacobs, Lewis (ed.) (1979), The Documentary Tradition Read More