Summer 2001
Volume 27, Number 4

See Also Shari M. Huhndorf: Nanook and His Contemporaries: Imagining Eskimos in American Culture, 1897-1922 (Autumn 2000) Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Envisioning Modernity: Desire and Discipline in the Italian Fascist Film (Autumn 1996) Gerald Mast: Kracauer's Two Tendencies and the Early History of Film Narrative (Spring 1980) Jonathan Auerbach: Chasing Film Narrative: Repetition, Recursion, and the Body in Early Cinema (Summer 2000)

Modernist techniques of fragmentation and juxtaposition lent an artistic aura to documentary that helped distinguish it from the cruder form of early actualités or newsreels. These techniques contributed to documentary's good name, but they also threatened to distract from documentary's activist goals. The proximity and persistence of a modernist aesthetic in actual documentary film practice encouraged, most notably in the writings and speeches of John Grierson, a repression of the role of the 1920s avant-garde in the rise of documentary. Modernist elitism and textual difficulty were qualities to be avoided. The historical linkage of modernist technique and documentary oratory, evident since the early 1920s in much Soviet and some European work failed to enter into Grierson's own writings. The same blind spot persists in subsequent histories of documentary film. But even though the contribution of the avant-garde underwent repression in the public discourse of figures like Grierson, it returned in the actual form and style of early documentary itself. Repression conveys the force of a denial, and what documentary film history sought to deny was not simply an overly aesthetic lineage but the radically transformative potential of film pursued by a large segment of the international avant-garde. In its stead a more moderate rhetoric prevailed, tempered to the practical issues of the day. For advocates like Grierson, the value of cinema lay in its capacity to document, demonstrate, or, at most, enact the proper, or improper, terms of individual citizenship and state responsibility.

My primary thesis is that a wave of documentary activity takes shape at the point when cinema comes into the direct service of various, already active efforts to build national identity during the 1920s and 1930s. Documentary film affirms, or contests, the power of the state. It addresses issues of public importance and affirms or contests the role of the state in confronting these issues. These acts of contestation, more than affirmation, were what initially drew me to the documentary tradition that ran from the work of the film and photo leagues in the 1930s to Newsreel in the 1970s.3 The radical potential of film to contest the state and its law, as well as to affirm it, made documentary an unruly ally of those in power. Documentary, like avant-garde film, cast the familiar in a new light, not always that desired by the existing governments. The formation of a documentary film movement required the discipline that figures like Grierson in Great Britain, Pare Lorentz in the United States, Joseph Goebbels in Germany, and Anatoly Lunacharsky and Alexander Zhadanov in the Soviet Union provided for it to serve the political and ideological agenda of the existing nation-state.

3. See Nichols, Newsreel: Documentary Filmmaking on the American Left (New York, 1980).

Bill Nichols is the director of the graduate program in cinema studies at San Francisco State University. He is author or editor of six books, including Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meanng in Contemporary Culture (1994). His edited volume Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde and a book, Introduction to Documentary, are scheduled for fall 2001 release.