Victims of Documentary: Scandinavian research on the classical documentary canon

If you can read Danish, and like solid, well-written books that are big enough to hold up your whole bookshelf, then you will find Den klassiske dokumentarfilm by Søren Birkvad of great utility. The book is a rewritten and fine-tuned almost 500-page long adaptation of his expansive PhD dissertation from NTNU from 2009. Coming from a self-proclaimed cultural conservative, the book is a revisionist history of the classical documentary film canon presented in earlier histories of documentary film. The author positions the work as a companion (‘forlængelse’) to the work established by two other solid documentary film histories from Scandinavia; Norwegian Bjørn Sørenssen’s Å fange virkeligheten: dokumentarfilmens århundre (2007) and Danish Ib Bondebjerg’s Virgelighedens fortællinger: Den danske tv-dokumentarismens historie (2008) and Virkelighedsbilleder: Den moderne danske dokumentarfilm (2012).

Den klassiske dokumentarfilm is divided into three main parts, with an interlude, before the third act. After an introduction that describes the main thesis of the book, which is basically a reorientation of the ‘victim’ paradigm from documentary theory, the first part focuses on the development of the mass media in the early 20th century: John Grierson and the British documentary movement, the New Deal in the U.S. and Nazi propaganda. This period, it is argued, was a period of ‘re-nomization’ (renomisering) – where documentary film was used in an attempt to unify and bring rational solutions to problems facing a society that was undergoing tremendous industrial transformations and social upheaval. The post-war period, and especially the 1950s, a decade, he argues, somewhat neglected by film historians, marked a new form of re-nomization towards a more individualistic humanism, characterized by Birkvad as “political correctness”. He writes, “Thus the benchmark documentary film was a form of modern re-nomization, connected with trust in authority, collectivism, and mass thinking, which was gradually replaced by a new form of modern re-nomization, connected with a new idealism around individual rights and left-leaning social criticism” (p.29).[1]

Part one reviews the most discussed films from the British documentary film movement of the 1930s: Drifters, Industrial Britain, Night Mail, Song of Ceylon and Housing Problems. Birkvad then moves outside of Britain to focus on the films of the American New Deal era, selecting a small group of other, again extensively researched and discussed films: The Plow that Broke the Plains, The River, Power and the Land, and The City. Part one ends, with what he calls the triumphant film of the ‘offervilje’ (collective sacrifice) period, Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens from Nazi Germany. Part two is devoted to what he calls the turning point, the classic documentary’s heyday, British and American documentaries from the Second World War. Special room is given the documentary series, Why We Fight, and a comparative analysis of Humphrey Jennings’s Diary for Timothy and John Huston’s Let There Be Light. After the interlude on the transitional period from the mainstream to the avant-garde in the 1950s, the third and final part of the book discusses a range of films from the 1950s that includes, among others, the work of Alain Resnais, Georges Franju, Lindsay Anderson, and Sidney Meyer.

Birkvad’s overall aim is to revise earlier historiography (mostly pre-2000) of classical documentary by taking into account some important criticisms and raising questions around earlier polemics in documentary theory. Here, he describes two different stages of developments in documentary historiography and theory: the 1970s and the 1990s, two periods of renewed respectability for documentary film research from the last 40 years. The first period consists of the 1970s generation of documentary enthusiasts, he describes as the ‘left-leaning humanist renaissance.’ Of the 1990s generation, whom he calls the poststructuralist documentary theories, he complains, “have become a partly burdensome tradition for the genre and the field” (p.45). Birkvad thus focuses on a selection from the canon of films that have been extensively written about in these previous film histories. The author’s approach is to do close textual analysis of a limited selection of films, using the method formulated in David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s Film Art, focusing on extracting different levels of meaning from the filmic text and contextualizing the work in the broader social and cultural movements of each decade. The main motivation behind ‘re-analyzing’ the film texts canonized widely in earlier literature is to ‘correct’ the superficial readings or generalizations symptomatic of earlier documentary film history writing.  

The book is also primarily an updated reformulation of the once heated debate in documentary studies on the issue and ethics of representation, with special focus on the question of the ‘victim’ as defined by documentary film theorist Brian Winston in his 1988 essay on Griersonian documentary “The Tradition of the Victim”.[2] In this essay, and in his later book Claiming the Real (1995), Winston takes an anti-Griersonian stance, arguing that the British Documentary movement presented the documentary subject as a kind of social victim, effectively ‘running from social responsibility’ in order to please the national corporate sponsors, the Empire Marketing Board and the General Post Office.[3] In Danish the word ‘offer’ contains the double meaning of both victim and sacrifice: ‘være offer’ and ‘at ofre sig’. Birkvad’s argument is largely inspired by the Danish historian Henrik Jensen’s book Ofrets århundrede (1998) and a critique of earlier theoretical claims about the victim in documentary theory, made by Brian Winston. Birkvad argues that up until the end of the Second World War, the social documentary subject was by and large, the ‘mass’ and a collective call to duty, ‘offervilje,’ or mass sacrifice, for the benefit of society at large. The post-war period saw the shift away from this representation of collective sacrifice towards the treatment of the social documentary subject as victim, and to promoting the individual’s moral duty to non-conformity, or to stand against institutions and organizations of social control and organization. Although Birkvad does not make reference to it, it is easy to see an eerily familiar parallel formulation of his main thesis in Gilles Deleuze’s influential 1989 book, Cinema 2: L’image-temps.[4] Here, Deleuze considers the representation of ‘the people,’ the ‘masses’ in the classical vs. the ‘missing people,’ in post-war modern political cinema.

While I find this to be an interesting and useful reformulation of the victim paradigm in documentary theory, there is certainly a difficulty that arises from such a generalization that relies at times heavily on secondary resources (earlier documentary histories: Barsam, Sørenssen, Ellis and McLane, to name a few) as well as text analysis of what is really a rather narrow selection of canonical films. Indeed, consolidating a largely male and western dominated film canon in this way already indicates that Birkvad’s mission is perhaps a little out of step with current historiographical work, including more recent work by those involved in the 1996 Post Theory debate. Especially in light of Grierson’s influence in other parts of the world, as well as the influence of other historical trajectories of the category, it seems like a rather limited view of the vast horizon of possible films that could (and perhaps should) be included in any new history of the documentary cinema. The book seems to purposely ignore much of the research in the field of documentary film and media studies since the turn of the millennium, a large part of which has moved beyond the polemical Post Theory moment, to explore new avenues of research and possible new theoretical paradigms in the digital era. We can take for example the recent anthology edited by Brian Winston The Documentary Film Book (BFI 2013), where the author updates his own position in the introduction with an excellent purview of the contemporary field of documentary studies.[5] In this anthology, which is full of new contributions in research on documentary work both old and new, Bill Nichols and Carl Plantinga are placed back to back with chapters that have positions that now appear far closer to each other theoretically, than they did in 1996. Birkvad’s book suffers a little, especially in the first half, with this burden of taking on the mantle of this arguably somewhat tired Post Theory debate. Much space is used on writing a politically motivated critique of these earlier histories, while still at times relying heavily upon them as historical source material.

The second half of the book, from the interlude (“mellomspil”) and beyond, is far more readable and enjoyable, as Birkvad moves beyond this academic peer bashing, to give what is an enlightening account of important documentary films from the 1950s, a decade that has often been considered uneventful in some documentary histories, in part due to the much criticized hegemony of boring Griersonian industrial and educational productions that dominated the immediate post-war period. Here, Birkvad demonstrates a deep and wide knowledge of his subject, and writes in a more confident fashion about what is a fascinating moment in documentary history. It is difficult to say whether his thesis that this period marked a shift from a focus on mass sacrifice over to the documentary subject as victim, will stand the test of future revision. At present, Den klassiske dokumentarfilm can only be welcomed as an accomplished and accessible contribution to Scandinavian research on the classical documentary cinema. It is certainly solid enough to hold up a whole shelf of books!

Notes

[1] Author’s translation.
[2] Winston, Brian (1988) ”The Tradition of the Victim” in Image Ethics, Gross et al. eds.
[3] This position was presented earlier in Joyce Nelson’s book, The Colonized Eye: rethinking the Grierson Legend (1988) and more recently criticized in Malek Khouri’s Filming Politics: communism and the portrayal of the working class at the National Film Board of Canada, 1939-46. Neither of these works are cited in Birkvad. According to Khouri, the NFB films produced by Grierson in the 1940s were part of a broader movement to organize labor in Canada and largely used the government sponsorship at arm’s length. It was John Grierson who insisted that the Government sponsorship should have no influence over the creative choices of the filmmakers, although he always promoted a strong sense of civil duty and public service, as Birkvad also shows.  See also Ian Aitken’s Realist Film Theory and Cinema (2006) for more on Grierson’s realist philosophy.
[4] Deleuze writes: “In American and in Soviet cinema, the people are already there, real before being actual, ideal without being abstract. Hence the idea that the cinema, as an art of the masses, could be the supreme revolutionary or democratic art, which makes the masses a true subject. But a great many factors were to compromise this belief: the rise of Hitler, which gave cinema its object not the masses become subject but the masses subjected; Stalinism, which replaced the unanimity of peoples with the tyrannical unity of a party; the break up of the American people, who could no longer believe themselves to be the melting-pot of peoples past or the seed of people to come (it was the neo-Western that first demonstrated this break-up). In short, if there were a modern political cinema, it would be on this basis: the people no longer exist, or not yet… the people are missing.” (Deleuze, 1989, p.216).
[5] While Winston largely maintains his earlier critique of Griersonian and Direct Cinema documentary’s reliance on the evidentiary status of the documentary image. In light of developments in documentary in the digital era, he now stresses the witness function and acknowledges audience reception as the place where documentary value is generated: ”In the new post-Griersonian situation any mode of presentation could produce ’documentary value’ if underpinned in some way by witness. This means digital imaging has a place.” (p.24) ”What is significant is not the changes in technology, not even the removal of the sole, controlling documentarist.  The overall, and most fundamental, consequence of the destruction of the old paradigm is that, with the new Post-Griersonian documentary, responsibility for determining documentary value is removed from the image and its maker and is passed to the audience (where, in fact, it should have always been).” (Winston 2013, p.26).

Printed in Wuxia 1-2, 2014