William Guynn the Art of National Projection Basil Wright Song of Ceylon

JUMP Cutting
A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY MEDIA

Paul Rotha'south Documentary Diary
Politics of the British documentary

past William Guynn

from Jump Cutting, no. 6, 1975, pp. 10-12, 27
copyright Leap Cut: A Review of Gimmicky Media, 1975, 2004

The appearance of Paul Rotha's Documentary Diary (Colina & Wang, 1972) affords a new opportunity to evaluate the British documentary movie. The British documentary has, over the years, maintained its reputation every bit the only long-lived political movement in cinema to succeed the revolutionary Soviet films of the 20s. Even today information technology is viewed equally a picture palace of social protestation, an expression of the mass movements of the 30s depression, as the cinema which finally gave an honorable place in its films to the worker. And nonetheless, despite its avowedly political grapheme, this motility has been subjected to very lilliputian political assay. Motion picture historians have uncritically catalogued its achievements, without defining its political nature. Political filmmakers, such every bit Joris Evens, have chided its "softness"; formalist critics have condemned its aesthetic poverty.

The major questions remain to be answered. Why did the motility arise at a given moment in history and how and why was it sustained for more than xv years? These questions need to be answered because the history of the British documentary motion picture poses the problem of the relation between the creative person and grade guild in the historic period of decadent capitalism. The British movement is of interest to u.s. because the British documentarists took the wrong route—leading them artistically to mediocrity and politically to class collaboration.

Paul Rotha'south' Documentary Diary is the intimate history of the British documentary film, written by ane of its filmmakers and chief theoreticians. Information technology evokes that period between 1930 and 1939 when the British documentarists, headed by John Grierson, came together in collective film units under authorities, sponsorship and produced, on shoestring budgets, a seemingly countless stream of films intended to revolutionize the art of cinema. As Rotha states,

"Upwards till 1940, there was only i real coherent movement in the young art of cinema which was destined to have an influence on western filmmaking ... that was the movement of documentary filmmaking in United kingdom in the 1930s." (Documentary Diary, p. thirteen)

Ironically, the impact of the British documentary on picture as art has been practically negligible. What the British formed was in essence a political not an artistic school.

There was no consequent artistic theory underlying the movement; the moving picture fine art was to be used every bit a ways to a political end. Hence the films themselves reveal a multitude of influences. And they are fabricated in several styles: documentary montage (Soviet movie theatre), documentary re-enactment and dramatization (Flaherty), "symphonic" avant-gardism (Cavalcanti, Ruttmann), and journalistic documentary (newsreels, MARCH OF Fourth dimension). The theoreticians of the movement were unable to ascertain exactly what documentary film was. We are left with Grierson's conception, which has more resonance than meaning, "the creative interpretation of authenticity." Equally Alan Lowell points out in Studies in Documentary,

"The importance of the documentary motion lies, not in the quality of individual films, but in the affect it had in general on the British picture palace." (Viking Press, p. 35)

If the films have been dismissed past subsequent generations of filmmakers, the legend of the movement remains, and information technology has never been seriously challenged.

Rotha's diary—a drove of reminiscences, anecdotes, private letters and documents—gives the states many insights into the internal life of the British motility. He chronicles the paw-to-oral cavity existence the documentarists lived in their struggle to secure from government agencies and private manufacture the financial backing for their film productions. The movie units' being, particularly during the lean years of the depression, was precarious and strife-ridden. Not surprisingly, it was sustained primarily by political maneuvering and bureaucratic backroom deals, Equally Rotha puts it,

"It is important to realize that against the EMB and GPO [The Empire Marketing Board and the General Post office were the government agencies with which the documentary move was affiliated] and what they stood for in the 1930s, at that place was woven this skein of intrigue and maneuver which most of the documentary filmmakers themselves, intent on their creative work in production, were unaware of." (p. 122)

Whether the private filmmakers were conscious of information technology or non, this intense struggle for survival was instrumental in imposing on the British documentary its particular political character. The documentarists found themselves forced to compromise, both artistically and politically. Grierson, as caput of the motility and chief negotiator, made it clear from the outset that the film unit was directly tied to the state and that

"treasury money, and opportunity to make any films at all, were entirely conditioned by these commissions to he served."

He further warned against whatsoever subversion of this purpose by artists with

"their enthusiasm for movie theatre, for art, for self-expression and other beautiful what-nots ..." (Grierson on Documentary, University of California Press, p. 164)

The British documentary film was not, then, the simple vocalization of social protest; despite its claims, it was no worker'due south cinema of grade struggle. Equally I will attempt to show, it served, rather, the interests of commercialism during a period of the potentially revolutionary upsurge of the masses, Information technology arose and was formed on the political battlefield of United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland after World War I. In gild to sympathize the political significance of the British documentary movie, information technology is necessary to examine its political roots.

World War I officially inaugurated what Lenin chosen the "epoch of wars and revolution." Capitalist society had entered the age of imperialism characterized past the domination of the monopolies over competitive capitalism, the merging of finance capital letter (the banks) with industrial capital, the export of capital by international monopolies, and the complete sectionalization of the world among the strongest imperialist nations (Lenin: Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism). Britain had been the most highly adult capitalist nation of the 19th century, with a colonial empire of unparalleled wealth, In World War I, Britain attempted to maintain its earth hegemony, its colonies, and spheres of influence against its rival imperialist ability, Germany. It emerged from the war victorious in proper name, but in reality profoundly weakened. As the oldest capitalist power, U.k. suffered from its own history. Its level of engineering and organization of the productive forces were antiquated past comparison with the younger industrialized nations, in particular the United States. Coal—at the ground of British industry—was speedily being supplanted past the superior power of electricity, characteristic of industry in the United States.

In addition, the British colonies, in item Canada and Australia, were achieving a high level of self-sufficiency, both industrially and politically. National movements in Republic of india, Egypt, and the East were farther indications that England was rapidly losing its position as the metropolitan and industrial center of its empire. Furthermore, the so-chosen pacification of Europe which followed the war all but guaranteed the rebirth of German language upper-case letter as a astringent threat to the maintenance of British hegemony.

In his analysis of the British situation in 1926, Leon Trotsky summarized its social development in this style:

"In the past the British bourgeoisie had by oppressing the toilers and plundering the colonies led the nation on the path of material growth and thus guaranteed its dominion. Today the bourgeois authorities is non only incapable of leading the British nation forward but neither motorcar it maintain for it the level already achieved." (Problems of the British Revolution, New Park Publications, p. 26)

U.k.'s position every bit the leading capitalist power of the 19th century to a large extent determined the character of the British working class. Equally Lenin observed, imperialism, because of the super-profits it squeezes from its own workers and from the plunder of the entire world, is able to create privileged sections of workers, to encourage opportunism among than, and to stifle, if simply temporarily, the militancy of the working class movement.

Hence Engels was able to say in a letter to Marx (Oct vii, 1858):

"The English language proletariat is becoming more than and more conservative, so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy, and a conservative proletariat every bit well as a bourgeoisie." (quoted past Lenin in Imperialism)

It is significant in this regard that, although the British trade wedlock movement was well avant-garde and had managed to extract numerous concessions from the bourgeoisie, it was late, by comparing with continental neighbors, in producing a political party of the working course independent of the bourgeois parties. Until the plough of the century, the working class was represented in parliament only by a half-dozen Lib-Labs ("labouring" men elected on the Liberal ticket).

The ideological development of the British proletariat was farther retarded past its dependence on the Fabian bourgeois. The Fabian Society, organized in 1983, was a grouping of intellectuals, among them Bernard Shaw, which preached reformism and served every bit the ideological comprehend for opportunism in the British labor movement. Its principal thesis was that the British working class could gradually and peacefully worm its manner into power. Presumably, the working form could capture parliament through the "autonomous" procedure, subsequently command the means of production by a gradual extension of state buying and transform the existing state into an musical instrument for public welfare. The British Labour Party, through its right fly (MacDonald and Thomas), was thoroughly nourished by Fabian reaction and largely adopted its ideology.

In contradistinction to the Communist strategy—"workers of the world, unite"—the social democratic British Labour Party attempted to link the destiny of the British working class with that of the British bourgeoisie by promulgating the notion that the backer state was reformable and could be forced to act in the interest of the proletariat. On the eve of imperialist war, which could only bring death, impoverishment and misery to the working class, the British Labour Party called for the patriotic defense of the fatherland. It was at this decisive celebrated moment, as the parties of the 2d International embraced the politics of social patriotism, that Lenin broke from their ranks and called for the creation of the Tertiary (communist) International.

The British Labour Party, which contained swell numbers of subjectively revolutionary elements, was, in the final analysis, dominated by its correct wing. The right wing had the distinct reward of a thoroughly consistent program based on the strong national bourgeois credo: for tradition and experience, for the nation, for the maintenance of the ruling class. It became the historic role of this party, during the war and in the subsequent misery of the depression, to organize the expose of the working form and to bring to the proletariat the ideas of the bourgeoisie.

As United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland entered the era of the 30s and the great depression, the state of affairs of the British proletariat was desperate. The British bourgeoisie, weakened by war, bogged down past its own industrial conservatism, outstripped by both German language and U.S. capitalism, was quite incapable of granting whatsoever concession to its working grade. As a measure of the depth of the coning crisis, one needs only to notation that by the mid-20s, United kingdom's key industry, coalmining, was unable to pay its workers without a subsidy from the state. In response to their own economic collapse, the capitalists began a counterattack, hoping to lay the burden of crunch on the backs of the proletariat.

The social democratic British Labour Party, which constituted the leadership of labor, immediately began to give ground, surrendering without a struggle reforms and concessions which had previously been extracted from the capitalist class. The social democrats recognized that, given the bankruptcy of the capitalist system, to struggle in this period for significant politico or even economic gains would pose before the proletariat the question of the conquest of state power. Equally Trotsky observed in 1925:

"There is non a single question of economic life: the nationalization of the nines, and the railways, the fight confronting unemployment, free trade or protectionism, housing and so on which does not lead directly to the question of ability." (Bug of the British Revolution, p. 26)

The social democrats—created by commercialism and destined to perish with it—were forced by history to try to defend the existing order. At this critical moment, the masses were confronted with their celebrated task of the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeois lodge with no revolutionary vanguard to lead them. Instead, they were tied to a social democratic labor aristocracy, the "lieutenants of capital in the working class" (Lenin), which would stood at every point as an obstacle to revolution.

Information technology was in the historic context of the intensification of class struggle in Uk in the 1930s that the British documentary was built-in. Equally a political move in film, its outlook was social autonomous. This is not difficult to bear witness. Grierson, the organizing force of the movement, is quite specific in defining its origins:

"Documentary was born and nurtured on the bandwagon of uprising social republic everywhere ..." (Preface to Rotha's Documentary Motion-picture show, Faber & Faber, p. 16)

This does not hateful that the British documentary was straight affiliated with the British Labour Party. On the contrary, the documentarists complained with some bitterness virtually the lack of support from the laborites. Ironically, they were forced to seek sponsorship from the right-wing Tory regime. This sponsorship was a source of embarrassment, since it exposed the bourgeois character of the documentary move. Equally Grierson states, with uncomfortable expert humor:

"I similar to put it ironically past saying that I take enjoyed a more radical conception of documentary and a richer, more imaginative, sponsorship free the Tories and then I have from those who have been thought to be by brothers-in-arms [the social democrats]." (Grierson on Documentary, p. sixteen)

It is notwithstanding truthful that the British documentary movement adopted as its own the ideology of social democracy. The documentarists' films were destined for a working class audition, simply they were produced by the capitalist state or by the capitalists themselves. As Lenin pointed out, social democracy represented an historically developed ideology through which the bourgeoisie communicated with the proletariat. Caught in the class forces of depression United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland, the documentarists did not so much choose social democracy as they were an historical production of that movement. Although individual filmmakers, such as Rotha, occasionally moved to the left in response to the militancy of the working course, they were irresistibly drawn, under the pressure of conservative sponsorship, to defend the existing order.

In the following paragraphs I will attempt to present the major components of the documentary ideology and their relationship to the politics of social democracy. I will place special emphasis on Rotha's and Grierson'due south contributions, as they were the political theoreticians of the movement. Rotha was the left face of British documentary and its more serious thinker. As such, he felt impelled to reconcile the movement'south burning contradictions. Grierson, on the other hand, was the movement'south right fly, its essence, a bureaucrat who did net hesitate to affirm, for example, that the "socialist" revolution had somehow taken place in Britain in the 1950s (unbeknown to the British proletariat). The diverging of views is only credible. The British documentary'due south political program was thoroughly consistent.

The documentarists, in particular Rotha as left pole, were faced with the task of resolving the obvious contradiction betwixt the "proletarian" orientation of the documentary and its subservience to conservative sponsorship and control. In seeking to reconcile the irreconcilable, Rotha is inevitably forced to deny the class graphic symbol of the country. The documentarists, similar the Fabian social democrats, subscribe to the idea that the state (the army, the law, the parliamentary, judicial and executive bureaucratic appliance), rather than being an instrument by which 1 course maintains domination over another, is a structure though which class antagonisms can be reconciled.

In The German Ideology Marx combats the idealist, Hegelian conception of the land equally standing higher up class divided gild. He asserts that, on the contrary, the land exists precisely considering of class oppression:

"[The land] is aught more than than the class of arrangement which the suburbia necessarily adopts both for internal and external purposes, for the mutual guarantee of their property and interests" (International Publishers, p. 80).

Information technology is this erroneous conception of a classless state which is at the root of the politics of the British documentary film, and on this foundation the documentarists formulated their ideas of film as a forcefulness for social transformation.

In his analysis of the social aspects of documentary film (Documentary Moving-picture show, 1936), Rotha propounds the idealist view of the relation between society and the land, and on it he builds a "strategy" for the conservancy of the working class. This strategy follows, in fact, the scenario developed by the Fabians for the peaceful seizure of power, except that Rotha'due south version grants a key role to documentary movie. Rotha notes starting time, with a symptomatic note of fright, that Britain is in a flow of massive social upheaval in which there is a singular "lack of collective enthusiasm" (in the form of militant strikes and mass disenchantment with the state). He observes, with something more than British understatement, that "present methods of ordering order are in some cases proving inadequate ..." (p. 47) In order to eradicate social upheaval, Rotha suggests that, since "democracy" has been mismanaged by the greedy few, the "ordinary citizen" must step in and save Britain by returning information technology to the command of the majority:

.".. it rests with the ordinary person to deed non merely as a passive voter only as an active member of the state. His political cooperation, criticism and fifty-fifty active opposition is demanded and he must be intelligently equipped to meet that demand." (p. 48)

Hence Rotha propagates the Fabian myth that land control of the economy can cure the national economic disaster and consequently alleviate the misery of the masses. His exclamation is based on the supposition that the state is an impartial trunk which belongs to the whole people and through which, past democratic means, the working class can control the greedy impulses of capital. Rotha not only denies the class nature of the state merely besides implies that crises, instead of beingness an integral function of the capitalist economical cycle, can be eliminated without the overthrow of capital itself. Obviously the documentarists' idea of social transformation had nothing to do with revolution. What they proposed was a scheme—and an unrealistic one—for returning the nation to the conditions of "healthy" capitalism.

The problem is (the scenario continues) that the working grade is non "intelligently equipped." That is, it has suffered from a course-biased educational system. Hence, it has been prevented through ignorance and consequent apathy from taking its proper place in the machinery of bourgeois commonwealth. This is the mistake non only of the educational institutions but also of the mass media, which are in the hands of industry and serve to atomic number 82 the public down the primrose path. Rotha concludes that cinema, "one of the most influential factors in the guidance, of public thought," must exist liberated from backer trade command and so that it may participate in the "economic and morel regeneration of the earth." (p. 57) In this scheme of things, how is movie theatre to achieve its liberation? Through what Rotha calls propaganda:

"By adopting propaganda as an alternative basis of product, not simply might movie house serve the greatest possible purposes as a medium, merely production might enter into a freedom impossible to entertainment motion picture." (p. 59)

The obvious models of liberated cinema are the EMB and GPO film units. Hence, propaganda is to be produced for the country, which, since it is not class dominated, is capable of creating an educational musical instrument for the liberation of the oppressed classes. In Land and Revolution Lenin exposes the reality of this kind of "democratic" fantasy:

"The petty bourgeois democrats, those sham socialists who have replaced class struggle past dreams of form harmony, even pictured the socialist transformation in a dreamy way—not as the overthrow of the rule of the exploiting class, but as the peaceful submission of the minority to the bulk which has become conscious of its aims. This petty-bourgeois utopia, which is inseparably connected with the idea of the country beingness to a higher place classes, led in practice to the expose of the toiling classes." (Selected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1970, pp. 303-4)

Co-ordinate to Rotha's political theory, documentary film liberated itself from capitalism by allying itself with the "impartial" state. And nonetheless, strangely enough, Rotha and the documentarists did non disapprove of sponsorship by industry. In fact, they sought it out, equally the Shell Film Unit's 17-year existence proves. One can legitimately wonder what exactly constitutes British documentary's independence from capitalism. Rotha gives usa the following answer: What is essential in determining the credo of movie house is non the ideological message it communicates nor the political forces which human action on information technology, but only the process past which it is produced. The "entertainment" film is produced in the capitalist mode, in emulation of "mod industry." That is, it is a commodity produced on a large scale and for turn a profit. The documentarists' films, on the other manus, are created in a "collective" manner through the cooperative endeavor of individual filmmakers.

This simplistic reasoning—which characterizes most "independent" filmmakers in this country who think of themselves every bit "political"—explains Rotha's excessive hostility to Hollywood. On the basis of this assay, Rotha quite easily dismisses Hollywood every bit political and creative "whoredom" and those critics who appreciate Hollywood film, as the equivalent of "partly educated teenagers flashing swastikas and cloth iron crosses." It is of course undeniable that Hollywood films as a whole are infused with bourgeois credo and that the filmmaker is subject field to political and artistic constraints. But to counterpose to the "amusement" film the backer- or land-sponsored propaganda moving-picture show as a model of "gratuitous" cinema is absurd. The irony is that cinema directly controlled by industrial sponsorship or by the state must submit to the most directly kind of political interference. And this is what Rotha'due south Documentary Diary eloquently confirms.

The social democrats and the documentarists shared an clashing—in reality, hostile—mental attitude toward the world communist move. Every bit Engels observed in a letter to Karl Kautsky (September 4, 1592), the Taylor "socialists" are "united only by their fear of the threatening rule of the workers...." It was essential, however, for the social democrats, as they addressed the working grade in time of crunch, to assume a left posture. This included an appreciation for far-away revolutionary movements, in particular for the Soviet workers' land.

Information technology was, at the same time, essential for the social democrats to brand it clear that the lessons of the October revolution could never he practical to U.k.. Consequently, they sought refuge in a theory of exoticism. The Russian revolution was simply a product of that country's peculiar political traditions, ethnic collates and climes. Britain had its ain enduring political forms and its national genius for "democracy." The documentarists, like the social democrats, were fond of quoting Marx, and even Lenin, who had exposed social democracy for what it was. Only they were, in fact, much fonder of Stalin, whose theory of "socialism in one country" obviated the international revolutionary perspective and, in a sense, validated the theory of exoticism. The social democrats, in their desperate want to prove that workers are incapable of ruling society, took advantage of Stalinist reaction, i.due east., that a bureaucratic caste had usurped the political ability of the working course in the Soviet Union. In so doing, they ignored Russia's profound social revolution and the socialized holding forms which continued to exist, even under the political role of Stalin and his bureaucracy.

Grierson expresses it this way,

."..I do not believe that socialism equally we take thought of it volition come at all. That surely was apparently when workers' soviets with all their socialist dreams of workers' control in a classless lodge were driven cut of industrial management in Russia and Republican Kingdom of spain, and past their own leaders" (Grierson on Documentary, p. 266).

In the domain of the arts, documentarists were, for the same reason, enamored of Stalin'southward policies. Grierson, who called the Soviet filmmakers the forerunners of documentary, was quick to disassociate himself and his movement from the early revolutionary menses and its insistence on class war (POTEMKIN, THE END OF ST. PETERSBERG):

.".. the whole effect was hectic, and, in the last resort, romantic. In the first menstruation of revolution the artists had non even so got down, similar their neighbors, to themes of honest piece of work." (Grierson on Documentary, p. 151)

Grierson frankly condemns the early Bolshevik policy on art, which called for the independence of the artist, as a disastrous indulgence. He greeted the Stalinist policy of state censorship and artistic command with a sigh of relief.

"For the future, one may leave them [the Soviet filmmakers] safely to the consideration of the Primal Committee" (Grierson on Documentary, p. 183).

In fact, Grierson pointed to the Stalinist policy of state interference in the arts as a model. With this gesture to the left, he justified his ain thoroughly reactionary theory, which proposed the direct political appropriation of the cinematic art past the bourgeois state.

What Grierson, Rotha, and the documentarists counterposed to the dictatorship of the proletariat was the alternative of a "customs" of classes, the obvious precondition of which is form peace. One of the primary propagandistic aims of the documentary movement was to "make peace heady" (Grierson), i.e., to prevent the eruption of class struggle. Pacifism as an ideology is thoroughly reactionary in that it is directed, not at the purveyors of war, the backer class, but at the working masses, who are, as information technology is, disarmed, and who are daily subjugated by class violence. It was the mission of the Empire Marketing Board film unit to "bring the empire alive." That is, it aimed to convey to the public the idea that British colonialism was developing into a benevolent venture that would bring the international working grade and exploited peasantry into a harmonious cooperative human relationship:

"Our original command of peoples was becoming slowly a cooperative effort in the tilling of soil, the reaping of harvests, and the organization of a world economy. For the old flags of exploitation it substituted the new flags of common labour." (Grierson on Documentary pp. 165-six).

Grierson correctly points out that imperialism had created an international economy and an international partition of labor. But what he obviously ignores is the colonial and class violence nether which this "internationalism" functions. He ignores the crucial fact that, although the international working grade does share the labor of product, information technology does non produce for its own needs simply for the profit of the bourgeoisie. Films such as Basil Wright's Vocal OF CEYLON [1914], sponsored by the British Tea Consortium, are deliberate obfuscations of the called-for issues of colonialism and course oppression.

This celebrated EMB-GPO production describes the cultural differences between do colonizer and colonized, the contrast between avant-garde commercialism (railroads) and mauve "backwardness" (elephants), the frenetic pace of British concern versus the gentle manners of the Ceylonese—all of which are skillfully edited together. Montage, equally the British documentarists understood information technology, did non nowadays a world of disharmonize. Rather, it was a method for reconciling contradictions. Wright uses contrast, not conflict, and submerges the reality of colonial oppression in the primeval foliage and harmonious rituals of Ceylon.

On the domicile front, the documentarist worked for the maintenance of class peace and asked the British proletariat in the throes of the low to "make an art from what we have ..." They consistently avoided raising any significant economic or political issues in their films since to do so in this period of profound crisis was to question the legitimacy of bourgeois rule. To evade the question of exploitation of labor, the documentarists portrayed the proletariat equally existing in an economical and political vacuum.

This extremely circumscribed and depoliticized representation of reality often relied on the quondam symphonic style of the European avant-gardists of the 20s. The images of modernistic life are torn from their social context and delivered to united states as abstractions. Typical subjects of the documentary are the beauty of men at work (INDUSTRIAL BRITAIN, Flaherty, 1933) or the heroism of the collective effort which makes the machinery of industrial society function. It was as if the greatest chore confronting the proletariat were to propel a train to the pinnacle of the Scottish highlands, encouraged in poetry by Auden and in music by Benjamin Britten (NIGHT MAIL, Basil Wright, Harry Watt, 1936). When the documentarists did address the social bug of the low, they did so in a journalistic style so innocuous that the critical misery of the proletariat could be exposed past the Gas Company, sponsor of HOUSING Problems (Anstey & Elton, 1935)

In Documentary Diary Rotha ends his discussion of the documentary movement at the outbreak of Globe War 2. Information technology was, Rotha asserts, the war which killed the documentary film. On the contrary, this was the catamenia of its most successful integration into the state, the period of its flowering. The documentarists were at start so caught upwards in their own pacifist rhetoric that they did not see where opportunity lay. But subsequently a short menstruation of stagnation, due in part to the unenlightened policies of the Ministry of Data, government sponsorship of documentary began in earnest. The filmmakers could for the first time work without the sad task of having to "educate" government bureaucrats. The documentarists, collected into the Crown Flick Unit of measurement and under the leadership of Alberto Cavalcanti, plant themselves installed at Pinewood studios with aplenty personnel and the latest equipment at their disposal.

World state of war 2 had come to fulfill Lenin's prediction of 1914:

"After this war, if a series of successful revolutions do not occur, more wars will follow—the fairy tale of a war to end all wars, is a hollow and pernicious fairy tale ..."

The social democrats, and in their wake the documentarists, came to the defence force of the "fatherland," that is, to the defense of the interests and privileges of British imperialism. In the "struggle for democracy" against fascism, they seemed to accept forgotten that it was the British government which had sided with Hitler in his ascension to ability. As Lenin had shown, the simply answer to imperialist state of war is socialist revolution. The politics of the British documentary in this period were the politics of open grade collaboration. Instead of proposing a working class offensive against imperialism, it attempted to defeat class consciousness and to tie the British proletariat to its class enemy.

It was mayhap Humphrey Jennings' films which best exemplified the documentary spirit during the state of war years. While other documentarists were realizing film's potential as an arm of armed forces applied science (training and technical films, reconnaissance films, etc.), Jennings became the "humanist" poet of state of war. In Alphabetic character TO BRITAIN (1941), perhaps his best known film, Jennings uses montage as a cinematic structure which reconciles in an imaginary construct the antagonistic interests of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. He orchestrates a "symphony" of Great britain at state of war, the music of armament factories, dance halls, send trains, and the concert at the National Gallery where the Queen Mother and proletarian war widows listen to Myra Hess play Mozart.

The history of British documentary picture provides an analogy of movie theater's predicament in the epoch of decomposable capitalism. As a mass art, cinema is extremely influential in the development of mass ideology. It is likewise the most susceptible of all art to bourgeois domination. It needs capital in order to exist equally an art form. Diego Rivera and André Breton, in their "Manifesto: Toward a Costless Revolutionary Art," Partisan Review, Fall, 1935), quote the young Marx as saying:

"The writer naturally must brand money in guild to alive and write, but he should not under any circumstances alive and write in order to make coin. ... The author by no means looks on his work equally a means. It is an finish in itself ... The beginning condition of the freedom of the press is that it is not a business action."

Most picture palace, because of the financial weather condition of production, is a business activity, and the independence of the filmmaker from capitalism is problematic from the commencement. The British documentary film does not correspond a solution. Despite their independence from the motion picture trade and despite their innovations in production and distribution of films, the documentarists did not succeed in liberating their art simply simply made bourgeois domination more than directly political by allying themselves with the state. What Marxist critics must reproach the British documentary film with is that it failed to expose the contradictions of the decadent backer social system. Wittingly or not, information technology made of itself a tool in the easily of the bourgeoisie. Succumbing to the ascendant ideology, it sowed illusionism to its working class audition apropos the ultimate reformability of capitalism, and information technology promulgated the politics of course collaboration.

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Source: https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC06folder/britDocPolitics.html

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