Documentary Before Grierson

In most standard film histories the emergence of documentary is generally understood as an international process in the 1920s when a number of films across different national cinemas — including Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) in America, Alberto Cavalcanti’s Rien Que les Hueres (1926) in France,Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a City (1927) in Germany, Dziga Vertov’s The Man With a Movie Camera (1929) in the Soviet Union and John Grierson’s Drifters (1929) in Britain — gave rise to a new type of film that eschewed the melodramatic antics of the fiction film in preference for social observation and authenticity in the representation of real people and locations.2 The films cited above all demonstrated, in different ways, Grierson’s notion of documentary as ‘the creative treatment of actuality’. Hence documentary came to be seen as a progressive mode of film practice characterized by aesthetic innovation and social purpose. However, as early film historian Stephen Bottomore has pointed out, the association between documentary and progressive aesthetics has led to the eclipse of an older tradition of non-fiction film in Britain and elsewhere: by ‘implying that the documentary is art or it is nothing’ the standard historiography posits ‘that no “real” documentaries were made before 1920’.3 Since the late 1970s the critical ‘rediscovery’ of early cinema has seen the emergence of a revisionist historiography that has comprehensively redrawn the historical map of film production and exhibition during the medium’s formative decades.