The Creative Treatment of Actuality

Kali Spencer

Richard Simpson

ENGL 342

10/13/20

The Creative Treatment of Actuality

This week we watched Drifters by John Grierson (1929), Night Mail by Watt and Wright (1936), and The Quiet One by Sidney Meyers of Film and Photo League (1948). These films and the readings highlight a pivotal time in the history of documentary film where documentarians were debating the best use and purpose of documentary filmmaking.

Bill Nichols stated this well when he said “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”. This quote perfectly encapsulates feelings at the time expressed by filmmakers like Grierson who thought that 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”. Grierson saw the potential of documentary film in serving the state in the form of propaganda and advocated for documentaries to take a decidedly argumentative rather than objective focus. This explains documentary’s split from other forms of cinema. Nichols theorizes that this split was the result of active efforts to build national identity during the 1920s and 1930s. He too acknowledged documentary films' ability to affirm, or contest, the power of the state. These ideas expressed by both Grierson and Nichols seem to tie into the ideas of Comolli and Narboni who would break this idea down in greater detail and classify it further.

From here the idea of the avant-garde film is created. Avant-garde is French for ‘vanguard’ which is a military term used to describe the front-line of an army moving into battle. Artists since then have been compared with these soldiers, as they are often a group force and have the ability to challenge long-established concepts and ideas about art. They can use these abilities to either fight or support an entrenched establishment. This is where the more political aspect comes in like in Night Mail and Drifters. These films have very pro-labor ideas attached to them that want to promote the everyday worker/the working class. And this idea of creating films that are trying to advance an agenda go along really well with the history of the time with shifts in the realm of politics with the idea of -isms communism, socialism, fascism all of which challenged the traditional role of governments. This is really important in relating back to the title of this week's section of films and writings as The Creative Treatment of Actuality because the lines do blur here. There is a form of creativity and art that goes into constructing a version of reality that documentarians create when they want to get you to see things from their perspective.