COMMENTARY

This selection of writings by Grierson attempts to illustrate both the continuities and discontinuities within his ideas, from the 1920s to the 1970s. ‘English Cinema Production and the Naturalistic Tradition’ (1927) contains Grierson's first definition of documentary film. It is an essentially modernist definition, which places emphasis on the creative potential of editing. The extract from Grierson's university paper’ The Character of an Ultimate Synthesis’ (1922) is very much a piece of undergraduate writing, but it is also characteristic of many of his other undergraduate papers, and illustrates the extent to which he was involved with philosophical idealism at the time. The untitled lecture on documentary written between 1927 and 1933, also reveals the influence of idealism, and indicates a phenomenological approach to documentary representation, making an important distinction between ‘the real’ and ‘the actual'. ‘Drifters’ (1929) continues the formative approach. Grierson talks about the need for an impressionistic and indeteminate type of documentary representation, where images take on abstract and symbolic significance. In addition to an essentially modernist approach to film form, Grierson also argues for the merits of depicting working-class communities. ‘First Principles of Documentary’ (1932) is a more systematic elaboration of Grierson's early film theory. Here, Grierson criticises Ruttmann's Berlin (1930) for saying nothing meaningful about its subject matter. Nevertheless, in this paper, Grierson places considerable emphasis on formative technique in the documentary film, and accepts the existence of a number of equally valid modernist documentary traditions, including that represented by Ruttmann. The central idea in the paper is that the conventional ‘story’ form is no longer able to represent the condition of modernity within the city and that new formal methods of depiction have to be explored. The paper also contains his definition of Drifters as an ‘imag-ist’ documentary.

‘Education and the New Order’ (1941) shows Grierson becoming preoccupied with issues of propaganda and civic education. He argues that the function of education is to create social unity rather than to promote critical debate, and that mass education and propaganda should be defined in religious terms, as preaching a ‘faith’ about the need to subsume individualism beneath collective duty. An ascetic, almost puritan discourse of self-sacrifice and hostility to individualism pervades the paper, which also contains Grierson's controversial notion of ‘good totalitarianism’.