American Documentary Film Projecting The

AMERICAN DOCUMENTARY FILM
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PROJECTING THE NATION

JEFFREY GEIGER
ER
F R EY G E I G
JE F
Edinburgh
American Documentary Film
American Documentary Film
Projecting the Nation
Jeffrey Geiger
Edinburgh University Press

© Jeffrey Geiger, 2011
Edinburgh University Press Ltd

22 George Square, Edinburgh
www.euppublishing.com
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by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and
printed and bound in Great Britain by
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ISBN 978 0 7486 2147 7 (hardback)

ISBN 978 0 7486 2148 4 (paperback)
The right of Jeffrey Geiger

to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reproduce material previously published elsewhere.
Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked,
the publisher will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.
Published with the support of the Edinburgh University Scholarly Publishing Initiatives Fund.
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
List of illustrations ix
List of abbreviations xi
Introduction 1
1 Novelties, Spectacles and the Documentary Impulse 17

Case studies: Blacksmith Scene (1893), Buffalo Dance (1894),
Mess Call (1896)
2 Virtual Travels and the Tourist Gaze 40
Case study: Nanook of the North (1922)
3 Serious Play: Documentary and the Avant-Garde 65
Case study: Manhatta (1921)
4 Activism and Advocacy: The Depression Era 86
Case study: The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936)
5 Idea-Weapons: Documentary Propaganda 121
Case study: The Memphis Belle (1944)
6 ‘Uncontrolled’ Situations: Direct Cinema 154
Case study: Grey Gardens (1975)
7 Relative Truths: Documentary and Postmodernity 186
Case study: Tongues Untied (1989)
8 Media Wars: Documentary Dispersion 217
Case study: Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004)
Bibliography 242
Index 263
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to the British Academy for awarding a grant during the
early research stages, and to the University of Essex for a generous sabbatical
(2008–9). I’m lucky to work in a congenial and stimulating environment, so
must thank the members of the Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre
Studies for their support. Many thanks, also, to the following for their gener-
ous feedback: Sanja Bahun, Shohini Chaudhuri, Ian Scott, Randy Rutsky,
Eithne Quinn and John Haynes. Students in my documentary seminars have
helped me to crystallize and challenge many ideas discussed here; I would
thank especially Nic Blower, Lina Alhafez, Kirsten Jones, Mark Tasker, Chloe
Wilson and Richard Craig. Daniel Rellstab, Christiane Schlote and Danièle
Klapproth kindly invited me to the interdisciplinary ‘Out of War’ confer-
ence in Bern, which fueled ideas for Chapters 5 and 8. I also appreciated the
help of staff at the following libraries and archives: the British Film Institute;
the British Library; the UCLA Film and Television archives; the Margaret
Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; the George
Eastman House; Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University; the
Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley; the Butler Library
at Columbia University; and the University of Illinois at Chicago Library,
Special Collections. Sarah Edwards at EUP deserves credit for pointing me in
the right direction early on, while Esmé Watson and Vicki Donald have been
the ideal editors, with Peter Williams helpfully working on the manuscript.
Finally, thanks to Hal Gladfelder who, with our selfless cats, has kept me
focused on life beyond the screen.
Part of Chapter 8, revised for inclusion here, was published as ‘Taking Aim:
New Documentary and War’, in ZAA: Language, Literature, and Culture, 56.2
(2008): 153–74.
List of illustrations
1 Midway Plaisance with Ferris Wheel 21

2 Javanese house builders 25
3 Plate 188, ‘Dancing [Fancy] woman draped [Miss Larrigan]’
(1885–7) 28
4 Mess Call (1896) 37
5 Flyer for Lyman H. Howe’s ‘22nd Semi-Annual Tour’ (1906) 48
6 Nanook of the North (1922) 53
7 Ballet Mécanique (1924) 68
8 Manhatta (1921) 74
9 The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936) 108
10 The Spanish Earth (1937) 113
11 Native Land (1942) 116
12 The Memphis Belle (1944) 145
13 Ruins of Wendenstrasse, Hamburg (‘Operation Gomorrha’,
July 1943) 148
14 Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment (1963) 165
15 Grey Gardens (1975) 176
16 The Thin Blue Line (1988) 197
17 Who Killed Vincent Chin? (1988) 201
18 Tongues Untied (1989) 203
19 ‘Target Iraq’ graphic (2003) 224
20 Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) 229
21 Bowling for Columbine (2002) 234
22 The Real Face of Occupation (2004) 237
List of abbreviations
ACL Amateur Cinema League

BMP Bureau of Motion Pictures
CIAA Co-ordinator of Inter-American Affairs
CPI Committee on Public Information
CPUSA Communist Party USA
FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation
FSA Farm Security Administration
GE General Electric
GPO General Post Office
HUAC House Committee on Un-American Activities
ITVS Independent Television Service
MOMA Museum of Modern Art (New York)
MPPDA Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America
NAACP National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
NBPC National Black Programming Consortium
NFB National Film Board (of Canada)
NIRA National Industrial Recovery Act 1933
OB Overseas Bureau
OWI Office of War Information
PBS Public Broadcasting Service
RA Resettlement Administration
TVA Tennessee Valley Authority
USIA United States Information Agency
USFS United States Film Service
[W]FPL [Workers’] Film and Photo League
WIR Workers’ International Relief
WPA Works Progress Administration
Introduction
American Documentary Film explores key themes, moments and movements in

US documentary over the course of more than a century of cinema. In spite
of the ambitious title, this is not a survey or exhaustive history of documen-
tary.1 Rather, this is an effort to distil important aspects of the documentary
idea while tracing the form’s development over time, focusing on the ways
documentaries have engaged with US national identity and perceptions of
American belonging. Moreover, by tracing lineages of the documentary idea
that might not be seen as ‘typical’ or wholly representative of the form, I hope
to suggest documentary’s open-endedness and fluidity. Documentary has long
been a negotiated concept: a site of personal, social, intellectual and aesthetic
investment keenly fought over and debated.
I’ll start by briefly outlining some ideas behind – and limits of – the book’s
title, American Documentary Film: Projecting the Nation. First, though the term
‘American’ features prominently, I would stress that the idea of ‘America’ is
a contested one, not only through questions of what constitutes ‘American’
identity, but in the ways that the term ‘America’ manages to elide the rest
of the Americas in one fell swoop. With this in mind, critics like Malini
Johar Schueller and Mary Renda employ the terms ‘USAmerican’ and ‘U.S.
American’, respectively, in efforts to draw attention to the implicit hegemony
of common usages of ‘America’ and ‘American’ (Schueller 1998; Renda 2001).
Whenever possible, then, I use ‘US’ both as a noun and as an adjective in the
text, though the noun ‘American’, referring to a resident/citizen of the United
States, has been generally retained, indicating a powerful idea – and hegem-
onic construct, as discussed below – of national identity.
‘Documentary’ is also a less straightforward term than it might seem at
first; as employed here, it refers to cinematic forms that haven’t always fit
comfortably within stricter definitions of the term. ‘Film’, similarly, serves
as shorthand for motion picture technologies ranging from celluloid to video
2 a m er ica n d o cum e nta ry f ilm
and digital technologies, though restrictions on space have meant I’ve been
unable to devote as much attention to television and Internet documentaries as
I would have liked. Other difficult decisions and elisions had to be made, given
these limits, and important areas relating to documentary’s development –
including newsreels, ethnographic film, feminist film, ‘PBS-style’ educational
films, home movies, post-Second World War experimental film and documen-
tary animation – remain underexplored.2
As for the book’s subtitle, the word ‘projecting’ is an effort to incorporate
several interlinked associations, the most obvious being the projection of a film
on to a screen. ‘Projecting’ further is meant to convey an idea of audiences pro-
jecting themselves into the film text – both imaginatively and sensibly. Finally,
the term also attempts to highlight the image of a nation constantly projecting
itself into an imagined, bigger, and better, future. The United States, as the
name of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1933 – ‘A Century of Progress’ – stressed,
has tirelessly promoted itself as being in a constant state of moving forward,
and documentary has been a key mode for charting this idea of progress –
the forward movement through what Henry Luce once laid claim to as ‘the
American Century’. The obsession with progress carried on, unevenly but
seemingly unstoppably, until the Vietnam War, when the imperial and indus-
trial imaginings of the ‘American Century’ and the ‘Century of Progress’ were
pushed to a breaking point. Yet the national rhetoric of perpetual reinvention,
projecting into a bigger and better future, has never really faded, as the aspi-
rational language of presidential campaign slogans always strives to remind
us – from ‘It’s Morning Again in America’ (Reagan, 1984) and ‘Prosperity and
Progress’ (Gore, 2000) to ‘Yes, America Can!’ (Bush, 2004).
d ocu m e n t a r y a n d t h e n a t ion
As this book sets out to show, documentary films have been important to
forming ideas of the US nation, both as an imagined space and as a real place.
Yet it is worth considering what makes up the idea of the nation, and whose
interests it serves. Concepts of the nation and of national identity are rooted
in cultural practices and beliefs, so much so that they might seem beyond
questioning. As Ernest Gellner contends, ‘having a nation is not an inherent
attribute of humanity, but it has now come to appear as such’ (2006: 6). To be
without a national identity – to be ‘nationless’ or ‘stateless’ – is to be powerless
in modern western consciousness, an aberrant prospect to be pitied or feared.
Yet, as Gellner suggests, nations are a ‘contingency, not a universal necessity’
(6); as a ‘natural, God-given way of classifying men, as an inherent though
long-delayed political destiny, [nations] are a myth’ (47).
An essential component of the nation-state, Homi Bhabha contends, is the
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effort to create a unified national culture. The nation is a ‘progressive meta-

phor of modern social cohesion’, a concept that posits ‘the many as one’ (1994:
204). National identities are based on a variety of factors – some foregrounded
more than others – such as birthplace, historically determined borders and
boundaries, language, ethnicity, and religious and political beliefs. In this
sense, nations can be seen as constructed out of perceived affiliations.3 Yet
at the same time it’s difficult to dismiss the transformational passions that
national identities arouse. The nation becomes invested with psychic and
emotional power, so much so that members are willing to sacrifice their lives
for them. In this sense nations are not merely – or simplistically – ‘artificial’,
in that they carry with them the force of individual and collective belief and
experience, making real that which is ‘imagined’.
In Benedict Anderson’s much-cited view, nations might therefore be seen
as ‘imagined communities’; that is, though it is impossible to know every
member of one’s own nation, there is a sense of affiliation and a mutual sense
of ‘knowing’ other members: ‘in the minds of each [national member] lives
the image of their communion’ (1991: 6). Anderson sees national thinking
and nationalism as chiefly arising towards the end of the eighteenth century,
advanced through centralized communication and perceptions of democratic
access, which encouraged the idea that citizens belonged to a distinct yet
shared national unit. Crucial for Anderson are the underlying roles played by
mass communication technologies such as the printing press, and with them
the possibility of cultural homogenization through standardized vernacular
language. These observations, as Núria Triana-Toribio suggests, begin to
imply the role of other forms of mass communication, such as cinema, in
framing the ‘narration and representation of the nation to itself’: reflecting and
shaping national identities (2002: 4).
Films, with the discourses that surround them and the institutions that
support them, are central means through which the idea of the national is
articulated and culturally determined. As Susan Hayward has shown, more
than simply influencing or reflecting ideas of the nation, films, filmic dis-
courses and institutional formations form part of complex, negotiated national
identities. Film reflects and refracts national consciousness – it can help create
a sense of national belonging through the national narratives and myths it
(re)produces. Like national affiliations themselves, films and filmic discourses
are selective: they can mobilize, promote and also suppress key ideas and
myths of the nation (Hayward 2005: 6–8, 15). In documentary contexts, this
process might be seen in its extreme version in propaganda documentaries of
the Second World War, which strategically vaunted concepts of their nations’
moral and military superiority while suppressing any appearance of ideological
division or dissent.
The idea of ‘national cinema’, in academic film studies, has been commonly
linked to state-sponsored cinema movements which work to reinforce the

‘truth’ of national identity by supporting national film industries that combat
external influences and powerful market forces – in particular, Hollywood.
Yet, if the US has a national cinema, it would naturally appear to be
Hollywood. Hollywood films, between the years 1930 and 1945, averaged 80
million admissions weekly, or more than half of the US population (Ray 1985:
25). In the darkened space of the theater, ‘utopian stories, political fantasies,
and mythic narratives were told’ (Denzin 1995: 14). Arguably this ‘classic’
period of US cinema saw the consolidation of a national ideology – particularly
in mainstream media – culminating in the dominant projection of clear-cut
American values and beliefs during the Second World War.
The relationship between US documentary and the idea of national cinema,
then, becomes complex and at times contradictory. Documentary filmmak-
ing has, on and off, engaged with state sponsorship and counter-Hollywood
strategies, as this book will show, yet documentaries have at different times
been produced by and absorbed into Hollywood frameworks. Likewise, it
would be difficult to prove that documentary as a cinematic form has consist-
ently constructed an ‘alternative America’ to the Hollywood version, though
political documentaries since Vietnam have made concerted efforts in this
direction (see Chapters 7 and 8). Hayward highlights similar ambiguities in
the idea of national cinema, noting that the dynamic relations between ‘central’
and ‘peripheral’ cinemas within national formations are sometimes mutually
dependent, and not always oppositional (2005: 15). Still, some critics have
seen US documentary as undermining the very precepts of a national cinema.
For Patricia Zimmermann, documentary can resist the status quo and signal
‘the dissolution of the universal nation and its narrational strategies through its
location within contestatory newly emerging identities and social collectivities’
(2000: 12). Such ‘postnational’ readings stress the potential of documentaries
to effect social and political change, to generate debate about national identities
and responsibilities. As this book will show, however, not all documentaries
– or even all those considered ‘social’ or ‘political’ documentaries – have
always worked to demystify the nation. The documentary idea has long been
predicated on nationalist ideologies and national identities, ranging from the
explicit national rhetoric of FDR’s Resettlement Administration films to the
implicit nationalist address of Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004).
This book attempts, then, to delineate ways in which documentary has
potently contributed to shifting conceptions of US national consciousness
and belonging. I wouldn’t, in the end, propose US documentary as a kind of
national cinema, though I would stress that documentary has powerfully con-
tributed to both the nation’s making and its unmaking. For Jonathan Kahana,
the impact of documentary lies in its ability to gesture towards worlds, expe-
riences, emotions and structures of feeling beyond the ‘evidence’ it depicts.
in troduction 5
Documentary representation can make visible ‘the invisible or “phantom”

realities that shape the experience of the ordinary Americans in whose name
power is exercised and contested’ (2008: 9). In this sense, documentary does
not just reflect or engage with national consciousness, it helps us to imagine
ideas and futures beyond its immediate framework and subject matter; it has
the potential to transform the experience and comprehension of a national
imaginary. To examine this process in more depth, it would be useful at this
point to reflect further on how the documentary concept has been variously
defined and debated.
d e f i ni t i o n s
The term ‘documentary’, it is generally agreed, was coined in the 1920s and
has been in common use since the 1930s, yet its definition often has been less
than clear.4 In 1954, almost thirty years after the term appeared, Cecil Starr of
the Saturday Review complained that the lack of a ready definition remained
‘an irritation among film-minded people; and the repeated demand for defini-
tion, when none is easily forthcoming, is even more irritating’ (1954: 44).
John Grierson’s much-cited phrase, the ‘creative treatment of actuality’,
has long served as a dominant description of what constitutes documentary
(Hardy 1946: 11). The documentarist works to produce ‘art’ by passing from
the realm of purely descriptive uses of ‘natural material’ into the realm of
‘arrangements, rearrangements, and creative shapings of it’ (Grierson 1946
[1932]: 79). Grierson’s notion of ‘creative treatment’ has remained, at the very
least, ambiguous enough to survive the test of time; it also usefully, for many,
differentiates documentaries from other ‘lower categories’ of nonfiction films
(78). Yet it is also seen as limited, based on a ‘denigration’ of earlier forms
such as travelogues, newsreels and actualities, suppressing their key role in
documentary’s development (Rosen 1993: 73–4). Indeed, there remains ‘little
consensus’ about documentary: as a concept it has long been a the center of
numerous ‘competing discourses’ attempting to claim it as art, propaganda,
education, science, human interest and so on (Roscoe and Hight 2001: 7).
Many critics have worked towards more coherent and unified definitions,
while others, such as Bill Nichols, have broken the form down into more
manageable subgenres and subcategories.5 Still, as Dai Vaughan suggests,
there is a ‘labyrinth of rules and exceptions, and exceptions to the exceptions,
which awaits anyone who tries to identify documentary by generic or stylistic
criteria’ (1999: 84). The range of genres and styles popularly consumed as
documentary – from PBS educational films and Discovery Channel adven-
tures to I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here and Wife Swap – testifies to the very
malleability and instability of the term.
Documentary has been seen to bear a special relationship to the concrete,

pro-filmic world, as the filmic opposite of fiction. This emphasis on facts, evi-
dence and accountability – what Michael Renov calls a ‘scientistic yearning’ in
documentary (1999: 85) – might be traced along at least one genealogical line
to the Enlightenment era of the later eighteenth century – around the time,
according to Gellner and Anderson, that the very idea of the nation itself was
gaining currency. During this period, demands intensified for more precise
technologies for reporting facts and presenting evidence that could advance
scientific and social progress. The film documentary, in particular, continues
to benefit from a widespread acceptance that it is a fact-based mode, echoing
Enlightenment differentiations between factual or ‘documentary’ representa-
tion (such as ‘documentary drawing’ that discouraged distortion and empha-
sized on-the-spot, plein-air technique) and more fanciful representations (such
as ‘inventive drawing’ or ‘illustrative drawing’) (Smith 1992: 54; Geiger 2007:
32–3).
Thus documentary images, though normally grounded in the unpredictable
and disordered realms of experience, are afforded pedagogical value as authori-
tative evidence of real phenomena and historical events. Other practices that
have fed into documentary approaches reflect this Enlightenment tradition:
illustrated lectures, ethnological displays, scientific collecting and exhibiting,
and so on. If these aren’t precise antecedents of documentary film, perhaps
they might be seen as traces – harbingers of what was to come. As Grierson’s
definition indicates, this scientistic yearning meets, to varying degrees, ele-
ments of ‘creative treatment’. This ‘expressive’ component inheres in the
poetic leanings of Robert Flaherty, in ‘city symphonies’ such as Manhatta
(1921), in the work of Joris Ivens and in the influence of the avant-garde. As a
result, documentary’s aesthetic function ‘can never be wholly divorced from
the didactic one’; in all, documentary might be summed up as a form of ‘pleas-
urable learning’ (Renov 1993: 35).
Most documentaries draw on photography’s ‘indexical’ properties, relying
on the ‘here and now’ impact of photographic technology.6 Of the photo-
graphic index, Gilberto Perez suggests that ‘the photographic image is an
index because it is an imprint taken directly from the things represented; and
it is also an index because, like the pointing finger, it tells us to look at those
things’ (1998: 395). In related terms, Laura Marks likens film to a fossil: as
an imprint of something it once touched, the fossil is ‘powerfully descriptive
of cinema’s disturbing ability to recreate its object in the present’ (2000: 22).
Vaughan, however, stresses that the power of the photographic index also
relies on social and cultural beliefs that circulate around the image. He offers
another analogy – in this case the Shroud of Turin – which sustains its unique
aura not merely because the image is seen as an imprint (a kind of fossilized
remains) of a crucified figure. Its power, rather, comes from its associations
in troduction 7
with the image of Christ: if it were an anonymous figure it wouldn’t carry the
same weightiness and mystic authority (1999: 135). Likewise, documentary
requires discourses and systems of belief – of authenticity, immediacy, author-
ity and knowledge – circulating around its ‘indexical’ images, imparting a kind
of aura of legitimacy to the likenesses ‘captured’ on film.
Of course, the indexical nature of film is not unique to documentary, though
it is harnessed, arguably, in distinctive ways. Nichols points out that though
both live-action fiction and nonfiction share indexical properties, importantly
documentary incorporates a host of mechanisms that ‘prepare us to expect a
privileged status for the indexical link between sign and referent’ (1991: 230).
This ‘privileged status’ depends on qualities and attributes that extend beyond
basic elements of genre and style. For example, a fiction film might have a
documentary ‘look’, as in neorealism or film noir, but it would very rarely be
taken for a documentary. At the same time, some documentaries are openly
reconstructions, or even use animation techniques, in which case the lack
of emphasis on the photographic index is usually balanced by foreground-
ing other documentary codes and conventions, such as the presentation of
factual information and analysis. In this respect, a documentary establishes its
status and distinctiveness more through its intents, uses and public reception.
Nichols thus sees the form’s integrity as coalescing around three interlinked
areas: the filmmaker, the text and the viewer.
The documentary filmmaker works within a series of social and institutional
frameworks relating to economics, ideological beliefs and professional prac-
tices. In terms of professional practice, there is a range of expectations relat-
ing to camerawork, editing and cinematic codes and conventions, as well as a
certain amount of ‘discipline and control’ exerted over what documentarists
can and can’t do (for example, pressures against distorting actions and events
that they are recording) (Nichols 1991: 14). The Australian documentarist
Philip Tyndall, for example, sums up some of these restrictions primarily in
ethical terms, highlighting the importance of an ‘honest’ relationship between
the filmmaker and his subjects and viewers; the filmmaker’s ‘responsibility’
for recording people, places and events so that this knowledge is not lost from
memory; and the importance of ‘accuracy’ (as opposed to stricter notions of
capturing the ‘truth’) in documentary (Tyndall 2003). Yet, Nichols stresses,
in spite of these presumed restrictions, there is always an element of lack of
control, and this lack comes down to the unpredictability and variability of
experience and history themselves.
Since this lack of control potentially undermines the intentions of the
documentarist, more important than intention, for Nichols, is documen-
tary’s ‘status as an institutional formation’. Documentaries are texts that bear
common and distinguishing features (such as working through an argument or
thesis, ‘evidentiary editing’ that stresses logical or cause and effect relations,
voiceover narration, interviews, testimony and so on), and thus are more or
less formally recognized as belonging to a common category. Finally, the role
of the audience – the ‘constituency of viewers’ – is key (Nichols 1991: 18–21,
24). Audiences assimilate previous experiences of watching different kinds
of films with their immediate analytical, critical and physical reactions to the
film text passing in front of them. Hence, among a range of approaches – from
educational to expressive, didactic to poetic – a ‘documentary identity’ will
generally ‘hold together’ (Corner 2002).
It is the convergence of these various indices, and what might be called
the nonfiction ‘contract’ between a film’s producers and consumers, that con-
stitutes the collective ‘faith’ or ‘trust’ invested in documentary. Hence, Carl
Plantinga suggests that while the audience’s receptive role can make or break
a documentary, documentary film should be seen more as a two-way phenom-
enon: a kind of speech act or communicative action. If fiction takes a ‘fictive
stance’ towards the world and does not overtly assert an authoritative claim
to obtaining the ‘actual world’, documentary is recognized through its ‘asser-
tive stance’ towards the actual world and its adoption of certain prototypical
stylistic and narrative features. It is also, very importantly, contextualized
and promoted as documentary in practices such as exhibition and advertising
(Plantinga 2009: 498).
d o c u m e n t a r y a n d / v e r s us fic t ion
Even with this range of arguments framing documentary’s enunciatory and
social particularity, many have contended there is little difference between
documentary and fiction. Though as a cinematic form documentary is aligned
to nonfiction and factuality, and therefore not viewed as ‘fancy’ or fantasy, it’s
easy enough to see that documentaries are constructs containing elements of
subjective interpretation, selection, fictional techniques, narrative modes and
so on. As early as 1938, Frank S. Nugent of the New York Times expressed
concerns about the form’s ambiguities and potential deceptions. Writing at
a time when documentary advocates were asserting the form’s unique value
(and the New School for Social Research had just launched its first course
in documentary film ‘as history and journalism’), Nugent was concerned
that documentaries could ‘be made to serve whatever purpose their compiler
intends them to serve’. ‘With camera reportage and camera distortage hope-
lessly intermingled’, it was almost impossible to ‘sift for the authentic among
the documentaries’ (Nugent 1984 [1938]).
Perhaps the most sustained challenge to documentary’s autonomous status
came with the poststructuralist focus on breaking down neat oppositional cat-
egories such as fiction and nonfiction.7 Following the rise of poststructuralism
in troduction 9
in theory and criticism, there was a steep increase in the academic study of
documentary, reflecting sustained interests in investigating questions of truth
and representation.8 These critiques helped collapse categorical distinctions,
stressing that convenient markers separating documentary and fiction were
always under suspicion and liable to interrogation. Documentary ‘truth’ could
be seen as a construct like any other, always intimately bound to issues of
power, subject position and ideological influence.
At the same time there have been attempts to reframe these claims by
re-examining differences between fiction and nonfiction from social, semi-
otic, philosophical and phenomenological perspectives. Vivian Sobchack sees
cinemagoing as always embodied, suggesting that experiences of nonfiction
images can be phenomenologically distinct from those of fiction. The vivified,
visible presence of people and objects in cinema can uncannily overlap with the
filmgoer’s physical presence and ability to bring cultural and personal knowl-
edge that can intimately, even physically, engage with and relate to figures
projected on screen. Sobchack supports this idea by posing the example of a
cinematic representation of a dog. If it happens to show my dog, she argues, ‘I
will not engage its image in the same way that I engage the image of “Lassie”,
a dog with which I have romped only cinematically, in a fiction’ (1999: 242–3).
The filmgoer will project a different range of responses, marked by recollec-
tions of touch, smell and physical proximity, on to the ‘real’ on-screen dog.
Further countering the ‘denial’ of differences between fiction and nonfic-
tion, Noël Carroll has questioned any simplistic levelling of distinctions by
examining the moving image’s differing qualities of ‘depiction’, ‘nominal por-
trayal’ and ‘physical portrayal’ (1996: 224).9 For example, a shot of Clark Gable
in the film Gone with the Wind depicts a man (as a general category or type) and
physically portrays Gable himself, but it nominally (and predominantly) por-
trays the character of Rhett Butler (Carroll 1996: 241). Documentary generally
combines depiction with nominal and physical portrayals, just as dramatic
fiction does, but these shared characteristics do not automatically collapse
distinctions between the two. The contextualization and reception of images
is crucial: for example, in a documentary about the behind-the-scenes lives of
Hollywood actors, the very same shot taken from Gone with the Wind would
signify to audiences a physical portrayal of Clark Gable – a kind of nonfiction
artifact – rather than the fictional character of Rhett Butler.
In identifying fictional and nonfictional strategies, we should be aware that
depiction, nominal and physical portrayals are employed in varying contexts,
and that their signifying properties can be strategically brought forward or
suppressed, to varying degrees, in processes of production, reception, exhibi-
tion and advertising. Fictions tend to foreground nominal portrayals, while
documentaries frame their portrayals in ways that testify to and highlight their
nonfictional status, even if they sometimes ‘lie’. As Carroll suggests, the use
10 a m erica n d o cum e nta ry f i lm
of stock footage of factory workers in a film about strikebreaking, for example,

would be an example of a documentary relying on nominal portrayal in a
nonfiction context, in that the image might not show the actual strikebreakers
in question. Yet audiences would still be expected to perceive these factory
workers as representative of the subject at hand (or at worst, viewers would
revert to accepting the images as generalized depictions). As long as the shot
is not explicitly misidentified, audiences will not consider the film to be pat-
ently misleading or ‘fake’. In such cases, a documentary doesn’t automatically
become a ‘fiction’ so long as it conforms to ‘established standards of objectiv-
ity’ (1996: 241–2). More important, in this case, than the ‘truth’ or ‘lies’ of
what a documentary shows is whether it can stand up to questions and tests of
authenticity and verifiability, questions to which fictions normally would not
be subjected.
As Vaughan states, ‘documentary, after all, can tell lies; and it can tell lies
because it lays claim to a form of veracity which fiction doesn’t’ (1999: 154).
I may be arguing that documentaries do operate and circulate, in important
ways, differently from fiction films, but I would also suggest that much has
to do with perceptions of difference, and that documentaries should be seen as
situated more along a continuum with fictions than standing in absolute oppo-
sition to them. Documentary is not a static or homogeneous form. Nichols
opens his Introduction to Documentary with the intentionally contentious
statement: ‘every film is a documentary’; elsewhere he calls documentary ‘a
fiction unlike any other’ (2001a: 1; 1991: 109). Essentially documentary, while
marking out a space in the popular imagination both alongside and against
fiction, occupies ‘no fixed territory’ and might be seen as a site of ‘contestation
and change’ (1991: 12).
d ocu m e n t a r y e x p e r i e n c e
Documentary is in a state of flux, marked by shifting aims and practices,
changing perceptions of its forms and functions, as well as remediation – a
process that sees the character of representations constantly evolving as media
technologies reinvent themselves (Chanan 2007: 22). Over the years, at least
in Anglo-American contexts, documentary has shifted focus from Griersonian
observation and advocacy, to direct cinema immediacy (a rebellion against
Griersonian approaches), to postmodern self-reflexivity and indeterminacy (a
rebellion against direct cinema). In recent decades, this mutability has argu-
ably intensified, as the lines once drawn by critics such as Grierson and Paul
Rotha between actualities, simpler nonfiction films, sheer entertainments and
‘serious’ documentaries have been further blurred.
My use of the term documentary, then, is at times rather approximate. I
in troduction 11
am, however, less concerned with arriving at a precise definition of the term
than in considering the ways that this broadly recognized form produces a kind
of imagined public space and a kind of real place. Documentary, as Sobchack
points out, is a term that designates more than just a cinematic ‘object’. As she
suggests, ‘along with the obvious nomination of a film genre characterized his-
torically by objective textual features, the term also – and more radically – des-
ignates a certain subjective relation to an objective cinematic or televisual text.
In other words, documentary is less a thing than an experience’ (1999: 241).
This experience is crucial to the production of what I would call documentary
reality. Documentary reality, while not ‘reality’ itself, is a cinematic experience
of reality that indexes – and points towards – real people, places and events. It
is socially produced, and experienced through cognitive and bodily processes.
At times this reality is marked by extreme difference from the familiar and
everyday, at others by powerful impressions of recognition and closeness. Just
as the smell and taste of Proust’s madeleine ‘triggers’ memories and desires
(Mavor 1996: 4), documentary reality can work on and with the spectator’s
memories, cultural investments, beliefs, sympathies, emotions and senses. In
this sense, documentaries are not detached replicas of the world, but might be
seen as corollaries of lived experience.
Importantly, the documentary experience doesn’t stand in isolation from
the world but speaks to broader affiliations and collectives. As Kahana sug-
gests, a documentary ‘collects the evidence of experience in the most far-flung
precincts, in coal mines, cornfields, cell blocks, convention halls, corporate
boardrooms, and city slums. Then it delivers these social facts to a broader
public, where they can be used for a variety of ideological ends.’ Documentary
might thus be seen as forming part of the ‘social imaginary’, helping us ‘envi-
sion the collective consequences of our thoughts and actions, no matter how
ordinary or idiosyncratic’ (Kahana 2008: 1–2).10 The social imaginary gives
shape to a common understanding, and ‘makes possible common practices and
a widely shared sense of legitimacy’. At the same time, this imaginary site isn’t
limited to establishing a consensus; it might form part of cultural critique and
expectations of social change (2).
Conceiving documentary in these terms might help, in part, to explain the
heightened social status that documentary has long enjoyed. Documentary can
translate experience and makes it ‘available for interpretation’ in institutional,
public and community forums (Kahana 2008: 2). Documentaries might, there-
fore, be seen as corresponding to a kind of public space, forming part of a social
imaginary that can help to determine shared identities, values and goals, while
also holding the potential to alter these conceptual frameworks and assert
dissensus. This collective role might be seen most clearly in thesis-driven
documentaries such as Bowling for Columbine (2002) or Super Size Me (2004),
designed to generate public debate and action, but can also apply to seemingly
socially indifferent nonfictions like television reality shows. My intent here is

not to return to a version of Griersonian hierarchy, where some documentaries
are determined to have ‘more’ or ‘better’ social value than others. It is simply
to suggest that most documentaries, at some level, serve a public function and
contribute to the public sphere: they can be flashpoints for discussion about
who and what we are, and want to be.
Of course the very idea of the ‘public’ sphere in the US – and of ‘public’
identities and ‘public’ interests more generally – is, increasingly, riddled
with problems and contested definitions. Traditionally, the public sphere is
associated with hierarchical power structures, where ‘official’ ideologies and
discursive practices strive to suppress alternatives and challenges to power.
Others have stressed the public sphere’s lack of homogeneity, citing the exist-
ence of ‘counterpublics’ as sites and affiliations that develop discourses that
challenge the very idea of official, ‘top-down’ social controls.11 Because docu-
mentary is essentially a public format, appealing to and depending on shifting
public understandings and beliefs, it has never, in the US at least, provided a
fully stable basis for projecting unified social and communal values and goals
(though some have tried). US documentary has always been differential and
diverse, and in this very diversity has reflected multiple and often compet-
ing discourses of different social and cultural groups. Even so, perhaps due
to ongoing presumptions of documentary’s orientation towards the public
sphere, often seemingly ‘counterpublic’ documentaries can be found attempt-
ing to encode and appeal to a horizon of shared interests.
There is a moment in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 that reflects this
tension between ‘official’ and ‘counterpublic’ discourses. Moore films the
grieving Lila Lipscomb, who lost her son in the Iraq War, putting up her
American flag; later, when interviewing her in her kitchen, he utters ‘it’s a
great country’ in perfunctory fashion. Lila – almost too quickly – agrees with
him. This insistence on American ‘greatness’ seems to stand out awkwardly
within a film that is condemning a US act of war. Yet the scene suggests that
the very basis of a film like Fahrenheit 9/11, and the reason why its status as a
documentary is so important, lies in documentary’s presumed public role. It
also reveals what is at stake when making and ‘selling’ political documentary
in the US. From Moore’s position, criticism of US war policies necessitates
avoiding the appearance of anti- or un-Americanism; the voice with which
the film tries to speak, though dissenting, aims for a broader consensus con-
structed around shared ideals and values presumed embedded in an ‘American
way of life’.
Documentaries are not always as self-conscious about their public function
as Moore’s, but they do almost always maintain a presumption of some form
of public address – even seemingly apolitical documentaries such as Manhatta
(1921) or highly personal statements such as Silverlake Life (1993). Looking
in troduction 13
at a history of US documentary, we encounter the perpetual subject of this

address, sometimes explicitly but more often implicitly conceived of as the
‘American nation’. In this respect perhaps, much US documentary bears at
least traces of a ‘national cinema’.
overview
The eight chapters that follow sketch a rough chronology, but I don’t wish to
imply a strict linear development of US documentary. Each chapter examines
a key set of themes or movements (historical, political, social, aesthetic), while
also containing a ‘case study’ of a single film. In choosing films for the latter,
I was very conscious of the risks of implying that one film might, somehow,
stand in for a whole era, group or movement.12 On the other hand I wanted to
stress the value of close reading, suggesting how particular rhetorical, techni-
cal and stylistic elements of individual films might always be seen as operat-
ing in tension with, and speaking to, more general contexts and concerns.
Documentaries are texts that seem to resist close analysis: often treated as
informational, they tend to give rise to opinion and descriptions of content
rather than sustained attempts to investigate and unpack deeper structures and
meanings. Many students of documentary are initially uncomfortable with the
imposition of theoretical, symbolic, thematic, narrative and aesthetic modes
of interpretation on a form still commonly considered transparent, immediate
and real. Yet it’s important not only to outline the social contexts and overt
‘messages’ of documentaries, but to engage with how a documentary con-
structs its realities, works as an experience, functions as a cultural and techni-
cal production, reflects and reveals the world around us. This means bringing
to bear all of the tools familiar to film analysis – examining the history, culture,
ideology, technology, markets and aesthetics of cinema – while also identifying
the ‘voice’ of documentary, recognizing its social currency and value, discover-
ing the meanings and broader concepts and histories towards which the text
gestures.
Chapter 1 looks at what I call authentic attractions, and at an era that
Michael Chanan aptly refers to as ‘documentary before documentary’ (2007:
55). Here I argue that, though the documentary had not yet formally come
into being, one might discern a documentary ‘impulse’ in the combination
of edification, sensation and entertaining display encountered at sites such as
the Midway Plaisance at the Chicago Exposition of 1893. This event, impor-
tantly, brought together efforts to invoke a distinct American national identity
through an amalgam of technologies, commercial ventures, cultural expecta-
tions and ideological notions that fed into early cinema in the US and into a
popular taste for nonfiction actualities. The chapter moves on to study films
of the Edison Company, suggesting that rather than see these early films as
‘documents’ as opposed to fully fledged ‘documentaries’, we might consider
how they lie at the heart of the documentary tradition – in no small part due to
their interactions with a national imaginary.
Chapter 2 expands on the idea of the Chicago Exposition as ‘the cheapest
and most exhaustive journey over the earth that was ever made’ (Reed 2000:
xxvi), reflecting on cinema’s capacity to serve as a vehicle for mobility, travel
and tourism. Associations between cinema and travel were widespread: actu-
alities and travelogues revealed faraway sights to Americans at home, while the
sensation of travel was incorporated into film technology itself. This chapter
examines how modes of entertainment ranging from illustrated lectures to
phantom rides were foundational to later documentary approaches. These
forms of virtual travel, ‘possessing the world’ in images, also fed into national
and imperial consciousness. Establishing a spectatorial relationship to sights
and scenes ‘over there’, these films helped define a sense of ‘us’ and ‘here’.
Chapter 3 further suggests the mobility of the documentary idea by looking
at movements conventionally viewed in opposition to each other: documentary
and the avant-garde. Avant-garde cinema has been associated with aesthetic
innovation, imagination and playfulness, while documentary has been seen as
a ‘sober’ discursive mode. This chapter works to excavate significant intersec-
tions between the two, finally considering how the modernist aesthetics of
documentaries such as Manhatta helped to vivify a widely adhered-to notion
of American individuality and newness: a progressive, unabashedly urban
vision of the nation, tinged with a cautious nostalgia for a pre-industrial past.
Chapter 4 ranges between the late 1920s and the Second World War, chart-
ing the ‘invention’ of documentary film as it commonly came to be known. The
idea of documentary as a specific form, and as a professional practice, came into
its own during this period. At the same time, ongoing reassessments of what it
meant to be American and part of an evolving national entity were paramount.
Significantly, this period also saw a concerted effort to establish a government-
funded documentary program under Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal
policies. Though this era is often seen as a time of increasing conformity and
assimilation to a narrow ideological consensus, this chapter takes into account
the incredible political and social diversity of the period – diversity amply
reflected in documentaries of the time.
Chapter 5 focuses on propaganda documentaries of the Second World War,
partly because they form a fascinating component of US documentary history,
when documentary took a dominant public role extending far beyond any it
had played before, partly because this explicit marriage of propaganda and
documentary speaks to elements of propaganda that haunt the documentaries
of other eras. The Second World War saw a severe straitening of notions of
American selfhood, not least in the forceful pronouncements that saturated the
in troduction 15
media. As the voices of soldiers in John Ford’s December 7th (1943) state, ‘we
are all alike . . . we are all Americans’. In addition to addressing issues of ideol-
ogy and representation, this chapter works to untangle the complicated web
of intense documentary production and distribution during the time, which
was spread among various government, corporate Hollywood and military
interests.
In Chapter 6, I investigate a key ‘revolution’ in US documentary produc-
tion, direct cinema. Direct cinema was not only a case of the form’s remedia-
tion, but brought with it a whole system of beliefs – variously referred to as a
‘philosophy’, ‘ideology’ or ‘set of rules’ – that privileged notions of documen-
tary spontaneity and immediacy. It also helped advance the idea of documen-
tary as a form of democratic access and democratic action, at times reinforcing
and at others critiquing a hegemonic national ideal through capturing the
diversity and contradictions of the American scene. This chapter carefully
examines key influences, practitioners and landmark texts of direct cinema,
charting the rise, fall and ongoing influences of its practices and beliefs.
Chapter 7 outlines postmodern influences in documentary, a meeting of
theory and praxis often characterized by self-reflexivity as well as formal and
semantic instability in nonfiction film. The postmodern era saw a shift away
from documentary certainty and immediacy, corresponding to a poststructur-
alist questioning of truth and the transparency of representation. Critics such
as Linda Williams have convincingly shown that postmodern documentary, by
insistently exposing its artifice while retaining key elements of its traditional
forms and uses, constitutes a break with convention. Arguably and somewhat
paradoxically, as this chapter shows, moves towards postmodern ambivalence
actually reinvigorated the form, leading to rich meditations on the ambiguities
of evidence, testimony and other kinds of documentation.
Finally, Chapter 8 looks at the idea of ‘documentary dispersion’, consid-
ering whether new markets, technologies and social challenges can be met
through documentary’s distinctive modes of address and filmmakers’ ongoing
efforts to engage with and influence the social imaginary. Given the ever-
broadening range of documentary production and consumption, this chapter
focuses more narrowly on a pressing issue taken up by recent documentary:
the representation of US wars, and in particular the Iraq War.
‘Cinematic identification is as fragile and unstable as identity itself’, Judith

Mayne asserts (1993: 27), and national identification might be seen as similarly
fragile, relying on interlinked networks of signs, affiliations and cultural rein-
forcements (such as cinema). Recently, US national identity has been caught
up in the varying pressures of globalization (interlinked global economies),
denationalization (erosion of the traditional nation-state under globalized con-
ditions), transnationalism (movements and flows within and between nations
that break down national fixities) and supranationalism (‘superstate’ affilia-

tions, such as the European Union). The last few decades also have seen a
resurgence of articulations of more local and regional affiliations: identities that
can impact upon and supersede the national. As these shifting negotiations at
local, national and global levels attest, and as this book hopes to show, engage-
ments between documentary and experiences of American identity testify to
a fluid range of formations and relations: both ‘documentary’ and ‘America’
might be seen as social and historical accretions rather than as fixed or natural
entities.
no t e s
1. See, for example, Barnouw (1983), Ellis and McLane (2005), Rotha (1952) and Barsam
(1992).
2. For further study see, for example, Nichols (1980), Fielding (1972), Hockings (1993),
Waldman and Walker (1999), Edgerton (2002), Zimmermann (1995a) and Brakhage
(1989).
3. The term ‘nation’ remains contested. Debunking direct links between ethnicity and
nationalism, for example, Valery Tishkov suggests that ‘all attempts to develop
terminological consensus around nation resulted in failure’ (2000: 627).
4. John Grierson’s anonymous review of Moana (1925) used ‘documentary’ as an adjective,
stating that the film had ‘documentary value’ (1979 [1926]: 25–6). Brian Winston traces
the term’s use in English to Edward S. Curtis, writing of ‘documentary work’ in 1914
(1988a: 277–9).
5. Nichols provides useful frameworks for what he calls the expository, observational,
interactive and reflexive ‘modes’ of documentary (1991: 32–75). He later recasts the
interactive as the ‘participatory’ mode and includes poetic and performative modes, or
‘voices’ (2001a: 99–137).
6. The notion of the index comes from the work of nineteenth-century theorist Charles
Sanders Peirce, who described different categories of signs. In Peirce’s formulation, signs
are classified into three main areas that indicate how they denote their object (or subject
matter): these are the icon (which denotes likeness or semblance, as in a painting), the
index (which bears a concrete, if often indirect, connection to its object) and the symbol
(an indirect or general sign, in need of further interpretation). In the context of cinema,
the second category, index, has been taken up to describe film’s relationship to reality,
which bears a special quality or direct connection to the objects it ‘captures’.
7. See, for example, Ryan (1979).
8. According to the Modern Language Association Bibliography, in 1990–1 there were sixty-
two major scholarly publications appearing on documentary film; by 2000–1 there were
295, and by 2006–7, 472.
9. Carroll adopts Monroe Beardsley’s terminology.
10. On the ‘social imaginary’ Kahana cites political philosopher Charles Taylor.
11. See Fraser (1992).
12. See, for example, Martinez (1993).
ch apter 1
Novelties, Spectacles and the

Documentary Impulse
Chicago was the first expression of American thought and unity; one
must start there. (Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams)
So where should a study of US documentary begin – with the first copyrighted

film? The five-second Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze was directed in
January 1894 by William Kennedy Laurie Dickson in Edison’s West Orange,
New Jersey, laboratory, appearing over a year before the Lumière Brothers’
cinématographe films.1 The Sneeze has been called the first ‘film of fact’ – that
is, the first motion picture record of a real event – and so might represent
the ‘very genesis of the documentary idea’ (Jacobs 1979: 2).2 For others, the
Edison films are the earliest ‘filmed recordings of actuality’ (Ellis and McLane
2005: 6). Still, most agree it would be overly simplistic to see these films as
prototypes for documentary, per se, due to varying ideas and histories of docu-
mentary film. Moreover, though labelled with the scientific-sounding prefix
‘kinetoscopic record’, The Sneeze could be closer to dramatic fiction than to
nonfiction: a neat bit of acting by an Edison employee, Fred Ott.
The cinema developed as a collusion of technologies – photography, per-
sistence of vision devices, projection – that were underwritten by legacies of
intersecting and often competing inventions, social impulses, commercial
imperatives, popular cultural phenomena and ways of seeing the world. Rather
than trace documentary film’s origins, then, I’d like to explore some contours
of pre- and early cinema that might characterize a documentary impulse – a
combination of enlightenment, engagement and spectacle that underlies the
production and apprehension of documentary realities.
For Bill Nichols, the documentary impulse ‘answers a need for evidence’,
for living proof and the potential to garner knowledge about worlds both
aligned to and extending beyond our own experience (1991: 211). Such an
impulse might be glimpsed in popular cultural phenomena that were parallel
to, and often intertwined with, nonfiction film’s emergence in the US, includ-
ing circus displays, dime museums and fairground attractions. This chapter
will chiefly focus on one of these phenomena poised on the transition from
pre- to early cinema, the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, an event
which incorporated an amalgam of the technological, commercial, psychical
and ideological currents that fed into early cinema and a popular taste for
nonfiction film. In particular, I want to turn towards the Exposition’s Midway
Plaisance, an entertainment zone that took shape during the summer of 1893,
several months before the appearance of Edison’s The Sneeze.
d ocu m e n t a r y a n d t h e f a ir g r ou n d
The Midway Plaisance was a mile-long strip of land that housed the most
popular attractions of the Chicago Exposition, a monumental spectacle staged
to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s ‘discovery’ of the New
World, which ran from 1 May to 9 October 1893.3 Over this period there were
nearly twenty-eight million admissions. Fairgoers came from across the con-
tinent, enduring twenty-nine hour journeys from Montreal, twenty-six hours
from New York, thirty hours from Boston, and three-and-a-half days from
San Francisco, all to take part in a monumental display of wealth, power and
all-American know-how.
The Chicago Exposition wasn’t merely a showcase for US innovation
and industry or just an expensively mounted public entertainment, it was
a conscious effort by government and business leaders to provide a rapidly
expanding, diverse and recently urbanized population with a sense of cultural
synthesis. It showed a collective desire, as Robert W. Rydell argues, to ‘define
social reality’ for Americans, to crystallize cultural and national consciousness,
just as the US was coming to terms with its newly acquired global status and
wanting to flaunt it (1984: 39). Essentially, the fair signified the passing of
empire from the ‘old’ European powers to the ‘New World’. The Exposition
didn’t invent the concept of a unified American culture, but it did go a long
way towards amalgamating and promoting an American cultural ideal within
a single, sprawling location on the shores of Lake Michigan. It might be seen,
then, as a celebration of the nation and of nationalism. But it was also, like any
public event on this scale, a more complex mixture of encounters, sensations
and ideas: far less ideologically unified and predictable than its organizers
might have intended.
The Exposition occupied the 686-acre Jackson Park site south of the city,
transformed by the renowned landscape designer Frederick Law Olmsted.
It included an array of vast neoclassical structures, collectively known as
the White City since all were painted brilliant white (for speedy com-
no v el t i es , s p e ct ac le s a nd the documen tary impulse 19
pletion as much as for aesthetic unity). Among the buildings were the
400,000-square-foot Agricultural Building, the Manufactures and Liberal
Arts Building (with eleven acres of exhibition space, the largest building in
the world), the Machinery Hall (full of deafening gas engines and turbines),
the Transportation Building (with a stunning ‘golden’ doorway by Dankmar
Adler and Louis Sullivan) and, lofted above them all, the gilded dome of
Richard Morris Hunt’s Administration Building, declared the ‘crown of the
exposition palaces’ (Bancroft 1894: 129).
For Montgomery Schuyler, the buildings and overall scheme of the
Exposition could be summed up by three words: unity, magnitude and illu-
sion. ‘In this country’, noted Schuyler, ‘mere bigness counts for more than
anywhere else’ (quoted in Badger 1979: 127). Boasting 65,000 different
exhibits, the Chicago Exposition was designed to surpass the scale and opu-
lence of the Paris Universal Exposition, staged four years earlier, and outdo
the educational exhibits of the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876.
The Chicago fair was to provide Americans with ‘a veritable encyclopedia of
civilization’, underlining the prominent position the US occupied in the ‘civi-
lized’ world (Rydell 2000). Still, whether the Agricultural Building’s 22,000-
pound monster cheese, a map of the US constructed entirely of pickles or the
California exhibit’s statue of a medieval knight made of prunes qualified as the
crowning glory of ‘civilization’ would, even then, have been debatable.
In spite of the fair’s idealized vision, controversies hung over the proceed-
ings. Significantly, many noted that the White City’s ‘whiteness’ went beyond
its painted facades: not a single African American had been appointed to the
fair’s governing commissions. This lack of recognition of African American
contributions to US culture led to the publication in 1893 of Ida B. Wells’s
protest pamphlet The Reason Why the Colored American is Not in the World’s
Columbian Exposition. Though it was finally agreed that a single fair day would
be set aside as ‘Colored People’s Day’, many viewed this as tokenism. Wells
boycotted, while Frederick Douglass – then in his late seventies – arrived to
launch a passionate speech against discrimination and the hypocrisy of the
fair’s organizers (Findling 1994: 28).
By the fair’s end, it was clear that skewed racial messages had prevailed.
One souvenir book declared: ‘perhaps one of the most striking lessons which
the Columbian Exposition taught was the fact that African slavery in America
had not, after all, been an unmixed evil, for of a truth, the advanced social con-
ditions of American Africans over that of their barbarous countrymen is most
encouraging and wonderful’ (quoted in Rydell 1984: 57). Racial stereotyping
at the Exposition echoed other commercial amusements, such as vaudeville
theaters and carnivals, providing heterogeneous white audiences with ‘a unify-
ing point of reference and visible and constant reminders of [their] privileged
status’ (Nasaw 1993: 47). As Anne Maxwell notes, the fair’s illusions of US
supremacy and imperial unity not only screened out the violence of the nation’s
past (the 1890 census had ascertained that over the previous forty years, half
the American Indian population had been wiped out), but also encouraged
people to ignore the most pressing social problems of the day (1999: 77).
Ultimately, the list of firsts that came out of the fair seems to define the
highs, lows and complex in-betweens that would come to define American
culture: George Ferris’s massive wheel, meant to rival the Paris Exposition’s
Eiffel Tower, was the first of its kind; the very concept of the amusement park
started here; Cracker Jacks, Cream of Wheat, carbonated soda, Juicy Fruit
gum and hamburgers all were introduced; fifty-nine-year-old Chicago domes-
tic worker Nancy Green appeared with her pancake mix as Aunt Jemima;
and the US Postal Service offered some of the first mass-marketed picture
postcards. Disposable amusements, fast food, commercialized stereotypes,
aspirational dreams – all were readily found at the Exposition.
If the White City constructed a monumental fantasy of imperial order and
national unity as a concrete (if stage-managed) reality, the Midway Plaisance
was the site where other realities could be consumed in diverse, disordered
and disruptive fashion. Geographically, the Midway occupied a marginal
space, projecting like a westward-pointing finger from the main fairgrounds.
Segregated at the edge of the White City, the Midway nonetheless became
integral to the financial viability of the Exposition as a whole. The reasons
for its immense popularity were at least twofold. First, the Midway, contrary
to the organizers’ original designs, became one of the fair’s main entrances
when a railway company dispute altered the plan for visitors to enter from the
great railway terminal and pass into the Court of Honor, where they would
face the uplifting grandeur of Hunt’s golden dome. Instead, half entered
through the Midway, where rather than the golden dome they confronted the
huge Ferris wheel, ‘the epitome of money-making entertainment’ (Badger
1979: 120). A second reason for the Midway’s success was that it housed
the kinds of exhibits and distractions that people demanded. A visit to the
Midway to ride the Ferris wheel became an obligatory part of the fairgoing
experience: reputedly nine out of every ten visitors paid fifty cents to ride the
wheel.
Crucial to the Midway’s unique heterogeneous appeal were its ethnologi-
cal displays, directly influenced by those featured at the 1889 Paris Universal
Exposition. There the French government had enlisted prominent figures
from the field of ethnology to create exhibits that transformed diverse peoples
from France’s colonial outposts in Africa and Asia into living displays that
fairgoers could study at length, or simply gawk at before moving on. In
Chicago, the planned Midway exhibits were initially placed under the auspi-
cious direction of Frederic Ward Putnam, professor of anthropology and head
of Harvard’s Peabody Museum. Putnam had ambitions for a ‘dignified and
Figure 1. Midway Plaisance with Ferris Wheel. Portfolio of photographs of the World’s Fair,
Household art series; no. 2. Chicago: Werner, 1893–4. Courtesy of the University of Illinois at
Chicago Library, Special Collections.
decorous’ educational zone that would provide visitors with a ‘street of all
nations’ (Badger 1979: 107). The Midway was to become a premiere ethnolog-
ical showcase that would, as in Paris, offer live displays of ‘primitive’ humanity
(Rydell 1984: 55–64; Brown 1994: 155). It would introduce fairgoers to human
exhibits that would be integrated into the universal, utopian aims of the fair as
a whole, affording visitors ‘the opportunity to measure the progress of human-
ity toward the ideal of civilization presented in the White City’ (Rydell 1984:
57). In such a vision of the ‘sliding scale of humanity’, as the influential ethnol-
ogist Augustus Pitt Rivers once argued, ‘the existing races, in their respective
stages of progression, may be taken as the bona fide representatives of the races
of antiquity’, providing ‘living illustrations’ of the ‘remote’ origins of modern
‘civilized’ man (quoted in Chapman 1981).
Putnam’s vision of the Midway was never realized. Fair organizers, lured by
the promise of financial gains, began to allow entrepreneurs to bid for enter-
tainment venues and food stalls along the linear route. Putnam was obliged to
give way to the twenty-three-year-old showman Sol Bloom, who took over as
the zone’s manager. Construction delays also plagued the Exposition – clearly
seen in the hulking, half-finished Ferris Wheel that greeted early fairgoers –
and continued well beyond the fair’s opening, leading many concessions to
struggle or close altogether. These problems pressed organizers into quickly
recouping investments through various moneymaking enterprises.
Thus the Midway became a tumultuous variety of consumable sights and
sensations, a combination of the ‘human zoo’ and the carnival: a ‘Dahomey
village’ (the Fon of Benin) opposite an ostrich farm, a Javanese Settlement
and German Village set across from South Sea Islanders and Turkish Village
exhibits, and (more or less jumbled together near the Midway’s center) the
Streets of Cairo, a Moorish Palace, Venice-Murano glass spinning, a model
of the Eiffel Tower, an Indian bazaar, a Viennese cafe, an ice railway ride and
finally the Ferris wheel, the commercial rival to the grand statues and domes
of the White City. After construction was complete, the Midway was the fair’s
most popular area, giving birth to the concept of the amusement park that
would soon sweep the country. David Nasaw emphasizes the segregationist
tendencies of the two fair zones: the contrast between the ‘districts’ – one ‘edi-
fying’ and the other ‘entertaining’ – was profound (1993: 47). Yet Reid Badger
wonders if the messy presence of the Midway contrasting the lofty aims of
the main Exposition might have engendered a kind of unexpected, dialectical
encounter. The White City was a grandiose model of unity and order, but the
tumult of the Midway showed up the White City’s false facades of steel and
plaster (1979: 120). Perhaps the elegant, stage-managed national fictions of
the White City were undermined, as much as reinforced, by the fascinating
realities along the Midway.
au the n t i c a t t r a c t i o n s
While the Chicago Exposition was just one of a range of public entertain-
ments available to urban audiences, it was clearly unique in variety and scale.
Fairgoers were given access to a myriad of unfamiliar worlds, captivated by
mechanical entertainments, exposed first-hand to cultural and ethnic differ-
ence. The Midway was a jumbled combination of educational aims and tawdry
distractions that brought together desires for gaining knowledge and engaging
with reality-based spectacles. In this broad sense the Midway, like a demand
for ‘bona fides’ in dime museums, provided not just public amusement or dis-
traction, but engaged what might be called a documentary impulse.
Strictly speaking, ‘documentary’ film refers to an established, though
always rather unstable, term for nonfiction cinema coined in the 1920s and
popularized in the 1930s. But the documentary idea, along with documen-
tary’s social functions, has long cut across different kinds of texts and media
occupying varying production and reception contexts. Hopefully without
obliterating important historical differences, I would echo Ellen Strain’s sug-
gestion that ‘cinema’s ability to deliver the illusion of direct experience was
not born with the invention of cinema, but was cultivated in other nineteenth-
century entertainment forms, ranging from the world’s fair exhibits to natural
history museum displays and furthered through the invention of precinematic
technologies’ (2003: 6). Elizabeth Cowie uses the term ‘spectacle of reality’
to describe an impulse that links different popular pursuits, ranging from the
circus to the European ‘grand tour’ to the actualities of early cinema. In this
sense, the spectacle of reality evokes ‘two distinct and apparently contradictory
desires’: desire for pleasurable entertainment and desire for knowledge (1999:
19). We experience in these spectacles ‘an entertaining of the eye through form
and light in showing, and an entertaining of the mind in the showing of some-
thing known either as familiar or in a new and spectacular way, as something
not yet known that thereby becomes known’ (27).
Tom Gunning has suggested that the early ‘cinema of attractions’ was
grounded in the fascinations of the fairground and the amusement park (1990:
56). Midway attractions, like documentary films, grounded their allure in con-
stantly referencing reality, engaging audiences as desiring as well as knowing
subjects. On the Midway, there was a peculiar juxtaposition of sensation and
knowledge-building through the consumption of reality-based displays, as
the problematic idealism of Putnam’s educational zone met, head on, with the
crowd-pleasing and at times scandalous sights commissioned by Sol Bloom.
Fairgoers could witness the Streets of Cairo, with its ‘hootchy-kootchy’ belly
dancer, alongside displays of South Sea islanders, the wonders of a Moorish
palace, or the architecture of a Bavarian village. To distinguish themselves
from competitors and lure the crowds, Midway entertainments often empha-
sized strangeness, but they still commonly drew on verifiable phenomena,
promoted as ‘bona fide’ or authentic. A few years later, the guide to the Buffalo
Pan-American Exposition of 1901 promised ‘dazzling, realistic’ displays
of ‘bona fide natives’ along its Midway (Official Catalogue 1901). Midway
fairgoers would have been immersed in a locale that persistently referenced
global travel, sightseeing and the otherness of worlds increasingly becoming
objects of knowledge and curiosity, yet perhaps never before seen. These
staged attractions were imbued with a sense of ‘direct experience’: like later
motion picture travelogues they constituted ‘the cheapest and most exhaustive
journey over the earth that was ever made’ (Reed 2000: xxvi).
Viewing unprecedented yet authenticated sights from a position of relative
mastery – a ‘god’s eye’ view of the world – spectators were able to discover,
individually and collectively, both who they were and who they were not.
Sampling the foods, smells, sensations and images of different ethnicities and
cultures, fairgoers could form a clearer sense of personal and collective affin-
ity with respect to the displays around them. As Strain suggests, forms of the
‘tourist gaze’ that emerged around this period offered means of testing the
fragile boundaries between the self and the cultural and racial ‘others’ that,
potentially, threatened (western) autonomy. Indeed in Chicago, racial and
cultural hierarchies were reinforced in explicit ways: the ‘World’s Congress of
Beauties’, for example, featured ‘40 ladies from 40 nations’, using the beauty
contest format to assert western beliefs in racial superiority (Strain 2003: 17,
55). Such exhibits ‘provided Americans with a shared set of myths about their
common origins and their present status in the race for supremacy among
western nations’ (Maxwell 1999: 94). Among the heterogeneous crowds in
Chicago were millions of recent immigrants, and many might not have had
a precise sense of what it meant to be ‘American’, nor would they have felt
closely attuned to growing US imperial ambitions. Yet they could link the
idealized vision of American selfhood – the White City – to the consumption
of the world and hierarchies of races and cultures on the Midway, asserting
identities as ‘modern’, ‘civilized’, ‘American’ and even ‘white’ subjects. The
Midway was a site not only for gleaning knowledge and entertainment, but for
building cohesion and a sense of belonging to a dominant version of the nation.
Though the Exposition strove for a persuasive ideological vision of America,
the tourist gaze on the Midway was not yet the well-oiled, largely one-sided
experience that, Strain argues, solidified in later versions of the travelogue and
package tour. Midway attractions would have both encouraged and at times
disrupted the gaze at otherness. Though the experience was essentially medi-
ated by the fair’s structure and organization, fairgoers walked through and in
a sense became part of the displays: the attractions were not paraded in front
of them. The displays of ‘native’ bodies would have provided visual and even
erotic interest, but there was always interactive potential. The Fon, Javanese or
South Sea Islanders were not just objects to be looked at, but also looked back.
They freely wandered the fairgrounds, reportedly with as much curiosity as
other spectators. Christopher Robert Reed has argued, for example, that the
African presence at the Exposition, typified by the much maligned Dahomey
(Fon) village, actually led to ‘multiple layers of ambiguities, paradoxes, and
dilemmas’ that have been clouded by subsequent interpretations of the event
(2000: xvii). The African presence was not wholly a one-sided exercise in
imperial power but led to unexpected links between peoples of diasporic back-
Figure 2. Javanese house builders. Portfolio of photographs of the World’s Fair, Household art
series; no. 2. Chicago: Werner, 1893–4. Courtesy of the University of Illinois at Chicago
Library, Special Collections.
grounds. For example, Reed argues, African Americans and people from the
African diaspora forged new friendships and relations that in many cases lasted
long beyond the closing of the fair. That said, the exhibits on the Midway were
hardly ideologically neutral, constituted as they were by commercial impera-
tives, racial and cultural stereotypes and the nationalist ideals of the White
City. The ‘human zoo’ could be grossly inhumane: Inuits exhibited at Chicago
had to wear heavy furs through the summer heat; Africans displayed in Buffalo
in 1901 succumbed to illness and death.
The documentary experience fostered on the Midway isn’t easily catego-
rized; it offered an alchemical mixture of verisimilitude, immediacy, other-
ness, education and spectacle. The Midway was a public space that permitted
audiences to see, learn about and (in a restricted manner) engage with forms
of life different from their own. This arrangement of fact-based sights might
suggest what Keith Beattie calls ‘documentary display’, forms of ‘sensational
knowledge’ that extend beyond the narrower confines of documentary as it was
later defined. Such displays can arouse pleasure in the spectator by combining
elements of performance, visual allure, illusions of liveness or immediacy and
the possibility of knowledge (2008: 19). Importantly, these spectacles of reality

persistently index the real: a tacit contract is established between producers
and consumers, anchored in a faith that the display is, at some level, authentic
and verifiable.
The Midway experience further asserted its authenticity through juxtapos-
ing different modes of apprehending reality. Midway attractions blurred lines
between artificial or virtual reality and ‘live’ witnessing, between the auto-
mated and the animated. Exhibits like the panorama of the Hawaiian volcano
Kilauea added to the smorgasbord of artificially reproduced real sights and
sensations. This exhibit showed a simulated eruption with flowing lava lit up
by more than 300 electric lights and was so realistic that one visitor remarked,
‘observers could easily imagine they had been transported to that interesting
but dreadful place’ (quoted in Brown 1994: 103). The human displays, rather
than undermine or give the lie to mechanical or virtual realities such as Kilauea
volcano, served to reinforce these reality effects. If we consider what Sergei
Eisenstein (influenced by the variety of compelling stage elements that fea-
tured in theater) called the ‘montage of attractions’ – a program of juxtaposing
a series of discrete elements that solicit audience attention – the Midway might
be seen as a kind of montage of authentic attractions. Here mechanical displays
and direct or immediate real sights complemented each other, giving rise to
perceptions of reality as consumable, spectacular and informational.
The montage of authentic attractions along the Midway thus might indicate
emerging ‘documentary’ modes of apprehending reality that mix an idea of
direct experience with technologized illusions of immediacy. There were yet
other harbingers of documentary’s coming technologies and functions. With
moving pictures about to be unleashed on the public, Chicago featured the
latest technologies for capturing life in motion.
the z o o p r a x o gr a p h i c a l ha l l
Though cinema, per se, did not quite make it to the Exposition, photography
was everywhere. In the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building alone, pho-
tography displayed as both science and art came together in dozens of exhibits.
Amateur photography too came into its own. George Eastman Company had
introduced the ‘Kodak #1’ camera in 1888: a basic, single-focus box camera
already loaded with a 100-exposure roll of film. Keen to capitalize on the
explosion in amateur photography that followed, the Kodak booth in the
Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building strove to be the most sophisticated at
the fair. Kodak also aggressively campaigned with the fair’s organizers for the
exclusive rights to rent and sell film cameras on the fairgrounds, even debut-
ing the ‘Kodak #4’, or ‘Kolumbus Kodak’, in honor of the event (West 2000:
21). Because it was accessible in scale but also offered views on to sights both
novel and spectacular, the Midway became, as Julie K. Brown suggests, the
landscape where ‘the photographer, especially the amateur photographer, was
most clearly and intensely at home’ (1994: 103). The invention of the ‘snap-
shot’ allowed the tumultuous, constantly moving global modernity crammed
onto the Midway to be framed as a ‘precise, bounded [. . .] instant in time’ –
captured and held as a souvenir (21).
As one devoted to transforming these discrete ‘instants in time’ into a
continuous stream of images that could reflect movement and time’s flow,
Eadweard Muybridge had set up an exhibit not far from the Ferris wheel,
between the Persian concession and the German village, rubbing shoulders
with the popular Streets of Cairo exhibit. Born near London and transplanted
to California, Muybridge was already well known as a chief architect behind a
process called chronophotography, a stop-motion photographic technique that
was a forerunner of modern cinema. Muybridge’s Zoopraxographical lecture
hall offered significant precursors of nonfiction motion pictures, and promoted
their educational and scientific potential.
Muybridge was sixty-three when he opened his Midway exhibit; over
twenty years earlier, he had begun work developing photographic processes
for the transcontinental railroad magnate Leland Stanford. With keen inter-
ests in science and ‘determined to unravel the mystery of motion’ (quoted in
Solnit 2003: 78), Stanford commissioned Muybridge in the spring of 1872 to
photograph his favorite racehorse, Occident. He was eager to resolve a dispute
about whether a running horse actually was capable of having all four legs off
the ground at one time. The dilemma of the running horse wasn’t quickly
resolved, and Muybridge had other issues: after notoriously killing his wife’s
lover in 1874, he spent several years on projects in Central America, returning
to Northern California in 1877 to photograph massive, multi-plate panoramic
views. Records are vague about exactly when Muybridge finally photographed
a horse with four legs off the ground, and he would not actually publish a
photograph of a horse in motion until 1877. None of the photographs from
this period remain, but a key turning point came with the first public demon-
stration of his techniques in June 1878. Having acquired improved lenses and
an electrical shutter device, Muybridge placed twelve cameras, each twenty-
one inches apart, to take twelve sequential views. Each camera was operated
by tripping a wire buried beneath the track (for horses and carriages) or thin
threads strung across it (for horses alone). The results were published as
popular cabinet cards – a series called The Horse in Motion – that still serve as
signature images for Muybridge, and chronophotography itself.4
Muybridge would forge a successful career improving his photographic
inventions, lecturing and presenting public demonstrations. His work helped
advance instantaneous photography – ‘stopping time’ – where motion could
Figure 3. Plate 188, ‘Dancing [Fancy] woman draped [Miss Larrigan]’ (1885–7). Eadweard
Muybridge, Animal Locomotion (1887). Courtesy of the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for
Visual Arts, Stanford University.
be captured without blurring, a project pioneered by inventors such as

Thomas Skaife. More generally, Muybridge contributed to visually docu-
menting the relationship of time to continuous motion. The latter task brought
him together with the physiologist Etienne-Jules Marey in Paris in late
1881. Afterwards, Marey developed a fusil photographique, or ‘photographic
gun’, based on a revolver photographique invented by the astronomer Pierre
Jules César Janssen. Muybridge would produce his own chronophotographic
sequences with the ‘gun’, releasing the definitive version of his motion studies
in 1887: Animal Locomotion: An Electrophotographic Investigation of Consecutive
Phases of Animal Movements, 1872–1885.
By the mid-1880s, Muybridge had shifted his focus towards human motion
studies. This work paralleled Marey’s physiological photography, but was
marked by Muybridge’s distinctive visual sense and, occasionally, sense of
humor (as in ‘Jumping; running straight high jump [Mrs Coleman]’ [1887],
where a serious, conservatively dressed woman suddenly leaps over a chair).
Working in Philadelphia with another follower of Marey, the painter Thomas
Eakins, Muybridge photographed varieties of humans in motion: wrestlers,
acrobats, women and men, both heavily dressed and fully undressed. He
even photographed himself in motion, nude, under the title ‘ex-athlete’. The
detached, highly clinical nature of these studies is observed by Rebecca Solnit:
‘Pretty Blanche Epler with thick fair hair down to her waist was an immeas-
urable distance away in her own thoughts, more a body than a person, not
as women are bodies in pornography but as people are bodies in anatomical
and medical texts. Unlike an actress, she was not emoting or expressing for
the camera; she offered it only the motions of her body’ (2003: 225). He also
collaborated with physicians to photograph people with various disabilities;
in Animal Locomotion he included studies such as ‘Arising from the Ground

[Miss Cox]’, which shows a very obese woman attempting to stand up. Some
have found these studies disturbing, though they are symptomatic of the ways
that photographic technology was appropriated into the medical and scientific
obsessions of the late-nineteenth century (Solnit 2003: 221). Such studies
strove to dissect, itemize and preserve human movements for future study;
problematically, though, they suggest hierarchical and Darwinian readings of
physiological differences.5
The moving picture machine that Muybridge brought to Chicago had been
in development since 1879, when he performed the first private demonstra-
tions of his zoopraxiscope (a neologism from Greek words meaning ‘animal
action viewing device’) – a technology that would help lay the foundations for
projected cinematography. The zoopraxiscope, very nearly, brought together
the core technical elements that made up modern movies: the illusion of
continuous motion, projection and photography. Muybridge combined his
experience of making instantaneous sequential photographs with two much
older technologies: the zoetrope or ‘magic wheel’ or ‘wheel of life’ – a device
that exploits the illusions of persistence of vision – and the magic lantern.
The zoetrope used a strip of paper depicting drawings of successive phases
of movement, placed within a spinning drum. Viewed through slits on the
drum’s side, the changing images provided an illusion of continuous motion. A
similar device called a Phenakistiscope, developed in the 1830s, used sequen-
tial images drawn on a spinning disc which, when viewed in a mirror through
the slotted sides, also produced continuous motion. The magic lantern, still
widely used for popular entertainments and lectures during Muybridge’s time,
is a projection device dating back through various permutations as far as the
fifteenth century. Using bright light, glass slides and lenses, it both projects
and amplifies images.6 Where the zoopraxiscope fell short of the soon to arrive
cinématographe, however, was surprisingly in the area in which Muybridge
specialized – photography. Due to technical limitations, photographs had to
be simulated through painted versions of the original chronophotographic
studies. These were then transferred to circular glass plates that rotated at a
steady pace in the zoopraxiscope and projected on to a screen.
In Chicago, Muybridge showed motion studies such as ‘Woman Dancing
[Miss Larrigan]’ with its eye-catching swirling skirts, and ‘Athlete; Running
Long Jump’. Each was projected for a few seconds, after which he would move
on to the next one. The crowd-pleasing effect of juxtaposing still and animated
images (watching the still image ‘come to life’) was central to the presenta-
tion, as it later would be at the Lumières’ demonstrations. At the front of the
concession patrons could purchase paper versions of Muybridge’s displays for
their own (non-projecting) zoetropes. Both the painted transcriptions and the
reliance on an invention that dated from years earlier meant that Muybridge’s
exhibit, based on fifteen years of lecture tours, might have appeared already
somewhat conventional. As Phillip Prodger notes, Muybridge produced very
little new work after the publication of Animal Locomotion in 1887 (2003:
7). Coupled with this, the ponderous content and tone, underscored by the
exhibit’s quasi-scientific name, the Zoopraxographical Hall, were not a hit
with fairgoers.
Compounding problems, the early weeks of the fair were plagued by poor
attendance due to construction delays. In the end, Muybridge’s illustrated
lectures couldn’t compete with the array of strange, arresting, erotic draws on
the Midway. The concession struggled in its first weeks, earning only $350,
and soon closed. Replacing Muybridge’s effort was more simulated authentic-
ity: the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and subsequent destruction of Pompeii.
More exciting, apparently, than animals and figures in motion, it ended up
with receipts totaling $19,505 (Brown 1994: 104). Still, Muybridge’s contribu-
tion to pre-cinema at the Chicago Exposition should not be dismissed. He not
only displayed a cinematic forerunner like the zoopraxiscope, but embodied
qualities of the motion picture showman and incorporated moving pictures
into his illustrated lectures (also precursors of documentary, as seen in the next
chapter). His decision to try his wares on the Midway, too, suggests an antici-
pation that motion pictures could be popular amusements affording ‘wonder
and astonishment’ to mass audiences (Gunning 2003: 255). In Muybridge’s
work, we glimpse a meeting of education, enlightenment and spectacle found
in later documentary forms. His experiments, according to Erik Barnouw,
‘foreshadowed a crucial aspect of documentary film: its ability to open our
eyes to worlds available to us but, for one reason or another, not perceived’
(1983: 3).
the mi s si n g ki n e t o sc o p e s
Muybridge’s stint at the fair was brief, though another ‘father’ of cinema,
Thomas Edison, was an omnipresent figure in Chicago. The proceedings were
effectively a pageant celebrating the wonders of electricity and, especially,
Edison’s fourteen-year-old invention, the light bulb. Paris had seen the first
use of electricity at a World’s Fair in 1889, but it didn’t approach the scale
of Chicago, where the extensive lighting displays would have been novel and
awe-inspiring (Badger 1979: 92). Edison, a consummate entrepreneur, strove
to make the most of the fair’s publicity. With the help of his secretary, Alfred
O. Tate, he contracted in 1892 to debut his revolutionary new motion picture
machine, the kinetoscope, at the Exposition.
According to most sources, the development of the kinetoscope was spurred
on when Edison and his employee, W. K. L. Dickson, attended a demonstra-
tion of Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope on 25 February 1888. Two days later,

Muybridge had a momentous meeting with Edison at his West Orange labora-
tory, which seems to have been the impetus behind Edison’s interest in devel-
oping ‘an instrument which does for the Eye what the phonograph does for
the Ear, which is the recording and reproduction of things in motion’ (quoted
in Robinson 1996: 23). Dickson was put in charge of producing the prototype:
a complex task greatly assisted by the invention of photographic celluloid
by John Carbutt in 1888 and the commercial production of celluloid film in
50-foot rolls by the Eastman Company in 1889. Together, these innovations
helped Dickson ultimately to produce seamless, continuous moving images.
As late as October 1892, the press was heralding the coming of Edison’s
groundbreaking machine, to be called the Kinetograph, a peep-show (not
projecting) machine combining moving images with synchronized sound. The
Phonogram announced: ‘At the opening of the Columbian Exposition there
will appear a dual instrument [. . .] The Edison Kinetograph is an instrument
intended to produce motion and sound simultaneously’ (quoted in Musser
1990a: 74). But in the end there were neither kinetographs nor kinetoscopes
at the Chicago fair. Edison’s laboratory failed to fill the order, though the pro-
motion was so widespread that many sources still claim that the kinetoscope
debuted at Chicago.7 The failure seems to have come down to several factors,
including Dickson suffering from a nervous breakdown and the serial drunk-
enness of the carpenter in charge of making kinetoscope cabinets. A leaflet for a
subsequent London exhibit explained: ‘Thousands of visitors to the [Chicago]
Fair inquired daily at the Edison exhibits concerning the new machine [. . .]
But great inventions take a long time, extended experiment, and large expense
before reaching practical and practicable perfection, and thus it was that the
Kinetoscope was not perfected in time for the great Fair’ (quoted in Robinson
1996: 40).
Taken together, the closure of the Zoopraxigraphical Hall and the case of
the missing kinetoscopes would suggest that Chicago 1893 was essentially a
catalogue of cinematic might-have-beens. But the fair everywhere bore traces
of the transition towards the ‘birth’ of the cinematic machine. Also on the
Midway was the electro-Photographic Tachyscope, devised by Otto Anschütz,
which ‘reproduced [. . .] the natural motion of objects and animals [. . .] with a
degree of truth and accuracy that is absolutely bewildering’ (quoted in Nasaw
1993: 68). Thomas Armat, who by 1895 would be demonstrating his own
Phantascope moving picture projector, later claimed that he had a moment
of revelation when viewing the Tachyscope along the Midway. Peering into
the machine, Armat watched an elephant walking in a ‘foreign setting’; he
later concluded, ‘the idea of bringing scenes from far and interesting countries
and projecting them on a screen before comfortably seated spectators, was an
exciting thought’ (Armat 1979 [1935]: 17). Watching fellow spectators paying
to consume these technologized displays of foreignness no doubt added to

Armat’s excitement.
With the kinetoscope’s debut in 1894, motion pictures – first as peep
shows, then as projected images – finally came to the US public. The earliest
films were concerned with showing off the wonders of a technology that could
produce moving images that were no longer just lifelike, but from life. Edison’s
early subjects were mainly taken from real or familiar phenomena, usually in
the form of re-enactments (The Barber Shop [1893]) and elaborate entertain-
ments (The Boxing Cats [Prof. Welton’s] [1894]). Still, it is the Lumière films,
not Edison’s, that are often cited as the first to exhibit a range of characteris-
tics later associated with documentary. Barnouw stresses that ‘it was Louis
Lumière who made the documentary film a reality’, and dismisses the ‘show
business’ direction that Edison’s films quickly took (1983: 5). Lumière actu-
alities such as Workers Leaving a Factory (1895) and Arrival of a Train at La
Ciotat (1895) drew their material from life without overt manipulation, and the
use of natural light and real locations (recalling the plein air tradition) endows
them with an impression of immediacy. They were also, importantly, projected
films watched collectively, as opposed to Edison’s individual peep shows. I
would suggest, however, that to confine these very early films to categories like
documentary or dramatic fiction is probably too restrictive; as Miriam Hansen
notes, early cinema’s diversity is difficult to pin down within the more precise
categories that came later (1994: 30). The film industry developed unpredict-
ably and rapidly, and technologies and public tastes kept changing.
Dickson, working for Edison, followed a path quite different to that of
the Lumières. He developed a studio setup that allowed for the regulation of
lighting, framing and action, and nicknamed it the ‘Black Maria’ because the
cramped space was like a police paddy wagon. Many Black Maria productions
recall the motion studies of Marey and Muybridge: The Sneeze, for example, is
a basic re-enactment of a physiological event. Here, however, instead of imper-
sonal studies of physiognomies in motion, the act of sneezing is addressed to
the viewer, showing off technology’s ability to capture a fleeting, seemingly
spontaneous event. Edison’s new invention, however, was all about generat-
ing business, and these early technical and physiological demonstrations soon
gave way to commercial entertainments such as Arab Knife Juggler (1894) and
Bucking Bronco (1894), where the foregrounding of entertainment over tech-
nology began the process of sublimating the viewer’s awareness of the appara-
tus delivering the spectacle.
Films made by Dickson and his assistant William Heise from 1893 onwards
– produced to advertise the kinetoscope – were largely drawn from carnivals,
circuses and the vaudeville stage. Still, in spite of their ‘show business’ lean-
ings, perhaps these films are no less documentary in nature than those of the
Lumières. To most viewers, Lumière actualities would appear natural, while
the Edison Company’s staged re-enactments, strange sights and eye-catching

performances might seem artificial. Yet we know that documentaries also still
commonly employ performative elements and staged re-enactments. The
next section attempts to draw out affinities between these early Edison films
and later documentary, problematizing the tendency to read the Black Maria
films as show-business fabrications versus actualities as proto-documentary
revelations.
blacksmith scene (1893) , buffalo dance (1894)

a nd mess call (1896)
Produced for the Edison Company, the films discussed in this section range
from an early demonstration in the Black Maria to the kind of on-location
actuality that would supplant Edison’s studio-based productions. Rather than
revisiting the ‘staged versus spontaneous’ and ‘fictional versus factual’ debates,
I’ll suggest that each indicates an approach to documenting reality that roughly
corresponds to the varying, often overlapping ‘modes’ of documentary as
defined by Bill Nichols. These modes range from observational and slight nar-
rative techniques, seen in Blacksmith Scene, to interactive performativity, as
suggested in Buffalo Dance, to the implied participatory stance of Mess Call. In
many ways these films suggest a meeting point between the authentic attrac-
tions consumed along the Midway and the documentary attractions that would
come later.
Blacksmith Scene is distinguished as the first motion picture publicly shown
on the kinetoscope, appearing at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences
on 9 May 1893. It depicts three Edison employees in the Black Maria, dramati-
cally lit against a black backdrop. The setup bestows an iconographic quality
on the image, recalling the sharply lit aesthetics of chronophotographic studies
(especially Muybridge’s ‘Blacksmiths, two models hammering on anvil’
[1887]). The camera reveals the men’s figures from head to toe, allowing an
unobstructed view of their motions. The set is schematic rather than scrupu-
lously realistic. An anvil lends compositional weight to the center of the frame
while providing a focal point for the action. The camera is stationary, but the
three men constantly move in their work, as if movement is itself on display.
The men’s actions and interactions all seem engineered to convey authenticity,
and in this respect the strategies of reconstructing reality, imposing a skeletal
story and maintaining the camera’s relative anonymity might be seen to antici-
pate aspects of later documentaries. The illusion is hardly seamless, however:
as the men pass around a bottle, there’s a palpable impression of hurrying that
shows up the film’s artifice (they need to complete the process within the film’s
50 feet (roughly 28 seconds) running time).
There are other anomalies on view: at one point one of the men slips out of
frame, though perhaps more jarring is the silhouetted figure that momentar-
ily appears, partially blocking the view. The appearance is a kind of accident,
interrupting the staged actions, imbuing the film with an unexpected immedi-
acy. Juxtaposing the planned and unplanned, the order and disorder of experi-
ence, Blacksmith Scene from the start displays the superiority of the cinematic
apparatus for the task of ‘capturing’ spontaneous action. Yet this cutting-edge
technology, Charles Musser suggests, is paradoxically used here ‘to prop up
and document a past that it is quickly making obsolete’, betraying a modern
nostalgia also visible in other films in the Edison catalogue (2004: 17).
This nostalgic impulse – indicating a nation perched between the advances
and sins of its past, and a hastening modernity – is even more evident in
Edison’s Buffalo Dance. Like other Black Maria films, such as the macho
display of Sandow (1894) or the racy skirt-lifting of Carmencita (1894), Buffalo
Dance offers a re-enactment of a popular stage performance. These acts pro-
vided entertaining subjects that were in most cases (considering technical
limitations) relatively straightforward and formally predictable. Buffalo Dance
was shot along with Sioux Ghost Dance, both featuring Sioux dancers made
famous through one of the era’s most popular attractions, Buffalo Bill Cody’s
Wild West Show. Buffalo Dance ‘stars’ three warriors: Last Horse, Parts His
Hair and Hair Coat.
Luring Buffalo Bill’s attractions into the Black Maria might have been an
attempt by Edison to redress the absent kinetoscopes at Chicago, while further
riding the coat-tails of the Exposition’s massive success. The Wild West Show
had been an ‘unofficial’ draw in Chicago in 1893, stationed (not entirely to
the fair organizers’ liking) outside the Exposition’s gates. Buffalo Dance was
also a form of advertising: in its companion, Sioux Ghost Dance, Buffalo Bill’s
signature ‘brand’ is clearly displayed in the lower right corner. Buffalo Dance’s
‘primitive’ display both recalls the live ethnological attractions of the day
and prefigures later ethnographic and expeditionary films, gesturing towards
US popular culture’s present and future consumption of ethnic and cultural
‘types’. Here, ethnological displays like those on the Midway are seen entering
the realms of the virtual: animation and automation seamlessly meld together.
Though staged, the film might be seen as carrying ‘documentary’ properties,
inscribing ‘live’ actions and foregrounding (as discussed in the Introduction)
physical depictions rather than nominal portrayals. As in Blacksmith Scene, the
actions in Buffalo Dance appear monitored: the dancers circle around a care-
fully delineated area on a raised platform. The dance is offered without detailed
context, as a sheer performance. As Strain notes of early ethnographic subjects
featuring dance, they appear ‘solely for the benefit of a US audience without
forcing that audience to recognize the movements, postures, and music as
components of a complex culture that may have been beyond audience under-
standing’ (2003: 108–9). Indeed, the Buffalo Dance was traditionally a ritual
for assuring a successful hunt. It had powerful implications for the Sioux,
being closely tied to collective memories of famine and to ongoing struggles
for the group’s survival. Performed for Dickson’s camera and destined for the
peep show, the dance suggests a kind of mise-en-abyme: a re-enactment for
the entertainment of post-frontier audiences, subsequently reconstructed for
virtual posterity (Griffiths 2002: 176). The ritual dance would be exhibited
alongside other authentic attractions in the kinetoscope, many lurid, and some
even illegal: cock fights, boxing matches and indiscreetly lifted skirts.
Taken alongside other Wild West Show films such as Annie Oakley (1894),
Buffalo Dance helped to market myths relating to the United States’ recent
frontier past. The consumption of the ‘real’ Native American complemented
the production of an imagined past, of a nation that had tamed a rugged wilder-
ness yet still was constituted by contact with it. These myths of the US fron-
tier were also highly exportable, potently contributing to the ‘Americanization
of the world’: Buffalo Dance, with other Buffalo Bill films, was distributed in
Europe as advance publicity for the Wild West Show’s upcoming engage-
ments there (Rydell and Kroes 2005).
Still, it is worth noting that the dancers perform to the camera rather than
simply being captured by it. The subjects of Buffalo Dance, arguably, aren’t
merely or simplistically trapped within the restrictive bounds of a burgeoning
US imperial imagination. One of the dancers looks directly, challengingly,
into the lens: a sustained and interactive stance. The look creates a palpable
tension between modern technology poised to capture and preserve the ‘bona
fide native’ and the subject’s determination to fix his look directly back at
that technology and at the spectral audience beyond it. Unlike the observa-
tional stance of Blacksmith Scene, the exhibitionism and performative nature
of Buffalo Dance address the audience directly from another space and time.
Highlighting this phenomenon, Tom Gunning and André Gaudreault coined
the term ‘cinema of attractions’ to refer to a dominant strain in early cinema
that shows something, that establishes contact with audiences. It ‘directly
solicits spectator attention, inciting visual curiosity, and supplying pleasure
through an exciting spectacle [. . .] that is of interest in itself’. As part of this
cinema of attractions, Buffalo Dance implies an ‘exhibitionist confrontation
rather than diegetic absorption’. Spectators are briefly drawn into the action
and confronted by the subjects’ looks, implicated in ongoing relations between
performers and those who gaze at them, rather than simply being – in Filippo
Marinetti’s cutting words – ‘stupid voyeurs’ (Gunning 1990: 57–9).
If traces of documentary might be glimpsed in the Black Maria films, the
illusion of immersion provided by actualities shot outside the bounds of the
studio and the theater would, later, become more closely associated with
the look and feel of documentary. Differing audience reactions to staged versus
more spontaneous filmed attractions were obvious almost from the start, at
the debut of Raff and Gammon’s vitascope projection machine, presented by
Thomas Armat on 23 April 1896 at Koster and Bial’s Music Hall in New York.
The screening signaled the shift in the US from the semi-private indiscretions
of the peep show to the jolts of the large screen and the noisy proximity of the
audience. Armat would recall that the most sensational reactions that night
were not to Edison films such as Umbrella Dance (1895), which featured short
skirts and a big umbrella, but to Birt Acres and R. W. Paul’s modest Rough Sea
at Dover (1895):
All the scenes shown, with one exception, were what might be called
vaudeville turns, or stage subjects. [. . .] The one exception to the stage
scenes [. . .] was of storm-tossed waves breaking over a pier on the beach
at Dover, England – a scene that was totally unlike anything an audience
had ever before seen in a theater. When it was thrown upon the screen
the house went wild. (quoted in Fielding 1972: 6)
Rough Sea at Dover’s appeal was not just realism and spectacle – all films on
show offered these to some degree – but its difference from studio productions
that replicated scenes from vaudeville or the fairground. The film seemed to
bridge more extreme displacements in space and time: in a darkened vaude-
ville house, this was a virtual voyage to a turbulent, dramatic seafront. The
waves hurtling towards the camera threatened to break the fourth wall, bring-
ing something and somewhere else into the here and now of the theater.
Mess Call, made for screen projection, was part of the Edison Company’s
shift away from the Black Maria towards an emphasis on cheaper, outdoor
shooting. Paid performers gave way to ‘found’ or ‘spontaneous’ subjects. By
May 1896, Edison had commissioned a portable camera, largely in anticipation
of competition from foreign and domestic markets, and Heise used it to record
local scenes around New York City (Musser 1990a: 118). Shot in July, Mess
Call’s 50 feet of celluloid captures a somewhat raucous slice of life, featuring
the state militia at their training camp in Peekskill, New York.
The film opens on a corner where a mess hall is doling out food. The sta-
tionary camera is positioned below shoulder height and captures the soldiers
passing by. Some pause to gape at the camera, and soon a small group gathers,
staring and laughing at the machine, seemingly delighted in being filmed. One
man stands out from the rest, waving from the rear ground and then loping
forward, taking exaggerated bites of food, pulling faces. Others stop to stare,
open mouthed, while one man acknowledges the camera’s phantom audience,
taking off his hat and bending down in greeting, a gesture that helps to empha-
size the camera’s/spectator’s low-angle (and perhaps by extension, vulnerable)
position amid the posturing soldiers. In such moments, we see that ‘the spec-
Figure 4. Mess Call (1896). Edison Company. Image capture, Kino International DVD.
tacle makers have themselves become a spectacle’, as Tom Gunning notes of

another film from the same period (2006: 40). By the end of Mess Call, a crowd
is edging towards the camera, before the film runs out. The final seconds are
subtly menacing: this is an all-male world of bravado that might excite, chal-
lenge and inspire spectators to react all at once.
Like Buffalo Dance, Mess Call suggests a cinema of attractions, ‘undertaken
with brio, establishing contact with the audience. [. . .] a cinema that displays
its visibility’ (Gunning 1990: 57). The film’s interactive and performative ele-
ments further underline how aware people already were of the camera, and
how difficult capturing offhand, unselfconscious moments – later hallmarks
of authenticity in documentary – would already have been. Beyond this overt
performativity, Mess Call encompasses certain features that the Black Maria
films commonly lack. There is no stage or safe distance between filmed sub-
jects and filmmakers; the action appears to unfold spontaneously, catalyzed
by the presence of the camera. This already suggests what Nichols calls the
‘participatory mode’, which ‘gives a sense of what it is like for the filmmaker to
be in a given situation and how that situation alters as a result’. The filmmaker
is positioned ‘on the scene’, perceived as a presence rather than an absence
(Nichols 2001a: 116). Though Russian Kino Pravda and French cinéma vérité
were a long way off, Mess Call is marked by similar elements of risk and play,
where, in Jane Gaines’s terms, ‘the frame is effectively taken by surprise’

(2007a: 14). The film’s lack of closure, cutting off mid-action, leaves unfin-
ished business and suddenly draws attention to the film’s status as a material,
celluloid reproduction. The audience is drawn into the production of reality,
imaginatively ‘filling in’ what extends beyond the film’s duration.
By reproducing recognizable facsimiles of everyday experience, actualities
like Mess Call testified to – and advertised – the power of the cinematic appa-
ratus to capture a precise index of reality. Lacking a clear message or intent,
Mess Call’s effects and meanings are more mobile than those of more control-
led scenarios. The force of the film’s attractions lies in its ability, through
spontaneous interaction and direct address, to conjure up ‘stolen moments’
and a ‘vivid sense of physical embodiment’ (Gunning 2009: 331). As a moment
distilled from the flow of time, Mess Call is both alluring and uncomfortable;
the animated looks of the film’s subjects stare back at the camera as if projected
straight from the past.
Yet we must also be careful about privileging these ‘stolen moments’ as
somehow ‘closer’ to reality as we consider the meanings, implications and uses
of documentary film. The illusion of direct experience that Mess Call and other
actualities produce lies in their ability to uncannily efface gaps in distance and
time; yet they are not necessarily closer to the ‘truth’ of human experience,
nor are they a more perfect indication of the range of documentary approaches
and styles that would appear later. Mess Call does, rather, form part of a
continuum of approaches to reproducing reality, ranging from re-enact-
ments and careful restagings to more spontaneous ‘uncontrolled’ and ‘direct’
approaches.
In terms of Heise’s choice of subject matter, Mess Call’s military setting
and challenging machismo also imply a shift, observed by Musser, from the
‘cosmopolitan vision’ of the kinetoscope to the arrival of projected cinema in
the US, which often ‘provoked or constructed national rivalries’. In the Black
Maria films we witness the multiple, somewhat chaotic varieties of the circus,
vaudeville and fairground, where ‘people of all cultures and races appeared on
the same vaudeville stage, enjoying the same basic forms of compensation and
attention’ (Musser 2004: 26). Though the kinetoscope films were hardly inno-
cent – with their erotic, violent themes and gender and ethnic stereotyping
– Raff and Gammon’s vitascope debut (mentioned above) noticeably and,
Musser argues, quite consciously aimed to narrow the field of vision. More
palpably ‘American’ in its emphasis on national and patriotic themes, the film
program featured ‘all [. . .] white, American performers’ (Musser 2004: 26).
The Monroe Doctrine (1896), two films down the program from Rough Sea at
Dover, featured Uncle Sam protecting ‘his’ South American territory from
European interference. The film’s huge success (Musser notes, ‘applause and
cheers rang through the house’ [27]) was prescient, signaling two years before
the Spanish-American War the potent patriotic sentiments that the medium
of cinema could mobilize. Film exhibition was already skillfully combining
mass entertainment, attractions specifically coded as ‘American’ and jingoistic,
nationalistic spectacles.
By late 1897, actualities had become so prominent that Edison and other
studios were devoting the majority of their production time to them. With
their dynamic images of travel, railways, boats at sea, famous monuments and
cityscapes, actualities transformed the far away and the everyday into compact
and seemingly direct experiences of the world. The far flung corners of the
globe, distilled into images projected on the wall, were suddenly, tantalizingly,
within reach.
As the next chapter outlines, actualities that featured travel and tourist
views were foundational to the evolution of nonfiction film. John Grierson
once referred to travel films as the groundwork of documentary, stating: ‘I
always think of documentary as having certain fundamental chapters. The
first chapter is, of course, the travelogue, that is, the discovery that the camera
can go about – it’s peripatetic’ (quoted in Sussex 1975: 206). Travel films were
capable not only of reproducing and disseminating real sights, they could
produce new perceptions of reality, providing a cinematic experience that par-
alleled modern modes of physical mobility and the expansion of global tourism.
These virtual voyages were the inheritors of the documentary impulse found
at locales such as the Midway; the grand tour afforded the intense pleasures
of contact with the world’s otherness, along with the satisfactions of knowing
and mastering it.
no t e s
1. The cinématographe debuted in Paris in March 1895, and was first demonstrated in the US
in June 1896.
2. Dickson’s early camera tests (Monkeyshines 1 and 2, c.1889) or Men Boxing (1891) could fall
under this category but were not made for the kinetoscope in its final form. Louis Le
Prince’s Roundhay Garden Scene (1888) also has been cited as the ‘first’ motion picture.
3. The Exposition missed the anniversary by a year due to Congress’s late authorization of a
host city. Sources include Findling (1994: 12–35), Rydell (1984: 38–71; 2000), Badger
(1979: 43–112), Brown (1994), Bolotin and Laing (2002) and Schulman (1996).
4. For a more detailed account of this period see Prodger (2003: 141–52).
5. Muybridge’s ‘scientific’ images weren’t value free, as Linda Williams (1981) argues of his
use of feminine and masculine props.
6. See Robinson (1996: 1–12), Solnit (2003: 200–3) and Musser (1990a: 15–38).
7. See, for example, Denzin (1995: 16), Applebaum (1980: 47) and Larson (2004: 247).
ch apter 2
Virtual Travels and the Tourist

Gaze
The rise of motion pictures was closely tied to changing concepts and modes
of travel. After the mid-nineteenth century, tourism saw unprecedented
growth, and with it the distant corners of the world seemed to creep closer to
established metropolitan centers. Tourism became such a fixture of modern
life that, John Urry suggests, a ‘tourist gaze’ emerged as a ‘socially organised
and systematised’ mass consumer phenomenon and dominant form of modern
perception (1990: 1). For Ellen Strain, the tourist gaze was, and is, ‘mobile,
portable, and even culturally promiscuous’: the gaze itself traveled, and was
transported into other media that themselves referenced acts of traveling. The
mobility and portability of the tourist gaze could therefore extend from actual
tourism to perusing issues of National Geographic, or to the armchair tourism
of watching a film travelogue (2003: 2).
As the tourist gaze took hold and solidified, people arguably began inter-
acting more intimately with images of the world than with the world itself.
Motion picture technology – like tourism, a growing leisure pursuit – kept
pace with modern travel developments, mirroring and often exploiting them.
The tourist and image-making industries were mutually dependent. Tom
Gunning suggests that the production of images was essential to selling
demands for travel: ‘One wanted to travel partly because one had already seen
images of distant places’, while images of these places were often ‘the end
products of the journey, the proof one had been there’ (2006: 28).
In cinema’s early years, travel films became central to the roster of actu-
alities produced at studios such as the Edison Company. Edison employee
James White embarked on extensive filming tours in 1897 and 1898, taking
in sights throughout the American West, Mexico and the Far East, bringing
back actualities such as Hong Kong Wharf Scene (1898) and Theatre Road,
Yokahama (1898). This period, often said to mark the end of cinema’s ‘novelty
period’, saw the rise of travel views alongside other nonfiction actualities and
v irt ual t ra ve l s an d th e tourist gaze 41
ethnographic-themed material. Like popular panoramas, stereograph views

and picture postcards, travel films carried with them a fetishistic and sou-
venir appeal – crucially distinguished by their astonishing ability to display
movement. These were not static views, but animated ‘postcards in motion’
(Strain 2003: 111).1 Film was a new medium for the consumption of foreign
views, complementing and even upstaging entertainments such as Wild
West shows and anthropological exhibits that fascinated viewers at World’s
Fairs.
Early travel films distributed in the US often emphasized not just an ability
to show life in motion, but illusions of the cinemagoer’s own mobility, altering
the relationship between ordinary Americans’ experiences of the world and
the spaces and places they might never have hoped to encounter first-hand.
As David Nasaw notes, travel films were designed to keep up the ‘novelty’ of
the cinema product, providing cinemagoers with access to new views of varied
places like Cairo, the Eiffel Tower, Jerusalem, Niagara Falls, India or Japan.
The material existence of these sights was confirmed through technical accu-
racy and realism: scale and image quality allowed for an unprecedented degree
of illusory immersion into the scene. Indeed, ‘sharp and clear’ was a common
phrase advertising travel films in distributor catalogues (Nasaw 1993: 149).
Travel films could draw clearer lines between mobility and its opposite,
stasis, between ‘the haves and have nots, the mobile and the static, the tour-
ists and the toured’ (Strain 2003: 123); they contributed to the shoring up of
emerging American, western and imperial identities. The possession of the
world through images of ‘native’ displays, foreign sights and exotic views
encouraged the vicarious appropriation of space, placing the American specta-
tor both at the center and within arm’s reach of the world. By the end of the
nineteenth century, the US was a highly industrialized, technologized nation,
with growing imperial aspirations. The sheer scale of the events that took place
over an eighteen-month period between 1898 and 1899 – when the US govern-
ment took possession of Hawai‘i, the eastern islands of Samoa, Wake Island,
Guam, the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Cuba (as an occupied country and
protectorate) – testifies to a nation looking to ‘take its rightful place among the
great World-Powers, and assume the unselfish obligations and responsibilities
demanded by the enlightened civilizations of the age’ (Procter 1972 [1898]:
21). Cinema would become a key mass medium (with print, advertising and
– after the 1920s – radio) for spurring on imperialist and mass tourist drives,
and the US would become the powerhouse of international film production.
As Giuliana Bruno suggests, the tourist gaze ‘was not always a mere expression
of curiosity, for it was also complicit with the aggressive desire of “discovery” ’
(2002: 77). This imaginative ‘taking possession’ of sites and their inhabit-
ants often went hand in hand with the tourist gaze of the film spectator. As
commercial amusements, they also gave currency to forms of commodified
ethnocentrism, ‘making faraway cultures into commodities that could be

enjoyed for the price of admission’ (Rabinovitz 1991: 85).
vi r t u al m o b i l i t i e s
The cinema experience might be described as a form of virtual mobility. For
Anne Friedberg, film was key to the emergence of the ‘mobilized virtual gaze’:
a manner of seeing – and consuming – the world, and a hallmark of modern life
that has evolved over the pre-cinematic, cinematic, televisual and Internet eras.
This gaze is ‘virtual’ rather than ‘actual’ because it is not a form of direct per-
ception but posits a ‘phenomenal body’ where perception is mediated through
modes of representation (1993: 143). As outlined in the previous chapter,
World’s Fairs expanded ‘the regimes of the wandering eye’; as Gunning sug-
gests, they were ‘expert tutors in the delights (and possible perils) of this new
mobile vision’ (Gunning 2002). Friedberg’s approach stresses important links
between these mobile acts of looking, commodity fetishism and the emergence
of cinema, arguing that the ‘newly conjoined mobilized and virtual gaze of the
cinema answered the desire [. . .] for temporal and spatial mobility’. In this
sense, the film experience goes hand in hand with ‘the pleasures of escaping
[. . .] physically bound subjectivity’, and allows, at the same time, other forms
of escape: temporary transcendence not just of physical bounds but of certain
social and cultural restrictions and expectations (Friedberg 1995: 65).
Because it developed out of an apparatus that combined the mobile and the
virtual, cinema spectatorship changed ‘concepts of the present and the real’ in
unprecedented ways (Friedberg 1993: 2–3). In other words ‘over there’ and
‘then’ is experienced as ‘here’ and ‘now’, a disruption of established spatial
and temporal relations. The illusion of direct experience can engage with an
exciting yet self-contained sense of immediacy. Virtual travelers are safely
ensconced in the theater, at a distance from the foreign scene, yet all the
while immersed in its vibrant textures and interesting landscapes. This is a
kind of ‘environmental bubble’ that ‘imposes spatial divisions while enabling
vision’ (Strain 2003: 34). As the New York Times declared after the premiere
of Nanook of the North, the film’s success lay precisely in the ways it trans-
ported ‘life itself’ from the frozen Hudson Bay in Northern Canada directly
into the comfortable, well-heated environs of New York’s Capitol Theatre
(‘The Screen’ 1922: 16). In this sense new, imaginative relations to the world
are forged in virtual space. The experience of travel images becomes a way of
coming to terms with and ‘possessing’ the world’s scale and diversity, perhaps
even providing a virtual substitute for the instabilities of world experience
itself (Gunning 2006: 27).
It was clear almost from the start that cinema could provide not just a
medium of mimesis but of movement, furnishing spectators with new, pre-

viously unimagined forms of mobility. For the poet Vachel Lindsay, the
cinematic apparatus could develop a mobilized viewpoint that was the tech-
nological equivalent of modern experience. Silent cinema’s ability to capture
the sensation of travel made it a new kind of ‘noiseless electric vehicle, where
you are looking out of the windows, going down the smooth boulevard of
Wonderland’ (quoted in Williams 2009: 348). Cinema, then, might simply
be characterized as a ‘machine for travel’ (Ruoff 2006: 1), a concept embod-
ied in the popular ‘phantom ride’. By 1896–7, films were being contrived
to enhance the immobile viewer’s impressions of being a body in motion,
mimicking increasingly fast modes of transportation. This can be seen in the
Lumières’ Arrival by Train in Perrache (1896) and Biograph’s Through the
Haverstraw Tunnel (1897), where cameras have been anchored on moving
trains. Haverstraw Tunnel shows the front-mounted camera entering and then
consumed by the tunnel (the very image itself dramatically swallowed by dark-
ness), and proved so popular it was copied many times over. As the New York
Mail and Express exclaimed of the phantom ride: ‘one holds his breath instinc-
tively as he is swept along in the rush of the phantom cars. His attention is held
almost with the vise of fate’ (quoted in Kirby 1997: 62).2
Starting in 1904–5, George C. Hale’s touring cars, or ‘Hale’s Tours’,
extended the phantom ride tradition and were hugely successful at amuse-
ment parks such as Riverview Park in Chicago, Luna Parks in Cleveland and
Pittsburgh, and New York’s Coney Island (Fielding 1983: 124). Hale’s Tours
were possibly based on the idea of the Cinéorama, a 360-degree cinematic
ride – though never fully workable – of a balloon trip that featured at the
Paris Exposition in 1900. Here, they simulated a moving train car, complete
with swaying, vibrations and train whistles forming a sound accompaniment
to projected scenes of natural landscapes and cityscapes.3 Some operators of
the Tours included scenes of the San Francisco earthquake and from The
Great Train Robbery (1903) – the latter of which also drew on the phantom
ride with its train-mounted shots and projected moving scenery.4 For Lauren
Rabinovitz, Hale’s Tours anticipated travel ride films – like Cinerama in the
early 1950s and IMAX – that ‘foreground the bodily pleasures of cinematic
experience’ through a careful coordination of ‘the spectator’s physical and
cognitive sensations’ (2006: 43). In so doing, they remind us of the crucial role
that bodily senses, other than vision, play in apprehending and consuming
cinema as virtual reality.
Along with phenomena such as the phantom ride, the improvement of
panning camera movement around the turn of the century produced pano-
ramic views that could place spectators in the midst of a highly realistic, virtual
space. Camera movement, Strain observes, could trace out a complete, circular
panorama of a locale, or more subtly imitate the movements of individuals
moving their heads or eyes to look left or right, up or down, surveying a

given scene (2003: 117–18). Such effects, from phantom rides and mounted
traveling shots to panning and scanning, offered the illusion of the ‘spectator
put into motion’. As Strain elaborates: ‘Instead of being placed in a position of
stasis gazing out at a foreign world bustling with motion, the moviegoer was
mobilized and transported across a globe whose minute motions are rendered
insignificant in comparison to the limitless mobility of the armchair trave-
ler’ (2003: 119–20). In this sense, the cinema of travel and mobility began to
perfect modes of illusory mastery over motion picture technology as well as
over the world itself.
As cinema moved into the twentieth century, travel subjects remained
popular draws. This was especially true of the railroad subgenre, which
included phantom rides and scenery shot from railway cars. The latter became
a reliable product for companies like Selig Polyscope, whose films Panorama
of Cog Railway (1902) and The California Limited of the Santa Fe Route (1903)
were subsidized by the railway industry and used to promote western states
as tourist attractions (Musser 1990a: 334–5). Such was the popularity of the
travel genre that in 1903, fully half of Vitagraph’s ‘catalogue of headline attrac-
tions’ were films featuring travel subjects (Musser 1990b: 123).
While travel themes and imagery remained reliable draws, by 1903 to 1905
cinematic ‘attractions’ and actualities were moving ‘underground’ (Gunning
1990: 57). The influence of imports from Europe (such as the ‘trick films’
of Georges Méliès), along with the rise of American directors like Edwin S.
Porter, heralded enormous changes in movie production. The year 1903 wit-
nessed a resounding move towards films that told stories. Porter, working for
the Edison Company, helped to pioneer complex, multiple-shot films based
on familiar American stories and themes, such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1903),
which comprised fourteen separate shots edited together. As David Robinson
notes, the coming of the story film ‘transformed motion pictures from yes-
terday’s faded novelty to the nation’s universal pastime’ (1996: 89). Porter’s
huge success, The Great Train Robbery (1903), skillfully brought mainly static,
single-shot scenes together to construct a gripping fictional narrative, but
also demonstrates the ongoing resilience of the travel genre, the railroad sub-
genre, and attractions addressed to the audience, which are synthesized into
the robbery plot. Indeed the ‘decline’ of actualities and attractions after 1903
might be attributed to changes in formal approaches to filmmaking and exhibi-
tion rather than to diminishing tastes for reality-based subjects.
As The Great Train Robbery announced, nonfiction subjects largely were
subsumed to storytelling after about 1903, but strong formal and imaginative
connections between cinema and travel would endure through the 1900s and
1910s, in many ways problematizing easy distinctions between authentic or
‘real’ and imaginary cinema travels. The railway subgenre showed particular
resilience, while imported films – such as The Automobile Chase (1905) and
An Impossible Voyage (1904), both by Méliès – highlighted sensations of fast
transport in other vehicles: here the motorcar and the rocket. Like The Great
Train Robbery, Porter’s A Romance of the Rail (1903) is a key example of the
emerging nonfiction/fiction travel hybrid, intercutting images from a moving
train with fictionalized scenes of a couple watching the scenery moving by as
their romance develops. The technique of combining the railway subgenre
with fiction persisted in Biograph’s Hold-up of the Rocky Mountain Express
(1906, with the Catskills standing in for the Rockies). Here what is primarily a
‘travel programme of views’ shot from the front of and inside a train skillfully
incorporates a train robbery narrative (Musser 1990b: 131).
Musser notes that nonfiction in such films was becoming ‘reoriented’
around the emerging story film (1990a: 351), a move that began to revise the
purpose, comprehension and reception of reality-based images themselves.
Yet, as suggested below, there was always a degree of two-way traffic in this
process, with fiction also ‘reoriented’ around presumptions of nonfiction,
ranging from the common practice of ‘fakes’ and re-enactments in nonfiction
shorts supporting the Spanish-American War (1898) to the later, more fully-
fledged ‘storytelling documentaries’ of Edward S. Curtis (In the Land of the
Head-hunters, 1914) and Robert Flaherty.
As cinema moved into its second decade, the theatrical screen was competi-
tive, constantly evolving and highly commercialized. Magic, trickery and the
world of fantasy had largely gained the upper hand over a film world drawn
from reality, and longer multiple-shot films that relied on compositional and
narrative continuities gained favor. During the nickelodeon era (roughly
1905 to 1914), mainstream film exhibition to a great degree – though by no
means entirely – shifted away from amusement parks, converted shops and
the vaudeville circuit. Cinema now had its own purpose-built facilities that
targeted audiences interested in seeing films on their own, and not as part of
mixed entertainment programs. Film viewing had evolved into a specialized
entertainment. But cinema reflecting the documentary impulse was by no
means dead and continued to travel, both embedded in nickelodeon entertain-
ments and circulating beyond them.
‘ t o p o s s e s s t h e w o r l d ’ : l e c t u r es, sc en ic s a n d
tr a v e l o gue s
One of these ‘documentary’ entertainments was the illustrated lecture, a form
of touring performance that might be seen as a paradigm for later documentary
approaches in film – particularly those that incorporate on-screen filmmak-
ers/presenters, instructive intertitles or voiceover narration (Musser 1990a:
39). Lecturers were serious entertainers, presenting their topical themes and
global scenes with a view to individual and social enlightenment. Travel mate-
rial was the lecturer’s mainstay: indeed Musser stresses important historical
continuities between the lecture format, travel and the documentary impulse,
contending that ‘the travelogue has undoubtedly been the dominant form of
nonfiction, documentary-like programming since photographic images were
incorporated into illustrated lectures in the 1850s’ (2006: 358).
Early lecturers were slideshow presenters, first using drawn or painted
slides but increasingly incorporating photography and, later, moving images.
After 1860, presentations drew on the stereopticon, a magic lantern device with
complex editing abilities. The stereopticon allowed for quick shifts between
slides, superimpositions and ‘dissolving views’ – all prefiguring cinematic
cutting. In fact many showmen and audiences, when first exposed to projected
films, viewed them essentially as more complex versions of the mechanical
lantern (Robinson 1996: 70).5 Many lecturers used hand-tinted photographic
slides which provided a heightened realism, a practice that continued even
after the invention of motion pictures, as some presenters preferred the magic
lantern’s familiarity and reliability (Musser 1990a: 221).
Along with current events and moral preachments, travel was a common
topic. Speakers such as Henry Northrop, Alexander Black, Lyman H. Howe,
John L. Stoddard (who retired in 1897) and Stoddard’s chief successor, E.
Burton Holmes, were lecture ‘stars’ who attained widespread success by
documenting journeys to far away places. After about 1902, Holmes began
to refer to his presentations as ‘travelogues’, popularizing the term. By 1897,
Holmes and Howe were working short films into lectures, and the following
year Oscar Depue, Holmes’s lantern operator (who also worked with Howe),
was gathering film material in Arizona’s Grand Canyon and the Hawaiian
Islands that would be integrated as ‘motion picture interludes’ into Holmes’s
lantern-slide presentations. These were not just travel lectures but ‘refined
educational entertainment’ and ‘sophisticated documentary presentations’
(Krows 1936: 170; Musser 1990a: 223). Lectures offered ‘highbrow’ alterna-
tives to the hubbub of the mass cinema industry – reflected in lecturers’ fairly
steep ticket prices. Lecturers such as Howe even reserved presentations for
Sundays rather than Saturdays, to avoid associations with ‘sinful, shameless’
vaudeville and music hall entertainments (Krows 1936: 170). Eileen Bowser
describes how lecture appearances coincided with demands for educational,
morally uplifting topics in popular entertainments:
In 1910 travel lecturer Burton Holmes could draw a crowd of ‘fashion-

able people’ to Carnegie Hall at prices of $2 and $2.50 ($1 in the gallery)
[. . .]. A nickelodeon exhibitor complained because Holmes was showing
the very same pictures that he, the exhibitor, had shown earlier at five
cents, yet the nickelodeon exhibitor could not get the exchange to stock
the scenic pictures any more. (1990: 44)
Lecturers like Lyman Howe advertised their work as entertainments of ‘merit,

refinement, amusement, and educational value’ (quoted in Griffiths 2002:
207), yet these elevated pronouncements gilded what were often more populist
sentiments. Illustrated lectures played their part in reinforcing links between
Americanization, imperial acquisition and a well-established missionary zeal
for ‘civilizing’ the uncivilized. Holmes’s material, for instance, included
ideologically slanted reports such as ‘The Hawaiian Islands’ (1898–9), a pro-
expansionist account of the annexation of Hawai‘i, and ‘Manila’ (1899–1900),
which lent support to the controversial US invasion of the Philippines (an
occupation widely represented as an imperial ‘civilizing mission’) (Rafael
2000: 55).6 To these he added ethnographic and ‘primitive’ subjects such as
‘Moki Land (Hopi Land)’ (1899–1900), a presentation on the Hopi Indians
(formerly Moki or Moqui) of the Southwestern Pueblo. Working for Holmes,
Oscar Depue documented the Snake Dance at Walpi as early as 1898–9 when
he visited Arizona. Depue didn’t just ‘take’ but disseminated motion pic-
tures as well, presenting one of the first film shows in the area in 1900 (Rowe
2002). Holmes’s lecture brochure that year referred to the Snake Dance as
‘a spectacle unique in its impressive savagery’ (quoted in Griffiths 2002:
176).
The lecturer’s narration normally stressed the authority of the traveler-
adventurer’s eyewitnessed perspective. As Holmes famously stated, ‘to travel
is to possess the world’. For his presentation on Japan, he noted: ‘The audience
is taken to the heart of the Real Japan, far beyond the reach of foreign innova-
tions. The experiences of three Americans on a tramp of over three hundred
miles through the interior provinces, are vividly described and illustrated’
(quoted in Musser 1990a: 43). Such an approach helped to ground images of
distant places in a first-person (and ‘American’) point of view: viewers could
identify with the western traveler/presenter while experiencing the vicarious
pleasures of travel. Along with authoritative ‘I was there’ narration spoken
from the podium and stills taken from Holmes’s point of view, film clips fea-
tured point-of-view traveling shots, mounted on the front of a train or shot
from a window – techniques still used in the first-person or ‘celebrity’ trav-
elogue on PBS or the Discovery Channel.7
First-person visuals were only part of the show: Howe for example added
mechanical sound effects to the travel experience. Howe’s ‘Lifeorama’ film
presentations included the sounds of clanging swords, blaring trumpets,
railway noises and ‘natives [. . .] heard chattering in their jargon’ (quoted
in Griffiths 2002: 222–3). As Musser sees it, these shows constructed a
‘privileged’ perspective in the system of visuals, sound and narration that
Figure 5. Flyer for Lyman H. Howe’s ‘22nd Semi-Annual Tour’ (1906).

suppressed obvious technological and human mediation while enhancing

identification with, and immersion into, the traveler’s experience – a ‘touristic
positioning’, in Strain’s terms (Musser 1990b: 127; Strain 2003: 114). The
travel lecturer thus served as a kind of diegetic and centering force, suturing
together essentially disparate images and sounds.
Film travelogues were close cousins to the illustrated travel lecture: rooted in
actualities, they expanded, unevenly, to incorporate multiple shots, structured
editing and expository intertitles (introduced in film during 1902–3) which
served dramatic, interpretive and scene-setting functions similar to those of
the lecturer. One branch of the travelogue – multiple-shot films known as
‘scenics’ – were used both as inserts in travel lectures and to pad out programs
at nickelodeons. Many of these shorts were imports to the US, coming from
Pathé Frères, for example, or Gaumont, the latter being something of a spe-
cialist in color-tinted scenics. Cinemagoers could journey through the Alps by
train with O’er Crag and Torrent (1910), visit the new US possession Hawai‘i
in Pineapple Industry (1910) or witness exotic wildlife through In the Land of
Monkeys and Snakes (1910). These kinds of films, lasting three to six minutes,
would soon face rapid changes in the commercial landscape with the coming
of multiple-reel production and distribution.
In 1911, Milano’s Dante’s Inferno appeared in the US, an epic of five reels
(over sixty minutes). Longer format nonfictions were soon finding a niche
in the market; indeed the US was on the verge of a ‘boom in expedition and
nature films’ exhibited in longer formats (Altman 2006: 74). In May 1912, the
New York Times’ ‘This Week’s Playbills’ section featured several multiple-reel
adventure and travel films, including Paul J. Rainey’s African Hunt (1912),
running at five reels, and Captain Frank E. Kleinschmidt’s six-reel The
Alaska-Siberian Expedition (1912). A popular draw at Maxine Elliot’s Theatre,
Kleinschmidt’s film gave New Yorkers an up-close view of ‘Eskimo life and
customs’, the ‘roping of a polar bear cub’ and ‘a walrus hunt close at hand’.
Further uptown, Paul J. Rainey’s African Hunt was attracting ‘the largest and
most fashionable crowds seen at the [Lyceum] theatre in more than a year’
(‘This Week’s Playbills’ 1912: X8). Made in Kenya with photographer John C.
Hemment and a taxidermist from the Smithsonian, Rainey’s African Hunt was
a highbrow entertainment that brought together guns, cameras and hunting
with dogs in wild Africa. While tapping into the popularity of exploitative
films such as ‘Colonel’ Selig’s Hunting Big Game in Africa (1909) – which
showed a Theodore Roosevelt lookalike killing an aged lion in East Africa
(actually, Selig’s mocked up ‘jungle’ in California) – Rainey’s hunt promised
bona fide ‘thrills’ that placed the audience in the middle of an exotic, yet ‘fully
authentic’, East African scene. It included exciting images of ‘a leopard [actu-
ally a cheetah] hunt, a lion hunt’, and informative shots of ‘native African life’
(‘This Week’s Playbills’ 1912: X8). Initially accompanied by a lecture from
Hemment, additional intertitles later allowed Rainey’s African Hunt to be

screened independently.8
Nonfiction travel spectacles were establishing a ‘fashionable’ place in the
longer format market. Also in May 1912, the New York Times reported the
much-anticipated return of The Delhi Durbar (1912), which was shifting from
Broadway to Coney Island’s Luna Park. The Durbar ceremony in India was a
grand, manufactured spectacle of empire dating from Queen Victoria’s reign,
which crowned the new British head of state ‘Emperor of India’ (McKernan
2009: 122). The 1911 proceedings were painstakingly recorded by the entre-
preneur Charles Urban in Kinemacolor, a ‘natural’ (as opposed to tinted)
two-color process developed by Urban’s associate George Albert Smith. The
two-and-a-half hour (16,000 feet) Delhi Durbar had been an enormous success
at Urban’s Scala Theatre in London, with a stage setting that represented
the Taj Mahal accompanied by a forty-eight piece orchestra, a chorus of
twenty-four, a fife-and-drum corps of twenty and three bagpipes. Its debut on
Broadway prompted the New York Telegraph to praise the transport through
time and space provided by scale, image quality and color: ‘There is no need
to seek the fabled East in the distant Orient. It may be found in Broadway at
the New York Theatre where Kinemacolor is showing all the glorious color
and movement of life in India [. . .]. They were not merely moving pictures –
they pulsated with life, color and emotion’ (quoted in McKernan 2006).9 The
intense ‘here-and-now’ realism of Kinemacolor could produce a distinctive,
immediate affective response: a moving pageant of imperial mastery and unity
(Brown 2009: 143).
Film’s potentially enormous influence on the social and civic realms was not
lost on Urban, an American who worked in Britain for much of his career. He
argued that ‘the cinematograph must be recognized as a national instrument
by [. . .] every institution of training, teaching, demonstration and research’
(quoted in Griffiths 2002: 230).10 Urban’s The Making of the Panama Canal
(1912, by the Kinemacolor Company of America) was, at nine reels, certainly
just this sort of ‘national instrument’: an imperial spectacle arising not out
of the opulence of monarchy but out of American grit, industry and ingenu-
ity. The Panama Canal had long been seen by established colonial powers
as the linchpin to achieving dominance of Pacific trade routes. At the 1893
Exposition in Chicago, a working model of the canal brought this concept
home to millions of Americans: the canal could do for US global expansion
what the transcontinental railroad had done for the mastery of North America,
yet on an even grander scale. The American achievement (the Canal opened
in 1914) was widely figured as a triumphal tale of technological expertise ‘in
which nation is featured as hero’ (Strain 2003: 79). Urban’s film ran to plaudits
in New York, earning a strong run at the Carnegie Lyceum.
Throughout the 1910s a number of travel films – many attached to high-
profile explorers – entertained largely well-off urban audiences. Vilhjalmur

Stefansson, whose quest for an ‘unknown continent’ and discovery of ‘blonde
Eskimos’ in the Arctic had garnered reams of press attention, featured in
Rescue of the Stefansson Arctic Expedition (1914), documenting the rescue of
the exploration party, feared lost when their ship the Karluk was crushed by
the Arctic ice.11 The photographer Herbert G. Ponting could have had an
even greater impact on the travelogue format, but the release of his extensive
cinématographe footage of Captain Robert F. Scott’s ill-fated exploration of the
South Pole was hindered by Scott’s death. Distributed in part by Gaumont in
1912, it was re-edited and released later as At the South Pole (1929), 90 Degrees
South (1933) and restored for a 2010 release.
Wildlife adventure films also enjoyed ongoing popularity. As in Rainey’s
African Hunt, animals were represented as ‘game’, hunted or caught for
display in western zoos, again suggesting that imaginary possession of distant
and exotic locales was a key draw for many audiences. Frank M. Buckland
and J. F. Cleary explored Canada’s wildlife in American Game Trails (1915),
while filmmaker Albert Blinkhorn’s travels to Mexico’s Guadalupe Island
yielded Capture of a Sea Elephant and Hunting Wild Game in the South Pacific
Islands (1914). This was a period of transition, when travelogues were moving
from being tied to personal appearances, lectures and independent distribu-
tion to becoming self-contained ‘industrial products’ available for mainstream
distribution. The explorer Edward A. Salisbury’s expeditionary films On the
Spanish Main, Pirate Haunts and The Footsteps of Capt. Kidd, shown with only
intertitles at New York’s Rialto Theatre in 1917, signaled, as Rick Altman puts
it, the ‘wrenching of documentary films out of the live performance lectur-
ing world’ (2006: 75–6). The lecturer gradually entered and became a kind
of ghost in the machine; the live presence was no longer essential to produc-
ing diegetic unity and a focalized point of view. Nonfiction films were in the
process of becoming self-contained narrative vehicles, perfectly engineered
virtual experiences of reality.
Two other films of the 1910s stand out as exemplary of the exploration and
travelogue modes, as well as anticipating a film like Nanook of the North (1922),
the commercial and artistic documentary breakthrough of the following
decade. The first, Edward S. Curtis’s In the Land of the Head-hunters (1914,
a.k.a. In the Land of the War Canoes), mixes travelogue, staged re-enactments
and ethnographic footage in attempting to construct a detailed portrait of
Kwakiutl Indian life in the Pacific Northwest. Frank Hurley’s extraordinary
South: Ernest Shackleton and the Endurance Expedition (1919, a.k.a. Endurance)
is an exemplary use of motion picture technology as documentation and as
careful aesthetic composition, all done under extreme freezing conditions. In
spite of this range of films, there has long been an assumption that during the
1910s nonfiction was a poor relation to fiction film, inferior in both its popular
appeal and its ability to engage with emerging narrative modes. In fact, nonfic-
tion films were establishing their own audiences, carving out specific functions
as informative and enlightening entertainments, providing alternatives to a
film industry that was churning out increasingly standardized products.
When the US, in spite of deeply divided public opinion, entered the First
World War in 1917, nonfiction film exhibition became dominated by war
footage and propaganda newsreels produced (under US government supervi-
sion) by powerful companies like Hearst-Selig News Pictorial and Pathé. Only
two years later, the Versailles Treaty was signed to riotous celebrations – yet
the European war had left behind a devastating legacy. The conflict’s techno-
logical mass killing was unprecedented, and in its wake was a social climate
of postwar malaise and profound uncertainty about the West’s ‘civilized’
advancements over ‘savagery’. As late as 1921, the war still haunted the public
imagination: the magazine Current Opinion ran a cartoon that read, ‘Getting
the last boy out of the trenches’, with a graphic image showing a lifeless body
dangling from a crane.12 By the early 1920s, the US public was anxious to
rediscover the mobilities halted by war. Tourism, travel books and travel films
returned with renewed vigor. There was also an increasing curiosity about
other, seemingly more ‘innocent’ cultures around the world that might offer
escape from memories of the savage war and from the sterile and mechanized
routines of postwar modern life.
nanook of the north (1922)

Often referred to as the ‘father’ of US documentary, Robert Flaherty was
nearly thirty in 1913 when he began experimenting with film. Just two years
earlier, a fateful meeting had occurred with Sir William Mackenzie, the indus-
trialist responsible for the Canadian transcontinental railroad; Flaherty would
later refer to him as ‘the Cecil Rhodes of Canada’ (Rotha 1983: 12). Flaherty
worked for Mackenzie mapping and searching for iron ore in northern Canada.
Though he had almost no experience of filmmaking, at Mackenzie’s sugges-
tion Flaherty purchased a camera and began making filmed records of his
journeys along the sub-Arctic coast of Hudson Bay.
Flaherty’s signature and most popular work came only after he decided
to abandon the results of earlier efforts at filming (which were, in any case,
destroyed by fire in 1916 when he dropped a cigarette on the nitrate nega-
tive). He decided that his early ‘Eskimo film’ lacked dynamic visuals or a fully
coherent storyline – two formal aspects that would ultimately distinguish
Nanook of the North from most non-fiction films of the time. Flaherty and his
wife Frances tirelessly sought funding for a second attempt at a more crowd-
pleasing film, finally achieving a breakthrough in 1920 when the French fur-
Figure 6. Nanook of the North (1922). Revillon Frères. Courtesy of the British Film Institute.
trading firm Revillon Frères agreed to sponsor a trek to the North with the sole
purpose of making a film.
The location was determined by Revillon Frères: a trading post on the
northeastern shore of Hudson Bay. Conditions could be extremely harsh.
On one occasion when the thermometer read 35 degrees Fahrenheit below
zero, the negative froze and shattered in the camera ‘like so much wafer-glass’
(Flaherty 1926: 87). Still, Flaherty held total production and post-production
costs to only $53,000, meaning Nanook was relatively cheap to make; yet in its
first three months of release it earned $251,000 at the box office (Murphy 1978:
10). It was the first feature-length documentary to achieve financial success on
this scale through mainstream distribution channels, and it was also critically
successful, with the New York Times exclaiming that ‘beside this film the usual
photoplay, the so-called “dramatic” work of the screen, becomes as thin and
blank as the celluloid on which it is printed’ (‘The Screen’ 1922: 16). But the
film didn’t receive universal acclaim: indeed, questions about its authenticity
quickly arose. The explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson noted that Inuits had for
generations hunted with guns, though Flaherty portrayed them as only having
primitive weapons (the intertitles stating that the Inuit still hunt with nothing
more than harpoons). Stefansson also pointed out that Nanook’s battle with
the seal was obviously faked, since the animal pulled from the ice was, clearly,
‘still and dead’ (quoted in Murphy 1978: 57).
Questions about the ethics and documentary value of staged reconstruc-
tions still surround Nanook, though more forceful criticisms of Flaherty came
with postcolonial investigations of the chauvinisms and fetishisms underlying
traditional exploration and ethnographic representations. One example of
divided opinion relates to Flaherty’s practice of developing the negative on
site and then screening the rushes to local Inuits, so that they could see the
results and work with him, Flaherty noted, ‘as partners’ (Rotha 1983: 31). The
practice has led Flaherty to be seen as a pioneer of the collaborative feedback
method in documentary ethnographic film, later adopted by filmmakers such
as Jean Rouch. Yet ‘collaboration’ also involved putting his native subjects to
(often grueling) work, including Allakariallak (‘Nanook’) himself, who spent
long hours, often through the night, washing and drying the negative. Such
practices reveal the fine line that separates participatory filmmaking and subtle
forms of indenture (Geiger 2005: 123).
Flaherty’s background as an explorer and prospector has added to concerns
about his relationship to imperialist ideologies and practices. While Flaherty
saw himself as lobbying against blatant forms of cultural hegemony, his films
nonetheless conjure up little-known worlds on the frontiers of civilization,
helping feed US and European fantasies of the ‘savage’ existing uncorrupted
in nature. For Brian Winston, Flaherty was ‘a child of the last age of impe-
rial expansion, and beneath the veneer of sympathy and understanding for
the peoples he filmed there is nothing but the strong whiff of paternalism and
prejudice’ (1995: 20).
Nanook’s reputation has not been helped by interpretations that place it
alongside other, more brutal practices involving the display of native people.
One notorious incident involved the explorer Robert Edwin Peary, who in
1897 took six Inuit from Greenland to New York as ‘living specimens’ for
study and exhibition. Four quickly succumbed to tuberculosis and pneu-
monia. The body and possessions of one, Qisuk, were put on display at the
American Museum of Natural History. His son, Minik, after being tricked
by a sham funeral, pursued a lifelong battle for the right to claim his father’s
remains, without success (Garroutte 2003: 59).13 Such incidents suggest the
extreme ends of the desire for authentic representatives of racial and cultural
difference – for evidence of the mysteries of the world at the fringes of western
territories and perceptions. Though Allakariallak’s display was virtual, his end
was similarly tragic; he died of starvation just two years after Nanook of the
North’s release.
Like the travelogues and illustrated lectures that came before, Nanook is
haunted by a history of western attitudes towards ‘other’ lives and cultures.

At the same time, the film speaks of western self-perceptions, registering anxi-
eties about modernity and its creeping mechanization. With its sentimental
and elegiac undertones, Nanook seems to highlight, albeit elliptically, the
loss of natural and ‘primitive’ harmony in a technologized world. This was
also an era when the US was coming to terms with increasingly popular con-
cepts of cultural relativism emerging in anthropological circles, and widely
affecting modern art and popular culture more generally. Cultural relativ-
ism, while problematic in its construction of cultural ‘others’ to the western
‘self’, helped to shatter a sense of western superiority in that it questioned
the presumption that there were universal laws governing all cultures, or that
a strictly hierarchical relationship existed between western and ‘primitive’
societies.
Of course, even as cultural relativism was exerting an influence, discourses
of racial and cultural chauvinism in the US remained, as ever, extremely
complex and fraught with division. While Flaherty was shooting his earliest
films among the Inuit, D. W. Griffith’s epic argument for racial segrega-
tion, The Birth of a Nation (1915), was breaking box-office records across the
country. Griffith offered ‘historical facsimiles’ of racial hierarchy, while tracts
such as Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race went even further,
dividing races into different biological categories, positioning the Aryan and
the idea of the noble Teuton against the inferiority of non-white peoples
(Stocking 1968: 68).
This was the heated cultural and political climate into which Flaherty intro-
duced his popular portrait of Inuit life, and these were some key debates with
which his text would have collided. Flaherty himself always avoided attempts
at any complex theorizing of his approach, and primarily expressed a senti-
mental affinity for his subjects. His mode of primitivism might best be seen as
aligned to an idealization of the primitive that was becoming prevalent among
his more liberal contemporaries. The sociologist Edward Sapir, for example,
wrote an influential article, ‘Culture, Genuine and Spurious’ that circulated in
the early 1920s and projected a vision of western cultural regeneration through
an appeal to primitive types. Sapir sees the West as plagued by ‘spiritual dis-
harmony’, particularly ‘the case of America, where a chronic state of cultural
maladjustment has for so long a period reduced much of our higher life to
sterile externality’ (1966 [1924]: 95–6). American culture, Sapir argues, needs
the revitalization of a ‘genuine culture’ that is ‘deeper and more satisfying’:
The Indian’s salmon-spearing is a culturally higher type of activity than

that of the telephone girl or mill hand simply because there is normally
no sense of spiritual frustration during its prosecution, no feeling of sub-
servience to tyrannous yet largely inchoate demands. (1966 [1924]: 93)
The nation’s cultural sickness is revealed by invoking the spiritual health of

the primitive ideal.
Flaherty’s film, while never directly referencing the fragmentation and
alienation of modern western life, posits primitive figures that are in key ways
‘like us’. The family consists of patriarch Nanook, his wife Nyla (who at one
point ‘cleans her brand new ice window’) and their children. Yet they are,
importantly, also unlike us: ‘noble savages’ who exist at close quarters with
nature’s rhythms. Nanook evokes nostalgia for a seemingly more harmonious
way of life – a way of life that perhaps never existed. Here an idealized western
self is projected onto a cultural or racial other – partly real and partly imagined
– familiarizing the subjects of difference while reducing the complexities of
other cultures to a series of easily digestible tropes and themes.
The scene in which Nanook encounters a gramophone has often been cited
as a key moment where the film infantilizes, while also distancing, its subjects.
Here Nanook’s ignorance of technology is underscored in the presence of the
machine, the intertitles explaining that the trader, ‘in deference to Nanook, the
great hunter [. . .] entertains and attempts to explain the principle of the gram-
ophone’. Apart from this scene, Nanook reinforces the contrast between civi-
lized and primitive through suppressing the presence of the filmmaker and the
trappings of western society. In this rare moment when technology is revealed,
it paradoxically becomes a device to exclude Nanook from the modern era by
showing his naivety. It also, unusually for the film, divorces us from Nanook’s
point of view, momentarily ‘throwing us out’ of the imaginary bond estab-
lished between the audience and the ‘great hunter’. Yet the scene might also
serve another, more ambiguous function, as a means to estrange (western)
viewers from any complacent sense of technologized modernity as the normal
or ‘natural’ way of life. Nanook remains a primitive ideal, positioned out of
time, out of the present, yet he reflects and projects the technologized West
back to itself – now distorted, unnatural, at times (like the gramophone) even
comical and bizarre.
Yet the film contains potentially darker undertones. The image of the
‘happy-go-lucky Eskimo’ can be seen shifting, ambiguously and unsettlingly,
towards shades of savagery. Close-ups of the blood-smeared faces of Nanook,
Nyla and Allegoo after the seal hunting sequence (the red appearing black
due to the limited tonal range of orthochromatic film) reinforce a potentially
derogatory meaning of ‘Eskimo’ as ‘eaters of raw flesh’. Along these lines,
Fatimah Tobing Rony sees Nanook as an extension of the colonial-era ethno-
graphic spectacle, where images of cultural and racial otherness feed western
curiosity, as in the displays along the Chicago Midway (1996: 105). Flaherty’s
follow-up, Moana (1925), shot in Western Samoa, perpetuated and extended
these oppositions between civilized and primitive. Even more consistently
than Nanook, Moana suppresses the filmmaker’s presence and the trappings of
modernity. Flaherty’s Samoan film recreates a dream of a lost paradise in the

South Pacific, a world out of time, where native participants act out a sensu-
ous, largely carefree life, free from the harness of modern technology. Such
films might be seen as expressions of western nostalgia, allegories of the loss of
nature and fall from Eden, just as much, if not more, than they offer ‘truths’
about the cultures they represent.
Nanook focuses its gaze on an approximation of the past, though it does so
through innovative approaches to nonfiction which borrow from narrative and
montage strategies already successfully tested on mass audiences. The practice
of interspersing staged sequences alongside candid scenes, while constructing
a coherent episodic structure, was to become a Flaherty trademark evident
in most of his major films. A key to appreciating Flaherty’s style lies not in
seeking out strands of unvarnished authenticity, but in observing his skill
in bridging the gaps between on-site improvisation and diegetic continuity in
the finished film. Moreover, Flaherty’s approach mobilizes modes of audience
investment and identification rarely employed in nonfiction film up to this
point. As Richard Koszarski notes, early audiences coming to Flaherty’s film
were ‘attuned to the usual Burton Holmes travelogue, a home-movie style
ramble in which the Western adventurer situates himself in exotic climes’
(1990: 243). Nanook broke out of this convention, focusing not on a traveler/
narrator nor mainly on traveling views and landscapes. Flaherty wrote that he
wanted to show ‘the Innuit’ and not lay the emphasis on ‘where I had been and
what I had done’ (quoted in Koszarski 1990: 243). He created a fleshed-out
‘native informant’ character, a ‘hero’ with whom audiences could identify.
William Uricchio characterizes nonfiction cinema in the 1920s as undergo-
ing a progression from imagistic description towards interpretation: a process
of shifting the camera’s role as ‘a viewfinder on the world’ towards a new
conceptual orientation of nonfiction. Here, ‘the construction of an elaborate
artifice dependent upon sets, story, and psychologically credible characters,
and the effacing of narrative agency, all contributed to a documentary form
with far greater similarity to the classical Hollywood cinema than the preced-
ing decades of nonfiction production’ (1995: 291). Of course these similari-
ties to classical cinema had limits; it was also the assertion of documentary’s
dissimilarity to Hollywood fiction that, crucially, set it apart from fantasy
and invention. The ongoing belief that certain films bore a special, indexical
relation to pro-filmic reality remained a key to their allure and market niche.
This was provided not only via publicity and intertitles announcing the film’s
dcumentation of real people and places, but through other deviations from the
Hollywood norm.
As Jeffrey Ruoff suggests, in the nonfiction travel genre one of these differ-
ences was the use of episodic structure over linear narrative (2006: 11). Indeed
Nanook is episodic and ultimately open-ended, though it does not eschew all
elements of plot. Rather, its scenes unfold within a ‘slight narrative’ frame
of changing seasons and the search for food (Rotha 1999 [1935]: 149). Each
vignette – walrus hunt, seal hunt, igloo building – is relatively self-contained,
providing a focus for gleaning information or knowledge, while contributing to
a framing narrative that holds the audience’s attention. The film thus success-
fully integrates appeals to epistephilia (pleasure in knowledge) and scopophilia
(pleasure in viewing) while providing narrative tension about what is pending
or unresolved.
Nanook’s popularity relied as much on the exhibitionistic and ‘primitive’
allure of its subject matter as it did on the successful integration of voyeuristic
pleasure, identification and narrative storytelling in a nonfiction context. Yet
Flaherty’s film is also, many still agree, a work of art, containing moments of
profound poetic and expressive imagery, especially in its opening and closing
sequences.14 In bringing these elements quite seamlessly together, Flaherty
tapped into public demands for legitimate, enlightened entertainments: films
that not only documented and displayed foreign places, but that seemed to
create new, barely imagined worlds permitting immersion into cultural dif-
ference. In this sense, Flaherty’s work forms part of what George Stocking
calls the ‘ethnographic sensibility’ of the 1920s and early 1930s: a broad inter-
est in producing more informed views of cultural diversity than the accounts
and travelogues that came before, but that still lacked the precise rules and
scientific trappings of emerging disciplines such as anthropology (1989: 212).
This ethnographic sensibility ranged across different artistic and scientific
endeavors, all of which took culture (as opposed to more fixed and oppositional
notions, such as race) as the primary force determining how humans formed
social networks and individual identities, how they shaped their public and
private lives.
Nanook’s ethnographic sensibility is thus subjective and undisciplined
rather than rigorous, objective or precise. Flaherty never trained as an anthro-
pologist, but did believe that his work could have some ethnographic value.
As he recalled of Nanook, ‘I had planned to depict an ethnoligical [sic] film
of life covering the various phases of their hunting, travel, domestic life, and
religion in as much of a narrative form as is possible’ (quoted in Ruby 2000:
71). On this level, Flaherty projects a certain seriousness and interest in edu-
cational value that aligns his work more to the illustrated lecture tradition, or
to Curtis’s or Kleinschmidt’s ethnographic studies, than to the manipulative
sensations of films such as Selig’s Hunting Big Game in Africa.
In 1922, travel programs made up of multiple shorts were still headlining at
theaters, as this New York Times entry suggests:
Travelaughs: ‘Such is Life’, in ‘Monte Carlo’, ‘Nice’, ‘Munich’, and

‘Amsterdam’, among ‘Alpine Shorts’, and ‘The Children of France’, and
‘Where Paris Shops’. In these works by Lily Mayer, in which motion

pictures are skillfully and imaginatively combined with drawings, the
travel film becomes delightful entertainment without losing its informa-
tive character. (‘Screen: Pictures of 1922’ 1922: 3)
While similarly ‘delightful’ and ‘informative’, Nanook of the North’s sophisti-

cated approach to the feature format marks its distance from travel programs
such as this one. But it should be stressed that Flaherty’s film did not appear
in a vacuum; it tapped into and extended a series of developing approaches to
telling nonfictional stories on screen.
ha r d t r a v e l i n g: t h e e x p e d it ion a r y mode
Flaherty’s documentary practices might speak to a range of nonfiction
approaches encompassing science, education and popular entertainment.
Sitting closer to the ‘scientific’ end of things would be filmmaking that engaged
the ethnographic sensibility: practices that included popular ethnography and
more carefully systemized anthropological film work. Leaning more towards
popular entertainment was the expeditionary mode: discovery and adventure
films that were conceived and distributed on a larger scale than previously
seen. Like Nanook, these features incorporated slight narrative, candid and
staged footage, and tightly edited sequences. Yet they tended to eschew one of
Nanook’s key features, the focus on a ‘rounded’ native character, preferring to
stay closer to the format inherited from the illustrated travel lecture. Martin
Johnson was one of these adventurer-filmmakers who retained the lecturer’s
function as mediator and primary point of view. Johnson’s early presentations,
such as Jack London’s Adventures in the South Sea Islands (1913) – document-
ing a cruise through the South Pacific as assistant to London – had brought
him modest success. With his wife and filming partner Osa, he pursued the
lecture-on-film format, releasing Among the Cannibal Isles of the South Pacific
(1918), made in Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands, Jungle Adventures (1921)
and Headhunters of the South Seas (1922). Together the Johnsons would carve
a specialist niche in safari and exotic wildlife films, as in Trailing African Wild
Animals (1923), based on their expedition to Africa in 1921–2.
After garnering the support of important figures such as Carl Akeley of
the American Museum of Natural History and Kodak’s George Eastman,
the Johnsons went on a major expedition to Kenya, which yielded the box
office hit, Simba, the King of the Beasts (1928). Simba’s success lay in its thrills
and technical virtuosity, but must at least in part be attributed to the Nanook
effect, which had not only whetted popular tastes for exotic and travel subjects
but had convinced studios and exhibitors that they could be highly lucrative.
Still, for Akeley, the power of the Johnsons’ work lay not just in its popular
appeal, but in the ways their pictures were ‘true to the facts’ and ‘sound natural
history’. Their animals were not ‘borrowed from a zoo’ but ‘photographed in
their native haunts’; the Johnsons’ images were ‘thrilling, not as they satisfy
the blood lust of the savage within us, but because they portray the novel and
fascinating truth (‘Martin and Osa Johnson’ 2002). Yet, while they aimed to
capture what Martin rhapsodically called the ‘beauties’ of ‘untouched Africa’,
Simba is also a colonizer spectacle, featuring not only exotic animals but their
vanquishing at the hands of white adventurers (quoted in Pierce 1992). We
see Osa shooting down a charging rhinoceros, elephant and lion, all in orderly
succession.
The Johnsons’ Fox Studios follow-up, Congorilla (1929), would take the
travel adventure into similar though more openly exploitative territory. With
its subtitle, ‘Adventures among the Big Apes and Little People of Central
Africa’, the film distinguished itself as the first sound film shot entirely in
Africa. In it, the Johnsons appear as adventurer-heroes, world famous for their
‘thrilling expeditions’ and ‘renowned career with gun and camera’. Hard travel
by boat, motor car and camel is interspersed with animal footage and ‘comic’
interludes that effectively infantilize the Africans appearing in the film.
Thomas Doherty neatly distinguishes earlier travelogues from the emer-
gence of this more grandiose expeditionary approach:
A travelogue is the cinematic equivalent of the act of tourism, a film that

provides a comfortable berth for seeing the sights and gawking at the
natives. [. . .] In contrast, the expeditionary film demands hard traveling.
No packaged tour but an adventure in cinema at feature length, it pos-
sesses the immediacy and intensity of on-location shooting and spontane-
ous action, a sense of wonder mixed with the adrenaline rush of fear. The
expeditionary film promised a true voyage of discovery. (1999: 222–3)
The travel-adventure film is organized around a narrative of rugged journey-

ing with cameras (and, usually, guns); at the same time it heightens the emo-
tional peaks and dangers of these voyages, staging dramas when necessary. In
Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack’s Grass (1925) and Chang (1927),
viewers are encouraged to identify with the western voyager and storyteller
who shows off the sights and peoples encountered. Narrative control, mobile
camerawork and panoramic views all imbue the armchair traveler with a sense
of voyeuristic mastery. Heightened events and the photographers’ heroic
efforts to capture them take center stage, such as the dramatic river crossing
in Grass or the elephant (‘chang’) stampede in Chang. These are the ‘sublime’
moments of the travel narrative: highlighted encounters that help to embellish
arduous, frequently dull journeys (Lamb 1994: 7).
Other than newsreels and what Variety called ‘two-reel lecture stuff’, the
beginning of the sound era in the 1930s saw travel-adventure films dominating
the non-fiction feature output of studios and smaller companies. Dana Benelli
notes that in the four-year period from 1930 to 1933, of the sixty documenta-
ries reviewed in the New York Times, most were related to the expeditionary
mode (2006: 180). Ingagi (1930), made by the one-off Congo Pictures, took the
genre to extremes in exploiting cultural projections, desires and fears of the
foreign, conjuring up exotic dangers lurking just beyond the western horizon.
Ingagi advertised itself as ‘an authentic incontestable celluloid document
showing the sacrifice of a living woman to mammoth gorillas!’ Interestingly,
though the film was banned by the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors
of America (a.k.a. the Hays Office), it was not for its lurid content (which at
first prompted an investigation for ‘sexual perversion’). Instead it was lam-
basted for its deceptive presentation and its advertising that attempted, among
other things, to pass off a Los Angeles zoo as Africa and an actor in a fur suit
as a gorilla (Erish 2006: E6). Ingagi’s fakery was controversial (leading RKO
to drop the picture), but the aggressive marketing of the film as nonfiction
seemed to pay off: audiences and the independent exhibitors who picked up
the film ignored accusations of deceit and official attempts at a ban. Andrew
Erish estimates that the film made $4 million on independent release, making
it one of the most successful films of the Depression era. The Hays Office had
failed to stop the film, and even the new Advertising Code of Ethics adopted in
the wake of the Ingagi scandal failed to stanch the flow of fakery in the expedi-
tionary mode. Ingagi’s success shows the marketability and malleability of the
documentary impulse, here engineered to shore up existing fears and fantasies
of ‘otherness’.
More ‘legitimate’ sensations came in the form of wild animal collector
Frank Buck’s Bring ’Em Back Alive (1932), shot in Malaysia and based on his
best-selling book. W. S. Van Dyke’s Academy Award-nominated Trader Horn
(1931), set in Africa, was openly marketed as fiction, but grounded its appeal
in its on-location scenes featuring wild animals and indigenous peoples. B. F.
Zeidman’s Samarang (1933), about South Pacific pearl divers, was a similar
mixture of fictional conventions and non-fictional subjects. Contemporary
reviewers were hardly troubled by the seeming contradictions of blending
fact and fiction: the New York Times commended the film’s ‘melodramatic
episodes [. . .] for the most part set forth with no little skill’, yet at the same
time maintained that it was ‘a picture distinguished by the obvious authentic-
ity of many of its scenes’ (Hall 1933: 22). It seems Hollywood had hit on a
winning formula: an ‘ethnographic’ context could permit displays of nudity
and violence, while the insertion of documentary footage into fictional frame-
works both heightened a film’s realism and extended its marketability. Benelli
suggests that this ‘travel-incorporating hybrid film’ could potentially appeal
to ‘multiple segments of the mass audience’ through its presentation of varied

elements, mixing education and adventure with romantic subplots. At the
same time it could be marketed flexibly by exhibitors as satisfying a wide range
of tastes (2006: 190).
Cooper and Schoedsack’s King Kong (1933), set on a fictional Melanesian
island (a character claims that the language spoken on Skull Island resembles
that of Nias Islanders), further draws on core features of the expeditionary
mode. The heroic explorer enters uncharted and ‘savage’ regions, returning
to civilization with living physical specimens captured on his adventures. But
the film, with its central character Carl Denham serving as chief adventurer,
animal wrangler and voyeur (Denham was said to be based on Frank Buck),
also pushed the boundaries of the expeditionary mode into the realms of
self-reflexive ambivalence. King Kong might be seen to present a cautionary
allegory of colonial and ethnographic mastery, revealing the hazards of the
desire to capture spectacular images of ‘unknown’ places and peoples, and of
the public’s insatiable demand for them. Arguably, these desires have never
really faded: twenty-first century celebrities like Bear Grylls or the ‘crocodile
hunter’, the late Steve Irwin, might recall past rugged adventurers from fiction
(Trader Horn) and fact (Frank Buck).
Along with the travel and expeditionary features of the 1920s and 1930s,
the newsreel travelogue was becoming a familiar site not only for armchair
adventures but for shoring up national and imperial identities. This might be
glimpsed in films such as James Fitzpatrick’s Travel Talks newsreels, distrib-
uted by MGM and screened in thousands of theaters across the US. Travel
Talks provided ‘a stock set of images and concepts about the world abroad at a
time when hardly any international films were available to American audiences
and when comparatively few Americans could travel to Ceylon, Argentina or
Japan’ (Ruoff 2006: 13). Fitzpatrick’s series also interpreted these places, ori-
enting American impressions of them.
As the 1920s moved into the 1930s, any notion of the US as a fledgling
or isolationist state was firmly in the past: US expansionist politics, par-
ticularly in the Pacific region, were approaching their zenith. In this context,
Fitzpatrick’s Fiji and Samoa: The Cannibal Isles (1933) essentially served
as an advertisement for joint British and US imperial control in the Pacific,
giving an indication of how the US was portraying itself as the natural inheri-
tor of established colonial networks and prepared to take up the mantle of
the ‘empire of the English speaking race’ (Kachru et al. 2006: 296–7). As the
voiceover stresses on approach to the Samoan islands, these are national pos-
sessions: an ‘enchanting group of islands belonging to the United States and
the British Empire’.
Fitzpatrick’s film gives an indication of how cultural and racial chauvinism,
masquerading as educational enlightenment, can be a by-product of the tourist

gaze. Fiji and Samoa offers a hierarchical point of view: the voiceover authori-
tatively describes ‘ravenous cannibals’ and ‘savage brown faces’, while menac-
ing music plays over shots of Fijians glancing towards the camera. Fitzpatrick
argues that, ‘as a race they have traveled far along the path of development
during the fifty-nine years under British rule. Perhaps war, cannibalism,
polygamy, and their attendant evils are but memories of the dark past from
which they have emerged’. Similarly, over a shot of a Fijian policeman the
voice intones: ‘Perhaps the most remarkable achievement of the white coun-
tries that have colonized the earth is that manner in which they have utilized
the military services of the natives, so that they can entrust them with the
very guns which were formerly used to conquer them’. Fitzpatrick’s voice-
over offers one-sided messages referencing threats of savagery, but the images
reveal ‘native’ figures that seem hardly dangerous or disturbing. Fitzpatrick’s
Travel Talks thus reflects the interdependency of the tourist gaze, racial
chauvinism and forms of cultural and territorial possession, but also hints at
conflicts and tensions that are always nascent in cinema viewing. The voice of
the film strives to restrict the viewer’s interpretations, but can never wholly
eliminate other, potentially more complex or open-ended forms of reception
and understanding.
The contours of travel and tourism in US nonfiction film – as a physi-
cal experience, concept, metaphor and theme – are certainly too broad to
contain in a single chapter. My intent has been to highlight some modes and
ideas of travel that moved across a range of early documentary approaches
and that appealed to ideas of national solidarity through constructions of an
‘American’ tourist gaze. These approaches – travel short, travelogue, illus-
trated travel lecture, expeditionary feature – have never really disappeared,
having branched into a wide spectrum of instructive media and popular diver-
sions. Illustrated travel lectures continue to draw large audiences, while the
format persists in the ‘show and tell’ approach of home-made travelogues
as well as in the cavalcade of virtual tours on the Discovery Channel, the
Travel Channel and elsewhere (Ruoff 2006: 235). IMAX releases are typically
designed as virtual voyages, where cinemagoers might embark on ‘an epic
adventure to places unknown, seemingly unattainable and beyond imagina-
tion’; in Antarctica (1991), for example, you can ‘vividly experience what life is
really like on the planet’s largest, driest desert’ (‘Antarctica’ 2009).
At the other end of the spectrum, low-budget travelogues and actualities
– souvenir postcards in motion – also persist. Short tourist views, shots from
trains, planes, cars and ships, videos of family vacations and so on, have
returned with a vengeance via YouTube and other sites. YouTube even
streams an updated version of one of the earliest phantom rides, Through
the Haverstraw Tunnel, remade as Southbound at Haverstraw Tunnel (2008).
Arguably, with the ease of shooting and sharing online, travel actualities again
rank among the most widely consumed modes of filmmaking.
note s
1. Postcards widely featured at the 1893 Chicago Exposition; by 1908 circulation had reached
680 million in the US.
2. The first film of this type was shot by a Lumière camera from the back of a train leaving
Jerusalem (1896); films shot from the front of a train were usually referred to as ‘phantom
rides’.
3. See Gomery (1992: 10), Fielding (1983: 118).
4. See Barnouw (1983: 30), Musser (1990a: 429–30, 1990b: 129).
5. Perhaps ‘new’ technologies are never quite as new as they seem, as they are experienced
‘in relation to older and more familiar media, which they challenge and destabilize’ (Renov
and Suderburg 1996: xii).
6. As John Robert Procter wrote: ‘From the blood of our [American] heroes, shed at Santiago
and Manila, there shall rise a New Imperialism’ (Procter 1972 [1898]: 26).
7. For further details, see Griffiths (2002: 203–13), Altman (2006: 61–76) and Barber (1993:
68–84).
8. See also Grau (1912: xvii), and ‘Show Rainey’s African Hunt’ (1912). Rainey’s African
Hunt was re-released with intertitles in 1913, running at six reels.
9. See also McKernan (2009: 131) and ‘The Delhi Durbar’ (1912: X9). Urban was previously
known for producing a series of ‘Bioscope Expedition’ films also featuring exotic sights.
10. Urban’s representative in New York, George Kleine, offered thousands of film subjects,
including Urban’s films, to the New York City Board of Education in 1910. Though never
fully taken up, the Board superintendent William H. Maxwell became known as a ‘pioneer
in visual education’. See Krows (1936: 170).
11. See ‘Stefansson Off for Arctic Quest’ (1913), ‘Stefansson’s Own Peril’ (1914) and
‘Stefansson Tells of White Eskimos’ (1912).
12. Current Opinion, 70, June 1921, p. 735.
13. See also Harper (2001).
14. Many scenes and shots evoke Inuit drawings done on site (Barnouw 1983: 37).
ch apter 3
Serious Play: Documentary and

the Avant-Garde
As the previous chapter showed, cinema embodied the idea and physical expe-
rience of the modern world in motion – from the legacies of moving crowds
and exhibits at world fairs to the disorienting speed of fast travel. Emerging
nonfiction genres such as the travelogue encapsulated film’s ability to capture
a god’s eye view of the moving world: the tourist gaze helped to stabilize the
blur of modern urban life, delivering views of far-flung sites and peoples as
consumable spectacles. The virtual journeying provided by panoramic, first-
person and mobile perspectives bolstered the viewer’s belief in knowing the
world through the accretion of images. Yet there are other strands in docu-
mentary’s development that engaged more critically with modern spectacle
– what Thomas Elsaesser calls the modern ‘tyranny of the eye’ – in particular,
the modernist avant-garde (1996: 16).
Important links between avant-garde work and documentary remain rela-
tively overlooked even as, in recent decades, clear boundaries between
documentary and other cinematic forms have come into question. Indeed,
documentary is often still viewed as the avant-garde’s opposite. While the
latter implies innovation, experimentation and playfulness in both content
and form (traced to the traditions of fantastic and otherworldly ‘trick films’ of
showmen like Méliès), documentary is seen as an established mode (usually
traced to actualities and the Lumières) for revealing the ‘real’, if often hidden,
worlds we inhabit. Valued for formal transparency and heuristic authority,
documentary, Bill Nichols notes, has been known for its ‘discourses of sobri-
ety’. It is seen to ‘speak directly about social and historical realities’, engaging
issues such as foreign policy, medicine, science, economics and education
(2001a: 39).1
Yet, Nichols forcefully argues, established histories of documentary’s
development have obscured complex influences, propagating in particular the
‘repression of the role of the 1920s avant-garde in the rise of documentary’
(2001b: 581–2).2 Key proponents of the documentary form such as Grierson,

for example, insisted that modernist innovation was a ‘dangerous’ model for
documentary, and effectively erased the avant-garde from the documentary
tradition (Beattie 2008: 20; Grierson 1946 [1932]: 85). Yet divisions between
avant-garde and documentary – aligned, respectively, to opposing ‘aesthetic’
and ‘scientistic’ impulses – have not always been so strict. Early experiments
with nonfiction and avant-garde techniques, such as Paul Strand’s and Charles
Sheeler’s Manhatta (1921), discussed below, illuminate productive tensions
between form and content that work to reveal the materiality of documentary
images and draw attention to the technologies of representation themselves.
This tradition might be traced right through landmark cinépoem and ‘city
symphony’ films such as Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera (1929),
Joris Ivens’s Rain (1929), Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1982) and Robert
Gardner’s Forest of Bliss (1986). Here, variously, the poetics and aesthetics
of lived experience, rather than being suppressed in favor of ‘sober’ facts and
information, are brought to the fore as contemplative, disruptive and even
ecstatic (as in Vertov or Ivens) pleasures. As I hope to show, what the avant-
garde bequeathed to documentary was an undercurrent of anti-illusionism: an
element often sublimated after documentary became bound to projects of civic
responsibility and social instruction. If documentary as a public institutional
form came to be associated with a collective belief in a unified or agreed-upon
‘truth’, avant-garde influences always suggested the possibility of a more criti-
cal stance, where moving images and the modern technologies that produced
them were met, as Elsaesser puts it, with ‘skepticism and sarcasm’ just as much
as ‘wonder and amazement’ (1996: 18).
This chapter outlines alliances between avant-garde and documentary
circles in the US even as, by the early 1930s, the concept of documentary was
taking on more precise social and heuristic associations. In the decade that
followed Grierson’s 1926 review of Moana – where Grierson argued the film
had ‘documentary value’ (1979 [1926]: 25) – documentary became delineated
as a form, with a clearer set of objectives. Advocates for documentary like
Grierson argued that cinema could promote national unities and civic-minded
identities, and that nonfiction moving images in particular could and should
be manipulated to political ends. As Chapter 4 shows, documentary in the US
– and the authority bestowed on it as a mode for delivering social arguments
to mass audiences – would become harnessed to the nation-building interests
of government film projects of the 1930s. But these developments should not
eclipse the crucial links between avant-garde and nonfiction traditions: a closer
look reveals documentary’s ongoing, dialectical relationship to innovative
form, aesthetics and even elements of the fantastic. At the heart of this discus-
sion, then, is my intention to stress documentary’s historical diversity rather
than its unity or linear progression. Documentary needs to be seen, I suggest,
s er i o u s p la y: do c um e nt ar y an d th e avan t-garde 67
more as the sum of a lengthy social and historical process than as a logical or
pre-given category.
u ns t a b l e b o un d a r i e s, d e f amil ia r ized r ea l it ies

The work of several critics (for example Jan-Christopher Horak, Bruce Posner
and David E. James) has helped chart the emergence of the ‘first’ US cinematic
avant-garde that, approximately, coincided with a period of increasing self-
awareness of, and theoretical interest in, the documentary idea. Importantly,
this critical work defines certain key features of an ‘American’ avant-garde
and underscores the ways that early (pre-Second World War) US avant-garde
film might be distinguished from later movements in ‘experimental film’ (the
1940s and 1950s) and ‘underground’ or ‘independent’ film (the 1960s–1970s)
(Horak 1995: 3).
Of course the meaning of the term ‘avant-garde’ is widely contested. In this
chapter it refers, broadly, to experimental and often subversive artistic endeav-
ors that spanned national boundaries and traditions. While there were always
key and often profound rivalries and shifting affiliations between members of
different avant-garde movements, we might also perceive a certain syncretism:
an overarching belief in ‘vanguard’ artistic and social practices that defied the
conventions of a bourgeois status quo. In film, the influence of the avant-garde
was firmly established after the First World War and became increasingly
widespread during the 1920s. Experimental dance featured prominently in
early avant-garde films: with its mixture of abstraction, fluid motion, compel-
ling visuals and music, dance dispelled any need for linear narrative. Dudley
Murphy’s Soul of the Cypress (1920) envisioned the seductions of a tree
nymph, using dramatic backlighting, color tinting and long shots to empha-
size the cadences of music and gesture. Murphy’s Danse Macabre (1922), a
filmed ballet made with photographer Francis Bruguière and dancer Adolph
Bolm, mixed techniques of animation and double exposure to develop a new,
largely unfamiliar film aesthetic. The Dada film Ballet Mécanique (1924) was
put together in Paris the following year by Murphy, with financial and artistic
input from Fernand Léger. Conceived to accompany a brutally mechanistic
musical piece by Georges Antheil, the film was intended to ‘try the specators’
patience’, transforming everyday machine parts (pistons, gears, pendulums,
eggbeaters) and physical labors into a looping, repetitive, frustrating choreog-
raphy (quoted in Freeman 1996: 32).
In the US, the first cinematic avant-garde – sometimes uncomfortably
– spanned the coming of the talkies. It emerged from a series of interlinked
movements that examined cinema’s pervasive cultural role and interrogated
presumptions that motion pictures were just mindless mass entertainments.
Figure 7. Ballet Mécanique (1924). Fernand Léger-Dudley Murphy. Courtesy of the British
Film Institute.
The US avant-garde exerted the force, albeit from the margins, of ‘a dynamic
and fractious sphere of production and exhibition in which the ontology of
cinema could be investigated and expanded’ (Donald 1998: 30). It developed
in the context of, and in collaboration with, radical artistic endeavors from
continental Europe, Russia and Ukraine such as Futurism, Constructivism,
Expressionism, Neue Sachlichkeit, Dada and Surrealism. Indeed as the First
World War raged in Europe, New York served as a hot spot for Dada activ-
ism, one of Surrealism’s key precursors. Dada signified a radical, international
art movement founded in Zürich by a group of artists, essayists, performers
and poets disillusioned by war. Among its key figures were Tristan Tzara
and Marcel Janco, the latter of whom recalled: ‘we had lost confidence in our
“culture”. Everything had to be demolished’. Dada wanted to ‘shock the bour-
geoisie’, to destroy the very idea of art, to ‘attack common sense’ (quoted in
Plant 1992: 41). In fact Dada – perhaps testifying to modernist impulses at the
heart of postmodernism – refuted the postulation of any sense whatsoever: the
moment a meaning emerged, Dada would question it through practices based
on a simultaneous unfolding of vastly different or opposite events/perform-
ances and through perpetual negation and questioning. Tzara’s pronounce-
ments in his Dada Manifesto sum this up:
I’m writing a manifesto [. . .], and in principle I am against manifestos,

as I am against principles [. . .]. I’m writing this manifesto to show that
you can perform contrary actions at the same time, in one single, fresh
breath; I am against action; as for continual contradiction, and affirma-
tion too, I am neither for nor against them, and I won’t explain myself.
(1987 [1918]: 45)
In New York, Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery 291 hosted exhibits by Dada artists
Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp is well-known for his
seminal ‘anti-art’ from found objects such as ‘Fountain’, a urinal first submit-
ted (though rejected) for exhibition in New York in 1917. Such Dada ready-
mades were aimed at ‘short-circuiting the means by which art objects acquire
financial, social, and spiritual values’ (Elsaesser 1996: 17). Also in New York,
the artist Man Ray garnered his early avant-garde influences. Later, with his
friend Duchamp, he would make Anémic Cinéma (1926), a kind of cinematic
ready-made of found objects, aimed at critiquing the ways art was produced
through an aestheticizing vision (Judovitz 1996: 47). Dada strove against
‘retinal’ or pure visual aesthetics, and cinema seemed well-suited to anti-art,
as it relied on mechanized as opposed to ‘natural’ or ‘raw’ forms of seeing and
was itself a kind of social machine.
After the First World War, the strategically eclectic Duchamp helped
establish Surrealism (though he avoided adopting the term himself) with
Paris-based artists and provocateurs such as André Breton, Salvador Dalí and
Luis Buñuel. Loosely aligned to the ideologies of anarchism and communism,
surrealists strove to unmask the cultural, artificial, sometimes alchemical
process of transforming objects into ‘art’ in the social sphere. Some, such as
René Magritte, were interested in estranging the relationship between words,
images and the things they conventionally represent; others, like Dalí and
Buñuel, used painting, cinema, costume and spontaneous performances/
events to explore the psychological terrains of cultural repressions and the
subconscious. Surrealists continually revisited the world of dreams and images
of what Freud called the uncanny, harnessing their potential to push the defa-
miliarization of conventional realities to extremes.
Constructivism was an avant-garde movement that gained a following
after the war, with its international profile enhanced by pioneering artists and
sculptors like Naum Gabo and his brother Antoine Pevsner. Concerned with
hidden ‘mathematical’ and ‘symphonic’ properties of objects transformed into
artworks, the movement’s importance was noticed early on in the US. Curators
from the New York Public Library even traveled to the newly formed Soviet
Union in 1923 with the sole aim of acquiring constructivist prints and publica-
tions. Constructivism was strongly aligned to communist politics and radical
Formalism; indeed Gabo saw the Soviet revolution as renewing human values
and leveling embedded social hierarchies. As the formalist Victor Shklovsky

argued: ‘The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are
perceived and not as they are known’. These strategies, Shklovsky continued,
were designed ‘to make objects “unfamiliar” ’, to invert the ideological lens
that defined dominant ways of seeing the world and its social realities (1965
[1917]: 12). Constructivism and Formalism, in Bill Nichols’s words, were
intended to ‘confront the habitual, render it strange, and open the door to new
ways of perceiving and acting’ (2005: 162). Constructivist strategies of inciting
new forms of perception over delivering established ‘truths’ and ‘facts’ were
keenly felt in Soviet cinema, and their influence soon extended around the
world.
So where does documentary fit into all of this? At the level of practice,
there were productive exchanges: the Russian artist Aleksander Rodchenko,
for example, designed animated sequences and intertitles for documentary
filmmaker Dziga Vertov; later Rodchenko – heavily influenced by Vertov –
would himself move towards photomontage and documentary photography.
This kind of cross-fertilization was repeated in the US, where an avant-garde
emphasis on radical form and defamiliarized reality was incorporated into
nonfiction films of the 1920s and 1930s. Indeed it is extremely difficult, Horak
asserts, to separate avant-garde movements from documentary film produc-
tion as it advanced during these years: nonfiction films drew widely from a
range of radical aesthetic approaches (1993: 388). Highly influential figures
included Vertov and the Kino Pravda movement (founded in 1922, the same
year that Nanook of the North was released). Strongly dissatisfied with tradi-
tional narrative, Kino Pravda celebrated spontaneity and attempted to explode
the ordinary, mundane realities witnessed by the naked eye. Vertov sought
deeper truths in reality revealed by the ‘superhuman’ mechanical properties
of the camera. Sergei Eisenstein, more closely aligned to narrative and theatri-
cal illusionism, influenced US filmmakers with his theories of experimental
montage, while the works of surrealists Jean Vigo (À propos de Nice [1930]) and
Buñuel (Las Hurdes [1932]) offered pointed critiques of cinematic realism and
its appeals to any socially accepted ‘truth’ of human experience.
Allegiances were forged among those who shared a common sense of
purpose: even the romantic primitivist Flaherty was impressed by Vertov’s
interests in dynamic and unplanned nonfiction scenarios. Writing to his wife
Frances in 1930, Flaherty said she should immediately look up an article in
the journal The Realist about ‘a man in Russia [Vertov] [. . .] who has founded
a new school of picture – pictures without plot or character’ (Flaherty 1930).
Flaherty was also instrumental in encouraging Eisenstein’s documentary work
in Mexico and his forays to Hollywood in the early 1930s. Willard Van Dyke,
who shot the landmark documentary The River for Pare Lorentz in 1936,
admitted the influence of German expressionist art, as filtered through films
such as The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919). Van Dyke once mentioned that for
two weeks in 1922 he watched Caligari ‘almost every day’ and was soon after
enthralled by Eisenstein’s October: Ten Days that the Shook the World (1928)
and Battleship Potemkin (1925–6) (Engle 1979: 345–6). Van Dyke’s first film,
An Automatic Flight of Tin Birds (1932), was marked by expressionist and sur-
realist influences, and soon after he moved into social documentary projects.
In the 1920s and early 1930s, stylistic and ideological influences from
aesthetic movements beyond US borders were transforming filmmaking at
home, while avant-garde artists and photographers based in the US, as Horak
has shown, were enhancing their repertoires with forays into cinema. Motion
picture form and technology could inform artists working in other media
who were ‘intrigued by the rhythmic, kinetic, tonal, and dramatic possibili-
ties’ of film (Wolfe 1993: 353). Many would only ‘dabble’ in film, or use film
as an extension of other artistic practices such as painting and photography
(Horak 1995: 15). During the 1920s and 1930s, they came from various fields
including music (Virgil Thomson, Aaron Copland, Marc Blitzstein), literature
(Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Archibald MacLeish), dance (Adolph
Bolm), painting and sculpture (Boris Deutsch, Stella Arledge), photography
(Man Ray, Stella Simon, Paul Strand) and animation (Mary Ellen Bute).
Many – such as Thomson, Hemingway and Dos Passos – would contribute to
documentary projects (Wolfe 1993: 353).
Yet even with such an eclectic and mobile range of influences, it is important
not to simply collapse different avant-garde movements and pursuits into each
other – each had distinctive tendencies, specific ideas, and their followers did
not necessarily always agree, aesthetically or politically, on the best ways to
‘render strange’ habitual aesthetic production and consumption. Still, for both
Europeans and Americans engaging in avant-garde work, as Horak argues,
there was a sense of sharing ‘a broader, inclusionist rather than exclusionist
view of independent cinema’ (Horak 1995: 17). The boundaries of nations,
institutions and media were being breached. Bold statements like Potemkin
and Man With a Movie Camera were transforming ideas about delivering the
truth of experience on screen, exerting an influence across national borders and
across professional and non-professional practices. Radical journals devoted to
seeing film as the new cultural medium were also springing up: for example,
Close Up appeared in 1927 and Experimental Cinema in 1930, both exemplify-
ing contemporary transnational tendencies. Close Up was published in English,
edited in Switzerland, and included correspondents such as the communist-
leaning American Harry A. Potamkin, Herman G. Weinberg, the poet H. D.
and the British critic Ernest Betts, with contributors working out of London,
Berlin, Moscow, Paris, Geneva, New York and Los Angeles. As this scope sug-
gests, avant-garde really needs to be seen as an approximate label for varied and
frequently quite different (if mutually influential) transnational approaches.
Certainly not everyone was happy with the term: speaking of the French
avant-garde, Jacques Brunius argued that it was ‘a rather meaningless name,
with its military, would-be heroic ring that easily provoked smiles’ (1948: 53).
Terms such as pure cinema, integral cinema and absolute film – all operating
within the parameters of avant-garde work – were attempts to distinguish
and isolate qualities and styles unique to cinema as an art form, but in nar-
rowing to ‘film for film’s sake’ they also tended to constrain the very spirit of
experimentation and boundary crossing that avant-garde artists set their sights
on. James Donald suggests that avant-garde cinema is better seen as an open-
ended, though not completely disparate, movement. Its purveyors shared ‘the
same concern with the power of the cinematic image to transform the objects
it represents and to create a unique aesthetic experience for the film spectator’
(1998: 31). Similarly, Horak stresses the ways in which US avant-garde critics
and practitioners were cineastes: film lovers devoted to improving ‘the quality
of all films, whether personal or professional’ (1993: 388).
A brief sketch of a few US experimental filmmakers might illustrate how
eclectic their work was, moving across different media, across documentary
and avant-garde circles. Ralph Steiner trained as a commercial photogra-
pher and worked on photographic plates for Nanook of the North, but later
embarked on a series of films that meditate on the real or concrete world as
abstract patterns and plays of light: H2O (1929), Surf and Seaweed (1930) and
Mechanical Principles (1931). After joining the Film and Photo League, Steiner
brought an avant-garde sensibility to pro-New Deal projects such as Hands
(1934), which strings together artfully composed close-ups of hands to deliver
a message about how leisure opportunities and everyday commodities rely on
work, physical activity and, always, money. Soon after, Steiner joined the ulti-
mately fractious crew of Pare Lorentz’s The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936)
and later made The City (1939), a ‘city symphony’ co-directed with Willard
Van Dyke that became a major feature of the 1939 World’s Fair in New York
(Horak 1993: 388; Wolfe 1993: 354).
Lewis Jacobs also demonstrates the dovetailing of cutting-edge aesthetics
and documentary, while revealing common links between critical, theoretical
and practical work. A prominent purveyor of avant-garde experimentation,
Jacobs’s filmmaking legacy has effectively been eclipsed by later work as a film
historian and theorist. But he never abandoned filmmaking: early projects
included Transition (1927) and the psychological study Mobile Composition
(1930), made as part of the amateur group the Cinema Crafters of Philadelphia.
From 1930 to 1934 he was editor of Experimental Cinema, extolling the theo-
ries of Vsevolod Pudovkin, Eisenstein and Alexander Dovzhenko. His essay,
‘Experimental Cinema in America, 1921–1947’ (1947–8) is still considered
a seminal piece of criticism on the topic (Posner 2005). Lewis’s recently
rediscovered film Footnote to Fact (1933) revisits Soviet montage techniques
to highlight the tragic ironies of the Great Depression. Billboards for com-
modities are juxtaposed with down-and-outs sprawled on street corners and
in gutters: the jobless veterans and ‘forgotten men’ relegated to the margins of
US history’s grand narrative. Later documentaries such as Tree Trunk to Head
(1938) draw on experimental techniques (extreme close-ups, zooms, swish
pans, blurred images) to create a time-lapse portrait of Chaim Gross produc-
ing a sculpture. Like many who came out of avant-garde circles in the 1920s,
Lewis’s range of interests and tastes was complex and at times seemingly
contradictory. While closely identified with the experimental left, his The
Rise of American Film (1939) was criticized for its appreciation of Hollywood
and admiration (and tacit apologia) for the controversial The Birth of a Nation
(‘Lewis Jacobs’ 1997: 28; Stokes 2008: 279).
The varied work of practitioners such as Steiner and Jacobs underscores
Nichols’s assertion that modernist elements of ‘fragmentation, defamiliarization
[. . .] collage, abstraction, relativity, anti-illusionism, and a general rejection of
the transparency of realist representation all find their way into acts of docu-
mentary filmmaking’ (2001: 593). Nichols’s point is useful, even if his chief
examples – Vertov, László Moholy-Nagy, Pudovkin, Ivens, Vigo and Walter
Ruttmann – don’t include work produced in the US. In the following section
I want to turn to a key example of this work, made by two prominent figures
linked to Stieglitz and the 291 gallery: Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler.
Their Manhatta, if not the very first avant-garde film made in the US, is a
quintessential work bridging modernist aesthetics and emerging documentary
modes to encapsulate Manhattan’s kaleidoscope of forms and movements.
This marriage of modernist avant-garde strategies and nonfiction also helps
to project an ambivalent image of US national identity, just as Americans
were coming to terms with the imposing scale and anonymity of the modern
metropolis.
manhatta (1921)
Strand and Sheeler’s eleven-minute study has become one of the most influ-
ential motion pictures to explore intersections between avant-garde and non-
fiction, using modernist abstraction to defamiliarize scenes of everyday life in
New York – the quintessential ready-made urban landscape.3 As proponents
of Precisionism, Strand and Sheeler were invested in capturing the precise
and sharply defined forms of an industrialized, modern American landscape.
While influenced by European movements such as Futurism and Cubism,
Precisionism aimed for a distinctly American aesthetic, fused to the newness
and energy of urbanized New World spaces.
Reflecting its makers’ backgrounds in painting and still photography,
Figure 8. Manhatta (1921). Paul Strand-Charles Sheeler (Film Arts Guild). Courtesy of the
British Film Institute.
Manhatta appears almost modest as a cinematic statement, characterized by

carefully framed shots that evoke more an impression of still photographs with
movement than of dynamic moving images. Juan Suárez, however, sums up
the diverse elements that contribute to the film’s lasting value: ‘It is at once a
documentary, a critical statement about modernity, an aestheticist explora-
tion of patterns, shapes, movements, and rhythms, and a visual counterpart
of the descriptions of metropolitan modernity produced by contemporary
sociologists, architects, and planners’ (2002: 88). Manhatta is in many ways
exemplary of the tensions and aspirations of the time and place of its making.
Suárez observes that cinema has been ‘married to the city from birth’.
Perhaps fittingly, then, Manhatta helped establish an international vogue
for the ‘city symphony’ genre, resulting in films such as Ruttmann’s Berlin:
Symphony of a Great City (1927), Herman Weinberg’s A City Symphony (1930
– now lost, but sections survive in Autumn Fire [1930–3]), and Jay Leyda’s A
Bronx Morning (1931). The ‘city symphony’ also betrays avant-garde roots
going back to Dada: the ready-made cityscape is revealed not as the primary
material out of which cinematic ‘art’ is produced, but as always already formed
and transformed by mechanical processes.
But Strand’s and Sheeler’s film might be seen as more ambivalent about
the mechanized cityscape than many ‘city symphonies’: it arrived at a junc-
ture when the nation’s self-image was in flux, perched between notions of an
American identity steeped in agrarian and frontier traditions and those that
recognized its advanced state of urban modernity. In October 1920, Frederick
Jackson Turner’s famous frontier thesis (premiered at the Chicago Exposition
in 1893) arguing that American character was forged on the frontier through
contact with the wilderness, was reprinted in The Frontier in American History,
a well-received collection that reflected revitalized frontier interests. As David
M. Wrobel sees it, the frontier image returned as an idyll that acted as a ‘kind
of solace’ for Americans experiencing a newfound sense of technophobia
and urban unrest during uncertain postwar years (1993: 98). In the 1920s,
post-frontier anxieties were enhanced by Malthusian debates that projected
overpopulation and limited resources for a nation now pressed, so it appeared,
against its continental boundaries. Best-sellers such as Hal G. Evarts’s The
Yellow Horde (1921) and Edison Marshall’s The Voice of the Pack (1920) cel-
ebrated the transformational powers of an unspoiled wilderness, providing the
public with an imagined return to an American Eden.
Given this backdrop, Horak understandably discerns a tension in Manhatta
between the manifest celebration of the urban and modern and a latent sense
of nostalgia for passing rural and agrarian ways of life. He traces this tension
in the elaborations on the work of Walt Whitman (drawn from ‘A Broadway
Pageant [1860], ‘Mannahatta’ [1860], and ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’ [1856]),
which express a ‘yearning for a reunification [of the city] with nature, inscrib-
ing technology, urbanization, and industrialization in mass society with
naturalistic metaphors’ (Horak 1995: 280). Suárez attempts to move past
what he sees as the limits of this interpretation by questioning the notion that
Manhatta’s ‘antimodern’ tendencies are grounded in nostalgia for nature or
desires for a holistic state that would reverse the trends of modernity. Suárez
prefers to see modernity as itself marked by conflicting urges that move both
backwards and forwards. A modernist text like Manhatta ‘reveals instead a
mongrel practice that combines traditionalism and innovation, abstraction and
figurativeness, romanticism and antiromanticism, the cult of technology
and that of nature’ (2002: 90).
In both its prevailing themes and formal tensions between avant-garde and
realist aesthetics, Manhatta sums up the contradictions of a nation steeped
in the complexities of modernity: the buzzing, multicultural, constantly
changing landscape of the city clearly serves as a kind of microcosm of the
United States itself. As the opening titles tell us, New York is international
yet distinctly American in its multi-ethnicity: it is a ‘city of the world (for all
races are here)’. It is a ‘proud and passionate city’, suggesting a diverse nation
full of potential, with nearly limitless human and technological resources.
Organic shapes and masses are fused with the man-made: the arrival of a
ferry packed with commuters recalls a lumbering beast, introduced as ‘million
footed Manhattan unpent’. The anonymous crowd pressing against the ferry’s
gates also nods to the multicultural mass cinema audience, recalling Charlie
Chaplin’s bitter arrival at the ‘land of liberty’ in The Immigrant (1917), where
America’s new immigrants, expecting instant opportunity and abundance, are
instead penned in and tagged like cattle. After the ferry crowds are discharged
in Manhatta, a series of shots moves the viewer ever higher, soon losing any
sense of the individual and instead stressing the anonymity of the human mass
in a built landscape.
This image of the mass – its melding to the cycles of both natural and indus-
trial production and consumption – is stressed two minutes into the film with
a striking and somewhat jarring image of a church cemetery. The high-angle
shot reveals people and gravestones practically indistinguishable from each
other: the hard, dynamic visible city is linked to the invisible world below it.
The tower of Trinity Church cuts a shadow across the yard, linking the shot to
larger concerns: the memento mori, or traces of previous lives, which suggest
that the city’s temporality is not fixed or constant but marked by transition,
change and movement. The image also indicates the return to the soil of all
work and life, even in the midst of the oblivious concrete wilderness.
The same churchyard appears near the end of the film, book-ending the
text with images that signify time’s invisible passage. This later shot is,
importantly, bisected down the middle, the sidewalk cutting the frame at an
angle from top left to bottom right. As Eisenstein’s work suggests, it is not
just juxtapositions between different shots, but angles, divisions and complex
‘overlapping of symbolic networks’ created within the frame that can produce
pressures and intensify tensions in form and meaning.4 Above the line is the
bustling street with its endless streams of traffic, the living world in constant
motion, oblivious to fate. The lower left side of the screen is dominated by
the cemetery, marked by tombstones and stillness, again a reminder that the
built environment visible to the camera is mirrored by an invisible population
lurking below ground. Here too, the neoclassical notion of ‘et in Arcadia ego’,
a phrase that invokes Virgil, is referenced in an indirect way: ‘even in Arcadia,
death is to be found’.
Following the earlier shot of the cemetery, another shot near street level
recalls Strand’s photo ‘Wall Street’ (1915), emphasizing several huge windows
– blank eyes that dwarf pedestrians and traffic passing beneath them. Strand’s
acute sensibility for the semiotic resonances of line, juxtaposition, visual
weight, volume, lighting contrasts and framing in still photography is every-
where in evidence. As John Berger puts it, Strand’s approach (influenced by
his mentor Stieglitz) ‘lets him choose ordinary subjects which in their ordi-
nariness are extraordinarily representative’. Strand’s photographs can ‘enter
so deeply into the particular that they reveal to us the stream of a culture or
a history which is flowing through that particular subject like blood’ (Berger
1980: 42–3). Strand’s press release for the film stated his intent in more clearly
Precisionist terms: ‘The photographers have tried to register directly the
living forms in front of them and to reduce through the most rigid selection,
volumes, lines and masses, to their intensest terms of expressiveness. Through
these does the spirit manifest itself’ (quoted in Horak 1995: 272).
As the film develops, the volume, line and mass of the cityscape appear
simultaneously as acutely defined, machine-made yet strangely organic. The
city now exhibits a degree of anthropomorphized spirit: buildings are ‘high
growths of iron, slender, strong, splendidly uprising toward clear skies’. While
recalling city panoramas such as Biograph’s Panorama from Times Building
(1905) and striking skyscraper images from the series Ford Educational Weekly
(1916–24), Strand and Sheeler’s long shots interrupt the established realism
of urban photography by intently fetishizing the skyscraper’s thrusting height
and power. The camera tilts top to bottom, then again bottom to top, encour-
aging wonder at the sheer scale of these animal-like ‘iron beauties’. Human
silhouettes toil in landscapes of towers and cranes, hanging tentatively from
rafters, melding and disappearing into the machine-made world.
Any impression of idealistic fusion of the city with nature, like the ‘clear’
sky itself, is soon obscured – by smoke. It pours from chimneys, the camera
perched on roofs alongside smokestacks. On occasion the camera itself –
aligned to the viewer’s perspective – is engulfed by smoke (the film premiered
in Paris in 1922 as La Fumée de New York). Smoke pours from train yards
and from the stacks of ferries on the harbor: at times it gives the grand city
a satanic and stained appearance (the theme would become a mainstay of the
‘city symphony’, as seen in The City’s industrial ‘City of Smoke’ sequence).
These shots of smoke in the sky, on land and over water imply not just endless
urban energy and industry, but contribute to a theme: rather than simply
illustrating the poetic intertitles, Strand’s and Sheeler’s urban images lie in
dialectical tension with the romantic, holistic ideals expressed by Whitman.
Whitman’s work, according to Horak, ‘constructed [. . .] a romantic discourse
that repressed the conflicts of nineteenth-century industrial and class relations
in favor of a homogeneous melting pot of technology, art, science, nature, and
man’ (1995: 278–9). Again and again lines used in the film similarly combine
man-made and natural imagery: ‘city of hurried and sparkling waters, city
nested in bays’. But the shot from one of the highest vantage points, giving
a bird’s eye view that aligns the spectator’s mastery with the eye of camera,
features the ziggurat chimney of the Banker’s Trust Building releasing more
smoke into the air. Such images work against Whitmanesque romanticism:
decay, pollution and renewal are inextricably entwined in this fusion of nature
and human industry.
The film’s final few minutes are given over to the movements and flows of
water: the river and traffic on the harbor. The Cunard Line’s RMS Aquitania,
a popular and luxurious cruise ship, takes star billing as several tug boats
cluster around like eager fans. We then return to the streets, which now appear
as deep ravines, traffic barely visible within their dark recesses. Shadows
create disturbing angles and cut across the view, suggesting uncertainty and
foreboding, while extreme camera angles contribute to a ‘fragmentation of
the [viewing] subject’s perception’ (Horak 1995: 275). This disorienting view
recalls the constructivist canted perspective that aimed to challenge traditional
perspectival order and coherence; it also draws attention to the filming appara-
tus as the instrument of vision. Yet it’s also akin to other artistic practices that
aimed to undermine the complacency of the here and now, like the anamor-
phic skull that cuts across and disturbs the balance of Hans Holbein’s The
Ambassadors (1533). This warning is reinforced by the stunning split image of
bustling street above and cemetery below.
Finally, the titles command the sunset – the end of day – to ‘drench with
your splendor me or the men and women generations after me’. In the dis-
tance a tugboat crosses the frame, suggesting again that images captured by
the ‘timeless’ medium of film are not wedded to particular instants in time,
but are part of time’s flow. Like smoke dissipating over water, urban human-
ity is transient, bound to cycles of life, death and renewal (or reconstruction
and rebuilding). From the onrushing crowds of its opening scenes to this final
coda, Manhatta’s imagery suggests that ‘unnatural’ city rhythms and flows
are fused with nature. Horak suggests the film echoes Whitman’s ‘yearning
for reunification with nature’, and its tendencies towards visual and narra-
tive closure ‘violate’ modernism’s ‘discontinuous and nonnarrative aesthetic
strategies’ (1995: 280–3). Yet rather than being saturated by nostalgia, qua
Whitman, or expressing scepticism towards the coupling of nature and tech-
nology, the film stresses the complex fusion of presumed opposites: a fusion
that leads to delirious growth and expansion of the nation, but also to the
loss of individuality and specificity. The static aesthetic of the photograph
fuses with the dynamism of the moving city; the precision of lines, angles
and careful juxtaposition meets the unpredictable flows of nature; growth and
progress are shadowed by spoliation and pollution.
Horak partly retreats from aligning Whitman and Manhatta too closely,
finally suggesting that Manhatta’s heterogeneity reveals a text that is both
modernist and antimodernist, that might be ultimately self-conflicted and
unresolved. Similarly Suárez, extrapolating from Siegfried Kracauer, argues
that the film’s reassertion of nature would not, in any case, necessarily make it
anti-modern – in fact modernist art is characterized by a flattening of opposi-
tional categories that finds ‘the natural back in the heart of the modern’ (2002:
104).
Manhatta, Suárez continues, looks not only forwards but also backwards,
recalling the popularity of actualities and the tradition of the panoramic
view. Unlike the traditional panorama, however, which sought to produce a

‘complete impression’ of a scene or view via its expansive format, Manhatta
reproduces the city as a ‘fractured space’ (2002: 99). This is not the conven-
tional tourist gaze striving for visual mastery, but a fragmented journey that
reflects constant disruptions experienced when moving through urban space.
Persistent formal and thematic techniques reproduce this fracturing, as in the
shot-counter-shot sequence first from, and then of, the ferry near the film’s
opening. Strategies of repetition such as the shots of Trinity Church cemetery
early and late in the film disrupt any sense of organic progress, while the back-
and-forth echoing of natural and built environments such as ravine/street,
eye/window, beautiful beast/building suggests (like that quintessentially
modernist film King Kong) that nature and technology lie in dialectical tension
at the heart of modern experience.
Manhatta both reflects and refracts American urbanism, imaging the dis-
tinctiveness of US modernity and compelling viewers to look afresh at the
familiar cityscape. It celebrates American newness, hybridity and dynamism
while subtly marking this optimism with caution and the mementos of a
common, inescapable fate.
c i ne ma a t t h e m a r gi n s
As the 1920s progressed, Hollywood’s streamlined, highly standardized
industrial approach dominated movie-making and distribution in the US,
and commanded the world’s markets. The studios had a stranglehold on US
theater exhibition, though alternative screening spaces did exist in venues
such as universities, rented halls and art galleries. Save for a few exceptional
‘blockbusters’, networks for distributing avant-garde/experimental and docu-
mentary films remained unreliable at best, nonexistent at worst. Small-scale
experiments like Manhatta struggled to find audiences: after a brief distribu-
tion run as New York the Magnificent, the film was screened in art galleries
and later acted as a scenic inserted into longer programs. Similarly Flaherty’s
24 Dollar Island (1926–7) – an elegant ‘city symphony’ that envisions New
York as an intricate series of intersecting lines and graceful, abstract forms
– was barely seen. Flaherty’s film eventually could be glimpsed as a moving-
image backdrop to a stage show at New York’s Roxy Theatre, entitled ‘The
Sidewalks of New York’.
Still, there were production and distribution networks being established
outside the burgeoning Hollywood system. These included, but were not
limited to, amateur films, film clubs and ‘little’ cinemas – all of which
were important to the development of documentary in the US.5 Before the
1920s, various nonfiction subgenres such as travelogues, ethnographic films,
industrials, scientific films, military films and (though more rare due to the
expense) home movies had been produced outside of mainstream production
networks, though, as Patricia Zimmermann reminds us, the precise definitions
and functions of these films were not always completely clear (1995b: 147). The
amateur movement of the 1920s, devoted chiefly to non-commercial filmmak-
ing, offered direction, self-definition and a ‘discursive umbrella’ under which
a variety of non-Hollywood practices could coexist (1995b: 140). Amateur
filmmaking played a key role in constructing the idea and social location of
nonfiction film as lying outside or beyond the constraints of Hollywood and
the commercial market – a legacy it would carry into the 1930s, as the formal
and social objectives of documentary also became further crystallized. Though
the idea of amateur filmmaking was not new in the 1920s, it was around this
time that amateurs, with the help of newly marketed hands-on technologies,
developed into a widespread and well-organized group, replete with publica-
tions, ideals and dogmas.
A range of products – such as Kodak’s 16 mm safety film and a stream-
lined Cine-Kodak 16 mm camera, first marketed in 1923 – helped to initiate
massive changes in both the practice and idea of film. Hands-on access meant
(keeping in mind the significant costs of much of this equipment) that ‘every
man and woman potentially [could] become a film artist’ (Horak 1993: 389).
This allowed individuals to control the finished product, bringing filming and
viewing into everyday experience, into domestic and leisure activities. The
idealization of amateur work sprung up via advocate organizations such as the
Amateur Cinema League (ACL), founded in 1926, with its flagship journal
Movie Makers, which stressed the value of doing creative work outside of
institutional and professional circles.6 The valorization of the amateur coin-
cided neatly with the interests of outsiders like the cinematic avant-gardists,
who ‘rejected consumer culture through experimentation’ and strove to define
themselves as removed from the demands of capitalism and commercialism
(Zimmermann 1995b: 141; Horak 1995: 28–9).
Avant-garde advocates tended to share in hostilities towards Hollywood’s
well-established assembly line and the ‘mediocrity’ it produced. Ernest Betts
argued in Heraclitus, or The Future of Films (1928) that ‘when the Future of
Hell is written [. . .] a large number of pages will have to be reserved for the
Americans who make films’. Hollywood had ‘doped the world with rotten
juices. By a strength of purpose which is staggering and its one superb virtue,
it has flung at us, year by year, in unending deluge, its parcel of borrowed
stories and flashy little moralities’ (1928: 40–6). The critic Bryher quipped
in Close Up that ‘Hollywood can produce kitsch magnificently but it cannot
produce art’ (quoted in Donald 1998: 28).7 Avant-garde filmmakers shared
in this disaffection, critiquing Hollywood’s crass commercialism and Fordist
approach. Filmmakers snubbed Hollywood by making a virtue of cheapness:
the opening titles of Robert Florey and William Cameron Menzies’s The Love
of Zero (1928) flaunt the fact that ‘this impressionistic picture’ was made for
$200. Florey and Slavko Vorkapić’s The Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood
Extra (1927) was supposedly made for $97, and successfully ran at alternative
movie houses.
Yet if avant-garde artists and groups like the ACL, initially, viewed ama-
teurs and independents as opposed to Hollywood, it should be stressed that
not everyone was interested in subverting mainstream cinema’s commodi-
fication of art and culture. As Zimmermann argues, subtle connections and
distinctions existed between professionals and non-professionals. Amateur
filmmaking ‘mapped out a discursive, production, and social space for
experimentation’ not only among individuals interested in making ‘person-
ally meaningful’ political and avant-garde statements, but among professional
cinematographers who tested and created new film effects using amateur
equipment (1995b: 139). Cecil B. DeMille used Bell and Howell Filmo and
Eyemo amateur cameras to shoot tight crowd scenes and obtain a spontane-
ous ‘documentary’ style for films like The Ten Commandments (1923) and The
Godless Girl (1929). Florey was ‘lionized’ by amateur magazines as the ideal
amateur to emulate, yet was an experienced assistant director who worked for
major studios and directors such as von Sternberg (Zimmermann 1995a: 82,
1986: 63). Slavko Vorkapić anonymously contributed to the left-wing social
documentary movement in the 1930s, yet was also an innovative montage
specialist in Hollywood (a ‘Vorkapich edit’ became familiar Hollywood termi-
nology). Dudley Murphy, pioneer of the American avant-garde, made short
music films (screened between feature films) featuring major performers such
as Bessie Smith and Duke Ellington, marked by both documentary and avant-
garde flourishes. For David E. James, such ‘hybrid’ careers underline the
ongoing transactions between non-Hollywood and Hollywood circles, between
political and/or avant-garde outsiders and industry insiders, a process where
‘experimentalism was industrialized in various ways’ (2005: 42). The tech-
niques and aesthetics of amateur, avant-garde and documentary movements all
were in part influenced by, and found their way into, Hollywood films.
Indeed, as seen in the previous chapter, many nonfiction filmmakers actively
sought mainstream distribution, accepting Hollywood funding and producing
the consumer-friendly spectacles it demanded. Among them, Cooper and
Shoedsack, Flaherty, and Osa and Martin Johnson, for example, showed little
aversion to Hollywood and the lucrative careers that beckoned – at least not
while their films remained popular draws. Cooper and Schoedsack found
great success creating Hollywood fantasies, while Flaherty, after some aborted
stints for the studios, would eventually develop a hardened attitude towards
Hollywood and all it signified. By the mid to late 1920s, Flaherty was losing
faith in the same studio machine that had provided carte blanche financing for
his Moana, and was manifesting a stubborn preference for small-scale shoot-
ing methods while experimenting with visual composition and editing. A shift
away from narrative and studio concerns was already demonstrated in films
such as 24 Dollar Island and The Pottery Maker (1925), the latter made with
the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Perhaps Flaherty’s gradual (in terms both
of practice and attitude) migration towards the margins of Hollywood reflects
a general trend in US documentary as it began to define itself in the late 1920s
and early 1930s. Working alongside amateur and avant-garde movements and
their advocates, many documentary filmmakers would view nonfiction as a
form that, at its most meaningful and most ethical, was produced outside of
the formal strictures and commercial imperatives of the studios.
The sense that there were viable options outside Hollywood extended to
distribution and exhibition as well. The idea of the little cinema, an art and
foreign language cinema movement, was first suggested by the National Board
of Review in 1922, following interest in European films like Ernst Lubitsch’s
Passion (1919) and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. By the late 1920s little cinemas,
taking inspiration from the cine-clubs of Paris and London, were appearing
in cities such as New York (including Michael Mindlin’s ‘subway circuit’
of theaters), Washington, DC, Rochester, Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia
and Los Angeles (Gomery 1992: 173–4; Horak 1993: 390–5). Some, such as
Rochester’s ‘Little Theatre’, are still doing business and remain devoted to the
distribution of lesser known and art-house films.
Most little cinemas were committed to developing mixed programs showing
both US and European (especially German and Soviet) films. Hollywood films
were bolstered by lavish marketing campaigns, mass circulation magazines and
radio advertising, and screened in the picture palaces that were dominating the
film-viewing landscape. Little cinemas were posed as more intimate alterna-
tives to the Hollywood experience: spaces of ‘civil exchange and polite engage-
ment’ (Wasson 2005: 39). The little cinemas’ commitment to a range of motion
pictures spanned foreign films, avant-garde and documentary, as confirmed by
the Rochester Little Theatre’s stated desire to screen ‘unusual, entertaining,
documentary, foreign-language, artistic, and musical pictures’ (‘History of the
Reel World’ 2008).
In the 1930s, expenses involved in the transition to sound and the hard-
ships of the Depression saw many little cinemas struggle and close, delaying
the spread of alternative movie houses until after the war, when ‘art cinema’
and ‘art houses’ were widely established. The 1930s did, however, see a boost
for experimental and documentary film when, in 1935, New York’s Museum
of Modern Art set up a film library, screenings and circulation networks that
helped establish art cinema as a social and institutional framework for thinking
about film. MOMA would become an important ‘institutional prop’ for the
documentary movement, sponsoring the premiere of The Plow that Broke the
Plains in 1936, acquiring eleven British documentaries in 1937 and becoming a

depository for Joris Ivens’s work during the Second World War (Waugh 1981:
226).8
The 1930s saw the establishment of the New York Film Society and the
Film Forum, both private membership clubs formed to show ‘motion pic-
tures of excellence, not ordinarily to be seen in even the little playhouse, or
forbidden for public performance by the censor’ (quoted in Wasson 2005: 41).
Alternative film was boosted, as Haidee Wasson observes, by writing about
film: a range of texts – from the criticism of Terry Ramsaye, Eisenstein and
Rudolph Arnheim (Film als Kunst [Film as Art] was published in German in
1932) to popular magazines and journals – began to ‘apologize for movies’
by extolling their social value (Wasson 2005: 14). Film viewing was encour-
aged among elite circles devoted to viewing cinema as art and education. As
Wasson argues, ‘attempts to define and shape the cultures of cinema during
this period should also be understood as a set of social practices that included
writing, arguing, and reading about films on a wide and public scale that was
significant unto itself’ (2005: 15). As many bemoaned the banal state of popular
Hollywood fare, the notion of a sophisticated ‘film culture’ was taking root.
The 1920s was a decade of unprecedented industrial expansion for American

movies, with US films comprising 95 percent of those shown in Britain and
Canada, 80 percent in South America and 70 percent in France: ‘The sun,
it now appears, never sets on the British empire and the American motion
picture’ is how one magazine described the situation (quoted in Rosenberg
1982: 103). With such prominence on the national and international scene,
film was under intense scrutiny, with demands for careful investigation into
the medium’s pervasive cultural, moral and ideological roles in everyday
life. As Barbara Low wrote in Close Up in 1927: ‘Can we be satisfied that the
Cinema is a method of promoting mind growth rather than one of mechanizing
mentality?’ (1998 [1927]: 250). Discourses springing up around issues of film
culture and its links to social betterment or degeneration reflected awareness
of cinema’s inherent ‘publicness’9 – and this idea of publicness, of cinema as a
kind of social machine, would underlie documentary’s enhanced profile over
the coming decades.
The emphasis on cinema’s social and heuristic potential was framed as
a challenge to Hollywood’s established methods. The cinematic apparatus,
rather than simply entertain crowds and turn a profit, should produce socially
transformative texts, even feed radical social change. Coming from the politi-
cal left, the denser socially and ideologically persuasive possibilities of cinema
were being investigated, while on the right, film was being tested as a force
for morality, ‘Americanization’ and uplift. Hollywood was the conventional
target in these debates, but other non-Hollywood modes were becoming sites
of intense ideological contestation and appropriation as well. Documentary, as

it became more closely associated with social enlightenment and anti-illusion-
ism, would be singled out by many who saw it as key to mass media interven-
tion in the nation’s social ills.
As William Stott has suggested, as the devastating effects of the Depression
set in, economic crisis and political upheaval coincided with the unprecedented
expansion of mass information: movies, radio, magazines and newspapers
assailed and captivated the American public. At the same time, documentary
material across these media seemed to take on a heightened status, as ‘reliable
witnesses’ were sought to uncover the hidden facts and the ‘awful truths of a
broken economy’. The documentary approach was finding favor as the dis-
possessed sought ‘the presentation of actual facts in a way that [made] them
credible and telling to people’ (1973: 72–3). Documentary would play a major
role in the increasingly radicalized popular imaginary of the 1930s, though
its enhanced profile was probably not merely the result of economic crisis –
rather it came out of a series of overlapping developments that positioned it
as a unique vehicle for representing and mobilizing America’s disenfranchised
masses and ‘forgotten men’. Documentary, with roots in avant-garde and
low-budget nonfictions, could be seen as operating outside elite corporate
and capitalist interests. As the 1930s progressed, this sense of documentary’s
relative immunity from crass commercial imperatives would see it raised to a
unique public status.
The next chapter tracks some of the trends in documentary through to the
start of the Second World War. It maps the uneven yet persistent shifts in the
mid-1930s towards the assimilation of radical photography and film move-
ments into public projects and government-backed information units aimed at
raising social awareness. This was also a period when the term ‘documentary
film’ would become common parlance, seen as a distinct approach with specific
aims and functions relating to promoting public responsibility and national
unity.
note s
1. Michael Renov argues that the association of documentary with ‘sober discourses’
misrepresents the historical complexity and play of documentary signifiers (as in the work
of Vigo, Ivens or Franju). See Renov (2004: 100).
2. Film histories cited as inadequate by Nichols include Rotha (1952 [1935]), Ellis (1989) and
Barnouw (1983).
3. In 2008 Posner supervised a digital restoration which runs for twelve minutes.
4. See, for example, Aumont (1987: 87–8) and Nilsen (1935: 116–19).
5. Other movements, especially the African American ‘race picture’ business, are highly
significant in terms of the history of independent production and distribution.
6. By the 1930s, however, the ACL was emphasizing the need for higher professional
standards.
7. Bryher was the nom-de-plume of Annie Winifred Ellerman, the daughter and heiress of
Britain’s wealthiest man.
8. After the Second World War, art cinema revived with the help of popular European
imports. Influential film clubs like Cinema 16, founded in New York by Amos Vogel in
1947 and inspired by Maya Deren’s work, signaled the ‘second wave’ of avant-garde
filmmaking in the US. See MacDonald (2003).
9. For more detailed discussion see Wasson (2005: 15), who glosses Hansen (1995: 365–6).
ch apter 4
Activism and Advocacy: The

Depression Era
In 1936, an article in the Mid-Week Pictorial took some sideswipes at avant-

garde films like Rain (1929) and Lot in Sodom (1932) while praising the varied,
low-budget efforts being made for politically active projects:
Not all the films that are made are the product of Hollywood. [. . .]
There are little fadistic art movies – studies in light and shade of a box
of matches, or a prolonged camera attack on an afternoon of rain. There
are films made obscurely without box-office appeal, by serious craftsmen
who wish to experiment with the medium of pictures; wealthy amateurs
who do symbolic stories out of the Bible; and amateur rookies who try
their hand at direction with the Brooklyn Bridge as the cast. But the really
important films, made outside the iron confines of Hollywood, are those
produced by genuine film artists, seriously experimenting with the young
technique of the camera, and the producers of the scattered films that
attempt to portray American Labor Problems. (‘Dignity of Toil’ 1936)
As this overview attests, the 1930s was marked by beliefs that the ‘really
important’ work was not taking place in major studios nor in the aesthetic
experiments and armchair travels of wealthy cineastes, but in street-level
political films. The Mid-Week Pictorial singles out here the American Labor
Productions’ union activist film Millions of Us (1936). There is, however, a
more complicated story behind this opposition of art and politics in that the
anonymous group that called itself American Labor Productions was actually
made up of just those ‘fadistic’ art movie-makers and Hollywood professionals
dismissed here as superficial, such as the avant-garde montage specialist Slavko
Vorkapić. Indeed, much political documentary of the 1930s was indebted to
an ongoing film culture of experimentation and to crossovers between profes-
sional and non-professional circuits established during the previous decade.
a c tiv is m and a d vo c ac y : th e depression era 87
Though it might seem logical to see the rise of politically active filmmak-
ing in the 1930s as directly resulting from the social and financial pressures of
the Great Depression, the seeds of dissent were actually sown at the height of
1920s economic hedonism. As left-wing filmmakers Leo Hurwitz and Ralph
Steiner recalled:
During the twenties we grew disgusted with the philistinism of the

commercial film product, its superficial approach, trivial themes, and
its standardization of film treatment: the straight-line story progress-
ing from event to event on a pure suspense basis, unmarred by any
imaginative use of the camera, unmarred by any freshness in editing or
any human or formal sensitivity. Our reaction, which we shared with
the young generation of experimental filmmakers, was a more or less
aesthetic revolt from the current manner of film production. (quoted in
Alexander 1981: 19)
This stress on form and aesthetics as a means to contest mainstream practices

underlines the ways in which film art and increasing access to hands-on film-
making and exhibition (evidenced by avant-garde and amateur movements)
underpinned a cultural politics that fed into the radical documentary projects
of the 1930s.
The heated political climate of the Depression era would overlap with the
distillation of documentary form and practice; many of the generic elements
we now commonly recognize in documentary were established during these
years. As Charles Wolfe observes: ‘In 1930, [Harry] Potamkin projected a
future cinema born of experimentation with the filmic image as document;
by the end of the decade, [Lewis] Jacobs was able to speak confidently of
a full-fledged genre, the maturation and social relevance of which seemed
amply evident’ (1993: 351). Paul Rotha’s landmark study Documentary Film
appeared in the mid-1930s, though even then, critics believed the major-
ity of cinemagoers probably still didn’t know what a ‘documentary film’
was (C. N. 1936: 763; Anon. 1936: 47). This state of affairs was quickly
changing. During these years, identities as working ‘documentarists’ and
‘documentarians’ were forged, while documentary emerged as a ‘conceptual
category through which discussions concerning the history, aesthetics, and
social value of cinema advanced’ (Wolfe 1993: 351–2). As such, documentary
was being claimed as a mode in urgent need of defining, categorizing and
theorizing.
Documentary’s increasingly prominent social status in the 1930s came
within the context of unique convergences between politics and mass culture
in the US, among them the ‘cultural front’ that resulted from ‘the encounter
between a powerful social movement – the Popular Front – and the modern
cultural apparatus of mass entertainment and education’ (Denning 1997:

xviii). Amid the political upheavals of hunger marches, labor protests, rioting,
intense left-wing demonstrations, right-wing reprisals and the growing threat
of fascism were ongoing reassessments aimed at stabilizing ‘American’ identity
and the disruptively evolving nation: at creating ‘an official mass culture’ from
‘competing aesthetic and political tendencies’ (Kahana 2008: 67). Writers,
intellectuals, historians, journalists, artists and filmmakers were grappling
with questions of what constituted an American ‘public’ or ‘popular’ culture,
and how its attendant cultural expressions might mobilize Americans and
promote a collective national good. Moving images, for many, seemed to hold
the promise of raising public awareness of social ills and instigating reforms.
This chapter looks at the escalating ambitions for documentary in the
1930s, focusing on how the documentary idea became tied to political radical-
ism, to demands for authenticity and transparency in the media, and finally
to government photography and film projects. We see here growing tensions,
identified by Jonathan Kahana, between documentary as a mode of expression
‘in which radicals and progressive intellectuals grappled with the problem of
how cultural form and social action could be related’, and documentary as a
mode for organizing audiences ‘in a hegemonic capacity, announcing crises
and managing them on behalf of the state’ (Kahana 2008: 68). In this latter
sense, documentary can be seen serving as a kind of ‘state apparatus’ operating
in the name of national interests.
s o c i a l d o c um e n t a r y: e a r l ier t r a c es
The reformist roots of social documentary film in the United States precede
photography, but in many histories the early use of photographic images to
document, highlight and publicize social ills is often linked to the Danish
immigrant and police reporter Jacob A. Riis. In 1888, using the advent of flash
photography, Riis developed a stereopticon presentation called ‘The Other
Half: How it Lives and Dies in New York’, and soon published the illustrated
book, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York
(1890). Riis’s photos remain classic documentary exposés of social inequities
and divisions. As Musser puts it, Riis’s exhibitions ‘almost single-handedly
launched the social-issue screen documentary, which prospers, primarily now
on television, to this day’ (1990: 40). While there are gaps – historically and
ideologically – between Riis and the social documentary turn of the 1930s,
Riis’s lectures and publications were among the few in the late-nineteenth
century to document the abject poverty of immigrants’ slum dwellings and
dark tenement interiors; the cellars and back alleys removed from the hubbub
of middle- and upper-class life. Riis helped to uncover ‘the dislocations
between the private and public spheres that were symptomatic of the daily life
of the poor’ (Musser 1990a: 40).
At the same time, Riis’s views gave the educated middle classes a glimpse
into the ‘dangerous, the fantastic, the grotesque, the impossible, at a close but
safe remove’ – as Robert Sklar describes the popular draw of lurid early cinema
attractions (1994: 21). Contemporaries described Riis’s mercury flash images
of the private worlds of the poor as ‘pictures of reeking, murder-stained,
god-forsaken alleys and poverty-stricken tenements’. Such ‘sensational lan-
guage’, Maren Stange argues, speaks to wider questions not only regarding the
motives and public functions of Riis’s work, but of the mixture of entertain-
ment and ideology that lies at the heart the documentary tradition itself (1989:
1).1 Indeed, Riis’s presentations might be seen as implicitly conjuring a kind
of tourist gaze: the lecture tour of the urban slum suggests associations with
the touristic ‘excursion’, where the ‘respectable half’ could be assured of their
elevated social position and domination (Stange 1989: 5–6).
In her careful unpicking of the Riis legacy, Stange shows that he was not the
first to use photography to document the conditions of the poor (some point
to John Thompson’s photographs in Street Life in London [1877]). Riis prob-
ably didn’t even photograph some of his best-known images, nor was he the
first to use magic lantern technology to put across socially conscious messages.
Moreover, the solutions to poverty he presented were grounded in an endur-
ing faith in late-nineteenth-century bourgeois ideals and private interests in
the form of sponsorship, patronage and charity (Stange 1989: 5). Still, Riis’s
focus on the New York poor and on tenement reform was distinctive and
influential beyond its local contexts. With hindsight, this combination of pho-
tographic projection, public presentation and moral philosophizing (Riis’s lec-
tures were sometimes preceded by scripture reading and a prayer) – and even
Riis’s reliance on sensation, spectacle, staged pathos and the guiding force of
the lecturer/voiceover and music to create a mood – can be seen to point the
way towards later strategies in social documentary.
Perhaps closer to social documentary – and particularly to the institutional
functions of 1930s documentary – was the photographic work of Lewis Hine
and the Pittsburgh Survey, which appeared in 1908–9. The survey intended
to use new methodologies for collecting and analyzing data about social condi-
tions to construct an ‘objective’ representation of industrial workers that would
‘substantially contribute to organizing and stabilizing the reform coalition’s
influence on corporate and government policy making’ (Stange 1989: 49).
Hine’s work demonstrates the meeting of the increasingly formalized practice
of sociology with advancing visual technologies such as photography, which, it
was thought, could more accurately document social conditions. Hine was pri-
marily a still photographer, working after cinema had already come to promi-
nence; as a result many documentary histories skip over his role in the use of
photographic records as social documents.2 But photographer Arthur Siegel

suggested that Hine ‘defined very simply the documentary attitude when he
said “I wanted to show things that had to be corrected. I wanted to show things
that had to be appreciated” ’ (quoted in Stott 1973: 21). Hine himself under-
lined the importance of the ‘social photographer’ to ‘social uplift’:
Curtis, Burton Holmes, Stoddard and others have done much along
special lines of social photography. The greatest advance in social work
is to be made by the popularizing of camera work, so these records may
be made by those who are in the thick of the battle [. . .] [W]hat a field for
photographic art lies untouched in the industrial world. There is urgent
need for the intelligent interpretation of the world’s workers, not only
for the people of today, but for future ages. (Hine 1980 [1909]: 112–13)
Hine’s invocation of illustrated lecturers such as Burton Holmes and Stoddard

and an ethnographic photographer and filmmaker such as Curtis suggests a
keen understanding of the diverse social uses and political potential of photog-
raphy and film. The work of Riis and Hine shows a passion not just for social
documentation and revelation, but for defining a participatory public role
through documentary images.
Hine had other influences on documentary’s future: Paul Strand was a
student of Hine’s at the progressive Ethical Culture Fieldston School, and it
was while on a fieldtrip in Hine’s class that Strand first visited Alfred Stieglitz’s
and Edward Steichen’s 291 gallery, motivating Strand to take photography
seriously. Hine was also close to Roy Stryker, who, we will see, was to become
a central managerial figure in the photography initiatives of Roosevelt’s New
Deal. In 1924, Stryker published the reformist economics study American
Economic Life and the Means of Its Improvement, drawing on his mentor Hine’s
photographs of rural and industrial working conditions.
Also echoing the work of Riis and Hine were films aimed at social educa-
tion and uplift made by commercial interests, such as Edison projects dealing
with welfare institutions: Children Who Labor (1912) and Public and Private
Care of Infants (1912). The latter’s high moral stance saw it become one of
earliest movies to be screened on Sundays in conservative, Sabbath-observing
cities in the South. Public and Private Care is a dramatization of a working
widow struggling to look after two children, one of which dies in a public care
home (thus advocating for better funded and individualized care). The film,
sometimes referred to as a documentary, uses what we’d now call ‘shock doc’
strategies (also seen in sex hygiene films of the First World War), showing
stark images of starving infants that are unsettling and explicit. In addition to
these social welfare films, later dramatic films made by activist groups such as
Labor Film Services, shown at labor film festivals in major cities in the early
1920s, were significant uses of cinema as social intervention before the 1930s
and demonstrated alternative media practices that served as challenges to the
censors. Some labor agitators were considered so dangerous that J. Edgar
Hoover arranged for spies to monitor their film productions (Ross 1998: 171).
‘ a wo r k in g c l a s s c i n e m a f or a mer ic a ’
The early years of the Depression are often typified by a hapless government,
headed by Herbert Hoover, turning its back on the dispossessed poor and
unemployed who were passively waiting for handouts in Hoovervilles and
breadlines. Yet, Roy Rosenzweig reminds us, this was actually a period of mass
unrest and intense political action: ‘sit-ins at relief stations, national and state
hunger marches, demonstrations at City Halls, and direct resistance to evic-
tions’ (1980: 5). On 6 March 1930, communist organizers oversaw one of the
largest protests of unemployed workers yet staged: nearly one million came out
for what became known as ‘Red Thursday’. But media coverage was limited,
and newsreel footage was censored by the New York police. Sam Brody, a
founding member of the Film and Photo League, wrote in the Daily Worker:
‘If the capitalist class fears pictures and prevents us from seeing records of
events like the March 6 unemployment demonstration [. . .] we will equip our
own cameramen and make our own films’ (quoted in James 2005: 105; ‘Tear
Gas Routs Reds’ 1930: 1–2).
As William Alexander describes it, the establishment of the Workers’
Film and Photo League (WFPL) of New York in 1930 was an effort to bring
together ‘a scattered, but ideologically united, left-wing kino-group’ (1981: 4).
The WFPL’s roots went back to communist and socialist organizations of the
early 1920s, specifically to the Workers’ International Relief (WIR), a commu-
nist front that was set up, at Lenin’s request, in 1921 by the political impresario
Willi Münzenberg in Berlin to coordinate famine and drought relief efforts for
Russia. Despite providing cultural and ideological directives, the Berlin-based
WIR was relatively decentralized, and would affiliate with a range of left-wing
cultural organizations in the US, such as the Workers’ Laboratory Theatre.
It also became a key force during the 1920s for extending film production
and distribution towards radical ends, focusing on industrial labor and class
politics (Campbell 1984: 69–71).3 The WFPL inherited the WIR’s interest
in socialist politics and cinema theory and an interest in film’s mass audience
potential (during the 1920s, the WIR largely handled the non-theatrical distri-
bution of Soviet features and political newsreels in the US). The WFPL would
extend this role, calling for radical changes in US film practice and distribu-
tion (Campbell 1984: 70). The coming of the Depression reinforced efforts
to forge links between communist, socialist and labor union-based activism,
and to further develop a systematized approach to producing and distributing

political films that could address a mass public.
The WFPL included the journalist Seymour Stern in Hollywood, Lewis
Jacobs in Philadelphia and Samuel Brody, Leo Seltzer, Robert Del Duca, Lester
Balog, David Platt and the group’s ‘unofficial spokesman’ Harry Potamkin in
New York. As Stern wrote in The Left: ‘A working class cinema for America?
. . . A cinema, in a word, that offers the exploited class of America precisely
the opposite, in spirit, technique, and ideology, to the Hollywood movie – the
advertisement for American Money? . . . What a possibility! What a vision!
. . . Films in the name of the American Revolutionary Proletariat!’ (quoted in
Alexander 1981: 3–4). The New York branch of the (W)FPL (‘Workers’ was
dropped after 1933) would list among its associates Leo Hurwitz, Jay Leyda,
Margaret Bourke-White and Ralph Steiner, all of whom would, to a greater or
lesser extent, blur lines between avant-garde aesthetics, politics and documen-
tary. As Brody put it: ‘Ours is a gigantic task, challenging the most institution-
alized of all the bourgeois arts [US cinema] with its monster monopolies and
gigantic network for mass distribution’ (quoted in Alexander 1981: 30–1). At
its peak in the early 1930s, the FPL numbered nearly one hundred associate
members and had affiliates in cities across the US.
The work of the FPL really can’t be judged according to the standards of a
substantial body of polished or professional filmmaking. As Russell Campbell
observes, the FPL generally shot ‘footage’ rather than films: coverage of politi-
cal events such as workers’ strikes was usually taken on the run, developed
and screened as quickly as possible for the greatest public impact – often for
the strikers themselves, to boost morale. Seltzer suggested that challenging
Hollywood’s mass production and distribution system on its own terms was
neither realistic nor attractive; FPL films were explicitly aimed at workers,
the unemployed and left-wing political activists (Campbell 1985: 126–7).4
The FPL footage would often be re-edited after showings – in town halls,
workers’ centers, tents, private houses, even roller-skating rinks – into com-
pilation documentaries that operated as alternative newsreels. Films like The
Ford Massacre (Detroit Workers News Special) (1932) documented the chaos
of industrial actions; here, 4,000 unemployed workers stormed the Ford plant
in Dearborn, Michigan – four were killed. Joseph Hudyma (a jobless Ford
worker) recorded the events as part of the Detroit FPL.
Some of the best-known FPL newsreels documented mass demonstrations.
Bonus March (1932) covered the march on Washington by war veterans pro-
testing government neglect and showed the police and government-backed
military brutality that met them: beatings on the street, burning of their ram-
shackle shelters. Hunger (1932/3), which dealt with hunger marches organized
by the Unemployed Councils, was similarly ad hoc. Hurwitz recalled: ‘[The
cameramen] stood with the marchers on a hill above Washington, knowing
that before dawn they might need to wield their cameras as clubs’ (Alexander
1981: 28).5 This largely sums up the FPL approach: to film from the perspec-
tive of struggling workers, raising public awareness – to, in Brody’s words,
employ ‘worker cameramen’ to film ‘the viewpoint of the marchers them-
selves’ (quoted in Campbell 1984: 76).
FPL compilation films weren’t simply ‘expository’, however; George
Steinmetz sees Hurwitz’s camerawork as saturated with ‘poetic’ and aesthetic
associations (2006: 498). In editing, they further worked with Soviet montage
techniques to enhance the impact of rough footage. As in Eisenstein’s work,
they often manipulated mass, line and directional movement to create intellec-
tual involvement and emotional dynamism, juxtaposing seemingly dissimilar
images as part of a ‘montage of attractions’. The prologue of Bonus March
suggests such an effort to intervene in the consumption of cinematic illusion
as implicit truth or transparent world view. It invites audiences to become
critically involved, sceptical viewers, intercutting signs proclaiming ‘Go
places with the US Army’ with images of exploding shells and dead soldiers
on the battlefield, then of the unemployed and their Hooverville shacks. This
‘model of savage political comment’ (Campbell 1984: 76) was echoed by Busby
Berkeley’s almost surreal interpretation of the same event in the ‘Remember
My Forgotten Man’ number from Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933). Campbell
contends, additionally, for a consideration of FPL cinematography as well as
montage: ‘cinéma vérité has dulled our appreciation of participant camerawork,
but in the thirties the hand-held, close-range cinematography of the street
actions which the League footage offered must have struck spectators with
great novelty and force’ (1984: 75).
Throughout the mid-1930s the FPL, while sporadically producing news-
reels, sponsored programs of Soviet and German features that were screened,
often alongside FPL productions, in rented auditoriums, union halls, migrant
camps, schools and occasionally purpose-built cinemas. As Wolfe stresses, the
‘only modest success’ of FPL film production and distribution was enhanced
by the League’s active devotion to film criticism, published in new journals
such as Filmfront and Experimental Cinema and radical publications like New
Masses, New Theatre and the Daily Worker (Wolfe 1993: 358). The establish-
ment of the Potamkin Film School soon after the death of Harry Potamkin in
1933 created a further pedagogical base for League members such as Brody,
Hurwitz and Jacobs to spread their ideas.
Though much attention has focused on the New York FPL, the makeup of
the League across the US was far more diverse. Leagues sprung up in Detroit,
Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles, and in smaller towns like
Laredo, Texas. ‘Rather than a single or unified group’, Carla Leshne explains,
‘the Workers’ Film and Photo League was a movement’ (2006: 361). Leshne fills
out the historical record, offering a glimpse of the San Francisco branch and its
key members Balog, Otto Hagel and Hansel (Johanna) Mieth (who became a
photographer for Life magazine), traveling cross-country with Edward Royce,
an organizer for the WIR. Along the way they screened League productions
together with Pudovkin’s Mother, arriving in San Francisco in 1933.
The San Francisco group produced newsreels of the agricultural strikes
that were sweeping California in 1933 and also the more ambitious A Century
of Progress (1934). The latter recalls Irving Browning’s City of Contrasts (1931),
in which the wealthy of Riverside Drive are ironically juxtaposed against the
poor in shantytowns along the Hudson River. Century of Progress begins with
shots of the spectacular Chicago ‘Century of Progress’ World’s Fair of 1933,
only to undercut any notion of progress by inserting shots of Hooverville
shacks and a woman picking over garbage to find food. The San Francisco
group lasted only until July 1934, when it was forced to cease production after
the violent San Francisco General Strike, where workers’ cultural centers
throughout the city were destroyed by right-wing mobs. (The 1930s saw a
series of quasi-secret vigilante groups, like the Black Legion in Detroit, dedi-
cated to combatting labor activism [Denning 1997: 126].) Over the course of
its short existence, the San Francisco League endured police harassment,
repeated confiscation and destruction of its footage, arrests and finally a vigi-
lante rampage through their darkroom and meeting space during the General
Strike (Leshne 2006: 362–3).
Along with reconsidering the geographical distribution of political non-
fiction filmmaking, the idea that 1930s documentary was the province of a
monolithic group of elite, intellectual, white males also needs to be recon-
sidered (Musser 2006: 356). Richard Meran Barsam stresses that significant
members of the New York FPL were the ‘talented sons of immigrants’, raised
on the Lower East Side and Brooklyn, with family roots in left-wing causes
(1992: 147). Many were part of the ‘new Americans’, as Louis Adamic called
them in 1934, mainly working-class, ‘the second generation of the second
wave of immigration’ (Denning 1997: 60). Significant women in the League,
such as Nancy Naumburg and Hansel Mieth, also deserve further attention.
Naumburg, another graduate of the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, pro-
duced with James Guy two of the earliest radical documentaries, Sheriffed
(1934) and Taxi (1935). Both were shot by Naumburg on her amateur 16 mm
camera; both have been lost. Irving Lerner devoted an entire column to
Naumburg’s first film in the New Masses, hailing it as ‘the first to come out of
the revolutionary movement’ (Koszarski 2006: 374).
By 1934, the FPL was arguably at its peak with the establishment of the
National Film and Photo League, but there were also signs of internal divi-
sion. The group’s emphasis on a workers’ revolutionary politics was becoming
diluted as Roosevelt’s ‘first’ New Deal, initiated in 1933, began to take effect.
Still, the most damaging rupture took place within the New York branch
when Hurwitz, Steiner and several others broke away in the wake of disagree-
ments that flared after the League’s National Conference in 1934. Inconsistent
production methods were an ongoing source of frustration. The National
Conference had underlined the League’s lack of interest in artistic innovation:
instead it argued for the centrality of the ‘simple newsreel document, photo-
graphing events as they appear to the lens’. While admitting the ‘weaknesses
of lighting, photography, [and] direction’ of FPL productions, the National
Conference expressed their hope to eventually match the skill and sophistica-
tion of Vertov’s Kino Pravda ‘newsreel’ productions (Alexander 1981: 57).
A split emerged not only between FPL members’ differing aspirations, but
along questions of how best to produce a politically effective documentary
‘truth’. While members shared in their admiration for Soviet ideas, they were
split between advocating for moving pictures that were ‘taken’ and those that
were ‘made’, a distinction emphasized by Seymour Stern that divided the rev-
olutionary nonfictions of Vertov from the more fictive ‘reconstructed reality’
of Pudovkin, Eisenstein and Dovzhenko (Alexander 1981: 57). For Hurwitz,
truly revolutionary filmmaking had to move ‘beyond the document’:
Because newsreels are fractional, atomic, and incomplete, the revolu-

tionary movement has required a more synoptic form to present a fuller
picture of the conditions and struggles of the working class. And so
the synthetic documentary film has become an important form for film
workers in the revolutionary movement – a form which allows for more
inclusive and implicative comment on our class world than the discursive
newsreel.
Hence, ‘a mixed form of the synthetic document and the dramatic is the next
proper concern of the revolutionary film movement’ (Hurwitz 1979 [1934]:
91–3). Such interests echo efforts, such as Eisenstein’s, to move film repre-
sentation away from the stress on observation, shifting emphasis from a ‘literal
imitation to a metaphorical interpretation of reality’ (Nichols 2005: 163). As
accomplished filmmakers, Hurwitz and Steiner were stung by the League’s
apparent anti-aesthetic and anti-dramatic stance. They wanted, rather, to
‘recreate events and emotions not revealable to the camera in the document’
(Hurwitz 1979 [1934]: 92), to pursue experimental approaches that would
blend radical aesthetics with politics, fictional strategies (in particular, acting)
with fact.
Working with Lerner and the photographer Sidney Meyers, a splinter
group formed during the autumn of 1934 calling itself Nykino – a statement
of international solidarity, blending New York political activism with Soviet
formalist experimentation. Nykino, linked with the Workers’ Laboratory
Theatre, went on to find a degree of stability and success, enlisting Elia Kazan
and his wife the playwright Molly Day Thacher for their first publicly released
production, Pie in the Sky (1934). The film was a declaration of intentions to
move away from documentary sobriety and transparency. It lampoons what
Karl Marx called the ‘opiate’ of the people, religion, which is seen as thwart-
ing radical change and pragmatic solutions by proffering an imagined escape
– heaven and the afterlife – from the real world of struggle and privation.
In spite of splitting from the FPL over their stress on ‘taken’ footage,
Nykino did not wholly ignore the newsreel format. Aiming to ‘revolutionize
the method of dramatizing actual news events’, they conceived The World
Today (1936), a series (though only two were released) designed to counter
the success – and political superficiality – of The March of Time (Alexander
1981: 126).6 The group’s influence spread. Willard Van Dyke and Strand
joined in 1935, just after Strand had shot Redes (The Wave, 1937) in Mexico,
with Mexican government backing. Widely admired when it came out for its
stunning photography, Redes is a semi-fictional, political exposé based upon
the personal and economic struggles of fishermen near Vera Cruz. The project
nicely complemented Nykino’s ‘interpretive’ documentary strategies, and
showed Strand’s affinity both for Flaherty’s ‘slight narrative’ and the montage
effects of Soviet films such as Potemkin and Pudovkin’s Storm Over Asia (1928).
In the meantime the FPL, devoted to producing radical newsreels, began to
struggle after 1935 with the weakening of the WIR’s powers. The Nazi gov-
ernment had dissolved Willi Münzenberg’s Soviet-backed front in Berlin and
he was exiled in Paris. Without the ‘organizational backing, financial support,
and political direction’ that existed under the WIR, as Campbell points out,
the motion picture production of the League began to dissipate (1984: 79). By
1936 very little new work was appearing – only brief newsreels of marches,
such as Maurice Bailen’s Chicago May Day and Peace Parade, and (though
a League project in name only) the first of a series of consumer rights films,
Getting Your Money’s Worth (Julian Roffman, with Del Duca, 1936) (Campbell
and Alexander 1977: 35; Campbell 1984: 79). The mid-1930s era of the New
Deal and the Popular Front saw a shift in emphasis away from revolutionary
struggle towards a stress on the common needs of ‘the people’: ‘ “the people”
became the central trope of left culture in this period, the imagined ground
of political and cultural activity, the rhetorical stake in the ideological battle’
(Denning 1997: 124). Popular Front beliefs in shoring up affinities across
class and ethnic divisions were summed up at the end of the decade by Paul
Robeson’s classic anthem, ‘Ballad for Americans’. ‘Are you an American?’ the
chorus asks. The reply first embraces profession and class: ‘I’m an engineer,
musician, street cleaner, carpenter, teacher [. . .]’, then ethnicity: ‘I’m just an
Irish, Negro, Jewish, Italian [. . .] Russian, Chinese, Polish [. . .] American’
(quoted in Denning 1997: 128).
New Deal and Popular Front alignments, explained further below, saw
key shifts in rhetorical strategies on the left. While the plights of American
labor and unionism remained central to left-wing political ideals, the image
of the neglected worker became more closely tied to ‘the people’ as a diverse
yet unifying symbol of America. In this spirit the group of film profession-
als calling themselves American Labor Productions, as mentioned earlier,
released the seventeen-minute sound film Millions of Us in 1936, a dramatic
re-enactment of a day in an unemployed machinist’s life. Testifying to the
ongoing and deep ideological divisions of the time, at one cinema in New York
the whistles and hisses of angry cinemagoers forced the film to be withdrawn
by the management (Rosenzweig 1980: 8).
s e ll i ng t h e n e w d e a l
As shown above, the Soviet and other governments had long been interested in
employing film for explicitly ideological purposes, helping to inspire the efforts
of groups like the FPL. The US government, wary both of Hollywood’s com-
mercial power and any appearance of politically manipulating the public, was
far less invested in using film as a persuasive medium. Still, the documentaries
that would result from New Deal financing were not the first efforts at govern-
ment filmmaking. By the time Pare Lorentz arrived in Washington in 1935
as consultant to the Resettlement Administration, film units already existed
at the departments of Agriculture and the Interior (starting as early as 1911,
advertising agricultural expansion to the west) and at the US Army Signal
Corps (Wolfe 1993: 365).
The difference, as Bill Nichols argues, between earlier social interventions
and the enhanced sense of identity and purpose that marked documentary
work in the mid-1930s was a stricter disciplining of the form. Public advocates
in the Soviet Union, Germany and Britain – to varying degrees – were empha-
sizing factual film’s usefulness for disseminating a collective sense of national
unity and social urgency. Here ideas of the ‘social’ and the ‘public’ were tied to
national interests and documentary was seen as possessing persuasive power to
‘serve the political and ideological agenda of the existing nation-state’ (2001b:
583). In the US, even while scepticism of major government film projects
had the upper hand, the stage was being set in other ways. Lawmakers were
making their presence felt at almost all levels of the film industry.
Grounds for government intervention in movie-making were reinforced
by the publication, between 1933 and 1935, of findings by the private foun-
dation the Payne Fund, devoted to studying the effects of popular and ‘low’
media entertainments on children. As David Cook relates, the Payne findings
‘confirmed the worst – the movies did seem to bring new ideas to children;
did influence interpretations of the world and day-to-day conduct; did present
moral standards’ (2004: 237). Here was proof of the movies’ widespread influ-
ence on education, behavior and development. The Payne Fund results not
only fortified calls for a stronger Production Code, they indicated a need for
government ‘films of merit’ (as Lorentz would call them) that might contrib-
ute to public education and responsible citizenship. By 1934, the Code and
government powers of censorship had ‘acquired teeth’ with the formation of
the Production Code Administration and its newly appointed head, the con-
servative Roman Catholic Joseph I. Breen (Doherty 1999: 6–10). New Deal
government film projects should be viewed, then, in the context of both these
growing state interventions into the film industry and the broader impact of
1930s radical filmmaking.
In revising policies established by Hoover’s government, FDR’s New Deal
was wide ranging but hardly revolutionary. Rather, it aimed to reframe and
re-appropriate the polarized extremes of US politics. Roosevelt ‘saved capital-
ism in eight days’, as one commentator said of the president’s early days in
office. Sidney J. Weinberg recalled the volatile political climate: ‘We were on
the verge of something. You could have had a rebellion. You could have had
a civil war’ (quoted in Doherty 1999: 337). Roosevelt’s acceptance speech for
the presidential nomination in 1932 directly addressed – and more or less dis-
missed – the revolutionary spirit that had fired up communist and trade union
movements of the time. ‘Wild radicalism has made few converts’, he stated;
‘to meet by reaction that danger of radicalism is to invite disaster. Reaction
is no barrier to the radical. It is a challenge, a provocation. The way to meet
that danger is to offer a workable program of reconstruction’ (Roosevelt 1938
[1932]: 647). Roosevelt’s ideal of ‘reconstruction’ was a far cry from socialism:
it lay in reconstructing the US’s capitalist dominance – even if this meant
increasing use of public funds in the shorter term.
Major legislation known as the First New Deal was put into place soon
after FDR took office, giving rise to the Unemployment Relief Act (31 March
1933), the Federal Emergency Relief Act (12 March 1933), the Social Security
Act (14 August 1933) and the Agricultural Adjustment Act (12 May 1933),
all of which gave the government sweeping powers to funnel public funds
into social programs. Beginning in 1935, the Second New Deal incorporated
support for labor unions – partially stabilizing a disruptive political faction
– and programs to aid tenant farmers and migrant workers. The resulting
‘Alphabet Agencies’, such as the Resettlement Administration (RA) (reor-
ganized as the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in 1937) and the Works
Progress Administration (WPA) would become the key sponsors of photogra-
phy and film projects.
Further political shifts taking place just as the New Deal was gathering
strength would affect the character and rhetoric of the left. The Communist
Party International’s decision in 1935 to back a Popular Front against fascism,
precipitated by Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, paved the way for a
broad international alliance of leftist parties and organizations. This included
the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), which would drop its opposition of
Roosevelt and the New Deal and join Roosevelt’s efforts to organize and
manage labor union issues. This official change of policy sent ripples across
the political spectrum: broad-based Popular Front liberal-left coalitions would
determine that the ‘crucial struggle of the day was to be not socialism versus
capitalism, but democracy versus fascism’ (Waugh 1984: 107).
The 1930s, then, might be seen as a period when a range of highly disrup-
tive factions were negotiated back towards working within the framework
of a hegemonic capitalist system. Sacvan Bercovitch suggests this process
of framing radicalism in his assessment of the centrifugal force of American
ideology, which ‘undertakes, above all, as a condition of its nurture, to absorb
the spirit of protest for social ends’; it has ‘accomplished this most effectively
through its rhetoric of dissent’. This ‘triumphant liberal hegemony’ attests to
‘capacities of the dominant culture to absorb alternative forms, to the point of
making basic change seem virtually unthinkable’ (1993: 367). The 1930s saw
the Americanization of a range of ‘foreign’ or ‘marginal’ ideological move-
ments: the Marxist readings of the American literary canon by Granville
Hicks; V. F. Calverton’s efforts to ‘Americanize Marxism’; Edmund Wilson’s
history of socialism; Kenneth Burke’s Marxist engagements with psychoa-
nalysis and literary theory. More to the point, the Popular Front era saw a rhe-
torical fusion of presumed oppositions: ‘Communism is Twentieth-Century
Americanism’, stated Earl Browder, Secretary General of the CPUSA, in his
run for president in 1936 (quoted in Rabinowitz 1994: 101). Protest, dissent
and debate were placed at the heart of achieving consensus: the aim became
not the destruction of the old system, but the rebirth of the ‘soul of America’.
New Deal documentaries, while part of this process of leveling political fac-
tionalism, were nonetheless viewed as aligned to the party politics of Roosevelt
and the progressive Democrats. For many, such state-sponsored projects
indicated the unthinkable: ‘socialist’ filmmaking – it was difficult to suppress
obvious parallels to the Soviets. But the Soviet example was not the only one.
In Britain, John Grierson had established a film unit at the Empire Marketing
Board in 1930 and then at the General Post Office (GPO) in 1933. Grierson’s
activities were crucial precedents and provided a safer institutional model for
US government interests. The Soviet example ‘represented a form of excess
for Grierson’ and as such his funding models combined both state and corpo-
rate investment (Nichols 2001b: 599). In theory, the state could sponsor the
popular culture industries while remaining relatively immune from the ideo-
logical extremism of Soviet-style controls. Still, Grierson continued to have
great belief in the state’s central role, arguing ‘the State is the machinery by
which the best interests of the people are secured’. The great dilemma of mass
100 a m eric an do c um e nt ar y film
education, for Grierson, lay ‘in the realm of the imaginative training for modern
citizenship and not anywhere else’ (quoted in Nichols 2001b: 602), and docu-
mentaries were considered the principal vehicles for this training. Grierson’s
grand plan for a state-sponsored documentary culture called for revitalizing
nonfiction forms of address, transcending the ‘lower categories’ such as the
lecture film, travelogues and nature shorts, all of which could ‘describe, and
even expose, but [. . .] only rarely reveal’ (Grierson 1946 [1932]: 79).
In the US, the Griersonian approach, while influential, was not whole-
heartedly endorsed. When Paul Rotha, just thirty years old at the time, came
in 1937 to promote Grierson’s ‘documentary idea’ on a trip sponsored by the
Rockefeller Foundation, he was both welcomed and critiqued. Rotha was a
strong advocate for social documentary, for fusing ‘the cinematic with the
citizen’ (Wasson 2005: 145), and sternly criticized what he saw as ‘escapist’
films such as Flaherty’s Man of Aran (1934). British newspapers enthusiasti-
cally reported that Rotha had almost single-handedly encouraged ‘films of
fact’ to strike ‘new roots abroad, notably in the United States’ (‘Documentary’
1939: 18; ‘Documentary Films in America’ 1939: 32). Some, such as Van
Dyke and Steiner, were impressed with Rotha’s ideas, and the establishment
of the short-lived American Film Center at Rockefeller Center can be traced
to his five-month visit. But figures like Lorentz were reportedly unhappy with
Rotha’s criticisms of how documentary was organized in the US (Wolfe 1993:
374; Wehberg 1938: 163–6). Leo Hurwitz thought the films produced by the
Grierson unit were ‘pale, passionless, restricted in range’. For many that had
come through the FPL and Nykino, the Soviet example remained the more
compelling (Alexander 1981: 246).7
The establishment of the film unit at the RA in 1935 might thus, to an
extent, be seen as a ‘Griersonian’ move.8 Responsible for this move was
Rexford Guy Tugwell, an agricultural economist from Columbia University
who came to the RA already equipped with a clear idea of the government’s
social role. Part of FDR’s academic ‘Brain Trust’, Tugwell had formulated
progressive economic theories in the 1920s based on the management con-
cepts of F. W. Taylor – ideas rooted in a highly ‘technocratic, pro-corporate
ideology’ (Stange 1989: xvi). Overviews of social and economic networks were
by this time influenced by the scientific methods of disciplines like sociology.
These concepts were married to ‘Taylorized’ management and Fordist mass
production systems. Notions of the ‘scientific management’ of social diversity
through orderly design, already embedded in the academic and industrial zeit-
geist, were soon being felt in central government agencies (Stange 1989: 107).
For Tugwell, the Information Division at the RA was crucial to explaining
official policy to those participating in public works programs. At issue was
not merely justifying the unprecedented scale and expense of the government
intervention, but encouraging an ideological shift in attitudes towards central
a c tiv is m and a d vo c ac y: th e depression era 101
management of public affairs. The production of photographic materials was

high on Tugwell’s list of Information Division activities.
Tugwell’s support for government photographic projects was effectively
a continuation of collaborative work done with his former teaching assistant,
Roy Stryker, who became his chief of photographic staff. By the 1930s, pho-
tojournalism had established itself as a primary medium of mass communica-
tion. According to Stange, ‘newly founded mass circulation picture magazines
worked successfully to establish a public view of corporate photojournalism
as a mode of mass communication not only reliable and professional but also
“artistic” ’ (1989: 107). The power of the image to relay information to the
masses was hardly overlooked by a government seeking to ‘sell’ the New Deal.
‘Not inconsequentially’, Stange continues, ‘the camera, with its image both
realistic and mass reproducible, rose to become [as James Agee wrote] the
“central instrument of its age.” ’ Tugwell and Stryker would amass an impres-
sive staff of thirteen photographers working for the Information Division,
including Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Ben Shahn and Arthur Rothstein.
In June 1935, Pare Lorentz was brought in to serve as the RA’s motion
picture consultant. Leonard MacTaggart Lorentz (‘Pare’ was taken from his
father) was a movie critic whose wife was ‘vaguely related to the president’
(Ellis and McLane 2005: 81), yet his political sensibility made him ideally
suited to the New Deal post. He brought to Tugwell’s office a mixture of
Southern populism (he was raised in the small town of Clarksburg, West
Virginia), a respect for nature rooted in his upbringing and concern about
how government should intervene in popular culture (Lorentz 1992: 4).
Having worked for a major corporation (General Electric), he was critical of
what he saw as corporate philistinism and elitism, finding that its bottom-
line ruthlessness could transform idealistic young people into victims of the
‘bootlicking’ and ‘mean advancement’ of big business practices (quoted in
Alexander 1981: 94). His hatred of hierarchy and ‘corporate behemoths’ was
projected onto figures like Will Hays, president of Motion Picture Producers
and Distributors of America (MPPDA) and master of the ‘Hays Code’ (the
1930 Production Code), a ‘conniving, sanctimonious Indiana Presbyterian
elder’, Lorenz called him, and ‘chief magistrate’ of the motion picture industry
(Lorentz 1992: 20–1).
Before coming to the RA, Lorentz had no filming experience, though he had
originally conceived his book The Roosevelt Year (1934) as a newsreel about
‘the tragic events going on in our country’ (Lorentz 1992: 28–9). He had also
written Censored: The Private Life of the Movie (1930), with Morris L. Ernst,
in which he lamented ‘politicians of the lowest order’ and the ‘unlearned and
stupid hecklings of the censors’ (Lorentz and Ernst 1930: 2). As a critic for
Vanity Fair, Town and Country and The New York Evening Journal, Lorentz
had closely observed film technique, voicing strong opinions about the kinds of
102 a m e ric an do c um e nt ar y film
films he respected. His reviews often railed at Hollywood’s ‘standard, cheap,

and unimaginative’ products ruled by profit motives, and admired more inde-
pendent and individualist work that seemed to challenge corporate control of
the industry (Alexander 1981: 95–6). His writing was trenchant, satiric and
deliberately confrontational. In a review of Sunrise (1927), Lorentz dismissed
a whole history of assembly-line filmmaking:
So far, most of the movies that have been made since Edison invented
the moving picture have been a mongrel, illegitimate breed, a mechani-
cal curiosity, with the less said about them the better. [. . .] [T]here are
but two or three men who have felt the real possibilities of the motion
picture as a medium for expressing human emotions with photography
and musical accompaniment. (Lorentz 1975: 5)
Critical of Hollywood business as usual, Lorentz’s politics were still far from
radical in the mold of the FPL or Nykino. He remained suspicious of anything
reminiscent of the Soviet school, since it uncannily mirrored the corporate
behemoths with its didactic messages and centralized controls that, he argued,
hindered freedoms of expression.
Lorentz was, many recalled, not easy to work with, and his lack of profes-
sional experience was cited as a persistent problem. But among his major
contributions to the RA’s output was the idea of government ‘films of merit’
that could meet the highest professional standards and share the bill with
commercial productions (Snyder 1968: 25). Inspired by investigations into
migrant camps by the economist Paul Taylor published in July 1935 along
with Lange’s photographs, Lorentz lobbied the government for a budget of
$6,000 to make a film about ‘overgrazing, overproduction, mechanized farming
by absentee owners, etc., and the results thereof’, since a motion picture would
be ‘one of the most effective, quick, and inexpensive means of explaining some
of these problems of the Administration to its employees and to the employees
of these agencies’ (quoted in Snyder 1968: 202–3). Thus The Plow that Broke
the Plains started as an RA training film: any expectations of publicly distribut-
ing a government film would have been highly controversial, probably killing
the project before it even got off the ground.
The bid was approved in August 1935, and Lorentz immediately hired the
experienced group of Ralph Steiner, Paul Strand and Leo Hurwitz as camera
crew. Given that he was acting as government representative of the New Deal,
Lorentz’s choice of a crew with avant-garde and radical credentials would
appear odd, but professionals schooled in studio production methods wouldn’t
have offered the flexibility and innovation he needed for a small, on-location
shoot. At the same time, Lorentz managed to steer clear of associations with
the Hollywood mediocrity he often criticized in his writing.
Though holding only a ‘sketchy’ outline script, the group began shooting
in Montana in September (Snyder 1968: 30) but ideological and practical dif-
ferences between Lorentz and the crew became untenable. The Nykino group
wanted the script to underscore ‘capitalism’s anarchic rape of the land’, but
Lorentz was geared more towards the ‘metaphor of natural disaster’ (Denning
1997: 265). Variety reported that the camera crew was ‘on strike’ in Texas.
After a brief reconciliation during which the dust storm sequences were
completed, Lorentz decided to fire his crew and complete the film by inter-
cutting stock footage with the existing shots (Snyder 1968: 30–1). He would
later denounce the ‘left-wing, self-conscious, social irony that so often defeats
the purpose of creative workmen with a point of view’ (quoted in Rabinowitz
1994: 97).
With few friends in Hollywood and at the helm of a government-sponsored
film, Lorentz had enormous difficulties getting access to stock footage. The
leftist critic Peter Ellis described the challenges Lorentz faced:
In an effort to keep the screens of America safe for private investment,

the motion picture industry not only attempted to block the progress of
The Plow during production by refusing to sell the government stock
shots necessary to round out the narrative, but on completion of this,
the first important American documentary film, summarily refused to
distribute it. (Ellis 1936: 18)
The story of The Plow has become a textbook example of the ambitions, com-
promises and pitfalls underlying state-sponsored filmmaking in the US, and
of the pressures that powerful Hollywood studios and private interests could
exert, even against the US government itself.
the plow that broke the plains (1936)

In his assessment of The Plow that Broke the Plains, Lorentz called it ‘a melo-
drama of nature, the tragedy of turning grass into dust, a melodrama that only
Carl Sandburg or Willa Cather perhaps could tell as it should be told’ (quoted
in Barsam 1992: 153). In many ways the film does play out as melodrama, with
its strong narrative line, surging musical score and at times heavy-handed
voiceover, suggesting that the complex dynamics that led to the Dust Bowl
were rather aggressively pared down for the sake of emotional storytelling.
The film exhibits a romantic streak, invoking America’s once-virgin land and
appealing to simpler agrarian ideals, even while self-consciously attempting
to avoid overt didacticism. The Plow is also, as many have observed, a work
of propaganda designed to publicize a cause, and it successfully did so for
numerous RA staff. One of these, the documentary filmmaker George Stoney,

recalled using it in workshops, town meetings and seminars designed to
‘convert’ the public to New Deal policies (Stoney 2007).
As Charlie Keil argues, of the four broad functions that Michael Renov
discerns in the documentary mode (preservation, analysis, persuasion and
expression), Lorentz’s film is symptomatic of a 1930s emphasis on the latter
two: social persuasiveness and poetic expressiveness (1998: 119). The film per-
suades on one level by echoing the ‘preachment yarn’, a form invoked in many
post-Crash era films, such as Michael Curtiz’s Cabin in the Cotton (1932).9
Thomas Doherty notes that the Hollywood preachment yarn contains at least
two distinctive features: the exculpatory preface and the Jazz Age prelude. The
exculpatory preface is a text that ‘gainsays in print what the images proceed
to affirm’, thus providing ‘plausible deniability’ to a film’s political statements
that might be deemed partisan or controversial. The Jazz Age prelude marks
the ‘shameful sins committed in the previous decade’ of rampant consumer
excess (Doherty 1999: 50). We see both employed in The Plow.
Exculpatory prefaces were no stranger to mainstream films dealing with the
politics of the Depression: one was tacked on to the opening of John Ford’s
The Grapes of Wrath (1940), a screen treatment of Steinbeck’s searing portrait
of Okie exile and the politicization of the laboring underclass. 20th Century-
Fox prefaced Ford’s film by stating it was ‘about a limited place called the
Dust Bowl, and about people displaced by economic circumstances that were
beyond anybody’s control’. In The Plow, the preface informs us that the film
is a ‘record of land . . . of soil, rather than people’ – the sort of natural disaster
scenario that so incensed the Nykino crew.
The Plow’s Jazz Age flashback comes later, in the juxtaposition of the
endless harvesting of wheat (even – to spectacular visual effect – under artifi-
cial lights) with a ticker tape machine spitting out a seemingly endless stream
of stock quotes. This is intercut with a jazz band wildly playing. The ticker
tape (signifying the flimsy dream of endless profits) finally runs out, pulling
the machine to earth with a quite literal ‘crash’. Such overt visual and montage
tactics are tempered by the film’s poetic expressiveness, which produces more
subtle effects in delivering the film’s message. The lyrical voiceover draws
on aural and mnemonic devices of repetition and alliteration, while evocative
images – captured by the Nykino crew – connote a land of plenty followed by
utter loss and spoliation.
The film’s structure is roughly chronological, providing a snapshot history
of Great Plains land use from settler times to the present day. A title crawl
comes first, describing the region as ‘a high, treeless continent, without rivers,
without streams . . . a country of high winds and sun . . . and of little rain’.
These lines are repeated several times in the film – a warning, yet one that
obviously was not heeded. A map of the Great Plains area and then the screen
itself fill up with undulating grass, which initiates the second section, ‘Grass’.
Lorentz’s script outlines nine sections in all, from the prologue through ‘dev-
astation’. An epilogue – often characterized as a bureaucratic addition that
detracts from the film’s poetic expressiveness – spells out government solu-
tions. Cut some time after the first distribution run, the epilogue is rarely seen
now, though it remains useful for contextualizing the film’s public functions
and situating its broader ideological aims.
The ‘Grass’ section meditates on what Lorentz called the ‘heroine’ of the
film, grass (quoted in Barsam 1992: 153), and suggests a virgin land waiting to
be settled, though the Prologue briefly mentions that ‘the Indian’ and ‘buffalo’
had been ‘cleared from the Great Plains’. Finally the voiceover intones, ‘first
came the cattle’, initiating the third section. Panoramic scenes emphasize wide
open spaces, recalling the sublime of American landscape painting and photog-
raphy, and the powerful psychic links between landscape representations and
national identity. The vast views also reference the Hollywood western, a genre
coming into its own in the 1930s as on-location visual spectacle. Continuing
the western theme, the voiceover introduces section four, ‘Homesteader’:
‘The railroad brought the world into the Plains. New populations. New needs
crowded the last frontier.’ Images of cattle overrun the frame in ever tighter
close-ups. The cattle are funneled into a pen, pushing at its sides, encapsu-
lating Malthusian fears of overpopulation and renewed anxieties about the
loss of the frontier. The next image usurps the previous one, supported by
a command: ‘Make way for the plowman!’ Commotion fills the frame, with
shots of wagons on the move, and close-ups of fence posts being driven into
the ground, cutting up and enclosing the land. A series of dynamic shots show
fieldworkers harvesting grain, and the farm equipment creates abstract pat-
terns of mechanical motion. The editing here recalls the avant-garde – particu-
larly the Soviet tradition – marrying American western imagery to didactic,
experimental (but now well-established) montage techniques, reminding us of
the close contacts between the nationalist documentary traditions of the US
and the Soviet Union. As the sequence ends, a train in silhouette traverses the
frame, suggesting the coast-to-coast crossing of the transcontinental railroad:
the open plain/frame has been spanned and compressed by new settlers, new
mobilities, new technologies. As the Plains witness the arrival of modernity,
the shot fades to black.
The first indication of the desolation to come introduces the fifth section,
‘Warning’: ‘the rains failed and the sun baked the light soil . . . the rains failed
them’. The finale of this section shows a return to activity with the declaration
of the First World War and newspaper headlines shouting about the rise of
wheat prices. War dominates the sixth section, and with it the juxtaposition
of conflict overseas and agricultural (over)productivity at home. The next
juxtaposition of shots – tanks rolling overseas and brigades of tractors moving
across the land – has generated much critical discussion, and again suggests the
influence of Soviet montage. Indeed, the importance of montage for producing
visual impact and complex meaning in Lorentz’s film cannot be overstated –
having fired his Nykino crew, Lorentz was impelled to make the most of stock
footage. The message is clear: as plows break up the land and tanks defend
national interests, the dust and frenzy of war begin to obscure the view. The
monoculture of wheat is fated to exhaust the fragile integrity of the soil, halting
the progress of the nation itself.
The next section shows the 1920s: the Jazz Age flashback. These were the
‘golden harvest’ years, though the section is called ‘Blues’. The voiceover
recalls optimism: ‘We had the manpower, we invented new machinery, the
world was our market’, but the use of the past tense indicates nostalgia for
something lost that only briefly existed. The blues-inflected score plays out
over flyers for cheap land, conjoining comic and tragic – ‘a few dollars now
means a farm for your old age’ – pipe dreams that will end in bitter regrets.
The section concludes with the ticker tape running out.
A fade-up on a skull against cracked earth is accompanied by the lines, ‘a
country without rivers, without streams, and with little rain . . . and the sun
baked the earth’. This eighth section, ‘Drought’, contains a spectacular dust
storm sequence; it approaches the surreal as a child runs towards the camera
and dust blankets broken homes. In an almost ironical touch, we hear a word-
less doxology (‘praise God from whom all blessings flow [. . .]’) played on an
invisible pump organ, as if at a funeral. The families are ‘baked out – blown
out – and broke’: lines drawn from interviews with displaced farmers that had
captioned Lange’s photos in US Camera. As the film gathers towards closure,
section nine, ‘Devastation’, envisages the great Okie exodus.
Closing shots of twisted trees in a dead landscape recall the ghostly tran-
sients of the previous scenes. Interestingly, there is only fleeting nostalgia for
an idealized rural past up to this point in The Plow – the history of settlement
is retold as one of ongoing struggle and opportunism. The forward movement
from occupying the land towards industrialized farming is presented almost
as an inevitability. Though it would seem the opposite of an urban film like
Manhatta, The Plow also deals with tensions between the built environment
and nature, though here the environment constructed via human labor and
industry is an agricultural space. The final shots mark the irrevocable distance
of this industrial agricultural space from any image of nature’s originary fecun-
dity. The solutions to the killing of the land, one is left to infer, rest only in
further human ingenuity and better management, not in going back to nature
per se.
The epilogue returns to the strategies of the prologue, with maps of the
region, projected improvements and ‘model farmsteads for resettled farmers’.
It ends with an image of grass, a ‘bookend’ to the film’s opening shots, though
this grass is no longer an image of nature’s bounty but of calculated effort and
strategic, centralized management. Keil’s reading focuses on the narrative
drive produced by these ‘solutions’, but the epilogue’s absence in later versions
(its excision, Keil contends, perhaps due to fears that the film was being overly
identified with government propaganda) lends a different impression of the
film’s structure and overall impact. Without clear-cut solutions, cause-and-
effect linearity is less pronounced, leaving the viewer suspended in the midst
of an unresolved crisis – probably a useful tool for encouraging the group dis-
cussions and debates that often followed screenings. The absence of solutions
also allows for meditation on the expressiveness of the images that close the
ninth section: dead trees, parched earth, unforgiving sky. Minor chords on the
soundtrack barely resolve beneath the final shot, reinforcing an iconography of
the costs to the nation of gaining power and international prestige on the back
of the profit motive.
In The Plow, the soundtrack might be seen to compete with, as much as
it completes, the images. Many praised Virgil Thomson’s score as ‘the finest
[. . .] of any American film’ (Ellis 1936: 19). The emotive music, while non-
diegetic, does more than simply shadow or reinforce the diegesis: Keil suggests
that the music expresses and ‘possesses’ the same degree of knowledge as the
narrator (1998: 127). In many ways the music, in its emotional intensity, con-
tributes more to the film than the spoken text. Lorentz referred to The Plow as
a ‘documentary musical picture’ and was so impressed with the results that he
employed Thomson again for his next government feature, The River (1937)
(Lorentz 1975: 135).
‘Voice of god’ narration, which also features prominently, is often derided
for instructing audiences about how to think and feel about images. The
meaning of documentary images (in publications, illustrated lectures, museum
exhibits and so on) is often shaped, as Stange asserts, by ‘a particular rhetori-
cal framework created by its interaction with caption, text, or agency’ (1989:
xvi). The Plow’s written text and voiceover, too, come within the context of a
government-sponsored film, which lends a problematic state authority to any
directives or meanings that the written and spoken material invokes. Still,
Stoney defends the voiceover, originally performed by Thomas Chalmers,
as ‘the narrative style of the day’. He points out that it was influenced by the
pervasive popularity of the newsreel format and radio (the dramatized March
of Time for radio began in 1932–3), and was necessary due the difficulty of
employing sync-sound equipment on a relatively cheap, on-location shoot
(Stoney 2007). Lorentz said he had hoped to subordinate the text to the image,
influenced by Murnau’s minimal, ‘reiterated’ and ‘repeated’ text in Sunrise
(Lorentz 1992: 42).
The term ‘voice of god’ might itself be misleading, as Wolfe notes, in that
the voice in many of these films is often not central or omniscient; rather it
Figure 9. The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936). US Resettlement Administration. Courtesy of
the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
tends to occupy an indefinite, undefined space, related in a relative rather than

hierarchal manner to the images (Wolfe 1997: 150). The voiceover in The Plow
further appeals to a collective rather than individuated subject. When it shifts
from third-person overview to first-person commands, the voice conveys an
urgency that might sway viewers’ opinions but, as Keil contends, never quite
usurps the image. Sound and image in films of the period, rather, tended to
be integrated in ‘a state of ongoing negotiation’ as they struggled to attain the
proper ‘voice’ that could modulate the tensions between the realms of the
visual and aural, of poetic expressiveness and didactic persuasion (Keil 1998:
122). The spoken text aims to echo image and music through its poetic styl-
ings, hypnotic alliterations and repetitions: ‘high winds and sun, high winds
and sun, without rivers, without streams, and with little rain . . .’ In any case,
audiences in the 1930s were probably as attuned to the hazards and manipu-
lations of voiceover as they are today. ‘Those film commentaries!’ stated an
exasperated critic in 1936: ‘We all know the film commentator – that bodiless
voice which speaks from the back of the screen to explain what is self-evident,
generally with an accent that suggests an origin in Oxford or Chicago’ (C. N.
1936: 763).
Lorentz hoped that the film’s ‘pictures’ might ‘tell their story’ on their
own terms, reflecting the RA’s emphasis on striking photographic aesthet-
ics – some thought to the detriment of their political impact (Snyder 1968:
28). As in much RA photography, the image in The Plow is displayed as icon:
making use of sharp focus, an emphasis on line, contrasts of intense light and
shadow, and the power of human faces and poses of resilience or resignation
that might move viewers to action. Iconographic motifs are persistent and
religious connotations are constantly invoked: sacred land, plenty, sacrifice,
drought, famine, plague, exodus. The film’s social realism, inflected by the
modernist expressiveness of its Nykino crew, exhibits precise aesthetic strate-
gies that work to restrict and direct our interpretations of the images. At times
this aesthetic is so exacting that the use of motion picture technology in The
Plow seems almost incidental. Images of people in the film, which are few, are
characterized not by dynamism but by their iconic stillness and silence. Irving
Lerner recalled Variety’s sarcastic observation: ‘[People] aren’t called upon
for any histrionics other than staring at the sky or whittling sticks to indicate
complete resignation to fate’ (quoted in Campbell 1982: 223). Walking figures
are shown only occasionally; at their most animated, people gaze into the dis-
tance warily. These Dust Bowl icons signify the profound failures of politics
and history, larger and more complex than the people themselves, requiring
solutions over and above the powers of the individual.
So, it needs to be asked, did Lorentz’s ‘melodrama of nature’ succeed
in its aims? On the level of historical accuracy, the film takes liberties and
oversimplifies numerous points. Its melodramatic tendencies might seem
to undermine the power of images to speak for themselves and its artifice to
negate its political messages. But Jane Gaines reminds us too of the power of
melodrama, particularly in documentary images. Gaines suggests:
Since recently film studies has been asked to understand what realism
does for melodrama, we would want, reciprocally, to ask what melodram-
atization does for the political aspirations of photographic realism. The
short answer to this question is that, contrary to all assumptions about
emotion as engendering powerlessless and immobility, in the history of
the American melodrama, ‘sentiment enables action’. (2007a: 8)
Arguably The Plow served its aims: to raise awareness of the displacement and
havoc taking place in the Dust Bowl, to arouse public sympathies and support
for the social welfare programs of the New Deal. Beyond this, the film pro-
vides a portrait of US documentary in the process of coming to terms with the
legacies of radicalism and the contemporary climate of financial desperation,
and stands as a testament to the skills of its Nykino crew and the tenacity of
Lorentz himself.
co ns e n sus , d i s s e n sus a n d t h e p op u l a r fr on t
Lorentz’s budget for The Plow had ballooned from $6,000 to nearly $20,000.
In a time of economic pressure, wasteful government expenditure would be
carefully scrutinized. At the same time Lorentz failed to find a distributor, as
Hollywood studios froze the film out of their theaters. Curiously, this prob-
ably had little to do with New Deal scepticism, nor even with studio fears of
propaganda. As Doherty points out, with the notable exceptions of MPPDA
president Will Hays and MGM chief Louis B. Mayer, Hollywood was essen-
tially pro-Democrat and had supported Roosevelt. Within days of FDR’s
inauguration, movie theaters were offering slides, trailers and lobby cards
urging cinemagoers to ‘stand by your president’, since this was the man who
was ‘paving the way for prosperity’. A national committee was formed of film
industry executives to organize the preparation of ‘propaganda pictures’ that
would help to get the nation behind the New Deal, and by autumn 1933 all
five studios had produced shorts that endorsed FDR’s policies (Doherty 1999:
83–4).10 Yet by 1936 the tone had changed, and with The Plow’s appearance on
the scene, perhaps Hollywood executives truly feared that the government was
going ‘into the picture business in earnest’ (Ellis 1936: 18).
Lorentz faced an uphill battle to get the film screened, in spite of a landmark
debut at the White House in March 1936, after which FDR was ‘brimming
over with enthusiasm’ (Anon. 1936: 47). A premiere at the Mayflower Hotel in
Washington, DC, sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art, was attended by

Hollywood figures, RA officials, congressional representatives and diplomats.
On the bill was an excerpt from Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935),
Lucien Backman’s ‘city symphony’ Midi (1929), a Russian short, the GPO
unit’s landmark animation A Colour Box (Len Lye, 1935) and Paul Rotha’s The
Face of Britain (1935). The grouping caused Time magazine to quip: ‘When
made by governments, as most documentary films are, they are usually inter-
larded with propaganda’, though it found The Plow to be an exception (Anon.
1936: 47–8).
Still, accusations of propaganda and government manipulation continued
to follow Lorentz’s film. One distributor (backed by the condemnation of the
Washington screening by Will Hays) argued that, ‘if any private company
or individual made this picture, it would be a documentary film. When the
government makes it, it automatically becomes a propaganda picture’ (quoted
in Snyder 1968: 46). Lorentz cannily circumvented the studio blockade by
appealing directly to individuals, social groups, reviewers and theater opera-
tors. Ultimately the cooperation of independent cinemas meant that The Plow
was screened and generated income, but, more importantly, it garnered excel-
lent reviews. When it opened at the Rialto on Times Square on 28 May, leg-
endary theater manager Arthur Mayer cleverly played on the film’s maverick
status, declaring in advertising that, ‘The New York Times said: “It is unusual,
timely, entertaining.” [. . .] Yet Hollywood has turned its manicured thumb
down!’ (Snyder 1968: 46). Even with this support, the experience of market-
ing The Plow left Lorentz on the verge of resigning his RA position. As he
recalled, within two hours of seeing Tugwell to offer his resignation, he was
given a green light by FDR himself, and a $50,000 budget, to produce a second
documentary (Lorentz 1992: 51).
This was to become The River, about water management and the Tennessee
Valley Authority (TVA). Similar in style and approach to The Plow (and also
filmed by a Nykino member, Willard Van Dyke) it is sweeping in its techniques
of mass persuasion. Peter C. Rollins observes that ‘every rhetorical device in
the lexicon of film is employed to force upon the viewer a realization of the
folly of our industrial exploitation’ (1998: 47). The River forms a neat compan-
ion to The Plow: land management to combat desertification followed by water
management for one of the nation’s most impoverished regions. Also similar,
as Stoney describes it, is the fundamental form of an evangelical sermon, and
this remained key to The River’s success. Its components echo the preachment
yarn, and the problem/solution structure of religious narrative: ‘Eden, man’s
sins, we know what we did, repent, heaven, and the TVA’ (Stoney 2007).
The film’s opening emphasizes water’s motion and fluidity, stressing
correlations between America’s waterways and the nation itself. ‘Down the
Yellowstone, the Milk, the White and Cheyenne’, the voiceover intones,
‘carrying every rivulet and brook, creek and rill, carrying all the rivers [. . .]’
Here the ‘melting pot’ metaphor weighs upon the narrative: a nation of rivers
in flow and flux, gathering together, constantly moving forwards, collapsing
and containing recent histories of political, cultural, ethnic and racial division.
The narration recalls mellifluous verse, invoking Whitman and his hyperbolic
views of the growing nation; like Whitman, Lorentz had succeeded ‘in imagin-
ing the nation as landscape and language’ (Rabinowitz 1994: 101).
Lorentz’s films thus imagined national management solutions forged out of
land, water and celluloid, and helped establish the wider critical and popular
cachet of documentary in the US. Yet these efforts were not alone. Even as
Lorentz was beginning work at the RA, debates presisted over how to advance
the form. By 1935–6, while the FPL was ‘on its last legs’, groups like Nykino
were actively engaged in diversifying their production and distribution strate-
gies (Waugh 1984: 107). Still, among independent filmmakers, uncertainty
lingered about how to achieve widespread and lasting collective organization
and ideological coalition. There was great excitement, then, when Joris Ivens
– respected, connected, admired on the left for both his politics and filmic
expertise – arrived in the US in January 1936 to lecture and host film screen-
ings. Appearing at the invitation of the Popular Front organization New Film
Alliance, Ivens signified ‘a turning point [. . .] a shot in the arm [. . .] [that]
confirmed the theories of Nykino’ (Waugh 1984: 112). While The Plow helped
advance government involvement and a public taste for documentary, Ivens
would have a ‘galvanizing impact’, as Wolfe puts it, on the ideological and
formal directions that political documentary would take in the US (1993: 354).
In the Netherlands, Ivens had been closely aligned with Amsterdam’s Film
League, founded in 1927 to promote avant-garde experimentation, and which
associated mainstream cinema with the masses, with ‘the commercial regime,
America, kitsch’ (Stufkens 1999: 46). Ivens had already built a reputation
working in nonfiction avant-garde through carefully composed shorts such as
The Bridge (1928) and the water-soaked ‘city symphony’ Rain.
In 1931 Ivens wrote: ‘Documentary film is the only positive means left the
avant-garde cinéaste who wishes to commit himself fully to labor, insofar as
he represents the expression of the masses or popular expression in his work’
(Ivens 1988 [1931]: 79). Drawing on staged and unstaged footage in New
Earth (1933–4) about grain overproduction, and Misère au Borinage (1934,
with Henri Storck) which covers a miners’ strike in Belgium, Ivens revital-
ized his radical and collaborative aims through an undecorated style, avoiding
too many ‘agreeable photographic effects’ that could ‘distract’ audiences from
‘the unpleasant truths we were showing’ (Ivens 1969: 87). In the autumn of
1936, he enlisted Archibald MacLeish, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker,
Lillian Hellman and Hellman’s producer, Herman Shumlin, to back a film
that would generate American support for the Loyalist cause against Franco
Figure 10. The Spanish Earth (1937). Contemporary Historians Inc. Courtesy of the Kobal
Collection.
in the Spanish Civil War. Calling themselves Contemporary Historians, the

collective formed the network behind Ivens’s first US production, The Spanish
Earth (1937).
The Spanish Earth sees Ivens in a palpably didactic mode, using carefully
constructed narrative and aesthetic framings to heighten the intensity of the
brutal wartime footage shown in the film. His earlier emphasis on the compo-
sition of shots and on the juxtaposition of movements, shot scales and camera
angles is still on display in certain sequences, but modernist extremes are
scaled down (see also Waugh 1984: 116). The lyrical, idealized sequence that
introduces the village of Fuentidueña de Tajo, where whitewashed walls are
eloquently furrowed and cracked, bread is prepared in shadowy interiors and
women sweep streets in dramatic long shots, is typical of a less obtrusive but
still markedly self-conscious aesthetic strategy. Edited by Helen van Dongen,
who also worked on New Earth and Borinage, the film reveals an occasional
affinity with the montage techniques of Eisenstein, whom Ivens met (along
with Vertov) while working with the Film League. But disruptive attractions
are usually given over to integrated transitions. Even when shifting from
dramatized scenes to newsreel footage, the film works towards narrative clarity
rather than formal virtuosity.
This is not, however, the case in the war footage – war is revealed as a series
of interruptions, discontinuities, dead ends. Though the scenes of battle and
siege are always legible, war’s shock effects aren’t smoothed over. The Spanish
Earth relies, to a great extent, on what Waugh calls the ‘spontaneous’ mode of
filming – over half of the film captures intense conflict and its aftermath. Shots
of long lines of civilians attempting to get food would have struck a chord with
those who witnessed US breadlines, the narration driving this home: ‘You
stand in line all day to buy food [. . .] sometimes the food runs out before you
reach the door, sometimes a shell falls near the line, and at home they wait and
wait, and no one brings anything back for supper’. Images of bodies loaded
into coffins, dead children face down amid the rubble, are presented with
matter-of-fact directness. As the stark images of the dead and wounded esca-
late, the film becomes a documentary counterpart to Picasso’s classic portrait
of Spain’s suffering, Guernica (1937).
The film’s success underlined support in the US for the Spanish cause.
The premiere in Los Angeles on 19 July 1937 was one of the Loyalists’ largest
fundraisers and the film was an unqualified critical, if not mainstream, success.
When screened at the White House for FDR, it featured the ‘slick’ narra-
tion of Orson Welles rather than the ‘frank, low-key roughness’ of the Ernest
Hemingway version screened in theaters (Waugh 1984: 124). In contrast to
a traditional ‘voice of god’, as Bernard F. Dick contends, ‘the greatness of
The Spanish Earth lies in Hemingway’s ability to subordinate his narrative
to Ivens’s images, enclosing them within a text that is never in competition’
(1985: 124). Though Ivens was optimistic about a wide release, the film ended
up in ‘traditional marginalized distribution’ channels, doing well in art houses
and political venues but creating a ‘mere ripple’ elsewhere (Waugh 1984:
127). Denning confirms that whereas Popular Front ideas were making strong
inroads in publishing and journalism, in the more corporate and monopolized
film and broadcasting industries there were few means of competing with ‘the
majors’ (1997: 95).
As The Spanish Earth was being shot in early 1937, the Nykino group,
encouraged by the support of figures like Ivens, established Frontier Films:
a not-for-profit organization devoted to producing professional-grade sound
films. Inspired by Alexander Dovzhenko’s Frontier (1935), the name also ges-
tured towards, and perhaps strove to reframe, a powerful American metaphor
and myth. Frontier would ultimately produce very few films based in the US,
though its People of the Cumberland (1937) was probably the most successful
independent Popular Front film of the period (Denning 1997: 72). It focuses
on the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, an experiment in fusing ver-
nacular roots of local miners and farmworkers with leftist aesthetic projects.
Filmed after the kidnapping and murder of local political organizers, the film
drew on the combined talents of Kazan, Meyers, Leyda, Steiner, Erskine
Caldwell and van Dongen to present the Highlander School as a proactive

force for American advancement, a natural fusion of local US traditions and
union activism.
True to the internationalism of the Popular Front, Frontier supported anti-
fascist and anti-imperialist causes abroad – the Spanish Loyalists, Chinese
solidarity in the face of Japanese invasion – featuring the work of Herbert
Kline, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Harry Dunham and others. Heart of Spain
and China Strikes Back appeared in 1937, and Frontier released an English-
language version of another pro-Loyalist film, Return to Life, the following
year. United Action (1939) returned Frontier to core concerns in trade union
activism. Combining ‘home-movie’ footage shot by United Auto Workers’
cameramen at Detroit’s General Motors strike with professional editing and a
soundtrack produced by Frontier, the film works to convey a powerful Popular
Front message: that ‘labor militancy is the highest form of Americanism’
(Rosenzweig 1980: 10).
In 1938, Steiner and Van Dyke created a rift at Frontier when they formed
American Documentary Films, Inc., and embarked on making The City, which
would become a key attraction at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.11 Though
depleted, Frontier still had sufficient political and cultural connections to
make what would be their last release: the Strand and Hurwitz collaboration
Native Land (1942). The film was inspired by the Senate’s La Follette Civil
Liberties Committee (1936–41) findings on espionage, private police systems
and other illegal strikebreaking methods used by employers’ associations
against industrial and farm workers’ union organizing. Through a mixture
of ‘spontaneous’ footage and dramatized sequences, it knits together stories
of civil rights violations against workers and a history of American rebellion,
ultimately drawing on patriotic sentiments grounded in Jeffersonian idealism.
Just as the name Frontier assimilated Soviet and American ideals, the title of
Native Land attempted to synthesize seemingly conflicting ideas: the concept
of native includes both the diverse immigrants who adopted the land and those
‘natives’ displaced and subjected to nation-building policies that amounted to
genocide. Campbell sees the film as persistently posing oppositions – light and
dark, advance and setback – with an aim at dialectical synthesis: ‘a Marxist
aesthetic bridging Stanislavsky and Brecht’ that was the result of years of theo-
retical debate and discussion (Campbell 1985: 83–4).
The opening titles state: ‘Since the founding of our country the American
people have had to fight for their freedom in every generation’, and invokes
the ‘democratic strength’ of the American people over the ‘fascist minded’
vigilantes and spies that threaten liberties. The first sequence portrays a series
of industrial workers laid off and blacklisted – some for ‘insubordination’ and
others for seemingly no reason at all. One by one they are denied their ‘rights as
Americans’: rights to organize and protest guaranteed under the Constitution.
Figure 11. Native Land (1942). Frontier Films. Courtesy of the British Film Institute.
As it progresses, the film mixes melodramatic scenes with viscerally disturbing

newsreel footage: women being pushed and harassed at a union march; brutal
attacks on striking steelworkers in Ambridge, Pennsylvania. The film’s climax
responds to the suppression of newsreel footage of the Chicago Memorial Day
Massacre of 1937, where police fired on protestors, killing ten.
Underlining links between dissent and Americanism, Time found the film
to be at the same time ‘unashamedly pro-labor propaganda’ and ‘as vitally
American as Carl Sandburg’ (Anon. 1979 [1942]: 200–1). As Wolfe sees it,
it is ‘Popular Front historiography writ large’, with the FPL’s working-class
constituency reconceived as ‘ “we, the people,” a democratic, classless force’
(1993: 363). In this sense we begin to see the ideological blurring and interac-
tions between the Popular Front and liberal Hollywood productions of the
period. Native Land’s emphasis on the resurgence of ‘millions of little people’
recalls the studio ending to Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath, where Ma Joad images
the Depression’s dispossessed as pioneers clinging to traditional frontier aspi-
rations. This national dynamic pervades Native Land: ‘little people’ posed
against potent forces of home-grown fascism (corporate spies, vigilante strike
breakers, the Ku Klux Klan, corrupt police). In defending the ‘innocent ones’,
the Roosevelt government becomes a key part of the solution. ‘The state is now
also viewed as a potential ally’, Campbell notes; ‘the La Follette Committee is

extolled, and the film is awash with patriotic imagery’ (1985: 83–4).
Native Land’s vision is not one of sheer national homogenization, however,
as it does emphasize ethnic and cultural diversity within a Popular Front
‘pan-ethnic Americanism’ – this during an era that saw some of the most
severe limits on immigration, including racial quotas and exclusions (such as
the ‘Asiatic Barred Zone’, established in 1917).12 The first dismissed worker
is Latino, called Antonio Machado, perhaps a reference to fascism in Spain
by invoking the name of the Spanish poet who died in exile in 1939 having
fled after Franco’s coup d’état. The next two workers dismissed are Arthur
Perkins (white) and William Grossman (Jewish). As Barsam notes, for some at
Frontier, perhaps Native Land reflected a sense of being ‘outsiders’: ‘outside
of mainstream American culture as the sons of Jewish immigrants, and outside
the mainstream of American film production’ (1992: 149). Paul Robeson, an
active supporter of the Spanish Republicans and civil rights campaigner, was
a key endorser and fundraiser. Already experienced in documentary projects
undertaken with his wife Eslanda, he provided resonant narration that, along
with Marc Blitzstein’s score, anchors and unifies the film.13
The events portrayed in Native Land were based in fact, but for all the
power of its dramatic retellings the Popular Front’s political acuity and highly
regional impact at times gets lost amid a desire to assert an overarching, ‘truer’
vision of America and its people. Moreover, the timing of the release made
any message of protest or dissent that much more difficult to deliver. Hurwitz
reportedly received the answer print for the film on the day Pearl Harbor was
bombed; not even the communist party would help promote a film which
could potentially disrupt national unity (Campbell 1982: 248). In all, Native
Land’s – and the Popular Front’s – attempted synthesis of left-wing dissent,
civil liberties issues and keen patriotic sentiments suggests a pattern of political
critique in US documentary – dissensus as power, leading to a stronger and
‘truer’ America, more closely in touch with its ‘national story’ and its roots.
This reformist pattern is still visible in the political documentaries of – to
name a few – Barbara Kopple, Michael Moore, Robert Greenwald and Eugene
Jarecki.
As the Second World War loomed, the radicalism of the early 1930s and even
the liberal messages of the New Deal were subsumed beneath responses to
the pressing threats of fascism. FSA (formerly known as RA) photographers
were beset by demands for images that demonstrated national unity and spirit.
Gordon Parks’s now-famous ‘American Gothic, Washington, D.C.’, showing
African American cleaner Ella Watson posed in front of an American flag with
her mop and broom, led Stryker to comment that such controversial images
would ‘get us [FSA photographers] all fired’ (Parks 2005: 66). Photographers
were called upon to capture ‘pictures of men, women, and children who
appear as if they really believed in the US’. FSA photographer John Vachon
lamented that government images were looking essentially ‘like those from the
Soviet Union’ (quoted in Stange 1989: 133). Signaling the shift from social
documentation and persuasion towards the demands of war propaganda, FSA
photography was moved into the Office of War Information (OWI) in 1943.
The latter was abolished in 1945, absorbed into the top-down management
structures of the State Department.
Frontier’s membership fractured after Native Land, while Lorentz’s govern-
ment role at the FSA – supported by FDR but embattled within congressional
and Hollywood industry circles – had in 1938 been transferred to a new organ-
ization, the United States Film Service (USFS). Under this umbrella Lorentz
made The Fight for Life (1940), a dramatized work dealing with medical care
for the poor in Chicago, focusing on mortality during childbirth. Negotiating
between the budgetary strictures of the USFS and various branches of the
Department of Agriculture, he also managed to draft Joris Ivens to direct
(with van Dongen again editing) The Power and the Land (1940). Distributed
by RKO, the film became one of Lorentz’s most successful projects, screening
in 5,000 theaters (Ellis and McLane 2005: 87). One of his final government
projects was working with Robert Flaherty on The Land (1942), a problematic
production which aimed to criticize intensive farming but was hampered by the
confusion caused by war in Europe and government policy shifts towards max-
imizing agricultural production. The film’s costs ballooned to $80,000 of public
money, and though it premiered at the Museum of Modern Art in 1942 it was
never publicly released. Indeed, films like The Plow, The River and The Land
would be withdrawn from circulation during wartime, ‘lest in the wrong hands
they should be used as anti-American propaganda’ (Murphy 1978: 36). When
Lorentz resigned his government position in 1940, it was a case of jumping
before being pushed. Perpetually under threat, the USFS was never far from
Hollywood criticisms of government ‘contamination’ of the film business,
while Congress expressed fears that Lorentz’s projects had expanded federal
filmmaking ‘beyond reasonable limits’ (Snyder 1968: 91–2, 166). There were
some positive, if short-lived, efforts: in 1939 Mary Losey, with the support of
Grierson, spearheaded a study by the American Library Association on the use
of educational films and the viability of film libraries for educational purposes,
leading to the Educational Film Library Association’s establishment in 1943.
Losey’s parallel project was the Association of Documentary Film Producers,
meant to help organize US documentary ‘after the Grierson pattern’, though
the coming of war meant the organization was dispersed (Griffith 1952: 309).
Publicly sponsored documentary and educational films gave way to wartime
propaganda.
The 1930s witnessed the coalescence of personal and organizational links
between practitioners and theorists, radical politics and aesthetic experi-

mentation. Though the war and immediate postwar periods saw political
and formal experimentation in documentary curtailed, in many respects the
foundations had been laid for future ‘political docs’ and alternative media that
would persist in the belief that political contestation and critique lay at the
heart of American values, beliefs and national identity. Comparing Kopple’s
Harlan County USA (1976) to the FPL work, Belinda Baldwin and Robert
Bahar argue that Harlan County ‘demonstrates why it and other films like it
are vital to the democratic process’ (2004: 13). Indeed, 1930s documentary
experienced something of a revival during the politically heated years of
George W. Bush, Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq War, with events such as
the IDA’s Pare Lorentz Festival in 2007 – the first time all the major Lorentz
films were screened in Los Angeles. Betsy McLane thus compares The River
to Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke (2006), suggesting: ‘Massive technologi-
cal changes, which in turn affect the funding, distribution, and aesthetics of
documentaries, have made the 2000s a very different time than the 1930s, but
despite the passing of decades, important continuities in the documentary
ethos remain’ (McLane 2007: 81). Documentary still envisions sites of collec-
tive social engagement; indeed the ‘social change potential’ of documentary,
one critic argues, might be seen ‘as approaching the miraculous’ (Gaines 2007a:
18).
note s
1. See also Rabinowitz (1994: 5–6).
2. Some overviews that do not mention Hine include Ellis and McLane (2005), Barnouw
(1983) and Jacobs (1979).
3. Campbell’s (1982) remains one of the most complete studies of the topic.
4. See also Seltzer (1980: 18).
5. The New York FPL produced a number of films based on Hunger Marches, including
Albany Hunger March (1931) and National Hunger March (1931, filmed during the first
national march), in addition to Hunger 1932. See Campbell and Alexander (1977: 33–8).
6. Working for The March of Time, filmmaker Mary Losey recalled being labeled a
‘dangerous radical’, with limits placed on political expression (Fielding 1978: 127–9).
7. Already by the late 1930s, however, Soviet filmmakers’ creative freedoms (including
Vertov’s) were being severely repressed by state controls.
8. See Ellis and McLane (2005: 80).
9. This film was so critical of capitalist exploitation that it was the first Hollywood talkie
given permission to be screened in the Soviet Union.
10. Perhaps these pro-New Deal moves were partly self-interested, in that the National
Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) of 1933 provided the government with powers to restrict
and regulate trade practices in industry, including the motion picture industry. The NIRA
was declared unconstitutional in 1935.
11. For a more complete account see Barsam (1992: 166–8).
12. See Denning (1997: 130). Chinese exclusion was repealed in 1943, though with a yearly
immigration figure set at only 105.
13. For further details on Robeson, see Musser (2006: 359).
ch apter 5
Idea-Weapons: Documentary
Propaganda
In 1941, the first Academy Award for best documentary went to the Canadian
short Churchill’s Island (1941), which chronicled Britain’s defence against
the Nazis. The following year, the documentary winners all reflected the
United States’ and its new military allies’ escalating involvement in the
propaganda war: John Ford’s rousing color combat film The Battle of Midway,
the Australian newsreel Kokoda Front Line!, the Soviet military orientation
film Moscow Strikes Back and Frank Capra’s Prelude to War. By 1945, all the
documentary winners had been war films, and in 1946, after the war’s end,
there were no nominees for documentary feature (though the category reap-
peared the following year). Given these beginnings, arguably the best docu-
mentary Oscar – designed to celebrate works where ‘the emphasis is on fact’
(‘Rule Twelve’ 2010) – was based in one of motion pictures’ key ideological
functions: rallying popular opinion and patriotic sentiments during times of
national crisis and war.
But the invention of the Academy’s documentary category, some suggest,
was about more than just endorsing film’s role in the war effort. Patrick
Stockstill, a coordinator for the awards, has seen it as part of a more wide-
spread ‘recognition of the fact that documentary was becoming a bigger part of
the theatrical experience’ (quoted in Mertes 1998: 7). The social functions of
documentary in the US had coalesced during the 1930s and the form’s stature
continued to rise, significantly, after Pearl Harbor. Addressing and bridging
demands for information, education and entertainment, the wartime docu-
mentary became a key mode for swaying public opinion and reinforcing ideas
of citizenship, patriotism and national duty.
Still, many commentators and policymakers continued to view documen-
tary’s authority with suspicion. The lines between persuasive instruction – the
need to convey national unity in times of crisis – and the ‘lies’ of propaganda
were too often far from clearly drawn. Propaganda, according to David
Culbert, ‘involves the exaggeration of ideas already present in a given culture

[. . .] [It] extracts and elevates selected themes to a dominant norm, in the
process allowing exaggeration to become the norm’ (Culbert 1990b: xv). As
seen in the 1930s work of Pare Lorentz, Frontier Films and others, an amount
of selectivity and exaggeration was permissible without destroying public per-
ceptions that a film might be truthful or genuine. Yet this fragile foundation of
trust – the informal contract between documentary producers and consumers
– was pushed to its limits during wartime. Many propaganda films passed
muster only because they mirrored and encouraged passionate wartime senti-
ments already very much in the air.
Philip Dunne once commented that ‘most documentaries have one thing
in common: each springs from a definite need, each is conceived as an idea-
weapon to strike a blow for whatever cause the originator has in mind. In the
broadest sense, the documentary is almost always, therefore, an instrument
of propaganda’ (quoted in Barsam 1974: 2). During the war Dunne worked
for the Office of War Information, promoting documentary as a means for
shaping public opinion at home and forging positive images of the US abroad.
Dunne’s ‘idea-weapon’ captures the basic perceptions and purposes of docu-
mentaries during the war: to serve as ideological tools that could help defeat
the nation’s enemies. But Dunne’s metaphor also recognizes something often
suppressed by claims that documentary maintains a special relationship with
transparency and truth: in spite of appearances, documentaries produced both
during and outside of wartime have been steeped in ideology. Ultimately,
wartime documentaries raise the question of how closely aligned propaganda
and documentary can be before the ‘documentary idea’ itself is pushed to its
limits: how far can documentaries blur the lines between bias and fact and still
be seen as documentaries? The task, then, is to unpack the manufacturing of
truth in documentary while keeping in mind that not all documentaries, even
those designed as propaganda, simply ‘lie’. As we sift through texts designed
to resist our interrogations, we might also begin to discern nuggets of historical
fact and experience embedded in them.
war a nd c i n e m a
Wars have played a crucial role in the ebb and flow of global power dynamics
and have shaped the societies that wage them. Whether revolutionary, civil
or ‘small’ – as in the Philippines, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Kuwait and
Iraq – wars have been fundamental to the construction of American identity
and culture at key junctures in the nation’s history.1 As Tarak Barkawi has
suggested, ‘wars are shaped by the societies that wage them and [. . .] societies
are shaped by the wars they wage. [. . .] War reacts back on its social context’
ide a - w e ap o ns : do c umen tary propagan da 123
(2004: 125). Entwined in this process have been the cultural mediations of
war: print media, film, television and the Internet, all of which reflect and
impact upon the global power dynamics, ideologies, rivalries and nationalisms
that give rise to military conflict. War and popular culture are closely related:
‘citizens’ subjectivities become sites of strategic significance’ and the domain
of the national-popular has been a ‘key battleground’ fought over by national
interests promoting militarism to achieve political objectives (Barkawi 2004:
115). J. David Slocum argues that militarization was ‘the process by which war
and national security became consuming anxieties and provided the memories,
models, and metaphors that shaped broad areas of national life’, and concludes
that ‘American cinema has played an ongoing and privileged role in that
process’ (2006: 1).2
Rudyard Kipling famously observed, ‘the first victim of war is the truth’.
An early sign of nonfiction cinema’s potential for enflaming nationalistic pas-
sions occurred during the run-up to the Spanish-American War in 1898. On
15 February, the US battleship Maine was bombed in Havana Harbor, sinking
along with 263 sailors on board. The incident yielded numerous patriotic,
anti-Spanish films, with public excitement fueled by the pro-war rhetoric and
‘yellow journalism’ of newspapers run by magnates like William Randolph
Hearst. Pro-war nonfiction films often combined real and staged footage, and
many relied on sheer fakery. In an infamous case, the Biograph Company,
which a few months before the Maine explosion had released Battleships
‘Iowa’ and ‘Massachusetts’ (1897), re-released the same film after the event,
now advertised as Battleships ‘Maine’ and ‘Iowa’. The film was exhibited to
great public approval: in Chicago, ‘the audience arose, cheered and cheered
again’ at the appearance of what they believed, or wanted to believe, was the
Maine (quoted in Musser 1990a: 241). A host of other films followed, such as
Edison’s Old Glory and Cuban Flag and Campaign in Cuba (shot not in Cuba,
but in New Jersey), boosting support for war and helping to feed imperialist
sentiments around the country. As Erik Barnouw notes, war-related images
were not only a financial bonanza for companies like Biograph and Vitagraph,
but helped advance the political careers of individuals like Teddy Roosevelt. It
was said Roosevelt halted his march up Cuba’s San Juan Hill in 1898 to strike
a pose for a Vitagraph camera (Barnouw 1983: 23).
More pressing than any demand for verifiable facts in these films was the
need to capture the drama of current events. Projected on screen, symbols of
national pride tapped into powerful emotional undercurrents; allies could be
cheered and enemies booed en masse. Indeed, whether it was the Massachusetts
or the Maine was fairly irrelevant: audiences were seeking verisimilitude, not
indisputable authenticity, to bolster their beliefs. Of course, the Spanish-
American War film didn’t rouse these sentiments on its own; it worked
alongside other media, such as advertising and newspaper accounts, to further
define a common sense of here and there, us and them (Kaplan 2002: 154). But
war and cinema do seem to share a particularly intimate bond. Paul Virilio, for
example, emphasizes how imbricated war and cinematography have been since
the First World War, arguing that ‘war is cinema and cinema is war’: there is in
particular a ‘deadly harmony’ that ‘always establishes itself between the func-
tions of eye and weapon’ (Virilio 1989: 26, 69). These connections have mani-
fested themselves in scientific and aesthetic concerns in the field of optics and
the demand in combat for increasingly sophisticated technologies of magnifi-
cation and sighting: for ever-expanding spatial mastery and accurate targeting.
The multiple meanings of the term ‘to shoot’, then, speak to a larger truth, as
connoted in pre-cinematic inventions such as Thomas Skaife’s ‘pistolgraph’ or
Étienne-Jules Marey’s chronophotographic fusil (gun/rifle), the latter of which
drew its inspiration from the machine gun and multi-chambered Colt revolver
(see Kittler 1999: 124). Reinforcing this point, James Castonguay observes
that early cinematic apparatuses were ‘literally transformed into signifying war
machines’: Edison even renamed his projecting kinetoscope the ‘Wargraph’, so
closely did he identify film with capturing war imagery (2006: 99).
The US government didn’t take long to recognize the potential benefits
and hazards of using film to disseminate ideas and images of war to the public.
During the First World War, the Committee on Public Information (CPI) was
involved in producing, monitoring and censoring war newsreels and features.
Headed by the tireless muckraker George Creel, the CPI (known as the Creel
Committee) aimed to project a unified image of the nation to its citizens and
to the world, especially to European countries that remained neutral. Creel’s
promotion of America was little short of messianic: his job, as he saw it, was
to transmit ‘the gospel of Americanism to every corner of the globe’ (Doherty
1993: 88). Official CPI films such as Pershing’s Crusaders (1918) and America’s
Answer (to the Hun) (1918) drew on military and civilian footage, underlined
by dramatic intertitles such as ‘German arrogance casts its shadow on America
when Deutschland rises like a serpent in our harbors’ (quoted in Doherty
1993: 89). The CPI aimed to project an unwavering sense of US military and
industrial power, and its films were marketed to theater exhibitors as essential
to their patriotic duties. ‘Hurrah for America’ trumpeted advertisements for
Pershing’s Crusaders: ‘Uncle Sam photographed it – Uncle Sam would like you
to show it in your theater’ (Culbert et al. 1990: 214–15).
Among the CPI’s productions was the Official War Review, a propaganda
newsreel distributed by the Pathé Company that drew on footage shot by the
US Signal Corps and various British, French and Italian military sources –
footage routinely censored by the Creel Committee. Indeed, the practice of
censoring factual footage was institutionalized during the First World War.
Censorship has always existed as propaganda’s ‘Siamese twin’; it was and
still is justified by the reasoning that ‘information which may be of value to
the enemy must be prevented from flowing outside the battle zone and that
the feelings of the relatives of dead or injured combat personnel must be
protected’ (Taylor 1994: 21). Closely related motives for censorship include
suppressing public awareness of the grim realities of death, destruction and
killing of civilians, and stopping the spread of potentially damaging informa-
tion such as military or governmental mismanagement or corruption. All of
this is believed to protect the interests of a nation at war.
The CPI encouraged the film industry to follow its lead – a rallying cry
that many in the commercial sector were eager to take up: ‘Let us show what
the screen can do for patriotism!’ enthused the President of the National
Association of the Motion Picture Industry, William A. Brady (Culbert et al.
1990: 200). A persistent theme of the Hollywood ‘hate’ film was the German
invasion of Belgium, and popular shorts represented the German ‘monster’ or
‘evil Hun’ as an oversized marauding ape that indiscriminately kidnapped and
slaughtered Belgian women and children. These images circulated alongside
an increasingly virulent anti-German press, and popular songs such as ‘Let’s
Bury the Hatchet (in the Kaiser’s Head)’ and ‘Hunting the Hun’ strove to
make a game of war’s brutality.
The propaganda machine of the First World War resulted from govern-
ment perceptions that pro-war rhetoric had to target the public aggressively,
though a large proportion of the US population was made up of recent immi-
grants, and many retained ties to the European nations involved on both sides
of the conflict. Public opinion about US participation in the war was far from
unified. Many considered neutrality as the best way forward for an increas-
ingly prosperous and multi-ethnic nation. European wars were not America’s
affair, and the Spanish-American War, and even the bloody battles of the Civil
War, lingered in the memories of many. Shortly after Armistice was signed
in November 1918, ‘hate’ films ceased to be relevant. As the facts of unprec-
edented destruction and the many millions of casualties in Europe sunk in,
there ensued a backlash against the saturation of media propaganda and the
censorship practiced by the US government.
After the war, anti-war narratives such as King Vidor’s The Big Parade
(1925) and Raoul Walsh’s What Price Glory? (1926) underlined America’s
desire to distance itself from wartime’s fevered sentiments. James Whale
directed a film version of the anti-war play Journey’s End (1930), while the
vivid realism of Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) drew
on military and newsreel images of the first war to be so extensively captured
on film, constructing a powerful anti-war message that led to a mini-boom
in the early 1930s of films critiquing war’s legacy. The brutality conjured up
by Milestone’s ‘stark, awful drama’ so affected its star, Lew Ayres, that he
became a conscientious objector in the Second World War at the expense of
his career (Chambers 1996: 25). The impact of the Great War and the intrusive
role of the government in producing propaganda and regulating media cover-

age still haunted the public imagination twenty years later, as the next war
approached.
pi c t u re s t o w i n t h e w a r
As fascism was gaining the upper hand in Europe during the 1930s, US com-
mentators were noting with awe and alarm the ways that state-sponsored
mass communications – enabled by efficient, top-down governmental controls
– could arouse the passions of the masses. Fascist spectacles such as Leni
Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935), an ode to Hitler’s displays of Nazi
unity, had generated interest among cineastes for their intense aesthetic and
emotional impact (scenes from Triumph were shown alongside The Plow that
Broke the Plains at the latter’s Washington, DC debut). Yet as war broke
out in Europe, admiration afforded by the sheer scale of nationalist visions
like Riefenstahl’s gave way to concerns about replicating fascist aesthetics or
imposing extensive regulations on the media. Even though the Soviet Union
was an ally, ‘Red Scare’ suspicions persisted and few wanted to duplicate its
state-run media networks.
Moreover, the US government’s excesses during the First World War
still overshadowed calls for greater centralized controls over print, radio and
motion pictures. As Harold L. Elsten argued in 1941:
The present fear of government interference in politics, of interference

with the rights of free speech, press, and the like, can be traced to the
period of the First World War. [. . .] More recently, this distrust has
been confirmed by the spectacle of government monopoly of mass com-
munications in the authoritarian nations. (Elsten 1942: 7)
Even after the US joined the war, scepticism about propaganda and regulat-
ing information disseminated on the ‘home front’ never quite faded. Fears
about protecting First Amendment rights were reflected in battles within and
between Congress and the executive branch. As Ernst Kris saw it, the distrust
of propaganda could be traced to a wider distrust, namely
the disappointment in government and the inflation of persuasion. Both

developed fully after the last war [. . .] The first, the disappointment in
government, is related to the feeling that the world has grown out of
control. It is a phenomenon apparently typical of industrialized mass
society under the impact of war and postwar conflicts. [. . .] The eco-
nomic crisis in all countries, though at different times and with differ-
ent intensity, has heightened the disappointment in government into a

feeling of general insecurity. (Kris 1943: 383)
Such concerns continued to hang over the Roosevelt administration, even as

the Office of War Information (OWI) was created by presidential decree in
June 1942.
The bombing of Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 and the declaration of
war to a great extent freed Roosevelt from hesitancies that reigned over gov-
ernment involvement in the media. Controls over the politics and morality of
American movies were seen as crucial to the project of establishing national
unity, but ‘chaos’ continued to prevail over various overlapping government
information divisions which together lacked a unified war vision (Koppes
1997: 269). The OWI was meant to streamline the management of wartime
propaganda, while controversial censorship duties were carefully segregated
off into the Office of Censorship. Headed by the radio commentator Elmer
Davis, the OWI was supposed to ‘enhance public understanding of the war at
home and abroad’ through overseeing the production of pamphlets, posters,
radio transmissions and films (Winkler 1978: 33). Davis approached his task
from the position of a journalist defending freedom and democracy, insisting
that his agency’s goal was not to spread convenient lies but ‘to tell the truth’.
The OWI was to avoid the ‘witch hunt’ and ‘anti-Hun’ rhetoric of the First
World War (Koppes and Black, 1988: 59). Propaganda might be an inevitable
side effect of war, but Davis still preferred to take the high road, stressing
American political openness rather than forcing measures that could appear
to mirror fascist rhetoric. In spite of popular support for Davis, the OWI’s
propaganda operations – still suspiciously viewed in Congress as the machina-
tions of ‘New Dealers’ – remained decidedly controversial (Koppes and Black
1988: 137–8).
It didn’t help that the organization failed to streamline all agencies involved
in war propaganda. The Office of the Co-ordinator of Inter-American Affairs
(CIAA, devoted to Latin American operations), for example, retained its
independence from the OWI when its head, Nelson D. Rockefeller – ‘always
jealous of incursions into his territory’ – threatened to resign if he had to work
within another agency (Winkler 1978: 26; Koppes and Black 1988: 58–9). The
work of the OWI quickly devolved into separate branches – domestic and
overseas – each responsible for their own film activities. The domestic branch
oversaw the Bureau of Motion Pictures (BMP), directed by the newspaper
editor and Roosevelt acolyte Lowell Mellett, based in Washington. Mellett
planned for the domestic branch to follow a ‘three-point’ strategy: to coor-
dinate the film activities of government agencies, to work with industry to
assure the maximum distribution of government films, and to aid the industry
in producing films that might assist ‘the prosecution of the war’ (Dyer 1943:
22). The BMP’s ‘Manual for the Motion Picture Industry’ exhorted studios
to ask themselves: ‘Will this picture help to win the war?’ (quoted in Koppes
1997: 269).
The domestic branch’s Hollywood office, headed by Nelson Poynter
(another pro-New Deal journalist who, as it happened, ‘did not follow movies’)
was set up in April 1942 to work with powerful studio interests (Koppes and
Black 1988: 58). The OWI intended it to serve a number of interrelated func-
tions, including monitoring Hollywood scripts to ensure that they contained
nothing that might undermine the war effort and that they guarded public
perceptions of the US and its policies. This latter task, many industry figures
complained, amounted to government ‘surveillance’ of Hollywood. There
was resistance to the OWI’s ‘intrusive presence’ and the ‘pushy cues’ handed
down in memos from Poynter’s office (disparagingly nicknamed ‘poynters’ by
Hollywood insiders) (Doherty 1993: 46–7). Mellett intervened, contending
that previewing and editing scripts was favorable to having completed films
deemed inappropriate and yanked from distribution later on. Eventually a
compromise was reached, and reading and approving scripts became a regular
OWI function.
While the Overseas Bureau attained a degree of autonomy (see below),
the OWI’s domestic branch struggled with anti-New Dealers in Congress,
the public, and industry power brokers suspicious of its functions. Congress
blocked its budget in 1943–4, only reinstating it after strict restrictions were
imposed – including the abolition of the Bureau of Motion Pictures’ domes-
tic operations. Though never far from scrutiny, the organization did create
a number of straightforward public information and instructional films, like
Wartime Nutrition (1943), which proffered messages of reassurance during a
time of instability and confusion. Samuel Spewack’s The World at War (1942),
a compilation documentary broadly similar to Capra’s forthcoming Prelude to
War, was the government’s first orientation film released to civilian audiences.
Testifying to the OWI’s nervousness regarding public perceptions of propa-
ganda, The World at War affirms that ‘nothing has been staged’ and defensively
draws attention to its own complicated ideological position: ‘The editors are
Americans’, it notes, ‘and therefore partisan, but every effort has been made to
let the facts speak for themselves’. Yet even with its dramatic images of Pearl
Harbor’s flaming wreckage, the film failed to make a broad impact. It was
met with resistance from exhibitors and lukewarm responses from audiences,
reflecting the difficulties of releasing government propaganda on commercial
screens.
Other films were directly targeted at domestic tensions and morale. Campus
on the March (1942) showed the mobilization of US universities, where
subjects such as agricultural management, chemical weaponry and aviation
were being geared towards the war effort. Manpower (1942) dealt with the
War Manpower Commission and labor shortages, including the transition of

African American and women workers from ‘menial’ and ‘domestic’ duties
into more skilled work such as machine operation. But encouraging the public
to re-imagine the social roles of traditionally marginalized or underrepresented
groups was an uphill struggle. As Michael Renov notes, one wartime training
manual designed for community-led indoctrination suggested: ‘The ultimate
goal [. . .] is to associate in the minds of the public the words “woman” and
“work” just as firmly as the words “man” and “fight” are associated’. Such
directives suggest the government clearly saw the need for a ‘vigorous and
repetitive public campaign’ that could ensure extensive ‘behavior modifi-
cation’ (Renov 1988: 85). The recasting of traditional sex roles, the radical
rethinking of ingrained racial prejudices and hierarchies – these were crucial
to rallying the whole nation around the war. The need to mobilize women war
workers, in particular, resulted in government-led campaigns and popular
icons like ‘Rosie the Riveter’ (initiated by the popular song of the same name).
The reformation of social roles and ideological expectations attempted during
the Second World War would have a long-term social impact.3
During the war, ongoing social divisions came up against urgent calls for
unity. Events like the ‘Red Summer’ riots of 1919, precipitated in part by
African American veterans still experiencing social exclusion after serving in
the First World War, had threatened both the substance and the popular image
of national harmony. As the US entered world war for the second time, unity
was still hampered by widespread racial discrimination. In Detroit, for example,
realtors had urged that ‘negro workers be removed from certain large sections
of the community [to] make their homes available for white war workers’
(Culbert and Suid 1991: 1702).4 Resentment prevailed throughout the African
American community; even feel-good OWI films appeared to perpetuate an
image of a ‘white war’ waged by a ‘white man’s country’ (Garrett 1994: 71).
This idea seemed reinforced by America’s racist stance towards the Japanese,
which at times threatened to mirror the racism of America’s other enemy: the
Nazi regime. At the Ford Motor Company in Detroit, some African American
workers tore down a poster of a ‘Jap soldier’ menacing a white woman with a
bayonet. As reported to Elmer Davis at the OWI, the workers argued that ‘the
Japs are colored people, so are we. We are not fighting colored people. We are
fighting for democracy’ (Culbert and Suid 1991: 1702). The quote suggests
that the protest was aimed against the racism of the poster and not against the
war effort per se, but the government was aware it needed to act on reports of
racial discord. Though groups like the Army still were officially committed to
existing policies of segregation, a rhetorical battle was set in motion.
The OWI responded to the ‘Negro problem’ with films like Negro Colleges in
Wartime (1944), which characterizes war as an opportunity that can help level
racial inequalities. Featuring training at African American institutions such
as Howard University and the Hampton Institute, the overriding message is

of African American self-determination, social progress and enlightenment.
While several scenes depict black students being taught by white instructors,
there are no references to the realities of discrimination and racial segregation,
such as the Jim Crow laws that forbade these very students from entering
mainstream educational institutions. Another ‘patronizing’ film addressed
to African Americans was the Department of Agriculture’s Henry Browne,
Farmer (1942) (Cripps and Culbert 1998: 112). The film follows a black farmer
working his forty acres, showing the rhythms of family, social and laboring
life. Anchored by the voice of actor and civil rights activist Canada Lee, it
depicts African American rural life as basically stable and comfortable. Still,
Browne’s rough-hewn cabin and under-equipped farm were meant to resem-
ble reality just enough to engage black audiences, rather than alienating them
through blatantly false images. At the film’s core is the idea that, ‘at a time
when every American has an important job to do’, there are crucial if often
invisible links between African Americans laboring on farms and the war going
on overseas. It was nominated for an Oscar, though Thomas Cripps calls it a
‘second-rate’ film that barely approaches the sophistication of the well-known
Army indoctrination film The Negro Soldier (1944), discussed below (Cripps
and Culbert 1998: 112).
If many of these films seem reasonably subtle vehicles for propaganda,
others did invoke the racism of First World War ‘hate’ films. While racial
slurs against Germans were usually kept to a minimum (Germans made up
one of the largest immigrant groups in the US), the Japanese were openly
reviled: portrayed as ‘vermin’ to be ‘exterminated’. ‘They live like rats, breed
like rats, and act like rats’, stated the governor of Idaho, while the Los Angeles
Times referred to ‘vipers’ hatched from eggs (Lindqvist 2001: sec. 221). The
most vitriolic anti-Japanese films released through the BMP were made for
military indoctrination. In Our Enemy – the Japanese (1943), the former US
ambassador to Japan, Joseph C. Grew, characterizes the Japanese as a nation
of ‘fanatics’ guided by a ‘primitive moral code’.5 Grew argues the Japanese are
‘as different from ourselves as any people on this planet: the real difference
is in their minds. [. . .] Their weapons are modern, their thinking is 2,000
years out of date’. The dehumanizing spectacle of the Japanese in Our Enemy
was restricted to military screenings, but similar sentiments were echoed in
Hollywood exploitation films that were saturating the US market. RKO’s
advertisements for Behind the Rising Sun (1943) trumpeted that the ‘villain-
ous Japs have simply got to be exterminated! They sell their own daughters!
They manhandle captive women! They make war even on babies! They
torture helpless men and women! [. . .] and more, and more, and more!’6 Fox’s
Guadalcanal Diary (1943) presented Japanese fighters as ‘apes and monkeys’;
killing them was likened to a ‘turkey shoot’. OWI script reviewers praised this
film as the ‘most realistic and outstanding’ motion picture yet made about war
in the Pacific (Koppes and Black 1988: 260).
Perhaps most indicative of the OWI’s fraught domestic role is Japanese
Relocation (1942), which betrays the ideological instability of wartime propa-
ganda. Taken alongside the bombastic claims of films such as Behind the Rising
Sun, the film effectively works to repackage ‘Yellow Peril’ hysteria as prudent
wartime behavior. Japanese Relocation was charged with the task of selling
to the public the forced migration and internment of over 100,000 Japanese
immigrants and Japanese-American citizens (nisei). Dominated by the defen-
sive narration of Milton S. Eisenhower of the War Relocation Authority, the
film exemplifies how home-grown propaganda strove to manipulate public
opinion and fiercely protect the nation’s image. The displaced nisei are mis-
leadingly referred to as ‘evacuees’. Bussed away from boarded up homes and
businesses – ‘quick disposal of property often involved financial sacrifice for
the evacuees’, the voiceover states – they arrive in remote areas of California,
Utah, Arkansas, Colorado and Arizona. D. S. Meyer, director of the War
Relocation Authority, would assure Elmer Davis at the OWI that the film was
‘an accurate record of the early stages of the evacuation’ (Culbert and Suid
1991: 1393).7
The relocation camps appear hospitable and open but in reality were
patrolled by armed military personnel and enclosed by barbed wire. The film’s
upbeat narration is buoyed by patriotic tunes and even claims that forced
internment offers an opportunity to establish ‘new pioneer communities’. The
‘evacuees’ (technically, prisoners of war) now have the chance to embody the
spirit of American expansionism. Over the image of visibly exhausted and
bewildered Japanese-Americans filing towards a processing center, the nar-
rator invokes Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis and the cliché of the
redemptive wilderness: ‘Naturally the newcomers looked about with some
curiosity – they were in a new area, on land that was raw, untamed, but full
of opportunity’. They can now ‘reclaim the desert’. Images of children focus
audience attention away from war’s brutalities and injustices towards a ‘new
world’ led by America. But the paternalistic edifice of Japanese Relocation
threatens to come tumbling down when the narrator admits that two-thirds
of the displaced people are American citizens and the rest are ‘aliens’. The
Japanese are divided into two groups: ‘loyal’ citizens who might eventually
hope to ‘once again enjoy the freedoms that we in this country cherish’, and
‘disloyal’ others who soon will have ‘left this country for good’. In spite of its
closing invocations of American decency and humane values, the film effec-
tively endorses segregation and ethnic exclusion (already in force through the
Asian Exclusion Act of 1924). These images and practices would long haunt
the Japanese-American experience.
The OWI domestic branch was constantly under fire from Congress. In
addition to fears over domestic propaganda, many Southern conservatives

were outraged by the OWI’s emphasis on rethinking race relations. The
organization’s operating budget for the fiscal year beginning 1 July 1943 was
practically eliminated. Lowell Mellett resigned and returned to his job as
administrative assistant to Roosevelt. Expressing barely suppressed relief at
the demise of the BMP, the industry mouthpiece Boxoffice reported that its
total production had amounted to less than a hundred films totaling 110 reels,
which included theatrical releases, newsreels, 16 mm non-theatrical short sub-
jects, numerous three-minute films for ‘local campaigns’ and the sponsored
releases of other government agencies (Dyer 1943: 25). The OWI was reorgan-
ized by Ulric Bell, who had virulently campaigned for US intervention before
Pearl Harbor, and domestic activities became more closely tied to the Office
of Censorship.
The production of propaganda for overseas use encountered less resist-
ance, helped by those who saw it as an essential ‘attack weapon’ (Koppes and
Black 1988: 54).8 The Overseas Bureau (OB), headed by Robert Riskin in New
York, was devoted to psychological warfare and circulating pro-American
propaganda in allied, neutral and key embattled regions such as North Africa.
Riskin’s bureau soon became ‘a huge operation’, asserting its autonomy from
the domestic direction and control of the BMP (Scott 2006: 349). As Ian
Scott contends, Riskin was committed to promoting documentary as a tool for
persuading audiences around the world to endorse the American cause. His
ambitious ‘Projections of America’ films, aimed at challenging preconceived
notions of the United States in foreign territories, would become (alongside
the well-known Allied ‘Victory’ films) one of the most ‘influential and substan-
tive collections of propaganda made during the war’ (Scott 2006: 347).
Riskin made use of experienced documentarists who had come to promi-
nence during the 1930s. Willard Van Dyke made Northwest USA (1945),
which focused on the Northwest as the ‘crossroads of the air’: a gateway to
international trade routes with Russia, Latin America and East Asia. Imaged
from high above the earth’s surface, the world suggests a paradox: globalized,
yet intensely conflicted, in need of unification to restore the flow of goods and
capital. The film then straightforwardly documents the Northwest region’s
industries, agriculture and growing urban centers. Working for the CIAA
with Ben Maddow (who had worked on Native Land), Van Dyke also made
The Bridge (1944), which again invokes an aerial perspective in examining air
transport links between dispersed Latin and North American countries.
Other documentarists working with Riskin included Irving Lerner, who
received an Oscar nomination for his first OWI film, Swedes in America (1943),
an uplifting short about assimilation and ethnic tolerance which featured
that most beloved of Swedish-Americans, Ingrid Bergman. Lerner’s jovial
The Autobiography of a Jeep (1943) joined a legion of films that anthropo-
morphized the machinery of war. In this seamless first-person tale, the Jeep
becomes a kind of pop icon: we see its fabrication, its functions in the war,
its growing celebrity status. War is a serious game, where the Jeep cuts a
swath of American liberation and good cheer through the most forbidding
terrains. Lerner also produced, with Alexander Hammid, the internationally
distributed Hymn of the Nations (a.k.a. Toscanini, 1944), a compelling film that
documented Arturo Toscanini conducting Verdi’s music in New York as part
of celebrations to mark the overthrow of Mussolini. Another Nykino veteran,
Sidney Meyers, contributed to Larry Madison’s and Helen Grayson’s The
Cummington Story (1945), a dramatized tale of Eastern European war refugees
resettled in Cummington, Massachusetts (known as the hometown of William
Cullen Bryant, an early promoter of American cultural nationalism). Often
cited for its affecting ‘melting pot’ theme of neighborly cooperation, The
Cummington Story is perhaps best remembered for its stirring Aaron Copland
score (Pollack 1999: 408).
Riskin’s overseas work came under the control of General Dwight D.
Eisenhower’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces, and
received broad support in executive and congressional circles. Philip Dunne
was chief of film production, sharing Riskin’s belief in documentary’s potential
to shape attitudes about the nation. For Riskin and Dunne, the idea-weapon was
subtly persuasive rather than aggressive (‘soft’ rather than ‘hard’ propaganda)
and needed to project the American scene as open, inclusive and harmonious.
OB films like The Cummington Story therefore avoided ethnic stereotyping of
the enemy and aimed instead to generate sympathy for the ‘American way’
characterized by enterprise, free speech and equal opportunities.
The Town (1945) is exemplary of this strategy. Filmed in Madison, Indiana,
by Josef von Sternberg, it conjures up an idealized and generic (as its title
suggests) image of Middle America: clean-cut, industrious, family-oriented,
churchgoing. Von Sternberg was himself the son of Austrian immigrants, and
his film stresses multi-ethnic European influences – France, Greece, Italy,
Norway, Austria, Germany, Czechoslovakia – embedded in US culture and
identity. ‘The United States was created by men who came from the four
corners of the earth’, the narrator states as a ferry (suggesting perhaps both
transport and an untroubled, revisionist history of migration) slowly makes
its way down a quiet river. Further images – harvesting grapes, gathering
eggs, stalls on the market square, varied architectural styles dotted around
town – evoke Europe before the eruption of war. Indeed, the US appears
nostalgically to mirror prewar Europe, and notably absent are any explicit
references to African American, Mexican, Chinese, Japanese or other non-
European American groups.9 The film invokes a distinctly ‘white’ American
vernacular grounded in Disneyesque homilies and Norman Rockwell fantasy,
yet manages to promote an inclusive (if eurocentric) multiculturalism that
speaks to broader tensions – Europe’s broken, war-torn societies would want

nothing other than to emulate this American idyll. As Scott suggests, films like
The Town presented American society as ‘to a degree, Edenic’, but most OWI
films were cautious about preaching an ideal ‘that might appear overtly false
to foreign audiences’ (2006: 358). Only the final images of The Town gesture
towards the specter of war, as the sons of immigrants travel ‘back across the
seas’ to ‘fight for freedom’ and restore order to a Europe now torn asunder.
More openly didactic, Alexander Hammid’s richly photographed Valley
of the Tennessee (1944) dramatizes themes explored in The River (and borrows
its footage): drought, flooding and New Deal solutions brought about by
the TVA. Hammid had worked on documentaries like Crisis (1939), about
the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, but perhaps is best remembered
for collaborating with his wife, Maya Deren, on the avant-garde Meshes of
the Afternoon (1943). Valley of the Tennessee opens with a striking shot taken
through a water-drenched lens: the camera perched on a seaplane taking off
from San Francisco Bay. As in many OWI films, an aerial perspective surveys
the American scene; the film then returns to earth with images of rural life:
wide-eyed, impoverished children crowding a shabby schoolhouse. Individual
characters are introduced, each embodying a distinctive political angle, and
the audience is encouraged to establish imaginary affinities. The apathetic
farmer Horace Higgins seems straight out of The Grapes of Wrath, contrasting
with the open-minded (and classically handsome) farmer Henry Clark, who is
‘descended of pioneers’. A boy, inspired by the epic scale of dam building, sig-
nifies ‘inquisitive youth’ and (again) the ‘pioneer spirit’. Also making appear-
ances are some heroes of civil management – Senators George W. Norris and
James Polk, Harcourt A. Morgan (president of the University of Tennessee)
and other architects of the TVA.
Avoiding controversies relating to dam building such as ecological impacts
or population displacement, the film stresses how American ingenuity and
the collective pioneer spirit have translated into social progress and personal
empowerment. Even the sceptical Horace Higgins sees the light. Government
initiatives, the film insists, are performed for and by the people: ‘The devel-
opment of people is the first concern of democracy’. An animated graphic
showing a bird’s-eye view of dams built along the Tennessee Valley encapsu-
lates the role of the aerial shot in visioning a ‘Taylorized’, industrially efficient
nation. The river and tributaries, branching out like veins and capillaries, are
managed by human ingenuity and collective labor, ‘by and for the people’,
indicating the social body of the American nation. For Scott, Valley of the
Tennessee reflects Riskin’s desire to highlight ‘communal harmony and organi-
zational logic within the grass-roots populace’ (2006: 358). Hammid’s ‘soft’
propaganda film conforms to contemporary views claiming that propaganda
might actually serve as a constructive social tool. Propaganda, if ‘intelligently’
understood, could ‘identify difficulties in our society’, helping people become

‘aware of the beliefs and aspirations of various groups’; it also could be ‘a useful
source in which to seek possible solutions [. . .] and some kind of unity of social
action’ (Tyler 1942: 155). Hammid’s final, sweeping zoom towards the face of
a young girl – her expression shifting from innocent awe to determination –
brings the film full circle, resolving the images of poverty-stricken children
that opened the film. As in many OWI films, references to Roosevelt’s famous
‘Four Freedoms’ speech of 1941 dominate the narration, projecting a new
world led by the US and characterized by freedoms of speech, of religion, and
of freedom from want and fear. Collective American perseverance and knowl-
edge can lead the world out of war towards a ‘new and better world’.
Overall, Riskin oversaw twenty-six documentaries in the OB’s ‘Projections
of America’ series. His efforts during the final months of the war to extend
government involvement in overseas distribution of films with a positive
American outlook were, however, never seriously heard, and the OWI’s func-
tions ceased in August 1945 (Scott 2006: 363).
ho l l y wo o d r e c r ui t s
Aside from filming for strategic purposes (such as aerial camerawork for
bombing and reconnaissance), nonfiction filmmaking during the war might be
broken down into several broad areas. These include: training and industrial
films for officers, medical personnel, troops going into battle and workers at
home; indoctrination (or ‘orientation’) films providing historical and cultural
background as well as justification for US intervention; records of battle or
combat films; and propaganda dealing with social and cultural themes aimed
at building a collective sense of purpose and boosting morale. There was an
overlap between these different areas (combat footage was incorporated into
indoctrination and training films, for example, as well as into Hollywood
combat dramatizations), but in general these categories suggest the uses to
which documentaries were being put during the war and indicate the contexts
in which they were produced and screened.
Films came from units linked to the Army Signal Corps, the Army Air
Force, the Navy and other military groups. The Signal Corps was relatively
new to filmmaking when the war began, but when faced with the task of
training millions of troops in a short time, it quickly started turning out films
(Culbert 1990a: 267). Lacking experienced filmmaking personnel, the Signal
Corps recognized that Hollywood had a major role to play and enlisted many
of the industry’s producers, technicians and writers. Over the course of the
war, the Signal Corps produced over 2,500 films for a variety of purposes, over
1,500 of which were translated for screening in allied countries (Betts 2004:
28). In addition, Hollywood studios were commissioned to make training

films that were sold directly (and, it would emerge, controversially) to military
and government agencies.10 Far from glamorous, these films served specific
functions: Ignition and the Spark Plug, Tanks, The 240mm Howitzer, and Care
and Maintenance of Tapered Roller Bearings are just a few of the thousands of
titles. One of the most widely screened items was the War Department’s no.
8-154, Sex Hygiene (1942), made under the auspices of John Ford and 20th
Century-Fox.
A prominent example of Hollywood and military collaboration was
Lieutenant Colonel Frank Capra’s Why We Fight series: seven films made
for the Signal Corps that compiled newsreel footage, Axis propaganda films,
staged scenes and numerous animated maps and charts – all designed to
provide irrefutable evidence of the need to go to war. When Capra – known for
populist films celebrating small-town American life – was enlisted by General
George C. Marshall to produce documentaries for the Army, he famously pro-
tested, ‘I have never before made a single documentary film. I’ve never even
been near anybody that’s made one’ (Doherty 1993: 24). Whether Capra’s
films were in fact documentaries at all would later be questioned by Philip
Dunne, who saw them as essentially ‘factual films’ that were ‘not the realm of
the true documentarian’ (quoted in Scott 2006: 352).
Whether seen as factual film or documentary, the Why We Fight series,
beginning with the first installment Prelude to War (1942), is steeped in the tra-
ditions both of the newsreel and of the persuasive, thesis-driven documentary
that came of age in the 1930s. The opening titles ground its authority in fact,
stating unequivocally that ‘the purpose of these films is to give factual infor-
mation’. Through the use of hortatory voiceover, stirring music and ominous
images of Axis power, the Why We Fight films intensify the argumentative
and emotional strategies laid down in Depression-era documentaries. Driven
forward by a historical narrative, seamless cause and effect and rapid-fire
editing (few shots are held for more than two seconds), Prelude to War com-
mands our attention. Capra’s format leaves little room for contemplation;
it disallows questioning of the images and their assigned interpretation. It
presents audiences with a simple, divided world view: two globes, one white
and one black. One is a world of free Allies, the other an enslaved Axis. For
Bernard F. Dick, the film doesn’t produce a broader ‘historical awareness’, it
only gives an impression of learning through the recitation of verifiable facts
and dates. Prelude to War served as a ‘summary lecture’ and a ‘crash course’ for
those largely uneducated about the causes of war (1985: 4, 7).
The Why We Fight series was initially conceived for indoctrination of armed
forces’ personnel. When the Army, with the War Activities Committee and
the OWI’s OB, exerted pressure to ‘force’ the films into commercial cinemas,
they tested the limits of the public’s – and the film industry’s – tolerance for
government propaganda (Hoorn 1990 [1942]: 377). Moreover, the Army was
faced with resistance from within the government itself in the form of Mellett
and the BMP, who were opposed to other government organizations exhibit-
ing films on domestic screens. This would have constituted ‘an unwarranted
incursion into their civilian franchise’ (Doherty 1993: 79). The industry also
protested: when in May 1943 it was announced that some 150 prints of Capra’s
Prelude to War would be distributed free of charge to exhibitors, Boxoffice com-
plained of an ‘overdose’ of war films being imposed by the government. Even
at no cost, the 53-minute film would add to the war-related newsreels and the
20-minute OWI and industry-produced ‘Victory’ films that exhibitors had
already pledged to show. This would mean that the majority of valuable screen
time would be devoted to war. Exhibitors claimed to be receiving hundreds of
complaints every week, mainly from women already under stress with ‘sons or
sweethearts’ going overseas, who wanted escapist fare to help ‘get away from
it all’ or were seeking suitable entertainment for children (‘Murmurs Against
Overdose’ 1943: 19).
After Prelude to War’s civilian premiere, the New York Times ignored pres-
sures towards war boosterism to complain that Capra’s film ‘hammers the
single thesis’ that the war was ‘between free states and those which would
enslave the world’ (‘Prelude’ 1943: 16). As part of a series, three of which – The
Nazis Strike, Divide and Conquer and The Battle of Britain – were already being
screened to US troops, the film’s usefulness as a single release was also ques-
tionable. Finally, the Times took a swipe at Prelude to War’s oversimplifications
and infantilization of its viewers: ‘[The film’s] generalizations are vague and it
leans heavily on patriotic symbolism to convey a sense of America. It leaves
many obvious “why” questions completely unanswered’ (16). All told, Capra’s
important documentary flopped as a commercial release, though it fared far
better in the military sphere where, as of May 1943, it had been screened to
over six million troops.
Capra’s Special Services Branch unit also would produce The Negro
Soldier, a film designed to address perceptions, such those of the African
American soldier James C. Austin, that the nation was fighting a ‘white war’.
As Austin wrote to Elmer Davis: ‘There are no colored bomber crews [. . .]
there is no need for any machinists, electricians, machine-gunsmiths, welders,
or aircraft technicians if they are colored’ (Culbert and Suid 1991: 1704). A
somewhat absurd memo sent to Capra from the War Department’s expert
on race relations, Donald Young, laid out the need to combat such think-
ing by producing an image of African Americans marketable to the broader
public. In a lengthy list of ‘typical subjects to be avoided’, Young forbade
showing any work that might require ‘a strong back but no brain’, the ‘singing
of spirituals’, tap dancing, crap shooting and ‘Negro dialect’, and suggested
playing down ‘colored soldiers most Negroid in appearance’. He concluded:
‘In short, avoid strictly any scene which shows Negroes in any role which
may become stereotyped as characteristically Negro’ (Culbert and Suid 1991:
1706–7).11
In spite of such egregious origins, the finished film was well received and
went on to become mandatory military viewing. Capra had little hands-on
involvement, leaving the directing to the relatively untested Stuart Heisler,
director of The Glass Key (1942), and the writing to African American author
Carlton Moss. Framed by the dramatic device of a preacher (Moss) deliver-
ing a sermon to a rapt congregation, The Negro Soldier lays out a history of
American military heroism that foregrounds the roles of African Americans.
In scene after scene, African Americans are represented as ‘neat, clean, orderly,
responsible, patriotic’; the black community is pervasively ‘middle class’ and
aspiring chiefly to the status quo (Cripps and Culbert 1998: 118). For a brief,
controversial period, the film was withheld from public viewing and limited to
military screenings. The Los Angeles Sentinel was incensed, calling it ‘not only
one of the best pictures of its kind but [. . .] a powerful and telling refutation
of racism’ (Hardwicke 1944: 13). Through endorsements from the NAACP
and celebrities like Lena Horne, The Negro Soldier gained wider distribution,
though mainstream success eluded it. For Cripps and Culbert, the long-term
influence of the film should not be underestimated; it was a ‘watershed in the
use of film to promote racial tolerance’, indicating the role film could play in
civil rights activism and initiating the development of the racial ‘message’ film
(1998: 130).
Other prominent Hollywood figures such as John Ford, John Huston and
William Wyler, well-versed in Hollywood’s populist strategies, were turning
out taut combat records that strove to rally the public to root for ‘our boys’.
During the war there was extensive overlap between documentary and the
strategies of dramatic fiction; as Thomas Doherty suggests, combat documen-
taries in particular had ‘an implied contract’ with homefront spectators. This
arrangement effectively stated that
though a documentary, we will use the familiar conventions of the

Hollywood feature film to accentuate the experience, but as a documen-
tary we want you to remember that what you behold is really real. Thus,
though the combat reports used the identifiable voices of Hollywood
actors for narration and dramatic readings, heavenly choirs and musical
soundtracks to modulate emotion, and transparently staged scenes for
expository or polemical purposes, they also insisted on their special status
as authentic records of wartime action and hence cinema that warranted
special credence and respect. Wartime audiences and War Department
filmmakers engaged in a mutual agreement to switch between Hollywood
convenience and documentary rigor. (Doherty 1993: 252)
Of course standards of ‘documentary rigor’ were hardly, at this stage, set

in stone, and much nonfiction work coming both from Hollywood veterans
and those previously trained in documentary filmmaking continued to draw
on a mixture of factual and staged footage, featuring professional actors and
manipulating emotions via musical scores, just as documentaries had through
the Depression years.
In Ford’s work, combat documentary clearly received the benefits of
Hollywood professionalism. His The Battle of Midway (1942) was the first US
combat film, documenting the Japanese attack on the US Navy at Midway
Atoll in the Pacific. Ford was well positioned to make films that stressed the
urgency of America’s mission against fascism. Before the war, he had directed
intelligent, liberal dramas such as Stagecoach (1939) and The Grapes of Wrath
(1940), subtly critiquing social prejudice, hierarchy and bloated corporate
bureaucracy. The Battle of Midway takes up the anti-fascist cause with mes-
sianic fervor. Reflecting both military standards and Ford’s innovative style, it
was shot with handheld cameras on 16 mm color stock. Color also reinforces
the film’s ideological function, producing a powerful aesthetic response while
conveying the feel of an amateur home movie (16 mm color stock was first
marketed to amateurs in the 1930s).12 The result is an intimate, visceral experi-
ence of battle.
Patriotic feelings are provoked through arresting color images of fighting,
framed by shots of waving flags and marching soldiers. Drawing from a stock
of Ford regulars (Henry Fonda and Jane Darwell added homespun touches
to the narration, Alfred Newman contributed a rousing score), the 18-minute
film laid down a standard for the combat documentary’s intense immediacy.
Hereafter combat films – both documentary and fiction – would aim to create
a palpable sense of being in the midst of the fighting. Filmmakers became
‘embedded’ reporters: the body holding the camera was clearly in as much
danger as the soldiers being filmed. Indeed, Ford sustained an eye injury at
Midway, and as a result the film earned its director not only an Oscar but a
Purple Heart.
John Huston’s The Battle of San Pietro (1945) introduced elements of
gritty realism that surpassed even The Battle of Midway’s arresting footage.
Huston’s first combat film, the technicolor Report from the Aleutians (1943),
had mitigated any negative impressions of battle by positing a redemptive
politics of the ‘fight for freedom’. The Battle of San Pietro instead suspends
redemptive messages until its very end. Made with hand-held Eyemo newsreel
cameras on 35 mm black and white stock, San Pietro documents fighting at the
Italian village of San Pietro Infine during December 1943: the first time that
Italian forces joined the Allies against the Germans. Unusually, the film opens
not with patriotic flag waving and marching troops but with San Pietro in
ruins. The commentator reads from a guidebook describing sights such as the
fifteenth-century church of St Peter: ‘Note interesting treatment of chancel’,

he states, over an image of a bombed out shell of a building. A dead woman lies
on the ground where she fell, photographed from two angles. One open eye
stares blankly upwards, perhaps mirroring our own conflicting desires both to
see and to shut our eyes to the tragedy of war. Like other combat records, the
film matter-of-factly plots the progress of the battle through numerous maps
and charts, but Huston’s work is anything but matter of fact, showing war
truly as hell on earth, to such an extent that the film can be read as condemn-
ing acts of war.
While never precisely unpatriotic, with implicit figurations of ‘us’ versus
‘them’, the film’s very brutality invites ambivalence and the possibility of
pacifist critique. The spectator him/herself becomes a vulnerable body
aligned to the camera. During the battle scenes, the sound of bullets (added
in postproduction) can be heard whizzing past the cameraman’s ears. The
results are clear: soldiers are shown bundled into body bags, their faces gro-
tesquely disfigured. At first, the liberation of San Pietro seems to reveal little
more than destroyed buildings and a handful of broken people. Notable are
images of women emerging from the ruins, figures of resistance and resilience.
Not soldiers, but simply survivors, they work amid the destruction, carrying
baggage and heavy furniture – one woman balances a coffin on her head. While
‘heavenly choirs’ on the soundtrack threaten to dissolve the film’s cumulative
impact, the images of destruction and suffering recall other powerful state-
ments of wartime carnage such as The Spanish Earth.
Indeed, the film was considered too strong for public release without
extensive cuts. Army officials reportedly walked out during a preview, calling
it ‘antiwar’, though the military eventually would come around, deeming it
suitable for training troops (Huston 1980: 119). Years later, Huston called
this and his subsequent film, Let There Be Light (1946), ‘incendiary pacifist
documents’, as opposed to his jingoistic Report from the Aleutians, which he
labeled a ‘tainted’ propaganda film full of ‘patriotic cheerleading’ (quoted in
Mackenzie 2000: 23).13 After the war, Huston passionately lobbied to make the
ill-fated war critique The Red Badge of Courage (1951), choosing to feature as
the deserter-turned-hero at the story’s center the Second World War’s most
decorated soldier, Audie Murphy.
the memphis belle (a story of a flying

fortress) (1944)
One of the most successful (critically and commercially) combat films was
William Wyler’s The Memphis Belle, a prominent example of documentary
and propaganda merging almost seamlessly. The term propaganda would
seem to exclude documentary truth, conjuring up forms of address where

excessive bias and selectivity are employed to promote a specific ideological
position – but the US documentary tradition up to this point hardly carried
with it assumptions of pure objectivity. Wartime films like The Memphis
Belle intensified documentary’s existing affinities with propaganda. Wyler’s
film presents itself as axiomatically the ‘right’ perspective, while evading any
obvious appearances of bias. It does this largely by setting careful limits on
its focus in terms of narrative, point of view and engagement with social and
historical contexts.
As part of what Jeanine Basinger calls the ‘second wave’ of combat films,
Wyler’s ‘visual shorthand’ compactly gestures to issues already covered in
films like Prelude to War. By 1944, audiences were well-versed in the justifica-
tions for going to war (Basinger 2003: 110). The strategy behind The Memphis
Belle was instead to put a human face on the conflict, placing the spectator
in the middle of the action while giving every indication of being an accurate
record of wartime experience.
Combat films are a form of war documentary that might almost escape more
obvious signs of bias by narrowing their frames of reference to the urgency
and immediacy of battle. If The Memphis Belle appears free from artifice, it is
precisely because it successfully constructs a ‘here and now’ simultaneity that
limits other points of view. Taking a cue from filmmakers like Flaherty, Wyler
engages the filmgoer in following a self-contained event or process unfold-
ing, seemingly in real time, in front of the camera. At the same time the film
minimizes evidence of overt manipulation and strips down (while not wholly
eliminating) effects such as voiceover and music, achieving a purer impression
of unreconstructed reality. In this sense, the film turns away from the more
theatrical style of 1930s documentary towards the compressed ‘slice of life’
storytelling that would further develop in the 1950s.
The Memphis Belle unfolds in linear fashion, documenting a single mission
on a single day, 17 May 1943, flying along with the crew of a Boeing B-17F
‘Flying Fortress’. Heightening the drama is the fact that the Memphis Belle is
set to be the first B-17 to complete twenty-five bombing missions over Europe.
This is the crew’s final mission, after which they can return home. The
journey is both actual and metaphorical: a journey into enemy territory and a
spiritual, cathartic flirtation with death in the name of freedom, the home and
the nation. The film’s intimate connection with the audience further draws
on anthropomorphizing the hardware of war: the B-17 was named for the
pilot Robert K. Morgan’s girlfriend, Margaret Polk, who lived in Tennessee.
Hence, in a film that shows no women other than the Queen, the ‘star’ is both
a plane and (indirectly) a woman.
Much of what is shown was manipulated for dramatic effect. Wyler’s fin-
ished film drew from over 19,000 feet of film exposed during five missions
flown with the 91st Bomb Group based in Bassingbourn, Cambridgeshire.

Much of the color footage was taken aboard the B-17 Invasion II, until that
plane failed to return from a mission. Wyler shifted to the Memphis Belle, and
a good deal of the action seen on screen actually occurred during the crew’s
second-to-last, and not final, mission. The Memphis Belle’s twenty-fifth and
final mission was, in fact, flown over Lorient, France, not Wilhelmshaven.
Indeed, the Memphis Belle wasn’t the first B-17 to complete twenty-five mis-
sions, an honor that went to ‘Hell’s Angels’, a combat group that would go
on to complete more missions – 300 – than any other. To enhance the film’s
seamless realism, some scenes were restaged in California.14
This is not to underplay the dangers faced by Wyler and the crew. On
earlier missions, four crewmembers had been killed and the Memphis Belle
once suffered more than fifty holes in its fuselage and wings. By the war’s end,
20 percent of the 91st Bomb Group would be dead. The radio operator Robert
Hanson recalled once being saved by leaning over to sneeze, just before a shell
went flying through the space where his head had been (‘Robert Hanson’
2005: 66). Wyler himself nearly died at one point when his oxygen was cut
off. Wyler was, in many ways, very well suited to combat filming. Born into a
Jewish family, he had witnessed war as a child in German-occupied Mulhouse,
France; over the years he had earned respect in Hollywood for skillfully direct-
ing tense action scenes. After finishing the highly successful anti-Nazi picture
Mrs. Miniver (1942) (‘propaganda worth a hundred battleships’ according to
Winston Churchill [quoted in Kozloff 2008: 459]), Wyler became one of the
first high-profile figures to give up a Hollywood career and enlist full-time in
the military.
Though The Memphis Belle avoids openly fictional touches, it unfolds with a
formal and technical precision that on closer examination betrays its director’s
Hollywood roots. The combat genre was increasingly blurring the boundaries
between fact and fiction: documentaries inspired popular Hollywood accounts,
while Hollywood stars were becoming real-life heroes. Like a fiction film, The
Memphis Belle has a strong narrative drive and carefully mounted scenes of
suspense and action. Unlike many combat films, it is sparing in its use of
non-diegetic voiceover and music, which enhances its mesmerizing effect. It
also benefits from accomplished and often stunning camera work. Shot on 16
mm color (a German U-boat had sunk the ship transporting Wyler’s 35 mm
cameras to Europe), much of the combat cinematography was by professional
camera operators William Clothier and William V. Skall, as well as by Wyler
and First Lieutenant Harold J. Tannenbaum, who would not survive to see
the film completed.15 Filming conditions were extreme, and not only when the
B-17 came under fire. As the film shows, the planes were not pressurized and
sub-zero conditions meant that cameras would freeze; reloading film maga-
zines could end in frostbite. The B-17 was ‘tortuously cramped’, with condi-
tions considered among the toughest of the war with the possible exception of
submarine duty (Miller 2006: 82, 122).
My intention is not to undermine The Memphis Belle’s impact: many with
experience of bombing missions have praised it over the years for its verisi-
militude and accuracy. Yet to draw an analogy to the ‘Flying Fortress’ itself
– where a powerful steel frame bolstered what was in other ways a fragile craft
covered in thin aluminium skin that was vulnerable to puncture – the film
gives an appearance of unassailable formal and narrative integrity but is in
fact ‘riddled with cracks’ (Comolli and Narboni 1976: 27). For all its realism,
Wyler’s film is expert propaganda. As Dana Polan suggests, we often think of
propaganda as ‘an art of the cheap and easy blunt effect’. Wartime propagan-
dists, however, had to work hard ‘to secure their propaganda effects and, as we
look closely at the strategies they employed, we find both a relative success and
relative limits to what they could achieve’ (2004: 39–40). The Memphis Belle
was only part of a larger propaganda network which included the widespread
publicity produced for the Eighth Air Force – a ‘high octane outfit’, according
to the reporter Harrison Salisbury, supported by an extensive public relations
contingent. The Eighth also included a number of high-profile celebrities,
including (then) Major Jimmy Stewart and Captain Clark Gable. This was
not just a fighting unit but a successful propaganda machine, and the air war
was seen as key to generating press attention that could capture the public’s
imagination and support.
The Memphis Belle derives its force from constructing a highly unified ideo-
logical and subject position. This is produced by a range of effects, from the
closely observed faces of the crew members intercut with images of the skies
they survey to the direct address of the narrator who draws ‘you’, the viewer,
into the action. This marks an important shift in the combat genre, moving the
audience from observer to participant (Basinger 2003: 114). Subjectivity can
be variously constructed in documentary, as David MacDougall has shown: ‘A
film can involve the subjectivity of its subjects, the viewer, and the institutional
or individual filmmaker in compound ways. From a textual point of view, each
of these perspectives can become an “I” from which the other two are rede-
fined as “you” or “they” ’ (1995: 223). Glossing Nick Brown, MacDougall
recalls the overlapping elements that construct the ‘spectator-in-the-text’,
which can include codes of position, narrative, metaphor and moral attitude.
It should be said that not all spectators, of course, will be automatically drawn
into this web of cinematic devices, since much depends on ‘who we are and
what we bring to the film’ (1995: 223). Still The Memphis Belle strives, at mul-
tiple levels, to knit spectators into the frame so they might occupy a virtual
place alongside the men of the 91st Bomb Group.
The film begins with evocative shots of middle England in summertime,
establishing a mise-en-scène of rural order and tranquillity. A simple pan to
the left, however, reveals an airfield, shifting from travelogue fancy to urgent
reality, as the commentary by Eugene Kern breaks in: ‘This is a battle front,
a battle front like no other’ – not a traditional front based on ground war, but
an ‘air front’. The stress on the air war recalls a persistent theme in Second
World War documentary: the prominence of the airplane and the bombing
raid, captured by the motion picture camera and the aerial shot. Just as the
gun and camera shared a special relationship in pre- and early cinema, so the
airplane, bomb and camera shared symbiotic relations in Second World War
cinematography.
As mentioned above, Paul Virilio, who himself witnessed the aerial bom-
bardment of Nantes during the Second World War, has surveyed the complex
ways in which film technology and aerial warfare have coexisted over time,
and how they have combined – from the First World War to the Gulf War –
to make wartime destruction a potent visual spectacle. In The Memphis Belle,
as the gaze of the camera lines up with the crosshairs of the machine gun, we
witness what Virilio has called the ‘deadly harmony’ between camera and
weapon: ‘a war of pictures and sounds is replacing the war of objects (projec-
tiles and missiles)’ (1989: 4). The Memphis Belle is not merely a straightforward
documentary representation of the aerial war. It is, rather, a complex technical
and cultural artifact that engages with broader, multimedia processes of pro-
ducing an aerial gaze over the war itself. The Memphis Belle is closely linked
to an emerging aerial perception of war: a form of perception characterized by
distance and remoteness from conflict (while simultaneously ‘witnessing’ from
above). This results in a collective sense of mastery created by a process of
overlooking. Designated bombing sites are described as ‘pinpoints on the map
of Europe – targets, to be destroyed’.
During the 1930s and 1940s, the development of what Virilio calls ‘global
vision’ was rapidly being perfected through innovations both in photography
and flight (1989: 1). In the pages of US Camera, one could witness aerial
views over the earth never before seen: in one shot, a ‘global panorama’
of the Black Hills of North Dakota, taken from somewhere near ‘the divi-
sion between the troposphere and the stratosphere’ also reveals ‘the actual
curvature of the earth – photographed from an elevation of 72,395 feet, the
highest point ever reached by man’ (Maloney 1936: 188–9). As the emphasis
on aerial perspectives in documentaries ranging from Northwest USA and
The Bridge to The Memphis Belle attests, the abstract concept of a shrinking
globe was being authenticated through photographic evidence, even as the
world was experiencing that most radical experience of divided perception
– global warfare. Aboard the Memphis Belle we experience vulnerability,
but it is difficult to deny the simultaneous exhilaration derived from flight
and the mastery of its view. The Memphis Belle encapsulates the marriage of
ideology and aesthetics in aerial warfare: the sunlight glistening off planes
Figure 12. The Memphis Belle (1944). US Army Air Forces First Motion Picture Unit.
Courtesy of the British Film Institute.
arrayed in neat formation, against a blue sky, affords an undeniable visual

impact.
The first half of the film shows preparations, taking off and journeying
towards Germany, and outlines the complex details of the mission. The planes
rise from the runway in a series of mobile shots taken from below, alongside
and mounted on wings and landing gear. As the pace increases, music and
voiceover are suspended for dramatic effect and the noise of roaring engines
intensifies. Once in the air each member of the crew is introduced and succinct
background stories are sketched in. Importantly, each crewmember is ascribed
a home town, encouraging local interest and viewer identification. Captain
Robert Morgan (called a ‘hard drinking hell-raiser’ by Donald Miller [2006:
79]) is from Asheville, North Carolina; radio operator and gunner Sergeant
Bob Hanson is a construction worker from Spokane, Washington; tail gunner
Sergeant John Quinlan is from Yonkers, New York. The male, all-white crew
is huddled in the plane, the latter implicitly sexualized as the absent girlfriend
figure and glamorous ‘star’ – Betty Grable or Rita Hayworth, perhaps – indi-
cated by the ‘leggy redhead in a bathing suit’ painted on its nose (which, later
in the film, Morgan climbs up to kiss) (Miller 2006: 117–18). But the Memphis
Belle is also a kind of mother figure, sheltering the men in its cramped belly.
The airborne journey is tense and hypnotic. Suspended in air along with
the crew, we sense the icy stillness of the surroundings; close-ups of the crew’s
faces are intercut with point-of-view shots of the sky and the earth below. This
is an intimate space within the mother ship, the sole vantage point from which
we view the outside world. Alongside the plane, vapor trails extend from the
wings of bombers arrayed in elegant formation. As the sky’s intense blueness
(‘at once luminous and laden with gloom’ [Virilio 1989: 10]) fades to white,
the soundtrack withdraws to sparing voiceover and the humming of engines.
Aligned with the sights of the crew, guns and cameras ‘cover the sky [. . .] in
every direction’. The pace is eerily calm as the planes rise towards the strato-
sphere. The narrator’s direct address continues to draw the viewer in: ‘you
plot your course, check your equipment, wait [. . .] and think’.
The incantatory role of poetic narration (written by Jerome Chodorov,
Lester Koenig and Wyler) comes to the fore here, underscored by the steady
humming of engines: ‘You look out at the strange world beyond, reflections
in plexiglass [. . .] like nothing you ever saw before outside of a dream’. But
there is a gap between calm appearance and stark reality: the sublime vision
combines beauty and danger. The vapor trails that ‘stream the heavens’ are
‘far from beautiful’ since they point ‘like signposts in the sky for the enemy to
spot us’. As if aware that the film is on the verge of imparting too much beauty
in the midst of war, Wyler cuts to a very unbeautiful sequence lasting just over
three minutes, where animated maps and charts reveal the plans behind the
mission and enhance the sense of authority and factuality of the film itself.16
The ‘here and now’ is restored as anti-aircraft flak begins to burst near the
plane. The sight of these ‘harmless looking silent puffs of smoke’ is at first
almost pleasing, but as an explosion erupts nearby, sedate camera movement
suddenly yields to violent shaking and an awkward loss of framing. Apparently
Wyler, scurrying around the plane, was so anxious to capture dramatic flak
shots that he ‘begged Morgan to steer the bomber into the thick of the shrap-
nel field’ (Miller 2006: 118). We now physically sense the menace in the
air. Enemy fighters appear on the horizon, and tense scenes of battle ensue.
Seemingly out of nowhere, monotonous suspense turns to jittery, dramatic
action. The camera shakes and swoops, struggling to keep the enemy planes
in frame just as the gunners struggle to keep aim. The narration now begins to
betray an anger and bias that was, until now, largely suppressed. We are told
that ‘the Hun’ lurks below and that the Germans ‘lust for conquest’. The land-
scape may appear like any other from above, but this is the land that brought
‘torment and anguish into countless American homes’.
As the target, Wilhelmshaven, comes into the Memphis Belle’s sights, the
narrator utters ‘bombs away’ with little dramatic intonation. The bombs
float down as if in slow motion, slipping alongside and below the plane. The
voiceover gives way to the drone of engines as several shots linger over the
smoke rising below, though the destruction remains distant and remote. The
understatement of ‘mission accomplished’ might seem surprising, as this

would appear to be the climax the film has been building towards. But the
overall tone is consistent with the businesslike detachment of the aerial war.
Bombs are ‘delivered’ to their ‘targets’. No mention is made of houses or
people, just ‘factories’, ‘rail junctions’, ‘docks’ and ‘submarine pens’. The nar-
rator argues that the bombing runs will help save the lives of Allied soldiers.
History would make clearer much of what was not fully visible from the
air. The year 1943 saw Europe in the midst of a total war of mutual annihila-
tion. Wilhelmshaven contained a subcamp of the notorious Neuengamme
concentration camp; two-thirds of Wilhelmshaven’s buildings were destroyed
by Allied bombs. In one civil damage report after a USAAF bombing raid
of 26 February 1943, bombs fell heavily on civilian areas; two schools and
two police stations were damaged and nineteen civilians were reported dead
(Hamilton 1999: 97). According to one Air Force publicist, the intent of The
Memphis Belle was to show ‘the ultimate destruction of Germany from the air’
(quoted in Miller 2006: 119), but the human costs of bombing are carefully
underplayed. Around the time the Memphis Belle was running its daylight
raids, residential and urban centers were being targeted by massive Allied
night-time campaigns. By the war’s end, millions of civilians on both sides had
been killed.
The novelist W. G. Sebald reconstructed the effects of some of these
raids, recalling in particular the intensive bombing on 27 July 1943 of
Hamburg (dubbed ‘Operation Gomorrah’ by the Allies), 120 kilometers from
Wilhelmshaven. In the firestorms that ensued, 45,000 civilians are thought to
have died. Sebald writes:
[A]n hour after the first bombs had dropped the whole airspace was a sea
of flames as far as the eye could see [. . .] the fire, now rising 2,000 metres
into the sky, snatched oxygen to itself so violently that the air currents
reached hurricane force [. . .] Those who had fled from their air-raid
shelters sank, with grotesque contortions, in the thick bubbles thrown up
by the melting asphalt [. . .] horribly disfigured corpses lay everywhere.
(Sebald 2003: 27–8)
Aerial perception depends upon a detached, mediatized perspective that can

suppress the details of death and destruction. In this ‘sanitized’ view, Patricia
Zimmermann suggests, ‘the physical and psychic horrors of war, its micro-
practices and dismemberments, its fragmentations and disruptions, must be
repressed’ (2000: 51).
In The Memphis Belle, as smoke rises from the explosions below, the narra-
tor prevents contemplation of the destruction by sustaining the airborne point
of view, focusing attention on dangers still lurking in the skies. A dramatic
Figure 13. Ruins of Wendenstrasse, Hamburg (‘Operation Gomorrha’, July 1943).

Photograph: Hugo Schmidt-Luchs. Courtesy of Ullstein Bild.
battle with German fighters ensues and the voiceover track is taken over by
the voices of the crewmembers, seemingly captured on intercom during the
heat of battle (though recorded in Los Angeles when they were on a War
Bonds tour). We hear the waist gunner Clarence Winchell muttering, ‘I see
him, I’m on ’em. C’mon you son of a . . .’ – only to be drowned out by the
sound of firing. Even in the midst of war, ‘bad language’ was forbidden by the
Production Code. The sound here helps to intensify immersion in the action:
as a damaged B-17 careens out of control, the calls of ‘c’mon you guys get out
of that plane’ add urgency to the images. As another damaged plane careens
away from the formation, the images fade to black, leaving the fate of the
Memphis Belle and her crew suspended in the air.
The film breaks from its here and now intensity to return to the base in
England, where the ground crew ‘sweat out the mission’. Parallel editing – a
standard technique for creating tension – briefly takes over until spatial unity
is restored as planes are heard in the distance. Planes begin to land one by one,
unloading their exhausted, sometimes mangled, passengers. The Memphis
Belle, the ‘ship everyone has been pulling for’, is, in dramatic fashion, the last
to touch down. To guarantee Wyler his grand Hollywood finale, group com-
mander Colonel Wray had radioed the other planes to land before the Memphis
Belle, and Morgan added his own flourish by buzzing the field (Miller 2006:
120–1). Having completed twenty-five missions, the American heroes can
finally go home.
The Memphis Belle shows that documentary can, perhaps counter-intui-
tively, be at once propagandistic and also ring true for countless Americans.
Wyler’s film was highly popular for a wartime documentary: 500 prints were
distributed by Paramount to over 10,000 theaters. It received glowing reviews,
one appearing in unprecedented fashion on the front page of the New York
Times. Wyler’s ‘fact film’, exclaimed Bosley Crowther, had ‘visioned the whole
course of a bombing mission in all its real and exciting detail’ (Crowther 1944:
1). The story of the Memphis Belle would become the stuff of legend, spawning
imitations such as Twelve O’Clock High (1950) and lending immortality to yet
another piece of fondly remembered military hardware.
The Memphis Belle intertwines aesthetics and ideology: the captivating
visuals of the airborne camera work together with the technologies of war
under the auspices of documentary truth. A close examination suggests ques-
tions pertinent to documentary more generally. For instance, are the truths
produced by documentaries always subjective, or can they be universal? What
is at stake when subjective views are presented as universals? In this sense the
questions raised by The Memphis Belle are not unique to wartime propaganda.
The Memphis Belle is, in short, an idea-weapon: its ideological messages are
constituted as much by what the film suppresses as what it chooses to show.
Indeed, its impact is grounded in this ‘less is more’ strategy, which constructs
a highly restricted point of view. Less overtly didactic than the Why We Fight
series, it nonetheless joins these Second World War propaganda documen-
taries in projecting the ‘truth’ of the American nation’s moral rightness and
collective mission. The documentaries of the Second World War helped
determine this sense of military and moral superiority for a generation; at the
same time they solidified the image of a nation with unified goals and desires.
As the voices of soldiers in John Ford’s December 7th (1943) state, ‘we are all
alike . . . we are all Americans’.
The Second World War reinforced not only the nation’s superpower status,
but confirmed a pervasive sense of American ideological superiority: it was
acclaimed as a moral war, battling against evil fascists. Photographic evidence
– both still and motion picture – taken by horrified Allied troops during the
liberation of concentration camps such as Bergen-Belsen easily reinforced
these notions. The extreme nature of this atrocity footage, showing piles of
anonymous dead bodies and shockingly emaciated survivors, meant that its
appropriateness for domestic screenings was (and still is) debated, but it was
officially, and very widely, screened to German civilians as part of efforts to
indoctrinate a collective sense of culpability (Haggith 2005: 33–5).
Yet the end of war also saw political polarizations at home, tentatively kept
in check by wartime patriotism, break into open hostilities. Though as recently
as 1942 Time Magazine had selected Joseph Stalin as its ‘Man of the Year’
and Hollywood films like Mission to Moscow (1943) had flattered the Soviets,
after the war, powerful anti-Soviet and anti-communist sentiments gained the
upper hand. The FBI and its long-standing director, J. Edgar Hoover, were
highly paranoid about communist infiltration of labor and government posts,
and even during the war (with Roosevelt’s consent) had been systematically
investigating individuals and organizations, compiling extensive lists. Still
reeling from the left-wing political organizing of the 1930s, Hoover and the
FBI remained convinced that the nation would be destabilized if it dropped
its guard during its alliance with the Soviet Union, and that the Allied coali-
tion had in fact made the nation more vulnerable than ever to communist
‘subterfuge’ (Sbardellati 2008: 416). The House Committee on Un-American
Activities (HCUA or HUAC), established as a special investigating commit-
tee in 1938, prepared documents listing ‘Communist front organizations’ that
could be ‘characterized by [. . .] the rigid conformity of these organizations to
the Communist pattern, their interlocking personnel, and their methods gen-
erally used to deceive the American public’ (the term ‘front’ transformed from
meaning ‘coalition’ into a facade or conspiracy) (Committee on Un-American
Activities 1948: 141). Hoover would single out the potentially dangerous
role of motion pictures in mass culture, fearing the appearance of ‘more
films having a propaganda effect [that would be] favorable to the Communist
ideology’ (quoted in Sbardellati 2008: 412). When the Soviets tested their
first atomic bomb in 1949, four years after the US destroyed Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, the Cold War escalated further. For more than fifty years the world
would live under the sword of Damocles known as MAD: Mutually Assured
Destruction.
By the early 1950s, the nation was witnessing the severe repressions of
Senator Joseph McCarthy’s ‘purges’ of ‘Communists and spies’, with particu-
lar focus on the media industries (Barnouw 1983: 222). To the shock of many
who had come of age in the era of the Film and Photo League, once-idealistic
visions of ideological coalition and secure civil liberties were thrown into disar-
ray: anti-fascist organizations formed before the Second World War in support
of Spanish Republicans or against Japanese imperialism were labeled by
HUAC and the FBI as ‘Communist sympathizers’ and ‘fronts’. The 1950 pub-
lication of the pamphlet ‘Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence
in Radio and Television’ by the right-wing news journal Counterattack exem-
plified the impact of Red Scare tactics on the media. It placed leading figures
such as Aaron Copland, Dashiell Hammett, Lena Horne, Langston Hughes,
Orson Welles and pioneers from the documentary movement such as Leo
Hurwitz under the category of communist ‘subversives’. Others, such as
Irving Lerner, Lester Koenig and Ben Maddow (who had established a suc-
cessful career as a screenwriter) found themselves facing the blacklist; some,
like Maddow, finally cracked under the pressures of social and professional
exclusion and ‘named names’ before HUAC (Burns 1998).
In March and April of 1954, a now-legendary series of exposés showing
an increasingly volatile McCarthy were broadcast on Edward R. Murrow’s
influential See It Now, damaging McCarthy’s reputation while establishing
television news as the new frontier for political documentary. Cinema docu-
mentary, on the other hand, was not faring particularly well, and was notably
absent from commercial theaters. At the end of the war, documentary film had
seemed poised to serve as a dominant force in shaping the nation’s and world’s
vision of America. More than fifty million dollars had been spent annually on
documentaries during the Second World War (Basinger 2003: 113). Robert
Riskin’s concept of a Hollywood–Washington liaison that would fund and
distribute pro-US documentaries after the war, however, never came to pass,
though the Marshall Plan and later the United States Information Agency
(USIA) did distribute postwar documentaries on a smaller scale (Scott 2006:
363). Hollywood reclaimed the theatrical screen time it had nobly sacrificed in
support of the war, while appropriating aspects of documentary as a style in
nostalgic war films and major trends such as film noir.
A few large-scale documentary projects lingered that had been conceived
during the war, such as Huston’s Let There Be Light, a frank treatment of
combat-related post-traumatic disorders made for the US Signal Corps.
Huston’s film was potentially a vehicle for representing peaceful reparations:
care and gentle attention to traumatized soldiers replacing the jingoism of the
war years. Still, the status of Let There Be Light’s stark revelations as factual
made it seem that much more dangerous to military officials as a critique of the
‘warrior myth’.17 More complexly, it unsettlingly images a postwar sense of
what is not fully representable, of what Michael Chanan calls the ‘inner space
of the invisible wound we call the experience of trauma’ (2007: 150). The film
was banned from public view by the War Department.18
Taking a cue from influential figures like Grierson in Britain, much US
documentary came to depend on corporate sponsorship, often with implicit
ties to government interests. With lavish funding from Standard Oil, Flaherty
made Louisiana Story (1948), drawing on the contributions of editor Helen
van Dongen and cameraman Richard Leacock. Flaherty’s elegant, highly
wrought study at times seems to question the place of oil drilling in the remote
Louisiana bayou, but as a ‘subtle piece of public relations’ it concludes with a
message that accepts the need for ‘progress’ (Anon. 1948: 96). Such theatri-
cal successes, however, were few. By 1952, Richard Griffith was sending out
a cautionary message: ‘Since few people now have real faith in the causes
which documentary customarily promoted, it is hardly strange that they
are indifferent to the documentaries themselves’, he complained; ‘this is the

background against which American documentary makers have had to work.
It is a story of sporadic endeavor, with nearly as many styles and purposes as
individuals’ (Griffith 1952: 315).
Griffith noted that, with the exception of films such as Louisiana Story
and The Quiet One (1948), few postwar documentaries were ‘breaking down
the barriers’ and having a wider impact (1952: 315). Indeed The Quiet One,
made by Frontier Films’ veteran Sidney Meyers, was essentially a piece of
fiction scripted by James Agee, Janice Loeb and Helen Levitt (who also shot
it), and even made use of Meyers himself on screen, playing a psychiatrist.
Like Flaherty’s film, The Quiet One used a young boy to create a protagonist
who, like (it was presumed) the camera, faced the world with an ‘innocent’
eye. Meyers’s film was made in Harlem on a small budget, but its focus on a
troubled African American child touched a nerve with urban audiences; the
nation was on the verge of revolutionary developments in the Civil Rights
Movement.
In an effort to turn around notions that American documentary was on
its last legs, in 1954 Griffith curated a major retrospective at the New York
Museum of Modern Art, ‘The American Scene: 1945–1953’. This included
works by established filmmakers such as Van Dyke, Hammid, Meyers,
Maddow, Fred Zinnemann and Henwar Rodakiewicz, along with names
that were relatively new to US documentary circles such as Levitt, Loeb,
Nicholas Read and Herbert Matter (Starr 1954: 44). Some significant films,
however, were left out, including George Stoney’s highly acclaimed All My
Babies (1953), an intimate and sensitive study of childbirth and the work of
black midwives in the South, commissioned by the Georgia State Health
Department. The film’s sponsors had restricted its distribution to medical
uses only, deeming its graphic birth sequences ‘not yet appropriate for general
viewing’ (Starr 1954: 45). Griffith’s eight-week MOMA series made its mark,
but couldn’t reverse documentary’s migration from the big to the small screen.
By the mid-1950s, the most widely seen US nonfiction film work was being
produced for television news and educational programs like See It Now and
Omnibus. Newsreels were on the wane, thanks to television’s ascendancy, and
by the end of the 1950s Paramount News, Pathé News and The March of Time
had all ceased production, with Hearst’s News of the Day and Fox Movietone
soon to follow. Corporate sponsorship in most areas of documentary, from
the occasional theatrical film to television, was the norm, and concerns about
‘public service versus profit motives’ dominated the debates of producers and
directors.19 As Erik Barnouw argues, ‘closely watched by top executives, docu-
mentaries became institutional, depersonalized’ (1983: 227).
no t e s
1. The term ‘small’ war refers to overseas war, waged at a distance.
2. Slocum glosses Michael S. Sherry.
3. See especially Renov (1988: 69–115) and Connie Field’s film The Life and Times of Rosie
the Riveter (1980).
4. Letter to Elmer Davis, 19 September 1942. See also James C. Austin to Davis, 1 August
1943, in Culbert and Suid (1991: 1704).
5. Grew had for a short time, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, been held by the Japanese
government.
6. Advertisement for RKO’s Behind the Rising Sun, Boxoffice, 17 July 1943, p. 28.
7. Letter to Elmer Davis, 27 October 1942.
8. These included William Donovan, who was in the process of setting up the Office of
Strategic Services (forerunner of the CIA).
9. There is only one very brief shot of an African American in the film.
10. The organization responsible for funneling War Department requests to studios – the
Research Council of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, headed by Fox’s
Darryl F. Zanuck – was investigated for favoritism in awarding contracts and even
suspected of using instructional filmmaking as a means for keeping relatives of studio
executives out of frontline duties. The four-month investigation resulted in no hard
evidence of profiteering. See Culbert (1990a: xvii).
11. Memo to Frank Capra, Spring 1942.
12. Color was the film stock of choice for the military, since black and white couldn’t register
enemy camouflage. Hand-held color techniques were perfected by amateurs during the
1930s.
13. See also Mathews (1985: 6).
14. See Friedman and Simons (2008) and Miller (2006).
15. Tannenbaum was killed during a mission over France on 16 April 1943. See Kozloff
(2008: 459).
16. Though the military favored color stock, many commentators were concerned that it
might make ‘war too pretty a picture’ (Doherty 1993: 264).
17. According to Huston: ‘it boils down to the fact that [the army] wanted to maintain the
“warrior” myth, which said that our American soldiers went to war and came back all the
stronger’ (Huston 1980: 125).
18. The War Department’s official reason for limiting screenings to military audiences was
that the ‘privacy of patients was invaded’ (Pennington 1980: 1). Let There Be Light was
finally released to the public in December 1980 with an edited soundtrack that omitted the
names of subjects who were still living.
19. Paul Rotha was particularly vocal about this issue. See, for example, ‘Documentary Film
in Danger’ (1947).
ch apter 6
‘Uncontrolled’ Situations: Direct

Cinema
Since the term appeared in the 1960s, ‘direct cinema’ has been a source of
confusion for some, frustration for others. Not only is the ‘directness’ of direct
cinema questionable, but the term is often used as the Anglo-American equiva-
lent of cinéma vérité (the latter coined by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin in France
in 1960 to describe their experiments in interactive documentary). For example,
in 1971, Alan Rosenthal observed that the terms direct cinema and cinéma
vérité were being ‘used interchangeably [in the US] in accordance with general
practice’ (Rosenthal 1971: 2). Outlining precise divisions between the two
approaches can be tricky, as they tended to overlap in many ways – especially
as, over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, proponents of both direct cinema
and cinéma vérité started to question and adjust their assumptions and practices.
Direct cinema and cinéma vérité, however, both have distinct origins and
features; in particular I want to look at US direct cinema’s narrative traditions,
style and audience expectations. William Rothman dismisses the term, since
‘direct’ implies ‘unmediated’ (1996: 7), but this is actually a reason I want to
maintain it here, since as a movement the idea of sidestepping or minimizing
mediation was paramount. With its shaky, hand-held visuals (‘wobblyscope’)
and on-location sync sound (or ‘direct’ sound, usually supplemented by on-
location ‘wild’ sound) direct cinema can deliver an impression of disordered
immediacy and tactility that stands in sharp contrast to the deliberate scenes
and soundscapes of more traditional documentary. Mobile tracking shots, on-
the-spot interviews, integrated close-ups and cutaways home in on marginal,
telling details: physical gestures, facial expressions, unexpected or awkward
reactions. These techniques place viewers ‘in the position of vicarious wit-
nesses’ (Corner 1996: 2), creating a sense of ‘being there’ while producing an
imagined, intimate connection between viewers and on-screen subjects. Direct
cinema thus has been seen as appealing more to emotional rather than logical
or analytical viewer responses.
‘unc o nt ro l le d’ s it uation s: direct cin ema 155
Moreover, the approach tends to present subjects as characters, focusing on

individuals’ lives and struggles while embedding hand-held and direct sound
effects within the storytelling conventions of popular film. This focus on indi-
vidual personalities and lack of forthright interpretation has led critics to argue
that direct cinema usually fails as trenchant social analysis. Jonathan Kahana
asks whether much direct cinema simply ‘serves to reify individual personality
as the site of social truth’ (2008: 153). Others have stressed that the approach
is vulnerable to manipulation, disguising the artificiality of its dramatic struc-
tures beneath an overriding impression of unmediated access to the people
and situations it represents. Still, with varying levels of effectiveness, many
direct cinema documentaries manifested the 1960s mantra ‘the personal is the
political’, striving to articulate social issues through a focus on highly personal
accounts (Vogels 2005: 154).
For Rothman, direct cinema is also ‘the fullest inheritor of the concerns
of America’s “classical” cinema’: the closest thing documentary has to
Hollywood. Direct cinema has helped uncover the complexities of the mosaic
nation, showing ‘the coarseness and ugliness of America’, but also ‘flashes of
beauty, tenderness, compassion’ (Rothman 1996: 80). The filmmaker Albert
Maysles saw in it the potential to revivify US democratic ideals, leveling hier-
archies through direct access to people’s lives and bolstering shared national
consciousness by letting citizens ‘know’ each other. ‘We had this possibility’,
Maysles stated, ‘with this equipment and this philosophy, to transfer one per-
son’s experience to another, so that the country could be transformed from a
geographical entity into a nation’ (Maysles 2001). Known both for the ideals
of its practitioners and for controversies over misleading claims to immediacy,
direct cinema nonetheless came to define the look and feel of US documentary
for a generation of filmmakers.
‘ d on’ t b e a f r a i d , i t ’ s a m i c r op h on e!’
The lure of direct cinema lies in the impression of intimate knowing, allowing
viewers to feel part of the action, observing the unplanned and instantane-
ous, constructing a vicarious experience of ‘other’ lives. While facilitated by
improvements to lightweight camera and sound technologies during the 1950s,
its key inventors have continued to stress that the ‘revolution’ of direct cinema
was not so much about the technological advances that became its hallmarks
but involved a whole philosophy of filming. They were determined to ‘ditch
the tripod’ and reproduce the spontaneity of real life (Leacock 2008 [2000]).
Keith Beattie cautions against the ‘crude technological determinism’ of
some accounts of direct cinema’s early years, stressing the social and profes-
sional pressures that always underpin new technological developments (2004:
85).1 In the US, an overriding factor supporting the emergence of lightweight,

sync-sound equipment lay in demands coming from television journalism for
flexible devices that could document news events with ease, on location and
in real time. In France, through figures like Rouch (who trained as an anthro-
pologist), the demand came more via the interests of ethnography and the need
for portable and unobtrusive recording devices for anthropological fieldwork
(Beattie 2004: 85). Both approaches sought what might be called a kind of
camera pen: a means to employ the camera and sound recorder with the ease of
note-taking, as in journalistic or ethnographic fieldwork.2
Also working against technologically determinist accounts of direct cinema
and vérité is the history of non-fiction filmmaking itself, which shows us that
both professionals and amateurs were always interested in recording everyday
life using candid, unplanned scenarios, and that technology matched these
demands. The Lumières’ cinématographe, at five kilograms (a small fraction of
the weight of an Edison camera), was designed to be transportable and uncom-
plicated in order to shoot actualities with minimal setup. Flaherty’s Bell and
Howell and Akeley cameras were chosen for durability and flexibility, so they
could be taken on treks along the sub-Arctic coasts of Hudson Bay. Workers’
Film and Photo League crews carried their cameras alongside unemployed
marchers to capture the intensity of protest at street level. Amateur filmmak-
ers too indicated a popular demand for lightweight cameras, for narrower
gauges of film and, later, for video and digital technologies that could record,
as cheaply as possible, everything from world travels to backyard adventures.
Direct cinema and cinéma vérité advanced these efforts by making it a
professional priority to reproduce scenes from life with ease and efficiency.
Photojournalism had been doing this for some time: candid scenes were regu-
larly caught by the instantaneous flash of Weegee or the intuitive framing of
William Eugene Smith, but moving pictures seemed only inconsistently to
reproduce spontaneous, off-hand encounters. In particular, the later 1950s
saw unprecedented efforts to unleash the heightened sense of realism that
lightweight cameras and sync sound might provide, thus doing away with
voiceovers and artificial post-syncing. Key challenges lay in developing quiet,
portable cameras and lightweight sound technology to go with them. Richard
Leacock recalled the frustrations of working with traditional equipment on
Toby and the Tall Corn in 1954:
[Toby] was to be my final attempt to make a documentary using classical

film industry techniques. A 35 mm Mitchell NC camera weighing about
100 lbs with its massive tripod and power-supply, a Reeves 35 mm mag-
netic tape recorder and its attendant vacuum tube amplifier at about 80
lbs (it was said to be portable and had handles on the two cases, we called
it the knuckle-buster), and a hand-held Eclair Cameflex for pickup shots,
plus a vast array of lights and cables, a dolly and tracks [. . .] a truck full.
(Leacock 1990: 4)
Leacock, in spite of this ‘elephantine’ equipment, did manage to retain a ‘trace

of spontaneity’ in the finished film. When screened as part of the CBS televi-
sion series Omnibus, Toby caught the attention of Robert Drew, a picture editor
and journalist at Life magazine who at the time was exploring the use of candid
photography in motion pictures. Though Drew thought the narration in Toby
was ‘idiotic’, he was struck by the realist dynamics of a scene showing a tent
being put up (Drew 2008). Drew was interested in developing a documentary
approach beyond what he called the ‘propagandist’ methods of Grierson, yet
true to (and improving on) the ‘naturalist’ and dramatic methods of Flaherty
(quoted in Saunders 2007: 9). By 1960, Drew and Leacock had teamed up with
D. A. Pennebaker and Albert Maysles. The groundbreaking television docu-
mentary they made together, Primary (1960), is discussed in the next section.
The 1950s was a period of keen experimentation not only with film tech-
nology, but with conceptions of film’s relationship to reality and its effects on
audiences. Filmmakers ranging across popular fiction, documentary, jour-
nalism and anthropology were seeking out less cumbersome methods that
could heighten impressions of immediacy and foreground film’s ‘indexical’
relationship to the pro-filmic. The Second World War had precipitated key
advances in lightweight cameras. The German Arriflex 35 was introduced in
1937 for newsreel photography and later adapted for military surveillance.
Arriflex cameras taken by American soldiers were copied by the US military to
produce its own camera for combat filming, the Cineflex PH-330, and Leacock
famously used the Arriflex when shooting Flaherty’s Louisiana Story (1948).
Other conditions and movements were having an impact on practice. After
the war, social and economic pressures helped give rise to realist, minimalist
approaches such as neorealism in Italy, where actors, directors and writers
advocated stripped down aesthetics for telling everyday stories. The neorealist
Cesare Zavattini argued for films that could offer people ‘a direct approach to
everyday reality’ (1953: 64).
Starting in 1956 in Britain, the Free Cinema movement began to gain
widespread attention, spearheaded by six film programs shown over three
years at the National Film Theatre. The screenings aimed to be eclectic,
experimental and edgy. From the US came Lionel Rogosin’s On the Bowery
(1956), an improvised drama-doc with a neo-realist feel, dealing with poverty
and alcoholism on Manhattan’s ‘skid row’ (John Cassavetes called Rogosin
‘probably the greatest documentary filmmaker of all time’) (quoted in Thurber
2000: B6). From France was François Truffaut’s uplifting short Les Mistons
(The Brats, 1957) and Georges Franju’s searing, at times surreal documentary
about the abattoirs of Paris, Blood of the Beasts (1949). Wlodzimierz Borowik’s
underground film Paragraph Zero (1957) offered an exposé of Poland’s ‘invis-

ible’ social problem, prostitution, against which there were no specific laws at
the time. The camera and spotlight probe and examine the squalid alleys and
back rooms inhabited by some of Warsaw’s most destitute women. Paragraph
Zero exemplifies the arresting visuals, marginal subject matter and sense of
immediacy that Free Cinema encouraged.
Meanwhile in Canada, the National Film Board’s (NFB) Unit B was using
increasingly flexible technologies to capture life in the street while minimizing
Griersonian didacticism. Wolf Koenig’s The Days Before Christmas (1957/8)
was a pilot for Unit B’s flagship Candid Eye television series and used light-
weight cameras and intermittent synchronized sound to offer a compressed
‘city symphony’ of Montreal in the run-up to the holidays. Koenig also pro-
duced The Back-Breaking Leaf (1959) with Terence Macartney-Filgate (an
important creative force in the NFB), a film that revisits the theme of human
struggle with the land, graphically depicting transient field workers harvest-
ing tobacco at the height of summer. The actor William Greaves also made an
impact at Unit B, working as an editor on Macartney-Filgate’s Blood and Fire
(1958), about the Salvation Army, while directing shorts such as Putting It
Straight (1957), Smoke and Weather (1958) and Emergency Ward (1959). Blood
and Fire generated debate in showing a destitute person weeping profusely
– the shot’s ‘emotional nakedeness’ pushed the boundaries of ethical cor-
rectness but was kept in, heralding expectations of personal revelation and
raw intimacy that would characterize direct cinema and cinéma vérité (Jones
1988: 143). Another NFB project, Michel Brault’ s The Snowshoers (1958) is
a much-cited early example of dynamic hand-held camerawork, but also indi-
cates direct cinema in its hands-off treatment of its subject (snowshoe races in
Quebec) and its ‘unprettified view of robust conviviality’ (Ellis and McLane
2005: 211). Jean Rouch was impressed, and Brault would later act as camera-
man on Rouch’s own breakthrough Chronicle of a Summer (1961).
Rouch had first worked with direct sync sound in La pyramide humaine
(The Human Pyramid) shot in 1958 and 1959 in Côte d’Ivoire, which led to
pursuing similar technologies in Chronicle of a Summer, a film about his ‘own
tribe’, Parisians. This was shot with sociologist Edgar Morin in the summer of
1960 with input from Brault on camerawork and remote sound. A few months
earlier, Rouch and Morin had coined the term cinéma-vérité on returning from
the first international ethnographic film festival in Florence, where On the
Bowery, The Hunters (1958) and Free Cinema films like We Are the Lambeth
Boys (1959) had made a deep impression. Cinéma-vérité was an homage to
Vertov’s Kino Pravda (‘film truth’), but in fact Rouch and Morin employed
the term more precisely, calling it ‘nouveau [new] cinéma-vérité’. It was in
many ways the ‘new’ that they wanted to stress (Morin 2003 [1960]: 229–30).
New cinéma-vérité retained a fidelity to Kino Pravda’s unplanned scenarios and
determination to get close to the spontaneous feel of everyday life, but at the
same time Rouch recognized that Kino Pravda’s ideals were not universal, and
that they occupied a specific time, place and purpose. What Rouch shared with
Vertov, he often stressed, was the idea that film truth was not ‘pure truth’ but
a kind of truth created with the assistance of cinema technology. Cinema initi-
ated new forms of visual and aural perception that could conjure up parallel
truths – ‘filmically understood’ truths – that might be comprehended through
a ‘new kind of audiovisual language’ (Rouch and Feld 2003 [1973]: 98). In this
sense, truth was produced by the presence of the camera and the dynamics
that arose between filmmaker, camera and subject. Barnouw calls the camera a
‘catalyst’ for events captured in the cinéma-vérité scenario and the vérité film-
maker becomes a kind of ‘provocateur’ (1983: 255).
Along with Vertov, Rouch was ‘consciously synthesizing’ Flaherty’s
methods in the creation of new cinéma-vérité (Rouch and Feld 2003 [1973]:
99). Like Flaherty, he sought to establish close affinities and working rela-
tionships with his subjects. Specifically he adopted Flaherty’s ‘participating
camera’, or subject feedback method, which could demystify the filmmaking
process for subjects and generate spontaneous ideas during filming, suppress-
ing the demand for predetermined outcomes. Rouch’s experimental films such
as Jaguar (1954–5, released 1967) and Moi, un Noir (I, a Black, 1958), shot
in western Africa, made this participation process explicit by recording the
feedback of subjects and incorporating it as voiceover commentary. In Moi,
un Noir the main actor, Oumarou Ganda, partly acts and partly lives out his
daily life for the camera; the performance is then self-reflexively narrated by
Ganda in voiceover. At its best the effect produces a kind of mise-en-abyme
of self-fashioned characters reflecting the cinematic fantasies of real subjects,
disturbing presumptions of documentary transparency (Geiger 1998: 3–8).
An early scene in Chronicle of a Summer, shot on the street, offers a
somewhat fetishistic display of the new filming methods and technologies.
Rouch’s and Morin’s assistants/subjects, Marceline Loridan and Nadine
Ballot, conduct interviews with the microphone and portable Nagra tape
recorder clearly visible to the camera. They engage passers-by with the ques-
tion ‘are you happy?’ and elicit responses ranging from curious and fearful (a
young boy), to diffident and amused (a policeman), to pretentious (a student
flashes a book of philosophy). The novelty of the technology is clear: at one
point a seventy-nine-year-old man looks confused by the object Marceline
waves in front of his face. She explains: ‘Don’t be afraid, it’s a microphone!’
But Chronicle of a Summer was not just a technical experiment, it was also a
social experiment, a self-critical examination of what truths the camera might
provoke into being. Near the project’s end, Morin and Rouch discuss the dif-
ficulties of communicating their feelings and intents through film: though they
were catalysts and key players, the film became something separate from them,
producing essentially ‘filmically understood’ truths and audience reactions

that didn’t always correspond to their own impressions and opinions of sub-
jects they believed they intimately knew. ‘Nous sommes dans le bain’, states
Morin finally, a phrase (translated in the subtitles as ‘we’re in for trouble’) that
has since animated debates – such as Brian Winston’s – about the veracity and
honesty of vérité approaches.3 Already, Chronicle of a Summer was pointing to
both the compelling possibilities and the pitfalls of cinéma vérité. Audiences
might take home an impression of direct collaboration and the distribution of
control among filmmakers and subjects, but this apparent openness tells only a
part of the story and in its own ways can disguise a film’s artifice and manipula-
tion of ‘truth’.
Due to the ambiguities of truth in cinéma-vérité, Rouch would come to
prefer the term cinéma direct, which seemed less constrained by implicit claims
to absolute truth. In the US, direct cinema would never really aspire to the
perceived openness and analytical self-awareness of Rouch’s approach. Robert
Drew would note that, even as he was helping to reinvent television documen-
tary in 1960, ‘Vertov had no influence on me, and I had never heard of Jean
Rouch’ (quoted in Saunders 2007: 9). For Albert Maysles, Vertov was essen-
tially ‘Soviet propaganda’ that lacked the immediacy of sync sound (Zuber
2007: 17). James Blue summed up the situation in 1964: while the French
‘probe, interview, provoke’, he noted, the Americans ‘are, for the most part,
fundamentalists. They eschew intervention whatever its goal. They cultivate
alert passivity. They seek self-effacement. They want the subject to forget
that they are there’ (Blue 1964: 23). Portable sound, lightweight cameras and
perhaps, above all, editing would help filmmakers and the filming apparatus
disappear behind the scenes, to become flies on the wall.
crisis and innovation

Though a handful of filmmakers – especially Drew, Leacock, Pennebaker,
Albert and David Maysles and Frederick Wiseman – are usually cited as direct
cinema’s key innovators in the US,4 it is important to remember that these
figures did not work in isolation. Scholars such as Kahana have looked beyond
the usual suspects towards, for example, the work of Michael Gray and the
Chicago Film Group (which included Lars Hedman and Mike Shea). Gray’s
Cicero March (1966, not released commercially) documented Civil Rights pro-
tests against housing policies and real estate ‘redlining’ in the all-white suburb
of Cicero (Kahana 2008: 156). An important retrospective at New York’s Film
Forum in 1997 highlighted other integral figures in direct cinema’s advance-
ment and diversification, including Allan King, Stephen Sbarge, William
Greaves, Hope Ryden, Charlotte Zwerin and Joyce Chopra.
Direct cinema’s roots go back to the interest in heightening the immediacy

of documentary that grew during the 1950s. This came out of mixed demands
– cultural, commercial, ideological, aesthetic and personal – to transform
structural and practical relationships between documentary films, their source
material and their audiences. As Kahana (citing Michael Curtin) stresses,
direct cinema’s ‘seemingly autonomous innovators’ in the US were working
within larger cultural and technological frameworks. These included Cold
War and nuclear fears, simmering political tensions at home (labor rights, the
civil liberties abuses of the McCarthy investigations, Civil Rights, the reces-
sion of 1958), the rise of US commercial television (aimed at both domestic
and overseas markets), and international developments in film technology and
new conceptual approaches to film.
While often viewed nostalgically, the decade and a half following the end of
the Second World War (Drew himself was a veteran, Leacock a combat pho-
tographer) was a highly disruptive period. The McCarthy ‘witch hunts’ had
targeted the film and media industries, leaving a swath of fear but also simmer-
ing resentment that would further stoke desires for ‘democratic’ alternatives
to conventional ways of negotiating and representing public and private life.
The 1950s was a decade of profound paradoxes: Civil Rights protests were
sparking violence and abuses of authority; media commentators were observ-
ing increasing cultural disaffection, particularly among younger people, giving
the lie to the rose-tinted Norman Rockwell image of America long proffered
in the pages of The Saturday Evening Post. Films like Rogosin’s On the Bowery
unveiled a scarcely hidden world of desperation and depravity at the heart of
the nation’s flagship city. When the film appeared, critics commented that it
reflected the deep alienation felt in American society at mid-century (Thurber
2000: B6).
As for the media available to address these social pressures, the theatrical
newsreel was a rapidly fading force and its reporting was usually superficially
entertaining rather than insightful (Fielding 1972: 307–8). At the same time
the new medium of the masses, television, was under fire for not meeting
public service needs. Beyond the occasional spark of newscasters such as
Edward R. Murrow, television was a ‘vast wasteland’ of ‘formula’ and ‘totally
unbelievable’ entertainment, as Newton W. Minow’s famous speech to the
National Association of Broadcasters described it (Minow 1961). These con-
cerns were later echoed in Lyndon B. Johnson’s ‘Great Society’ speech (1964),
calling on social institutions to rebuild an America ‘where the demands of
morality, and the needs of the spirit, can be realized in the life of the Nation’
(Johnson 1964). Responsibility in television was seen as central to a project
of national regeneration, and broadcasting reforms gathered strength among
government policymakers and in the media industry itself.
Robert Drew, an editor at Life, was keenly interested in advancing the
cultural currency of documentary, in particular television documentary.

Richard Leacock was a professional filmmaker, born in the Canary Islands,
who had worked as an editor on Frontier Films’ Native Land and as cam-
eraman on Louisiana Story. Both were questioning the fundamentals of
documentary practice. When Drew obtained the sponsorship of Time-Life
Broadcasting, they formed Drew Associates, producing several films over the
next few years. Bullfight at Malaga (1958) shows evidence of their efforts to
find freer filming techniques. Perhaps more significantly, it exemplifies a key
documentary narrative device: the conflict or ‘crisis’ structure (here mani-
fested in a duel between two rival bullfighters). Produced through the choice
of material and especially through editing, the ‘crisis’ structure would lie at the
center of much direct cinema work that followed.
Seeking to maximize maneuverability and with no suitable equipment on
the market, Leacock painstakingly developed, with Pennebaker, a 16 mm
Auricon camera linked to a portable sound recorder, synchronized through
the timing mechanism of a Bulova watch (Saunders 2007: 10). Other devices
appeared around the same time: wireless microphones, increasingly sensitive
film stock that reduced the need for complex lighting set-ups and film maga-
zines that allowed for quick reloading. In 1960 Drew began work with a crew
that included Leacock, Albert Maysles, Macartney-Filgate and Pennebaker,
producing Primary (1960), the first fully-fledged example of a direct cinema
ethos.
Dave Saunders calls Primary ‘an important film in the documentary canon,
but [. . .] not an especially good one’ (2007: 21). Perhaps this assessment is a
bit harsh. The film provides a well-paced account of John F. Kennedy’s and
Hubert Humphrey’s competition in Wisconsin for the Democratic Party nom-
ination. It depicts much of the uncertainty, artifice and awkwardness of the
campaign trail. It also exhibits Kennedy at close quarters and at the peak of his
charisma. He arrives on the campaign like a seasoned pop star, with scream-
ing girls demanding autographs, an image contrasted to Humphrey’s folksy,
down home persona. Just as importantly, the film offers a palpable record of
direct cinema coming into its own, with self-conscious displays of innovative
camera and sound work. The excitement of working with new technologies is
visible in segments such as the shoulder-mounted tracking shot of Kennedy
arriving at a Milwaukee rally (shown twice in the film), conceived by Maysles
and Pennebaker using a wide-angle lens to capture a maximum amount of
peripheral detail. The shot follows Kennedy through the adoring crowds, up a
narrow flight of stairs and on to a stage. The podium and crowd fan out before
him; the back of Kennedy’s head is at times so close it seems you could touch
it.
Still, as Saunders argues, the film is far from perfect. The home-made
equipment often failed to work and there is a fair amount of ‘cheating’ on
display, where the visuals fail to match the audio track. Leacock recalls the
film’s successes and its limits: ‘For the first time we were able to walk in and
out of buildings, up and down stairs, film in taxi cabs, all over the place, and
get synchronous sound’, but only, he claims, in the scenes he shot himself.
Pennebaker and Maysles were still shooting with silent Arriflex cameras
(Mamber 1974: 30, 36). The film also falls back on voiceover to plug gaps in
the narrative. Beyond these technical considerations, there are shortcomings in
the breadth of coverage: in spite of direct cinema’s aspirations towards candor
and previously unseen revelations, Primary reveals little beyond the prevail-
ing image of Kennedy and Humphrey then available in the mainstream press.
This is not quite the democratic dream of leveling hierarchies and intimately
‘knowing’ the nation’s political leaders and the political machine. Primary’s
scenes are essentially anecdotes and, as many have noted, it fails to provide a
genuinely insightful study of the election process itself.
Moreover, in capturing a private glimpse of a public figure, as Saunders
suggests, Drew was essentially caught in the middle. He was compromised in
his ability to reveal complex truths about Kennedy and the campaign, wanting
to ‘court the favour of high-profile subjects’ but at the same time needing to
‘remain innocuous in his coverage for fear of being ostracised from a clique
that was defending national interests’ (2007: 23). This situation is aligned to
what Stuart Hall calls the media ‘double bind’, where broadcasting implies
‘open, democratic, controversial’ reportage but in fact is constrained ‘within
an overall framework of assumptions about the distribution of political power’
(1988: 359). This is the ‘lie’ of direct cinema’s political and pop cultural
exposés: on the one hand revealing the ‘warts and all’ lives of public figures, on
the other needing to convey an illusion of observational objectivity and unbi-
ased reporting while not damaging the filmmakers’ personal and professional
contacts. In the end, the approach maintains the status quo – a product of
consensus packaged as unmediated direct access. To make things more com-
plicated, some direct cinema filmmakers, such as Pennebaker and the Maysles
brothers, would themselves edge closer to celebrity status.
Drew Associates produced nineteen films in all, most of them for network
television. The Children Were Watching (1960), contrasting white segrega-
tionists with the experiences of a black family during the integration of New
Orleans schools, was one of the first television programs to openly show the
direct impact of racism. Themes of race and social division were revisited in
The Chair (1962) and Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment (1963), which
stand out as exemplary of the Drew group applying their signature approach
to volatile social issues. The Chair follows the high-profile appeal process of
Paul Crump, sentenced to death in the electric chair. Rather than focus on
a miscarriage of justice or on Crump’s emotional state as he faces death, the
film features Crump’s defence attorney, Donald Moore, following the case
he makes for Crump’s rehabilitation. The ‘crisis’ structure is clearly laid out:
Crump faces execution in five days and Moore must save him. In a key scene,
we witness Moore in his office, achieving a major step towards clemency by
attaining support from the Catholic Church; he breaks into tears, a cathartic
reaction that underlines the intensity of the crisis. The scene is intimate and
discomforting at the same time, eliciting a complex mix of voyeuristic fascina-
tion and sympathetic connection. Though Crump is the fulcrum of the plot,
he serves more as a referential figure around which the crisis develops: the
site of tension and viewer identification lies in the challenge of Moore’s rescue
attempt. The Chair won critical plaudits but it also had its detractors, including
Jean-Luc Godard, who claimed that, in its emotionalism and lack of analysis,
it was no more insightful than Robert Wise’s Hollywood foray into capital
punishment, I Want To Live (1958) (Mamber 1974: 102).
The Chair reveals a paradox amid direct cinema innovation: while shoot-
ing strategies were rapidly changing, the temptation to structure the material
along conventional story lines remained. The new observational style still
largely held itself to the cardinal rule of shooting and editing: the trappings of
the filming apparatus should remain invisible. The raw material of the direct
cinema documentary remained essentially useless in the public realm until it
was manipulated into dramatic stories, crises, character motivations, causes
and effects. In the case of The Chair, this meant a shooting to finished film ratio
of over 30 : 1, similar to Hollywood productions. In this sense Godard perhaps
had a point.
Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment would similarly rely on classi-
cal narrative techniques such as parallel sequencing, used here to establish
familiarity with two ‘camps’ – North and South – hurtling towards a critical
encounter. Attorney General Robert Kennedy attempts to implement the
court-ordered desegregation of the University of Alabama, while Governor
George Wallace intends to stop it (the former boxer Wallace is shown in close-
up staring at the camera near the beginning of the film, already very much the
villain). As in The Chair, Crisis invests itself in a conflict/resolution narrative,
creating suspense in the lead up to the crisis: the meeting between Kennedy’s
Deputy Attorney General, Nicholas Katzenbach, and Wallace in Tuscaloosa.
Wallace plans to personally block the doorway to the university building, liter-
ally and symbolically barring African American entry.
Recalling, while ideologically countering, the North/South parallel
sequencing of The Birth of a Nation, each ‘camp’ in Crisis is associated with
contrasting family values. In the Alabama Governor’s mansion, Wallace’s tiny
blonde daughter is watched over by an African American servant. Wallace is
heard expressing beliefs in the separation of the races, and anachronistically
defends the Confederate cause; an imposing portrait of a Civil War general
stares over him. Wallace’s opulent quarters suggest a plantation house, con-
Figure 14. Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment (1963). Drew Associates. Courtesy of the
British Film Institute.
trasting with Robert Kennedy’s chaotic, casual family setting (RFK already
had seven children at the time). Throughout, cross-cutting constructs a privi-
leged spectator position where the viewer knows more about the interlocked
drama taking place in different locales than the characters do, creating height-
ened tensions.
A number of elements stray from the direct cinema ethos, not the least
being the use of intrusive voiceover (What’s Happening!, the Maysles’ 1964
film about the Beatles, was the first direct cinema film without voiceover) and
some scenes – particularly those in the Oval Office – appear ‘stage-managed’.
Though the oncoming confrontation creates simmering tensions, neither
RFK nor Wallace has the compelling screen energy or accessible humanity
of JFK and Humphrey in Primary, and the excitement of the campaign trail
is replaced here with a series of protracted meetings and telephone conversa-
tions. But the fascination of Crisis at the time lay in the historical moment:
the previous year riots had marred the entrance of African American student
James Meredith to the University of Mississippi, leaving two dead and hun-
dreds wounded (as briefly mentioned in voiceover). Except for short scenes
with the students Vivian Malone and James Hood, the most notable figure is
Katzenbach, intently strategizing as he drags on a dangerously burned down
cigarette. A much-admired moment occurs when RFK’s daughter Kerry takes
the phone from her father and briefly chats with ‘Nick’ Katzenbach (the sheer
luck, Leacock recalled, of the Southern and Northern teams working on each
end of the conversation without being certain that the other was still filming).
The scene not only underscores the informality of the Kennedy administra-
tion, but is a reminder of how children are often ideal direct cinema subjects:
conveying naturalness and injecting spontaneity even into scenes that are ‘a
little bit flat’ (Leacock 2010).
Crisis was a popular breakthrough for Drew: the September 1963 issue of
Show magazine declared, ‘A New Kind of Television Goes Backstage with
History’. But the program was also criticized for dramatic manipulation. In
the New York Times, Jack Gould accused key figures in the film of ‘an incred-
ible bit of play-acting’ (Watson 1989: 40–1). Stephen Mamber, unusually,
counters Drew’s defence that ‘the cameras did not, in anything that was seen
in the film, influence people’s reactions’. Mamber acknowledges that the cam-
era’s presence might ‘influence’ its subjects, and that those moments when
this influence is most palpable can ‘often be the most revealing’ (1974: 102). In
this sense direct cinema encounters the filming dynamics openly admitted
in Rouch’s cinéma vérité.
After 1963, Leacock and Pennebaker left Drew Associates. Reflecting in
part the need for commercial sponsorship, direct cinema projects gravitated
towards what Mamber calls ‘personality oriented’ films. Best known perhaps
is Pennebaker’s legendary Dont Look Back (1967), an exercise in direct cinema
demystification that served only to enhance the mystique of Bob Dylan. Direct
cinema observation was also the preferred approach for rockumentaries such as
Pennebaker’s Monterey Pop (1968) and Michael Wadleigh’s Woodstock (1970)
– films which helped elevate the rock music festival to the supreme filmic sig-
nifier of hippie communal ideals.5 Leacock’s first film after leaving Drew was
Happy Mother’s Day (1963), made with Chopra, and suggested direct cinema’s
potential for social observation and critique. The film deals with events in the
lives of the Fishers, the nationally famous parents of quintuplets, and casts an
ethnographic eye on their home town of Aberdeen, South Dakota. Leacock
displays a fascination for social oddities and cultural curiosities, and spurned
re-enactments in favor of patient long takes to capture seemingly offhand
details. The film also subtly shows up interactions between camera, filmmaker
and subjects (Mrs Fisher’s glance and brief smile at the camera is a classic – if
ambiguous – instance of this).6
Telling moments reveal the Fishers’ unprecedented situation: confronted
with so many children, and at the height of early 1960s consumerism and family
values, their straitened circumstances are obvious. Their faded Model-T car
is thirty years old; during a visit to a department store we are told that Mrs
Fisher ‘has not had a store-bought outfit since her marriage’. Sponsored by
the family-friendly Saturday Evening Post and Beech-Nut baby foods, ABC
would decide to broadcast a different version from Leacock’s. The televised

version included more shots of adorable babies, and fewer peculiar, critical and
humorous observations of small-town America (Mamber 1974: 195). Indeed,
Leacock’s version went against Drew’s formulas engineered for network
broadcast. For Saunders, Leacock’s film is ‘a critique of the tendency of con-
ventional journalism to invade, reduce, commoditise and exploit the province
of those who have no possible redress or alternative, and a response to the
formal demands of national television’ (Saunders 2007: 33). As Erik Barnouw
summed up the situation in 1964, television documentary was restricted by the
hegemony of the ‘big three’ networks; filmmakers were usually ‘more aware of
inhibitions than breakthroughs’, while sponsors, ‘with logic from the point of
view of the merchandiser, prefer to avoid programming that will exclude them
from any major “market” ’ (Barnouw 1964: 16–17).
Despite commercial challenges to projects like Happy Mother’s Day, direct
cinema did find a place in the market. The combination of lightweight equip-
ment and a philosophy of non-intervention meant that the shooting process
was dynamic and hands-on – thus popular with filmmakers. Before long direct
cinema was an established practice with a firm set of ideological, ethical and
practical principles attached to it. Mamber offers a summary of the ‘rules’ that
became a dominant – and, many would argue, privileged – approach to docu-
mentary. Documentary should capture ‘uncontrolled situations’ where actions
and events unfold spontaneously. As Mamber puts it:
Uncontrolled means that the filmmaker does not function as a ‘director’

nor, for that matter, as a screenwriter. [. . .] [N]o one is told what to say
or how to act. A prepared script, however skimpy, is not permissible, nor
are verbal suggestions, gestures, or any form of direct communication
from the filmmaker to his subject. The filmmaker should in no way indi-
cate that any action is preferred by him over any other. The filmmaker
acts as an observer, attempting not to alter the situations he witnesses
any more than he must simply by being there [. . .] Interviews are also
not employed, since their use, in effect, is a form of directed behavior.
(1974: 2)
Mamber’s version of the rules basically outlines so-called fly-on-the-wall

documentary, with its expectations of non-interference, neutrality and invis-
ibility. In this respect, ethnographic film in the observational mode overlapped
on many levels with direct cinema, and practical and theoretical film courses
often stressed their affinities: it was not unusual to find Primary and an NFB
Unit B production screened alongside John Marshall’s The Hunters (1962) and
Robert Gardner’s Dead Birds (1965).
Direct cinema rules occupied an elevated status in documentary circles
for many years. Mentors at major documentary teaching centers such as

UCLA and the National Film and Television School in Britain encouraged
the approach as the filmmaker’s modus operandi. More traditional approaches
were sidelined, ‘drummed out’, as James Blue noted, ‘for having “used” life
for the dissemination of a “selfish point of view” ’. For direct cinema filmmak-
ers, Blue stated, the ‘only proper material is believed to be life itself – not as
it is recreated, but as it happens. To these men, all else is heresy’ (Blue 1964:
23). There was effectively a ‘right’ method of capturing reality, opposed to
re-enactments, formal interviews (‘talking heads’) or directorial intervention.
Of course an ideal of pure observation was always just that, an ideal, and direct
cinema practitioners would find themselves, consciously and unconsciously,
having to adjust these ideals.
By the 1970s and into the 1980s, critics such as Thomas Waugh (1976) and
Brian Winston were articulating the disillusion that many felt with the ‘phi-
losophy of documentary purity’ being promoted ‘with the fervor of true believ-
ers’ in film schools and on festival circuits (Winston 1988b [1978/9]: 23–4).
Invoking Morin, Winston stressed important divergences between direct
cinema and cinéma vérité, the latter characterized by self-analytical scenes and
practitioners willing to put themselves on display alongside their subjects. Still,
it should be said that direct cinema always betrayed a weakness in the facade
of pure observation. Many filmmakers, such as Leacock, already had a healthy
suspicion of documentary approaches that veered towards orthodoxy. As
Happy Mother’s Day showed, direct cinema could reveal striking and unforced
insights, and the rules were less stable than many liked to admit. ‘These are
rules, not laws, and rules can be broken’, Leacock later stated (Leacock 1997).
l i mi ts o f p ur e o b s e r v a t i on
Direct cinema developed in opposition to what Bill Nichols calls the ‘exposi-
tory mode’ of Grierson and the RA/FSA films – though Grierson did advocate
for the ‘special value’ of ‘spontaneous gesture’ and the ‘intimacy of knowledge’
(Grierson 1946 [1932]: 80). Still, where a Griersonian approach stressed uni-
versals and interpretation for the greater good, direct cinema looked towards
the particular, the individual, the minutiae. As such, direct cinema heightened
impressions of immediate access to the private and personal, even (or espe-
cially) when its subjects were recognizable public figures. Professing to be
unobtrusive observers, direct cinema practitioners strove for a sense of invis-
ibly entering into the scene, a strategy that could produce a range of affects,
from intimate viewer participation to invasive voyeurism. Long lenses caught
candid behavior at a distance; zooms provided intense, revealing close-ups;
cutaway shots homed in on awkward and nervous gestures; directional and
remote microphones captured whispered, offhand remarks. Such a fetishiza-

tion of total observation works, as Corner suggests, to cover for the presence of
the camera, fusing the idea of the ‘putative event’ (what would have happened
without the camera’s presence) with the pro-filmic event (what actually hap-
pened with the camera present) (Corner 1996: 20).
This implied personal connection between audiences and viewed subjects
also helps to explain direct cinema’s dependency on – and appeal to – televi-
sion. Beaming directly into homes, television rapidly usurped the role of radio
and became a familiar part of American life. Here the renowned celebrity
and the average man-on-the-street could, in equal measure, be scrutinized
at close quarters. Kahana, citing Rhona J. Bernstein, suggests that due to its
‘location, its size, and its integration into social ritual’, television provided an
impression of personal and democratic involvement in the activities and con-
cerns of the nation. Grierson observed that television could penetrate ‘private
emotional spaces and extend them unreasonably, making us care about people
we will never meet’ (quoted in Kahana 2008: 292–3). Primary and Crisis offer
examples of this illusory levelling process, where political leaders are shown
as glamorous and elevated, and mundane and accessible, often concurrently.
In Primary we see the stellar JFK addressing an adoring crowd, watched over
by a fastidious, somewhat shy Jackie, while Hubert Humphrey is serenaded
by a band of children playing ‘Davy Crocket’ on accordions, then tucks into a
humble dinner of ‘ham, mashed potatoes, and string beans’. At the same time
the coupling of direct cinema and television could transform ordinary people
living ordinary lives into celebrities – a familiar by-product of more recent
reality television.
Promising to offer honest and unobstructed access, direct cinema attempted
to perform a double gesture: to observe people with whom audiences might
identify and empathize, while offering ‘simulations of depth’ – getting behind
or below the surface of the events and personalities represented (Kahana 2008:
297). These impulses are indicative of what Nichols labels the ‘observational
mode’, which closely parallels the strategies of fiction films. Both observational
documentary and fiction aim to produce a sense of absolute realism that offers
‘unmediated and unfettered access to the world’ (Nichols 1991: 43). Direct
cinema thus strives ‘to eliminate as much as possible the barriers between
subject and audience’ (Mamber 1974: 4), and as result these ‘barriers’ – the
limits of the filmmaker and equipment as physical and technical presences
in a particular space and time – are not normally visible in the finished film.
Direct cinema masks the filmmaking apparatus, like classic Hollywood fic-
tions, encouraging identification with characters and producing dramatic ten-
sions that repress the contingencies of the spectator’s location and the actual,
complex dynamics of filmmaker, filming technology, subjects and filming
conditions.
Take for example Crisis and its narrative produced via parallel editing,
which creates a spectator position that transcends the perspectives of both the
filmmaker on the scene and the subjects in the scene. Kahana notes that conti-
nuity editing in documentary can help to privilege an ‘individuated perception’
where the spectator occupies a position in which ‘he or she takes in the scene
from the best possible vantage point’ (Kahana 2008: 294). Because the film-
maker in the observational mode remains an absent presence, rarely revealing
him/herself or showing the filmed subjects’ awareness of the ongoing produc-
tion, the camera/spectator becomes a sort of ideal observer, witnessing the
hidden truths of everyday life. As Nichols acknowledges, the fact that the raw
material is still based on real-time events does limit a film’s ability to create
fully omniscient observers: the film content will always be partly restricted by
actual events taking place in front of the camera. Nonetheless, ‘the expectation
of transparent access remains’. The filmmaker’s absence ‘clears the way for the
dynamics of empathetic identification, poetic immersion, or voyeuristic pleas-
ure’ (Nichols 1991: 43–4). Technological innovations were meant to allow
filmmakers to dispense with preconceived notions, but didacticism effectively
went underground: direct cinema films are often driven by an underlying
thesis or argument. We might attribute this gap between ideals, intentions
and results solely to the interventions of obtrusive editing (such as the ‘crisis’
structure or the problem/solution story) but the issue really runs deeper. The
processes of planning and choosing material, matched with issues of audience
expectations, commercial imperatives and sponsorship – all of these are just a
few of the many limits on ‘pure’ or direct access (Kahana 2008: 294–5).
The limits and ultimate progression of direct cinema are visible in the work
of the famous partnership of Albert and David Maysles. In early films such as
Showman (1963) and What’s Happening! The Beatles in the USA, the ‘crisis’
structure and heavier narrative elements were put to one side in order to stress
what Drew called ‘picture logic’ – limiting context and background infor-
mation to what the camera could ‘show’ or ‘reveal’. The direct cinema film
intended to be legible, as fully as possible, via observation: what Mamber calls
‘revelation through situation’ (1974: 142). The Maysles brothers worked in
what many consider the ideal direct cinema partnership: the two-person crew
consisting of cameraperson and soundperson (for Drew, this translated to the
‘correspondent’ on sound and engaged with the subjects, and the photogra-
pher on camera). The two-person team appealed to direct cinema’s hands-on
ethos and was small enough to be flexible and discreet. But even a two-person
crew, meant to minimize interference, is hardly invisible. Filming in confined
spaces and small rooms, Al and David no doubt often resembled, in Beattie’s
words, ‘elephants on the table’ more than flies on the wall (2004: 97).
After the celebrity studies Meet Marlon Brando (1965, with limited release
due to Brando’s objections) and With Love From Truman: A Visit With Truman
Capote (1966), the Maysles wanted to produce ‘not just feature length [docu-
mentaries] but a feature with all the drama to compete with mainstream fea-
tures in movie theaters’. The result, Salesman (1969, with Charlotte Zwerin),
was hailed by the Saturday Review as ‘one of the most important films ever
made’. Still, Maysles recalled, ‘PBS wasn’t a bit interested, no one was inter-
ested, and cinema exhibitors weren’t quite getting on to the notion that a
documentary could be a feature’ (Zuber 2007: 10). Salesman follows the hard
and often seedy lives of door-to-door Bible salesmen, highlighting the dra-
matic potential of everyday encounters. In dramatizing quotidian experience,
it shows an affinity to contemporary movements such as New Journalism,
which Al often suggested paralleled the aims of direct cinema. Also like New
Journalism, Salesman’s classical realist style and focus on plot and charac-
ter development (in particular on the hangdog figure of Paul ‘The Badger’
Brennan) reflect efforts to break documentary into the theatrical mainstream.
Salesman’s debts to narrative realism might be seen not only in its observa-
tional approach but in its use of parallel editing, the ‘meanwhile’ structure that
unites disparate storytellers from D. W. Griffith to Capote.
David Davidson observes that, unlike Drew, the Maysles stressed ‘psychol-
ogy over sociology’ (both Al and David had backgrounds in psychology), cre-
ating ‘self-contained’ character-centered worlds that underline direct cinema’s
reaction against an Anglo-American tradition that privileged documentary’s
role in ‘advancing understanding’ and ‘bettering social conditions’ (1981: 4–5).
For Mamber, however, Salesman mixes brilliance with problematic backslid-
ing: it is ‘full of devices heretofore more the province of fiction film’; thus it
is ‘edging back into the kind of manipulation that American cinema verite
was originally reacting against’ (1974: 161, 167). Drama is indeed emphasized
through the shooting and cutting choices. In one scene, as a Florida woman
is ‘badgered’ by an increasingly desperate Brennan, the camera zooms in on
her beleaguered face as she wrestles internally with the salesman’s entreaties.
The lingering shot involves us in her interest in the lavishly illustrated Bible;
we also sense her embarrassment at expressing her financial troubles. Similar
to fiction, absorption and voyeuristic fascination are mixed with identification
and empathy. But other effects – the unusually long take, the persistent focus
on the woman’s face and gestures, Brennan’s soft-sell monologue off-screen,
the lowly state of the house, the harsh natural light, the slight shake of the
camera – all work to create a claustrophobic and intensely psychological space
drawn from and contextualized as spontaneous experience. Salesman creates a
highly wrought documentary space but is not ‘simply’ mimetic fiction.
The Maysles brothers and Zwerin’s more experimental and controversial
Gimme Shelter (1970) further modified direct cinema’s rules, drawing atten-
tion to the paradoxes of editing out or streamlining the rough patches and
inconclusive fragments of documentary production. As Jonathan Vogels
observes, while remaining direct cinema’s most ardent ‘purists’, the Maysles
brothers manifested ‘a surprising inconsistency between rhetoric and prac-
tice’, developing an essentially modernist aesthetic that was ‘sometimes more
pragmatic, sometimes more widely experimental’ (2005: 149, 12). In this sense
(though Al Maysles contended differently [Zuber 2007: 13]) we might notice
similarities between the Maysles’ and Frederick Wiseman’s work. Both have
suggested that their work parallels New Journalism, though Wiseman’s stated
attitudes towards documentary purity tend to be more ironic than doctrinal,
referring to his own work as ‘reality fictions’ (Wiseman 1994: 4). Wiseman’s
films largely but not exclusively have dealt with institutions and institutional
life, ranging from Titicut Follies (1967), High School (1968), Law and Order
(1969) and Welfare (1975), to Public Housing (1997), Domestic Violence (2001)
and State Legislature (2006). Most were made with the support of the Public
Broadcasting Service (PBS), and from 1971 to 1981 Wiseman’s contract
offered him essentially carte blanche treatment – one film per year without
constraints on the subject matter or running time. He thus has occupied a
rare position for a documentarist, with reliable funding sources and broadcast
outlets not wholly dependent on market economics.
Wiseman’s early films are not openly reformist, but reveal the dynamics and
abuses of power at the heart of public institutions. Part journalistic exposé,
part experimental collage, the films raise questions about institutional efficacy,
showing up flaws in the superstructure while homing in on individual lives
caught up in rigid frameworks and managerial hierarchies. Rather than high-
light public figures and celebrities, Saunders observes, Wiseman deals with
what Michael Harrington called ‘the other America’: the nation ‘populated
by failures, by those driven from the land and bewildered by the city’ (quoted
in Saunders 2007: 145). In the tradition of Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine and social
documentary more generally, the films probe both the mundane and hor-
rific undersides of institutional life, examining the detached lawmakers and
bureaucratic functionaries who enforce rules and those caught up in their web,
unable to stage a protest.
Wiseman’s films are largely realist with moments that verge on the surreal,
and generally lack explicit analysis. They pay careful attention to visual and
aural textures and to the allusive potency of formal and thematic continuities
and juxtapositions. For the most part manifestly non-intrusive, their compact,
sometimes amusing, sometimes shocking scenes are structured in a stream-
of-consciousness, episodic manner. Nichols discerns a ‘mosaic’ pattern to
the films, where the organizational links are motivated more by rhetorical
or impressionistic means than by plot or chronology (Nichols 1981: 211).
Saunders further links Wiseman’s anti-narrative or ‘anti-syntactical’ sequenc-
ing to his scepticism of ‘reductive’ institutional schemes. Any illusions of
easy continuity would simply reinscribe the generic institution’s false sense
of ordering and containing the world (2007: 167–8). To achieve these free-
flowing mosaic patterns, however, Wiseman has been known to rely on a very
high shooting ratio (for Juvenile Court [1973] sixty hours of footage was edited
down to two).
With a background in law, Wiseman chose to document in his first film,
Titicut Follies, the grim day-to-day life at the Massachusetts Correctional
Institution at Bridgewater. A combination prison and hospital for the crimi-
nally insane, the facility was familiar, as Wiseman had taken his law students
on public tours. He was encouraged to make a film by Bridgewater’s super-
intendent and the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts in a public relations
attempt to ‘humanize’ the troubled institution (Atkins 1976: 5).7 The results so
alarmed officials that they called for a ban on the film which the State Supreme
Court ultimately upheld.
Many in favor of the ban argued the film was sheer voyeurism, document-
ing private lives in order to exploit them. Still, Wiseman insisted that the film
actually ‘uncovered’ nothing: everything in the film would have been visible
on the public tours that officials themselves encouraged (Wiseman 1976: 70).
Of course these comments are slightly disingenuous, as Titicut Follies is any-
thing but a purely observational ‘tour’ of the facility. Self-reflexively framed
by the ‘follies’ performed by inmates to entertain the prison staff, the film
underlines the blunt ironies of institutional life though careful camera and
sound work and associative juxtapositions that often border on horror film. In
an unforgiving early sequence, we are shown emaciated prisoners lining up,
stripped for inspection: frankly recalling a concentration camp. In another
long take, a grinning prisoner is filmed in a harshly lit close-up, singing rough
counterpoint against a television screen featuring the Greek chanteuse Nana
Mouskouri. For Variety, such scenes appeared ‘merely gratuitous’ without
advancing a social argument ‘one whit’ (Byro. 1967: 12). This was, however,
effectively their purpose, to ‘prevent us from maintaining a unified point of
view’ (Grant 1998: 242), to defamiliarize and disorient, challenging seemingly
transparent cinematic modes that feed voyeurism and offer easy moral solu-
tions. As we watch staff enforcing rigid compliance through degrading acts,
amid this extraordinary world is a bleak, routine-like banality. Some inmates
appear eminently rational, while guards are in turn kindly, automaton-like or
borderline sadistic. As Kahana succinctly states, the film reveals ‘banal and
continuous forms of repression inside a generic institutional structure’ (2008:
224).
Titicut Follies recalls the grim ironies of Franju’s work, which offered
oblique commentary on institutionalized violence in films such as Blood
of the Beasts and Hôtel des Invalides (1952). In Franju’s hands, the world’s
explicit and implicit horrors (animal slaughter and the memorialization of
war, respectively) are wedded to moments of unexpected lyricism, even
dark humor. Similarly, in spite of Titicut Follies’ harshness, Wiseman found

glimpses of humanity: ‘Even in Titicut Follies, the guards in their own way
were more tuned to the needs of the inmates than the so-called “helping”
professionals’ (Peary 2004 [1998]). In one scene, as a prisoner removes his
clothes to be searched, he appears compliant and passive, yet we learn that
he has molested his own daughter, committed aggravated assault and arson,
and attempted to hang himself. We see the guard lifting and turning over
the nude prisoner’s arms and hands, then briefly running a hand over his
close-shaven head. While fleeting and incidental, the gestures are palpably
tactile, perhaps reminding us of the lived presence and vulnerability of these
bodies amid others in the film. Here the filmmakers (John Marshall working
camera with Wiseman covering sound) (Benson and Anderson 2002: 28),
while ‘invisible’, are nonetheless felt presences in the hand-held movements,
deliberate shooting decisions and proximity of the camera to the bodies being
filmed.
The scene is marked by subtle editorializing: as the prisoner is led to his
cell, Marshall performs one of direct cinema’s signature maneuvers, the
traveling long take. In the midst of the shot, the camera unexpectedly tilts
upwards to capture a television screen, where images of a body on a stretcher
accompany news commentary referring to Vietnam. The camera movement
explores spaces on the periphery; similar to a cutaway it encourages active
associations, here in a single continuous motion. Its implications are various:
indicating the symbolic interaction of ‘live’ and mediatized realities, remind-
ing us that the world outside the prison walls is not necessarily safer, or saner,
than the one inside. As the door closes behind the prisoner, the guard opens
a peephole, taking a look inside before the camera zooms in to frame the man
– naked, confined, alone – at the window. Such scenes remind us of direct cin-
ema’s tenet that pro-filmic reality – even when limiting context to the recorded
event alone – produces complex metaphors and meanings that can parallel fic-
tional constructs. As Colin Young saw it: ‘A [documentary’s] events will have
the weight of general metaphor, but first and foremost they will have meaning
within their own context’ (Young 2003 [1974]: 108).
Compelling in its simplicity and completeness, even with its subtle edi-
torializing, this sequence actually performs much of what direct cinema’s
advocates preached – an appearance of non-intervention, fidelity to subjects,
narrative legibility without added contextual information, mobile camera, sync
sound, natural lighting and settings, and so on – and it shows how involving
this approach can be. Yet, as the tilt up to the television hints, there is no
unified or ‘unmediated’ observational position, though there are meaningful
engagements that can nonetheless speak through the film.
grey gardens (1975)

As Beattie concisely puts it, while practitioners of direct cinema and cinéma
vérité made strong claims for ‘the efficacy of their respective methods’, these
claims were ‘not necessarily borne out in practice’. Both movements con-
tained elements of intervention and efforts towards ‘pure’ observation, and
the films they produced often relied on overlapping techniques (2004: 84).
The Maysles’ Grey Gardens is a particularly interesting case of this fusion.8
The film was made under conditions that would confound attempts at non-
interference and thus offers a glimpse of filmmakers who seem both at home
and off-balance, adjusting to the capricious and sometimes anarchic lives into
which they’ve arrived with their cameras.
As Charles Reynolds stressed in a mid-1960s interview with Al Maysles:
‘Maysles’s passion for recording life “as it actually happens” is equalled only
by his sensitivity to the people and situations he films [. . .] [Maysles’s] rule is
never to tamper, never to impose on what is before the camera, but to watch
and wait and react freely, approaching the scene spontaneously without pre-
conceived ideas’ (Reynolds 1979 [1964]: 401). If there were efforts at making
Grey Gardens adhere to these principles, they were short lived. The film’s
restless and demanding subjects – ‘Big’ Edie and ‘Little’ Edie Bouvier Beale –
required a good deal of attention, engagement and negotiation. An example of
this appears when Big Edie, who has arthritis and is unsteady on her feet, says,
‘I’m going to need David’s hand to get up’. David, holding the sound equip-
ment, moves into the filmed space to help her, and Al’s camera briefly catches
him in frame but quickly shies away, never showing David’s face, finally
zooming into an awkward close-up on the fabric of Big Edie’s dress. Shots like
this suggest the kind of compromise Jay Ruby refers to as ‘ “accidental” reflex-
ivity’ (1988: 73). The Maysles are obliged to break observational rules (and
Vogels reminds us that nearly every Maysles film violates these rules [Vogels
2005: 149]), but still avoid the more open stance of French cinéma vérité.
Rouch stated that he was not interested in the ‘cinema of truth, but the truth
of cinema’ (Rouch and Feld 2003: 14). Grey Gardens on the other hand seems
committed to capturing more essential truths about the lives of its subjects that
lie beyond contingent cinematic truths. Al claimed in numerous interviews
that the camera’s presence changed nothing about the Beales’ behavior – we
see the truth of their lives. But it is worth asking: do Grey Gardens’ truths run
any deeper than cinematic artifice itself?
The idea for Grey Gardens began in a project initiated by Lee (Bouvier)
Radziwill, sister of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Radziwill hoped to make a
film about her childhood memories on Long Island. As Al Maysles recalled,
Radziwill was suddenly contacted by her aunt and cousin, who were facing
threats of eviction by the Suffolk County Health Department, and she asked
Figure 15. Grey Gardens (1975). Portrait Films. Courtesy of the Kobal Collection.
at that point if the Maysles brothers wanted to film at Grey Gardens. Little
Edie would later describe the health inspectors’ arrival in October 1971 as
a ‘raid’ that traumatized her and ‘almost killed’ her mother through shock
(Graham 2001 [1976]). At that time the brothers shot one and a half hours
inside what newspapers would sensationally report as a ‘garbage-ridden, filthy
28-room house with cats, fleas, cobwebs, and no running water’. Radziwill was
reputedly so alarmed by the footage that she confiscated it. A clean-up and
refurbishment took place in 1972, with Jackie O.’s financial and (much to the
media’s delight) on-site assistance. The filmmakers returned in September
and October 1973, having agreed to pay the cash-strapped Beales $5,000
each and promising 20 percent of future profits from the film. The Maysles
invested $50,000 in equipment and preparation for the shoot. In six weeks they
had filmed ‘80 to 90 percent of the film’, emerging with seventy hours of film
and forty more of additional sound material (Graham 2001 [1976]).
What resulted is an observational documentary that seems always on the
verge of breaking the bounds of cinema’s narrative and perceptual frames,
exemplifying the transitions and experiments going on in direct cinema.
Indeed, as Al claimed, the aim behind Grey Gardens was always far less about
creating a fly-on-the-wall exposé than about ‘having a relationship’ with
the Beales (Froemke et al. 2001), perceivable through the off-camera banter
that punctuates the film. Edie reveals her need for interaction: she is a rest-
less interviewee, constantly pushing forward and stepping back (causing

the camera to move forwards and backwards, struggling to maintain focus),
running from well-lit rooms into dark corridors (forcing rapid adjustments
to lighting – though Al recalled that the film stock, Kodak 7254, had a great
‘tolerance for error’ so that problems could be anticipated and later adjusted)
(Froemke et al. 2001). From early on, Little Edie contrives much of the pro-
filmic mise-en-scène and action, describing her ‘revolutionary costume’ and its
rationale in detail, directing the crew to move through the garden and shoot
from the top of the house. Highly conscious of the filming process, Edie
urgently whispers ‘the movie, the movie’ to her mother when she threatens to
take off her clothes in the sun.
At the same time the film reveals a meeting not just between observation
and vérité interaction but between documentary – and its association with
verifiable, factual discourses – and fiction. Grey Gardens is haunted by ghosts
of gothic and romantic tales, and by Hollywood fantasy: the melodrama and
the ‘woman’s film’. In the opening sequence, contrasting with its resplend-
ent East Hampton neighbors, Grey Gardens exudes (even in its name) an
overgrown, unkempt grandeur. A color shot of the house is intercut with a
black-and-white photo, shifting to a sequence that outlines the Beales’ ordeal
with the Health Department; the contrast of color and black and white shrouds
the house in mystery and isolates it in time. Grey Gardens easily recalls Billy
Wilder’s Sunset Blvd. (1950) where the character Joe Gillis encounters the
faded glory of Norma Desmond’s mansion, with its overgrown gardens and
decrepit swimming pool. The house evokes the figure of an abandoned, aging
woman: ‘A neglected house gets an unhappy look; this one had it in spades’,
states Gillis; ‘it was like that old woman in Great Expectations, that Miss
Havisham in her rotting wedding dress and her torn veil, taking it out on
the world because she’d been given the go by’. Norma is first glimpsed from
behind a screen, sequestered and ominous (a similar image of Little Edie,
speaking from behind a screen in an upstairs window, appears in Al Maysles’s
The Beales of Grey Gardens [2006], which features previously cut scenes).
Intertextual references abound: the gentle 1930s melody ‘I See Your Face
Before Me’ plays beneath the opening sequence, helping to associate Grey
Gardens with a bygone era. The sequence was developed, according to the
filmmakers, to avoid using voiceover, but it also helps to underscore the sense
of lost grandeur and the notion of the woman frozen in time as the world
passes her by. The Beales’ aristocratic connections are also emphasized, and
‘real’ royalty in the form of Jackie O. appears fleetingly in a photo where she
is shown in the house assisting the clean-up. The fascination with celebrity
extends to referencing the Maysles brothers’ own: the sequence ends with a
news article about the two descending on Grey Gardens to make a film.
The film’s themes coalesce around the symbolic figure of the ‘vanishing
woman’: in this case the aging woman deluded about her ongoing relevance
while actually signifying a ‘pathetic spectacle of loss’. Writing on Sunset Blvd.,
Lucy Fischer suggests that the ‘aging woman [. . .] was viewed by man only
as a site of profound loss. And her sunset years stretched out as bleakly as the
desolate Hollywood boulevard that presciently opens the film’ (Fischer 1988:
112). For John David Rhodes, there are embedded social and symbolic con-
nections between the Beales and the house they inhabit:
Grey Gardens materializes very concretely the horizon of possibility for

the Edies’ interaction with and intervention in the world, and it is hardly
incidental that Grey Gardens is a film about a mother and daughter living
together in the family home; no accident that Little Edie’s brothers are
nowhere in sight [. . .]. Given the limits – both historically and contem-
porarily – placed on women’s autonomy, the female child, much more
than the male, will be subject to the rule of the house and the domestic
sphere which tend to define, limit, and circumscribe her range of actions
within the world. (2006: 86)
Complementing the idea of the women’s close, entrapped relationship to the

home is the ghost of the faded belle in Southern gothic literature and drama.
The Maysles refer to themselves as ‘gentlemen callers’, a term that evokes, as
in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, empty promises of escape, faded
youth, the pain of impossible romance and always the specter of madness (also
associated with the feminine, as in the medical tradition of ‘female hysteria’).
Invoking one of Williams’s most tragic heroines, the theatrical trailer quotes a
critic from the East Hampton Star: ‘The film promises to give Big and Little
Edie as much a place in the life of our arts as Blanche DuBois has attained.’
Little Edie herself underlines the comparisons when she comments, ‘It’s very
difficult to keep the line between the past and the present, you know what I
mean? It’s awfully difficult’.
The filmmakers, who included co-directors/co-editors Muffie Meyer and
Ellen Hovde and associate producer/co-editor Susan Froemke, were aware of
these impressions and keen to make use of them. They recalled being struck
by the overtones of ‘aristocracy in decay [. . .] we kept talking about, “it’s like
Tennessee Williams, it’s like Eugene O’Neill” ’ (Froemke et al. 2001). Even
so, their dominant conceptions of the Beales were essentially the opposite of
fading women isolated from the world. The Beales were ‘not recluses’ at all,
and Hovde expressed an admiration for Big Edie, calling her ‘strong and tough
and willful and confident’ and a dominant force in a tight-knit mother–daugh-
ter relationship. The Beales were ‘nonconformists, they had made a stand’
against suffocating cultural expectations and norms, they were ‘courageous
and inspirational’. For the filmmakers, Grey Gardens deals with ‘feminist
concerns’, documenting what Little Edie refers to in the film as ‘staunch’

women who remained fiercely independent in the face of social, marital and
financial difficulties, and who refused to cave in to paternal and other social
expectations (Froemke et al. 2001).
There is evidence of these ideas in the finished film, and understanding
the pressures of gender, class and social demands in the postwar era certainly
underlies any fuller comprehension of how and why the Beales lived as they
did. Always in tension with the invocation of the feminine figure marked
by entrapment and loss are the simultaneous pressures that the subjects
themselves – in particular Little Edie – exert against these narrative frames.
Little Edie is not simply a curiosity in a sideshow: she constantly violates the
presumed safe space that separates on-screen character and camera, disrupt-
ing the delicate balance between filmmaker and filmed, audience and screen,
voyeur and object of the gaze. She might be seen as ‘the director of her own
show’ (Vogels 2005: 136). As she pushes her face into the lens, we might per-
ceive the weight of her embodied presence and the hesitancy and disorienta-
tion of the body behind the camera.
In Little Edie’s ‘revolutionary’ costumes, and in observing the fine line
drawn between performed and real life, the film partly resembles other celeb-
rity documentaries such as Dont Look Back or Gimme Shelter. But the Beales’
performances also offer profound elements of excess and even of camp (as
borne out, subsequently, by Little Edie’s appeal to drag performers). Camp,
as exemplified so flamboyantly in the early films of John Waters, is based
on ‘the great discovery that the sensibility of high culture has no monopoly
upon refinement [. . .] camp taste supervenes upon good taste as a daring and
witty hedonism’ (Sontag 1991 [1964]: 109). These ideas in many ways reflect
the dynamics of excess and the disruption of ‘good taste’ seen in the film, as
well as suggesting a shared camp aesthetic that brings together the film’s still
increasing army of fans.
A politics of camp excess is hinted at in the scene acted out to Norman
Vincent Peale’s ‘try really try’ radio sermon. Little Edie mimics Peale’s
hortatory speech while at the same time offhandedly inspecting her white
high-heeled shoe. Through her flattened delivery and disinterested stare, she
seems to undermine the rhetorical and masculine force of the sermon, ignor-
ing Peale’s demands for attention. When Peale states that his listeners have to
‘get on top and stay there’, Big Edie intones, ‘does that mean women too?’ In
the end, they both agree that the sermon was ‘very good’, adding perfuncto-
rily that it was ‘very long’. In the much-admired ‘staunch’ scene that follows,
Little Edie’s costume of the day appears to be battle fatigues. As she describes
her defiance against social and family pressures, she pushes her face and body
forward into the lens, threatening the presumed autonomy of the camera.
So why did audiences and critics often take away a different impression of
the Beales? Why would people argue, as Al recollected, that ‘Edie Beale, she’s
senile, and the other one is demented; they’re incompetent, so they can’t be
filmed’ (Pryluck 1976: 12)? As Vogels outlines, ethical concerns have long
dominated discussions of the direct cinema approach (2005: 152–3) and many
critics found Grey Gardens particularly exploitative. Relating it to a circus side-
show, one stated: ‘we are in the position of those crowds who came and paid
to look at the Wolf Boy in his cage’ (Haskell 1976: 118). When recalling these
reactions, the filmmakers have always dismissed them as opinions of conven-
tional people taken aback by the Beales’ ‘unconventional’ and ‘nonconformist’
lives (Froemke et al. 2001). But perhaps the idea of celebrating the Beales, as
emphasized by Al in interviews (and even by Little Edie herself, who often
expressed delight in the film, stating, ‘thank god I met the Maysles’) (Graham
2001 [1976]),9 came up against Grey Gardens’ narrative frame, cultural allu-
sions and marketing tactics that together worked to produce a rather different
range of effects. As Jack Kroll stated in Newsweek, the Beales seemed to inhabit
‘a time warp of their own’. Indeed, the luridly fascinating spectacle of women
trapped in time and the Beales’ uncanny similarity to classic American gothic
fictions were among the film’s key selling points: both the Kroll quote and the
Blanche DuBois reference appeared in a promotional trailer for the film.
As Al Maysles’s camera roves across Big Edie lying on her stained, bare
mattress amid the refuse of bags, tissues and dirty dishes, ‘inspirational’ is
probably not a word that immediately comes to mind. Yet Big Edie’s words
suggest a challenge to any pigeonholing of her as a victim: ‘I love that smell’,
she states; ‘I thrive on it. It makes me feel good. I’m not ashamed of anything.
Where my body is is a very precious place’. Such comments imply a challenge
to conformist beliefs about social and domestic order, gender, the body, age.
They might even encourage readings that pose the Beales’ ‘savage’ lives as
a subversion of antiseptic, bourgeois norms, their closeness to animals, both
through association and lifestyle, being a case in point. Yet whether the film
successfully empowers or celebrates the Beales remains an open question.
Films always elicit competing reactions from audiences, but the negative
and pitying responses generated by Grey Gardens cannot solely be pinned on
narrow-minded audiences.
In examining Grey Gardens’ connotations, it is worth looking more closely
at the film’s structure and how it was produced. As in many observational
documentaries, Grey Gardens draws a ‘slight narrative’ out of the disarray and
disorder of real life that was captured in dozens of hours of rushes. The editing
process, in particular, was both painstaking and interpretive. Hovde recalled:
When the material came in we just let it wash over us. [. . .] You almost
couldn’t tell if you had anything until you cut it, because it was so free
flowing. Very repetitive. It didn’t have a structure. There were no events.
There was nothing around which a conversation was going to wheel. It

was all kind of the same in a gross way, and you had to dig into it, try to
find motivations, condense the material to bring out psychological tones.
(quoted in Rosenthal 2007: 282)
Indeed, while edited into a certain coherence, Little and Big Edie seem to
be free-associating much of the time, and certainly an interesting paradox
suggested by the film is that of characters obsessed with lost time who actu-
ally seem to have nothing but time on their hands. For Davidson, this sense
of repetitive or static temporality reflects the ‘modernist’ nature of the film,
where ‘one scene follows the next without respect for orderly temporal
sequencing’ (Davidson 1981: 8).
Amid a free-flowing, modernist rhythm, the film does develop a forward
momentum: a sense of mystery or gathering conspiracy (Jerry and the ‘Marble
Faun’) and a specific set of themes. As Meyer noted: ‘In documentary one is
taking reality and trying to squeeze it into a fictional form, a form that has a
middle, climax, and end; certainly not one that life actually has’ (Froemke et
al. 2001). The ‘slight narrative’ of Grey Gardens thus mirrors impulses in rep-
resentation to discipline, via rhetorical and narrative means, the unpredictable
and disordered nature of experience. Moreover, as the film was geared towards
theatrical release, there was a commercial imperative to appeal to audiences.
With a final investment of close to half a million dollars, the Maysles needed to
deliver a film with characters, tensions and experiences with which audiences
could strongly connect.
Thus, though the narrative is hardly linear, there are tensions underlying
Grey Gardens arising from framing strategies that seem to restrict rather than
enhance the range of connotations that characters and events might gener-
ate. This tension is palpable in what the filmmakers referred to as the ‘Pink
Room’ scene, which serves as the film’s climax of sorts. So far, Grey Gardens
has indicated Little Edie’s lasting regrets and a simmering, long-term dispute
between mother and daughter that here flares into open argumentation. Little
Edie sings a song that dramatizes her infatuation with David, ‘People Will
Say We’re in Love’ (from the musical Oklahoma!), much to her mother’s
consternation. Edie’s insistent, weird rendition has ‘ruined breakfast’, left Big
Edie irritated and out of sorts and even precipitated a moment in which Big
Edie’s bathing-suit top falls off on camera. After calming down on the terrace,
Little Edie re-enters the room and glances left at a portrait of herself as a girl
(already shown in the bedroom when she recounted her days as a model and
debutante). In the scene just before the ‘Pink Room’, Little Edie remarks that
she sees herself ‘as a little girl, Mother’s little girl’ living in Grey Gardens.
Her glance at the portrait seems to trigger another, more violent bout of
regret. A proposal of marriage, Little Edie claims, was ruined by her mother’s
intervention, even though it had been her ‘last chance’ to get away from Grey
Gardens’ grip and an increasingly smothering mother–daughter relationship.
She openly weeps at the Maysles: ‘She wouldn’t give me a chance. [. . .] I’m
bored with these awful people’.
The scene hinges on the cutaway to the portrait. Michael Rabiger describes
what he calls the ‘legitimate’ use of cutaways in the documentary context:
‘Many times you will use eyeline shifts to “motivate” cutaways. [. . .]
Frequently a person will show a picture, refer to an object in the room, or look
offscreen at someone, and in each case he directs our attention to a legitimate
cutaway’ (2004: 366). In this sense, the cutaway here is legitimate, as it appears
motivated by Edie’s glance. But it is also an associative cut, what Eisenstein
called ‘a reconstruction of the laws of the thought process’ (1949: 106). The
effect is melodramatic and encourages speculation as to Edie’s private thoughts
while highlighting the persistent themes of loss and regret that encircle her.
Though employing a fictional eye-line match the shot is actually poorly lined
up: other shots in the scene suggest the portrait would have been hanging in
front of Edie as she entered the room, and not to the left where she glances
(although the zoom in to the picture from the left disguises this somewhat).
The shot sums up some of the problems of transposing the techniques of fic-
tional realism into nonfiction material: Edie’s regret has already been potently
portrayed, so the cutaway simply underlines our sense of gaining ‘true’ insights
into her private life and past. On the other hand, the cut’s lack of seamlessness
might spark an awareness of our own capacities for belief in representation:
how viewers participate in constructing myths as reality and fictions as truth.
The ‘Pink Room’ scene, situated as a climax to the film, offers further
clues about how central the editing process can become in direct cinema. As
Hovde recalled, though the scene comes near the end, it was actually one of
the first the editors cut. They considered it to be the point where things ‘came
to a head emotionally [. . .] once you had that, you then began to understand
how you were going to get to it’ (Froemke et al. 2001). Elsewhere, Froemke
notes: ‘If we’re lucky, one scene might suggest a strong ending, and that’s
what we cut first. Then you know what you’re working towards’ (Froemke
2003: 8). Essentially, then, much of the editing process involved constructing
a comprehensible story around the ‘Pink Room’ scene, which could serve as
an emotional climax. The raw footage would have been pared down to support
the conflicts suggested here, with its themes of spurned proposals and Little
Edie’s sense of suffocated potential.
The film’s final shot shows Edie dancing in the foyer, shot from behind a
balustrade. The instrumental version of the song that opens the film, ‘I See
Your Face Before Me’ (‘crowding my every dream’, the unheard lyrics would
continue), accompanies the dance. ‘She’s inside her dreams’, Al stated, noting
that he was aware even while filming that the balustrade seemed to evoke a
prison, or a birdcage from which Edie could not ‘fly away’ (Froemke et al.
2001). A similar shot of Big Edie behind a balustrade opens the film. Again
the final scene engages with intertextual references: Norma Desmond lost in
her dream world as she dramatically descends her staircase; Baby Jane dancing
on the beach, lost in reverie as the world watches in horror. Little Edie is
dressed in black: she dances off screen into black space and silence as the music
stops.
In spite of these framing devices, it is possible to see the Beales exerting
certain pressures against any definitive reading of their lives and motivations.
There is a mixture of exuberance and ironic awareness in their words and
behavior, and clearly their ‘actual’ lives could never have been contained in a
ninety-four minute portrait in any event. Indeed, much material that was left
out – accessible in DVD special features and in The Beales of Grey Gardens
– arguably better supports the filmmakers’ conceptions of the Beales as inde-
pendent and inspirational figures than does the original film. In one outtake,
we see Big Edie tenderly entreat Little Edie to make a costume change (we
discover that she made Little Edie change costumes as often as ten times per
day). The scene captures the exceptional dynamics of a relationship based on
mutual consent, familial devotion, fantasy and constant role-playing. We see
how accustomed the Beales were to performing and dressing up for each other,
and how they might have adapted this performance element for the camera. In
the outtakes, the Beales’ long-term financial difficulties are also clearer. (In the
original, one of the few references to money appears in a scene where Big Edie
is writing checks, conveying an impression that their shabby surroundings
have more to do with eccentricity than financial need.)
Perhaps the ‘real’ Grey Gardens lies beyond the confines of the original
film, and beyond demands to pare down the subjects of representation into a
range of accessible themes, storylines and tropes. An open dialogue has devel-
oped between the film and an archive of outtakes, recollections, ephemera and
other extra-filmic material that, via DVDs and the Internet, have become inte-
grated into the Grey Gardens viewing experience. In this sense, Grey Gardens
is an example of how a documentary – or any cultural production – forms part
of processes of making meanings that are never static but constantly subjected
to changing interpretations, audiences and viewing/distribution technolo-
gies. The two women have entered into cultural myth, attaining cult status
through the film and, after Little Edie’s death (in Florida in 2002), through
a whole Grey Gardens industry that has included fashion lines, a Broadway
musical (reputedly the first ever adapted from a documentary) and an HBO
dramatization. Grey Gardens dolls, t-shirts, coloring books and holiday cards
are available for purchase online, while Little Edie imitators draw thou-
sands of Internet hits and enthusiastic comments from new fans around the
world.
For Albert Maysles, direct cinema practitioners were idealists: ‘The most
important revolution in documentary was the one I took part in’, he argued
(Iseli 1998: 15). Yet one of the great chroniclers of the American scene, Arthur
Miller, felt differently about direct cinema. After seeing the Maysles brothers’
Salesman, the author of Death of a Salesman expressed reservations about an
approach that lacked insight, context and history: ‘you are stopped at the wall
of skin’, he said (Canby 1969: C1). Perhaps a problem with an idealist version
of direct cinema lies in a conflict between illusions of present-tense immediacy
and the ‘authentic’ and intimate revelations it strove to convey. In retaining
the explanatory functions of narrative and the sense of ‘seeing but not being
seen’ that underlies the pleasures of voyeurism, the democratic ideals of direct
cinema frequently broke down, essentially replicating the hierarchies, desires
and demands for entertaining spectacle found in more traditional cinematic
forms. But neither could the ‘pure presence’ of direct cinema really compete
with the imaginative function of realism and suspension of disbelief in fiction,
precisely because the pro-filmic stuff of documentary is always ‘real’ – contin-
gent, interconnected, temporally displaced – far more complex and disorient-
ing than shots, angles, zooms and even performance can relay. This sense of
what is absent always haunts the documentary image, and in part defines its
uncanny fascination; to suppress it is to initiate, even at the level of the subcon-
scious, an impression of falseness.
In moving in this chapter from early experiments in direct cinema to Grey
Gardens and its ‘modernist’ intertextual and cultural resonances, I wanted to
suggest how direct cinema’s ideals of truthful immediacy came into productive
interplay with the multiplicities and contingencies of truth that would begin to
define postmodern documentary approaches. Noël Carroll suggests that accu-
sations about direct cinema being interpretive – even fictive – came to widely
‘stigmatize’ all nonfiction films’ claims to truth (Carroll 1996: 225). Critiques
of documentary truth intensified, accelerated by a backlash against ‘exploita-
tive’ direct cinema that came with television series such as An American
Family in 1973. For Jean Baudrillard, the Loud family in the series confirmed
the collapse of public and private space: ‘the entire universe comes to unfold
arbitrarily on your domestic screen’ like an ‘all-too-visible [. . .] obscenity’
(Baudrillard 1983: 130–1).
Still, direct cinema’s influence has persisted: in the US, Charles Burnett,
Barbara Kopple, Jennie Livingston and Rex Bloomstein are just a few directors
who have perpetuated and expanded the approach. Direct cinema stylizations
still largely dominate the ‘look’ and structures of belief that define documen-
tary: sync sound, rough continuity editing littered with jump cuts, the wob-
blyscope of handheld cameras – all constitute a key strand of documentary’s
generic signature. As Dai Vaughan suggests, ‘after Primary, documentary
was able to redefine its mission as the entrainment of the unrehearsed into
the process of signification; and from that point, the markers of spontaneity
began to be understood as the markers of documentary per se’ (Vaughan 1999:
147). As a result, mockumentaries also tend to favor direct cinema stylings:
Jim McBride’s David Holzman’s Diary (1967), Mitchell Block’s No Lies (1974)
and rockumentary spoofs such as This is Spinal Tap (1984) copy its ‘look’ and
key narrative strategies such as the crisis structure. Spinal Tap even references
famous moments such as Primary’s traveling shot at Kennedy’s campaign
rally: in Rob Reiner’s parody the shoulder-mounted camera doggedly follows
the heavy metal band as they get lost in a series of corridors and stairways.
Direct cinema’s technical and stylistic keynotes have been widely adapted to
mainstream industry practices, honed into ‘real-life’ news programming and
innumerable reality shows. As Corner succinctly notes: ‘Verité has been a
central strand informing the newer styles of “infotainment” ’ (Corner 1996:
33), though primarily as a stylistic signifier of immediacy rather than as a com-
prehensive philosophy or mindset.
note s
1. Beattie references Winston’s concept of ‘supervening necessities’ (Winston 1986, 1998) and
Allen and Gomery’s notion of historical and contextual ‘generative mechanisms’ (Allen and
Gomery 1985).
2. Stephen Mamber states: ‘the filmmaker is a reporter with a camera instead of a notebook’
(1974: 3).
3. The phrase means literally ‘we are in the bath’ (or perhaps ‘in hot water’) and is translated
in Rouch and Feld as ‘we are in the know’ (2003: 328). It might also imply ‘we are
implicated’ or ‘we are in the midst of things’.
4. See, for example, Mamber (1974), Barnouw (1983: 240–55), O’Connell (1992), Beattie
(2004: 85–8), Ellis and McLane (2005: 208–26), Saunders (2007).
5. See Saunders (2007: 102).
6. See Saunders (2007: 34).
7. See also Kahana (2008: 222–5), Benson and Anderson (2002: 10–24).
8. The filmmakers have, in a general sense, referred to Grey Gardens as ‘a cinéma vérité film’
(Froemke et al. 2001).
9. Little Edie, never wholly consistent, could easily reverse her opinion, stating in 1998: ‘I was
so disappointed in Grey Gardens! It upset me terribly [. . .] I thought we were going to make
some money, and we didn’t make a thing’ (Crain 1998: 43). The Beales were never paid
their 20 percent since, Al argued, the film never turned a profit.
ch apter 7
Relative Truths: Documentary and

Postmodernity
As the Vietnam War shuddered to an end, dominant images of a nation under-

pinned by universal aspirations were undergoing a crisis of containment.
Fault lines had become visible through issues such as the war, demands for
civil rights and legal protections for marginalized peoples. Voices displaced or
ignored by aggressively marketed versions of ‘average’ and ‘typical’ American
values were asserting presence and influence. The US was always already
irreducibly diverse, multicultural and multi-ethnic, but the idea of America
was, as this book has stressed, also subject to complex negotiations among dif-
ferent social strata and competing ideological influences. During the 1960s and
1970s, hegemonic concepts of US cultural and national identity came under
renewed pressures, particularly in the media. If, for much of the 1960s, media
outlets had suppressed controversial political content, by the decade’s end
they were reflecting widespread public disillusion. Americans could hardly
avoid the barrage of photographic and moving images revealing the brutalities
of military actions overseas and unrest at home.
As US troops were withdrawing from Vietnam, Peter Davis’s Hearts and
Minds (1974), which concludes with Vietnam veteran Randy Floyd declaim-
ing the ‘criminality’ of US policymakers, won an Academy Award. Emile de
Antonio criticized the film’s ‘political emptiness’, lack of historical rigor and
‘japing, middle class superiority’ (de Antonio 2000 [1974]: 359); still Davis’s
film and its reception seemed to underline a period of collective national con-
trition known as the ‘Vietnam syndrome’. Producer Bert Schneider’s accept-
ance speech at the Oscars included reading a telegram from the Viet Cong
delegation at the Paris Peace Talks; this was countered by Frank Sinatra’s and
Bob Hope’s apology for Schneider’s words later in the show, in effect summing
up the nation’s broader ideological – and generational – rifts (McEnteer 2006:
19). And if the periodization of US history into pre- and post-Vietnam eras
– American ‘innocence’ and ‘loss of innocence’ – has become something of a
r el a t i v e tr uths : d o cum e nta ry an d postmodern ity 187
cliché, still the fallout from this particular protest era across the political and
cultural landscape should not be underestimated. The legacies of Vietnam-era
cultural shifts are palpable in documentaries produced during the Vietnam
syndrome years, through the rise of Reagan-era neo-conservatism and into the
Bill Clinton presidency.
As this chapter outlines, documentary was redefined and rejuvenated
as a popular form and mode of self-expression during this period, reflect-
ing a range of pertinent issues: political debates, multicultural views and
the profound effects of the postmodern turn in cultural theory and the arts.
Moreover, the broad ‘democratization’ of filmmaking advanced, with cheaper
technologies such as video newly marketed to the public. Revaluations and
vigorous critiques of documentary conventions and assumptions meant that
by the 1990s, documentary as a popular term and concept arguably no longer
resembled what it had twenty years earlier.
l e a ne r t i m e s
During the 1970s, what Variety calls ‘nonperformance’ documentaries were
having scant impact at the box office. Indeed it would have been easy to
conclude that theatrical documentary was a thing of the past. Karen Cooper,
director of New York’s Film Forum, recalled that, ‘in 1972, we had zero
competition for documentaries’ (Harmetz 1986: C21). It didn’t help that
documentary was aligned in the popular imagination to discourses of sobriety,
or that direct cinema had become integral to the conventions of television jour-
nalism, thereby associating documentary’s most prominent style with infor-
mation-gathering and the grim realities shown on daily newscasts. Perceptions
of documentary reliability also had been undermined by controversial military
propaganda films such as Why Vietnam? (1965), shown widely in schools. The
film evoked Capra’s Why We Fight series in painting communism in Southeast
Asia as equivalent to the global security threats posed by Nazism (Springer
1986: 161). By the war’s end, such ‘voice of god’ pronouncements seemed only
to further underline the evasive machinations of government policymakers.
With a few notable exceptions (for example, The Sorrow and the Pity
[1972] and The Ra Expeditions [1972]), ‘nonperformance’ documentaries
were difficult to sell on the big screen, and by the late 1970s and early 1980s
audiences were still by and large staying away (Cohn 1992: 22). With the
re-ascendancy of Hollywood’s blockbuster mentality after Jaws (1975) and
Star Wars (1977), competition for screen time was fierce. The highest gross-
ing nonfiction releases were, by far, rockumentary and comedy films such as
Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz (1978), the Led Zeppelin concert film The
Song Remains the Same (1976) and several Richard Pryor ‘live’ films which
lampooned the politics of race and class through explicit, subversive stand-up
comedy sketches. There were a few surprises: the relative financial success
of Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County USA (1976) was driven by rave reviews
and word of mouth. The film followed the events of a bitterly fought miners’
strike in Harlan County, Kentucky, recalling the activist traditions of 1930s
documentary. Perhaps fittingly, the best documentary Oscar was presented to
Kopple by the formerly blacklisted playwright and Nykino supporter, Lillian
Hellman. Still, such films earned only a fraction of what the performance films
were making (Cohn 1992: 22).
At less conspicuous levels, documentary form and practice was continually
evolving, with the help of technological and distribution developments. As
discussions of movements such as the FPL and direct cinema have shown,
not only the practice but the very idea of documentary has been continu-
ally reshaped by remediation. Throughout the 1970s, video technology was
becoming cheaper and alternative media and community access groups were
taking advantage. In the late 1960s, the Challenge for Change program at the
National Film Board of Canada had been a landmark experiment in using
video to encourage local, small-scale filmmaking about social issues. George
Stoney, who headed the program until 1970, set up the Alternate Media
Center at New York University in 1972, and the same year Jon Alpert and
Keiko Tsuno established the Downtown Community Television Center, also
in New York (Barnouw 1983: 290–1). Their video features included Health
Care: Your Money or Your Life (1977) and Vietnam: Picking Up the Pieces
(1977): riveting, critically lauded works that gained attention through screen-
ings on public television. (Health Care in particular makes Michael Moore’s
Sicko [2007] seem almost tame.) Half-inch portable video was introduced in
the US in 1968 and became the medium of choice for various ‘guerrilla’ move-
ments such as Videofreex (founded in 1969), Ant Farm (1968) and People’s
Video Theater (1969). Influenced by the media theory of Marshall McLuhan
and marked by a ‘pronounced strain of technological euphoria and utopian-
ism’, Michael Shamberg and the Raindance Corporation published Guerrilla
Television in 1971 (Boddy 1990: 92–3). The book offered a manifesto for
underground video collectives to break the stranglehold of mainstream televi-
sion networks and reach out to mass audiences.
Other projects, some working with video, others 16 mm film, strove
towards wider access that could alter the monotone landscape of US televi-
sion. The influential African American political affairs series Black Journal,
produced by William Greaves, appeared on PBS in 1968. It covered current
concerns of the black community, examined controversial issues such as racial
discrimination in the media and provided air time to black leaders such as
Angela Davis and Bobby Seale (Lott 1999). The innovative video project
Detroit Black Journal premiered on Detroit’s public station WTVS the same
year, lampooning racial stereotypes and promoting African American activism

and cultural production.
By the early 1980s, Sony Betacam brought video camera and sound
together, eliminating awkward cables and initiating the video ‘revolution’.
With the marketing of portable camcorders in the mid-1980s, independent
video groups gained a foothold around the country (Fuller 1994; Halleck
2002). If, in general, the political left was ‘slow to engage with public access’,
key collectives such as Paper Tiger Television, established in 1981 by DeeDee
Halleck, were driven by the ideals of reinvigorating, through widespread
access, the nation’s faith in participatory democracy. Paper Tiger aimed to
‘demystify the information industry’ and still defines itself in opposition to
corporatized mass media (quoted in Boddy 1990: 96–7). Independent and
small-scale documentary was increasingly viewed as aligned to left-wing poli-
tics, partly due to practical links between documentary activism, demands for
access and alternative media outlets, partly because of many filmmakers’ alli-
ances with political and aesthetic movements such as feminist counter-cinema
and Third Cinema. Certainly the form’s heuristic and muckraking potential
seemed uniquely suited to bringing ‘unrepresented or underrepresented’
social issues to light (Bullert 1997: xv). ‘Documentary is a battleground of
social and historical truth’, notes Michael Chanan, ‘and this is one of the main
reasons why people make them’ (2007: 22–3).
For much of the 1970s and 1980s, major television networks presented
few opportunities to independent producers, so low-budget film and video
documentaries were generally found on public television, self-distributed or
distributed through organizations such as Kino and California Newsreel to
universities, schools and film festivals. Though on the surface they would
hardly seem to pose a threat to large corporate and political interests, inde-
pendent documentaries became targets for right-wing attacks. The Reagan
and Bush administrations (1980–92) polarized the political climate, intensify-
ing a conservative agenda well beyond previous administrations. The Reagan
years saw steep funding increases to the military industries, endorsed the
proliferation of nuclear arms, reinvigorated Cold War rhetoric and spear-
headed a renewed emphasis on heterosexual ‘family values’ and traditional
sexual attitudes (hence the administration’s retrograde response to the AIDS
crisis). As Norman Denzin describes it: ‘Throughout the 1980s the New Right
constructed conceptions of who the ideal subjects were and how they per-
sonified the sacred values of religion, hard work, health, and self-reliance. This
ideological movement redefined the meaning of an “ordinary, normal, com-
monplace” individual’, and ‘played on common sense and ordinary American
values’ (Denzin 1991: 6). Battles about national character and the ‘true’ defini-
tions of ‘America’ and ‘American’ were waged with renewed force in the media
and at all levels of government.
Small-scale production was under pressure: the federal Cable Franchise

Policy and Communications Act of 1984 took away the power of local authori-
ties to regulate cable access, meaning that ‘underused’ public channels could
be appropriated by powerful business interests (Boddy 1990: 96). Added to
this, the presumed threat from liberal and left-wing filmmaking was addressed
by new, Reagan administration guidelines for government funding. The New
York Times predicted ‘leaner times for documentaries’, citing ongoing prob-
lems with fundraising and in particular federal directives declaring that any
project advocating ‘a particular program of social action or change’ was ineligi-
ble for National Endowment for the Humanities grant money – at that point a
mainstay of independent documentary, having awarded $4.4 million to various
projects in 1983 alone (Stein 1984: 25). Filmmakers found themselves caught
up in political rows enthusiastically followed, and often fanned, by the media.
There were attempts to block broadcasts of films such as Dark Circle (1982),
about the nuclear weapons industry; Days of Rage: The Young Palestinians
(1989), which dealt with the Palestinian Intifada and with calls for a Palestinian
state; Stop the Church (1990), a vigorous critique of the Catholic Church’s
views on contraception and safe sex; and most controversially, Marlon T.
Riggs’s Tongues Untied (1989), discussed below. Bette Jean Bullert explains:
‘These battles raised questions about which views of reality would be allowed
to contend on the public television airwaves, and which would predominate’
(Bullert 1997: 2).
Declamations against documentary ‘propaganda’ gained renewed force.
The Oscar-winning short If You Love This Planet (1982), a filmed lecture
about the dangers of nuclear weapons, was officially designated by the US
Department of Justice as ‘foreign political propaganda’ and public screen-
ings were suppressed (Guenette 1987: S-26). As for PBS, once seen as the
exemplar of the ‘Great Society’ ideals advanced in the 1960s, interrogations
of its relevance were rife. PBS’s stated mission to ‘give voice to the voiceless’
was re-examined, and its role in a ‘heterogeneous and changing society’ was
being redefined along strict ideological lines (Bullert 1997: 91). A long-term
‘political tug-of-war’ ensued which saw PBS programmers on the front line,
negotiating tensions between the new conservatism and politically motivated
funding policies, and filmmakers demanding opportunities to air viewpoints
on social realities they believed were being hidden from the public by corpo-
rate media interests (Bullert 1997: 2).
t he rashomon e f f e c t
Yet less than two years after the New York Times predicted ‘leaner times’ for
documentaries, an unexpected, parallel phenomenon was emerging: theatri-
cal documentary was undergoing a revival. The Times suddenly headlined:

‘Nonfiction is Surging in Movies’. Films such as Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah
(1985) and Martin Bell’s Streetwise (1985) were, as one distributor put it,
‘wildly successful’ at the box office (Harmetz 1986: C21). The films were
very different, but both engaged with subjects and provided cinematic expe-
riences missing from mainstream media. Shoah consisted of nine hours of
evasive, frustrating, gripping testimonies about the Holocaust; Streetwise drew
viewers, through its vérité-style intimacy, into the marginal lives of homeless
youths in Seattle.
The resurgence of theatrical documentary might be attributed to several
factors: a rise in the number of cinemas capable of showing 16 mm films
(though transfer to 35 mm would become the norm), the exploitation of
urban markets and deployment of sophisticated ‘niche’ advertising campaigns
(Shoah was promoted in cities with large Jewish populations, The Times of
Harvey Milk [1984] was targeted at gay audiences) and shifts in audience tastes
towards reality-based stories. Importantly, there was also greater interest in
low-budget documentaries among distributors, who viewed them as lesser
financial risks than big-budget features (Harmetz 1986: C21). During a period
when cinema was dominated by ‘corporate movie making’ (An Officer and a
Gentleman [1982], Top Gun [1986]) (Davies and Wells 2002: 4), documentaries
were meeting changing expectations. Audiences seemed willing to accept –
indeed were demanding – more fluid, unexpected, entertaining approaches to
on-screen reality.
Subtle shifts in style and structure were becoming common. Suggesting the
influence of innovative directors such as Werner Herzog (Precautions Against
Fanatics [1969]), Michael Rubbo and Les Blank, filmmakers were disrupting
traditional assumptions of authority and immediacy, instead playing with
instability, irony and outright manipulation. Errol Morris’s Gates of Heaven
(1978) and Vernon, Florida (1981) and Ross McElwee’s Sherman’s March
(1986), for example, drew out the comic potential embedded in documentary’s
pose of seriousness. Gates of Heaven, a tale of two pet cemeteries, derives its
situational irony and impression of authenticity from highlighting rather than
editing out ‘bad takes’ and outrageous comments delivered with forthright
sincerity. Influenced by the ironic political critique and collage method of
Emile de Antonio, Connie Field’s The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter (1980)
encouraged audiences to laugh at the sexism of old promotional and documen-
tary films, while offering a message of female empowerment. There was some-
thing funny about the earnestness of the documentaries that most Americans
had grown up with in classrooms or obediently watched on educational tel-
evision – and filmmakers were acknowledging it. These new documentaries
permitted audiences to laugh at reality and, problematically in some cases, at
other people: they were in this sense disruptive, liberating cinema experiences.
Following this trend, Michael Moore’s Roger and Me (1989) injected humor
into political documentary, a form better known for impassioned critique and
moralizing. Moore’s film both relies on and plays with embedded assumptions
of documentary sobriety: this double-edged strategy is key to Roger and Me’s
ability to surprise, amuse and inform all at once. As Moore stated: ‘We violated
the two rules of documentary filmmaking: our film is entertaining and people
are going to see it’ (quoted in Oberacker 2009: 1). But conventional assump-
tions weren’t dismissed easily. Roger and Me was the most financially success-
ful feature documentary ever released – but it wasn’t, to many, a documentary
at all. Touted for an Oscar, the Academy Awards committee summarily
rejected it, citing concerns about verifiability and accurate sequencing. In the
New Yorker, critic Pauline Kael derided the film as ‘glib’ and ‘manipulative’
(quoted in Bullert 1997: 157).
Moore’s popular success signalled a commercial potential scarcely imagined
a decade earlier. Documentary auteurs such as Morris, Moore, McElwee,
Trinh T. Minh-ha and Barbara Hammer were building bodies of work at the
same time that American ‘indie’ directors like Spike Lee, Jim Jarmusch and
David Lynch were gaining prominence: together they signalled demands for
alternatives to Hollywood’s blockbuster mentality. For Chanan, around this
time we might observe ‘a crucial shift in the documentary idiom, almost an
epistemological break, in which the old idea of objectivity is seen as naive and
outmoded’ (2007: 241). Documentaries were reflecting profound, popular
shifts towards relativist views; they were becoming more idiosyncratic and
less orthodox. Michael Renov has seen this movement as linked to changes
in social attitudes where ‘universalist’ stories that once strove to articulate
common interests were giving way to expressions of local knowledge that were
openly subjective and could emphasize relative and contingent experiences
(Renov 2004: 176).
Following from Renov, Chanan likens the objective and observational
strategies of traditional documentaries to the universalizing meta-narratives,
or ‘grand narratives’, that cultural theorist François Lyotard named as the
western legacies of the Enlightenment (2007: 241). These key assumptions –
such as progressive or linear history, the absolute knowledge of science and
common human understanding – were at the core of western belief systems.
As Jonathan Kahana sees it, the notion of a unified or holistic American nation
– an ideal often invoked, for example, via direct cinema journalism – forms
one such ‘grand narrative’. In its explicit address to the national ‘we’, tele-
vision journalism becomes ‘an apparatus of a national-security state’, relying
on the documentary form as ‘an instrument of truth’ that projects common
national interests (Kahana 2008: 298). Questions of what group precisely
made up this ‘we’, and who was speaking to and for whom, were becoming
vital and unavoidable. Writing in 1979, Lyotard saw the West’s grand (or
‘master’) narratives as being thrown into question by a heightened awareness

– manifested in the kinds of representations cultures produced for and about
themselves – of difference, diversity and multiplicity. A proliferation of local
and personal perspectives – ‘petit récits’ or micronarratives – were characteristic
of postmodern incursions into the modern era (Lyotard 1984 [1979]).
Shifts towards personalized, self-reflexive perspectives in cultural and
artistic production came amid wider investigations into the nature and fixity
of representation, and of the cultural currency and inherited faith in concepts
such as Truth and Reason. Truth (with a capital ‘T’) was gradually shifting
towards conceptions of truth as mediated and culturally constructed, as in
Friedrich Nietzsche’s much-cited postulation: ‘Truths are illusions which
we have forgotten are illusions’ (1979 [1873]: 84). Writing in 1993 about the
postmodern turn in documentary, Linda Williams observed that ‘many theo-
rists do share a sense that the Enlightenment projects of truth and reason are
definitively over’ (1993: 9). Although postmodern theory was at first couched
less in political than aesthetic terms, politicized accounts quickly took shape:
History was in a process of becoming histories (or ‘herstories’), Society and
Culture were erupting into local communities and subcultures, Feminism
was giving way to feminisms, and both ‘color blind’ and fixed notions of race
were being disrupted by a critical focus on socially and culturally determined
ethnicities and mixed identities. As Andreas Huyssen suggested, postmoder-
nity harbored the promise of ‘a “post-white”, “post-male”, “post-humanist”,
“post-Puritan” world’ (1986: 194). The pluralization of truth suggested ways
of recognizing cultural and experiential diversity and difference.
Alongside this crisis of truth and legitimation, a crisis of representation
was grounded in questioning notions that textual interpretation was a unified
or easily systematized process. The task became to investigate the limits of
representations themselves rather than questing after certitudes once pre-
sumed embedded within them. Emphasis shifted towards the ‘slipperiness’
of texts, stressing that texts might be polysemous in their multiple meanings
and polyvalent depending on the subject positions of readers, viewers and
listeners who engaged with them. In the context of ethnographic film, Karl G.
Heider referred to shifts towards polysemous and polyvalent readings as the
‘Rashomon effect’ (1988: 73–81), based on Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950).
In Kurosawa’s film, four observer-participants of a single event (the rape
of a woman and murder of her husband) each relate different accounts based
on their own witnessing. The ‘actual’ event remains effectively constant but
appears to recede, and we are left only with the witnesses’ (including the dead
man’s) varying points of view. The process of narration, then, rather than
firming up or securing a truthful meaning, actually begins to destabilize any
sense of origin: people, so the film states, ‘only remember what they want to
remember’. Key to the film’s unsettling power is that none of the differing
narratives are lies, per se: each contains elements of fact grounded in a point
of view; each professes to be true, yet none is authoritative. The critical task
in Rashomon shifts from chiefly analyzing narrative meaning to analyzing the
process of narrativizing: of unpacking how we make sense out of disparate,
disorganized experiences of the world. But this approach comes with its own
hazards. For Williams, a danger lies in producing a kind of mise-en-abyme: ‘if
representations, whether visual or verbal, no longer refer to a truth or refer-
ent “out there” [. . .] then we seem to be plunged into a permanent state of
the self-reflexive crisis of representation. What was once a “mirror with a
memory” can now only reflect another mirror’ (1993: 9). Strategies for nego-
tiating the potential pitfalls of representing such ‘relative truths’ are explored
in the next section.
Of course any ‘break’ from tradition is usually gradual, and less than clean.
In the case of US documentary, key assumptions were just beginning to be
seriously challenged. Traditional techniques such as talking heads and inter-
pretive voiceover still bestowed films with instant authority and self-evident
veracity. Of these, Ken Burns’s work – such as The Statue of Liberty (1985),
The Congress (1988) and his enormously popular The Civil War (1990) – epito-
mizes an educational approach which imparts facts and certainties through
accessible narratives. This is history retold through skillful lighting, pan and
scan, and seamless editing that promotes unquestionably liberal, yet deter-
minedly consensus, public opinion (Edgerton 2001: 3–6). The doctrine of
direct cinema objectivity also persisted, remaining dominant in film schools
right through the 1990s. Finally, among elite tiers of critics and practitioners
(such as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences), fixed conceptions
of authenticity and accuracy still defined the privileged term ‘documentary’.
Critics of unconventional approaches like that of Roger and Me continued
to invoke a gold standard of documentary objectivity; thus Moore’s film
was ‘not a documentary’ but merely represented the ‘filmmaker’s personal
viewpoint’ (quoted in Bullert 1997: 158). Rather than enacting an epistemo-
logical break, then, documentary filmmakers and audiences were (and are) in
a process of negotiating with history, with remediation and with the form’s
multiple, inherited conventions. These negotiations were taking place at
every level of production, distribution and reception. Through community
access, university screenings and festivals, ‘no-budget’ documentaries were
reaching new audiences. PBS, too, was playing a key role, initiating the hour-
long public affairs program Frontline in 1983 and P.O.V. in 1988, the latter
screening films such as American Tongues (1988) and Who Killed Vincent Chin?
(1988). Moore, Morris and Jennie Livingston were undeniable box-office
forces.
p o s tmode r n i t y a n d ‘ n e w ’ doc u men t a r y

As a mode grounded, often naively, in presumptions of factuality and reason,
and in its appeal to ‘epistephilia’ (or pleasure in knowing) (Nichols 1991: 178),
documentary became a fruitful if problematic site for investigating postmodern
questions about truth and representation. Documentary’s presumed imme-
diacy – the ‘directness’ of direct cinema – was generally cast aside in favor of
foregrounding the gaps between the filmic end-product and the raw material.
Representation was seen as constituted by distances and approximations.
Many practitioners were already addressing these concerns, questioning
(or in some cases merely ignoring) the impersonal and universalizing conven-
tions of what Nichols labels the observational and expository modes (1991:
34–44), effecting a displacement of the seemingly neutral ‘we’ of documentary
towards asserting the subjectivity of the ‘I’. Andrew Noren’s diary films of the
mid-1960s were in the vanguard, while Ed Pincus explored processes of con-
structing a sense of self through film in Diaries (1971–6). Feminist documen-
tary often focused on the intense social pressures of female self-making: the
work of Liane Brandon (Anything You Want to Be [1971] and Betty Tells Her
Story [1972]) highlighted the individual costs to women of patriarchal social
expectations. Margie Keller’s Misconception (1978), about childbirth, JoAnn
Elam’s Rape (1978) and Bonnie Klein’s Not a Love Story (1981, made with
the NFB) variously manifested filmmakers who constructed openly subjective
points of view: feminist visions of interactive vérité. Some replicated vérité’s
problematic elements. Klein’s film shows the filmmaker successfully ‘educat-
ing’ a female stripper about the truth of her exploitation and, while it asserts
a convincing feminist message about commodification of the female body, it
never quite destabilizes power and knowledge hierarchies between director
and subject.
Documentaries were linking testimony and performative self-making; here
people were no longer just documenting the world but were ‘constituting their
own lives through the production and viewing of the videotape’ (Jakobsen
and Seckinger 1997: 151). This performativity ranged from Ross McElwee’s
low-key reflections to the over-the-top self-inventions of Madonna: Truth or
Dare (Alek Keshishian, 1991). Obvious practical and stylistic differences aside,
both films explore lives constituted for and through the camera. This ‘I’ was
both filmic and ‘actual’: McElwee saw himself as ‘creating a persona for the
film that’s based upon who I am, but it isn’t exactly me’ (MacDonald 1998:
23). McElwee, Moore, Nick Broomfield and others were stressing the ‘I’ of
the presenter/director: the ‘filmmaker-as-star syndrome’ (Arthur 1998: 73;
2005: 21).
Amid these moves towards first-person subjectivity, representing history
posed particular challenges. For Fredric Jameson, the task of historical
reconstruction conjures up a hall of mirrors, with postmodern subjects ‘con-

demned’ to seek out the past not through directly accessed events and facts,
but through memories, mediated texts and representations. The past itself
‘remains forever out of reach’ (1996 [1983]: 194). Similarly, documentaries
were drawing attention to their own unstable truth claims by focusing on
an inability to fill the gaps in the historical record. Strongly influential were
European films dealing with the Second World War, which offered formal
expressions of the fragility of memory and the combined impossibility and
urgency of regaining the past. Lanzmann’s Shoah contains personal accounts
and recollections but no historical footage of concentration camps, gesturing
to the unrepresentable traumas of the Holocaust. Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s
Our Hitler (1977) – like Shoah a mammoth project, running over six hours – is
an ironic take on the historical documentary and its obsessions with Nazism,
a narrative that ‘has already been textualized over and over again’ (Nichols
1991: 236).
Much discussion of postmodern documentary in the US has focused on
Morris’s breakthrough success, The Thin Blue Line (1988). Reflecting Morris’s
private detective experience, it reconstructs a recent history involving murder,
imprisonment and a miscarriage of justice. Conflicting testimonials begin to
build up ‘Rashomon-style’ (Hinson 1988: D7) and seriousness overlaps with
parody. Morris as documentary auteur presides over camerawork, lighting
and a mise-en-scène that deliberately yet always approximately evoke film noir.
Instead of being ‘as unobtrusive as possible’, Morris chose to be ‘as obtru-
sive as possible’ (McEnteer 2006: 106). Direct cinema had largely banished
non-diegetic music, but here a haunting Philip Glass score sustains a sense
of urgency and uncertainty. The pastiche of old and current, fact and fantasy
foregrounds the film’s constructedness, yet Morris never fully suppresses the
structure and appearance of traditional documentary. As Williams suggests,
instead of ‘careening between idealistic faith in documentary truth and cynical
recourse to fiction’, the film puts forward ‘not an essence of truth but [. . .] a
set of strategies designed to choose from among a horizon of relative and con-
tingent truths’ (1993: 14).
It is not that truth and fiction merely amount to the same thing, though
The Thin Blue Line implies that some truths are truer than others and fictions
contain necessary elements of truth. Truth and lies are no longer juxtaposed as
polar opposites; fabrications, simulations and partial fictions that disguise and
insulate traumatic events might be drawn upon in relation to other narratives
to help reconstruct figurations of the past. The fragmentary nature of truth
and witnessing is underscored when David Harris’s confession is shown as a
tape recording: a picture of ‘a machine that records sound but not pictures’.
Neither Harris nor Morris provides embodied ‘visible evidence’ before the
camera (Michaels 1994: 50). The image and sound here slyly undercut, even
Figure 16. The Thin Blue Line (1988). American Playhouse. Courtesy of the British Film
Institute.
while gesturing towards, the authority of both visual and acoustic technical
reproduction.
The open questions of whether this film, or any film, can resolve the dilem-
mas it poses stymied some reviewers, who argued that Morris had ‘hyped his
material’ and that his manipulations ‘disqualified’ the film as a ‘factual docu-
ment’. The smudging of fact and fiction seemed almost ‘irresponsible’ (Hinson
1988: D7). Still, the unorthodox approach of The Thin Blue Line would find
itself incorporated into popular and even elite perceptions of documentary
reality. Significantly, the Academy Awards again overlooked one of the year’s
most important films, though the Academy would later alter its biases (while
retaining the term ‘documentary’, even with its mobile significations) in finally
awarding Moore and Morris in 2003 and 2004, respectively.1
Albert Maysles bemoaned postmodern scepticism, stating that ‘postmod-
ernism has corrupted our confidence in gathering the truth’ (Zuber 2007: 17).
But, rather than undermining documentary altogether, postmodernity seemed
to assert the resilience and flexibility of the ‘hunger for documentary images
of the real’ (Williams 1993: 10). Filmmakers were revisiting and revising the
playful exchanges between nonfiction and fiction, convention and experimen-
tation, sobriety and humor that had marked nonfiction filmmaking before the
documentary idea was distilled and institutionalized. Directly confronting
documentary’s burden of truth became an enabling factor posing creative
possibilities for filmmakers such as Hammer, Riggs and Trinh, all of whom
strove in different ways to expose and destabilize audience expectations.
Foregrounding avant-garde techniques and hybrid forms, Trinh’s 1980s
and 1990s work drew on feminist counter-cinema and Third Cinema political
aesthetics to challenge popular assumptions. Surname Viet Given Name Nam
(1989) is designed to undermine – through techniques such as staged readings
by American-Vietnamese women masquerading as unrehearsed interviewees
– the seeming transparency of documentary even while appearing to deploy its
techniques. At the same time it poses questions about the fixity of identity and
the stability of national and cultural borders. Shoot for the Contents (1991) also
questions naturalized boundaries and viewing habits, elliptically addressing
the Tiananmen Square massacre while drawing attention to the hierarchies of
space, framing, focus and sound in documentary by homing in on images and
noises usually forgotten in the background, the margins or off-screen. Hybrid
approaches such as Trinh’s not only suggest the emergence of ‘post-documen-
tary’, but invoke documentary’s (once) sublimated avant-garde histories and
sensibilities. Such experiments invite us to break down oppositions such as
documentary ‘truth’/avant-garde ‘fancy’, hinting at an avant-garde that might
be traced even through much of what is (often derisively) labeled ‘Griersonian’
documentary. As a concept, practice and kind of text consumed by audiences,
the Griersonian approach was more formally flexible and experimental than
many have allowed.2
As postmodern theory established itself, the notion that documentary films
had to draw attention to their own constructedness and restricted points of
view became almost de rigueur. Paul Arthur argued that ‘the once-sacrosanct
boundaries between [a documentary’s] subjects and its processes are evaporat-
ing in the heat of a deconstructive gaze’ (Arthur 1998: 73). Yet this strategy too
could serve as a means to mask certain power hierarchies and presumptions of
authority underlying the form. As Trinh argued in a biting critique:
There is now a growing body of films in which the spectators see the
narrator narrating, the filmmaker filming or directing [. . .] What is put
forth as self-reflexivity here is no more than a small faction – the most
conveniently visible one – of the many possibilities of uncovering the
work of ideology that this ‘science of the subject’ can open into. (Trinh
1989: 147–8)
Indeed, many documentaries in the postmodern vein were shedding the pre-
sumed ‘we’ for the individuated ‘I’, yet leaving tendencies towards voyeurism
and hierarchies of what Trinh calls ‘us talking to us about them’ relatively
intact (1989: 134). Nick Broomfield’s Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam (1996)
and Fetishes (1996) certainly follow this pattern, though by the time of
Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (2003) and His Big White Self (2006),
Broomfield’s on-screen relationship with his subjects and questions of who
is controlling whom in producing ‘truth’ before the camera have become far
murkier (and more interesting).
On the other side of the coin, documentaries that appeared to adhere more
closely to convention still innovated in subtle ways and opened themselves
to postmodern questions of identity, history and representation. Henry
Hampton’s PBS series Eyes on the Prize (1987) placed the Civil Rights
Movement at the center of narratives of twentieth-century US history. Rather
than focus on authoritative talking heads analyzing history from a distance,
Hampton drew on a vast archive of testimony, photographs, protest songs, and
amateur and news footage to weave together and ‘reclaim’ a compelling and
often surprising narrative (Hadley 1999: 119). Eyes on the Prize appropriates
and revises the conventions of the PBS educational format to confirm the cen-
trality of ‘minority’ discourses of national history. Many films highlighting US
ethnic diversity were becoming less focused on giving voice to marginal groups
with the goal of assimilation into ‘one nation’, and were instead re-examining
and relativizing constitutive elements of ‘American’ identities themselves,
reframing concepts of national belonging as multiple and irreducible.
Working along related lines, Marlon Riggs’s politicized history Ethnic
Notions (1986) and its sequel Color Adjustment (1992) stick largely to a ‘PBS-
style’ expository format, yet in meditating on racist artifacts commonly deemed
too shameful for inclusion in the ‘grand narrative’ of US history, they push at
the limits of historical representation. Ethnic Notions deals with 150 years of
demeaning African American stereotypes, while Color Adjustment explores not
only the suppression of African American themes and social concerns on US
television (a key mediator of the ‘American Dream’) between the late 1940s
and the 1980s, but also works to reveal how fantasies of homogeneity and con-
formity prop up the American ideal itself. Both films pose powerful critiques
of ‘melting pot’ ideology, white privilege, commodity fetishism and class hier-
archy. Moreover, as David Van Leer notes, Ethnic Notions is neither naive nor
unselfconscious in terms of form. In the scene where the choreographer Leni
Sloan re-enacts a blackface routine, an unsettling moment introduces a new
perspective which interferes with Riggs’s dominant presence as documentar-
ian and source of evidence and argument. The ‘self-conscious staging of the
subjectivity of viewpoint’ as Sloan constructs his blackface persona points to
the staging of documentary authority in the rest of the film; it helps ‘admit
the fictiveness’ of documentary realism rather than simply transpose a new
documentary and historical ‘truth’ over a previous and outmoded one (Van
Leer 1997: 164).
Documentary was, and is, a means for underrepresented groups to draw
on presumptions of its evidential and heuristic authority. Documentary
realities, while always constructs of some sort, draw on the camera’s power as
an ‘indicative instrument’; they point to other realities and experiences of the
world, relying on audiences to reinvest their own experiences of and in these
realities (Perez 1998: 396). A number of films dealing with Native American
issues suggest related strategies, including More Than Bows and Arrows (1978),
narrated by M. Scott Momaday; Tom McCarthy’s Navajo Code Talkers
(1981), documenting Navajos who developed a communications code for
the Marine Corps during the Second World War; Broken Rainbow (1985),
revealing the political and corporate maneuvers behind the eviction of 10,000
Navajos from Hopi land; and Deborah Wallwork’s Warriors (1987), which
examines American Indian participation in the Vietnam War. While couched
in relatively traditional formal approaches, these films effectively take up the
task of reconfiguring received concepts of citizenship and what it means to be
American.
Other films are sceptical about reclaiming any inclusive notions of
Americanness, and aim more at issues of local community and cultural continu-
ity. Our Sacred Land (1984), directed by Chris Spotted Eagle, focuses on Native
American religious autonomy and the struggle of the Sioux to regain the Black
Hills of South Dakota. Victor Masayesva’s lyrical Itam Hakim, Hopiit (1984)
explores myths, histories and oral traditions of the Hopi through a retelling of
the life of Ross Macaya, one of the last members of the storytelling tradition.
Such films aim towards at least two perhaps somewhat contradictory demands,
expressing Indians’ desires to ‘remain distinct from the larger culture, to main-
tain a separate, coherent identity’, and at the same time ‘to invite others to
view the world from [Indian] perspectives’ (Leuthold 1994: 52). Assumptions
about a homogeneous ‘we’ the people are replaced with an implicit message
that no single ethnic or linguistic group can lay claim to US history or national
character. This impels recognition of complex networks of local and cultural
affiliations, interacting differentially with each other and with the nation.
Americans on the fringes of the privileged establishment might be patriotic,
others ambivalent about any presumed unified set of national beliefs, while
still others might question the very legitimacy of ‘America’ itself. The melting
pot gives way to the mosaic pattern of multiculturalism, where multiplicity is
encompassed under a much more loosely defined umbrella term – ‘America’.
Arthur Dong’s adaptation of Allan Bérubé’s Coming Out Under Fire (1994)
and Christine Choy and Renee Tajima-Peña’s Who Killed Vincent Chin? (1988)
both place the idea of an inclusive America under scrutiny. Each reveals the
paradoxes of being excluded while desiring to belong, of being marginalized
even while striving after – and fighting to protect – the ‘dream’. Coming Out
Under Fire intensely criticizes the injustices and severe humiliations meted out
to gay soldiers, forcing the question of why gay Americans should ever consider
defending a nation that so actively excludes them. Who Killed Vincent Chin?
Figure 17. Who Killed Vincent Chin? (1988). Film News Now Foundation and WTVS Detroit.
Courtesy of the filmmaker.
reconstructs the brutal murder of a Chinese-American engineer in Detroit.

Chin is positioned as an assimilationist success story, yet – and the film never
pretends to provide a comprehensive explanation – was beaten to death on
the street just days before his wedding. Perhaps, many contended, this was
because he was mistaken for Japanese, just as Japanese car manufacturers
were being blamed for eclipsing the US industry and ‘taking over American
jobs’. At one level the film is a detective story, where extensive contextualiza-
tion tries to fill in gaps not just about the murder, but about the disturbingly
everyday facts of racist violence. The Chin case highlights the contradictions
at the heart of American ideals of ethnic and cultural integration.
By juxtaposing narratives of victims and assailants – those of Chin’s family
and of his disturbingly blank and unrepentant killers – the film interweaves
both parallel and strikingly divergent experiences of US identity and belong-
ing. While Chin’s mother often appears nearly mute, shaking with grief, one
of Chin’s killers, Ronald Ebens – an unemployed autoworker – invokes his
own confused feelings of exclusion. He served in the army, yet his confidence
in the American ideal has been undermined as the country now seems to say:
‘we’re against you’. We see the Chin controversy becoming a media event,
and the film implicates media exploitation even while it reveals the Chin story
as a galvanizing force for Asian American coalition-building and establishing
links across different ethnic groups. One African American community leader
is struck by parallels between the Asian American experience and a history
of African American oppression, arguing that ‘injustice is endemic in the
American system’.
While containing few postmodern stylizations, Who Killed Vincent Chin?
serves as a corrective to inherited myths of American unity and homogeneity
and to any easy sense of patriotic belonging. The film’s final, lingering close-
up of Chin’s bereft mother seems to pose unanswerable questions: the ques-
tion of the film’s title blurs into questions of whether America ever was, or ever
can be, ‘whole’. We are left to ponder whether an elusive idea of justice can
set right histories of ethnic divisions and cultural miscomprehensions among
various groups struggling to define and lay claim to ‘American’ identities.
Writing in 1984, Audre Lorde articulated questions of affiliation and sepa-
ration, belonging and alienation, arguing for ways to negotiate differences that
not only divided various groups from each other, but estranged individuals
from their own multiple beliefs and histories:
Certainly there are very real differences between us of race, age, and
sex. But it is not those differences between us that are separating us. It
is rather our refusal to recognize those differences, and to examine the
distortions which result from our misnaming them and their effects upon
human behavior and expectation. (1984: 115)
Lorde refused to deny, sublimate or simply relativize away human differences,

while also critiquing the tradition of striving for a ‘mythical norm’ in US
society. At the same time she deflected neo-conservative reductivisms, stating
that ‘the need for unity is often misnamed as a need for homogeneity’ (1984:
119). The problem Lorde perceived was a fundamental lack of comprehension
and respect across social, sexual, age and ethnic divides.3 Documentaries such
as Tongues Untied, which Jacquie Jones called ‘possibly the most powerful
examination of black sexual identity ever produced’, formed part of efforts to
negotiate these divides (Jones 1993: 256).
tongues untied (1989)

Marlon T. Riggs’s Tongues Untied echoes Lorde’s demands to ‘root out inter-
nalized patterns of oppression within ourselves’ and assert the value and politi-
cal urgency of recognizing multiple and irreducible identities (Lorde 1984:
123). In Riggs’s case, this means determining his own relations to being black,
male and gay in the US at a time when African American masculinity rarely,
if ever, serves as a site for exploring issues of gender and sexuality (Blount
Figure 18. Tongues Untied (1989). Signifyin’ Works. Image capture, Frameline DVD.
and Cunningham 1996: x). Black masculinity was effectively under attack at
the time: black men were discussed in legitimate sociological circles as prone
to criminality, lacking motivation and being weak fathers (myths explored in
Marco Williams’s In Search of Our Fathers [1992]).4 Re-interpreting estab-
lished belief systems is hardly a simple task, and the identity categories Riggs
has to work with are rooted in preconceptions and stereotypes: identity itself is
segmented into normative definitions that naturalize affiliations and encourage
a sense of belonging (if you fit in) or impose exclusion and marginalization (if
you don’t).
This process is spelled out in one of Tongues Untied’s most directly autobio-
graphical sequences, where Riggs describes growing up in Georgia. He speaks
of being persistently ‘cornered by identities I never wanted to claim’. Riggs
looks into the camera, soliciting our attention through ‘direct address’ (Mercer
1993: 241), though his narrative is intermittently interrupted by close-ups.
A shot of a young, black male’s mouth that utters ‘punk’ is followed later by
other mouths spitting out the words ‘homo’, ‘faggot’ and ‘freak’. These acts
of (re)naming usurp what Orlando Patterson has contended is ‘the verbal
sign of a person’s whole identity, his being-in-the-world as a distinct person’
(Patterson 1982: 54).5 Homosexuality becomes an imposed, named identity,
(mis)interpreted by others and labelled as an aberration. As Riggs speaks,
another close-up of a mouth, now of a white male, cuts in with a further pariah
status – ‘mother fuckin’ coon’ – and yet another mouth reads out a slogan
scrawled on his old school’s wall: ‘niggers, go home’. Riggs asserts that these
hatreds aren’t limited to simple oppositions, as he describes being considered
‘uppity’ by black schoolmates for attending classes aimed at ‘the best and
brightest’; another black mouth intones ‘Uncle Tom’. As the epithets increase
in frequency and speed, Riggs’s image simultaneously retreats. Sheila Petty
observes that ‘the effect of the collision between angles is that of Riggs being
crushed and pounded by the violence of the epithets’ (1998: 421).
Riggs’s early experiences are linked in later scenes to widespread social
division and prejudice. We see church leaders referring to being gay as an
‘abomination’ while black activists dismiss homosexuality as ‘selling out’ the
race. The conundrum of choosing from multiple identities and ‘prioritizing’
political and cultural loyalties is summed up by Riggs in a neat rephrasing of
the Bible: ‘How do you choose one eye over another?’ Demands to ‘confer
one identity and erase another’ operate at all levels of social expectation (for
example, before 1997 the US census required respondents to identify them-
selves under just one racial category) (see Hollinger 1995: 20). For Kendall
Thomas, any choice between one’s ethnic and/or sexual identities is ‘forced,
false, and ultimately fatal’ – effectively a form of ‘psychic suicide’ (Thomas
1996: 61).
These autobiographical sequences indicate the multivalences of negative
identities Riggs ‘never wanted to claim’. They are culturally naturalized,
stemming not just from white racism but from homophobia and what Lorde
called internalized patterns of oppression in the black community as well. By
the end of the earlier scene, Riggs temporarily retreats to silence, to presumed
safety – though he is not safe. The dangers of being gay are underlined in the
next scene, which begins with poetic imagery that rapidly becomes unsettling:
‘summer full moon night, started with the rhetorical chant, “hey faggot” ’.
Inviting controversy at a time when hypermasculine hip hop and gangsta rap
were grabbing media attention, the scene ends in the brutal beating of a black
gay man at the hands of several black men. Just before the attack, the victim
turns to look at the camera as if entreating for help, but a cut to another angle
reveals the space already occupied by an attacker. There is no escape, and no
‘kindness of brethren’. As Petty stresses, the careful cutting and compressing
of filmic space signifies oppressions imposed by ideologies that strive to limit
expressions of race and sexuality. The scene further links gay experience to
black experience through the sense memory of threatened violence – both
homophobic and racist. As Thomas notes: ‘Gay and lesbian Americans of all
colors and African Americans of every sexual orientation live with and under
the knowledge that at any time, anywhere, we might be attacked for being gay
or lesbian or bisexual, for being black, or for being both’ (1996: 63).
Another identifying category that Riggs is impelled to negotiate in the film is

HIV-positive status. Riggs was diagnosed in December 1988, midway through
taping what he then expected would be a short video shown exclusively in gay
venues. According to Havi Carel, illness imposes categories that ‘other’ you
in the everyday world, where the ill person is treated from a ‘third-person
perspective’ (2008: 13). In the 1980s, especially, HIV and AIDS hovered at
the extremes of this othering process. As Max Navarre argued in 1987: ‘As
a person with AIDS, I can attest to the sense of diminishment at seeing and
hearing myself constantly referred to as an AIDS victim, an AIDS sufferer, an
AIDS case – as anything but what I am, a person with AIDS. I am a person
with a condition. I am not that condition’ (1988: 143). This social reductivism
was compounded by the ways HIV was exploited by neo-conservative groups
seeking to link homosexuality, promiscuity and degeneration. Jerry Falwell,
founder of the Moral Majority, called HIV-related illness ‘god’s punishment’.
AIDS first appeared in the press labelled as a ‘gay plague’, as if a form of divine
retribution.6
Riggs underlines how gay men become compelled to internalize the align-
ment of sexual pleasure with fears of annihilation. In a love scene near the
end of the film, the textures of skin and flesh are underscored by a heartbeat
rhythm that, paradoxically, suggests mortality. This heartbeat punctuates the
film, at times as a marker of life and sentience, at others ‘a time bomb ticking
in my blood’ (Wallenberg 2004: 139). Just after it returns here, ‘the resound-
ing refrain of grown men in love’ is subtly disrupted by the words ‘now we
think as we fuck’. The individual words of Essex Hemphill’s poem ‘Now We
Think’ run together as something like ‘noweethikaweefuh’, rendering the
phrase obscure, a muffled return of the repressed that grows in volume and
clarity. Robert LeBlanc stresses that the layering of image and sound in this
scene aesthetically enacts the ways Riggs’s film ‘displaces’ expectations: quite
palpably, ‘postmodern ways of representing the subject progress gradually into
prominence in our film experience’ (2009: 8). The scene further foregrounds
the juxtaposition of body/mind, feeling/thinking, which parallels a range of
responses potentially generated by the film. When I screened it in the early
1990s, the film elicited both emotional and physical responses from students,
ranging from ‘joy’ to ‘disgust’; others responded that the film ‘made me think’.7
The fact of mortality comes to the fore in the next sequence, where a
photo of Riggs appears among black men that have died: Joseph Beam, James
McLaurin, artists, writers, drag performers and activists crowded among
other anonymous faces. Riggs speeds up the montage until the images freeze
on a photo of his own face, isolated in silence (we hardly register that the
heartbeat has stopped). Connections between the ‘suffering’ of AIDS and a
‘history of suffering’ in the African American experience are again stressed
(Wallenberg 2004: 139). But Riggs refuses ‘victim’ status; the heartbeat
resumes as he invokes a history of African American political resistance. This

film and its messages are resolutely not his, alone, but are polyvocal and trans-
historical. The dissolves between Civil Rights marchers and men marching for
the Minority Task Force on AIDS not only help to ‘give the lie to the notion
that black and gay identity are hostile to one another’ (Thomas 1996: 61), they
connect past political solidarities to ongoing struggles.
In spite of its autobiographical concerns, Tongues Untied didn’t originate in
Riggs insisting on articulating his own identity, though he ultimately deter-
mined it was his ‘responsibility’ to ‘make that step in front of the camera’
(Riggs 2008 [1991]). Riggs’s hesitancy about producing a ‘straight’ autobi-
ography is understandable, considering autobiography is ‘customarily the
genre in which dominant cultures first permit minorities to speak’ (Van Leer
1997: 166). The film was inspired by the profusion of black men’s cultural
work going on around him, in particular the poetry of the ‘Other Countries
Workshop’ in New York and collections produced by Beam and by the Gay
Men’s Press (Castro 2000). In the film, a poster for Isaac Julien’s then recently
released Looking for Langston (1989) is highlighted in the ‘BGA’/Black Gay
Activist’s room, underscoring affiliations with queer filmmakers such as
the UK-based Julien, Pratibha Parmar and the photographer Rotimi Fani-
Kayode. Riggs later recalled: ‘Taken as a group, we do not subscribe to notions
of artistic effort for the sake of delighting the eye. Rather, our work addresses
issues of identity, selfhood, and nationhood in an effort to interrogate received
notions of who we are’ (quoted in Castro 2000). The ‘BGA’ scene references
this questioning of selfhood and nationhood by indicating wider synergies of
black gay political work. The camera lingers over the political culture maga-
zine A Critique of America (later called Arete), a t-shirt for the AIDS activist
group ACT UP with the slogan ‘silence = death’, and a poster for the black
gay publication Blacklight.
Essex Hemphill was a key collaborator, and his appearances and poetry
are at the core of the film’s emphasis on lyrical language and the rhythms and
cadences of speech. The speech act – the nuances and shocks of language – is
persistently twinned with its opposite, silence, which operates as a structuring
motif in the film, stressing opposition and dialectical exchange between forms
of liberation and oppression, openness and hiding in troubled ‘safety’. Silence
and its social and psychic effects are marked not only through language and
its absence, but through image and absence: the bright pink ACT UP slogan
against the black shirt, the black screen (which Chuck Kleinhans calls a ‘black
void’) that frequently breaks into the visual field, juxtaposing invisibility
with visibility (Kleinhans 1991: 110). For LeBlanc, when the film focuses on
silence and absence as counterparts to presence, and on the margins or out-of-
frame as opposed to the center, it betrays a postmodern scepticism and self-
consciousness regarding ‘transparent’ representation. Rather than pointing to
‘an imaginable moment of “completion” of the documentary’s goal’, absence

and silence serve to posit ‘an ultimate unrepresentability of certain events
and subject positions’ that are restricted by social expectations and responses
(LeBlanc 2009: 2).
Tongues Untied openly wrestles with questions of representing the self
and representing others, with ideas of belonging and exclusion, presence and
absence. Though elements of traditional documentary are approximated and
parodied, it seems clear that what Riggs wanted to express could never find
voice – his tongue couldn’t be ‘untied’ – through established filmic approaches.
In her call to revaluate the norms and expectations of race, gender, class and
age, Lorde argued that ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s
house’ (1984: 123). In a similar sense Riggs dismisses the ‘master’s tools’ while
establishing a disruptive and deconstructive expository and aesthetic vehicle
for a politicized subjective viewpoint. For Petty, ‘the narrative premise of the
video is very complex because Riggs negotiates, not within one cultural space,
but four: black culture, white culture, gay culture, and black gay culture.
This makes generalizations, either about his narrative structure, or his the-
matic material, almost impossible’ (1998: 418). Yet this lack of homogeneity
perhaps posed, and poses, an opportunity of sorts. It suggests that rather than
appropriating or mimicking documentary authority to assert the truth of his
experience, Riggs had to interrogate assumptions about the very production
of truthful histories, in turn pointing towards the artificiality and inadequacy
of linear narratives of US identity and history. There is little point, then, in a
straightforward or sequential ‘reading’ of the film: our attempts to ‘shoot for
the contents’ will be constantly deflected.
Riggs’s filmic style is often jagged: fragmented by interruptions and seem-
ingly empty shots and spaces – the ‘dead spots’ traditionally avoided by film-
makers (though taken up in avant-garde experiments such as Andy Warhol’s
Sleep [1963] and Empire [1964]) (Beattie 2008: 13–14). Unlike direct cinema,
Riggs offers no illusion of immediacy or ‘uncontrolled’ reality; Tongues Untied
is an exposed construct. Indeed, perhaps more precise than labelling Riggs’s
approach postmodern would be to say Riggs enacts a series of displacements
of subjectivity and audience identification that reconstruct a diasporic sensibil-
ity.8 Diaspora suggests nomadic exile, ‘dispersal and reluctant scattering’, yet
is always ambivalently bound to questions of national belonging and ‘home’.
For Paul Gilroy, diaspora-identification ‘exists outside of and sometimes in
opposition to the political forms and codes of modern citizenship’ (1994: 207).
In other words, Riggs’s African American ancestry forms part of the black
Atlantic diaspora, yet his experience – with its complex affiliations and dis-
placements on levels of ethnicity, gender and sexuality – renders any notion of
‘return’ to unity or ‘home’ an impossible illusion. At the same time the domi-
nant conditions that determine belonging in ‘America’ induce other forms of
exile and alienation from the self. Yet, Gilroy suggests, diaspora might also
provoke new versions of and relations to national belonging, ‘less through
outmoded notions of fixity and place and more in terms of the ex-centric
communicative circuitry that has enabled dispersed populations to converse,
interact and even synchronize significant elements of their social and cultural
lives’ (Gilroy 1994: 211). In other words, diaspora as both a state of being and
a concept can point to new ways of belonging that do not rely on traditional
notions of citizenry and the nation-state – communities, affiliations and identi-
ties are formed through other cultural synergies and connections.
Riggs expresses the complexity and mobility of these synergies though
variously structured and unstructured expressive modes. Dance in the film
accents the importance of choreographed and creative movement, which
becomes, as in the vogueing scenes, ‘a form of resistance and community’
(Castro 2000). Music expresses other forms of ambivalent longing through the
elegiac use of Roberta Flack, Nina Simone, Billie Holiday and Steve Langley.
Fittingly, Petty calls the film ‘a symphony on race, culture, and sexuality’
(1998: 418). Indeed, Riggs’s diasporic style relies on impressions more than
definitive facts and statements. The hypnotic, fraught movements of Riggs’s
body against the ‘black void’ early in the film, or the dazzling white fade after
the film’s opening black and white images: each leaves a momentary physical
impression on the eye. Image, sound, words and movement in Tongues Untied
tend to register as felt traces rather than as definitive assertions. Riggs refuses
to enter into the public and academic competition for establishing the socio-
logical ‘truth’ of black and/or gay life, but also doesn’t retreat from political
engagement. The film’s formal approach is itself a bridging of political and
aesthetic intervention.
Embedding his own voice and perspective amid a text that is insistently
polyvocal, Riggs refuses the double bind of representation that would see
a black gay director, due to a paucity of representation, having to appear as
a delegate for the black, gay or black and gay communities as wholes. This
latter situation suggests the ‘burden of representation’, according to Kobena
Mercer, where the artistic production of minority individuals is harnessed
to expectations to speak as ‘representatives’ for all in the marginalized com-
munity (1994: 214). Riggs undermines expectations that his film might offer
paradigmatic access to the black gay community, parodying institutional
modes of address such as the ethnographic ‘native informant’ tradition. As
Riggs and his friends demonstrate ‘a basic lesson in snap!’ sparring, a subtitle
– ‘courtesy of The Institute of Snap!thology’ – indicates the filmed subjects’
subcultural status to potentially curious onlookers. The subtitle follows the
more traditionally rendered ‘native informant’ street interview with Master
Snap! Grand Diva, slyly transforming the whole sequence into a mock-
scientific investigation of what Paul Arthur calls the ‘twin markers of black-
ness and homosexuality’ (Arthur 1999: 281).9 The gesture both implicates
and undermines epistephilia: it snaps! the viewer and the documentary form
itself.
A more ambiguous snap! at documentary convention occurs during Riggs’s
autobiographical reverie about a ‘white boy’ with ‘grey-green eyes’ and ‘soft
Tennessee drawl’. As Roberta Flack’s mournful version of the English folk
song ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’ plays, a photo floats out of the
void. The photo’s obvious ‘blandness’, the boy’s awkward expression and
outdated hairstyle all resist audience desires to identify or sympathize with
Riggs’s attraction, yet also underline the moment’s ‘air of tragic inevitability’
(Van Leer 1997: 169). The video stylizations here imitate the ‘pan and scan’
approach of much PBS documentary – used by Riggs himself in Ethnic Notions
– but the image doesn’t impart evidence or bolster an argument. Rather than
feeding epistephilia, the boy’s image remains anonymous, a cipher that signi-
fies memory as absence as much as presence.
The question of what fills the voids of identity and identification is partly
addressed through Riggs’s careful articulation, framing, positioning and
lighting of the black male body in the film. Early on, in a gesture suggesting
baptism and ritual transformation, he uncloaks his own body, revealing it to
the camera’s gaze. This exposure and vulnerability works as a counterpoint
to the self-conscious distancing employed elsewhere in the film. The body
is both performative and sentient, contested public ‘territory’ and sensual
private experience. As Hemphill recites in the film, ‘our lives tremble between
pathos and seduction’. Scenes that suggest remoteness or parody are never far
removed from those that evoke closeness and intimacy. The black male body
as physical presence and as trope thus operates on a number of interrelated
levels: the exposed body indicates the vulnerability of black and gay people
to exposure in the world and in the media; the self-conscious manipulation of
lighting and video exposures suggests the uneven social and psychic relations
between whiteness and blackness, visibility and invisibility.
Relevant here are discussions that have theorized the haptic or tactile
experience of the body in cinema, mapping complex relations between
bodily representations and the filmgoer’s multiple sensory responses. Jennifer
Barker emphasizes sensory responses to film that range beyond the purely
visual:
Exploring cinema’s tactility [. . .] opens up the possibility of cinema as an

intimate experience and of our relationship with cinema as a close connec-
tion, rather than as a distant experience of observation, which the notion
of cinema as a purely visual medium presumes. [. . .] We share things
with it: texture, spatial orientation, comportment, rhythm, and vitality.
(Barker 2009: 2)10
For David MacDougall, film might tap into ways in which we actively engage
with physical objects; filmed bodies can be ‘as much projections of our own
bodies as independent of them’ (2006: 21). Many New Queer documentaries
of the late 1980s and 1990s work to heighten sensory relations between audi-
ences and the cinematic body. As Riggs stated: ‘I wanted to show how people
touch, and the touching. I didn’t want to show pornography. [. . .] I wanted to
show two black men touching tenderly, romantically, sexually [. . .] an image
that I had never seen and which would confirm an experience for a number of
people’ (quoted in Bullert 1997: 98). Like Tongues Untied, Barbara Hammer’s
Nitrate Kisses (1992) interweaves intimate footage with references to stere-
otyping and broader experiences of oppression: scenes of couples making
love – lesbian, gay, white, black, interracial; some bodies shaven, pierced and
tattooed – act as interruptions to a history of ‘othering’ queer sexuality. The
very title, Nitrate Kisses, weds the realms of cinema artifice (silver nitrate) to
the sensual.
The body’s felt presence is also central to Tom Joslin, Mark Massi and
Peter Friedman’s Silverlake Life: The View from Here (1992), an intense por-
trayal of illness, AIDS and dying that engages with the endpoint of bodily
sentience – the ‘taboo’ image of death. Like Tongues, the film aims to politicize
private and subcultural experience through public acts of showing and speak-
ing out (Lane 2002: 88). Silverlake Life works to conjure the body’s felt pres-
ence by meditating on the sense of touch, on the feel and texture of flesh and
skin. Indeed Silverlake Life starts here, gesturing to the audience’s desire and
inability to ‘touch’ the bodies on screen by invoking the memory of touching
the sentient body of a person – here, a lover – now dead. The first words are
from Mark Massi recalling his partner, Tom, through sense memory: ‘The
thing I remember most about Tom’, Mark says, ‘is what he feels like’. The
use of the present tense is telling; it goes against the realization of absence, yet
we might also recognize this leap of faith in our own experience. Only after
meditating on touch does Mark consider the visual image of Tom, though now
through a strangely moving anecdote about his dead body: ‘It was scary to look
at him, the first time after he died. And then I wanted to close his eyes, because
it’s strange to see a dead person staring, and I tried – just like in the movies – to
close his eyes. But they popped back open. I said to Tom, I apologize, life isn’t
like the movies’. And though the movies are not quite like life, documentaries
such as Silverlake Life work to ‘point to a lived body occupying concrete space’
(Sobchack 1999: 248), strikingly registering lived experiences and sensations.
Concluding Tongues Untied, nine title cards spell out the statement: ‘Black
men loving Black men is the revolutionary act’. While this might at first appear
a denial of cross-ethnic relationships, a retreat to essentialism or an advocacy
of ‘black separatism’, the words are not, in fact, Riggs’s, but Joseph Beam’s
(Wallenberg 2004: 135; Van Leer 1997: 169). The quote is followed by a telling
snap! cartoon, suggesting that even seemingly direct messages in Riggs’s film
are rarely direct. The words have already appeared earlier, emblazoned on the
parade banner held by the Minority Task Force on AIDS. Riggs would later
pluralize the interpretation of ‘loving’ in Beam’s statement, beyond sexual and
romantic connotations, to include ‘friendship, community, family, and fra-
ternity’ (Van Leer 1997: 179; Simmons 1991: 194). In this sense, acts of black
men loving black men are indeed crucial to establishing stable and mutually
supportive relations in African American life. After the end titles, the words
that close the film are: ‘The nights are cold and silent, and the silence echoes
with complicity’. The phrase challenges the audience to speak out, to create
their ‘revolutionary acts’ or otherwise remain complicit in histories of denial
and repression.
As Bullert points out, of all of the documentaries screened on the PBS
P.O.V. series, none caused more public controversy than Tongues Untied.
When it was broadcast in July of 1991, 110 of the 284 PBS stations that
normally carried P.O.V. refused to air the film, leading to accusations from
filmmakers and critics on the left of widespread media censorship. Most sta-
tions showed it late in the evening along with a ‘viewer advisory’ warning of
‘explicit language and images’, and it was condemned by conservative groups
and politicians as ‘obscene’ and ‘promoting a gay lifestyle’ (Bullert 1997: 93).
As a result of this small film, shot on video for roughly $40,000, Congress was
pressed to cut off federal funds to public broadcasting. Part of the problem was
that the film was seen as ‘government funded’: screened on PBS, with a small
portion of the budget ($8,000) having come from National Endowment for the
Arts funds (Bullert 1997: 99).
Among the African American community, concerns were raised about
Riggs’s ‘negative’ images, especially as this was the first P.O.V. program
to feature an African American director. Though the National Black
Programming Consortium (NBPC) had given Tongues Untied its documentary
award in 1990, opinion remained divided. Founding director of the NBPC,
Mable Haddock, recalled problems of homophobia in the black community:
‘I’ve been a woman all my life. And black all my life, but when people found
out I was supporting this program – I thought I knew hate, I thought I knew
sexism and racism, but the hate – you could just feel it. It was palpable’
(quoted in Bullert 1997: 101). Homophobia here is not characterized as merely
an isolated prejudice; Haddock recognizes links to a history of sexual exploita-
tion and stereotyping of the black community, and to a lack of open dialogue
about sexuality, in particular homosexuality.
Riggs wanted Tongues Untied to ‘start the dialogue’ about black sexual-
ity, but also to ‘preserve our lives in a form that people can see and address,
not only now, but in years to come. People will see there was a vibrant black
gay community in these United States in 1989’ (Simmons 1991: 193). These
ambitions indicate impulses towards instruction and cultural preservation for

which documentary is known, but turn them towards reframing and diver-
sifying the idea of the nation itself, not only for the present but for a future
that will one day be confronted by the absences of memory and history. The
rendering of black history in the US has frequently involved a process of
reinserting once-marginalized African American lives and experiences into
a hegemonic narrative of US inclusiveness. More recently, through reality
shows such as Bravo’s Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (2003–7), the process
of reinserting those historically ‘edited out’ of the grand American narrative
has extended to reframing gay/queer identity as an example, par excellence,
of the patriotic pleasures of consumerist and capitalist aspiration. If gayness
and blackness were effectively ‘erased’ from history, Riggs was evidently less
interested in battling this narrative than in remaking its very foundations,
confounding its common terms of reference.
Riggs died in 1994 at the age of 37. His career spanned a period when
essentialist definitions of ‘race’ were undergoing intense revaluation, when
gay identity was engaging with broader notions of queer identities, and
when HIV and AIDS were both repressing and radicalizing sexual attitudes.
Though Riggs’s work shares experimental aesthetic and political aims with
postmodern-era directors like Morris, Riggs’s layered – and what I have
called diasporic – sensibility might be seen as ‘more embodied than inscribed’
(Gilroy 1994: 207). Riggs is distinctive in foregrounding a subjective point of
view that articulates displacements while enacting new alignments and felt
experiences. His films command attention because they still offer challenging
points of view, problematizing reductive narratives of US identity and history.
On its own terms, Tongues Untied is a meditation on identities and their

relations to larger imagined communities. With its television broadcast, it
became something else entirely: a flashpoint for debates about special inter-
ests, funding for the arts, censorship versus freedom of expression, and moral
standards (many objections came from politicians and religious figures who
admitted they hadn’t seen the film).
If, on the surface, at issue was the film’s reliance on public money, a larger
issue lay in the status of documentary itself, as a mode ‘defined and applied
in relation to a sense of the “Public” ’ and public interests (Corner 2002).
Bullert concludes that the contested public spaces documentary can create are
essential to democratic values: ‘Not being able to hear the voices of talented
independent filmmakers limits the public discussion of certain issues and the
inclusion of certain viewpoints. This is at odds with the democratic principles
on which the United States was founded’ (1997: 190). Yet the relationship
between democratic principles, freedom of the press, and access to media dis-
tribution channels has always been less than transparent. How can ‘majority’
and ‘minority’ interests ever be fairly represented in the media? How can mar-
ginal voices gain a public hearing and have access to spaces for self-expression?
Tongues Untied became an example of what Stuart Hall calls the ‘double
bind’ of media power:
The media cannot long retain their credibility with the public without
giving some access to witnesses and accounts which lie outside the con-
sensus. But the moment television does so, it immediately endangers
itself with its critics, who attack broadcasting for unwittingly tipping the
balance of public feeling against the political order. It opens itself to the
strategies of both sides, which are struggling to win a hearing for their
interpretations [. . .] This is broadcasting’s double bind. (Hall 1988: 364)
This double bind persists, even as the ground shifts beneath documentary
practices of production and distribution. Freedoms of expression face new
challenges with increased media corporatization and reliance on market forces,
yet possibilities for documentary action have also opened up through remedia-
tion in the form of cheaper digital equipment and the Internet.
By the 1990s documentary practice, distribution and reception had under-
gone sweeping changes, as had the media landscape as a whole. When media
democratization movements such as guerrilla television and public access first
arrived they propounded interventionist, even utopian, ideals, but the ability
of alternative media to exert widespread social influence was, and remains,
challenged by financial and distribution limitations. The appearance of satel-
lite, cable and pay-per-view television seemed to offer the potential to enhance
documentary’s profile (the Discovery Channel, the most widely distributed
cable network in the US, was launched in 1985). Cable promised new forms
of televisual subjectivity, as viewers could ‘actively seek out and select from
a myriad of program choices’, and independent producers hoped to connect
with less visible and niche audiences that would have been almost impossible
to reach through customary marketing techniques (Boddy 1990: 94). Yet in the
midst of the cornucopia of choice, pushes for deregulation and major corpo-
rate mergers meant that the media came under the control of fewer and fewer
global companies. Indeed, only about ten conglomerates now dominate the
majority of US media production and dissemination.
On the big screen, documentary successes persisted through the 1990s
(though dipping towards the end of the decade), helped by film festival expo-
sure and specialist distributors like Fine Line and Miramax, subsidiaries of
large interests such as Sony, Disney and New Line. Even mildly successful
documentaries could yield a sought-after combination of high profit-to-cost
ratios and award prestige for comparatively small investments in post-produc-
tion and marketing. Steve James’s Hoop Dreams (1994), an involving study of
the struggles of two African American teenagers with aspirations to become

world-class basketball players, garnered numerous awards (though controver-
sially was denied an Oscar nomination) and surpassed the box office record set
by Roger and Me a few years before. Hoop Dreams was later named by influen-
tial critic Roger Ebert as the best film of the year (and later, best of the decade),
positioning documentary as a sophisticated and socially relevant alternative to
big budget Hollywood fantasy.
New documentary auteurs such as Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, who
combined direct cinema with postmodern touches of narrative aporia, reg-
istered successes with Brother’s Keeper (1992) and Paradise Lost: The Child
Murders at Robin Hood Hills (1996). Cheryl Dunye’s mockumentary The
Watermelon Woman (1996) reconfigured issues of the archive and documen-
tary truth in weaving together a fictional history of an elusive 1930s black
Hollywood actress, at the same time engaging issues of black and lesbian repre-
sentation and spectatorship. Documentary was not only financially viable and
legitimate once again, but ‘sexy’. Karen Cooper of New York’s Film Forum,
who in 1972 saw ‘zero competition’ for documentaries, proudly pointed out
in a 1998 interview that nine of twelve films premiered at the theater during a
six-month period that year were documentaries (Iseli 1998: 14).
Other financial successes ranged from biographical exposés such as Crumb
(1995) and Unzipped (1995) to the queer cinema history The Celluloid Closet
(1996). Major directors associated with fiction were drawn to the form: Spike
Lee’s 4 Little Girls (1997) was conceived as a documentary because, Lee
noted, only documentary could capture the complexity and human cost of the
notorious bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, Birmingham, in 1963
(Susman 1997). But these high-profile films in many ways masked the larger
picture of theatrical documentary’s place in the transnational, corporate US
film industry. Though a box office ‘boom’ was heralded in trade magazines,
documentaries could not expand beyond the ‘limited’ (as opposed to ‘nation-
wide’) release category. Documentaries made up roughly 1 percent of US film
earnings during this period, and even a significant hit like Crumb never played
in more than sixty cinemas at the same time nationwide (when blockbusters
such as Batman Forever [1995] were playing on nearly 3,000 screens). Moore’s
huge hit, Bowling for Columbine (2002), never played on more than 250 screens
at one time.
Most smaller-scale documentary filmmakers were experiencing severe ide-
ological and financial challenges. A hopeful development was the creation of
the Independent Television Service (ITVS), established by an act of Congress
in 1988 explicitly to encourage productions that ‘take creative risks’ and
‘enrich the cultural landscape with the voices and visions of underrepresented
communities’ (‘Mission Statement’ 2010). But ITVS didn’t end the conflict
over public funding; in fact attacks on independent and political documenta-
ries intensified. Controversy ensued over Deadly Deception (1991), a short film
that juxtaposed the ideal worlds of advertisements for General Electric (‘GE:
We bring good things to life’) with the lives ruined by GE’s construction and
testing of nuclear weapons. Attacked as a partisan misuse of public money, the
film was denied a screening slot on PBS (which claimed a conflict of interest, as
GE was a PBS underwriter). The British film Damned in the USA (1992) took
up some of these issues – examining high-profile battles over public funding
and censorship (in particular a landmark Cincinnati obscenity trial involving
the exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe photos) – and in turn was met with
further controversy. The film’s producers were sued by the Rev. Donald
Wildmon, of the American Family Association, who wanted to bar the film’s
US release.
There was little relief from the ideological storm that was dubbed the
‘culture wars’. Effectively the culmination of restrictions to public arts
funding stretching back to the Reagan years, the culture wars were imbri-
cated in larger battles over the definition and policing of American values and
American identity: ‘unity’ versus diversity, cultural and ethnic homogeneity
versus multicultural and multilingual networks. Documentary and public
service television were on the front lines: in 1995, conservative Republican
and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich argued for the complete elimina-
tion of federal funding for public broadcasting. As Patricia Zimmermann
argued at the decade’s end: ‘Documentary and public affairs programming are
truly an endangered species’ (2000: 25). Independent documentary was under
‘siege’: ‘Congressional debates, political targeting by conservatives, geopo-
litical restructurings in the telecommunications sector, and new technologies
have turned documentary into a bloody political battlefield where the casual-
ties are mounting daily’ (Zimmermann 2000: 12).
With the Telecommunications Act of 1996, regulations and centralized
controls were severely curtailed. The premise of the Act was that market
forces should be the guiding factors behind media and communication activi-
ties. Drafted amid pressures of powerful lobbies and corporate interests, the
Act escalated the ongoing process of large corporations taking over smaller
establishments, including community and local television, cable provision,
newspapers and radio, leaving media ownership concentrated in the hands of
a few companies such as Sony, Disney (owners of ABC and ESPN), and Time
Warner (owners of CNN).11 As Brian Winston puts it, the distinctly American
sense of ‘public service’ was being absorbed into commercialism (Winston
2000: 45).
Still, there were what Zimmermann calls ‘cracks’ in corporate and govern-
ment restrictions on independent production and distribution, some gener-
ated by the conglomerates themselves. These included funding from sources
such as Time Warner’s cable station HBO, which financed Lee’s 4 Little Girls
and When the Levees Broke (2006). The Independent Lens series was launched
by PBS in 1999, providing a platform for documentary features such as The
Weather Underground (2002) and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005).
While most of these films take few formal risks, they draw on documentary
traditions of engaging with questions of citizenship and social responsibility.
Newer sites and forums, such as the Internet, remain crucial if the documen-
tary form is to persist in some of its key functions: questioning received histo-
ries and ideologies, creating ‘new social imaginaries’ (Zimmermann 2000: 12).
no t e s
1. Controversial omissions from the best documentary Oscar nominations were Shoah, Paris
is Burning, Hoop Dreams, Roger and Me and The Thin Blue Line, leading critics to argue
that the Academy was not only narrow-minded about ‘authenticity’ but spurned
commercially successful films. The outrage over Hoop Dreams led to changes in
nomination practices. Moore was elected to the Academy Board of Governors
(Documentary Branch) in 2010.
2. Coming from a different angle, Jeffrey Skoller has engaged with the social, political and
historical value of the avant-garde (Skoller 2005).
3. More recently, theorists such as Chantal Mouffe have expanded on such observations
about identity politics and multiculturalism. Mouffe cites a pluralist ideal of ‘radical
democracy’ that creates a space where ‘we acknowledge difference – the particular, the
multiple, the heterogeneous’ even across national boundaries (2005: 7).
4. See, for example, the widespread debates generated by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles
A. Murray in The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1994), which suggested that ‘both genes and environment’ influenced
intelligence, linking race to IQ and subsequent social success (see pp. 287, 292 and 311).
5. Patterson examines acts of renaming as part of a ‘ritual of enslavement’ (1982: 54).
6. In 1982–3, references to the ‘gay plague’ appeared in Philadelphia’s Daily News, the
Toronto Star, London’s Sun and many other newspapers. See also Williams and Retter
(2003: 162).
7. Student feedback to Tongues Untied, Freshman Summer Program, University of
California, Los Angeles, August 1992.
8. See, for example, Mark A. Reid (ed.), ‘African and Black Diaspora Film/Video’, Jump
Cut, 36 [special issue] (May 1991).
9. For further analysis see Becquer (1991: 6–17).
10. See also ‘haptic visuality’ in Marks (2000: xi).
11. In the US, data on market shares of media companies is forbidden from release into the
public domain, therefore exact figures of who owns what and the relative power of each
media organization is not clear.
ch apter 8
Media Wars: Documentary

Dispersion
In a lengthy shot from Ross McElwee’s Six O’Clock News (1996), the camera
scans a bridge destroyed by a hurricane, panning the extent of the disaster,
the media filming it, and the locals observing both them and it. In the shot,
we are reminded that mediated realities are at the same time both packaged
entertainments and ‘real’ experiences. As McElwee trails journalists that
seek ‘news’ and ‘stories’ in lives devastated by natural disasters and traumatic
events such as earthquakes, floods, hurricanes and murder, the film examines
the blurred lines between first-hand experience and manufactured reality,
closeness and distance. Ultimately, the different levels of filmic engagement
with tragic events in Six O’Clock News create a kind of hall of mirrors: crews
fabricating news out of disaster and trauma reflect and are filmed by the self-
reflective documentarian chronicling his own version of events. Highlighting
this interplay and blurring of documentary ‘truth’ and mainstream media
‘infotainment’, the film anticipates central questions facing documentary in
the intensely mediatized world of the twenty-first century.
Representational and existential questions overlap in the film: how do we
reach the ‘true’ experience of trauma beyond the anonymous media screen?
How might the filmmaker make sense of a world rife with personal tragedy?
McElwee reaches an ‘epiphany’, he states, when he befriends an earthquake
survivor in Los Angeles called Salvador Peña, who suffered terrible injuries
when trapped by a falling building. In spite of continuing debilitation and
poverty, Peña remains stoic and deeply religious. When Peña signs a contract
with the CBS docudrama Rescue 911 to recreate his experience as reality televi-
sion, he must pull out of the film – with McElwee’s blessing – as financially
and practically Rescue 911 can do more for him than McElwee ever could. The
film’s positioning of direct experience against packaged news comes full circle
as Peña’s tragic experience, at least in some way, finds compensation in being
transformed into commodified entertainment. The trajectories of Salvador’s
story – and of McElwee’s, it turns out – come to pose questions about the state
of documentary itself: whether developments such as reality television, tabloid
news or the appropriation of documentary modes by mainstream fictions indi-
cate the death of documentary, or its future.
The production of documentary reality in the twenty-first-century US
faces serious challenges, magnified by a series of disasters and national
crises that have seemed to defy representation. These events have reshaped
the political spectrum and reconfigured conceptions of national identity
and security on many fronts. Their abbreviated monikers – 9/11, Katrina,
Afghanistan, Iraq, the recession – point to a vast archive of media discourse,
political debate, social analysis and powerful emotional investment. They have
been components, as well as what Slavoj Žižek calls ‘symptoms’, of a loss of
confidence both in the unassailable might of the US and in presumptions of
American exceptionalism. For Žižek, the symptom might describe critical
events (Katrina, for example) that have been invested with profound cultural,
historical, ideological and personal meanings. But this collective search for
meaning and clear explanations for such events also ‘obscures the terrify-
ing impact of [the event’s] presence’, reflecting desires to both ‘escape’ and
‘domesticate’ the terrible thing itself, to mask the ways these events point to
the actual precariousness of social and personal life. The symptom, therefore,
both solicits and exceeds our ability to assimilate and come to terms with ter-
rifying realities (Žižek 1989: 71).1
Documentaries have addressed these cultural ‘symptoms’ in both direct and
indirect ways: some ‘make sense’ of the world by offering narrative coherence,
interpretation and seeming solutions to dilemmas involving real people strug-
gling in the midst of social crises both great and small. Others offer solace,
identification and entertainment through formulaic solutions and forms of
‘public therapy’ (as in ABC’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition and Wife
Swap): simplified personal transformations that might mask or defer more
disturbing realities beyond our grasp. At other times documentaries, as seen in
the previous chapter, mark the impossibility of desires for fuller explanation or
completion, gesturing towards the unknown and ambivalent realms of experi-
ence. They can, Nichols notes, engage an ‘awareness of the tension between
representation and [. . .] magnitudes beyond representation’ (1991: 233).
Production of this more complex picture of the world has come up against
changing conceptions of private experience and public engagement. How can
a documentary any longer claim to speak for a collective ‘public’? If we can’t
presume the unity of a collective, then who do documentaries address, and to
what ends? Ambiguities always present in the documentary form have sur-
faced with renewed force. Documentaries no longer have the luxury of implicit
authority and transparency, they must succeed on numerous fronts: aligning
with popular expectations of reality in representation, convincing through
m e d ia w a rs : do c u men tary dispersion 219
persuasive argument and evidence, winning over viewers with insightful and
sometimes ironic acknowledgement of their own fabrications and limitations.
Even then, success is hardly guaranteed.
This chapter will consider how documentaries have negotiated changing
practices, markets and public expectations, while still attempting to represent
and intervene in crises and shattering events that have marked twenty-first-
century US life. I’ll ultimately focus on one of these events, the Iraq War,
which has produced a ‘tide’ of filmic responses since 2003 (Kahana 2008: 328).
If this site of intense documentary work is any indication, it seems the key
functions of the documentary form – in all its variety – still have potent cul-
tural currency, particularly in the face of social and national crisis.
p o s t- d oc um e n t a r y?
Recent years have witnessed a rapid expansion and dispersal of the functions
of documentary, triggered by shifts in production contexts, technologies,
channels of transmission and distribution, and public expectations. The range
of approaches and styles encompassed by documentary is vast and, depending
on how strictly one wants to define it, might include everything from reality
television to home-made shorts on YouTube and Google Videos, or hybrid
forms such as documentary musicals. In this case it would probably be easier to
dispense with the term documentary and simply speak of an ongoing prolifera-
tion of nonfiction filmmaking – but as this book has argued, documentary has
always been imbricated in a wider constellation of nonfiction film practices,
and the boundaries between it and other kinds of films have long been less than
clear. For example, documentary traditions have helped to inform and ‘disci-
pline’ related activities such as amateur filmmaking, while these ‘peripheral’
forms and changing technologies have had profound effects on how people
conceive, make and consume documentaries.
The term ‘post-documentary’ has been used to indicate the ways that
perceptions of truth in documentary, along with the relative stability of
‘documentary’ as a descriptive term, have significantly shifted. Keith Beattie
explains that post-documentary ‘evokes a post-Griersonian documentary
devoid of the authoritarian, expository positions which underpin the truth
claims’ of traditional approaches (2008: 151–2). Similarly Stella Bruzzi, while
avoiding laying down strict categories or implying clean breaks from the past,
invokes the term ‘new documentary’ to describe a form inflected by increasing
attention to questions of its own mediation and the prevalent problematization
of the ‘real’. As a consequence, new documentary tends to foreground perfor-
mativity rather than assuming transparency or applying solely to the task of
essential truth telling (Bruzzi 2006: 9).
John Corner also stresses the performativity of post-documentary culture,

which has seen a greater emphasis on ‘documentary as diversion’, or entertain-
ment (Corner 2002, 2008). This has displaced – though not entirely replaced
– documentary’s core functions of encouraging democratic civic-mindedness,
engaging in journalistic enquiry and interrogating dominant ideologies and
naturalized viewpoints. Certainly after filmmakers like Michael Moore and
Morgan Spurlock, documentary can no longer be seen simply as a discourse
of sobriety. Performative and playful elements have always been present but
were usually suppressed by more rigid and institutional definitions. Beattie
highlights this long-standing, crucial but relatively under-examined func-
tion of documentary, noting that ‘entertainment, fun and pleasure’ – or what
he calls ‘documentary display’ – can be viewed across a range of nonfiction
modes, from early actualities and avant-garde experiments to rockumentaries
and surfing films (2008: 5).
Clearly we are moving away from a time when documentary was primarily
defined according to Griersonian notions of social instruction and authority,
or determined by later perceptions of unvarnished directness and immediacy
– yet we might not quite have arrived at a post-documentary moment, per se
(indeed, Corner emphasizes the speculative and ‘tongue in cheek’ nature of
the ‘post-’) (Corner 2008: 59). Critics such as Brian Winston have been key
to ongoing revaluations of documentary as it continues to evolve, pointing
to differences between post-Griersonian documentary and so-called post-
documentary culture. Here documentary is viewed as always having been less
stable than many theorists and advocates would have liked, and now might
be seen as ‘growing’ to include docusoaps, reality television and hybrid forms
such as docudrama. As Winston has suggested, ‘we are [. . .] not living in a
“post-documentary” era; we are, though, at a point when John Grierson’s tra-
ditional definition (“the creative treatment of actuality”) has clearly outlived
its shelf-life’ (Winston 2008a). As Winston stresses, much depends on how the
documentary concept circulates in the public realm.
These shifting perceptions apply not just to documentary as a discursive
mode, but to a whole range of media that serve the public. The forms and
functions of these media are in a state of flux, and driven by increasingly
market-centered forces. As Corner suggests, documentary’s ongoing integrity
as a concept and its place in public debate should be viewed against the refram-
ing of the very notion of ‘the public’ itself. Changing ideas of citizenship and
identities as ‘public’ subjects have
very much to do with the [. . .] increasing emphasis on market systems,

market values and the dynamics of production and consumption. These
have generated a version of the ‘popular’ which is often in direct tension
with notions of the ‘the public’. [. . .] All media researchers know the
extent to which ‘public service’ broadcasting has been redefined and, in

some countries, displaced both as a practice and as an aspiration, by these
changes. (Corner 2002)
One of these countries, of course, is the US, where Patricia Zimmermann

sees a link between a crisis in socially committed documentary, the erosion of
public service ideals and a greater cultural and political emphasis on market
forces. Here, ‘the clear lines of distinction between public space and corporate
space, between public affairs and private enterprise, between oppositional
work and corporatist multiculturalism, between identity politics and niche
marketing, between the nation and globe, have become murky’ (2000: 50).
The satisfactions of participatory democracy no longer chiefly rely on
identifying with a national collective. They might derive from posting on
YouTube, twittering, blogging, engaging with – even shouting opinions at –
the dramas of reality television, or voting for a contestant on American Idol. If
an ideal of documentary as democracy in action has been seen as a means to
define national values and priorities, to re-imagine the world and create spaces
for public dissent and debate, then the new world order of dispersed, corpo-
ratized and commercialized notions of public participation and democratic
access poses profound questions about the shape documentaries will take and
what social functions they will serve.
Interestingly, while documentary has metamorphosed, it has also largely
thrived amid this transforming public realm. What Linda Williams called
the ‘hunger for documentary images of the real’ (1993: 10) seemed to vastly
expand over the course of the 1990s and into the 2000s. From 1996 to 2002, an
average of fifteen documentaries per year had a theatrical release; in 2003 and
2004, more than forty were being released to theaters each year. Newly formed
distributors such as Magnolia were backing a range of projects. Domestic
revenues for documentaries increased from $5 million in 2001 to $55 million
in 2004, even leaving out the mammoth box-office takings of Fahrenheit 9/11
($119 million) (Arthur 2005: 18; Aufderheide 2005: 25). Some have argued
that post-9/11 uncertainties instigated a renewed ‘search for authenticity’ and
demand for stories that were ‘genuine and real’ (quoted in Arthur 2005: 19).
For Paul Arthur, other factors should be recognized, such as the US popula-
tion’s established taste for reality television, which in a sense spilled over into
theatrical markets. Films such as the highly successful Capturing the Friedmans
(2003), marketed as a tell-all drama of a family haunted by repression and
secrecy (with the tagline, ‘who do you believe?’), deepened and complicated
the kinds of television psychodramas refereed by the likes of Jerry Springer
and Sally Jessy Raphael. When released on DVD, documentaries also made a
comfortable ‘fit’ with small-screen viewing habits: indeed sales of documen-
tary DVDs skyrocketed between 2001 and 2004 (Arthur 2005: 19).
Much documentary success of the 2000s has related to what Pat Aufderheide
calls the ‘high end market in documentary as artful entertainment’. At a time
of widespread cynicism regarding corporate media, ‘indie docs’ have been
groomed through film festival circuits, with public interest and anticipation
built up through positive reviews (2005: 25). But the majority of documentary
consumption takes place at the other end of the spectrum, through low-budget
action and reality television programming. Highly formulaic structures and
styles dominate this industrialized approach, resulting in ‘low-cost, high-vol-
ume’ documentaries. As a programmer for the History Channel stated: ‘Our
M.O. is clip, talking head, clip, talking head [. . .]. We do it because it works.
If you want to do something else, tell us how it’ll happen on a budget and why
its better’ (quoted in Aufderheide 2005: 26).
Even amid these commercialized, easily repeatable forms, more tradi-
tional documentary approaches are branching out to capture new audiences.
Depending on one’s perspective, reality television – with its fly-on-the-wall
stylizations and reliable crisis structure – is either the monstrous child or
most successful legacy of direct cinema. The customary addition of voiceover
takes us back to documentary’s explanatory and interpretive functions, though
much voiceover has come to offer sarcastic or humorous observations instead
of earnest contextualization and analysis. The elliptical style of postmodern-
ism also has been absorbed into mainstream entertainments. Errol Morris’s
film noirish penchant for forensic detail, dramatic re-enactments and hypnotic
musical scoring has been adapted to serve cable television’s ‘true crime’ shows
such as Serial Killers, The FBI Files and Crimes that Shook the World. These
series, while sensationally outlining facts and details, often leave larger ques-
tions of motivation, of why and how, unanswered, leaving viewers with an
uneasy sense of postmodern indeterminacy.
Keeping in mind this potential range of current perceptions of documen-
tary, I want to consider how ‘serious’ documentaries have attempted to come
to terms with recent conceptual, stylistic and commercial turns while still
engaging certain inherited social functions of documentary. Even after the
ascendancy of postmodern irony and documentary as diversion, documenta-
ries that recall the form’s traditional functions do continue to retain a measure
of cultural currency: commenting, interpreting and intervening at times of
national crisis. The productive focus of recent documentary work on the war
and occupation in Iraq is a measure of this persistent, if contested, ‘faith’ in
the documentary form.
‘ war s ho w s ’
It is important to remember that US documentaries dealing with the Iraq War
have been produced under the shadow of representations both of the Vietnam
War and of the previous Gulf War (1990–1). After Vietnam and, especially,
the Gulf War, many critics were effectively writing off cinema’s potential for
critically engaging with war – for reversing or undermining an established
symbiosis between war and US cinema that stretches back at least as far as
1898, when theaters boldly advertised their programs of Spanish-American
War shorts as ‘War Shows’ (Kaplan 2002: 153).
As Harun Farocki’s Inextinguishable Fire (Germany, 1969) set out to prove
during the Vietnam War, electronically mediated versions of war’s atroci-
ties (in this case napalm burns) no longer seemed to have the power to shock
viewers, who have been desensitized and thus ‘close their eyes’ to the sheer
repetition of war imagery. Similarly, writing after the first Gulf War, Bernd
Hüppauf argued that cinema had ‘finally exhausted its critical potential’ for
dealing with war (1993: 41). Influenced by the theories of Paul Virilio and Jean
Baudrillard, Hüppauf reiterated claims that the ever-proliferating mass repro-
duction of images meant that photographic representation had lost its power
to persuade or invoke historical reality. With the dehumanized virtual realities
that typified media images of the Gulf War (‘surgical strikes’, ‘smart bombs’,
infrared guided missile footage, the eerie absence of human beings), war at a
distance became a video game: fully technologized and remote from humanity.
For Baudrillard, ‘War, when it has been turned into information, ceases to be
a realistic war and becomes a virtual war’ (2001: 242). War became spectacle,
a ‘simulacrum of war’ that, in public consciousness, ‘did not take place’ (232).
After the Gulf War, the possibility that moving images might be used as a
tool for opposing powerful ideologies underpinning acts of war seemed to be
receding, stacked against a growing consensus that the radical and counter-
hegemonic potential of film had long ago dissipated. Anti-war cinema not
only ran the risk of repeating ‘exhausted’ images, but, in its very invocation
of war imagery (as in combat films such as Full Metal Jacket [1987] or Saving
Private Ryan [1998]), of actually propagating patriotic and nationalist ideolo-
gies. For Hüppauf, it was no longer enough to practice a humanist montage
that exhibited the effects of war – for example, that showed ‘increasingly brutal
war conditions [. . .] juxtaposing them with the [suffering] human face’ (1993:
63). This approach suggested ‘anachronistic’ moral humanism that had lost
its impact in the context of modern warfare and the ‘structurally inhuman
battlefield’ (63). In this view, Robert Capa’s war photographs, for example, or
documentaries like The Spanish Earth, with its close-ups of dead children and
the faces of young soldiers going to war, would have lost their ability to shock
viewers into examining the consequences and casualties of war.
Figure 19. ‘Target Iraq’ graphic (2003).
History seemed to be repeating itself in 2003 in the run up to the Iraq War,
with ‘action’ news broadcasts across the US rolling out colorful computer
graphics, sound effects and slogans (‘Target Iraq’ on NBC; ‘America’s New
War’ on CNN). Twenty-four-hour commercial news was saturated by non-
stop, up-to-the-minute reports, endless screen crawls and multiple televisual
frames opening on to hyped-up (soon to be ‘embedded’) reporters, all provid-
ing the tense, carnivalesque atmosphere that has become almost de rigueur
in US television news. The war hadn’t yet started, but the story was already
written. The blanket use of military personnel as key experts on networks such
as CNN further reinforced, in Norman Solomon’s words, ‘a decidedly military
mind set’ even before war had been declared (2005: 124). Together, these sup-
pressions and amplifications typify features of what Simon Dalby refers to as
the dramatically successful tactics of ‘tabloid imperialism’ (2006: 304).
As has been widely observed, after the bombs began falling on Baghdad in
March 2003, the Iraq War became television’s sanitized war. There were few
scenes of carnage on the streets. The Bush administration forbade broadcast-
ing images of the coffins of returning dead soldiers, and the media complied.
Embedded reporting was a tactic assuring media collusion with US military
interests, where reporters could invoke Second World War-style heroics,
while suppressing images of the dead and wounded. Dissent was silenced, as
CBS news anchor Dan Rather recalled: ‘There was a fear in every newsroom
in America [. . .] fear of losing your job . . . the fear of being stuck with some
label, unpatriotic or otherwise’ (Pilger 2010: 7).
Yet the war also was met with a flurry of documentary production, deter-
mined to highlight mainstream media biases and elisions.2 Robert Greenwald’s
Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War, for example, was released
in November 2003 via house parties and Internet publicity organized by
the advocacy group MoveOn.org. Errol Morris’s The Fog of War (2003), an
extended interview with John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam
War czar Robert McNamara, was released six days after the capture of Saddam
Hussein in December 2003 and spoke implicitly to the Iraq occupation (as
Morris himself later stressed in his Academy Award acceptance speech). The
following year saw films like Jehane Noujaim’s Control Room, Fahrenheit 9/11,
David O. Russell’s (initially suppressed) Soldiers Pay and Petra Epperlein
and Michael Tucker’s Gunner Palace. Esteban Uyarra’s War Feels Like War,
screened on PBS – interestingly in light of Hüppauf’s comments on the
exhaustion of the war image of the suffering human face – eloquently employs
close-ups to document the life-altering situations encountered by interna-
tional journalists who refused to be ‘embedded’ according to the US military’s
demands. Many of these films, such as Greenwald’s, draw on documentary
mainstays of argument and persuasion; others, such as Control Room, draw on
direct cinema.
As outlined in Chapter 5, war in film has harnessed powerful public sen-
timents, constructing potent rhetorical frameworks (as in Capra’s Why We
Fight) for conveying historical veracity and social urgency. Perhaps to avoid
appearing manipulative, many Iraq War documentaries display an ‘aesthetic
of honesty’ (Musser 2007: 15), minimizing excessive rhetorical and stylistic
risks, relying instead on logic and reasoned argument. Some are accented with
postmodern flourishes – as in Eugene Jarecki’s response to Capra, Why We
Fight (2005) or Greenwald’s Iraq For Sale: The War Profiteers (2006) – but
always towards establishing a more robust truth. Here, as Charles Musser sug-
gests, documentaries mobilize a rhetorical structure where ‘state’ or ‘official’
truths are revealed as lies, as filmmakers ‘penetrate the dissembling masks of
public pronouncements and general knowledge that conceal or distort reality
and so reveal what is hidden underneath’ (2007: 12). Irrefutable evidence of
this suppressed truth is provided through talking heads interviews, authorita-
tive voiceovers and the recitation of facts, as in Charles Ferguson’s forensic
analysis of haphazard preparations for war, No End in Sight (2007). Still others
recall the illustrated lecture, as in Loretta Alper and Jeremy Earp’s study of the
deceptive politics of launching wars, War Made Easy (2007, based on Norman
Solomon’s book). Fewer prominent films play a more dangerous game, blur-
ring the lines between rationality, entertainment and sensation.
Documentaries dealing with critical issues such as military conflict tend to
be restricted in their ability to play at the level of performativity and unstable

truth claims. They risk opening themselves to the burden of proof and excep-
tional demands for verifiability and accountability. They wade into contested
territories, deeply divided ideologies and allegiances. But perhaps most prob-
lematic is the way they must negotiate a prevailing public sense of irony and
disengagement, where information has become unreliable disinformation or
‘infotainment’, where the ‘real’ has, paradoxically, retreated from perception
with the ever-increasing proliferation of ‘reality’ images and ‘live’ feeds that
take precedence on our multiple (television, computer, iPhone, BlackBerry)
screens. Finally, documentaries dealing with the Iraq War have had to come
to terms with the increasing tabloidization of television news and public
information – and with this, the perceived instability of all media ‘truth’.
These are the networks of media oversaturation, ‘voluntary’ censorship and
postmodern disengagement that Michael Moore entered into when making
Fahrenheit 9/11, which is the focus of the next section.
John Corner suggests that ‘the generous license accorded to the more
diverting modes [of documentary] cannot, as yet, be simply transferred across
to more serious kinds of documentary claims-making’ (Corner 2002). Still,
some filmmakers recently have attempted versions of this complex effort.
The documentary musical Soundtrack to War (2005) by Australian filmmaker
George Gittoes examines salient connections between war and mass media
diversions, interweaving combat footage with dance, rap, heavy metal and the
music video formats that dominate soldiers’ amateur films posted on YouTube
and elsewhere. At times the mood is meditative and unsettling, at others aban-
doned and entertaining. We discover that Gittoes’s camera is just one lens on
soldiers already flirting with media and celebrity culture. At one point when
Gittoes asks for an interview, a soldier passes on the offer, muttering in the
background, ‘I’ve been interviewed by Time, Newsweek, The New Yorker, fuck
it’. Similarly, Fahrenheit 9/11 creates a dialogue with other modes of public
information and popular entertainment (which includes Moore’s own previ-
ous work), rather than retreating to the narrative and representational certain-
ties of more traditional approaches.3 Rather than aim for ‘high-end’ sobriety,
Moore’s film holds a mirror up to the media, taking a parodic stance that
openly flirts with accusations of manipulation and falsification.
fahrenheit 9/11 (2004)

The omnipresence of tabloid journalism and the media assault that accompa-
nied the ‘war footing’ and ‘war on terror’ clearly influenced Michael Moore’s
decisions regarding how, stylistically and narratively, to approach the Iraq
War. Appropriating its title from Ray Bradbury’s classic dystopian novel
Fahrenheit 451 (1953), Moore implies the film will engage not just with the
war, but with more general problems of censorship, propaganda and truth
in representation. Yet while critical of the Iraq War and its pretexts, I would
argue that the film ends up projecting ambiguous and perhaps contradictory
conclusions about war as a mechanism of international policing and ideological
influence. At the same time, Fahrenheit 9/11 manages to capture a sense of the
density, heterogeneity and instability of Americans’ own national and patriotic
self-perceptions.
Stella Bruzzi refers to Fahrenheit 9/11 as ‘quintessential cinema documen-
tary’ (2006: 177). Moore’s film shows off the self-reflexive, performative and
popular elements of new documentary, veering between subversive parodies
of mainstream media and affective cinéma vérité. Cynthia Weber highlights
the ways the film exemplifies ‘vigilante journalism’ (2006: 116). From the self-
evident seriousness of PBS-style interviews to the superficiality of MTV and
cheap wedding video effects: one could arguably refer to Moore’s style as a form
of political and pop-cultural bricolage (Scott 2007). In this sense, Fahrenheit
9/11 is exemplary of the ‘dialectical’ tendencies that Bruzzi perceives in new
documentary, which reveal ‘the tensions between the documentary pursuit
of the most authentic mode of factual representation and the impossibility of
this aim’ (2006: 7). But in content and style, I would suggest, the film gestures
towards other realms of excess and undecidability – in particular towards the
political aesthetics of surrealism. ‘It is the excess of realism itself’, suggests
Nicholas Rombes, ‘which creates the conditions for the revelation of absurdity
that surrealism makes possible’ (Rombes 2008).
Moore’s film opens with fireworks etched against a night sky – a reference
to the ‘shock and awe’ fire display that hit Baghdad starting on 20 March
2003 – and Moore’s disembodied voice saying, ‘Was it all just a dream?’ After
the camera pans down to Al Gore’s Florida rally at the 2000 elections, Moore
repeats the question: ‘Was it a dream, or was it real?’ These self-reflexive
lines lend, before the fact, a certain irony to the flood of accusations regard-
ing manipulation and fakery that followed the film’s release. As Robert Brent
Toplin notes, Fahrenheit 9/11 quickly became recognized ‘as an embarrassing
example of over-the-top cinematic journalism, and Michael Moore has gained
a reputation as an extremist and a propagandist’. Of these critics, Christopher
Hitchens was one of the most outraged, calling the film ‘a sinister exercise in
moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness’ (Toplin 2005:
8–10; Hitchens 2004). Yet, as Moore’s ironic use of James Baker’s comments
on going to war asserts, perhaps ‘all this talk about [he laughs] legitimacy is
way overblown’. Indeed, perhaps a discussion of Moore’s strategies should
be couched in terms not just of whether the documentary makes stable truth
claims, but of how the documentary attempts to cope with the truths and lies
of going to war. The tactics of Fahrenheit 9/11 in this sense fall somewhere
closer to surrealist politics and the legacies of the avant-garde, as Moore’s

opening address about the slippage between dreams (and, one assumes, night-
mares) and the conscious, ‘rational’ world begins to suggest.
Surrealism, after the First World War, developed a powerful anti-estab-
lishment rhetoric with regard to war. André Breton’s observations of shell-
shocked soldiers who believed war to be a sham, staged ‘like some strange
form of theatre’, indicated ways of viewing war in terms of alternative reali-
ties (Breton 2006a [1918]: 204–5). In Fahrenheit 9/11, the theme of surreal
spectacle and its ambiguous relation to the real extends to the ‘domestic’ or
‘homeland’ sphere as well, where the theatrics of live news coverage of election
night (or, in NBC’s slogan, ‘Decision 2000’) are underscored by Moore’s addi-
tion of a Beverly Hillbillies-style banjo soundtrack. Surreal spectacle continues
into the halls of Congress, where African American members of the House
line up to decry the Supreme Court’s decision to disallow an extended recount
of votes in Florida. The scene ends with Congresswoman Maxine Waters’s
defiant exchange with the Chair of the proceedings, Senator Al Gore:
AG: ‘Is the objection in writing and signed by a member of the House
and a Senator?’
MW: ‘The objection is in writing and I don’t care that it is not signed by
a member of the Senate.’
AG: ‘The Chair will advise that the rules do care’ [laughter and applause
from the floor].
Waters’s passionate resistance (her voice breaks with emotion in the midst of
her protest) contrasts with the political circus (underscored by the laughter
from the floor, which borders on ridicule) breaking out around her. Gore’s
joke, too, is bounded by an ironic framework that verges on the unreal: not
only is he the instrument of the very ‘rules’ that are in fact working against his
interests (and possibly those of democracy), but he appears to be making light
of it.
As if to underscore the emptying out of truth and justice, Moore returns to
the Gore celebrations in Florida, but reverses the image, unfixing the bonds
between history and the event, between representation and the ‘reality’ it
represents. Just as surrealism, as in the documentary experiments of Vigo
and Buñuel, attempted to harness film’s oneiric ‘power to disorient’ (Breton
2006b [1951]: 786), Moore’s film returns to the world of dreams: ‘It turns out
none of this was a dream, it’s what really happened’. The authority of Moore’s
voiceover is itself rendered unstable in the face of the illusions, excesses and
inversions of ‘legitimacy’ that have just been screened.
The opening credit sequence breaks quite late (ten minutes) into the film,
disrupting the viewer’s absorption into the story and drawing attention to the
Figure 20. Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004). Dog Eat Dog Films. Courtesy of the British Film Institute.
process of viewing a filmic construct – and perhaps to the illusory power of

cinema itself. The ensuing ‘pre-roll’ sequence documents the stage behind
the stage, the ‘off-camera’ moments behind or edited out of the illusion: Bush
administration officials preparing to be filmed. Recalling the documentary
Feed (1992) about the New Hampshire primaries (featuring then-governor
Bill Clinton), the images show us both ‘the moments before an event of spec-
tacle’ and ‘the technological conditions of its display’, feeding scepticism
about media authenticity while denying faith in political realities as unified or
‘true’ (Kahana 2008: 311, 316). Fahrenheit 9/11’s ‘pre-roll’ sequence is slowed
down and further defamiliarized by Jeff Gibbs’s hypnotic musical score, creat-
ing an aesthetic effect that underlines the abstraction and remoteness of the
politicians on screen. The image of Paul Wolfowitz is especially memorable.
‘Disgusting, and funny’, Weber suggests (2006: 120), but also, as Wolfowitz
wipes his comb back and forth across his tongue before combing his hair with
it, oddly resembling another iconic figure: Flaherty’s Nanook, performing a
similar gesture with his ‘walrus ivory’ knife. Recalling the image of Nanook,
too, is Wolfowitz’s broad, uninhibited smile, which exudes uncanny brightness
and clarity. The shot perhaps implicitly links the film to a wider network of
unstable documentary images: here to Flaherty, the ‘father’ figure of American
documentary, whose work has also been a flashpoint for accusations of fakery.
Moore’s strategic usage of dialectical montage and self-reflexivity further
recalls surrealism, which – as in Buñuel and Dalí’s Un Chien andalou (1929) –
drew attention to the ‘rape and seduction of the viewer’s vision’ (Conley 2005:
197). Perhaps this rape and seduction is exemplified nowhere more than in
war films, with their compelling mix of patriotic urgency and sensation. And
it would be difficult to recall another ‘iconic’ image that has come closer to
viewer rape and seduction than that of the endlessly repeated destruction of
the Twin Towers.4 Once again Moore reverses the natural order of things by
refusing to privilege the visual: here sound upstages image. The technique is
effective: the sound of the first plane emerging from silence and a black screen
impels the audience, at the moment of impact, to imaginatively recreate the
missing visuals. There is a brief instant, in Eisensteinian fashion, when the
viewer ‘sees’ the anticipated image – so deeply ingrained are the links between
the sounds of 9/11 and the apocalyptic visions that accompany them – before
recognizing its absence. As Dalí wrote, the unconscious ‘often confronts our
consciousness with extreme cruelty’ (2006 [1930]: 426).
The black screen is, effectively, the start of the narrative, which moves from
the destruction of the Twin Towers towards the Iraq War and finally to the
war’s aftermath ‘at home’. Efforts to subvert audience expectations continue:
after one minute of black screen, the image fades to a woman’s face, gazing
upwards in shock. Slowly images merge with diegetic sound, which itself
begins to ebb away, replaced by music. Human figures become more marginal
as the visual field, previously suppressed, prevails. Here the film indulges in
a series of (counter-intuitively) aesthetically rich images: slow motion ashes
falling like snow on the city, papers blowing in the wind. The floating debris
mirrors the final scenes of Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970), itself a poetic
meditation on terrorism as social disenfranchisement and fatally confused
political protest. The whole sequence recalls surrealism’s objectives towards
‘convulsive beauty’ (quoted in Flitterman-Lewis 1996: 115).
With the sequence of Bush reading The Pet Goat to schoolchildren as the
towers are hit, the film moves towards the familiar comic territory of Moore’s
previous work. Comedy and parody, too, engage with surrealism’s legacy,
where humor is linked to anger and subversion of a patriotic war footing.
The humor was lost on the conservative radio commentator Rush Limbaugh,
however, who referred to Fahrenheit 9/11 as a ‘pack of lies’ (quoted in Toplin
2005: 8). Subsequent exposés such as Alan Peterson’s FahrenHYPE 9/11

(2004) portrayed the film as a dangerous web of deliberate misrepresentations.
Yet Moore’s parody consists far less of overt manipulation (such as Bush,
Cheney, Rumsfeld and Blair photoshopped, with obvious sloppiness, on to the
bodies of actors from the television western Bonanza) than of simply replay-
ing US television news and found footage as it was broadcast. This practice of
‘media piracy’ (Zimmermann 2000: 186–7) has the effect of recontextualizing
news images in order to defamiliarize the overly familiar. Newscasts branded
with their ‘War on Terror’, ‘America on Alert’ and ‘America Strikes Back’
logos – explicitly transforming social crisis and national fear into commodity
– fill the screen. We see stories about the terror threats posed by poison pens
and model airplanes packed with explosives, and a sequence about a high-
level terrorist alert for the town of Tappahannock, Virginia, rerun with little
alteration. Such scenes encourage contemplation of the paranoia of the media
world – reputedly the rational and objective reportage of the ‘real’ world – as a
landscape of dreams and nightmares.
But even with its multi-layered bricolage and auteurist displays, Moore’s
film enacts a partial retreat from its manifestly subversive intentions. This
becomes evident in Moore’s self-projection as the prototypical American
everyman, or ‘Little Man’ in baseball cap, t-shirt and baggy jeans (Rizzo 2006;
Nolley 2005). Moore places himself prominently, like an oversized version of
Chaplin’s Little Tramp, at the center of the narrative and often at the center
of the screen itself. For example, while the facts of Bush’s tarnished military
record and intimate relations with James R. Bath, who worked in a financial
capacity for the bin Ladens, should not fail to convince (as drawn from the
research of Craig Unger’s House of Bush, House of Saud [2004]), the overstated
manner in which Moore introduces them threatens their credibility. The
sequence opens with a heroic, slow motion shot of Moore himself in profile,
framed by an American flag and a captivated audience; a soothing piano score
plays in the background. Moore stresses his popular influence: ‘I called George
W. Bush a deserter [. . .] in response, the White House released his military
records’. The theme of cat and mouse enacted in Roger and Me returns here
with force, leaving this scene’s wider political implications subsumed to little
man/big man personality clashes.
The scenes reconstructing the Bush/Bath case are intriguingly imaged
through interwoven shots of appearing and disappearing textual evidence
accompanied by a pulsating score reminiscent of The Thin Blue Line, but a
striking difference from the latter is, once again, Moore’s authoritative inter-
pretation of events via the imposition of his voiceover. The omnipresent voice
positions Moore as the figure of authority and audience identification, a ‘US
“we” that [. . .] is hyper-individualized and utterly collectivized at the same
time’, Weber notes. Moore generally fails ‘to mouth the extremely complex
and varied moral objections many Americans have to the Bush administra-
tion’s security policies’, and rather poses ‘his own morally certain opposition
to the moral certainty of the Bush administration’ (Weber 2006: 124, 129).
This tendency towards an oppositional framework – ‘good’ Moore/us versus
‘bad’ Bush/them – possibly limits the film’s efforts to construct complex
truths and produce a trenchant and more expansive political critique.
The appearance of Lila Lipscomb, for all her emotive screen presence,
further generates a sense of ideological ambiguity. Lipscomb is positioned
within Moore’s diegesis not to critique patriotic war sentiments in favor of
pacifism, but to reassert a more traditional sense of national identity amid
an increasingly cynical and distrustful post-9/11 political climate. Moore
frequently stresses that criticism of Bush and the Iraq War shouldn’t be seen
as an attack on the idea of nationalism: critiquing the patriotic ‘we’ would
clearly alienate a substantial portion of his US audience. Lila never appears
as anything less than a patriotic everywoman, though she is disillusioned
with this war. We are led to believe that she might not be shocked by her loss
in quite the same way had Iraq been a ‘just’ war. In interviews, Lipscomb’s
argument echoed Moore’s, never interrogating the moral rightness of war,
but focusing on the ‘lies’ uttered by politicians like Bush (Brockes 2004).
Here Fahrenheit 9/11 diverges from the radical anti-war stance of movements
like surrealism, which ‘eschewed any willingness to die for one’s country’
(Toohey 2007: 612).
In Lila’s most affecting scene, she breaks down in front of the White House.
Once a democratic symbol of openness and access to the supreme figure of
national power, we see it barricaded with snipers patrolling the roof. As in
the ‘pre-roll’ credit sequence, the image suggests leaders failing to serve the
people: they are remote, self-protective, likely not to be trusted. Weber rightly
suggests that the shift in focus to Lila, away from Moore, in many ways signals
Moore’s attempt to appropriate Lila’s sympathetic yet authoritative voice as
his own (2006: 128). Yet the shift is, significantly, also signaled by a stylistic
move towards direct cinema. Unlike much of Moore’s work, an ethic of rela-
tive non-interference takes over, indicating objectivity, embodied subjectivity
and the ‘[film] material as evidence’ (Winston 1988b: 26). Yet the embedding
of direct cinema in Fahrenheit 9/11 works quite differently from its application
in other contexts. The audience relationship to Lila is one of ‘knowing’ her
through Moore, and we always sense his proximity even in scenes where he
isn’t visible. Moreover, unlike direct cinema observation, the film’s prevalent
self-reflexivity positions viewers as active and vigilant to the manipulations of
media representation. This cynical awareness instils a sense of having a savvy
relationship to the recording apparatus. We might distrust politicians and
the media, but Moore has also given us another vantage point in the film, one
that allows us to discern when the camera has the power to reveal moments of
‘truth’. This vantage point is created by juxtaposing images of obvious tech-

nical manipulation against revelatory moments (as in the ‘pre-roll’ sequence)
that have been ‘accidentally’, and thus faithfully, inscribed by the apparatus.
Hence Lila’s most affecting scene is marked by one of these ‘accidents’ of
inscription: a woman breaks into the frame and states, ‘this is all a stage’. We
recognize our own media cynicism in this woman, so how can we, in effect,
doubt the doubter? Yet, through Moore’s careful juxtapositions and the sty-
listic shift to direct cinema, viewers are encouraged to mark the difference
between media ‘lies’ and the documentary ‘truth’ of this moment. Since we
intimately ‘know’ Lila and her story by this point, the woman’s interrup-
tion suggests dramatic irony (as spectators, we know more than the doubting
woman, therefore her behavior appears inappropriate). Lila, and presumably
viewers, have been converted to Moore’s ‘truth’: ‘Ignorance’, Lila states;
‘people think they know, but they don’t know. I thought I knew, but I didn’t
know.’ In the figure of the doubting woman, confronting Lila in her moment
of grief, Moore reveals a different, postmodern version of the interpellated
subject: one no longer blinded by a faith in the national ‘we’ propagated by
dominant ideology and the media, but a subject so desensitized and disaffected
by media lies that she no longer recognizes the truth. Her appearance disavows
any potentially lingering doubts about Lila’s – and Moore’s – moral integrity
and authenticity.
A widely distributed publicity shot for Bowling for Columbine (2002) shows
Moore with two objects, one slung over each shoulder: a gun and a camera.
This juxtaposition not only underlines the film’s subject matter, but suggests a
project behind it: to use documentary as an idea-weapon, combating ingrained
prejudices and corporate networks that support the US gun trade. But as in
Fahrenheit 9/11, Bowling for Columbine ultimately reduces denser questions of
cultural and psychic investment in violence to the realm of little people enact-
ing victories against corporate interests (in Bowling, this involves successfully
lobbying for the suspension of ammunition sales in Kmart). Similarly, many
documentaries addressing the Iraq War avoid examining embedded, mythic
structures of conquest and imperial ‘right’ that have underwritten support for
military action. As Louis Menand argues, few films offer a denser reading of
the ‘intellectual investment’ behind the war, and ‘the intellectual investment
in the Iraq War is much scarier than the financial involvement’ (2004: 94).
For Weber, Fahrenheit 9/11 offers no utopian vision, ‘just a warning about
our current and possibly future dystopia’ (2006: 118). The same might be said
of a number of Iraq War films, such as Jarecki’s Why We Fight, which conveys
a multi-layered, historical argument about the Iraq occupation as an inevitable
outcome of the growth of the military industrial complex. Employing a thesis-
driven approach, Why We Fight combines archival footage with interviews,
compiling historical evidence to contest the insistence of Bush administration
Figure 21. Bowling for Columbine (2002). Dog Eat Dog Films. Courtesy of the Academy of
Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
officials that the US faces a ‘new war’ on terror, for which there is no relevant
history or precedent.5 Yet the film’s critique of the military industries stops
short of being pacifist or anti-nationalist, sidestepping accusations of anti- or
un-Americanism. Such films (like Moore’s) also sometimes hint at nostalgia
for a ‘better’ America of just wars and honest industry. Nonetheless, they
remain crucial for feeding public debate, generating forms of political belong-
ing and responsibility, and fueling ongoing conversations that ‘cut across
boundaries of generations and geography’ – in spaces ranging from cinemas,
church halls, and house parties to the blogosphere (Aufderheide 2007a: 64).
t he r e a l f a c e o f o c c up a t i o n
While responses to the Iraq War by directors like Greenwald and Jarecki have
critiqued the war ‘at home’, films engaging with those on the front lines tend
to eschew the thesis and lecture formats in favor of more visceral, intimate and
intensely subjective views of war. In the various video war diaries on YouTube,
the lives of soldiers are relayed through short clips, including comedy sketches
by bored soldiers stationed in armored vehicles and videos set to the music
of bands like Slayer and Seether. Deborah Scranton’s The War Tapes (2006)
gathers up such video diary accounts to provide close-up views of soldiers in
Iraq. Ellen Spiro and Phil Donohue’s Body of War (2007) works to convey the
personal costs of military conflict, foregrounding the soldier’s traumatized
body as the key trope for war. Errol Morris brought his auteur approach and
interrotron interview device to Standard Operating Procedure (2008), chiefly
a meditation on the ambiguities of photographic evidence (the Abu Ghraib
torture images), with glimpses of some of the motives behind torture. At the
other end of the spectrum of so-called grunt docs (Aufderheide 2007a: 59) are
cable and Internet-streamed shows such as Alpha Company: Iraq Diary (the
Military Channel), written and directed by former Baywatch director Gordon
Forbes III. Alpha Company: Iraq Diary stresses action and machismo, pitch-
ing US troops squarely against ‘the enemy’ through a mixture of combat and
patrol footage, high-energy music and sonorous voiceover. The collective
‘you’ is drawn directly into the frame, as in more traditional war propaganda.
Importantly, certain ‘frontline’ films have foregrounded not just soldiers,
but the Iraqi people themselves. These are the Iraqis often seen in the margins
of war films, portrayed in the media as ‘good’ allies or ‘bad’ insurgents, speak-
ing untranslated in the background of journalists’ diaries, crowding around
cameras pointed from military vehicles, lying on the ground at the wrong end
of a gun barrel, providing evidence of horrific injury or ‘collateral damage’.
Some of these ‘learning-from-the-Iraqis-films’ have had relatively high-profile
releases, including James Longley’s elegant and wrenching Iraq in Fragments
(2006, made with HBO) (Aufderheide 2007a: 62). But generally, these films
have had a harder time finding distribution and press attention, gaining audi-
ences through alternative venues and Internet sites. Of these, Steve Connors
and Molly Bingham’s Meeting Resistance (2007) records personal testimonials
of those labeled insurgents by the US military and media; Usama Alshaibi’s
Nice Bombs (2007) documents his cautiously optimistic 2004 return to
Baghdad, which eventually he decides to flee. The film collective InCounter’s
About Baghdad (2004) is an account of the Iraqi writer and poet Sinan Antoon’s
explorations of tensions and fears in Baghdad during the summer of 2003, just
after the fall of the Ba’ath regime.
A series of shorter documentaries have found limited distribution via the
Internet, film festivals and community and university screenings, for example:
500 Miles to Babylon (David Martinez, 2006), the Al Qitaf Artistic Production
Testimonies from Fallujah (Hamodi Jasim and Dahr Jamail, 2005), the anony-
mously made Vietnam Street (2004), Terror (Termite TV Collective, 2005) and
Kareem Farooq, Molly Fink and Brian Drolet’s Globalization at Gunpoint: The
Economics of Occupation (2004). The latter was made with Deep Dish Satellite
Network, an outgrowth of the video activist group Paper Tiger Television,
established to gather and distribute community access work from around the
US. Deep Dish also helped produce a film to which I’d like to briefly turn:
The Real Face of Occupation (2004), a compilation documentary (included
on the independently distributed DVD collection, Shocking and Awful: A
Grassroots Response to War and Occupation [2004]) that draws on the footage of
activist video groups like Democracy Now! and Occupation Watch.
The Real Face of Occupation at first appears to be a loose montage of harrow-
ing clips drawn from found footage, documenting public addresses, protests,
angry encounters, military aggression at checkpoints and the suffering inflicted
by daily losses of life in Iraq. While the footage is drawn from various sources,
the montage technique ultimately reveals underlying patterns. One sequence
links a speech by the campaigner Yanar Mohammed of the Organization
for Women’s Freedom in Iraq to images of escalating tensions between US
soldiers and women demonstrators in Baghdad during August 2003. These
scenes move to seemingly unrelated night vision shots at a Baghdad check-
point in July 2003, where US soldiers shout threats and profanities, aiming
their rifles into a car in which a group of Iraqis are transporting an ill woman.
The jarring scene cuts to an intense interview with a grieving family – father,
brother, wife and children – of a man shot by US troops while waiting for a
taxi (the military later claimed he had a pistol). The sequences seem to unfold
randomly, documenting disparate locations and events through a variety of
low-budget styles, but the juxtaposition of scenes indicates escalating tensions
and lapses in communication, culminating in the eruption of violence and its
devastating consequences. As opposed to the ‘mathematical space emptied of
human experience’ (Hüppauf 1993: 74) that dominated images of the first Gulf
War, Iraq War films often foreground embodied experience, the ‘real face’ of
war, with images of conflict that have become ‘highly subjective and chaoti-
cally intense’ (Pisters 2010: 243).
In terms of production and distribution, films such as The Real Face of
Occupation perpetuate not only the democratic ideals of community access, but
recall aspects of activist documentary of the 1930s, emphasizing compilation
reels rather than polished cinema products. The FPL, Belinda Baldwin and
Robert Bahar argue, cemented a political documentary practice in the US that
could ‘bring marginal or invisible social identities to the forefront’, challeng-
ing ‘the commercial media’s stranglehold over the American political agenda’.
Figure 22. The Real Face of Occupation (2004). Deep Dish TV. Image capture, Deep Dish TV
DVD.
Indeed much recent activist documentary in the US, even with (or because
of) digital cameras and the Internet, recalls versions of the ad hoc production
and distribution techniques developed by the FPL (Baldwin and Bahar 2004:
12–16).
The work of organizations such as Deep Dish suggests that perhaps less
depends upon producing a ‘new aesthetic’ (Hüppauf 1993: 76) to combat
the distancing and dehumanizing of war’s consequences than on the task of
getting documentaries such as The Real Face of Occupation widely screened.
For example, Adam Curtis’s complex analysis of the ‘war on terror’, The Power
of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear (2004), while broadcast on BBC2
in Britain, was rejected by HBO and not commercially distributed in the US
– though HBO’s ‘shock doc’ that dealt with the occupation, Baghdad E.R.
(2006), was shown as a lead-in to The Sopranos. Some of these films have been
broadcast on PBS or can be accessed on Internet Archive or Google Videos,
but most have had no mainstream network or theatrical distribution.
Here, especially with regard to access, the Internet plays a crucial role. Sites
like WikiLeaks, in particular, have generated sensational debates relating to
transparency, visual evidence and the role of documentary in shaping politi-
cal views and national policy. In the WikiLeaks release of footage shot from
an Apache helicopter gun-sight, entitled Collateral Murder (2010), we again
witness the alignment of camera and weapon, revealing (as the film describes
it) ‘the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of
New Baghdad’, including two Reuters employees, along with two children
seriously injured. Though drawing directly on military footage, the release was
‘packaged’ as a documentary, with two versions streamed online: one thirty-
nine minutes and the other edited to seventeen minutes. The video’s impact is
enhanced by its status as a ‘leaked’ and authenticated military record, an ‘acci-
dent’ of technical inscription never meant for public view. As a result, we are
aware as we watch that the deaths might ‘never have taken place’ were it not
for the release of this video record. The film indicates WikiLeaks’ attention to
public paranoia about falsification and digital manipulation; thus any obvious
interferences such as added voiceover are minimized, though it does contain
subtitles and title cards of quotes, opinion and analysis, all framed by an una-
bashedly editorializing title. Some footage is slowed down to highlight the
Reuters staff, and arrows point to details in the blurry images such as the men’s
camera equipment (referred to by soldiers on the radio track as weapons), the
two injured children and dead bodies in the aftermath. There are also pointed
repetitions, in particular the looped voices of soldiers who seem desperate to
fire their weapons (‘c’mon, let us shoot!’). They refer to the victims as ‘dead
bastards’, congratulating themselves on ‘good shootin’ and laughing as a
military vehicle drives over one of the victims’ bodies. They first person point
of view recalls both video gaming and combat film, with the viewer engaged
in the middle of the action, but here customary heroic identifications are
reversed: we are locked into a viewpoint taking actions that arouse shock and
repulsion. We witness close at hand the desubjectified and desensitized states
of soldiers in combat mode, armed with sophisticated killing technology, and
trained to use it.6
The New Yorker echoed WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange’s view that the video
was ‘a striking artifact – an unmediated representation of the ambiguities and
cruelties of modern warfare’ and an unsettling interrogation of the ‘Rules of
Engagement’ (Khatchadourian 2010: 40). Fox News criticized the editing of
the video, while US Defense Secretary Robert Gates complained that there was
no ‘context’: ‘there’s no before and there’s no after’ (Stewart and Zabarenko
2010). Collateral Murder is not, however, unmediated ‘pure’ information: it
makes use of the documentary form as a public mode for consuming factual
material. It contains contextual analysis via title cards, quotes from witnesses
and a three-minute introduction that includes ‘after’ images including the
journalist Saeed Chmagh’s grieving son, clutching a photograph of his dead
father. The film’s power to shock derives from its minimalism and its ‘found’
aesthetics that blur video gaming technology (on which soldiers are actually
trained) with a visceral reality effect. Real-time footage shows the speed at
which adrenaline-fueled desires to ‘engage’ can set in, how human beings in
the wrong place at the wrong time are reduced to ‘targets’ and dispatched with
a mixture of detachment and satisfaction in a job well done.
If another ‘small war’ – Vietnam – offers any precedent, together these

films and videos of the Iraq War help us to track the development of war and
its impact on national self-perceptions. Documentary’s established functions
of engaging with issues of social responsibility and citizenship, of question-
ing dominant ideologies and naturalized viewpoints and of creating public
spheres and ‘active interventions in public life’ persist in this body of work
(Aufderheide 2007a: 56). Documentary, Paula Rabinowitz notes, ‘memorial-
izes the present for the future’ (2005: 31). If this is true, then documentaries
dealing with the traumas of war and occupation address not only the present,
but a future that will one day have to confront the gaps and silences of history
and memory.
In Notes of a Native Son (1955), James Baldwin wrote: ‘I love America more
than any country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right
to criticize her perpetually’ (1984 [1955]: 9). Baldwin’s critique was aimed at a
future imagined nation – stronger, more equal, more just. A similar sentiment
might be applied to recent documentaries such as Fahrenheit 9/11, which
appeal to the idea of national regeneration through critique. They also imply,
however, a stronger ambivalence about the future nation’s capacity for gener-
ating a moral and just society. As Moore finally asks of those Americans who
might be called on to defend a future America: ‘Will they ever trust us again?’
The Real Face of Occupation and Collateral Murder take far more pessimistic
views of a nationalist agenda and the tunnel vision of naive or unquestioning
nationalist thinking. Indeed, as Kahana has observed, much post-9/11 US
documentary has noticeably moved away from applying social and political
critique as a nation-building exercise towards asserting a greater sense of
national indecision and incompleteness. Observing this contrast to the certain-
ties and future imaginings that documentary once strove to produce, Kahana
notes a contemporary ‘foreshortening of the social horizon of documentary’
(2008: 336).
The implications of this foreshortened social and historical perspective
become more profound as the proliferation of reality images increases expo-
nentially: we live amid an ever-increasing number of devices that reproduce,
display and invite us to consume the real world. The realities they show us
are often mundane or trivial, yet can also be heartbreaking or shocking: from
comic stunts, dares and pet tricks to dramatic storms, floods and lives broken
by war. These technologized realities flip by on our screens in numbers that
would be staggering had they not become such common fixtures of modern
life. Much nonfiction footage is consumed in isolated, decontextualized
bites – fragments caught on image and sound recorders around the world.
Yet to comprehend what they reveal is still not a simple process. If YouTube
comments posted by viewers – a free-for-all forum for audience response –
provide any clue, these images cannot simply ‘speak for themselves’. Take, for
example, the many short films and images of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami,
in which 230,000 people died. Whereas most YouTube viewers express pain
or sorrow at the images, others actually joke about the staggering losses, label
the images as ‘fake’ or even criticize the loss of life as stupidity. Clearly, such
nonfiction images serve a variety of purposes across a vast number of sites.
Just as clearly there remains a widespread lack of comprehension of the scale
and impact – the magnitude – of events captured in fragments and streamed
to global audiences.
For Nichols, this question of magnitude underlies the understanding,
meaning and use of nonfiction images. The issue of magnitude ‘involves a
tension between the representation and the represented as experienced by the
viewer’ (1991: 232). Though we avidly consume and respond in various ways
to technical reproductions of sounds and images of the world, we do not neces-
sarily ‘know’ them, and simply being exposed to technologically reproduced
realities does not necessarily add to our knowledge. Though we might engage
in a ‘visceral experience’ of filmed reality, still that visceral experience ‘must be
rendered meaningful’ (Nichols 1991: 232). In the case of extreme images such
as those of war, natural disaster or other tragic events, there remain seemingly
unbridgeable physical, temporal and technological gaps between those close
to the tragedy and those viewing the events from a safe remove. For Nichols,
‘the magnitudes opened up by a [film] text are not merely a matter of naming
something of profound importance’ – beyond this basic information, audi-
ences need to be situated in positions where a received image or text can be
endowed with ‘subjective intensity’. Audiences develop an awareness of the
meanings of filmed events through an awareness of a tension between what is
represented and what this representation implies: those ‘magnitudes beyond
representation’. These palpable magnitudes include factors such as time,
embodied subjectivity and histories and contexts that lie beyond the immedi-
ate frame (Nichols 1991: 232–3). Of course this process of endowing meaning
and subjectivity to discrete fragments of filmed reality is complex, and can
become a process of negotiation, contestation and, frequently, manipulation,
as this book has hopefully made clear.
Transforming spectacles, sights, facts and information into forms of
complex experience means linking them to magnitudes beyond the visible.
This is the task – the ever receding horizon, perhaps – of the documentary
form.
no t e s
1. On the ‘symptom’ as the collapse of the symbolic and ‘real’ of cultural events, see Žižek
(1989: 11–54).
2. For an overview of Iraq War-related films, see Jaafar (2008: 16–22).
3. About seventeen shots from Gittoes’s film were used in Fahrenheit 9/11.
4. On the ‘iconic’ image, see Bruzzi (2006: 21).
5. On the ahistoricism of the ‘war on terror’, see McAlister (2002).
6. Pisters cites John Protevi, who examines soldiers’ training practices that induce
desensitized states and reflexes for killing, including training on video gaming technology
(2010: 243).
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Index
About Baghdad, 235 amateurs, 26–7, 79–82, 85–7, 156, 219

Academy Awards, 121, 186, 188, 194, 197, 225 and color stock, 139, 153n
and controversy, 192, 214, 216n American Family, An, 184
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and American Indian, 20, 34–5, 47, 200
Sciences, 153n, 194, 197, 216n and cultural nostalgia, 34, 55
acting, 17, 95, 159, 166 see also Inuit
actualities, 14, 35–9, 40–1, 44, 63–4, 156 American Library Association, 118
v. documentaries, 5, 10, 32–3, 39 American Tongues, 194
advertising, 8–9, 34, 41, 82, 123, 191 Americanization, 35, 47, 83, 99
and Code of Ethics, 61 amusement parks, 20–3, 43, 45
aerial photography, 132, 134, 144–7 Anderson, Benedict, 3, 6
aesthetics, 6, 66–7, 70–4, 78 Anémic Cinéma, 69
and anti-aesthetics, 69, 95 animation, 7, 67, 70–1, 134, 146
and camp, 179 Anschütz, Otto, 31
and the everyday, 66, 157 anthropology, 20–1, 41, 55, 58, 156–7; see also
and ideology, 18–19, 189, 198, 208, 229–30 ethnography
and left-wing politics, 92–5, 114–15 Antonio, Emile de, 186, 191
and war, 112–13, 136, 144–5, 225–7, 237 Armat, Thomas, 31–2, 36
Afghanistan see wars Arnheim, Rudolph, 83
Agee, James, 101, 152 art cinema, 82–3, 85n, 86, 114
Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer, 199 Arthur, Paul, 195, 198, 208, 221
Akeley, Carl, 59–60 Asian Exclusion, 117, 120n, 131
Alaska-Siberian Expedition, The, 49 Association of Documentary Film Producers,
Alexander, William, 91–2, 95, 100, 119n 118
All My Babies, 152 attractions see cinema of attractions
All Quiet on the Western Front, 125 audiences, 8, 179–80, 213, 239–40
Alper, Loretta, 225 and critical engagement, 22–3, 93, 198,
Alpert, Jon, 188 230–3
Alpha Company: Iraq Diary, 235 and demographics, 51–2, 130, 191, 213
Alshaibi, Usama, 235 and direct address, 34–6
alternative media see media and identification, 24, 47, 56–7, 143, 169,
Altman, Rick, 51, 64n 207–10
as social mass, 30, 76, 88, 91, 123–4, Bhabha, Homi, 2–3
188 Bingham, Molly, 235
Aufderheide, Pat, 222, 234, 239 Biograph Company, 43, 45, 77, 123
authenticity, 10, 23–4, 37, 53–4, 123, 194, Birth of a Nation, The, 55, 73, 164
229 Black, Gregory D., 127, 131–2
autobiography, 203–4, 206 Black Journal, 188
and diary films, 195, 210 Black Maria, 32–5, 37–8
and war diaries, 235 Blacksmith Scene, 33–5
Autobiography of a Jeep, The, 132–3 Blank, Les, 191
avant-garde, 65–85, 198, 207, 228–30 Blitzstein, Marc, 71, 117
definitions of, 67–8, 72 Block, Mitchell, 185
and documentary, 65–7, 70–3, 93, 112 Blood and Fire, 158
and Grierson, 66, 198 Blood of the Beasts, 157, 173
Bloomstein, Rex, 184
Back-Breaking Leaf, The, 158 Blue, James, 160, 168
Backman, Lucien, 111 Boddy, William, 188–9, 213
Badger, Reid, 20, 22, 30 body
Baghdad E.R., 237 and direct cinema, 154, 174, 179
Bahar, Robert, 119, 236 and display, 20–2, 24, 28, 54
Baldwin, Belinda, 119, 236 and filmgoing experience, 9, 38
Baldwin, James, 239 and queer documentary, 209–10
Ballet Mécanique, 67–8 and virtual reality, 42–3
Balog, Lester, 92, 94 and war, 139–40, 235, 237–8
Barkawi, Tarak, 122–3 Body of War, 235
Barker, Jennifer, 209 Bolm, Adolph, 67, 71
Barnouw, Erik, 30, 32, 123, 152, 159, 167, 188 Bonus March, 92–3
Barsam, Richard Meran, 94, 103, 117, 119n, Borowik, Wlodzimierz, 157–8
122 Brandon, Liane, 195
Basinger, Jeanine, 141, 143 Brault, Michel, 158
Battle of Britain, The, 137 Breton, André, 69, 228
Battle of Midway, The, 121, 139 Bridge, The (Ivens), 112
Battle of San Pietro, The, 139–40 Bridge, The (Van Dyke), 132, 144
Battleship Potemkin, 71, 96 Brody, Sam, 91–3
Battleships ‘Maine’ and ‘Iowa’, 123 Broken Rainbow, 200
Baudrillard, Jean, 184, 223 Bronx Morning, A, 74
Beales of Grey Gardens, The, 177, 183 Broomfield, Nick, 195, 198–9
Beam, Joseph, 205–6, 210–11 Brother’s Keeper, 214
Beattie, Keith, 25, 155–6, 170, 175, 207, Browning, Irving, 94
219–20 Bruno, Giuliana, 41
Behind the Rising Sun, 130–1 Bruzzi, Stella, 219, 227, 241n
Bell, Martin, 191 Bryher, 80, 85n
Bell, Ulric, 132 Buck, Frank, 61–2
Benelli, Dana, 61–2 Buffalo Dance, 33–5
Bercovitch, Sacvan, 99 Bullert, B. J., 189–90, 211–12
Berger, John, 76–7 Bullfight at Malaga, 162
Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, 74 Buñuel, Luis, 69–70, 228, 230
Berlinger, Joe, 214 Bureau of Motion Pictures, 127–32, 137
Betts, Ernest, 71, 80 Burnett, Charles, 184
Betty Tells Her Story, 195 Burns, Ken, 194
in dex 265
Bush, George W., 2, 119, 224, 229–32 City, The, 72, 77, 115
Bute, Mary Ellen, 71 City of Contrasts, 94
city symphony, 66, 72, 74, 77, 79, 112, 158
Cabin in the Cotton, 104 City Symphony, A, 74
Cabinet of Dr Caligari, The, 71, 82 Civil Rights Movement, 117, 138, 152, 160,
Caldwell, Erskine, 115 199, 206
Campbell, Russell, 91–3, 96, 115, 117 Civil War, The, 194
Campus on the March, 128 Clinton, Bill, 187, 229
Canada, 42, 51–2 Close Up (journal), 71, 80, 83
and National Film Board, 158, 188 CNN, 215, 224
Capa, Robert, 223 Cold War, 150, 161, 189
Capra, Frank, 121, 128, 136–8, 225 Collateral Murder, 237–8
Capturing the Friedmans, 221 colonialism, 20, 50, 60, 62
Carroll, Noël, 9–10, 184 and postcolonial debate, 54
Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 115 see also imperialism
Castonguay, James, 124 color, 121, 139, 142, 153n
Castro, Alex, 206, 208 and early processes, 49–50, 67
Celluloid Closet, The, 214 Color Adjustment, 199
censorship, 83, 91, 98, 101 Colour Box, A, 111
and First World War, 124–6 combat film, 124, 135, 138–40, 157, 223, 235
and Iraq War, 224–5, 226–7 and artifice, 138–9, 142–3
and neo-conservatism, 211–12, 215 and immediacy, 139–40, 141
and Second World War, 126–7, 132 and point of view, 143–7, 238
Century of Progress, A, 94 comedy, 187–8, 191–2, 222, 230–1, 235
Chair, The, 163–4 Coming Out Under Fire, 200
Chanan, Michael, 10, 13, 151, 189, 192 Communism, 69–70, 187
Chang, 60 and ‘fronts’, 91, 96, 150
Chaplin, Charlie, 76, 231 and Red Scares, 126, 150–1
Chien andalou, Un, 230 and US, 91–2, 98–9
children, 90 Congorilla, 60
and documentary, 114, 152, 165–6 Congress, The, 194
and media effects on, 97–8 Constructivism, 68–70, 78
Children Were Watching, The, 163 Control Room, 225
Children Who Labor, 90 Cook, David, 97–8
China Strikes Back, 115 Cooper, Merian C., 60, 62, 81
Chopra, Joyce, 160, 166 Copland, Aaron, 133, 150
Choy, Christine, 200 Corner, John, 8, 154, 169, 185, 212, 220,
Chronicle of a Summer, 158–60 226
chronophotography, 27–9, 33, 124 corporate sponsorship, 99, 151–2, 215
Churchill’s Island, 121 Cowie, Elizabeth, 23
Cicero March, 160 Creel, George, 124
cinema of attractions, 23–4, 35, 37–8, 44 Cripps, Thomas, 130, 138
cinéma vérité, 93, 156, 158–60, 195 Crisis (Kline and Hammid), 134
and direct cinema, 154, 166, 168, 175 Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment
and influence of, 184–5 (Drew), 163–6, 169–70
cinématographe, 17, 29, 39n, 156 Crumb, 214
citizenship, 3, 207–8, 220–1 Cuba, 41, 123
and documentary, 98, 100, 121, 155, 199– Culbert, David, 122, 129, 130, 135, 138
200, 216 Cummington Story, The, 133
Curtis, Adam, 237 and ‘modes’, 16n, 33, 37, 168–70, 195
Curtis, Edward S., 16n, 45, 51, 58, 90 and resurgence of theatrical, 190–1, 214,
221–2
Dada, 67–9, 74 Doherty, Thomas, 60, 98, 104, 110, 128, 138
Dahomey (Fon), 22, 24 Domestic Violence, 172
Dalí, Salvador, 69, 230 Donald, James, 72, 80
Damned in the USA, 215 Dong, Arthur, 200
dance, 34–5, 67, 208, 226 Dont Look Back, 166, 179
Danse Macabre, 167 Douglass, Frederick, 19
Dark Circle, 190 Dovzhenko, Alexander, 72, 95, 114
David Holzman’s Diary, 185 Drew, Robert, 157, 160–3, 166, 170
Davidson, David, 171, 181 Duchamp, Marcel, 69
Davis, Elmer, 127, 129, 131, 137 Dunne, Philip, 122, 133, 136
Davis, Peter, 186 Dunye, Cheryl, 214
Days Before Christmas, The, 158
Days of Rage: The Young Palestinians, 190 Eastman Company see Kodak
Dead Birds, 167 Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze (aka
Deadly Deception, 215 The Sneeze), 17–18, 32
December 7th, 15, 149 Edison Manufacturing Company, 17–18,
Del Duca, Robert, 92, 96 30–4, 36–40, 90, 123–4; see also Black
Delhi Durbar, The, 50 Maria; kinetoscope
democracy, 99, 115–16, 220–1, 228 educational films, 64n, 90, 118, 152, 191,
and filmmaking, 15, 155, 163, 187–9, 212– 199
13, 236–7 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 133
and television, 169 Eisenstein, Sergei, 26, 70–1, 76, 93, 95, 113,
Denning, Michael, 87–8, 94, 96, 114 182
Denzin, Norman, 4, 189 Elam, JoAnn, 195
Depue, Oscar, 46–7 Ellis, Jack C., 17, 101, 118, 158
Deren, Maya, 85n, 134 Elsaesser, Thomas, 65–6, 69
Dick, Bernard F., 114, 136 Enlightenment, the, 6, 192–3
Dickson, W. K. L., 17, 30–2, 35, 39n Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, 216
direct cinema, 15, 154–85, 194, 222 ethics, 7, 54, 61, 158, 167, 180
and backlash against, 168, 180, 184, 195 Ethnic Notions, 199, 209
and cinéma vérité, 154, 166, 168, 175 ethnicity, 3, 16n, 131, 199–202
and editing, 162, 164–5, 170, 180–2 and difference, 24, 34
and intimacy, 154–5, 158, 163–4, 168, and diversity, 96, 117, 133–4, 193, 204,
233 207–8, 215
and style, 154, 184–5, 232–3 and stereotypes, 38, 124–5, 130–1, 137–8,
Discovery Channel, 5, 47, 63, 213 203–4
distribution, 213–15, 221 ethnography
and alternative methods, 79–83, 91–3, and display, 20–2, 34–5, 41–2, 54–7, 60–1
110–12, 188–9, 235–7 and film, 34, 51–2, 156, 158–9, 193
and film festivals, 189, 213, 222 and ‘shared’, 54, 58, 159, 198, 208
and niche marketing, 191, 213 exoticism, 20–2, 41, 49–50, 57, 59–63
Divide and Conquer, 137 expeditionary films, 49–51, 59–62
documentary experimental film, 67, 70–3, 79–82, 86–7, 95,
and authority, 6–7, 65–6, 121, 191, 198– 159, 198, 228
200, 218 Expressionism, 68, 70–1
definitions of, 5–8, 11, 219–20 Eyes on the Prize, 199
in dex 267
Fahrenheit 9/11, 226–34 Freud, Sigmund, 69

and anti-war film, 232–4 Friedberg, Anne, 42
and cynicism, 226, 232–3 Froemke, Susan, 176–83
and Moore’s persona, 231–2 frontier (US), 105, 114, 131
and self-reflexivity, 227–8, 230, 232–3 and nostalgia, 35, 75, 116, 134
and surrealism, 227–8, 230, 232 Frontier Films, 114–18, 152, 162
fakery, 10, 45, 54, 61, 123, 227; see also
staging Gabo, Naum, 69–70
Farm Security Administration see Gaines, Jane, 38, 110, 119
Resettlement Administration Gardner, Robert, 66, 167
Farocki, Harun, 223 Gates of Heaven, 191
fascism Gellner, Ernest, 2, 6
and Europe, 98–9, 126–7, 139 gender, 37–8, 129, 145, 179–80, 195, 202–4,
and US, 88, 94, 115–17 207
Feed, 229 Germany, 68, 97, 133, 145–9
feminism, 178–9, 189, 193, 195, 198 and filmmaking, 70–1, 82, 157, 223
Ferguson, Charles, 225 and wartime stereotypes, 124–5, 130
Field, Connie, 153n, 191 Gilroy, Paul, 207–8, 212
Fielding, Raymond, 36, 43, 119n, 161 Gimme Shelter, 171, 179
Fiji and Samoa, 62–3 Gittoes, George, 226
Film and Photo League, 91–7, 100, 112, 116, Globalization at Gunpoint, 236
156, 188, 236–7 Godard, Jean-Luc, 164
film noir, 7, 151, 196, 222 Gomery, Douglas, 82
film societies, 83, 113 Gore, Al, 2, 227–8
film stock government filmmaking, 14–15, 88, 97,
and 16mm, 80, 139, 162, 188, 191 99–103, 110–12, 118
and 35mm, 156, 191 and wartime, 118, 126–35, 137
and orthochromatic, 56 government funding, 190, 211–12, 214–15
see also color Grapes of Wrath, The, 104, 116, 134, 139
Fischer, Lucy, 178 Grass, 60
500 Miles to Babylon, 236 Gray, Michael, 160
Flaherty, Robert J., 6, 45, 70, 81–2, 159 Great Britain, 36, 157–8
and 24 Dollar Island, 79, 82 and documentary, 10, 66, 99–100, 151
and The Land, 118 and Second World War, 121, 142–4, 148
and Louisiana Story, 151–2, 157, 162 Great Train Robbery, The, 43–4
and Man of Aran, 100 Greaves, William, 158, 160, 188
and Moana, 16n, 56–7, 66, 82 Greenwald, Robert, 117, 225, 235
and Nanook of the North, 42, 51–9, 70, 72 Grey Gardens, 175–83
Florey, Robert, 81 and budget for, 176, 181
Fog of War, The, 225 and editing of, 180–2
Footnote to Fact, 72–3 and modernist form, 181, 184
Ford, John, 15, 104, 121, 136, 138–9, 149 and reception of, 179–80
Ford Massacre, 92 Grierson, John, 39, 99–100, 118, 168–9, 220
Fordism, 80, 100 and definition of documentary, 5–6, 10,
Formalism, 69–70, 95 198
4 Little Girls, 214, 215 and first use of ‘documentary’, 16n, 66
France, 20, 142, 154, 156–7, 158–60 Griffith, D. W., 55, 164, 171
Franju, Georges, 84n, 157, 173–4 Griffith, Richard, 118, 151–2
Free Cinema, 157–8 Griffiths, Alison, 35, 47, 50
Guadalcanal Diary, 130–1 homosexuality, 203–10, 214

guerrilla television, 188, 213 and homophobia, 200, 203–4, 211–12
Gunner Palace, 225 and niche advertising, 191
Gunning, Tom, 23, 30, 35, 37–8, 40, 42 Hoop Dreams, 213–14, 216n
Hoover, Herbert, 91, 93, 98
Haddock, Mable, 211 Hoover, J. Edgar, 91, 150
Hale’s Tours, 43 Horak, Jan-Christopher, 67, 70–2, 75, 77–8,
Hall, Stuart, 163, 213 80
Halleck, DeeDee, 189 Hôtel des Invalides, 173
Hammer, Barbara, 192, 198, 210 House Committee on Un-American
Hammid, Alexander, 133–5, 152 Activities, 150–1
Hampton, Henry, 199 Hovde, Ellen, 178–82
Hands, 72 Howe, Lyman H., 46–8
Happy Mother’s Day, 166–8 Hughes, Langston, 150, 206
Harlan County USA, 119, 188 Hunger, 92, 119n
Hays, Will, 61, 101; see also Motion Picture Hunters, The, 158, 167
Producers and Distributors of America Hunting Big Game in Africa, 49, 58
Health Care: Your Money or Your Life, 188 Hüppauf, Bernd, 223, 225, 236
Hearst-Selig News Pictorial, 52 Hurley, Frank, 51
Heart of Spain, 115 Hurwitz, Leo, 87, 92–3, 102, 150
Hearts and Minds, 186 and break from FPL, 95
hegemony, 1, 54, 99, 186, 199–200 and Grierson, 100
Heider, Karl G., 193 and Native Land, 115, 117
Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam, 198 Huston, John, 138–40, 151
Heise, William, 32, 36, 38 Hymn of the Nations (aka Toscanini), 133
Hellman, Lillian, 112, 188
Hemingway, Ernest, 71, 112, 114 identification, 15, 49, 57–8, 164, 169–71, 218,
Hemment, John C., 49–50 238
Hemphill, Essex, 205–6, 209 identity
Henry Browne, Farmer, 130 and ethnicity, 199–200
Herzog, Werner, 191 and hybridity, 198, 202–6
High School, 172 and the nation, 1–5, 24, 88, 122, 186, 215,
Hine, Lewis, 89–90, 172 232
history, 192–3 If You Love This Planet, 190
and marginality, 138, 199–200 illustrated lectures, 30, 45–9, 58–9, 88–90, 225
and preservation, 7, 205–6, 211–12, 239 immediacy, 7, 23, 25–6, 34, 38, 50
and representation, 7, 136, 186–7, 194, and combat film, 139–41
195–6, 207, 228 and direct cinema, 154–5, 157–8, 184–5,
and revisionism, 75, 133 195
Hollywood, 4, 61–2, 81–2, 102, 110 and travel, 42, 60
and alternatives to, 79–84, 86–7, 92–3, 96, Immigrant, The, 76
191–2, 214 immigration, 24, 94, 117, 120n, 130–1
and documentary’s influence, 59–62, 151 and Americanization, 99, 133–4
and government projects, 103, 110–11, imperialism, 24, 35, 50, 54, 150, 233
118, 132, 151 and US identity, 20, 35, 41, 47, 62–3
and wartime, 125, 128, 130, 135–40, 150 see also colonialism
Holmes, E. Burton, 46–7, 57, 90 In Search of Our Fathers, 203
Holocaust, 147, 149, 191, 196 In the Land of the Head-hunters (aka In the
Home Box Office, 183, 215, 235, 237 Land of the War Canoes), 45, 51
in dex 269
independents, 79–83, 84n, 86–7, 189–90, Julien, Isaac, 206

212–16, 236–7 Juvenile Court, 173
and distribution, 51, 61, 93
and production, 67, 71, 81, 112 Kahana, Jonathan, 4, 11, 88, 160–1, 169–70,
indoctrination (orientation) films, 128, 130, 192, 239
135–8, 149 Katrina (Hurricane), 119, 218
industrial films, 80, 135 Kazan, Elia, 95–6, 114
Inextinguishable Fire, 223 Keil, Charlie, 104, 107–8
Ingagi, 61 Kennedy, John F., 162–3, 166, 185, 225
interactive documentary, 16n, 37–8, 154, Kennedy, Robert, 164–5
158–60, 176–7 kinetoscope, 17, 30–3, 35, 38, 124
Internet, 42, 63, 123, 183, 235–7 King Kong, 62, 79
and distribution, 213, 216, 225 Kino Pravda, 37, 70, 95, 158–9
intertextuality, 177, 183–4 Klein, Bonnie, 195
intimacy, 9, 11 Kleinhans, Chuck, 206
and direct cinema, 154–5, 158, 163–4, Kleinschmidt, Frank E., 49, 58
168 Kline, Herbert, 115
and queer cinema, 205, 209–10 Kodak, 26, 31, 59, 80, 177
Inuit, 25, 49, 51–9 Koenig, Lester, 146, 151
Iraq For Sale: The War Profiteers, 225 Koenig, Wolf, 158
Iraq in Fragments, 235 Koppes, Clayton R., 127–8, 132
Iraq War see wars Kopple, Barbara, 117, 119, 184, 188
Italy, 49, 157 Koszarski, Richard, 57, 94
and Second World War, 133, 139–40
Itam Hakim, Hopiit, 200 labor issues
Ivens, Joris, 66, 83, 112–14, 118 and filmmaking, 86–7, 90–7, 114–17, 158
and reform, 89–90
Jacobs, Lewis, 17, 72–3, 87, 92–3 Lange, Dorothea, 101–2, 106
Jaguar, 159 Lanzmann, Claude, 191, 196
Jamail, Dahr, 236 Last Waltz, The, 187
James, David E., 67, 81, 91 Leacock, Richard, 151, 155–7, 160–3, 166–8
James, Steve, 213–14 LeBlanc, Robert, 205–7
Jameson, Fredric, 195–6 Lee, Spike, 119, 192, 214–15
Japan, 47, 115, 150 Léger, Fernand, 67–8
and exclusion, 117, 133 Lerner, Irving, 94–5, 132–3, 151
and racism, 129–31, 201 Leshne, Carla, 93–94
and Second World War, 139 Let There Be Light, 140, 151, 153n
Japanese Relocation, 131 Levitt, Helen, 152
Jarecki, Eugene, 117, 225, 233, 235 Leyda, Jay, 74, 92, 114
Jasim, Hamodi, 236 Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra,
Johnson, Lyndon B., 161, 225 The, 81
Johnson, Martin and Osa, 59–60, 81 Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter, The, 153n,
Joslin, Tom, 210 191
journalism, 101, 127, 227 little cinemas, 79, 82–3
and ‘embedding’, 139, 224–5 Livingston, Jennie, 184, 194
and ‘New’, 171–2 Loeb, Janice, 152
and ‘tabloid’, 224, 226 Longley, James, 235
and television, 151–2, 156–7, 161, 187–8, Looking for Langston, 206
192, 217–18, 231 Lorde, Audre, 202, 204, 207
Lorentz, Pare, 72, 97–8, 100–12, 118–19, 122 and transparency, 81, 212–13
Loridan, Marceline, 159 see also remediation
Losey, Mary, 118, 119n Meeting Resistance, 235
Love of Zero, The, 81 Méliès, Georges, 44–5, 65
Lumière brothers, 17, 29, 32, 43, 64n, 65, 156 Mellett, Lowell, 127–8, 132, 137
Lye, Len, 111 melodrama, 103, 109–10, 116, 177, 182
Lyotard, François, 192–3 memory, 7, 194, 196, 204, 209–10
Memphis Belle, The, 140–9
Macartney-Filgate, Terence, 158, 162 and point of view, 141, 143, 146–7
McBride, Jim, 185 and propaganda, 143, 149
McCarthy, Joseph, 150–1, 161 and reception of, 140, 149
McCarthy, Tom, 200 Mercer, Kobena, 208
MacDougall, David, 143, 210 Meshes of the Afternoon, 134
McElwee, Ross, 191–2, 195, 217–18 Mess Call, 33, 36–8
McLane, Betsy A., 16n, 17, 119, 158 Meyer, Muffie, 178, 181
MacLeish, Archibald, 71, 112 Meyers, Sidney, 95, 114, 133, 152
McLuhan, Marshall, 188 militarization, 123, 224, 233–4
Maddow, Ben (aka David Wolff), 132, 151–2 military, 38, 187, 224–6, 233–8
magic lantern, 29, 46, 88–9 and documentary, 121, 139–51
Making of the Panama Canal, The, 50 and filmmaking by, 124–5, 157
Mamber, Stephen, 163–4, 166–7, 170–1 and training films, 130, 135–8
Man With a Movie Camera, 66, 71 Miller, Arthur, 184
Manhatta, 6, 12, 14, 66, 73–9 Miller, Donald L., 145–6, 149
and American identity, 73, 75 Millions of Us, 86, 97
and city symphony, 74, 77 Misconception, 195
and modernity, 75, 77–8, 106 Misère au Borinage, 112–3
Manpower, 128–9 Mission to Moscow, 150
March of Time, The, 96, 119n, 152 mockumentary, 185, 214
Marey, Etienne-Jules, 28, 32, 124 modernism, 14, 65–8, 73–9, 172, 181
Marker, Chris, 66 modernity, 27, 34, 55–7, 74–5, 105
Marks, Laura, 6 modes of documentary see documentary
Marshall, John, 167, 174 Moi, un Noir, 159
Marxism, 96, 99, 115 montage, 26, 57, 182, 205, 223, 230, 236
Masayesva, Victor, 200 and Soviet approaches, 70, 72–3, 93, 105–6
Maxwell, Anne, 19–20, 24 Moore, Michael, 117, 195, 197, 220
Maysles, Albert, 157, 170–2 and Bowling for Columbine, 11, 214, 233–4
and Grey Gardens, 175–84 and Fahrenheit 9/11, 12, 226–34, 239
and the nation, 155 and Roger and Me, 192; 194, 214, 231
and postmodernism, 197 and Sicko, 188
and Primary, 157, 162–3 More Than Bows and Arrows, 200
Maysles, David, 160, 170–1, 175–83 Morin, Edgar, 154, 158–60, 168
media, 4, 40, 71–2, 97–8, 161, 217 Morris, Errol, 191–2, 212, 222, 225, 235
and alternative practices, 91, 119, 188–90, and The Thin Blue Line, 196–7
225, 235–7 Moscow Strikes Back, 121
and corporate institutions, 101–2, 189–90, Moss, Carlton, 138
213, 215–16, 222 Mother, 94
and cynicism, 226, 232–3 Motion Picture Producers and Distributors
and the masses, 84, 186, 220, 226 of America, 61, 101, 110
and propaganda, 126–7, 147 Mrs. Miniver, 142
in dex 271
multiculturalism, 75–6, 133–4, 186–7, 200, newsreels, 52, 61–3, 91–6, 124–5, 136, 152,
202–4, 215 161
Münzenberg, Willi, 91, 96 and Soviet Union, 91, 95
Murnau, F. W., 107 Nice Bombs, 235
Murphy, Dudley, 67–8, 81 Nichols, Bill, 17, 70, 73, 97, 172, 218, 240
Murrow, Edward R., 151, 161 and ‘sobriety’, 14, 65
Museum of Modern Art, 82, 111, 118, 152 and documentary definitions, 7–8, 10
music, 67, 138–9, 183, 208, 229–30 and ‘modes’, 16n, 33, 37, 168–70, 195
as subject matter, 81, 107, 187, 219, 226, Nitrate Kisses, 210
235 No End in Sight, 225
Musser, Charles, 34, 38–9, 44–5, 46–7, 88–9, No Lies, 185
94, 225 Noren, Andrew, 195
Muybridge, Eadweard, 26–31, 33 Northwest USA, 132, 144
and Animal Locomotion (1887), 28–30 Not a Love Story, 195
Noujaim, Jehane, 225
Nanook of the North, 42, 51–9, 70, 72 Nykino, 95–6, 100, 102–4, 111–14, 133, 188
and identification, 57–8, 59
and modern anxieties, 52, 54–6 observation, 95, 155, 163–4, 166–70, 173–7,
and reception of, 53 192
narrative, 8, 51–2, 107, 170, 193–4, 218 October, 71
and continuity, 45, 60, 103, 136, 142–3, 163 Office of War Information, 118, 127–35,
and ‘crisis’ structure, 162, 164, 170, 185, 136–7
222 Omnibus, 152, 157
and nonlinearity, 67, 70, 172–3, 207–8, 228 On the Bowery, 157–8, 161
and ‘slight narrative’, 33, 57–9, 96, 180–1 Our Enemy – the Japanese, 130
Nasaw, David, 22, 41 Our Hitler, 196
nation Our Sacred Land, 200
and definitions of, 2–3, 15–16, 192, 221,
239 Paper Tiger Television, 189, 236
and nationalism, 18, 38–9, 50, 97, 111–12, Paradise Lost, 214
122–4, 149, 223 Paragraph Zero, 158
and transnationalism, 71, 95–6, 198, 206– Parks, Gordon, 117
8, 214 Parmar, Pratibha, 206
national cinema, 3–5, 13 participatory documentary, 16n, 33, 37, 93,
national identity see identity 143, 159–60
Native Land, 115–18, 132, 162 patriotism, 115, 117, 223, 227–30, 149
Naumburg, Nancy, 94 and war, 38–9, 123–5, 137–40, 232–3
Navajo Code Talkers, 200 see also nation
Nazi Party, 96, 99, 121, 196 Paul J. Rainey’s African Hunt, 49–51
and propaganda, 111, 126, 129 Paul, R. W., 36
Nazis Strike, The, 137 Pearl Harbor, 117, 121, 127–8
Negro Colleges in Wartime, 129–30 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 16n
Negro Soldier, The, 130, 137–8 Pennebaker, D. A., 157, 160, 162–3, 166
neorealism, 7, 157 People of the Cumberland, 114–15
New Deal, the, 90, 94, 96–101, 104, 134 Perez, Gilberto, 6, 200
and scepticism, 110, 127–8 performance, 25–6, 33–6
New Earth, 112–13 and documentary, 159, 179, 183–4
New York Public Library, 69 see also acting
news see journalism performativity, 37, 195, 209, 219–20, 226–7
Petty, Sheila, 204, 207–8 queer cinema see homosexuality

Philippines, 41, 47, 122 Quiet One, The, 152
photography, and ‘index’, 6–7, 16n, 38, 57,
157, 200 Ra Expeditions, The, 187
Pie in the Sky, 96 Rabiger, Michael, 182
Pincus, Ed, 195 Rabinovitz, Lauren, 42–3
Plantinga, Carl, 8 Rabinowitz, Paula, 103, 112, 119n, 239
Plow that Broke the Plains, The, 72, 82, 102– racism, 60, 163–4, 199–202, 203–4, 211
11, 118, 126 and ‘scientific’, 55
and distribution, 103, 110–11 and wartime, 124–5, 127, 129–31
and production, 103, 106 and World’s Fairs, 19, 24–5
and propaganda, 103–4, 107, 111 radio, 41, 82, 84, 107, 127, 169
poetic documentary, 58, 66, 93, 104–5, 206– Rain, 66, 86
7; see also aesthetics Rape, 195
political documentary, 12, 86–120, 151, 188– Rashomon, 193–4, 196
90, 214–16, 235–9 Ray, Man, 69, 71
and comedy, 119, 228, 230–1 Reagan, Ronald, 2, 187, 189–90, 215
and the FPL, 91–7, 119, 236–7 Real Face of Occupation, The, 236–7, 239
see also social documentary realism, 70, 169, 199
Popular Front, 87, 96, 98–9, 114–17 and fiction, 182, 184
Porter, Edwin S., 44–5 and image quality, 41, 50
Posner, Bruce, 67, 72 and immediacy, 23–4, 26, 43–4, 156–7, 171
post-documentary, 219–21 and nonfiction, 61–2
postmodernity, 15, 68, 184, 186–216 and rejection of, 70, 73, 77, 228–30
and history, 195–6, 199–200, 211–12 reality television, 5, 169, 217–18, 219–22
and representation, 193–4 and ‘public therapy’, 218
and truth, 192–3 Redes (The Wave), 96
poststructuralism, 8–9, 15, 192–4 Reed, Christopher Robert, 24–5
Potamkin, Harry A., 71, 87, 92–3 re-enactment see staging
Power and the Land, The, 118 relativism, 55–6, 192, 199, 202
Power of Nightmares, The, 237 remediation, 10, 15, 64n, 188, 194, 213
Poynter, Nelson, 128 Renov, Michael, 6, 84n, 104, 129, 192
Prelude to War, 121, 128, 136–7, 141 Report from the Aleutians, 139–40
Primary, 157, 162–3, 167, 169, 184–5 Resettlement Administration (RA / FSA),
Prodger, Phillip, 30 97–8, 100–2, 111–12, 117–18
Production Code, 98, 101, 148 Return to Life, 115
propaganda, 14–15, 116, 187, 190, 227 Rhodes, John David, 178
and definitions of, 121–2 Riefenstahl, Leni, 111, 126
and New Deal, 103–4, 110–11 Riggs, Marlon T., 190, 198–9, 202–12
and wartime, 52, 118, 121–53 Riis, Jacob A., 88–90, 172
public access television, 188–9, 213, 236 Riskin, Robert, 132–5, 151
Public and Private Care of Infants, 90 River, The, 70, 107, 111–12, 118–19, 134
Public Broadcasting Service, 190, 194, 199, Robeson, Paul, 96, 117, 120n
211, 215–16, 237 Robinson, David, 31, 44, 46
public service, 152, 161, 215, 220–1 Rodakiewicz, Henwar, 152
public sphere, 11–12, 83, 212–13, 220–1, 239 Rogosin, Lionel, 157, 161
Pudovkin, Vsevolod, 72–3, 94–6 Rollins, Peter C., 111
Putnam, Frederic Ward, 20, 22–3 Rony, Fatimah Tobing, 56
Pyramide humaine, La, 158 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 90, 94, 98–100
in dex 273
and Lorentz, 101, 111, 118 social documentary, 12–13, 91–7, 99–100,
and Second World War, 127–8, 132, 150 172–4
and speeches by, 98, 135 and background of, 88–9
and support for, 110 and persistence of, 119
Roosevelt, Theodore, 49, 123 and threats to, 117–18, 220–1
Rosenthal, Alan, 154 see also political documentary
Rosenzweig, Roy, 91, 97 social imaginary, 11–12, 189, 218–21, 239
Rotha, Paul, 10, 58, 84n, 87, 100, 111 Socialism, 91, 98–9
Rothman, William, 154–5 Soldiers Pay, 225
Rouch, Jean, 54, 154, 156, 158–60, 166, 175 Solnit, Rebecca, 27–9
Rough Sea at Dover, 36, 38 Solomon, Norman, 224
Rubbo, Michael, 191 Sontag, Susan, 179
Ruby, Jay, 58, 175 Sorrow and the Pity, The, 187
Ruoff, Jeffrey, 43, 57, 62 sound
Russia, 68, 70, 91; see also Soviet Union and effects, 43, 47, 140
Ruttmann, Walter, 73–4 and role of, 107–8, 138, 146, 154, 230
Rydell, Robert W., 18–19, 21, 39n and synchronization, 31, 156, 158–60,
162–3
Salesman, 171, 184 and transition to, 82, 114
Sapir, Edward, 55–6 Soundtrack to War, 226
Saunders, Dave, 160, 162–3, 167, 172 Soviet Union, 69–70, 97, 99
Schoedsack, Ernest, 60, 62, 81 and influence on US film, 72–3, 91–6, 100,
Scott, Ian, 132, 134–5, 151 105–6, 115, 118
Scranton, Deborah, 235 and Second World War, 126, 150
Second World War see wars Spanish American War see wars
See It Now, 151–2 Spanish Civil War see wars
segregation, 22, 131 Spanish Earth, The, 113–14, 140, 223
and desegregation, 163–6 spectacle
and Jim Crow laws, 130 and ‘attractions’, 35, 37
and the military, 129, 137 and fascism, 126
see also racism and reality, 23–6
Seltzer, Leo, 92 and travel, 50, 56–7, 60, 65
senses, 9, 43, 154, 174, 204, 209–10 and war, 144, 223, 228–30
Sex Hygiene, 136 Spewack, Samuel, 128
sexuality, 189, 202–12 Spiro, Ellen, 235
Shea, Mike, 160 Spotted Eagle, Chris, 200
Sheeler, Charles, 66, 73–4, 77–9 Spurlock, Morgan, 11, 220
Sheriffed, 94 staging, 23–4, 32–4, 54, 57, 165, 198
Sherman’s March, 191 and war film, 123, 136–8
Shklovsky, Victor, 70 Standard Operating Procedure, 235
Shoah, 191, 196 Stange, Maren, 89, 100–1, 107
Shoot for the Contents, 198, 207 Stefansson, Vilhjalmur, 51, 53–4
Silverlake Life, 12, 210 Steichen, Edward, 90
Simba, 59–60 Steiner, Ralph, 72–3, 87, 92, 100, 102
Six O’Clock News, 217–18 and break from FPL, 95
Slocum, J. David, 123 stereotyping see ethnicity
Snowshoers, The, 158 Stern, Seymour, 92, 95
Snyder, Robert, 102–3, 111, 118 Stieglitz, Alfred, 69, 73, 76, 90
Sobchack, Vivian, 9, 11, 210 Stocking, George, 58
Stoddard, John L., 46, 90 Toby and the Tall Corn, 156–7
Stoney, George, 104, 107, 111, 152, 188 Tongues Untied, 190, 202–13
Stop the Church, 190 and aesthetics of, 206–8
Storm Over Asia, 96 and the body, 209–10
Stott, William, 84, 90 and controversy, 190, 211
Strain, Ellen, 23–4, 34, 40–2, 44, 49–50 tourism, 14, 40–64
Strand, Paul, 66, 73–8, 90, 96, 102–3, 115 and revitalization after war, 52
Streetwise, 191 and the ‘tourist gaze’, 23–5, 40–2, 63
Stryker, Roy, 90, 101, 117–18 and virtual reality, 26, 36, 42–5, 47–9, 51,
Suárez, Juan, 74–5, 78–9 63
Sunrise, 102, 107 see also travelogue
Sunset Blvd., 177–8 Town, The, 133–4
Super Size Me, 11 training films (military), 130, 135–8
Surf and Seaweed, 72 travel see tourism
Surname Viet Given Name Nam, 198 Travel Talks, 62–3
Surrealism, 68–70, 227–32 travelogue, 46–9, 62–3
Swedes in America, 132 and expeditionary mode, 60
Syberberg, Hans-Jürgen, 196 and Grierson on, 39, 100
and Nanook, 57–9
Tajima-Peña, Renee, 200–2 and shift from lecturers, 51–2
Taylor, Charles, 16n Tree Trunk to Head, 73
Taylor, F. W., 100, 134 Triana-Toribio, Núria, 3
technology Trinh T. Minh-ha, 192, 198
and amateurs, 80–1 Triumph of the Will, 111, 126
and democracy, 187–9 Truffault, François, 157
and direct cinema, 155–7, 159, 162 Tsuno, Keiko, 188
and documentation, 6, 219–20 Tucker, Michael, 225
and early developments, 10, 17, 27–9, 32, Tugwell, Rexford Guy, 100–1, 111
64n Turner, Frederick Jackson, 75, 131
and scepticism of, 66, 75 Tyndall, Philip, 7
and tourism, 40, 43–4 Tzara, Tristan, 68–9
and warfare, 124, 144–5, 223, 237–8
Telecommunications Act, 215 U.S. Camera (journal), 106, 144
television, 156–7, 169 Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq
and corporate sponsorship, 152, 166–7 War, 225
and independent movements, 189–90, 213 United Action, 115
and journalism, 151–2, 160–1, 187–8, 192, United States Film Service, 118
231 Urban, Charles, 50, 64n
and reality TV, 184, 217–18, 222 Uricchio, William, 57
Terror, 236 Urry, John, 40
Testimonies from Fallujah, 236 Uyarra, Esteban, 225
Thin Blue Line, The, 196–7, 231
Third Cinema, 189, 198 Valley of the Tennessee, 134–5
This is Spinal Tap, 185 van Dongen, Helen, 113, 115, 118, 151
Thomas, Kendall, 204 Van Dyke, W. S., 61
Thomson, Virgil, 71, 107 Van Dyke, Willard, 70–2, 96, 100, 111
Through the Haverstraw Tunnel, 43, 63 Van Leer, David, 199, 206, 210–11
Times of Harvey Milk, The, 191 vaudeville, 32, 36, 38, 46
Titicut Follies, 172–4 Vaughan, Dai, 5–6, 10, 184–5
in dex 275
Vernon, Florida, 191 Wasson, Haidee, 82–3

Vertov, Dziga, 66, 70, 95, 119n, 158–60 Watermelon Woman, The, 214
Victory films, 132, 137 Waugh, Thomas, 99, 112–14, 168
video We Are the Lambeth Boys, 158
and aesthetics, 209, 227 Weather Underground, The, 216
and development of, 188–9 Weber, Cynthia, 227, 231–3
and democracy, 187, 236 Weinberg, Herman G., 71, 74
video games, 223, 238, 241n Welles, Orson, 114, 150
Vietnam, 198; see also wars Wells, Ida B., 19
Vietnam Street, 236 What Price Glory?, 125
Vigo, Jean, 70, 73, 228 What’s Happening!, 165, 170
Virilio, Paul, 124, 144, 223 When the Levees Broke, 119, 215
Vitagraph Company, 44, 123 Whitman, Walt, 75, 77–8, 112
vitascope, 36, 38 Who Killed Vincent Chin?, 194, 200–2
Vogels, Jonathan, 155, 171, 175, 179–80 Why Vietnam?, 187
voiceover, 45, 142, 159 Why We Fight (Capra), 136–7, 149, 187, 225
and authority, 63, 107–9, 136, 194, 228 Why We Fight (Jarecki), 225, 233–4
and direct cinema, 156, 165, 177 WikiLeaks, 237–8
as poetic, 104, 108, 146 Williams, Linda, 15, 39n, 193–4, 196–7, 221
von Sternberg, Josef, 81, 133 Williams, Marco, 203
Vorkapić, Slavko, 81, 86 Wilson, Edmund, 99
voyeurism, 24, 60, 168–71, 184, 198 Winston, Brian, 16n, 54, 160, 168, 215, 220
Wiseman, Frederick, 160, 172–4
Wallenberg, Louise, 205, 210 With Love From Truman, 170–1
Wallwork, Deborah, 200 Wolfe, Charles, 71–2, 87, 93, 107–8, 112, 116
war, 121–53, 223–39 Woodstock, 166
and anti-war sentiments, 52, 112–14, 125– Workers’ International Relief, 91, 94, 96
6, 140, 232, 235–9 Workers’ Laboratory Theatre, 91, 95
and popular culture, 38–9, 122–4, 223–4 World at War, The, 128
see also combat film; wars World’s Fairs, 2, 41–2
war diaries see autobiography at Buffalo (1901), 23, 25
War Feels Like War, 225 at Chicago (1893), 13, 18–33, 56
War Made Easy, 225 at New York (1939), 72, 115
war on terror, 226–7, 231, 234, 237, 241n at Paris (1889), 19–21, 30
War Tapes, The, 235 Wrobel, David M., 75
Warriors, 200 Wyler, William, 138, 140–9
wars
First World, 52, 68, 124–6, 228 Young, Colin, 174
Second World, 14–15, 121–53, 196, 224 YouTube, 63, 219, 221, 226, 235, 239–40
‘small’, 122, 153n
Spanish-American, 38–9, 123–4, 223 Zabriskie Point, 230
Spanish Civil, 112–15, 117 Zavattini, Cesare, 157
Korea, 122 Zimmermann, Patricia, 4, 80–1, 147, 215–16,
Vietnam, 122, 186–7, 200, 223, 239 221
Gulf (first), 144, 223, 236 Zinnemann, Fred, 152
Afghanistan, 122, 218 Žižek, Slavoj, 218
Iraq, 15, 122, 223–9 Zwerin, Charlotte, 160, 171

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AMERICAN DOCUMENTARY FILM

PROJECTING THE NATION

Edinburgh University Press

Edinburgh University Press Ltd

Typeset in 11/13 Ehrhardt

ISBN 978 0 7486 2147 7 (hardback)

The right of Jeffrey Geiger

1 Novelties, Spectacles and the Documentary Impulse 17

1 Midway Plaisance with Ferris Wheel 21

ACL Amateur Cinema League

American Documentary Film explores key themes, moments and movements in

effort to create a unified national culture. The nation is a ‘progressive meta-

linked to state-sponsored cinema movements which work to reinforce the

Documentary representation can make visible ‘the invisible or “phantom”

Documentary has been seen to bear a special relationship to the concrete,

of stock footage of factory workers in a film about strikebreaking, for example,

socially indifferent nonfictions like television reality shows. My intent here is

at a history of US documentary, we encounter the perpetual subject of this

‘Cinematic identification is as fragile and unstable as identity itself’, Judith

that break down national fixities) and supranationalism (‘superstate’ affilia-

Novelties, Spectacles and the

So where should a study of US documentary begin – with the first copyrighted

the possibility of knowledge (2008: 19). Importantly, these spectacles of reality

be captured without blurring, a project pioneered by inventors such as

in Animal Locomotion he included studies such as ‘Arising from the Ground

tion of Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope on 25 February 1888. Two days later,

to consume these technologized displays of foreignness no doubt added to

the Edison Company’s staged re-enactments, strange sights and eye-catching

blacksmith scene (1893) , buffalo dance (1894)

tacle makers have themselves become a spectacle’, as Tom Gunning notes of

where, in Jane Gaines’s terms, ‘the frame is effectively taken by surprise’

Virtual Travels and the Tourist

ethnographic-themed material. Like popular panoramas, stereograph views

ethnocentrism, ‘making faraway cultures into commodities that could be

medium of mimesis but of movement, furnishing spectators with new, pre-

moving their heads or eyes to look left or right, up or down, surveying a

In 1910 travel lecturer Burton Holmes could draw a crowd of ‘fashion-

Lecturers like Lyman Howe advertised their work as entertainments of ‘merit,

Figure 5. Flyer for Lyman H. Howe’s ‘22nd Semi-Annual Tour’ (1906).

suppressed obvious technological and human mediation while enhancing

Hemment, additional intertitles later allowed Rainey’s African Hunt to be

profile explorers – entertained largely well-off urban audiences. Vilhjalmur

nanook of the north (1922)

haunted by a history of western attitudes towards ‘other’ lives and cultures.

The Indian’s salmon-spearing is a culturally higher type of activity than

The nation’s cultural sickness is revealed by invoking the spiritual health of

modernity. Flaherty’s Samoan film recreates a dream of a lost paradise in the

Travelaughs: ‘Such is Life’, in ‘Monte Carlo’, ‘Nice’, ‘Munich’, and

‘Where Paris Shops’. In these works by Lily Mayer, in which motion

While similarly ‘delightful’ and ‘informative’, Nanook of the North’s sophisti-

A travelogue is the cinematic equivalent of the act of tourism, a film that

The travel-adventure film is organized around a narrative of rugged journey-

to ‘multiple segments of the mass audience’ through its presentation of varied

masquerading as educational enlightenment, can be a by-product of the tourist

Serious Play: Documentary and

(2001b: 581–2).2 Key proponents of the documentary form such as Grierson,

u ns t a b l e b o un d a r i e s, d e f amil ia r ized r ea l it ies

I’m writing a manifesto [. . .], and in principle I am against manifestos,

and leveling embedded social hierarchies. As the formalist Victor Shklovsky