A ‘World Without End’: Post-War Reconstruction and Everyday Internationalism in Documentary Film
2013; Routledge; Volume: 35; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/07075332.2013.813863
ISSN1949-6540
Autores Tópico(s)Political and Economic history of UK and US
ResumoAbstractAlthough the Documentary Film movement has been the object of an immense amount of scholarly attention, much of it has framed early documentary film in relation to projects of national projection or national cultural development. This article builds on recent calls to move beyond this preoccupation with ‘national cinema’ by stressing the international basis of early documentary film, especially in the inter-war and early post-war period. The author argues that international ambitions became central to the ways in which John Grierson and those closest to him defined their sense of identity and purpose, especially as they began to envision a role for documentary film in a reconstructed world order: a kind of internationalism that international theorist John Ruggie would call ‘embedded liberalism’. This identity, the author argues, was built around the possibility of an everyday sense of ethical solidarity: a precursor to more recent experiments in fair trade. Aitken concludes the paper by noting that in their international ambitions, filmmakers like Grierson were visible in their most progressive and yet also most contradictory face.Keywords: embedded liberalismdocumentary filmeveryday internationalismpost-war reconstructionOrientalism Notes1. J. Grierson, Education in a Technological Society [Address to The National Conference on Adult Education, Winnipeg] 28 May 1945 [Los Angeles, UCLA Special Collections Library, Collection 2001,] P[aul] R[otha Papers] 70, fo. 3.2. See, for example, D. Grover, ‘Would Local Currencies Make a Good Local Economic Development Policy Tool? The Case of Ithaca Hours’, Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy, xxiv (2006), 719–37; M.S. Peacock, ‘The Moral Economy of Parallel Currencies: An Analysis of Local Exchange Trading Systems’, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, lxv, no. 5 (2006), 1059–83; E. Helleiner, ‘Think Globally, Transact Locally: Green Political Economy and the Local Currency Movement’, Global Society, xiv, no. 1 (2000), 35–51; P. North, Money and Liberation: The Micropolitics of Alternative Currency Movements (Minneapolis, 2007); H. Henderson. Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy. (White River Junction, 2006); M. Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (New York, 2006).3. J. Sexton, Alternative Film Culture in Inter-War Britain (Exeter, 2008).4. See, for example, J. Chapman, Cinemas of the World: Film and Society from 1895 to the Present (London, 2003).5. John Grierson was perhaps the most explicit in the movement about the need for the formal retirement of empire. By 1945 Grierson was actively calling for the end of empire and, more importantly, the mechanisms which prevent ‘a more equitable distribution of the good life’. See J. Grierson, Education in a Technological Society, 28 May 1945, PR 70, fo. 3.6. S. Tallents, ‘Films of Empire: A Sketch for a Portrait’, the Times [London] 30 May 1938, Los Angeles, UCLA Special Collections Library, Collection 2001, Paul Rotha Papers, 66 fo. 8.7. Although it is beyond the scope of this paper to explore it in detail, I conceive of the Film Movement as an internally differentiated, even occasionally fractured, body. The main focus of this paper is the wing of the movement most closely associated with Grierson and those who affiliated themselves with him: Rotha, Wright, Legg, and others. This strand of the movement contrasts sharply, for example, with the group of artists who coalesced around Cavalcanti after he assumed leadership of the GPO film unit when Grierson left. As Barsam notes, Cavalcanti opened an approach to ‘realist’ filmmaking which contrasted with and shifted away from Grierson. See R. Meran Barsam, Nonfiction Film; A Critical History (Bloomington, 1992): ‘Unlike Grierson, Cavalcanti did not theorize about the purpose of documentary films … However, since one function of the GPO Film Unit was to serve as a training school for young filmmakers, Cavalcanti offered … practical advice, most of which distinctly criticizes the Grierson approach …’ (101).8. See I. Aitken, ‘The British Documentary Film Movement’ in R. Murphy (ed), The British Cinema Book (London, 2009); E. Sussex, The Rise and Fall of British Documentary (Berkeley, 1975); P. Swann, The British Documentary Film Movement, 1926–1946 (Cambridge, 1989); J. L’Etang, ‘John Grierson and the Public Relations Industry in Britain’, Screening the Past, vii (1999); B. Winston, Claiming the Real: The Griersonian Documentary and its Legitimations (London, 1995) and J. Grierson, ‘The Challenge of Peace’ in F. Hardy (ed), Grierson on Documentary (London, 1966), 325.9. See S. Anthony, Night Mail (London, 2007).10. Sexton, Alternative.11. See Z. Druick, ‘The International Educational Cinematograph Institute, Reactionary Modernism and the Formation of Film Studies’, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, xvi, no. 1 (2007), 80–97.12. P. Jaikumar, Cinema at the End of Empire: A Politics of Transition in Britain and India (Durham, 2006), 1–3, see also R. Aitken, ‘Provincialising Embedded Liberalism: Film, Orientalism and the Reconstruction of World Order’, Review of International Studies (forthcoming).13. Society for Cultural Relations between the Peoples of the British Commonwealth and the USSR, Eisenstein, 1898–1948 (London, 1948), 6. See also Rotha: ‘ … we documentary workers in England … shall always acknowledge our great debt to your film technicians of the Soviet Union.’ Rotha to Pudvokin, 24 Feb. 1947, Los Angeles, UCLA Special Collections Library, Collection 2001, Paul Rotha Papers, 66 fo. 5. On this theme see also V. Pudvokin, ‘The Global Film’, Hollywood Quarterly, xi, no. 4 (1947), 327–32.14. Grierson to Mary Posey, 10 Dec. 1945, Los Angeles, UCLA Special Collections Library, Collection 2001, Paul Rotha Papers, 70, fo. 2.15. Rotha to Eric Knight, 4 May 1940, [Los Angeles, UCLA Special Collections Library, Collection 2001] P[aul] R[otha Papers Box] 67, fo. 7.16. For a useful summary of Tallents’ contribution see S. Anthony, Night Mail (London, 2007). For a discussion of Beddington, see C. Drazin, The Finest Years: British Cinema of the 1940s (London, 2007), 177–84. Special thanks to an anonymous review for International History Review for pointing out the importance of Beddington.17. Grierson to Rotha, Dec. 1940 [Los Angeles, UCLA Special Collections Library, Collection 2001] P[aul] R[otha Papers Box] 67, fo. 6.18. J. Ellis and B. A. Mclane, A New History of Documentary Film (New York, 2005): 125.19. Grierson to Basil Wright 27 April 1941 [Los Angeles, UCLA Special Collections Library, Collection 2001] P[aul] R[otha Papers Box] 70, fo. 2, Box 70.20. John Grierson Retirement Notice, Ottawa Journal, 9 Aug. 1945, Los Angeles, UCLA Special Collections Library, Collection 2001, Paul Rotha Papers, 70, fo. 2. This retirement sentiment is echoed in slightly more frank terms in a letter, from Grierson to JPR Golightly, 29 May 1945, Los Angeles, UCLA Special Collections Library, Collection 2001, Paul Rotha Papers, 70, fo. 2: The parochial attitude in Ottawa, he noted, ‘is natural, but it does not help me enough in what I want to get done. It is too parochial, too self-centered, too goddamn unimaginative in the larger sense, and of course not conscious in its bowels of where the political issues more desperately lie.’21. See J. Ruggie, ‘International Regimes, Transactions and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Order’, International Organization, xxxvi, no. 2 (1982), 379–415; M. Blyth, Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 2002); J. Steffek, Embedded Liberalism and its Critics: Justifying Global Governance in the American Century (London, 2006); J. Best, The Limits of Transparency: Ambiguity and the History of International Finance (Ithaca, NY, 2005), and Aitken, ‘Provincialising Embedded Liberalism’.22. See Ruggie, ‘International Regimes’; D. Markwell, John Maynard Keynes and International Relations (Oxford, 2006) and R. Skildesky, John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Freedom, 1937–1946 (New York, 2000).23. Grierson to Elton, 24 March 24 1940 [Los Angeles, UCLA Special Collections Library, Collection 2001] P[aul] R[otha Papers Box] 67, fo. 6.24. J.M. Keynes, ‘National Self-Sufficiency’, The Yale Review, xxii, no. 4 (1933).25. The classic discussion of the film movement and the question of social reform is I. Aitken, Film and Reform: John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement (London, 1990).26. J. Grierson, Politics and the Film Industry, address, 1941 [Los Angeles, UCLA Special Collections Library, Collection 2001] P[aul] R[otha Papers Box] 70, fo. 3.27. Grierson to Wright, 16 Nov. 1944 [Los Angeles, UCLA Special Collections Library, Collection 2001] P[aul] R[otha Papers Box] 70, fo. 2.28. Grierson to Cowan, 1946 [Los Angeles, UCLA Special Collections Library, Collection 2001] P[aul] R[otha Papers Box] 70, fo. 2.29. The foundational text linking film and national projection is Sir Benjamin Schaife Gott, The Film in National Life (London, 1932).30. J. Grierson, ‘The Changing Face of Propaganda’ in Free World Jan. 1945, Ottawa: Library and archives Canada, M G 30 D77 VOl. 22, emphasis added. See also J. Grierson, ‘Postwar Patterns’, Hollywood Quarterly, i. no. 2 (1946), 159–65. Grierson also made this case to the English film scene upon returning there after his time in Canada. The ‘Unit,’ he argues, should produce ‘films showing … one nation how another nation lives … The coming era is bound to be one of profound social changes at home and abroad … They can promote sympathy between nations and help people to think not only in terms of national but of world problems.’ J. Grierson, The Future of Government Film Making, 18 Oct. 1945, Los Angeles, UCLA Special Collections Library, Collection 2001, Paul Rotha Papers, Box 66, fo. 7.31. Rotha to Griffith, 27 May 1939 [Los Angeles, UCLA Special Collections Library, Collection 2001] P[aul] R[otha Papers Box] 67, fo. 3.32. Ibid.33. See S. Constantine, ‘Anglo-Canadian Relations, the Empire Marketing Board, and Canadian National Autonomy Between the Wars’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, xxvi (1993), 357–84, and S. Constantine, ‘Bringing the Empire Alive: The Empire Marketing Board and Imperial Propaganda, 1926–33’ in J.M. Mackenzie (ed) Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester, 1986).34. Empire Marketing Board, Attack Unemployment in Britain, EMB, ca. 1928, Ottawa, Library and Archives Canada, G 17 Vol. 3310, Fo. 848-1(3).35. Empire Marketing Board, What Empire Labour Conditions Meant to You, EMB, ca. 1928, Ottawa, Library and Archives Canada, G 17 Vol. 3310, Fo. 848-1(3).36. R.B.J. Walker, After the Globe, Before the World (London, 2009), 26.37. A. Bashford, ‘Global Biopolitics and the History of World Health’, History of the Human Sciences, xix, no. 6 (2006), 83.38. M. Watson, ‘Towards a Polanyian Perspective on Fair Trade: Market-Based Relationships and the Act of Ethical Consumption’, Global Society, xx, no. 4 (2006), 441.39. See L.T. Raynolds, ‘Mainstreaming Fair Trade Coffee: From Partnership to Traceability’, World Development, xxxvii, no. 6 (2009), 1083–93.40. Aitken, ‘Provincialising Embedded Liberalism’.41. A. Cavalcanti, We Live in Two Worlds (London, 1937).42. S. Legg, Search-Light on the Nations (New York, 1949).43. R. Kruger, ‘Paul Rotha and the Documentary Film’ in D. Petrie and R. Kruger (eds), A Paul Rotha Reader (Exeter, 1999), 21.44. See D.J. Petrie, ‘Paul Rotha and Film Theory’, in D. Petrie and R. Kruger (eds), A Paul Rotha Reader (Exeter, 1999): ‘the shadow of Grierson - the self-styled intellectual leader of the British documentary movement - unfortunately falls heavily on Rotha's writing about the form’ (67).45. P. Rotha, Rotha on Film: A Selection of Writings About the Cinema (London, 1958), 106. See also D. Petrie and R. Kruger (eds), A Paul Rotha Reader (Exeter, 1999).46. Rotha, Rotha on Film, 98.47. P. Rotha (dir) World of Plenty (London, 1943).48. Rotha, World of Plenty.49. Rotha to Griffith, 13 Oct. 1943 [Los Angeles, UCLA Special Collections Library, Collection 2001] P[aul] R[otha Papers Box] 70, fo. 5. Some of the broader film community seemed to be in agreement. Griffith at MOMA, for example, reported to Rotha on a successful New York Screening: ‘It was like that feeling we used to have when a new film came in from Germany or Russia, and which we haven't had for almost fifteen years ….’ Griffith to Rotha, 12 July 1943 [Los Angeles, UCLA Special Collections Library, Collection 2001] P[aul] R[otha Papers Box] 70, fo. 5.50. P. Rotha (dir), World is Rich (London, 1947).51. Z. Druick, ‘Visualizing the World: British Documentary at UNESCO’ in S. Anthony and J. Mansell (eds), GPO Film Unit (London, forthcoming), 5.52. Although Druick (‘Visualizing’) notes that World Without End lacks the explicit political analysis pursued in either of the two earlier films.53. Rotha, Rotha on Film, 101.54. P. Rotha and B. Wright, Synopsis: World Without End, UNESCO [Los Angeles, UCLA Special Collections Library, Collection 2001] P[aul] R[otha Papers Box] 77, fo. 10.55. P. Rotha and B. Wright (dir), World Without End (Paris, 1953).56. Druick also emphasises the importance of World Without End as a signpost of the film movement's internationalism. ‘I consider the making of World Without End as a pivotal moment for a set of ideas about film and politics embodied’ by the Griersonian movement. (Druick, ‘Visualizing’, 2)57. Rotha to Griffith, 27 May 1939 PR, 67, fo. 3.58. This quote relates to a film made while Grierson was Director of the NFB. The film, Of Japanese Descent was produced in 1943 as a partial justification of Canada's relocation of Japanese-Canadian citizens into internment camps. Dallas Jones to A. H. Brown, 25 Feb. 1944, Montreal, National Film Board of Canada Archives, Of Japanese Descent Production Files Production No. 6053.59. J. Grierson, Education in a Technological Society, 28 May 1945, PR, 70, fo. 3.60. R. Aitken, ‘“To the Ends of the Earth”: Culture, Visuality and the Embedded Economy’ in J. Best and M. Paterson Cultural Political Economy (New York, 2009), 67–90.61. Empire Marketing Board, Your Great Inheritance, EMB, 1927, Ottawa: Library and Archives Canada, RG 17 Vol. 3310, Fo. 848-1(3).62. Legg, Search-Light.63. See Jaikumar, Cinema.64. T. Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley, 2002).65. See A. Escobar, The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton, 1996) and U. Kothari (ed), A Radical History of Development Studies: Individuals, Institutions and Ideologies (London, 2005).66. Calvalcanti, We Live in Two Worlds.67. Druick, ‘Visualizing’.68. I am particularly indebted to Jason Sanders at the Pacific Film Archive and Library, Berkeley California, for his advice on Ivens and for his detailed knowledge of the Archives Ivens’ miscellaneous files.69. J. Ivens, Rain (Amsterdam, 1929); J. Ivens, The Bridge (Amsterdam, 1928).70. E. Barnouw, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film. 2nd ed. (New York, 1993), 133–4.71. Ibid., 139.72. J.C. Ellis, John Grierson: Life, Contributions, Influence (Carbondale, IL, 2000), 142.73. Netherlands Information Bureau, 28 Dec. 1944. Film Commissioner for the Netherlands East Indies [San Francisco: Netherlands Information Bureau Western Division. Berkeley CA: Pacific Film Archive] J[oris] I[vens Miscellaneous files].74. Ibid.75. R. Katz and N. Katz, ‘Documentary in Transition, Part II: The International Scene and the American Documentary’, Hollywood Quarterly, iv, no. 1 (1949), 51–64.76. J. Ivens (dir), Indonesia Calling (Sydney, 1946).77. J. Hughes, ‘The (Heterogeneous) Voice of Indonesia Calling’, Studies in Australasian Cinema, iv, no. 2 (2010), 289.78. Ibid., 296.79. Ibid., 290.80. G. Quinn, ‘A Lifetime of Documentaries’ in In These Times, Berkeley, CA: Pacific Film Archive, Joris Ivens Miscellaneous Files, 21–27 Jan. 1981, 19. See also Barnouw, 1993: ‘Sailing ships carried two prints of Indonesia Calling through the blockade to the Indonesian islands; there they had many night showings for independence forces, who had to fight until late in 1946 against Dutch and British ‘liberation’ troops’ (171–2). Note that Barnouw gives a slightly different account of the origins of Indonesia Calling. For him, the event that formed the basis of the film involved a pro-Dutch ship destined to Indonesia staffed with an Indian crew, in violation of a blockade organised by Javanese and Australian dock workers. A speedboat carrying union representatives pursued the ship and, speaking through a bullhorn, convinced the Indian crew to force the ship to return to dock (169–72)81. E. Stein, ‘Travels of the Flying Dutchman’, Village Voice (2002), Berkeley, CA: Pacific Film Archive, Joris Ivens Miscellaneous files.82. See P. Langley, ‘The Ethical Investor, Embodied Economies and International Political Economy’ in R. Abdelal, M. Blyth, and C. Parsons (eds), Constructing the International Economy (Ithaca, NY, 2010).
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