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The Last Snapshot of the British Intelligentsia: Documentary, Mass-Observation, and the Fate of the Liberal Avant-Garde

Thomas S. Davis

in The Extinct Scene: Late Modernism and Everyday Life

This chapter argues that documentary aesthetics turn to everyday life in order to create works that promoted the norms and values of the British liberal state during its period of greatest distress.

Early Television and Television Drama

John Caughie

in Television Drama: Realism, Modernism, and British Culture

This chapter discusses the transition of the British Broadcasting Company into the British Broadcasting Corporation—a move that shifted the network giant from being a private enterprise into a public ... More

This chapter discusses the transition of the British Broadcasting Company into the British Broadcasting Corporation—a move that shifted the network giant from being a private enterprise into a public firm. The BBC’s role in reconciling the national interests of the public with the interests of the national government is also tackled in this chapter. The company’s monopoly of public media was somehow salvaged by the BBC’s promotion of public interest via public service. The beginnings and the struggles of the British Documentary Movement is also discussed in this chapter.Less

The Politics of Japanese Documentary Film

Hikari Hori

in Promiscuous Media: Film and Visual Culture in Imperial Japan, 1926-1945

Chapter Three shows how documentary film was a rich and chaotic site for nationalist, imperialist, and anti-imperialist experimentation. Introducing the female documentarian Atsugi Taka (1907-98) as ... More

Chapter Three shows how documentary film was a rich and chaotic site for nationalist, imperialist, and anti-imperialist experimentation. Introducing the female documentarian Atsugi Taka (1907-98) as a guide, the chapter demonstrates the development of the genre and show how practitioners worked within and around official ideologies and the restrictive media-scape. Atsugi is well-known for her translation of the theoretical treatise Documentary Film (1935) by British producer and theorist Paul Rotha. The book attracted an unexpectedly wide audience in Japan during WWII when documentary as genre flourished. Atsugi’s own films also present a tangled, complicated site of production where she navigated the gender politics of filmmaking and everyday life, state suppression of socialist and proletarian movements, and the problems of adapting socialist British theory to actual filmmaking in totalitarian Japan. (129 words)Less

‘Suspense, fright, emotion, happy ending’: documentary form and audience response to Touching the Void

Thomas Austin

in Watching the World

This chapter uses research among audiences for Touching the Void, the highest grossing British documentary in history, adapted from a best-selling climbing memoir. It examines the film's form, and ... More

This chapter uses research among audiences for Touching the Void, the highest grossing British documentary in history, adapted from a best-selling climbing memoir. It examines the film's form, and interrogates a mode of engagement that treated the film as an inspirational story of suffering and survival. Revelations are made on how viewers responded to aesthetic aspects such as Touching the Void's use of dramatic reconstructions alongside ‘talking heads’-style interviews with the climbers involved in the original event. Elements of melodrama exist in Touching the Void, and its story of disaster and survival against the odds carried huge emotional clout for some commentators and audiences. A central plank of the documentary's appeal is its presentation of opportunities to find out about, and somehow connect with, other people ‘out there’ in the world. One way in which this connection can occur is via empathetic engagement with another's situation.Less

Introduction

Ian Aitken and Camille Deprez

in The Colonial Documentary Film in South and South-East Asia

The Introduction sets out an overview of the book and summaries of the individual chapters in the book. In addition, the Introduction also provides a justification for the geographical scope and time ... More

The Introduction sets out an overview of the book and summaries of the individual chapters in the book. In addition, the Introduction also provides a justification for the geographical scope and time frame of the book, attempts to arrive at a definition of the colonial documentary film, and seeks to establish and analyse the encounter between colonialism and documentary cinema in South and South-East Asia. In addition, the Introduction also attempts to reassess current understandings of the colonial documentary film.Less

A Film-progressive Nation: The Social Denmark Series and the British Documentary Movement

C. Claire Thomson

in Short Films from a Small Nation: Danish Informational Cinema 1935-1965

In the immediate post-WWII period, Danish documentary filmmaking was recognised overseas as productive and of high quality. This chapter tells the story of a collaboration between Ministeriernes ... More

In the immediate post-WWII period, Danish documentary filmmaking was recognised overseas as productive and of high quality. This chapter tells the story of a collaboration between Ministeriernes Filmudvalg and the British Documentary Movement, which resulted in a package or series of five films made for the foreign market and entitled Social Denmark. The British documentarist Arthur Elton was invited to Copenhagen to oversee the production of one or more films which would promote newly-liberated Denmark to the world as a modern, progressive, democratic nation. Elton’s report on the state of Danish documentary and recommendations for its further development is discussed in detail as a snapshot of the state-of-the-art in international informational film production and distribution. Informational filmmaking was regarded in and of itself as a progressive act. The film People’s Holiday (Søren Melson, 1947) is analysed as an example of the Social Denmark films. The impact of conflicting political and aesthetic interests on its production is discussed, as well as the routes by which ‘facts’ emerge as such in the film, and its reception. The role of the auteur Carl Th. Dreyer in the production and promotion of Social Denmark is also considered.Less

After the War

Alain Kerzoncuf, Charles Barr, and Philip French

in Hitchcock Lost and Found: The Forgotten Films

After the war, Hitchcock continued to do extensive work in the margins of his high-profile feature films, notably through the TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents and his regular on-camera ... More

After the war, Hitchcock continued to do extensive work in the margins of his high-profile feature films, notably through the TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents and his regular on-camera introductions to it, and through his fronting of film trailers, but these are now widely known. Less well known are the four items that this chapter presents and discusses, different forms of work for good causes unpretentiously done: for cancer research, for hospital fundraising, for a film society in his native Essex, and finally a tribute to John Grierson, father figure of British documentary. It is argued that these four items, like all of the previous lost and found material, add significantly to our understanding of Hitchcock’s career and its representative status: in the case of the final two items, by recording his own tribute to the importance of his roots, both geographically and within British film culture.Less