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Chapter 4 ranges between the late 1920s and the Second World War, charting the ‘invention’ of documentary film and outlining the social functions for which 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 programme 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, a diversity amply reflected in documentaries of the time. It includes a close reading of The Plow that Broke the Plains.

This chapter focuses on the 1920s and 1930s as a constitutive phase of the documentary film, as well as on the genre’s initial relation to cities (and, by extension, their slums). It introduces the notion of ‘cognitive mapping’ and asks why it was especially the city that became documentary film’s first major subject. The chapter first discusses well-known ‘city symphonies’ of the 1920s, but focuses then on a lesser-known example, La Zone (Lacombe 1928), which maps the Parisian slum belt (la zone) as a ‘rag-pickers’ country’. The chapter goes on to show how some of the ideas of the ‘social avant-garde’ flow into John Grierson’s notion of ‘social documentary film’ and its power to disclose a society’s ‘true heroes’, its ordinary people and workers. The chapter provides a close reading of a paradigmatic Griersonian documentary, Housing Problems (Anstey and Elton 1935). The film employs a classical voice-of-authority style and exemplifies some of Grierson’s progressive ideas (giving ordinary people a voice). In conclusion, the chapter shows how the strategies of Housing Problems have become conventions of TV documentaries today, particularly the problematic (sociological and apparently scientific) mapping of urban poverty from both the ideological and visual ‘perspective-of-god’.

This chapter takes the decade of the birth of cinema, the 1890s, as a vantage point and tackles the question of how, by that time, the slum has become a topic of high visibility in various media. The author identifies the notion of ‘remediation’ (Bolter and Grusin) as this era’s key paradigm, because clichéd slum imagery and sensationalist stories (of violent crime, immorality, abject poverty etc.) travel around 1890 across (old and new) media, from the stage to the cinema, from photo books to magic lantern shows. The chapter focuses thereby on the ‘documentary impulse’ (Gunning) to disclose urban pauperisation, which emerges together with the photographic apparatus and the reform movement. Accordingly, the chapter’s case example, a famous reformist photo book / magic lantern lecture which promotes the urgent need to improve the housing conditions in New York’s notorious neighbourhood Five Points, How The Other Half Lives (Riis 1890), illustrates how reform movement, technological innovation and remediation go hand in hand. The chapter finally draws comparisons to a contemporary transmedia project, The Places We Live (Bendiksen 2008), in order to demonstrate the (dis-)continuities between nineteenth and twenty-first century documentary photography of slums.