Hollywood Quarterly "ss1.10"

― 100 ―

The Documentary and Hollywood

Philip Dunne

During the war Philip Dunne was Chief of Production of the Motion Picture Bureau, OWI, Overseas Branch. He is at present a member of the Executive Board of the Screen Writers Guild, and a member of the Board of Governors, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Author of How Green Was My Valley, he is now working on The Late George Apley.
. ….

Almost Everything that needs to be said about the documentary per se, analytically or historically, has already been said by such well-qualified professionals as John Grierson, Raymond Spottiswoode, and Paul Rotha (three Britishers; none of the able American documentarians has yet taken time out to write the book that needs to be written about the American documentary). Indeed, an able analysis of the documentary by Mr. Grierson appears elsewhere in this issue [pp. 91–99, this volume]. However, I do feel that I may be permitted to describe the appearance of the documentary to a fairly typical Hollywood picturemaker thrown suddenly into the field and into close association with professionals in the medium. This association, a creature of the war, is one I profoundly hope will continue into the peace. Hollywood picturemakers have much to learn from the documentarians, and vice versa. Both groups have suffered from inbreeding.

I learned about documentaries the hard way: in the process of directing the production activities of Robert Riskin's OWI Overseas Motion Picture Bureau. My associates, and teachers, were all veterans of the American documentary movement, such men as Willard van Dyke, Irving Lerner, Alexander Hackenschmied, Sidney Meyers, Irving Jacoby, Roger Barlow, and Henwar Rodakiewicz.

I should guess that most of these names are unknown to a majority of Hollywood picturemakers. They will continue to be unknown as long as some in Hollywood persist in looking on the documentary as a poor relation of "The Industry"; as long as so many in that "Industry" continue

― 101 ―

to consider the typical documentarian a long-haired crank, his mind cluttered with impracticalities.

So far from being impractical, most established documentarians can take a camera apart, cut their own negative, and perform a hundred other useful little chores which would flabbergast the average Hollywood writer, director, or producer. All documentarians are unit managers in the Hollywood sense, and nothing could be more practical than that. They manage their own crews in the field, forage for their production materials, and bring in exposed film at a cost per foot which would appear visionary to a Gower Street independent.

Why, then, the allegation of impracticality? I venture to think it is because the documentarian insists that his film must nurture an idea. We have recently listened on the radio to various influential Hollywood personalities to whom ideas seem to be anathema. I believe that it is in these quarters that we are most likely to find contempt for the documentary; and precisely in these quarters that we will find the kind of thinking, and the kind of picturemaking, which instill a reciprocal contempt for "The Industry" in the mind of the average documentarian. The gap between the twomedia is not so wide that it cannot be bridged.

It is difficult to set down in category the salient features of the documentary as opposed to what we may as well call the entertainment film. (I use the phrase with the warning that the reader should not infer that a documentary is by definition not entertaining.) The documentarian, like his fellow craftsman in the entertainment field, is not bound by iron regulation or custom. By its very nature the documentary is experimental and inventive. Contrary to the general impression, it may even employ actors. It may deal in fantasy or fact. It may or may not possess a plot. But 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. And in this we can make the first major distinction between the documentary and entertainment media.

Every film we made for the Overseas Branch of the OWI was built round a central idea: to make friends for America. Pare Lorentz made The River to awaken the people to the dangers of industrial and agricultural

― 102 ―

negligence, and to point to the antidotes. Kline and Hackenschmied's Crisis was a powerful protest against the assassination of Czechoslovakia's independence. On the other side, Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, so valuable a source of Nazi material to all the American war-film agencies, was produced expressly to reunite the Party behind Hitler after his murder of Ernst Roehm and associates on the "Night of the Long Knives."

At this point, I should like to make a distinction between the two types of documentary: the "factual film," and what we might call the "true documentary."

The factual film is a legitimate descendant of the newsreel, often with a strong strain of the old-fashioned travelogue in its ancestry. But the factual film is not, like the newsreel, limited to mere reportorial coverage of a particular event at a particular time. It is, like all documentaries, built round an idea, a point which the producer tries to make. To make this point, he uses old newsreels, animations, reënacted scenes, blending all, by careful construction and tempo, into a homogeneous document. The needs of war stimulated the growth of the factual film as in a hothouse. In 1942 such films began to appear in feature length. That factual films can be both instructive and gripping (entertaining, in the broad sense) has been amply proved by the justly admired series produced by Colonel Frank Capra's unit. The Capra films are classics of their kind.

But the factual film is not the realm of the true documentarian, although many individuals with documentary experience have contributed to its development. The technique of the factual film in this country has been dictated largely by the needs of war. The producers of such films, recruited mostly from Hollywood studios and the newsreels, learned their techniques as they worked, shaped their product to the needs of the times, and gave them the mood dictated by the emotions of a world at war. Most of these men will return to their normal occupations with the coming of peace. It is extremely doubtful if the form they created—the emotional propaganda film—will survive in theatrical feature length the times which gave it birth. But there is no question that it has played an important and significant role in the winning of the war.

There remains the "true documentary," a permanent fixture in the film world, and potentially of as great importance as the purely entertainment film. In the hands of a hardy and devoted few the documentary flourished in Europe and, more obscurely, in America before the war. During the

― 103 ―

war it was subjected to the same sort of forcing process as that experienced by the factual film, but not to the same degree. In these postwar times, as nontheatrical outlets for distribution increase, and as theater audiences begin to demand—as I am sure they will—programs on a higher intellectual level, the documentary should retain its wartime growth and become an important factor in the education and entertainment of the public. Its influence on the entertainment film may well become profound.

The true documentary is usually limited in pictorial scope, though the idea it espouses may be as large as the idea of democracy itself. To express its idea, it will make use of a convenient microcosm, a homogeneous setting and cast of characters through which the idea can be advanced.

The true documentary, unlike the factual film, makes little use of stock material. It strives for uniformity in quality and mood and, like the entertainment film, achieves it by shooting original material to express its central idea. Since budgets perforce are meager, production planning is not impressive from the Hollywood point of view.

The simplicity of production arrangements marks the second essential difference between the documentary and entertainment films. The typical documentary is filmed in a natural setting, exterior and interior, and uses actual personalities selected on the scene to play its parts. A comparatively small crew, by Hollywood standards, handles the shooting. In our OWI operation, the standard crew consisted of eight men: director, cameraman, unit manager, two assistant cameramen, electrician and assistant, and a driver-helper. Standard equipment was a station wagon and a light truck, a moderate number of lights, a Mitchell camera, and an Eyemo. At our operational peak in the summer of 1944, we had five such units in the field. In three years of operation OWI shot film in more than thirty of the forty-eight states.

The mechanics of field production of this sort dictate sharp variations from typical Hollywood techniques. Nine documentaries out of ten are location pictures. All shooting is done in the field, sometimes thousands of miles from home; retakes after a preview are therefore almost always out of the question. To maintain good quality under constantly varying atmospheric conditions requires much time and patience.

Working with nonprofessional performers also consumes much time. It is his ability to work with such performers that distinguishes the documentary director: He must be able to "cast," from among an average

― 104 ―

group of villagers or steelworkers or students, the exact type called for in the script—or to change the script if he finds a better type. Acting ability cannot be assumed; indeed, the opposite is true. He must be careful not to select the born ham, the man or woman who once played in local amateur theatricals (and who is certain to push himself forward). He must possess a monumental patience; the ability to wait till the farmer's self-consciousness passes, for the golden moment when the child forgets the camera and grows really interested in the nesting bird. He must be both psychologist and politician. He cannot, like his Hollywood confrere, fall back on a combination of good acting and good writing. His responsibility —and his opportunity—are as great as that of the Hollywood director before the advent of sound forced him to follow his script, not to lead it. And, like that vanished genius of the early Hollywood scene, the documentary director should be above all a writer, wielding the camera instead of the pen.

The conditions under which documentaries are shot dictate other variations from Hollywood techniques. The best documentary photography is sharper, more realistic, less glossy and high-lighted than the Hollywood article. Make-up is almost unknown. The film editor has a great deal more freedom than in Hollywood. He is less concerned with the careful "geography" of the typical Hollywood scene, more concerned with making a story point by an adroit cut. A documentary editor thinks nothing of moving actors in time or space by direct cuts instead of by the traditional Hollywood dissolve. (In this, the heritage of the newsreel is evident.) In general, editors in this field, working with what is usually silent film, have more freedom than their Hollywood confreres. In documentary practice a film editor is also in effect a writer, using a moviola instead of a typewriter. Give a good documentary editor an idea and he will express it for you in film: pictorial image, mood, and tempo. His function is more often creative than editorial.

As a quid pro quo, the documentary writer has an important semieditorial function: the writing of the narration, a common feature of documentary films, though somewhat rarer in Hollywood. Its importance to the documentary, particularly to the silent film, cannot be overestimated. Many a weak documentary has been given a semblance of life by an inspired commentary; many a strong one has been marred by wooden or insipid words. Narration should add something to the image, not merely

― 105 ―

explain it. If the image needs explanation, the writer and director have not done their work properly (and this is also a good working rule in Hollywood). The best narration is simple, sparse, often poetic. Its tempo should be in close synchronization with the tempo of the film. In the best documentary practice, the writer of the narration is encouraged to suggest changes in the editing of the film. Words and image can thus be dovetailed and emerge, not as a mere illustrated lecture, nor as a reel of film with spoken comments, but as an artistic entity.

Similarly with the music. The composer of a documentary score is not required, as is too often the Hollywood practice, to lay out so many feet of music against so many feet of film. He is encouraged to participate, to become a part of the editorial team. Documentaries are often recut and rewritten to meet the requirements of the composer. His ideas are always heard with respect. It is thus no accident that many of the best American composers have done some of their most striking work for the documentary.

This brings us to another significant difference between the documentary and the entertainment film. In Hollywood, the contribution of each craftsman to a given picture is fairly well understood. We can assume that the writer wrote the script, that the director shot it with usually minor alterations, and that the editor put the film together, all supervised by the producer. There is a sharp differentiation of function between the various crafts. Only in comparatively rare instances do we find individuals who combine two or more of these functions. Very rarely is there any serious overstepping of craft lines. At its best, this differentiation leads to that happy collaboration of all crafts which makes for fine pictures; at its worst, it leads to the sort of assembly-line production once in vogue at several major studios, though now, happily, on its way to the ash heap.

Such differentiation is the exception rather than the rule in the documentary field. Writer-directors, editor-directors, writer-editors, and individuals who can write, direct, and edit their own films are common. There is also a constant interchange of functions. It is nothing unusual to find a writer filling in at the camera, a director cutting film, or an editor writing scripts.

Documentary films are usually far more flexible than the typical Hollywood product. In part, of course, this arises from the fact that most documentaries are shot silent. (Recutting was the rule rather than the exception

― 106 ―

in Hollywood's silent days.) But this quality is also inherent in the uncertain nature of the documentary, based, as it often is, on things still happening. Our film on the San Francisco Conference had to be revised from day to day. A Navy camera crew went out on the new Yorktown to shoot the "life and death of a carrier." After two years she was still a float, and thus, happily, The Fighting Lady was deprived of its original ending. Also happily, the first Battle of the Philippine Sea provided a more than satisfactory substitute. There are admittedly extreme cases, but many documentaries must be turned inside out, either while still in production or in the cutting room.

For this and other reasons, documentary scripts are usually simple affairs, allowing the director plenty of leeway for substitution or invention in the field. They are notably devoid of "situations," melodrama, or suspense developed from plot devices, or from intricate interrelations between characters.

In the first place, such situations are usually beyond the abilities of nonprofessional performers. In the second place, they are not consonant with the characteristic goal of the documentary: to drive across an idea. This does not mean that the documentary need lack suspense, or even the "menace" for which the fabled producer so plaintively cried. The documentary "menace" is there, but he doesn't wear striped pants or whiskers, or carry a whip. He is the unseen enemy in John Huston's The Battle of San Pietro; in Fighting Lady, the pink tracers floating up from the hostile atoll; he is the starboard engine sputtering and the ground fog in Britain's magnificent Target for Tonight; he may be as intangible as the gray loneliness of the English housewife in They Also Serve, as tangible as the dreadful specter of flood and erosion in Valley of the Tennessee.

For the same rules hold true for documentary as for entertainment films: the audience must be for one thing, against something else. The documentary must have a "pulling" interest. The script, simple as it usually is, strives to enhance this interest. Thus the best documentary, like the best entertainment film, has suspense, light and shade, honest dramatic motivation throughout.

As I have said above, it is the fashion in some Hollywood quarters to deride the documentary as pedantic, undramatic, and "arty." I have even heard the documentarians accused by one producer (who should know better) of trying to drive audiences out of the theaters.

― 107 ―

The Battle of San Pietro (1945), by John Huston

The charge of "artiness" cannot be wholly denied, but it should be leveled not against the medium per se but only against those few producers who have so indulged their aestheticism. The other charges are more serious since they imply that no film dealing in truth can ever hope to win public acceptance; and this, of course, is a matter of the very first importance to the producer of entertainment films.

Yet many of Hollywood's finest pictures have dealt with material usually considered to be purely documentary. The menace in Fury was not the cruelty of individuals, but the psychotic hatred of a mob; The Grapes of Wrath pointed out the evils of sel fishness and economic troglodytism: the theme of Citizen Kane was the well-worn aphorism that absolute power corrupts absolutely; and in Wilson we saw a great man destroyed, not by one whiskered senator, but by the ignorance and indifference of a nation. This fine film also pleaded powerfully for its cause in the best documentary tradition. Zola and Juarez, among many others, also had something very de finite to say.

Several producers of Hollywood pictures have begun to grasp the enormous responsibility and the opportunity facing the industry in the critical years ahead. Their ideas are winning acceptance. The trend is obviously

― 108 ―

toward greater realism, toward a more frequent selection of factual American themes, toward the theory that motion pictures should not only entertain and make money, but should also give expression to the American and democratic ideals: to "the truth" as we, the citizens of democracy, accept it. The industry is preparing to do its part in the fight for human freedom, tolerance, and dignity. This preparation should be not only spiritual but technical. Hollywood can and should prove to its own satisfaction that truth is not only stranger, but stronger, than fiction. It can do this best by closely observing the methods, and sometimes absorbing the personnel, of the documentary field. After all, the words, "truthful" and "documentary" are nearly synonymous.

Citizen Kane. RKO Radio, 1941. Director, Orson Welles. Original screenplay, Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles.
Crisis. Mayer-Burstyn, 1939. Director, Herbert Kline. Commentary, Vincent Sheean.
The Fighting Lady. Fox, 1944. Director, S. Sylvan Simon. Narration, John S. Martin and Eugene Ling.
Fury. MGM, 1936. Director, Fritz Lang. Original story, Norman Krasna. Screenplay, Bartlett Cormack and Fritz Lang.
The Grapes of Wrath. Fox, 1939. Director, John Ford. Novel, John Steinbeck. Screenplay, Nunnally Johnson.
Juarez. WB, First Nat'l, 1939. Director, William Dieterle. Adapted from play Juarez and Maximilian by Franz Werfel and novel The Phantom Crown by Bertita Harding. Screenplay, John Huston, Aeneas MacKenzie, and Wolfgang Reinhardt.
San Pietro. U.S.A. Signal Corps Campaign Report, 1945. Narration, Maj. John Huston.
The Life of Emile Zola. WB, First Nat'l, 1937. Director, William Dieterle. Original screen story, Heinz Herald and Geza Herczeg. Screenplay, Norman Reilly Raine, Heinz Herald, and Geza Herczeg.
The River. U.S. Govt, 1937. Written and directed by Pare Lorentz.
Target for Tonight. Crown Film Unit, B.M.I., 1941. Director and supervisor of narrative, Henry Watt.
They Also Serve. B.M.O.I., 1942. Producer, Ruby Grierson.
Wilson. Fox, 1944. Director, Henry King. Original screenplay, Lamar Trotti.
Valley of the Tennessee. O.W.I., Overseas, 1945. Director, Alexander Hackenschmied.