The Projection of Britain
A History of the GPO Film Unit
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12239148 |
|---|---|
| Authors | D L Lemahieu (0000-0002-3046-4813, Lake Forest College, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2012 |
| Volume | 23 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 149-151 |
| Publication date | 2012-02-24 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Twentieth Century British History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0955-2359 • E-ISSN: 1477-4674 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1093/tcbh/hws004 |
| OpenAlex | W1989316978 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
John Grierson and other members of the documentary film movement in Britain were masters of myth-making and self-promotion. From their beginning in the 1920s and throughout the following decades, they generated an enormous amount of highly articulate, self-referential criticism that routinely exaggerated the aesthetic merit and social impact of their films. Setting themselves apart from Hollywood and the commercial film industry in Britain, they portrayed themselves as embattled artists of a different kind of cinema committed to progressive social change. Yet it was primarily as creators of public relations, not cinematic art, or engaged social comment, that the documentary film movement acquired its limited funding and distribution. Grierson's Drifters, first shown in 1929 and underwritten by the Empire Marketing Board, borrowed heavily for its cinematic style from Battleship Potemkin made four years earlier. Eisenstein's film celebrated revolution in Russia; Grierson's effort promoted the herring industry. In one of the best essays in this edited volume, Jeffrey Richards documents how the myths of the documentary film movement began to unravel after the 1960s. Marxists belittled their politics and praised instead ever more obscure films made by such groups as the Workers' Film and Photo League. Film historians debated the issue of sponsorship, with some conceding that films such as Housing Problems (1935) from the British Commercial Gas Association may have affected how elites viewed poverty. Feminists noted the masculine bias of documentary films and lamented that women rarely appeared. Richards places the movement within the context of British commercial film during this period and argues that, whatever their obvious limitations, the inclusion of real working-class voices and faces in documentary films made a social difference. Yet, Richards himself does not entirely escape the mythology of the movement when he asserts that a brief, visually ambiguous final shot in a Paul Rotha film on shipbuilding comments on looming unemployment
Art · Art history · Big business · Context (archaeology · Criticism · Film director · Film industry · Hollywood · League · Literature · Movie theater · Mythology · Political science · Politics · Shadow (psychology · Sociology · Cinema and Media Studies · History · Law
| Citations per year | 0.29 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2019 - 2024 (6) |
| Highly cited | No |