The Oxford History of World Cinema (37 page)

western United States, Hawaii, China, and Japan ( Japanese Sampans) over ten months in

1897-8.

British cameraman. J. B. McDowell in the trenches

News films were also frequently taken; seven were made of the Tsar's coronation in

Russia, including the Lumières'
Czar et Czarine entrant dans l'église de l'Assoinption

('Tsar and Tsarina entering the Church of the Assumption', May 1896), and sporting

events were also a popular subject, Paul filming The Derby in 1895. In smaller or less

developed countries, local film-makers quickly emerged to take these actualities': in Italy,

Vittorio Calina shot
Umberto e Margherita di Savoia a passeggio per il parco
('King

Umberto and Margherita of Savoy strolling in the park', 1896); in Japan Tsunekichi

Shibata took films of the Ginza, Tokyo's fashionable shopping district, in 1897; in Brazil,

Alfonso Segreto began to take news and actuality films during 1898.

The very earliest motion pictures, whether Sandow ( Edison, 1894), Bucking Broncho

( Edison, 1894), Rough Sea at Dover ( Paul-Acres, 1895), The German Emperor

Reviewing His Troops ( Acres, 1895), or
Sortie d'usine
(Workers Leaving the Lumikre

Factory, Lumière, 1895), had 'documentary value' but did not necessarily function within

'the documentary tradition'. Exhibitors often projected these non-fiction films in a variety

format, interspersed with fiction films. The location of a given view was usually well

labelled either in the programme or by a lecturer, but narrative and a sustained treatment

of a specific subject were thwarted.

This 'cinema of attractions' approach continued to be popular, but it rapidly began to be

balanced by the efforts of exhibitors to sequence films of related subject-matter, in many

instances through an extended narrative. In England, for example, exhibitors routinely

grouped together five or six films of Queen Victoria's Jubilee ( June 1897) in an effort to

cover the event. Each 'film' was generally one shot long and in an increasing number of

instances each film was introduced by a title slide; often a lecturer or 'spieler'

accompanied the screening with verbal explanations as well.

By 1898, exhibitors in different countries had begun to integrate slides and films into full-

length documentarylike programmes. At the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Science ( New

York) in April 1897, Henry Evans Northrop interspersed Lumière films through his

lantern show A Bicycle Trip through Europe. Dwight Elmendorf gave a popular illustrated

lecture, The Santiago Campaign ( 1898), which supplemented his own slides with Edison

films of the Spanish-American War. Many programmes on the Spanish-American War

combined actuality views with staged or 're-enacted' events as well as fictional vignettes,

posing the problem of generic specificity that continues to this day. In England, Alfred

John West produced a fulllength show of slides and films, West's Our Navy ( 1898),

which ran for many years and proved effective propaganda for the British Admiralty.

By the turn of the century, production companies shot groups of short films on a single

theme that were then exhibited together, either as a short subject or as part of a longer

slide-film presentation. The Charles Urban Trading Company ( London) supplied news

films of the Russo-Japanese War: in the United States, Burton Holmes acquired and used

them for his full-length slide-film lecture Port Arthur: Siege and Surrender ( 1905), while

Lyman Howe showed the same films but as one portion of his two-hour, magazine-style

format. In the United States at least, professional illustrated lecturers were regularly

combining slides and films into full-length documentary programmes by 1907-8.

With the rise of the story film between 1901 and 1905, non-fiction film lost its

domination of the world's movie screens. Increasingly it was relegated to the margins of

industrial practice. News films posed a particular problem. Unlike fiction films, they

quickly became dated, losing their commercial value and their attraction for exhibitors

and distributors. Only films showing events of earthshaking importance tended to sell.

This problem was solved when Pathé-Frères began to distribute a weekly newsreel,
Pathé

Journal
, in 1908, first in Paris and, by the following year, throughout France, Germany,

and England.
Pathé Weekly
débuted in the United States on 8 August 1911, and was

rapidly followed by several American imitations.

Documentary-type programmes continued to appeal to middle-class and genteel

audiences, and performed a range of significant ideological functions. They were

frequently employed as propaganda for the colonial agenda of industrialized nations. The

Anglo-Boer war was extensively photographed and filmed from a British perspective in

1899-1900. After 1905 numerous films were taken in the British, French, German, and

Belgian colonies of Central Africa, including
Chasse à l'hippopotame sur le Nil Bleu

('Hunting hippopotamus on the Blue Nile', Pathé, 1907),
Matrimonio abissino

(Abyssinian marriage', Roberto Omenga , 1908), and
Leben und Treiben in Tangka
('Life

and events in Tangka', Deutsche-Bioskop, 1909). Many nonfiction films, such as Making

of a Newspaper ( Urban, 1904), depicted work processes which celebrated the technology

of production, while showing workers as peripheral to these achievements. Innumerable

depictions of royalty, activities of the rich, and military forces on parade or manceuvres

all tended to offer a reassuring picture of the world scene. On the eve of World War, these

non-fiction programmes generally lacked both critical perspective and any awareness of

the catastrophe that loomed.

Many of the earliest feature films were full-length illustrated lectures using only motion

pictures. These included Coronation of King George V (Kinemacolor, 1911), although the

majority were still 'travelogues'. By the end of the 1910s no major expedition was

complete without a film cameraman, and many produced popular films: Roping Big

Game in the Frozen North ( 1912), taken on the Carnegie Alaska-Siberian Expedition by

Captain F. E. Kleinschmidt; Captain Scott's South Pole Expedition (Gaumont, 1912).

Others featured underwater photography ( Thirty Leagues under the Sea, George and

Ernest Williamson, 1914) or returned to Africa ( Through Central Africa, James Barnes,

1915) and the poles ( Sir Douglas Mawson's Marvelous Views of the Frozen South,

1915). For all of these programmes, lecturers stood by the screen and delivered their talk.

They had generally participated in the events and expeditions, or at least were

eyewitnesses or acknowledged experts, and so they shared their personal understanding or

insights with the audience. Often several prints of a given title would be in circulation at

the same time, with each lecturer's personalized narration varying considerably.

Frequently a programme would initially be presented by the chief filmmaker or even the

expedition head; then lesser figures would gradually take over these responsibilities.

While often shot in exotic locales, these programmes always featured the adventures of

Europeans or European Americans. In a remark about popular fiction that is equally

applicable to the documentary Stuart Hall ( 1981) has observed, 'In this period, the very

idea of adventure became synonymous with the demonstration of the moral, social and

physical mastery of the colonisers over the colonised.'

Non-fiction film played a crucial role as propaganda during the First World War, although

governments and their top military officers at first barred cameramen from the front lines.

More or less rapidly they came to recognize that documentary materials could not only

inspire or reassure their own civilian populations but be shown in neutral countries, where

they could influence public opinion. In the United States fiction films depicting the war

were barred because they violated America's claims to neutrality, but documentaries were

seen as informational, and were allowed to be shown. Films made by the belligerent

nations and screened in the United States included Britain Prepared (US title: How Britain

Prepared; Charles Urban, 1915), Somewhere in France (French government, 1915),

Deutschwehr War Films (Germany, 1915). These 'official war films' served as precedents

for documentaries such as America's Answer ( 1918) and Pershing Crusaders ( 1918),

which were produced by the Committee on Public Information, a section in the United

States government headed by George Creel, when the United States finally entered the

conflict in April 1917. Shown in a wide range of situations, these feature-length films

generally relied on intertitles rather than a lecturer -- though someone associated with the

sponsoring organization commonly introduced each screening. Documentaries of this

kind continued being made and screened throughout the war, and beyond, including

Alexandre Devarennes's
La Femme française pendant la guerre
('The Frenchwoman

during the War', 1918), Percy Nash's Women Who Win (GB, 1919), and Bruce Woolf 's

The Battle of Jutland (GB, 1920).

FROM 'ILLUSTRATED LECTURE' TO 'DOCUMENTARY'

After the war, illustrated lectures continued to be widespread, but many were eventually

turned into straight documentaries with intertitles replacing the lecturer. Former President

Theodore Roosevelt had given a slidefilm lecture, The Exploration of a Great River, in

late 1914.

and in 1918 this material was given a more general release as Colonel Theodore

Roosevelt's Expedition into the Wilds. Martin E. Johnson, who had begun his career

giving illustrated lectures, released his documentary Among the Cannibal Isles of the

South Pacific ( 1918), which played S. F. Rothapfel's Tivoli Theater. Robert Flaherty had

filmed the Inuit of northern Canada between 1914 and 1916 and subsequently used this

material in an illustrated lecture The Eskimo ( 1916). When the possibility of turning it

into an intertitled documentary was lost when the negative went up in flames, Flaherty,

with sponsorship from the French furriers Revillon Frères, returned to northern Canada

and filmed Nanook of the North ( 1922).

Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North ( 1922)

The term 'illustrated lecture' had obviously become an inadequate label for the many non-

fiction films that were being distributed and shown with intertitles rather than live

narration. But critics and film-makers initially applied the term 'documentary' to those

programmes that displayed a marked cultural shift, rather than simply to all non-fiction

programmes that embraced a shift in production and representational practices. The

illustrated lecture typically took the western explorer or adventurer (who was often also

the presenter standing by the screen) as its hero. Nanook of the North switched its centre

of attention from the film-maker to Nanook and his Inuit family. To be sure, Flaherty was

guilty of romanticization and salvage anthropology (western influence was effaced as the

Eskimos were dressed in traditional clothing they no longer used). The Eskimos he

depicted as naïve primitives mystified by a simple record player actually fixed his

camera, developed his film, and actively participated in the film-making process.