John Grierson

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John Grierson (right) with Bolivian filmmaker Jorge Ruiz in 1955

John Grierson (born April 26, 1898 in Deanston near Doune , Scotland , † February 19, 1972 in Bath , England ) was a British documentary film director and producer. He is considered the "father of British and Canadian documentary films " and is credited with introducing the term "documentary".

Education and path to film

He was raised by his parents in the spirit of liberal, humanistic ideals and Calvinistic morals and views. After he was employed as a mine clearer in the Royal Navy during the First World War , he went to study at the University of Glasgow and was involved in left-wing activist circles. With a scholarship he studied from 1924 in the USA at the University of Chicago , Columbia and the University of Wisconsin – Madison . His research topic was propaganda psychology and the influence of press, film and other mass media on public opinion formation.

Grierson paid special attention to the tabloids, which he believed to be a threat to democracy. He saw tendencies towards political reactionism, anti-democratic tendencies and political indifference in the USA. Responsible for this he held the complexity and lack of transparency of society for the common citizen. Grierson believed that this should be counteracted with education and the involvement of citizens in political decisions. He saw a means for this in the film .

Grierson began writing film reviews for the New York Sun. In a review of Robert Flaherty's South Seas film Moana (1926) he coined the term “documentary” ( NY Sun , February 8, 1926: “Of course Moana , being a visual account of events in the daily life of a Polynesian youth and his family , has documentary value ").

In his work, he also came into contact with groundbreaking works by foreign film industries and was influenced, among other things, by Sergei Eisenstein's editing technique and assembly theory as used in the Battleship Potemkin .

Documentary movement in Great Britain

At the end of the 1920s, Grierson returned to England with the idea that film could educate the people and moralize and, with its propaganda effect, could help overcome the Great Depression in Great Britain in the 1920s. Although he rejected the exoticism of Robert Flaherty , Grierson was enthusiastic about his documentary work and planned to document the lives of ordinary people in his homeland.

Grierson was appointed to the Empire Marketing Board (EMB), a UK government public relations agency in support of UK world trade. Around 1930 he was able to convince the establishment of a film department and became its director. This is how the British documentary film movement began .

Already at the end of 1929 Grierson had produced his first film Drifters together with his cameraman Basil Emmott . The film shows the work of the herring fishermen in the North Sea. It differs from its documentary predecessors mainly in that almost no scene of the film was staged. The choice of the topic should be due less to Grierson's own interests than to his discovery that fishing was a hobbyhorse of his financier. Drifters premiered with Battleship Potemkins UK premiere and received good reviews.

After this success, Grierson's work concentrated mainly on organizational tasks of film production within the EMB. Between 1930 and 1933 he engaged young filmmakers such as Basil Wright , Edgar Anstey , Stuart Legg , Paul Rotha , Arthur Elton , Humphrey Jennings , Harry Watt and Alberto Cavalcanti in the film department and was more of an adviser. Grierson was also able to persuade Robert Flaherty, who made exemplary documentaries in England with Industrial Britain (1933) and above all Man of Aran (1934).

As a result of the global economic depression, the film department of the EMB was also dissolved and Grierson's supervisor at EMB went to the General Post Office (GPO) as manager for public relations. He brought the film department there, now as the GPO Film Unit , and one of the first productions was Night Mail (directors: Basil Wright and Harry Watt), which showed the modern postal system using the example of the mail train from London to Scotland, but also the award-winning one Documentary The Song of Ceylon .

In 1938, Grierson went to Canada at the invitation of the Canadian government , where he created the national film production company, the National Film Board of Canada , of which he became the first director. When Canada entered the Second World War, mainly propaganda films were produced there. During the Second World War he advised Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King as Director General of the Wartime Information Board . From 1957 to 1967 Grierson worked for Scottish television. In 1957 he received the Canadian Film Award .

Grierson's younger sister, Ruby Grierson , also became a documentary director and producer.

Filmography

As a director

  • Drifters (1929)
  • Granton Trawler (1934)

As a cameraman

As a producer and consultant

literature

  • Forsyth Hardy (Ed.): Grierson and the Documentary. Translated into German by Wilhelm Flöttmann. Bertelsmann, Gütersloh 1947.
  • Patrick Hörl: Film as a window to the world. An examination of the film theoretical thinking of John Grierson (= communication audiovisual. Vol. 20). UVK Medien Ölschläger, Konstanz 1996, ISBN 3-88295-234-2 (also: Munich, University of Philosophy, dissertation, 1995).
  • Jack C. Ellis: John Grierson. Life, contributions, influence. Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale IL et al. 2000, ISBN 0-8093-2242-0 .
  • Brian Winston: Claiming the real II. Documentary: Grierson and Beyond. 2nd Edition. BFI Palgrave Macmillan, London 2008, ISBN 978-1-8445-7271-7 .

Documentaries about Grierson

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Wartime Information Board ( English, French ) In: The Canadian Encyclopedia . Retrieved August 21, 2016.
  2. ^ Grierson, National Film Board of Canada
personal data
SURNAME Grierson, John
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British documentary film director and producer
DATE OF BIRTH April 26, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Deanston at Doune , Scotland
DATE OF DEATH 19th February 1972
Place of death Bath , England