Remaking History: Jay Leyda and the Compilation Film

A slim volume of 176 pages with an original paperback price of $1.95, Jay Leyda’s Films Beget Films: A Study of the Compilation Film (1964) remains one of the most insightful, stimulating books on the compilation film yet written.¹ (Used copies now sell for $38.) The initial champions of documentary—Dziga Vertov, John Grierson, Paul Rotha, and others—stressed the creative treatment of reality, or as Rotha put it, documentary film involved a “dramatic statement of facts.”² Editing was a pivotal part of this treatment, as was reenactment, but reusing found footage was not. Found footage, already understood as a rapidly accumulating resource, simply did not have the immediacy of freshly recorded material, be it staged, reenacted, or caught on the fly. And with the technological innovations of the early 1960s that made capturing the encounter of filmmaker and subject in the moment of filming a defining act for documentary—be it in an observational or participatory mode—the idea of compiling new films from old, despite Esther Schub’s remarkable example,³ remained a largely neglected, secondary consideration.

In that sense, Louis Marcorelles’s Living Cinema: New Directions in Contemporary Filmmaking captures the spirit of the 1960s far more accurately but entirely ignores the value of this well-established and vital tributary of documentary filmmaking.⁴ Similarly, A. William Bluem’s Documentary in American Television, published just a year after Leyda’s book, devotes just one chapter (almost entirely on Project XX, NBC’s acclaimed series of compilation films) to it, and Eric Barnouw’s classic text, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film, published a decade later, makes no more than passing mention of this form.⁵

None of these books scrutinizes the formal, ethical, and aesthetic complexities of the compilation film. In fact, we have had to wait for the recent publication of Jaimie Baron’s The Archive Effect: Found Footage and the Audiovisual

Experience of History (2014)⁶ to find a significant elaboration on the insights Leyda offers in his seminal book. There is a reason for this. In Representing Reality I argued that the collage-like principle championed by Leyda as a foundation for the compilation film never gained a solid foothold in the United States, not even among leftist filmmakers: “The formalist concept of ostranenie, the ‘making strange’ of things familiar through the manner of representation and juxtaposition, the Brechtian concept of Verfremdungseffekt, using alienation devices that break the empathetic bond to promote a broader level of insight … all seemed too distracting when priorities favored the direct, immediate, and obvious.”⁷ Strange juxtapositions seemed too contrary to the sense of immediacy and transparency that formed the basis for documentary realism. It is then not surprising that the compilation film became little more than a side current to the mainstream documentary and that its analytic treatment should be neglected apart from this one outstanding book. Representing Reality is as guilty of this neglect as any of the other books mentioned.

Leyda spent considerable time in the Soviet Union during the birth of the Soviet cinema of the 1920s and 1930s. He returned to the United States in 1936 as purges and show trials abounded but retained his faith in a communist ideal. His Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (1960) remains a unique, firsthand account of the rise of the Soviet cinema.⁸ Leyda understood well the importance of montage as a cinematic principle and, more broadly, the centrality of strange juxtapositions as both an artistic and political tool.

Although Eisenstein’s theories of montage—and practice of photomontage by John Heartfield, Hannah Höch, and Alexander Rodchenko—do not receive extended discussion in Films Beget Films, they clearly form the bedrock for the book’s treatment of the compilation film. All of them understood the shot or image as part of a greater whole whose sum could be constituted by parts chosen for their dissimilarity of type, origin, or affect rather than as a contribution to continuity and transparency. This was a...