100 British Documentaries

Patrick Russell, whose tenure as Senior Curator at the BFI National Archive establishes his credentials both as a historian and as an aesthetic critic, has compressed into just 250 pages (in a nearly pocket-sized format, with around 50 black-and white stills) a remarkably articulate series of two-page summaries of Britain’s most characteristic approach to film: the documentary. Russell calls it “the British film genre” (1). The selection here is not comprehensive; it is representative, “celebrating” the British oeuvre as “varied, interesting and – against all expectations – fun.” And yet, in a more academic posture, the author is aiming to “map” the nation’s “documentary heritage,” using the films as “coordinates” (1). On the one hand, then, Russell is celebrating his own critical range; because his commentaries elucidate, if only cursorily, the “intrinsic value” of each film, his “personal” choices can be justified on aesthetic grounds (1–2). On the other hand, Russell is celebrating Britain itself, not because a nation’s collective imagination can be boxed into any “grand theory of documentary,” but because the British eye and ear can “represent” reality with inimitable control over “style, technique, sensibility and viewpoint” (2).

Implicitly, Russell is arguing not only that Britain does claim the documentary form as its own but that it is uniquely qualified to do so. By emphasizing the aesthetic element of documentary filmmaking, eschewing the naïve “actuality” model (2–3), Russell sets up the reader to value what he argues Britons do especially well with documentary material: they make it artful. Size, scope, topicality, historicality – these are essential but ultimately secondary matters. Yes, a map we shall have. But what about a mind? What about not just what we see but how we see it? “American ‘Direct Cinema’ may have exalted ‘observation’ above all else,” says Russell, in a grudging reference to the States, but Direct Cinema “was rarely imported wholesale into Britain (4). Note how Russell accents British sovereignty over the commerce of film. Britain takes what it wants; Britain owns this genre.

Hence the oddness of including in his map seemingly slight films of eight, five, or even one minute. All together, they demonstrate the range of British documentarists’ imaginations. Heavy-weight champions like The Battle of the Somme (Geoffrey Malins and J. B. McDowell, 1916) and South – Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Glorious Epic of the Antarctic (Herbert Ponting, 1919) – each film running 80 minutes -- are set beside feather-weight contenders like the three-minute Baby’s Toilet (Cecil Hepworth, 1905) and the eight-minute Snow (Geoffrey Jones, 1963). British documentaries control a lot of territory, Russell demonstrates. The 15-minute Guinness for You (Anthony Short, 1971), for instance, is historicized with piquant details on production and financing, but it is also richly the matized: the film, claims Russell, expresses the connections between the disinterested documentary film and the tendentious propaganda film. The panoply of techniques – montage, jump-cuts, reverse action, focus shifts, and “a strong colour scheme of burnished oranges, yellows, browns – and black, of course” – embodies the British power to assimilate: a venerated director “remembers Guinness for You without affection, as ‘advertising’. The company described it, approvingly, as ‘documentary’. It’s both” (79). Overjoyed by the combinatory powers of this film, Russell concludes proudly with “Slainte!”

One result of this pride is the occasional slip into effete editorializing, as when discussing Out to Play (Harold Lowenstein, 1936): “Filmed entirely in unglamorous exteriors, it privileges the evocation of atmosphere over the taking of individually ‘well-made’ shots and is largely devoid of plot. It’s all rather delightful (weird end-title, though), a bit too ramshackle but compensating with its joie de vivre” (156). But by this point Russell has earned his stripes as an art critic, for his prose has all along been closely tuned to the film under discussion. With Lockerbie – A Night Remembered (Michael Grigsby, 1998), for example, Russell adopts a modestly elegiac tone and style: “Then the point of view shifts…we are moving…the camera is staring through the windscreen of a car driving through dark rural...