Tour of duty m miller iss18

Tours of Duty The opening sequence of: FACT-TOTEM (?)

Documentary Politics Through Footage and Footnotes

By Mitchell Miller.

!Upper classes are a nation"s past. The middle class is its future."

Ayn Rand. !The working class position could change, but it won"t change through the media ‌ it won"t be changed by films, televisions, papers ‌ because it"s middle class views. It"s controlled and owned by the middle class (pause) who put across what is in their interests."

Ethel Singleton talks to Nick Broomfield in Behind the Rent Strikes, 1974.

1. The Boys" Brigade Proverbially, the average age of the American GI is 19. The American army is the world"s largest nonconscripted army. Put together, we have a worldbeating !Boys" Brigade", or, in the west-kicks-east-bites-west dialectic of today"s conflicts, something alarmingly close to a Children"s Crusade.

Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein"s documentary Gunner Palace (2005) features a distinctly child-like crusader on its handbill, his big blue eyes pleading with and challenging us in equal measure. The !Palace" referred to was once the pleasure-dome of Uday Hussein, now home to the 2/3 Battery, an artillery unit !trained to halt the Russian advance. They lived to blow things up." The Palace is home to gunners such as the dug-faced Stuart Wilf, who in his tour of duty faces, and in many instances must try to curb, the resentment of the local population. As real estate goes, it is sited precisely where extremes meet; one minute the troops are drinking watery American beer by the pool, the next they are bursting into Iraqi homes and dragging alleged "terrorist sympathisers" into the street.

The end result is something of an American antisyzygy, lurching between moments of medieval summary justice and private moments of reflection and self-awareness. These are not college kids, but they are far from blind to the contradictions of their situation, often painfully aware of the mismatch between their official media image as !liberators" and the reality of their role. !I don"t feel like I"m defending my country anymore," says one. It is confusion of the deepest kind, for these Callant-conquerors must also act as policemen, social workers and when standing over the splinters of a living room door, judge and jury over the !liberated" Iraqi population.

But the action switches as suddenly to the downtime, the !post-raid" blow-outs by the palace pool. Were the soldiers not so young, or the hip-hop and Nu-metal so blaring we might mistake it for a re-enactment of Alexander

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and his troops running amok in Persia. This past gifting of civilization to the decadent east culminated in Alexander"s troops getting drunk on table wine and burning all in their path, but in the 21st century the !civilisers" are fighting a media war, emphasised and observed by Tucker. Fortunately, American alcohol (specifically, the !near-beer" Kreig Lite) is too weak for a Macedonian rampage, and in any case, this is a very different sort of Empire building – one where the footsoldiers are less clear of the goals and less certain of their rewards. For Alexandrian concubines, insert gluesniffing Iraqi teens. The post-raid pool parties have an unreal, slightly desperate air about them; the creation of an enclave, a facsimile of home on very foreign soil.

down the shrapnel so that it stays in your body instead of going clean through. And that"s about it!"

These are clearly coping mechanisms, a means of blowing off steam that ranges from the perceptive to the embarrassingly inappropriate (Wilf dresses up as a Muslim holy man for an embarrassing satirical bedroom skit). There are heartening instances of insight: !I don"t feel anywhere in history has somebody killed somebody else and something better come of it," says one GI as he cradles his firearm.

Nevertheless, if the army allows these young people to !see the world", it is a particularly narrow line of sight – their experiences not so much a broadening of the mind as a reason to miss home.

Such a process, naturally, prompts us to ask questions about the identity of the filmmakers and their reasons for doing such work. Tucker"s interest stems from his own military background, of the same caste, if not class, as the soldiers he films. Even so, are his representations trustworthy? Are these young soldiers truly representative of the entire 2/3 Battery demographic? Or has selective !casting" emphasised the enduring liberal Hollywood myth of the undercooked, adolescent victim-soldier of America"s foreign adventures?

Patrols and dawn raids become freestyle raps, drummed on the hood of a Humvee, so acerbic and astute they are used (indeed, somewhat under-used) for the soundtrack. Such musical outpourings suggest that the first response of a foreign serviceman or woman to a foreign culture is to seek refuge in their own – entirely understandable given that the two cultures meet at the opposite ends of bullets or flying shrapnel. Although it sheds light on the psychological state of the young soldiers, it can also be jarring (sometimes we find it hard to distinguish between a bomb or a bass).

Gauche though he can be, Wilf"s !role" in the film is to supply a steady stream of !mouth-of-babes" wisdom and where that fails, withering sarcasm and an unerring bullshit detector. He seems the most likely author of one particularly direct piece of graffiti, scrawled on a palace wall – !I hate everyone equally" (interestingly enough, he was one of the GIs included on the centrefold of the Time issue which featured the American soldier as !person of the year"). His guided tour of a reinforced Humvee is characteristically humorous and horrific:

!Part of our eighty-seven billion dollar budget provided for us to have some secondary armor on put on top of our thin skinned Humvees. This armor is made in Iraq, and it"s high quality metal ... and it will probably slow

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Although such clear-eyed commentary provides a welcome counterpoint to the Walter Mittyesque broadcasts of official US Army radio (the soldiers make great comic collateral out of military jargon such as !Horizontal Fusion"), it slowly, surely, chills the blood as we come to understand the degree to which this experience is damaging his moral and emotional capacities. We can almost see his soul thicken and harden in front of us, and the longer Tucker"s lens dwells on him the more queasy and voyeuristic it becomes.

Blessed with his smart mouth, electric guitar and quick wits, Wilf was always a likely survivor of the conflict, but eight of his comrades were killed during the filming process (two trips made in October 2003 and February 2004), the victim of stray bullets or the most terrifying feature of occupied Iraq, IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices, often concealed inside seemingly innocuous plastic bags). Stylistically, Gunner Palace recalls the claustrophobia and complexity of the Battle of Algiers (1965) which in many scenes it closely resembles, hidden craftily beneath a parodic style that references trash TV shows such as COPS, the very show that Michael Moore in Bowling for Columbine (2002) singled out as a catalyst fuelling middle class fear and paranoia.

Tucker shoots in digital video, a sensible choice in that it affords greater on-the-hoof flexibility. But his choice of film stock references deeper aesthetic textures – its flat, harsh qualities, the sense of exposure and revelation; its credentials as a !democratic" counterpart to film, available and useable by amateurs and professionals alike, give a sense of equality and directness – a sign of empathy between the professional camera man and his subjects.

But this sustained view, these extreme close ups also serve to emphasise a melancholic subtext. It proves to be an alarmingly short leap from letting off steam to a world-view characterised by unrelieved cynicism based

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on equal hatred and a passive aggressive line in selfcontempt. This complex psychosis is aptly summed up by one Sgt. Beatty:

!Someone being sympathetic to this? I don"t know if I"d be sympathetic if I wasn"t in the army. After you watch this, you"re gonna go get your popcorn out of the microwave and talk about what I said, and you"ll forget me by the end of this … Only people who remember this is us."

This soldier clearly perceives a significant gulf between himself and the people he serves (in particular, one might say, the type of cinema-goer who would chose such a documentary over the latest series of explosions featuring Vin Diesel). Such a gulf may be educative, it may simply come down to individual tastes, or the pariah status often suffered by veterans – but it might also be understood in terms of socioeconomic class: !It was community college or travel the world," explains one young soldier, an army fuelled by a deficit in prospects for young people from the current Republican heartlands.

Such a point is emphasised in Eugene Jarecki"s Why We Fight (2005), a reflective film essay on the military-industrial complex. Much of it consists of tense, often unnerving head-andshoulder interviews with Washington players, arms dealers, whistleblowers and analysts, but (as is typical of the American style) the global view is juxtaposed against that of the !regular guy" painted into the corners of the big picture. One such is Michael Sullivan, a young New Yorker recently recruited into the US Army. Clearly exhausted by a civilian life that has repeatedly disappointed and damaged him, he conceives of the army not as a civic duty but a personal refuge, an economic escape route. !These problems are, plain and simple, gonna be solved by enlisting in the army." In a deeply uncomfortable, blackly comic moment (a Beau Jest, if you will) Sullivan turns to his recruiter and says: !Because of you, I"m gonna retire real nice." The recruiter has at least the decency to look uncomfortable.

largely southern. All were there of their own accord, seeking to start again or compensate for a lack of direction in their civilian lives. As a US Defence expert says in Why We Fight: ![The US Military recruiter will] appeal to people"s self-interest – then put them into a situation of self-sacrifice."

And yet, even this corrective has its problems. If these troops are not wild-eyed fanatics ready to die for the NeoCon Empire, there is still the matter of where such !enlightened self-interest" gets us, how it connects to the Industrial Militarism that many, from Eisenhower onwards, have identified and where this leaves American class politics. Tucker does not broach the subject; Jarecki touches on it but is primarily focused on the powerbrokers themselves.

Documentary has routinely presented its audiences with various representations of class, especially the working and/or underclasses. These could be heroic – the shipbuilders of Seawards the Great Ships (1960) – or incendiary, as in the films of Dziga Vertov, the great Russian innovator who intended agitprop to be the cohesive agent for an emergent Soviet classconsciousness. Or they can be for cheap thrills and titillation, even to excite horror, as in the !chav" chic of Big Brother or Wife Swap.

Is not the desire to document in itself an extension of class politics and behaviours – a desire to appropriate reality for one or the other? In Capturing the Friedmans (2004) Eugene Jarecki"s brother Andrew makes tremendous artistic and discursive capital out of the home movies of the eponymous Long Island family, an affluent middle class family torn apart by the arrest of Arnold Friedman and his son Jesse for alleged child sex abuse. Almost all of the film is made up of the Friedman"s own footage, dependent on his compulsion to record, even his own destruction.

But in many respects, the most interesting feature of the class-based documentary resides with the class origins and politics of the filmmakers themselves, for it is they, in a highly mediated age, who ultimately control our ability to perceive other classes. This essay gives just a few examples of how this has manifested itself.

2. People Like Us?

But that the army should act as a community college for Americans of a certain demographic is not by any means a new discovery. British filmmakers Nick Broomfield and Joan Churchill found a very similar situation in their film Soldier Girls (1981), an extraordinary document of the American military machine in action at the height of the Cold War. The soldiers there were largely rural, largely black and

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In the UK, where filmmakers bound themselves to the (social democratic) state (rather than Dziga-Vertov"s Soviet Union), documentaries confirmed class identity and arguably, class divisions. In a highly influential critical review of Elizabeth Sussex"s The Rise and Fall of the British Documentary (1976) for Jump Cut (the Marxist film journal), William Guynn attempted to

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demolish the socialist credentials of the British documentarians. Guynn"s piece may well have cemented the reputation of Grierson as a douce social democrat, whereas friends such as Murray Grigor remember him as an !anarchic libertarian bent on jolting you into action" (see The Drouth, issue 8). But Guynn condemns Grierson and his contemporaries as sell-outs to a bourgeois, capitalist infrastructure, betrayers of the British working classes. The nub of his thesis is as follows:

!Despite Grierson"s exhortation, the British documentary does not stand up well under close political scrutiny, if one judges the movement from the perspective of the interest of the British working class.

The political study Grierson had in mind would doubtless have portrayed the documentarists as highly moral social servants, who, in response to the depression years" massive unrest and economic turmoil, brought the heroic working class to the screen for the first time. Doubtless such a work would have extolled the documentary"s attempts to achieve distribution outside the commercial film trade and to undertake mass “education” in the interest of “democracy”. The documentarists themselves have in fact, already written this kind of political analysis, in particular Grierson and Paul Rotha. Such analyses are attempts to whitewash the movement. For, despite its supposed anti-capitalist stance, it participated in the historic betrayal of the British working class during a period of potentially revolutionary upsurge of the masses."

Guynn"s view is straightforward, fairly consistent Marxist-Leninism. The documentarists (as they preferred to call themselves – an interesting ideological suffix) tied themselves to social democracy, which in the Leninist framework is always the historical !spoiler" in the revolutionary process that stifles the necessary working class militancy. To Guynn, the documentarists !pleaded" the case for capitalism to a working class public in a manner diametric to DzigaVertov"s pleas to his Soviet audience. In the Leninist view, the choice of the documentarists was fairly clear-cut – to aid the revolution from beyond the institutions of the British state, or to oppose it by joining with it.

The cynic or the wag might point out that the British working classes were in any case far more interested in Clark Gable or John Wayne than in lessons on

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socio-economics, and that official pleas for capitalism were simply outclassed by the real, unexpurgated thing. Yet even if the British public found documentary somewhat medicinal (or reminiscent of a rap with the tawse), this does not mean they did not, on some level, respond to the conscious and unconscious messages it imparted.

As John Gray"s testimonial in The Drouth issue 16 confirms, the British Documentary movement owed its early existence to Sir Stephen Tallents, whose primary purpose was to promote the British Empire and its products through the Empire Marketing Board.

Grierson had seized the opportunity this offered and gathered about him his own Boys" Brigade of emergent talent, most of whom would go on to form the infrastructure of non-fiction film and broadcasting over the next few decades – Arthur Elton and Paul Rotha in the private sector (but also at the BBC), Basil Wright overseas, while Grierson would himself continue to work dutifully for the British state until it, unceremoniously, discarded him after the war. Guynn continues:

!It is only in the light of a Marxist analysis that the British documentary movement"s ups and downs – so frustrating and confusing for the filmmakers who participated in it – make any sense at all. To Marxists it is clear that British documentary was caught in the class forces of Britain in crisis. The need to maintain capitalist rule called British documentary into being during the depression"s turmoil, and it was capitalism"s propagandistic needs which made British documentary flourish during the war."

Grierson"s sometime associate, most-times antagonist Paul Rotha comes under particular fire, for obvious reasons – he worked variously for corporate funders such as ShellMex, Imperial Airways and the various industrial marketing boards. That he lost no sleep in taking money from such quarters had also widened the rift with Grierson, who believed fundamentally that such money was !unclean". Rotha attempted to have it both ways, to find a middle ground that Grierson found distasteful: his Shipyard (1935) and The Face of Britain (1935) were films made for private funders that attempted to piggyback socially-aware subject matter on the main business of

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promoting concrete or gas heating.

A non-Marxist (or at least, a non Marxist-Leninist) perspective on the documentarists reveals them as a group of pragmatic socialists, swallowing some of their more radical sensibilities to get the chance to work, and trying to sneak some of their socialist ideals into their films when their paymasters weren"t paying attention. Grierson also saw such compromises as a necessary evil, part of the overriding duty to create a cinema of ideas, although he stopped short of the Shell-Mex shilling. It also helps to understand Grierson"s Calvinist milieu, one so strict he was only allowed to see his first film because, as a Lumières" Actualité, it showed the real world rather than artificially create a real one. Furthermore, as a Calvinist, or !Puritan", his logical pursuit of his goals may have temporally inclined him along a capitalistic trajectory:

!The Puritan, like every rational type of ascetism, tried to enable a man to maintain and act upon his constant motives, especially those which it taught him itself against the emotions."

Or so Weber argued in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. We might see in this Grierson acting and maintaining his constant motive of a !cinema of ideas" to educate the working classes despite his unease at promoting an Empire he must ideologically oppose. The end did not necessarily justify ALL means, but could steel him against apparent contradictions. This goes unmentioned in Guynn"s demolition, as does the social origins of the documentarists. It is mentioned in passing in individual entries to Brian McFarlane"s The Encyclopaedia of British Cinema; they were mostly middle to upper middle class, the majority having reclined under a cloister or two and some, such as Gray, were from grammar schools. There were some aristocratic types in search of a new parvenu status, seeking the more !valid" achievements to be pursued in fledgling bourgeois institutions such as the BBC. But there has been relatively little discussion of documentary as an outgrowth as well as a document (or, as Guynn would say, a non-document) of class politics in Britain or elsewhere.

For his part, Grierson rarely missed an opportunity to mention his shoemaker grandfather, although he himself was a dominie"s son – which anywhere other than Scotland would be regarded as solidly middle class as it comes. But Grierson saw his class identity as an existential choice, identifying himself with the workers, or at least the pawky peasant stock immortalised by Lewis Grassic Gibbon in A Scots Quair. In a 1960 essay entitled !A Scottish Film Industry" he refers to the dearth of enlightened funders and champions of films to be found in his homeland and invokes precisely the Puritan gamesmanship of Weber:

!The only true analogy is the role of the old village dominie whose honour lay in backing the lad o" pairts and obscuring his own role in the encouragement of

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others. Find two or three of these and you will have your Scottish films; and I see no reason why the country which once produced dominies shouldn"t find them again for our film purposes."

Bear in mind that only a few years ago Grierson had invested a great deal of time in trying to stimulate native filmmaking through the film The Brave Don"t Cry (1952) (see Jonny Murray"s piece in The Drouth, issue 6). One can see in this statement more than just the sloganeering of an old campaigner; there is a crucial hint as to the nature of Grierson"s self-regard and selfimage – perhaps even a lament that he was only one dominie in a nation crying out for more of them.

But this did not, to Grierson"s mind, remove him from the masses he sought to communicate with; for he is a parish dominie, working amongst the people in their schoolhouse, a chalkboard professional rather than a capitalist exploiter. Like Tucker, his professional distance from the subjects relies upon the artifice of the camera and the filmmaking process. Without it, he is fundamentally one of them.

Certainly, gentility was not one of his assets, and he would often prove his peasant credentials with a sneer at the delicacies of public life – once openly supporting the brutal Soviet reprisals in Prague in 1968. And it could get much more personal: !Let"s go down and see Humphrey being nice to the common people," he once said to a GPO colleague, speaking of Humphrey Jennings, the Cambridge-educated, ex-poet and painter who had joined Grierson"s group in 1934. Too talented to ignore, but with an accent and manner much too patrician for Grierson"s liking (although he seemed to have no such problems with the much posher Basil Wright), Jennings was often marginalised at the GPO, despite his obvious talent, as shown in films such as Spare Time (1938). Here, the heroic working classes are cast in an absurdist, somewhat unsettling light, never more so than in the image of a marching Kazoo band, accompanying a tin-pot villagefête Britannia. The shiny uniforms and the absolute seriousness of the marching Yorkshirewomen are so otherworldly it might as well be somewhere in the Land of Oz. The ordinary folk in Spare Time do not fit easily into a context where the working classes are to be the dignified cloth-capped Achilles of the industrial era.

The suspicion was that Humphrey was making art when he should be finding the facts. Yet the real issue may have been that Jennings was startlingly successful at getting remarkable footage and in negotiating the divides in class and education. It was as if his refined accent and manners gilded him as he glided into pubs, bomb shelters or street corners to come back with frequently beautiful, astonishing, yet naturalistic images.

For Jennings, Britain – or to be more accurate, England – was a muddle of irreconcilable contrasts and dissonances, unified in its disunity, as Julian Petley says, the equivalent of Orwell"s prose montage on !the sights and sounds of Britain" that asked: !How can one make a pattern out of this muddle?" Such broad church, Anglican sentiments no doubt chipped at

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the Calvinist flint in Grierson"s soul, but most of all, offended his logical, socialist sensibilities.

The mark of some silly toff who couldn"t button his own braces? Perhaps not. For one thing, Jennings was actually from a middle-class family, albeit an unconventional one. His father was an architect, his mother a painter, his birthplace a small fishing village in Suffolk. On the fact of it, both Jennings and Grierson were from the non-productive middle classes. But the Jennings-Grierson divide aligned itself on more than just class differences (perceived or real). Jennings was also a rival in a real sense that Rotha was not, for he too was a gifted theorist, and while Rotha"s !dramatisation of fact" was a trump of Grierson"s !creative treatment of actuality", Jennings" views were far more disturbing. His ideas converge most spectacularly in the posthumously published Pandaemonium and the Coming of the Machine (1985), a collage-book of documents and fragments charting an imaginative history of the industrial revolution – a paper-bound documentary of often astounding textual imagery and juxtaposition, numbered and presented chronologically.

Jennings was near to completing this book when he took a fall off a Greek cliff in 1951, so it is an invaluable and necessary port of call in understanding the development and !end-point" of his thinking. Among the !contributors" are Darwin, Marx, Watt and Coleridge, but Jennings also rescues many gems from obscurity – entry no. 126 extracts the papers from an 1806 committee devoted to the creation of !rational toys" to inculcate children with utilitarian values (Meccano and Lego were a long way off…); no. 49 reproduces a long poem from Christopher Smart, inmate of Bedlam; no. 23 is an early call from Robert Southwell to disestablish London as the English capital and spread the !vitals" of government more evenly throughout the kingdom. The effect is illuminating in the same hallucinogenic fashion as that of a visitation from the Virgin Mary. It is a dialectic, but not solely material in nature – as well as the fragmentation of socio-economic arrangements, there are fractures of the consciousness and psyche in the face of a rapidly changing world. It treads the same ground and subject matter as Grierson, but has the gall to complicate what the latter had set about eulogising with Calvinist zeal and clarity of purpose. Jennings constantly casts doubt and complication:

Jennings brand of experimentalism:

!The rebellion … to the tradition of pure form in cinema is no great shakes as a rebellion.

Dadaism, expressionism, surrealism are all in the same category. They present new beauties and new shapes. They fail to present new persuasions."

While Grierson no doubt planned to fell many targets with this broadside, it seems likely that Jennings was one of them. Jennings was an active member of the British surrealist movement in painting, helping to organise its first exhibition in 1936, during a two-year sabbatical from the GPO. For his part, Jennings may have made something of a rejoinder in Pandaemonium, in reproducing and critiquing the writings of Dr Andrew Ure, the Glasgow-born chemist and industrial theorist. Here was another dominie sort, who saw the ant-farm but had little notion of the inner mind of the ants. In item no. 193, Ure writes:

!… thus, the Iron Man as the operatives fitly call [the machinery] … sprung out of the hands of the modern Prometheus and at the bidding of Minerva – a creation destined to restore order among the industrious classes and confirm to Great Britain the Empire of Art … and even long before it left its cradle, so to speak, it strangled the hydra of misrule …"

It is hard not to visualise the efficient operations of Seawards the Great Ships, or the assembly lines of the great factories that the documentary movement captured so lovingly. One also wonders whether this is not in fact some internal memo rescued from the files of the Empire Marketing Board, and of course, one cannot fail to notice the last phrase, an open confirmation of Marxist thinking on the industrialdemocratic set-up. In Jennings" own commentary, he makes the following remarks:

!Imagination is a function of man whose traces are more delicate to handle than the facts and events and ideas of which history is usually constructed."

Grierson had nothing but scorn for this sort of patter. The man who could champion Eisenstein"s experiments in montage even as he lambasted Dada leaves us in no doubt where this dominie stood on the

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!Man as we see him today lives by production and by vision. It is doubtful if he can live by one alone. He has occasionally however, tried. Dr Ure speaks of a factory as ideally “a vast automaton, composed of various mechanical and intellectual organs, acting in an uninterrupted concern for the production of a common object, all of them subordinated to a self-regulated moving force”."

Jennings also reminds us that Marx referred to Ure as the !Pindar of the automatic factory". If this reference is in any way aimed at his ex-benefactor, then Jennings is no more a gent than he was.

If anything, Jennings was a !prickly" personality

no easier to categorise or pin down. Isaiah Berlin"s famous dichotomy of the hedgehog and the fox seems to describe these two protagonists all too well:

!… there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel – a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance – and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related by no moral or aesthetic principle … all-embracing, sometimes selfcontradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision."

Although Grierson had his spines permanently raised,

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he was probably not as much of a hedgehog as he wanted to be, whereas Jennings is a veritable Basil Brush hiding some fairly lethal spikes. His friend Charles Madge notes in the introduction to Pandaemonium:

!… Jennings was well aware that his choice of texts was contradictory, but he believed that it was imaginatively valid."

Boom. Boom. Not content with furthering the cause of bourgeois phantasmagoria in the surrealist exhibition, he was also involved with a separate documentary movement (that used photography and print rather than film)

more explicitly incredulous of the everperverse working classes. Working with Charles Madge and Humphrey Spender, Mass Observation used a fox-like medley of photography, art and detailed diaries from thousands of volunteer researchers to create !an anthropology of ourselves". Its impetus was the abdication of Edward VIII that proved, to the dismay of leftist, New Statesman-reading middle class intellectuals, the continued hold of the monarchy on the popular imagination. With some degree of condescension, the MO group set out to understand the roots of this general !ignorance" among the working classes. Researchers were sent into pubs, racetracks and homes to observe and interpret !mass behaviour".

Augmented by the atmospheric photographs of Humphrey Spender MO publications went into extraordinary, often bizarre detail on the everyday

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experiences of the working classes. In one celebrated moment, a man in a Bolton (renamed in startlingly !Urian" terms as !Worktown") pub nonchalantly pulled a tortoise from his pocket. The researchers" beer consumption was also noted (and perhaps matrixed against the believability of their reports) as well as the frequency of spittoons. The attention to the details of a suddenly very exotic working class strayed frequently into the realms of the absurd. The movement was lampooned by Graham Greene in the 1939 book The Confidential Agent, where Mr Muckerji, a Mass Observer, notices every small detail in his boarding except that the landlady is a killer and a fellow lodger is the agent of the title.

Of course, one of the problems with this approach was that !an anthropology of ourselves" could often become !an anthropology of them", the observers being nice middle-class boys with the time and inclination to obsessively scribble in their notebooks. As the American writer James Buzard notes, Mass Observation required the observer to place a distance between themselves and the subject: !We are studying the beliefs and behavior of the British Islanders", an echo of the famous studies of Malinowski. Although Buzard is talking anthropology, he inadvertently puts his finger to the very nub of the documentarian"s (or documentarist"s) class dilemma:

!A practitioner"s authority hinged upon the demonstration of what we might call an outsider"s insideness, an achieved passage into alien lifeways that nevertheless held any permanent “going native” to be an abdication of authority and identity alike."

In short, the anthropologist or the documentarist is only ever a visitor, whose eye is already fixed on the way out, towards the developing room, typewriter and editing suite. This was especially true in the 1930s and 40s, where technical constraints and the very conception of how a film should be made meant that time actually filming on location was rigorously scheduled and often carefully staged. Mass Observation hinted at a freer and looser interaction of the documentarist and his/her environment; but even so, there were limits and gulfs that could never be entirely removed. Yet, one might ask whether they ever should be – for in being distant the documentary filmmaker is surely at greater liberty to essay his subjects than someone fully embroiled in the life that unfolds?

To Jennings, the movement confirmed the strangeness, the unifying !coincidences" lurking beneath the surface of reality, a view he took with him on his return to the GPO in 1938. It stood him in good stead for the films of the war years (Fires Were Started, Listen to Britain) when he was tasked with describing a nation, a landscape and a people in the throes of violent, radical change – patrolling the bomb sites and production lines to create singularly dissonant visions of an industrial Empire and its people, locked in a struggle to survive.

Jennings took many lessons from his time as a mass

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observer but in a vulpine move, returned to film. Spare Time was made immediately after the MO interregenum and shows its marks most clearly. He used the camera as a mass observer, trying to come to terms with and understand the dissonant reality that confronted him through documenting it – and to reconcile, as Madge recollects in his foreword to Pandaemonium, the contradiction between the progressive elements of Marxism and the psychic and social toll it could exact upon the population. A Jennings documentary does not strip the facts to their logical components as with Grierson, nor dramatise complex reality as with Rotha; he was a complicator – the middle class !fox" transfixed in the headlights of mass culture.

In Pandaemonium, Jennings did make one final and important contribution to documentary theory, although given that the book languished in publishing limbo until the early 80s, it was a largely subliminal contribution that was often expressed in very different ways. Taking a post-Marxist stance (but referencing early theorists such as Vertov), he suggested a necessary corollary – or corrective – to the underpinning concept of !means of production" with his !means of vision" – the transformation of !sense perceptions" of matter by the imagination into images that allow us to better understand our environment. To Jennings, this was a role that the poets had since abdicated in favour of commodification and escapism.

So who controls the means of vision? For Jennings it was the sociologists, the cultural critics, the economists – and yes, the documentarians. A natural question arises as to what extent they are the same as those who control the means of production? Writing in The Cinema of Nonfiction in 1990, William Guynn recalled Dziga-Vertov"s own investigation of this issue:

![Dziga-Vertov] asserts … that the coherence of any discourse is the work of an agency, here not the bourgeois filmmaker as individual but a collectivity of filmworkers who create in the progressive stages of production a representation of the visible world."

In a 1999 article, the debate is taken up by Jonathan Beller, who elaborates on ideas of the relationship between production and vision thus:

!What we learn from Vertov is that the image is constituted like an object – it is assembled piece by piece like a commodity moving through the intervals of production – and it is a (technological and economic) development of the relations of production."

But in an era where the mainstream media is untrustworthy at best and the industrial model of nonfiction filmmaking has given way to a small one or twoperson crew, holding the means of vision gives the individual documentarians directing these crews considerably more power than in Grierson"s day – hence Michael Moore"s attempt at regime change with Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004). In such cynical, weary times, claims for documentary can become grandiose in ways scarcely imagined by either Grierson or Jennings. !…

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Independent documentary-making is one of the last bastions of free speech," said Morgan Spurlock in a recent press interview to promote his new More4 series 30 Days. Spin? Almost certainly, but Spurlock represents a common view that presents the documentary as a form of struggle in itself, although one that is, in his own words, !issue based". It"s as if the means of vision, as with those of production, have been cut off from any ideological framework, simply acting and influencing on feelings and instincts.

Yet what does it mean to have !means of vision"? It is clear enough in an analysis of the mainstream media, that it is a power in itself – the stuff elites are made of.

In a 1964 Pelican edition titled simply Elites and Society (1964), T. B. Bottomore interrogates two of the great theorists of the elite, Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca. It was Pareto who first developed (on the back of Marx) a universalist theory of elitism that saw societies dividing along the lines of resources-rich, highly organised minorities dominating the majority.

Mosca added to Pareto"s rather spare theory by further investigating the ways in which these elites connected to the larger society. He identified a sub-elite, a:

!… much larger group which comprises, to all intents and purposes, the whole “new middle class” of civil servants, managers, white collar workers, scientists and engineers, scholars and intellectuals. This group does not only supply recruits to the elite … it is itself a vital element in the government of society, and Mosca observes that “the stability of any political organism depends on the level of morality, intelligence and activity that this second stratum has attained”."

As Bottomore notes, Mosca"s is a somewhat fuzzy term, but it is tempting to identify here the idea of a !means of vision" and who its holders are. One of these is Michael Tucker – from a military family, but clearly very distant in terms of his class and education – even his ability to leave Iraq. Tucker is led by his desire to understand these soldiers who class and economic divisions render exotic, yet familiar. It is mass observation with its horizons greatly narrowed – !minute" observation of a set cast of !characters" watching for twitches and tics as much as tortoises. It is, in a sense, an anthropic universe where everything exists in relation to the people, as opposed to the entropic universe of Grierson and Jennings, where people were an aspect – some might say a cog – of wider machinations. The mass observers compiled their diaries as various individuals came and went – their interest being in how such individuals interacted with a place and within a social context. In Gunner Palace we do not gain any purchase on such a place as Baghdad, and only fleetingly on the Palace itself;

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because we dog the steps of GIs, the environment becomes simply a psycho-geographical extension of their daily grind.

But then America is, as we all know, a different sort of place, with a different conception of class and society.

If class is an unspoken subtext of Gunner Palace that is because the vision that Tucker offers is extended to a largely American clientele – one which, as Ashley Shelby will tell you in this issue, does not even like to admit to the existence of class.

It is accordingly hard for Americans, even some Europeans, to entirely grasp the complexities of a fully intact class system as operates in Britain, where socioeconomic distinctions run into deeper, existential, even moral territories. Even the term middle class must be qualified either side of the pond – most Americans will happily claim to be middle class, and they often take it far more literally than we do, meaning the middle band of the economic spectrum. The term working class is much less in evidence. The preferred term is !minimum wage", an implication that class is a conditional, rather than a circumstantial or even existential state (and perhaps also, setting a false bottom on the slopes of American social mobility). Wages go up, people get jobs with dental insurance, they join the marines – class is mutable in much of the US in a way it can never be in the UK. The minimum wage is invoked in the first episode of Spurlock"s new TV series 30 Days, where he and his fiancée voluntarily live on the minimum wage in the unglamorous location of Columbus, Ohio.

Working in crappy jobs in a dreary American city with terrible public transport, the Spurlocks slide further and further into a penurious misery, counting every cent and stretching every buck.

Spurlock has already trawled such waters, tangentially, in Super Size Me, where his subject is the sustenance of so many breadline families in America, both as wage source and evening meal, and as with that film he essentially plays the metropolitan playing dumb in the suburbs and strip malls of Middle America. It is true that we see him working a very grimy, blue collar job and there are the tense discussions over budget, but much of it seems phoney – a transplantation of middle class thrift into the sub-breadline zone. The rules the couple set for themselves of not borrowing, not overspending and not using their health insurance are laudable, even sensible, but it is hard not to think they miss the point. What about borrowing money?

Overspending, or simply robbing Peter to pay Paul – all time-honoured traditions of the poverty line. And of course, he is only a visitor here.

As with Super Size Me (2004), Spurlock"s real subject

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is himself – minute observation of the most truncated and rarefied type. His real question is not what are the minimum wage/working classes like, but what such an environment means for people like him – the !fish-outof-water" conceit of much reality TV extended to an hour-long film. This immediately removes the situation from any sense of history, continuity or place within that setting. It does, to its credit, utilise interviews with people whose encounters with the breadline have gone beyond flirtation – yet the issue of whether the !minimum wage" masses have any sense of classconsciousness or alienation is almost entirely avoided.

To be more exact, the nature of life on the minimum wage is understood according to a set of criteria, standards and axioms that reside with the educated middle classes who can afford to live in desirable cities such as New York – largely secular, largely humanist, thrifty and determined to succeed in their appointed task. They are zealously poor. In her thoughtful critique of Super Size Me in The Drouth issue 15, Elke Weissmann perceptively identifies Spurlock"s !mommy and apple pie" politics, at least in relation to the American diet. The Middle American kitchen becomes a benchmark against which junk food, inevitably, fails.

It is hard not to think that my co-editor, writing in the same issue, got it right after all – Spurlock is his own measure, his own golden mean, a super-sized Vitruvian.

3. The masses mirrored?

One of the pivotal moments in Super Size Me is the !barf" scene, where Spurlock eats his first Big Mac and promptly brings it up (in luminous Technicolor) in the car park. As Tom Gunning"s essay Visions of Crowd Splendour (see this issue, pp. 30-36) testifies, gut reactions to working class culture could, as in Freud"s case, be equally visceral.

Our reproduction of Gunning"s excellent essay recalls a period long before Grierson, Jennings or even established cinemas, one reborn in the general consciousness through the recovery of over 800 reels of film from c1900, produced by Edwardian filmmakers Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon. With most of the films in astonishingly good condition, the recovery of the Mitchell and Kenyon archive has been compared, with only a smidgen of hyperbole, to the finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Mitchell and Kenyon were previously a footnote to the history of early film, known largely for a few surviving re-enactments of the Boer War. The discovery by Peter Worden in a Blackburn shop revealed that Mitchell and Kenyon in fact traded mostly in !actualities" or topicals, non-fiction precursors to the documentary, taken at factory gates, seaside promenades, busy city centre streets or as a !ghostride" from a tram. At a stroke, the discovery elevated them to a plane with other early pioneers like the Lumières, Dulaar and Gaumont.

Most films from the early 1900s were used by Fairground showmen in their bioscope shows and their survival is rare; the films worked as novelties and had a limited shelf life, the travellers being rarely sentimental enough to keep any of them. This writer"s

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own Great Great Grandfather pioneered film exhibitions on fairgrounds in the south of Scotland, but the only surviving material is a rather ghoulish threeminute film from 1908, showing his own funeral.

The film is a very simple narrative, yet remains an interesting example of early experimentation with narrative technique. Great Great Grandad is shown taking a stroll about town with his dogs, followed by a horde of local children fascinated by the camera that struggles to keep him in shot. Having established the central figure, cut to the front of his !Ghost illusions show", where such films – including this – would be shown. The coffin, followed by my Great Great Grandmother, my Great Grandparents, Great Uncle, Buffalo Bill and countless others follow, each in their very finest get-up.

They wait by the steps and carriages line up to take them away – but what really comes to interest us is the foreground, teeming with ragamuffin kids enjoying the spectacle and again, the camera itself. The narrative focus may well be the family, yet the constraints of filming mean that the operator cannot purposively direct us to that focus (in any case, the family were canny enough to know that by showing so many local people, it would attract customers when the film was shown). The last scene (or act) is the funeral procession of the carriage on its way to the church.

The rediscovery of such films has certainly changed or challenged many established views of the early era of film, as a BfI volume testifies. Essentially an opening volley in the process of studying and understanding these relics, The Lost World of Mitchell and Kenyon – Edwardian Britain on Film (2005) gathers film critics, historians and archivists to consider the collection and its implications variously, for social history, film history and theory and our understanding of the more esoteric corners of twentieth century scholarship, such as the history of British fairgrounds.

The book sets out two principal analytical approaches to the material – the first looks at the films in context and analyses their technical and aesthetic qualities; the second mines the films for historical data. The central purpose of an actuality was to be the mirror of a locality, to be shown days, or as Mitchell and Kenyon have shown, hours after filming. The films did not necessarily have anything new to show the audience but themselves, their friends and family, the entertainment being in self-recognition as they sauntered out of a factory gate. It would be some time before there was the capacity to capture more universal experiences and show it elsewhere, although even in the early 1900s there were glimpses of what was to come.

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Highlights include Leo Enticknap"s analysis of the impact of film technologies, in particular, the transition from a cottage industry of inventors-cum-exhibitors, to a much more open field stimulated by the availability of Prestwich cameras. The availability of this and other !off the shelf technologies" made it viable for Fairground exhibitors to take up the new technologies and expand the distribution of early cinema – which could be compared to the revolution in filmmaking and distribution made possible by digital technologies.

Robert Monks makes much of Mitchell and Kenyon"s Irish films – an often-ignored aspect of film history.

As Gunning has noted, there were high hopes for !actuality" film from the very beginning – Vachel Lindsay who dreamt of the !Mirror Screen" sanctifying the teeming masses of the street. A DVD also released by the BfI presents a number of the actualities, ranging from sporting events to the factory films, simple fixedframe records of teeming crowds. They walk into shot, smile, wave at the camera or, as in a film shot at Pendelbury Colliery, square up to it. Never intended as art, they nevertheless have an extraordinary beauty, a simplicity in the way they realise the faces of workers, city gents and scullery maids.

Such was the actuality before Grierson"s !creative treatment", although it went through its own course of development throughout the First World War and the 20s, as it was pressed into service for newsreels and propaganda films. Gunning gives an authoritative overview of the treatment of class in this period; as for the identify of the filmmakers and exhibitors themselves, they are an interesting admixture. There are the entrepreneurial petit-bourgeoisie such as Mitchell and Kenyon themselves. Then there are the show travellers, who owed no real allegiance to the dominant class structures except as a source of income. They led an itinerant life subsistent on their patter, their cunning and the crowds they could attract, often dressed in the get-up of town or country gentlemen. There were also another class of exhibitors, independent showmen who caroused the town halls and lecture theatres with their film programmes, who unlike the Fairground showmen were enthusiasts or technical innovators (the Lumière brothers would belong to this group). Opportunists, shysters and zealots thus all had a hand in incubating the new form. But most, if not necessarily all, were in it for the money, and market forces dictated that the early films would be actualities, as the chance to see !themselves" was what most audiences wanted.

The eye of the camera was in the control of those with the capital and the education to exploit it – it is thus significant, even impressive, that the likes of Grierson, Jennings, Dziga-Vertov and in an uneasy, unpalatable sense, the likes of Leni Riefenstahl, were able to sequester the non-fiction film as a vehicle for purposeful ideas or expressions. Not that it was ever settled as to how the screen should mirror society.

Should it simply reflect back at us, with a wave from the crowd, or should it, as with the !princes" mirrors of medieval and Renaissance times, offer moral and

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ethical instruction? It took a couple of decades for its full potential to be realised.

4. Green Book Disarrangements Winding forward once again, past the Grierson era, we find that the creation of great bourgeois institutional structures for the purposes of broadcasting tightens the grip of the so-called !sub-elite" on popular means of vision. The great success of the early documentarians (or !ists") lay in establishing a basic trust in their authority and objectivity, aided in no small measure by the growing technical and artistic competence of many practitioners. To this day, contemporary documentary suffers from the expectations raised by the authoritative !classic" Anglo-American documentary. As opposed to the much more polemical continental tradition, English-speaking documentary was expected to show a !balanced" view of a subject, to mix facts and figures with interviews, and show several sides to the same argument – the parameters being set in an office somewhere in Shepherd"s Bush, Broadcasting House or Queen Margaret Drive.

Not that this is without value; but it is an approach that has its natural limitations and can (and did) hamper creativity. It also privileges !balance" over genuine objectivity. The presenter figure, whether disembodied or onscreen, was a natural development of silent era inter-titles that disappeared with the advent of sound (although many contemporary documentaries purposefully opt for inter-titles over narration, as in Capturing the Friedmans). The presenter was !privileged" and compendious– effortlessly dispensing information and commentary from some unknown reservoir. And this being the Beeb, or Pathe or RKO, the voice of the presenter was necessarily crisp, refined and soothing (or depending on your own origins, insufferable, especially living in a world postHarry Enfield"s Cholmondley-Warner).

At its most drab the documentary of the post-war period functioned as a somewhat joyless mockery of some of the earlier films – even the team-playing Grierson was scathing about many of them. Ian Sinclair dismisses the British documentary tradition as !print journalism with jump cuts" and no more trustworthy for all its pedestrian accoutrements.

But the problems go beyond boredom or worthiness or the inadvertent humour of public information films. It may be too extreme to compare the patrician, patriarchal documentaries of this period with the !Voice of Fate" from Alan Moore"s comic strip V for Vendetta (a dulcet-toned actor who personalises the central computer that props up an English fascist regime). Yet it could be argued that the persuasions of much !traditional" documentary came not from the quality of the facts but the timbre of the voice and the breeding of its owner.

Furthermore, the positivist viewpoint of aesthetically beautiful films such as Seawards the Great Ships can also be questioned, or at least further explored.

Beautiful as the shots of hulking ships splashing the

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Clyde are, there is, as mentioned previously, a !Urian" gloss to the proceedings. The shipyards are a welloiled, highly-efficient organism – there is little dirt, no accidents, go-slows or complications of any kind. Such a perspective frames this truth as external to the filmed material, as opposed to the contemporary style, whereby the footage gathered over a period !in the field" is the basis for interpretation of the facts – or simply the reality, as experienced. What if a camera crew had spent several weeks in a Govan drydock, and allowed the men to carry on as normal?

What would be shown then?

Seawards the Great Ships represented a triumph of knowledge over experience, an institutional approach to filmmaking as incarnated in the legendary !Green Book" issued to budding documentarians at the BBC. This gave technical and formal guidance to the corporation"s documentary makers, essentially an Airfix for the non-fiction film. As with the Grierson-era documentaries, these films required detailed treatments that clearly defined what footage would be gathered, edited and reassembled in presenting the facts on a subject. The presenter was the outward face of this massive group effort, not a filmmaker, but a voice, disembodied or onscreen, enunciated, educated and ergo, authoritative.

The peak of !Green Book" documentary was arguably Sir Kenneth Clark"s Civilisation (1969), the presented documentary par excellence, scripted and presented

by Sir Ken with unbridled aristocratic brio, while the crew and director of the film fade into relative obscurity, their task seemingly to keep up with their presenter. Clark"s approach, however, was far from conventional; even the subtitle of !a personal view" drew a very definite line in the sand, taking the series far beyond the cathedral builder model of many nearanonymous hands. The influence of !Green Book arrangements" is felt even today, being referred to in the various memoranda of the Ministry of Defence around embedding in the current Gulf War. In fact, the Green Book amounted to a list of do"s and don"ts (emphasis on the don"ts) to guide journalists and factual filmmakers in covering certain subjects, and was just one reason why rival programmes such as ITV"s World in Action would often outdistance the BBC on many counts. Until the arrival at the BBC of Hugh Carleton Greene in the 60s BBC, the Green Book dominated factual programming at the BBC, and it was only when he pared it back that a revival was possible.

Paul Watson (now unfortunately labelled !The Godfather of Reality TV") was a direct beneficiary of this new liberalism. Even as Clark was tucking his first class tickets to Italy beside the Savile Row kerchiefs,

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the likes of Watson, Michael Apted (of Seven-Up (1964) fame) and Peter Watkins (see The Drouth, issue 8) had already been doodling irreverently in the Green Book"s margins. Both were brainy, middle class boys of an angry bent, none more so than Watkins, who favoured a much more literal agitprop interpretation of the early documentarian Paul Rotha"s !dramatisation of fact" (Rotha, incidentally, was the first to install filming equipment in a van so that on-location interviews were possible), one that would see him ostracised and forced to work abroad within only a couple of years of arriving at the corporation.

Watson was less angry (or simply more diplomatic), which allowed him to innovate and extend the reach of British documentary with the support of BBC monies. Although certain features of the standard BBC doc are apparent in his films – the narrator, the occasional segue into abstract facts and figures – Watson was the UK"s first true !direct cinema"-style documentary filmmaker. Direct Cinema was the brainchild of the Americans Robert and Albert Maysles, who favoured films shot in real time, with no lighting or manipulation of the environment and shot on location with minimal interference from narrators or researchers. Starting with films such as David and Sonia Got Married (1968), Watson broached many taboo subjects such as sex, poverty, unemployment and the benefits culture, garnered from extensive, unscripted time shooting in the field. He is best known for his 1974 television series The Family, in which Watson and his crew gained an extraordinary degree of access to a working class family in Reading. Ian Holm gives the narrative gravitas to the series, occasionally supplying us with facts and figures about council housing or pregnancies. But it is the footage that is so different. The family are rarely interviewed in the !conventional" way, of being sat down and pelted with questions – instead the questions are fired at them as they go about their business, and their responses – feckless, thoughtful, mundane or otherwise – are fired back in the heat of the moment.

The impression is of unvarnished reality– as the mother says: !You see these kitchen sink dramas with people who are beautiful, kitchens are beautiful – real kitchens aren"t like that."

In Why We Fight, an interview with the Republican politician John McCain (an outspoken critic of President Bush) ends with an interruption; The President is on the phone and would like to speak to the Senator. As McCain has only just offered some scathing criticism of his President to camera, the interruption is sufficiently sinister to send a chill up and down the spine.

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More importantly, however, it serves as an interesting example of how the Direct Cinema technique has pervaded even the most structured of documentary approaches – of blurring the distinction between what would conventionally be off camera and what would be on, and introducing a !real-time" incident into the fabric of the film.

And yet, the manipulation is evident – Jarecki could have easily chosen to edit this out, just as Watson ultimately, chose what aspects of the family"s lives to highlighted. Yet the advent of Direct Cinema acted as an important corrective to the many weaknesses of the traditional documentary. Beginning with Psychiatry in Russia in 1955, the style sprang almost fully formed from the Maysles" first films, many of which, such as the middle-period Salesman (1969), explored the psychic landscape of Middle America with sympathy and without sentimentality. It remains one of the great films on the neuroses and pressures of the American middle classes. Their influence would be immense, particularly Albert Maysles" argument that documentary filmmakers should be authors rather than directors, drawing from what unfolds rather than chopping and changing the environment into a preconceived mould.

Of course, the possibility of distancing oneself from a point of view can also be very difficult when the narrator and camera operator are essentially one and the same, and few filmmakers (Tucker and Spurlock being just two) have also matched their capacity to remain largely objective and direct the camera in directions beyond their preoccupations. The Maysles were also, mostly, concerned with documenting great figures, people in full possession of their own image and self-delivery – the Brandos, Capotes and the Muhammad Alis of their early shorts. But what if the subjects are working class people who, while no fools, are nevertheless at a power disadvantage in relation to the visitor sitting in the corner of their sitting room?

Watson was of a leftist persuasion, and the tremendous power his footage gave him was directed towards issues of economics and equality – in The Family, poor housing was his primary target, while in the later Sylvania Waters (1992) he documented the lives of Australian nouveau riche. But it was with The Fishing Party (1985) that he made his most openly polemical piece, one that speaks volumes of the role of class politics as a motivation for documentarians.

The film follows four wealthy Englishmen on a jaunt to Scotland. Three of these are clearly refugees from a Boys" Own story or a Flashman novel: Henry Carew is an affable enough, somewhat earnest country gent, his friend Robert Hutchinson, an almost cartoonish upper class twit of little brain, who plays backgammon for a living, while Guy Cheyney (might be a relation ...) even more cartoonish as a toad-like city trader of brutal sensibilities and brash manners. Were we to stretch the Kenneth Grahame metaphor further, then Watson himself is surely the Badger (an apt enough monicker for the intrusive, chiding art of the documentarian) here to dose upper-class excesses with his antidote of

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riverbank common sense (oddly enough, these three men describe themselves as !upper middle class" which may be an abortive attempt at the parvenu respectability of the Thatcherite project).

We watch these men at home with their ugly children and talking wistfully of hanging, lounging at a gentleman"s club or patronising the ever patient Scottish Ghillie. The film amounts to a number of set pieces (or set-ups), all the more potent because it is on their home territory. !The unemployed are a threat to security," argues one, while another demonstrates the gulf in aspirations between the classes by expressing his !hope" that he will be !a head of industry one day".

Watson"s crew are highly adept at zooming in at just the right moment to capture their facial expressions or slight, faltering pauses in the face of the camera as we think, just for a second, it might dawn on them how they are being railroaded. And such it is, for the 40 minutes remorselessly exposes their deepest prejudices and assumptions. In one sequence the !chaps" wantonly crack off shots at a seagull. Intruding onto their somewhat loutish victory whoops as the bird falls into the sea is a blustering speech from Hutchinson on the importance of discipline.

There are certainly plenty of vicarious pleasures for the class warrior; but the viewer might wonder whether or not the bigotries of these men are any different from those held by other social classes at the time. One senses another agenda, one much more vindictive entirely, and this is perhaps shown by the comparative silence of John Buttland, the fourth man in the party.

He is no more pleasant (!I"m not worried about the country, I"m worried about me"), but clearly of a different class and mindset to his hooray-Henry companions. He has none of the public school background, the requisite tie or the braying laugh. He is bearded, dark-featured and speaks in a barrow-boy accent. He may well be Jewish, and therefore excluded from the England these men imagine. He does not seem to like these men he describes as !passing acquaintances" much. He seems to be the epitome of the new aspirational petit-bourgeois that fuelled Thatcherism, and of no real interest to Watson whatsoever.

Watson"s disgust is palpable, and we might at least wonder whether that disgust is entirely an expression of his politics, or hints at some of the ascetism Weber identified in the middle classes. These men wear their privilege openly: they laugh, they bray and shoot seagulls simply because they can – precisely the sort of excess the bourgeois ascetic disdains, and, Weber argued, the successful capitalist avoids. Carew and his crew were also the sort who segued easily into powerful positions, the sort to excite a jobbing TV crew to mutinous acts of sabotage. And sabotage there seems to be; instead of unpacking the Buttland conundrum, we have Guy saying to the Ghillie: !Can I have a crotch pad?", and we snicker right up to the credits. But there is a sense of losing a real opportunity to understand the dynamics of Thatcherism

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– of playing it for laughs over serious analysis. Would Guynn not see this, and the string of tacky, tragic, tawdry, transgressive reality shows that so abused the legacy, as yet another betrayal of the mass audience by the British documentary-making classes?

To be fair to Watson, The Fishing Party is but one film among many that documented the complexities and dynamics of class in Britain, and he is to be praised for his devotion to the subject and for pursuing it. Like Watkins, he also introduced, almost by stealth, what were then cutting-edge documentary techniques and added greatly to the repertoire of the Green Book – or at least provided valuable marginalia.

Not that the presenter, even the disembodied narrator, were entirely superfluous – but their very role was up for question. What mediation is necessary when the facts self-evidently play themselves out in real time?

Can the audience not judge these for itself? In Watson"s films, the presenter becomes a guide rather than an authority, filling in gaps or delivering asides that contextualise the action. They commentate on the main event almost as a viewing companion rather than a manifestation of the facts we take in. By the 90s, a sufficient weight of technique, cliché and reference had accumulated to make documentary a subject in itself.

In his experimental piece London (1992), Patrick Keiller very eloquently made this point by shooting a series of images from around the city and presenting them alongside an entirely fictional story that had no real relationship to the circumstances in which they were collected.

One might have wondered whether this too would lessen the importance of being from a certain class and caste – one that could glide serenely in and out of pubs and living rooms – to impart facts onscreen. Yet such new techniques were hampered by several self-imposed constraints – in most cases a relationship had to be built with the subjects, access negotiated and sustained. It had to be a relationship that offered multiple opportunities for the documentarian"s patience to be rewarded. It must also, one assumes, be consenting, or cordial.

And yet for Nick Broomfield, the exact converse has proved the makings of a successful career. His early films with Joan Churchill (such as Soldier Girls) were accomplished pieces of British Direct Cinema/CinémaVérité. Broomfield was given a start by the distinguished documentarian and Rotha associate Sir Arthur Elton who gave him £200 for his film Who Cares, on slum clearance. His Juvenile Liaison I and II (on Police treatment of juvenile petty crime) were banned in 1976. In Chicken Ranch (about a legal brothel in Texas) he confirmed that his great subject would be scandal itself, the stuff of which moral panics

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are made.

But his reputation was truly made by The Leader, His Driver and the Driver"s Wife (1991), a follow-up to Driving Me Crazy, !the most expensive experimental documentary ever made" where a financial cock-up saw him develop his unique style, learning to trust to catastrophism over the positivism of the prewritten treatment. This !abortive" film on Eugène Terre"Blanche, leader of the Boer Neo-Nazi party (the AWB) at the time of Mandela"s imminent release, offered a distinctly post-modern spin on the documentary format. Serendipity – or anyone else"s definition of bad luck – meant that getting the prized interview with the leader proved a tortuous process, no thanks to Broomfield"s own brinkmanship. Broomfield and his crew are deliberately late for interviews, the better to froth Terre"Blanche into a rage, as he indeed does. Excluded from even routine press calls, they latch onto his driver – a complex, oddly sympathetic individual with a chipmunk-faced wife who hates Terre"Blanche. In such ludicrously tabloid vein it proceeds; it seems that Broomfield"s project is in an unholy mess, excluded from the nexus of power that Maysles so easily shadowed. But it is a game – even the seemingly pathetic moments (Broomfield"s crew films Terre"Blanche"s dogs in apparent frustration) part of his overall plan to expose through the detritus left in the wake of power.

And it is only Broomfield"s bemused upper-class Britabroad demeanour, his seemingly desperate pleas in a cut-glass accent that !we"re making a film" which sustains him from the serious injury he often seems bound to incur. His own bluster and diffidence brings out the same in others – even a racist pastor who catches him filming illegally seems uncertain about what has upset him. Clutching his boom-mike he is, like the very earliest pioneers, truly entrepreneurial in the way he makes the environment he walks into his own.

Not that any of this is new – it is just that Broomfield is rather more honest in his deceits. It is a powerful technique that allows Broomfield to capture !Direct Cinema" moments that simply show the truth of a situation, as well as allowing him to control it. He is a clown in control of every trick and tumble. For his part, Terre"Blanche, who is himself !revealed" as a slavering clown with no sense of humour, begins to suspect that he is being !played". !You got what you wanted – a good argument with me," he snarls at the end of their last encounter and Broomfield has to hide his glee.

In a retrospective on the film, Broomfield openly admits his polemical intentions:

!I felt that the AWB was a resistance of desperation,

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that they weren"t really a viable political party. A lot of journalists had taken the AWB very seriously, that gave him a credibility they didn"t really deserve – so I was very anxious not to do that, and Eugène Terre"Blanche made that very easy because he didn"t take us seriously – he thought we were like a bunch of film students …"

This is essentially the opening paragraph of the same off-Green Book being used by Michael Moore and many contemporary filmmakers, although Broomfield"s technique and demeanour remains unique. Broomfield becomes, in himself, a conflation of the filmmaker and the presenter in all their ulterior glory: the falseness of the presenter, the manipulation of the producer or director – and the power that being of a certain class and accent gives him. !The position of the working class won"t change by you making a film," states Ethel Singleton, the remarkable subject of Broomfield"s second film Behind The Rent Strike (1974). If The Leader saw his style mature, this earlier film shows that his !style" has very deep, and very class-conscious roots:

!I always felt that one of the contradictions of being a filmmaker is that one is very often from a middle class background … and Ethel was from a working class background. I had a very different upbringing and life expectations from Ethel … and I very much felt that this should be stated in the film. And this was the first way in which I put myself, or used my differences, in a film."

In short, he turns out his pockets and reveals his ownership of the !means of vision". Strange though it seems, it is the conniving blackguard Broomfield who maintains not just a constant motive, but his integrity, and so brings a great bourgeois art form full-circle.

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the drouth

the drouth

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