Before the 1920s, documentary filmmaking had largely been confined to newsreels and scenic shorts. Occasional feature-length documentaries had been made, but these had not established the genre as significant. During the 1920s, however, the documentary achieved new stature as it increasingly became identified with artistic cinema. We can distinguish three main tendencies in the documentaries of this era: the exotic film, the attempt at direct recording of reality, and the compilation documentary.
8.45 A documentary spectacle as thousands of nomads brave frigid mountains in a search for pastureland in Grass.
The exotic documentary was particularly important in the United States. It came dramatically to public attention in 1922 with the release of Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North. An explorer and prospector in Alaska and Canada, Flaherty had shot some amateur footage of Eskimo culture. He determined to make a feature film following the life of an Eskimo family. Eventually, in 1920, a fur company agreed to finance the venture. Flaherty spent sixteen months in the region of Hudson Bay, filming Nanook and his wife and son. Every scene was planned in advance, with Nanook making many suggestions about what sorts of action to include (8.44). Flaherty balanced authenticity with arranged scenes, as when the Eskimos built an oversize igloo with one side open so that the family could be filmed going to bed.
The major Hollywood film firms refused to distribute Nanook, but the independent Pathe Exchange released it. It met with great success, undoubtedly in part because of the engaging personality of its hero. As a result, Paramount supported Flaherty in an expedition to Samoa to direct a similar film, Moana. He set out in 1923, only to find that the natives had adopted western-style customs. Flaherty persuaded his “actors” to return to traditional clothing and, in order to inject drama into the film, to reenact a painful, obsolete tattoo ritual. Flaherty had by now fallen into his lifelong habit of running far beyond schedule and shooting immense amounts of footage. Moana was not ready for release until 1926 and did not duplicate the success of Nanook. Flaherty would not complete another film for eight years.
8.46 In Kino-Pravda (number 21, 1925), Lenin’s face is superimposed in the sky above his tomb.
8.47 In The Fall ofthe Romanov Dynasty, Esfir Shub includes newsreel footage of the destruction of the statue of Tsar Alexander Ill in Moscow in 1921.
8.48 The new railroad is used to tether a camel in Turksib.
Nanook' triumph also enabled the producer-director-photographer team of Ernest B. Schoedsack and Merian Cooper to create their first feature, Grass: A Nations Battle far Life (1925). Also financed and distributed by Paramount, it recorded a dangerous migration of Iranian nomads seeking pastures for their flocks (8.45). Grass was popular enough to permit Schoedsack and Cooper to make Chang (1928), a staged account, shot on location, of a peasant family battling dangers in their native Siamese jungle. Chang reflected a move toward fiction-based filmmaking, and Schoedsack and Cooper were to push their interest in exoticism completely into fiction in producing the immensely successful King Kang in 1933.
The documentary form was particularly important in the Soviet Union. There all three types of documentary— exoticism, recording of reality, and compilation—found expression.
Dziga Vertov had taken charge of Soviet newsreel filmmaking during the Russian Revolution. By the early 1920s he had formulated his theory of the “kino eye,” claiming that the camera lens, due to its recording abilities, was superior to the human eye. He put this claim to the test in 1922, establishing a new newsreel series, Kino-Pravda. (The name was derived from the national Bolshevik newspaper, Pravda [“Truth”], started by Lenin in 1912.) Each installment of the newsreel focused on two or three episodes of current events or ordinary life. Vertov also, however, believed that special effects were part of the camera’s superior ability to report the truth. Thus he often used split-screen effects or superimpositions to comment on his subjects (8.46). Vertov also made feature-length documentaries, mixing footage photographed directly from life with special effects that conveyed ideological points (see 6.54). When sound was introduced in the Soviet Union, Vertov insisted on having a mobile recording machine that could be taken on location in factories and mines for use in making Enthusiasm (1931), a documentary on the First Five-Year Plan in steel production.
During this era, Soviet filmmaker Esfir Shub virtually single-handedly invented the compilation film. She had reedited foreign films for Soviet release during the early 1920s. Her real interest, however, was in documentary. She aspired to assemble scenes from old newsreels into new films. The Soviet authorities refused to give her access to such footage until 1926. Among the old reels, she found the home movies of Tsar Nicholas II, around which she based The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927; 8.47). The favorable reception of this film allowed her to make two additional features: The Great Road (1927), on the Russian Revolution, and The Russia of Nicholas II and Leo Tolstoy (1928), on the prerevolutionary era. Having used much of the footage she had discovered, Shub continued her career as an editor in the sound era.
Aware of the many ethnic groups living in the new Soviet Union, directors fostered an exoticism not unlike that of Flaherty’s Nanaok. In 1929, Viktor Turin made Turksib, chronicling the epic construction of the Turkestan-Siberian railway. Although the film emphasized the achievements of the Soviet state, it also recorded the reactions of the indigenous peoples living along the railway’s route (8.48). This exotic appeal made Turksib popular on the art-cinema circuit in the West. Similarly, in Salt far Svanetia (1930) Mikhail Kalatozov recorded in sparse but beautiful detail the efforts to bring salt to a remote mountain village near the Black and Caspian Seas.
The work of Flaherty, Schoedsack and Cooper, Vertov, Shub, and others would have a considerable impact during the 1930s, when the documentary became more prominent.