The beginning of World War II abruptly changed the status of documentary filmmaking. Leftist filmmakers who had criticized capitalist governments recognized the necessity for switching to a position supporting the battle against fascism. Military establishments within the warring countries called on professional filmmakers, and major directors previously associated primarily with fiction films switched to documentaries. Documentaries became far more popular. In those days before television news, families who had members in the military or who were directly endangered could witness wartime events at their local theaters, in newsreels and documentaries.
Hollywood Directors and the War
The United States stayed out of the escalating European conflict until December 7, 1941, when the Japanese launched an unprovoked, devastating attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Germany declared war on the United States a few days later, and global conflict became inevitable.
The U. S. government called directly upon the Hollywood establishment to make films supporting the war effort. Immediately after Pearl Harbor and the German declaration, the Pentagon asked the prominent Columbia director Frank Capra to make a series of propaganda films. These were to explain to American soldiers and
14.22 In The
Battle of Britain, animation turns the map of Europe into a Nazi whale about to devour the United Kingdom.
Sailors why their country was in the war and why they were obliged to help foreign countries in the fight against Germany, Italy, Japan, and other members of the Axis. It was especially necessary to explain America’s new alliance with the USSR, which had previously been portrayed as a threat to the American public.
Capra himself entered the military as a major. He recalled watching Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will and deciding that the best way to motivate soldiers to fight was by drawing upon existing films that portrayed the enemy’s power. He created a series called “Why We Fight,” based primarily on footage captured from German and other enemy sources, combined with material from the Allies. The directors he supervised compiled this footage, explaining military strategies through animated maps supplied by the Disney studio. A forceful narrator told the audience exactly what to think about the images (14.22). The series consisted of seven films: Prelude to War (1942), The Nazis Strike (1942), Divide and Conquer (1943), The Battle of Britain (1943), The Battle of Russia (1943), The Battle of China (1944), and War Comes to America (1945). Major Hollywood figures like actor Walter Huston (as narrator) and composer Alfred Newman worked anonymously on some of the films. The series was required viewing for military recruits, but some of the films were also shown publicly.
Other Hollywood directors soon entered the service, recording aspects of the war in powerful documentary films. John Ford joined the Navy as the chief of the Field Photographic Branch. Since military intelligence anticipated the Japanese attack on Midway Island, Ford and his cameraman were there to record this turning point in the war. Using 16mm cameras, they captured the attack and American response, including a memorable shot of the American flag being hoisted amid the turmoil of battle. Ford edited this footage with shots of actors speaking the sentiments of archetypal American people, he also used traditional folk music on the sound track. The result was a paean to American strength, The Battle
14.23, left Lightweight 16mm cameras carried during bombing runs created spectacular aerial footage for Memphis Belle, including this shot of a plane’s tail against the squadron’s vapor trails.
14.24, right In Let There Be Light, the camera lingers on the jubilant face of a traumatized soldier who has regained his voice under treatment; his therapist is glimpsed in the left foreground.
Of Midway (1942, coproduced by 20th Century-Fox and the Navy). Ford was later decorated for wounds received during the attack, and The Battle of Midway garnered an Oscar as best documentary.
William Wyler served in the Air Force, where he supervised Memphis Belle (1944), a film on bombing runs over Germany (14.23). John Huston had established his reputation as a director of fiction films early in the war with The Maltese Falcon. He made two exceptionally candid films during the war. In San Pietro (generally known as The Battle ofSan Pietro, 1944), he was assigned to show why the Allied advance through Italy was taking so long. He used footage taken by frontline camera operators as the troops moved through Italian villages. The film came close to being banned because Huston juxtaposed soldiers’ voices with shots of their body bags. After some revision, the film was released.
Huston ran up against further censorship problems with his next project, Let There Be Light. The military initially delegated him to make a film about the rehabilitation of victims of shell shock. Employing direct sound, Huston shot extensive candid interviews with traumatized soldiers undergoing therapy. This film was virtually unprecedented in using unrehearsed, direct recording of people’s responses to offscreen questions
(14.24). Let There Be Light captured the soldiers’ illnesses so effectively that it was banned by the U. S. government and thus had no influence on the subsequent development of documentary filmmaking. It did not become available to the public until the 1970s. Nevertheless, it anticipated the documentaries of the Direct Cinema era, and especially the “unbiased” approach of Frederick Wiseman (see Chapter 24).
As a result of Germany’s invasion of Britain’s allies in eastern Europe, primarily Poland and Czechoslovakia, Britain declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939. Just under a year later, on August 13, 1940, the
Germans launched a bombing campaign against Britain, known as the Battle of Britain or the Blitz. Bombers targeted civilian areas as well as military sites, and thousands of Londoners regularly slept on the platforms of Underground stations. Many citizens were killed, and there was massive destruction in the southern and eastern areas of England. Within months, the Britishers’ determined resistance led the Nazi military to turn more of its attention to the USSR.
The British documentary cinema contributed to the united front against the Nazi attack. Some films were made by units within the military services. The Army and the Royal Air Force coproduced Desert Victory (1943, Roy Boulting), a feature-length account of one of the turning points of the war, the North African campaign and defeat of the Germans at El Alamein. Dozens of camera operators exposed their film in the desert
(14.25), often in the thick of battle. Stock footage, maps, and staged footage were also used, yielding a clear, dramatic account of the campaign. Rapid editing enhanced the intensity of the battle scenes. Desert Victory was popular in many countries, even winning an Oscar as best documentary in the United States.
As soon as the war began, the GPO Film Unit had become the Crown Film Unit, dedicated to making war-related films. Some members of the unit were documen-tarists who had worked under John Grierson—Harry Watt, for example, who directed Target for Tonight (1941), showing a typical bombing raid over Germany. Virtually all the action, from the establishment of the home base and personnel to the return of the planes, is staged; the opening emphasizes, however, that “each part is played by the actual man or woman who does the job.” The action goes beyond simple exposition of information, drawing upon conventions of fictional war films. Little touches lend human interest, as when a pilot misplaces his helmet. Similarly, Target for Tonight’s bombing unit was a mixture of nationalities (14.26). Perhaps in part because of these “fictional” aspects, the film was enormously popular.
14.25 Prime Minister and Minister of Defence Winston Churchill flashes his familiar “V for Victory” sign while visiting the troops in Desert Victory.
14.26 An American soldier and a Scot, both members ofthe bombing team in Target for Tonight.
One crucial documentarist came to the fore during this period. Humphrey Jennings, an artist and a poet, had been acting, editing, and scripting for the GPO Film Unit since 1934. He had directed a significant film, Spare Time (1939), on Britain’s leisure activities. Along with his close collaborator, editor Stewart McAllister, Jennings devised a style that lyrically evokes the lives of ordinary British citizens. The pair frequently cut together shots taken in different locales, but the sound from one locale would continue uninterrupted. The counterpoint invites the viewer to see the connections among events.
Jennings’s approach proved suited to depicting the home front once war broke out. Rather than celebrating the dramatic glories of combat, he concentrated on the quiet resilience of the British public. With Watt and Pat Jackson, Jennings made The First Days (1939), on London’s preparations for the inevitable bombing. The title of London Can Take It! (1940, also codirected with Watt), on the Blitz, suggests the determined mood that Jennings captured in his wartime films.
Listen to Britain (1942, co directed with Stewart McAllister) reflects the pair’s fascination with sound. Using only music and sound effects, they moved freely among everyday routines continuing incongruously during the reminders of war. A scene inside the National Gallery, for example, shows a concert against a backdrop of empty frames whose paintings have been removed for safekeeping. The concert music continues over views outside the hall, including a girl sitting reading while a barrage balloon floats overhead. As the scene shifts to a factory, the music gives way to loud clanging as a tank is assembled. In other parts of the film, popular songs span a range of shots in different places.
14.27 Staged action in Fires Were Started allowed Jennings to cut among details of the firefighting, such as this close shot of two men on a roof.
In 1943, Jennings made a feature documentary, Fires Were Started, on the role of the National Fire Service in putting out blazes started by German incendiary bombs during the Blitz. The film was completely staged, using a small group of characters to lend human interest to the story. Jennings portrayed them fighting fires and off-duty—playing pool, drinking beer, listening to music. For the fire scenes, several bombed-out buildings were set ablaze so that Jennings could set up careful compositions and get enough footage to edit scenes in the style of a fiction film (14.27). Despite all this manipulation of events, actual firefighters from the Blitz considered the film highly authentic.
Just as Jennings had captured the home front during the war, he meditated on the approaching postwar era in A Diary for Timothy (1945). The narration, written by E. M. Forster, addresses a baby born on the fifth anniversary of Britain’s entry into the war, attempting to tell him not simply what went on but why the war was fought (14.28). The film juxtaposes scenes of the young Timothy along with scenes of wartime events, such as John Gielgud rehearsing Hamlet and police coping with a bomb. A Diary for Timothy attempted to convey the
14.28 Children walk through the rubble of war as the narrator addresses Timothy: “When you joined us we’d been fighting for exactly five years. We’ve hated it, but we’ve kept on at it to save our skins. And also we had a feeling, deep down inside us, that we were fighting for you. For you and all the other babies.”
14.29 Walter Ruttman put his flair for abstract images to work for the Nazis in Deutsche Waffenschmieden (“German Armaments,” 1940), as in this shot of a factory worker inspecting the interior of a new gun barrel.
14.30, left The Deutsche Wochen-schau depicted the hardships of German troops operating during the winter on the Russian-Ukrainian front, as in this shot of an airplane taking off amid heaps of snow and ice.
14.31, right In The Fight for Our Soviet Ukraine, Dovzhenko used his familiar flower motif, here juxtaposed with real destruction wrought by the Germans (compare with 12.8).
Experiences of wartime to the young generation who had to build a new society.
Jennings made a few films after the war’s end, but they failed to recapture the poignancy and optimism that had made him the foremost documentarist of the war. He died in an accident while scouting locations in 1950. The Crown Film Unit itself was abolished in 1952, though its alumni continued to work prominently in sponsored documentaries after the war.
Overtly propagandistic films made up a relatively small proportion of German production during the Nazi era (pp. 272-275). Most programs included newsreels and documentary short films, however, and these consistently contained Nazi propaganda. As in other countries, established filmmakers sometimes worked on these. For example, Walter Ruttmann, who had created experimental and documentary films in the 1920s, made a few shorts (14.29). In 1940, there were four newsreel series, and these were merged into one, the Deutsche Wochen-schau (“German Weekly”), under Goebbels’s control.
During the early years of the war, theater attendance rose because viewers wanted news from the front. Initially, newsreels portrayed the obstacles German soldiers encountered and overcame abroad (14.30); death and suffering were never shown. After the disastrous German defeat at Stalingrad in 1943, however, many spectators dismissed newsreels as mere window dressing. The Deutsche Wochenschau became pure agitation in favor of total war, stressing the fearsomeness of the enemy.
Soviet documentaries took a different approach, stressing the suffering and destruction caused by the German invaders. As the war progressed, filmmakers could also inspire the public with genuinely heroic victories. The counterattack against the Fascist forces was shown vividly in Defeat of the German Armies Near Moscow
14.32, left A Bronx Morning celebrates the charm of ordinary city life.
14.33, right Douro, Faina Fluvial returns repeatedly to shots of this dramatic bridge from many angles.
(1942, Leonid Varlamov and llya Kopalin; seen in the United States as Moscow Strikes Back, it won an Academy Award). Stalingrad (1943, Varlamov) depicted the yearlong siege that proved to be the turning point in the war. Alexander Dovzhenko spent the war supervising documentary production, including the heartfelt The Fight For Our Soviet Ukraine (1943, Yulia Solntseva and Y Avdeyenko; 14.31).
After World War II, documentary films were less frequently seen in theaters. Techniques that had been invented for military cinematography, however, were to affect fiction filmmaking. Also, because documentaries had accustomed audiences to seeing real events depicted in film programs, in some cases a greater realism emerged in entertainment films.
World History
