Documentary Film
by Paul Rotha
with Sinclair Road & Richard Griffith
The first edition of Paul Rotha’s Documentary Film got published in the 1930s and has gone through several revisions since then. At first its readers may be shocked at how narrow the author’s range is, but the historical context needs to be kept in mind for anyone who even bothers to pick this one up.
Rotha starts with a simple and precise definition of documentary film. He contrasts it with what he calls “entertainment film”, meaning movies that tell a fictional story with no other purpose outside of entertainment. Documentaries, on the other hand, are meant to depict reality and intended to transmit information that may be necessary in order to inform the general population. Rotha points out that schools in Western culture do not properly educate the majority of the populace which means that most people do not know how to gather information or evaluate its merits on their own. Rotha was certainly right about that and I would say not much has changed over the last one hundred years. In any case, documentaries are necessary to inform the public and by this Roth clearly states that “inform” means persuading people to make the right choices. By “the right choices” he means whatever the government and the corporation say is right. This book is written from the perspective of a technocrat. His interest is in films that educate, instruct, or function as propaganda.
Also of importance when contrasting fiction with non-fiction films is the setting and the people who star in the production. Entertainment films are an extension of the theater and utilize created stage sets and professional actors, whereas documentaries use already existing settings and ordinary people who do not act but speak naturally as they would when off-camera.
Obviously, the two sides of this dichotomy do not hold up. Fictional and entertainment films can be used for educational purposes. Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, or the 1982 film Ghandi could be used as examples of non-documentaries that teach, or even Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound which was produced to explain the concepts of Freudian psychoanalysis. Then there is the absolutely amazing film Black Orpheus directed by Marcel Camus in 1959 using non-actors and the already -existing favelas of Rio de Janeiro as settings to tell an entirely fictional story based on Greek mythology. It may be unfair to cite these as examples that disprove Rotha’s framework because they were all made after he wrote this book and you would be correct in your objection. But I do want to point out the limited range of the author’s argument. That limited range is also not his fault as he could not see the future and had no idea where the art of film would eventually go. That is just the limitations of our consciousness.
Then again, it is also important to understand that Rotha is uncritical in his analysis of documentary film. He never addresses the ethical issue of who is to decide what is right or wrong for documentary film making. There are documentaries that give misleading or false information, sometimes deliberately so. This is especially true in the era of the internet. He does briefly address the problem briefly in his analysis of the Nazi propaganda films made by Leni Riefenstahl, but he doesn’t take the issue beyond that point. He never looks inward at his own country, England, to examine whther or not the government there is entirely truthful in their presentation of propaganda or the news reels that were shown in cinemas during that time. Then there is also the question of what is real. A documentary about religion might be considered either fiction or non-fiction depending on who you ask. Finally there are also documentaries like Jonestown: Paradise Lost where actors and studio sets are used to recreate the story of the Peoples Temple in Guyana documentaty-style. Dismantling Rotha’s framework shouldn’t mean anything against the man who wrote this book; he obviously wasn’t stupid and his shortsightedness is simply a typical human trait. If anything, it should serve to remind us that future generations will look at us with shock and dismay, wondering how we could have been so ignorant. Keep that thought in mind when you pass judgment on the generations that came before you.
Rotha proceeds to analyze the elements and techniques used in the production of documentary films. He explains the roles of producer and director, the use of sound, the process of editing, the method of camera work, and so on and so forth. The discussion gets slightly technical and may be a little boring for those not inclined to care about these matters. I did find the passage about how sound is used to influence an audience’s mood to be interesting, especially because he is writing about non-musical, atmospheric and environemtnal sound. Also the chapter on how the physical movement of objects can be used to arouse an emotional reaction in the audience was provocative too. Most of what is written in this section could just as easily apply to non-documentary films though as it could to documentaries so I wouldn’t say it fulfilled its real purpose.
Rotha relies heavily on Robert J. Flaherty’s Nanook Of the North and Battleship Potemkin to illustrate his points. Those are the kinds of films that film historians discuss passionately while ordinary people tend to dismiss them as horribly boring; you might want to consider that serious film geeks may be on the spectrum when they make the mistake of thinking they are on the level. Normies don’t really appreciate Citizen Kane much either. I mean A Touch of Evil was a far better Orson Welles film anyways. Nanook Of the North and Battleship Potemkin also further illustrate what I previously said because many critics do not actually consider them to be documentaries for reasons I won’t go into here.
The rest of the book is filled with essays by Sinclair Road and Richard Griffith. They list and briefly describe documentary film production internationally. Judging from the time in which this book came out, it should be no surprise that the concentration is heavily in favor of Western Europe, the United States, and Canada. The Global South gets some mention, but not much. The chapters on Latin America and Africa get about one and a half pages each respectively. These chapters merely list the titles of documentaries that are no longer on anybody’s radars with some brief commentary. They really aren’t worth reading.
Documentary Film is not a book that will appeal to most people in our times. It was written when the art of film production was just past its infancy and the scope is narrow as a result. The art of cinema has expanded in an infinite number of directions since Paul Rotha wrote this book. Reading this makes me think that future generations, supposing the human race survives global warming and environmental destruction, will look back on the internet in the 200s the way we now look back at silent movies and think similar thoughts. This book might be of historical value because it was a foundational text in film theory and provides us with a reference point regarding how far we have come in almost one hundred years. Other than that, it isn’t a terribly interesting or useful book to read.
Rotha starts with a simple and precise definition of documentary film. He contrasts it with what he calls “entertainment film”, meaning movies that tell a fictional story with no other purpose outside of entertainment. Documentaries, on the other hand, are meant to depict reality and intended to transmit information that may be necessary in order to inform the general population. Rotha points out that schools in Western culture do not properly educate the majority of the populace which means that most people do not know how to gather information or evaluate its merits on their own. Rotha was certainly right about that and I would say not much has changed over the last one hundred years. In any case, documentaries are necessary to inform the public and by this Roth clearly states that “inform” means persuading people to make the right choices. By “the right choices” he means whatever the government and the corporation say is right. This book is written from the perspective of a technocrat. His interest is in films that educate, instruct, or function as propaganda.
Also of importance when contrasting fiction with non-fiction films is the setting and the people who star in the production. Entertainment films are an extension of the theater and utilize created stage sets and professional actors, whereas documentaries use already existing settings and ordinary people who do not act but speak naturally as they would when off-camera.
Obviously, the two sides of this dichotomy do not hold up. Fictional and entertainment films can be used for educational purposes. Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, or the 1982 film Ghandi could be used as examples of non-documentaries that teach, or even Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound which was produced to explain the concepts of Freudian psychoanalysis. Then there is the absolutely amazing film Black Orpheus directed by Marcel Camus in 1959 using non-actors and the already -existing favelas of Rio de Janeiro as settings to tell an entirely fictional story based on Greek mythology. It may be unfair to cite these as examples that disprove Rotha’s framework because they were all made after he wrote this book and you would be correct in your objection. But I do want to point out the limited range of the author’s argument. That limited range is also not his fault as he could not see the future and had no idea where the art of film would eventually go. That is just the limitations of our consciousness.
Then again, it is also important to understand that Rotha is uncritical in his analysis of documentary film. He never addresses the ethical issue of who is to decide what is right or wrong for documentary film making. There are documentaries that give misleading or false information, sometimes deliberately so. This is especially true in the era of the internet. He does briefly address the problem briefly in his analysis of the Nazi propaganda films made by Leni Riefenstahl, but he doesn’t take the issue beyond that point. He never looks inward at his own country, England, to examine whther or not the government there is entirely truthful in their presentation of propaganda or the news reels that were shown in cinemas during that time. Then there is also the question of what is real. A documentary about religion might be considered either fiction or non-fiction depending on who you ask. Finally there are also documentaries like Jonestown: Paradise Lost where actors and studio sets are used to recreate the story of the Peoples Temple in Guyana documentaty-style. Dismantling Rotha’s framework shouldn’t mean anything against the man who wrote this book; he obviously wasn’t stupid and his shortsightedness is simply a typical human trait. If anything, it should serve to remind us that future generations will look at us with shock and dismay, wondering how we could have been so ignorant. Keep that thought in mind when you pass judgment on the generations that came before you.
Rotha proceeds to analyze the elements and techniques used in the production of documentary films. He explains the roles of producer and director, the use of sound, the process of editing, the method of camera work, and so on and so forth. The discussion gets slightly technical and may be a little boring for those not inclined to care about these matters. I did find the passage about how sound is used to influence an audience’s mood to be interesting, especially because he is writing about non-musical, atmospheric and environemtnal sound. Also the chapter on how the physical movement of objects can be used to arouse an emotional reaction in the audience was provocative too. Most of what is written in this section could just as easily apply to non-documentary films though as it could to documentaries so I wouldn’t say it fulfilled its real purpose.
Rotha relies heavily on Robert J. Flaherty’s Nanook Of the North and Battleship Potemkin to illustrate his points. Those are the kinds of films that film historians discuss passionately while ordinary people tend to dismiss them as horribly boring; you might want to consider that serious film geeks may be on the spectrum when they make the mistake of thinking they are on the level. Normies don’t really appreciate Citizen Kane much either. I mean A Touch of Evil was a far better Orson Welles film anyways. Nanook Of the North and Battleship Potemkin also further illustrate what I previously said because many critics do not actually consider them to be documentaries for reasons I won’t go into here.
The rest of the book is filled with essays by Sinclair Road and Richard Griffith. They list and briefly describe documentary film production internationally. Judging from the time in which this book came out, it should be no surprise that the concentration is heavily in favor of Western Europe, the United States, and Canada. The Global South gets some mention, but not much. The chapters on Latin America and Africa get about one and a half pages each respectively. These chapters merely list the titles of documentaries that are no longer on anybody’s radars with some brief commentary. They really aren’t worth reading.
Documentary Film is not a book that will appeal to most people in our times. It was written when the art of film production was just past its infancy and the scope is narrow as a result. The art of cinema has expanded in an infinite number of directions since Paul Rotha wrote this book. Reading this makes me think that future generations, supposing the human race survives global warming and environmental destruction, will look back on the internet in the 200s the way we now look back at silent movies and think similar thoughts. This book might be of historical value because it was a foundational text in film theory and provides us with a reference point regarding how far we have come in almost one hundred years. Other than that, it isn’t a terribly interesting or useful book to read.
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