I won’t bug you with every DVD release notice, but this week’s dovetails with my renewed interest, scholarly and otherwise, in documentaries of the mid-20th century. First is a fascinating sounding series of British pseudo-documentaries directed by Peter Watkins. I’ve yet to see them (Netflix queue here they come), but I’ve been studying the postwar pseudo-docs more closely and recently watched House on 92nd Street again, which is fascinating not only in its queer subtext, but also in the excitement it has in applying every possibility of documentary style (from voiceover narration to jumpcuts to handheld camera) to fictional filmmaking. The followups like 13 Rue Madeleine and Call Northside 777 were not nearly as good, but as an industrial trend they fascinate me and I’m trying to explore how they affected the cinematic language of realism in postwar feature filmmaking.
Also released this week is Emile de Antoniono’s Point of Order, to complement In the Year of the Pig, which finally has its DVD release. De Antonio pioneered a democratic propaganda, nonfiction filmmaking that made a strong polemical case, but did so through the accumulation of media archival footage, without voiceover narration and requiring the spectator to make sense of the material on her or his own. Point of Order takes that premise toward minimalism: there is no footage other than the Army-McCarthy hearings broadcast on television. De Antonio edits selectively but still lets long takes unfold uninterrupted. It’s the polar opposite of both television journalism today and of agitprop like Michael Moore.
Finally, I checked out some of Anthology Film Archive’s Unseen Cinema. Really amazing material on there. Some overlap with Kino’s experimental film set, but a wider selection including Hollywood, documentary and non-canonical films. Of particular interest were a couple of lefty non-fiction films by Worker’s Photo League and Nykino. Native Land is a pro-union tract narrated by Paul Robeson; Black Legion criticizes the anti-union activities of the Klan. The odd thing is, while non-fiction, these films aren’t exactly documentaries. Much of the footage is as staged as a feature film. Black Legion is every bit as fictional as Warner Brothers’ Black Legion with Humphrey Bogart, about the same subject. Native Land treats the truth status of actuary footage of crowds and staged, Eisenstenian montage segments as equivalent. Given that these films were central to a certain highbrow reclamation of non-fiction cinema in the 1930s, I’m curious to know when the veracity of the image became a central concern among documentary proponents.
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