Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- 1 Radical Cinema
- 2 Mass Observing: The 1930s Documentary Gaze
- 3 The Documentary Movement and Mass Leisure, 1930–1945
- 4 Camera Consciousness
- 5 Framing History: Virginia Woolf and the Politicisation of Aesthetics
- 6 ‘The savage and austere light of a burning world’: The Cinematic Blitz
- Afterword
- Endnotes
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - The Documentary Movement and Mass Leisure, 1930–1945
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- 1 Radical Cinema
- 2 Mass Observing: The 1930s Documentary Gaze
- 3 The Documentary Movement and Mass Leisure, 1930–1945
- 4 Camera Consciousness
- 5 Framing History: Virginia Woolf and the Politicisation of Aesthetics
- 6 ‘The savage and austere light of a burning world’: The Cinematic Blitz
- Afterword
- Endnotes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The ideal documentarist emerges in the 1930s as someone able to straddle the contradictions inherent in social realism. He allows the workers to speak for themselves, at the same time as analysing them; and maintains an objective, camera-like distance, at the same time as mingling, when need be, with the crowd, blurring the boundary between observer and observed. Subsequent commentators, such as Mengham, Cowie, Williams and Highmore, all indicate that the best documentary creates a perspective that allows viewers to understand the social context while simultaneously allowing the workers to emerge as individuals.
The subject matter best suited for these virtuosic contortions of perspective was leisure. Leisure-time offered ‘a chance to be ourselves’, as Humphrey Jennings put it in the brief opening commentary to Spare Time (1936), his enthusiastic romp through working-class leisure activities. There was more scope for individuality in group singing or amateur dramatics than in descending into a darkened coal mine or battling with dirt in the slums. Leisure showcased the working classes at their most generous and least downtrodden. It was easy to stop seeing them as heroes or victims when they were bent merely on having fun.
And the cinema was ideally placed to capture the working class at play. It had emerged as victorious in Rotha's battle between the arts both because of its potency as a medium and because it had a series of radical techniques at its command.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Literature Cinema and Politics 1930–1945Reading Between the Frames, pp. 98 - 121Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2010