Governing Visions of the Real: The National Film Unit and Griersonian Documentary Film in Aotearoa/New Zealand

By Lars Weckbecker

Governing Visions of the Real traces the emergence, development, and techniques of Griersonian documentary – named for pioneering Scottish film-maker John Grierson – in New Zealand throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Paying close attention to the productions of the National Film Unit in the 1940s and 1950s, Lars Weckbecker traces the shifting practices and governmentality of documentary’s ‘visions of the real’ as New Zealand and its population came to be envisioned through NFU film for an ensemble of political, pedagogic, and propagandistic purposes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Dec 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781783204960

Lars Weckbecker

Lars Weckbecker is assistant professor in media and communication at Zayed University in the United Arab Emirates.

Book preview

First published in the UK in 2015 by

Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2015 by

Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,

Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2015 Intellect Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

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Cover image: L to R – Bob Allen, Stan Weymess & Allan Whittle on set in Miramar http://audiovisual.archives.govt.nz/nationalfilmunit/image.php?image=w3939-bx-22-bob-allen-stan-.jpg used under Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

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For the materialist historian, every epoch with which he occupies himself is only a fore-history of the one that really concerns him. And that is precisely why the appearance of repetition doesn’t exist for him in history, because given their index as fore-history, those moments in the course of history that matter most to him become moments of the present and change their character according to whether this present is defined as a catastrophe or triumph.

Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project

Contents

Abstract

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Governing Visions of the Real

Chapter Outline

The Governmentality and Dispositive of Visions of the Real

Mapping Discourses on the National Film Unit

When and How Is Documentary Film?

Chapter 1: The Griersonian Programme for Documentary Film and Democratic Government

Introduction

Walter Lippmann and Stereotyped Vision

Techniques and Strategies of Documentary Film and Public Media

Civic Education Becomes Propaganda

Chapter 2: Propaganda

Introduction

From Attractive Views to Visions of the Real – Early New Zealand State Film Production

Labour and the Means of Public Discourse

Show me the Face of a New Zealander – John Grierson in New Zealand

Propagandists with Good Consciences – Stanhope Andrews and the Politics of Realism

Directing Democracy – State Publicity and the Positive Effort

The Birth of the National Film Unit

Mobilizing the Population for War – Wartime Film Production

Chapter 3: Civic Education

Introduction

The Reorganization of State Publicity and the NFU

Controversy on and behind the Screen – The Holmes Case

The Economy of Vision I – Educating the Population

Envisioning Workers – The Politics of Dignity

Chapter 4: Public Relations

Introduction

National and the Political Economy of State Publicity and Film Production

The Economy of Vision II – Promoting the Nation

Envisioning Ma-oritanga – Visions of Ma-ori between Adaption and Adjustment and Tourism Commodification

Conclusions: Re-Forming Vision

Glossary of Māori Terms

Filmography

Bibliography

Abstract

In this book, I trace how documentary film by the New Zealand National Film Unit (NFU) historically came to be calculated and employed as a governmental technology to cultivate visions of the real that were to advance economic conduct and democratic government by shaping subjectivity and directing agency towards a desirable future. The NFU was established during World War II, and throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the period primarily under consideration in this study, it was organized as the film production wing of State publicity within the executive of State government. Throughout this period, NFU documentary film was marked by a teleological transcendence of the material surfaces the camera could record in specific locations. It variously arranged, interpreted, optimized and evaluated actuality, hence encoding a certain vision for popular audiences about what is and should be real. At the same time, the investments in and purposes of film production were rendered transparent, and the films evaded controversy, heterogeneity, ambivalence and critique in favour of simplification, generalization, recognition, intuition and affect.

Such practices, I argue, need to be discussed in reference to historical problematizations of the operation of knowledge and power in the conduct of modern democratic society. Such problematizations are traced back to Walter Lippmann and John Grierson. The latter developed a programme for democratic government through the use of documentary film that shaped the approach to film production taken by the NFU.

By drawing on Michel Foucault’s concepts of the dispositive and governmentality, this book sets out to trace and discuss a shifting dispositive of visions of the real. This dispositive encompassed a heterogeneous ensemble of calculations, reports, policies, arrangements, techniques, strategies and practices that related to and ordered how New Zealand and its population came to be envisioned through NFU film.

I argue that NFU documentary film, in departure from earlier State film production, set out to render the interpretative and visionary aspects of an embodied and subjective vision disposable and hence governable in order to produce a harmonious, cooperative, efficient, self-disciplining and docile population. In the process the vision cultivated through film became increasingly abstract, generalized, homogenized, de-limited and normalized, while increasingly being unable to distinguish between actuality and its strategic realization and treatment. Hence, I conclude, it may be useful to substitute the term documentary with monumentary, given that Griersonian documentary was less concerned with a documentation and observation of events, but in the creation of visions of the real that set out to shape the future.

Acknowledgements

No doubt, this book would have been impossible without the kind assistance of many people who supported, questioned, assisted and criticized my research.

I would particularly like to thank Annie Goldson for her continued assistance, feedback and input throughout the writing of this book. I am grateful for her placidity and informed support.

Further, I would like to express special gratitude to all those who have assisted me with the gathering of information, who gave their time for interviews and discussions, and who had an open ear when I had another and another and another question. I would particularly like to thank former members of the staff at the NFU, including Hugh Macdonald, Lynton Diggle and Arthur Everard. I would also like to thank Simon Sigley, Deborah Yates, Basil Holmes and Dean Parker for valuable information and interesting discussions.

Amelia Harris and Siobhan Garrett from the New Zealand Film Archive in Auckland have been of particular assistance in ordering and viewing NFU films. In addition, the staffs of Archives New Zealand, the Hocken Library, the National Library, the Alexander Turnbull Library, the Film Archive in Wellington and the John Grierson Archive have been most helpful during my research.

Furthermore, I would like to thank Jelena Stanovnik and Claire Organ at Intellect for their very kind assistance in getting this book ready for publication.

I would also like to express gratitude to my friends, and in particular Michael Kleinod and Mario Stenz, as well as to Natalia Lombardo for inspiring me with their enquiring minds and at times difficult and uneasy questions. Thanks for letting me learn from you.

Last, but not least, I wish to thank Tina Krombach for being the wonderful and amazing person she is.

Introduction

But, above all, it was important never to lose the ultimate vision of what is going to end up on the screen. The magical mix of sound and pictures, in all its totality, providing accessibility to an audience and securing their involvement. In the end, the trick of it is to persuade them to share your vision with them.¹

– Cecil Holmes, NFU director 1947–1949

The selectiveness of the camera gives him [the director] almost god-like powers. He can make his audience see only what he wants them to see – only what is significant and characteristic. By means of various technical devices he can heighten their perception or create emotional tensions. Even time and space become tractable and obedient in his hands.²

– Margaret Thomson, NFU director 1947–1949

Governing Visions of the Real

The New Zealand National Film Unit (NFU) was born during the war. Its establishment stems from a State of Emergency, and film production was assigned with urgent socio- and psycho-political functions in order to assist in furthering the wartime economy. The New Zealand State administration, together with Britain, had declared war on Nazi Germany in September 1939 and thereby entered World War II, and was engaged in the rearrangement of the political economy in terms of wartime needs. In 1941, under war emergency powers, the NFU was established in a Cabinet Minute, its task being broadly defined to further the war effort. Thus, film came to be employed to achieve a variety of objectives in differing ways. The will of the population to save metal, paper and petrol was to be furthered, national identification and empathy advanced, and discipline, morale and perceptions of mutual responsibility increased. Faith in victory had to be instilled, the might of the enemy downplayed, wartime industries and the army man-powered, pride in the army and the home front cultivated, dissidence and subversion minimized, sectional interests coordinated and harmonized, and visions for the future produced. In short, the economic conduct of the population was to be advanced through the assistance of visions of the real that could be arranged and cultivated through realist film, which would thereby assist in the realization of a desired future through the subjectivity and agency of popular audiences.

After the war, film production by the NFU operated within the realm of what was referred to as civic education and public relations, and the NFU continued to be organized within the executive of State government until it was dismantled in 1990. Throughout its existence, the specific purposes for film production and the ends that it was to serve continued to be of primary importance and provided for the legitimation and funding of film production as a public service. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, these purposes included informing, educating and shaping the population in reference to a variety of norms, desires and perceived necessities, such as increased and more efficient industrial and agricultural production, racial and national harmony, the cooperation of various sections and classes of society, the adaption and adjustment of Māori, as well as improved education, hygiene, health and safety. Additional tasks involved the cultivation of appropriate national and individual self-perceptions and discipline, the promotion of a vision of New Zealand and its population as modern, progressive, equal, humanitarian, democratic and free, the standardization of conduct, and the promotion of State enterprise and government along with industry, science and the labour force. Additionally, democratic principles and ideals were to be fostered in order to strengthen the population against the Communist menace, and New Zealand was to be promoted overseas to advance a profitable movement of capital, people and commodities throughout the world.

At the same time, however, NFU films were and continue to be regarded as more or less authentic documents of past events, providing insights into how it was then, the past reality of New Zealand. Nevertheless, sometimes unease has been expressed that it was the State, which controlled film production and for some the NFU was largely a propaganda machine, whose films were biased and of limited value. John O’Shea, one of New Zealand’s most prolific film-makers and owner of Pacific Films, a company that made sponsored promotional films from the late 1940s, has claimed that the NFU, as well as private companies that made sponsored documentaries, were

half dishonest. The people who paid the money determined the shape of the message … So it was a gradual corruption of any communication of an artistic kind. Even though communications from artists are moulded by the culture in which they live and the set of beliefs they have, nevertheless when you add a further bird and they must say certain things to please their sponsor, maybe what we have present is a commercial. A television commercial could well be the more honest communication because it doesn’t fool around with you.³

Particularly, the NFU’s projection of Māori and Māoritanga tends to sit uneasily with contemporary perceptions about the colonial history of Aotearoa/New Zealand and how Māori/Tangata Whenua became subject to State policies of assimilation and integration.⁴ Merata Mita, an acclaimed Māori film-maker, has criticized the work of the NFU for its projection of our nation as community, a fine multiracial, harmonious society in the 1940s as an unqualified success.⁵

This questioning of the documentary status of NFU films and their truth value, however, is not a recent phenomenon. During the period under consideration, there repeatedly were controversies regarding the use of the NFU for party-political propaganda. Additionally, some government sources as well as memoirs by NFU personnel show an ambivalent relationship between a desire for truth and a concern with socio- and psycho-political effects of film; nevertheless, the focus on the latter remained clearly dominant.

Thus, there was and indeed remains a certain ambivalence about to what extent NFU films can be regarded as providing authentic and reliable insights into past realities, particularly since NFU films were and continue to be seen as having served certain interests and purposes and were being made from certain perspectives. However, so far few attempts have been made to thoroughly sustain particular assumptions about NFU films and their status as (in-)authentic documents of the past.

This indecision about the relation of NFU films to past events leads to an important question. How come that one assigns NFU films with a certain truth value and authenticity, while there is also a certain doubt whether NFU films can generally be qualified as such? Nowadays, documentary film is commonly regarded as a genre that is precisely marked by its interweaving of factual and fictional aspects. In this book, however, I do not take a generic perspective and use concepts developed by Michel Foucault to trace a historically specific dispositive, a certain implicit productive order, and modes of realization that resulted in films being made to cultivate a vision of what is and should be real.

From such a perspective it is important to note that before World War I, the authenticity of the filmic image was generally not questioned or discussed – it was simply assumed. As Martin Loiperdinger, Frank Kessler and Sabine Lenk have argued, filmic authenticity historically became problematic only with the move from an assemblage of autonomous shots to a discursive arrangement in the form of functional shot sequences during World War I, in which images were often staged and used to evidence or illustrate implicit and/or explicit arguments.⁶ However, as I argue in detail, in New Zealand State film production, the authenticity of the filmic image only became problematic after World War I and particularly with the establishment of the NFU in 1941 when film took on a propagandistic function for war purposes.

If the authenticity of film images is regarded to be warrantable through a non-interventionist and disinterested documentation of actuality, then one can see the conception and practices of Griersonian documentary film, seemingly paradoxically, to be jointly responsible for an ambiguity and indecision of historical authenticity. While film production rested on the mechanical conventions of the camera and hence could not entirely invent the subjects and events it represented, the Griersonian documentary programme calculated a certain logistics and strategic approach that made it possible to variously appropriate, optimize and control actuality and its projection. John Grierson’s programme at once legitimized and demanded a teleological transcendence of actuality by outlining a set of norms and instructions that would allow controlling and shaping vision and by extension subjectivity and agency. That is, Grierson’s project demanded to rise above and move beyond the observable material world for the sake of advancing an assumedly given telos of progress. Hence, it was important that film-makers to varying degrees would deliberately intervene in, strategically interact with, model, creatively treat and optimize actual events towards a set of socio- and psycho-political purposes.

While we may never be sure what Grierson really had in mind or meant when he rationalized the term documentary,⁷ designating and inventing a certain type of film, it clearly fulfilled a function: it sustained a sense of authenticity, veracity, evidence and truthfulness; and it did so in the face of a set of defining normative principles and practices of documentary film that weakened the photograph’s indexical and iconic bond with actuality and hence documentary’s legitimacy to be regarded as an authentic and evidential document of past events. From this perspective, the term documentary itself has primarily a strategic and ideological function, which brings us back to Grierson’s claims that he was never interested in film per se, but in its educational and formative potential. In this sense, as I argue throughout this book, Griersonian documentary less set out to document the material surfaces that the camera could record than to produce monuments that would direct vision towards a desirable future. I will conclude that, in retrospective, Griersonian documentary might be better referred to as monumentary, since this concept draws attention to the strategic nature of Grierson’s project. And this may be one of Grierson’s most significant achievements: to legitimize, normalize and advance the concerted use of film propaganda for liberal government, while masking its strategic objectives in the term documentary itself, which is bound to the evocation of expectations and impressions of authenticity, veracity, fidelity and evidence.

While postmodern epistemological enquiry has thoroughly questioned and criticized notions of objectivity, truth and authenticity, which all resonate in the concept of the document, here I propose a more pragmatic understanding of the concept. In a pragmatic sense, we can understand a document to be defined by its absence of markers or traces that imply a concern to strategically impress and model a future recipient, whereas monuments are strategically created and arranged to control and limit their interpretation. They are constitutively addressed towards, and set out to shape, a future recipient, and in this sense their primary purpose is not to observe and preserve, but to wield power through the subjectification of an addressee.⁸

Grierson’s documentary programme neither set out to produce fiction nor to disinterestedly observe actuality, but outlined how a desirable future reality could be achieved through realist film. I argue that it was precisely when the documentary film approach took hold in New Zealand that the camera increasingly began to be used less to document observable aspects of the historical world. Images were released from a strict denotative literalism⁹ and took on various layered functions as illustrations, symbols, evidence and to advance affect, empathy and identification, as well as to address, engage and govern the power of imagination and by extension the subjectivity and agency of popular audiences.

Such an approach began to take hold in the realm of New Zealand State publicity during the 1920s, when film began to move beyond the provision of a series of views of recorded events towards the production of documentary film. That is, film production shifted from a concern with the filmic preservation of events and people, and from focusing on a picturesque and attractive assemblage of scenic and industrial shots for the promotion of tourism and trade, towards propaganda, civic education and public relations. This implied a mode of production that was less focused on the observation and documentation of actualities, and more concerned with the realization of visions of the real, calculated in relation to their projected lasting impact on and within audiences. In other words, films were to be made to be able to take hold of and cultivate the visionary faculties of audiences, while at the same time claiming the real, that is, in Grierson’s programme, a transcendental, metaphysical, a priori given, general and universal totality that had to be rendered ascertainable through intuition – not reasoning – by interpreting, dramatizing, simplifying, generalizing and optimizing empirically observable material surfaces for popular audiences.

I hence use the phrase visions of the real to point out that in Grierson’s documentary programme, films were a means to an end. Not the films themselves and their content were important, but how they could strategically objectify and order, that is arrange and regulate, the vision of popular audiences. Documentary films would in the moment of screening engage bodily faculties of sight and hearing. Crucially, however, they would also take hold of and shape the imaginative and visionary aspect of how perceptions of what is and should be real are formed.¹⁰ Such a vision would subsequently govern how individuals make sense of the world and act upon their self and others. In other words, visions of the real imparted through film were to shape certain modes and patterns by which audiences would envision the world in realistic and productive ways, while subjecting their selves to constant self-surveillance and self-discipline with reference to a set of desires, norms and ideals fostered and reiterated through documentary film and other public media and institutions. This, I argue, was precisely Grierson’s definition and programme for documentary film. It had to advance the progress of nations and the integration of populations in specific ways, while demanding and rationalizing a teleological transcendence of the knowledge that could be imparted to popular audiences through moving images. This at once legitimized and made necessary the use of certain formative techniques and the strategic disposition of visions of the real.

While NFU films were made in reference to certain projected ends, and their production was organized within the executive of State government, they were made in complex and differing ways, involved many different people with different interests, ideas, intentions and understandings of film; and the film-makers drew upon a certain potential and conventions of representation immanent in the cinematographic apparatus. Additionally, the films were made for a variety of layered purposes, in a variety of ways and styles, by employing a range of strategies and techniques that at once relied upon and shaped certain conventions of filmic projection and aesthetics. Furthermore, they were made in reference to anticipated faculties and expectations of target audiences, desired effects, as well as demands for efficiency and requirements for public decency and non-controversy.

Therefore, the films should not be seen to have resulted from or to have been promoting a singular intention or logic of ideas. NFU films should not be regarded as the sole product of, or to be projecting an ideology in the service of, elites or the State.¹¹ It is important to note that NFU film was to assist in the advancement of a better future for the entire population, and in some sense politicians as well as film-makers were subject to the specific qualities of film and the vision it (re)produced, and were not simply its masters.¹² Furthermore, discussing NFU film in terms of ideology would not do justice to Grierson’s specific programmatic demands for documentary film production, nor would it encompass the practices and routines of film-making by the NFU that were more heterogeneous than a focus on ideology would allow to trace. This said, however, there were mechanisms of direction, control, supervision and (self-)censorship in place, which ensured that certain historical events and experiences would remain invisible, while others would be staged, heightened, homogenized, optimized, dramatized and continuously reiterated.

This book, then, focuses on a historical enquiry that traces how NFU documentary film came to be calculated and employed as a governmental technology in New Zealand, with a focus on the 1940s and 1950s. It discusses the politics and modes of realization of visions of the real. Hence, what interests us here is how Griersonian documentary film created a new kind of perception in the move from (filmic) views to visions. Griersonian documentary set out to modernize vision and was traversed by a strategic governmentality of population control and social engineering that was decisive for twentieth century modernity, which found a specific expression in New Zealand.

Hence, this book sheds light on the dispositive of visions of the real; how these were governed and how they were to govern its bearer. It sheds light on what was to remain implicit and invisible in the films and the vision they set in motion. This dispositive historically related to, traversed and ordered, that is arranged and commanded, the realization and operation of visions of the real. From this perspective, an attempt is made to describe how these visions were to shape and refer popular audiences in specific and strategic ways back to the political economy and the inherent knowledge/power relations from which they emerged. In other words, some of the ways in which visions of the real were to position subjectivity and agency are traced. However, by doing so, I do not attempt to make claims about empirical effects of films on audiences, or to identify an ideal spectator or observer in the films or in the reception situation, but to focus on more heterogeneous and greyer practices and discourses in which subjectivity and agency were problematized and shaped, thus moving beyond the assumption that an observer will always leave visible tracks, that is, will be identifiable in relation to images.¹³ The task is therefore to describe a historically specific dispositive – of which NFU films formed one important aspect – that set out to produce a specific kind of vision. The term vision in this book thus serves as a model to describe an ideal and optimal configuration of the dispositive that conditioned how popular audiences could envision the real through film, that is at once perceive and imagine what is and should be real.

The aim of this book has thus not been to