A ‘World Without End’: Post-War Reconstruction and Everyday Internationalism in Documentary Film

Abstract

Although the Documentary Film movement has been the object of an immense amount of scholarly attention, much of it has framed early documentary film in relation to projects of national projection or national cultural development. This article builds on recent calls to move beyond this preoccupation with ‘national cinema’ by stressing the international basis of early documentary film, especially in the inter-war and early post-war period. The author argues that international ambitions became central to the ways in which John Grierson and those closest to him defined their sense of identity and purpose, especially as they began to envision a role for documentary film in a reconstructed world order: a kind of internationalism that international theorist John Ruggie would call ‘embedded liberalism’. This identity, the author argues, was built around the possibility of an everyday sense of ethical solidarity: a precursor to more recent experiments in fair trade. Aitken concludes the paper by noting that in their international ambitions, filmmakers like Grierson were visible in their most progressive and yet also most contradictory face.