British Documentary Research Articles

John Grierson, his ‘documentary boys’ and the british ministry of information, 1939–1942

The best propaganda idea man, of course, is the Film Commissioner for Canada. John Grierson, 19411 John Grierson is best remembered for two distinct phases in his life prior to 1945. Firstly, as th...

Hurricanes and typhoons: past, present, and future

Introduction, by Richard J. Murnane Part I Prehistoric Variability: Millennial to Centennial 2. Paleotempestology: Principles, Methods, and Examples from Gulf Coast Lake Sediments, by Kam-biu Liu 3. Back-barrier Sedimentary Records of Intense Hurricane Landfalls in the Northeastern United States, by Jeffrey P. Donnelly and Thompson Webb III Part II. Historic Variability: Centennial to Annual 4. A Method for Reconstructing Historical Hurricanes, by Emery R. Boose 5. Tropical Cyclone Reconstructions from Documentary Records: Examples for South Carolina, United States, by Cary J. Mock 6. The Use of Spanish and British Documentary Sources in the Investigation of Atlantic Hurricane Incidence in Historical Times, by Ricardo Garcia Herrera, Francisco Rubino Duran, Dennis Wheeler, Emiliano Hernand 7. The Atlantic Hurricane Database Reanalysis Project: Documentation for 1851-1910 Alterations and Additions to the HURDAT Database, by Christopher W. Landsea, Craig Anderson, Noel Charles, Gilbert Clark, Jason Dunio 8. Ancient Records of Typhoons in Chinese Historical Documents, by Kin-sheun Louie and Kam-biu Liu 9. The Importance of Best-Track Data for Understanding the Past, Present, and Future of Hurricanes and Typhoons, by Richard J. Murnane Part III. Present-day Variability: Interdecadal to Intraseasonal 10. Variations in Tropical Cyclone Activity over the Western North Pacific: From Interdecadal to Intraseasonal, by Johnny C. L. Chan 11. ENSO and Tropical Cyclone Activity, by Pao-Shin Chu 12. Hurricane Landfall Probability and Climate, by James B. Elsner and Brian H. Bossak 13. Dynamical Seasonal Forecasts of Tropical Storm Statistics, by Frederic Vitart Part IV. Potential Future Changes 14. Response of Tropical Cyclone Activity to Climate Change: Theoretical Basis, by Kerry Emanuel 15. Impact of Climate Change on Hurricane Intensities as Simulated Using Regional Nested High-Resolution Models, by Thomas R. Knutson, Robert E. Tuleya, Weixing Shen, and Isaac Ginis 16. Conclusion, by Richard J. Murnane and Kam-biu Liu , by i

Britten and Parable-Art

Between 1960 and 1971, Benjamin Britten seems to abandon large-scale opera in favour of more intimate pieces with a particularly obvious Christian message, his three "parables for church performances," which revisit medieval miracle plays through a specific musical language and stagecraft. Although quite original in Britten’s output, the parables hark back to older pieces also on religious subjects, composed between his operas. With hindsight it seems that Britten’s work as a whole springs from the concept of "parable-art." The aim of this paper is first to examine how Britten came to embrace as his own this concept inherited from his friends the poet W. H. Auden, the British documentary filmmaker John Grierson and the ideals of the American New Deal to become a "musician for an occasion," a composer whose mission is to educate his audience. It then proposes to look at the way parable-art is implemented in his operas. Through the adoption of the model of tragedy and oratorio with Britten’s own tragic heroes and tragic imagery, through the rhetoric of musical devices and forms and through social criticism and his indictment of Bible-thumping and dogmatic intellectuals, Britten the educator strives at raising the consciousness of his audience so as to better spread his humanistic message.

The Documentary as ‘amplification’: Holding the Baby and politics of attachment

Under headings The Cultural Context, The Industrial Context, The Historical Context and The After Effect an empirical study is made os a particular, and higly controversial, British documentary. In the 1990s in the UK, there was a sudden flowering or programmes os the topic of childcaring, and in a particular at the first investigation os the subject on UK television, Channel 4’s Holding the Baby. This article explores the institucional and cultural context from which this programme emerged, the way it reflected contemporary debates and then helped drive them in a certain direction. The significance of the role of the documentary in contributing to opinion formation is discussed and assessed.

Has Archaeology never been so much fun? Archaeology is rubbish. A beginner's guide By Tony Robinson and Mick Aston

This review is about the latest arrival in a series of Time Team books published by Channel 4. Like various other recent titles, Archaeology is Rubbish has not (and presumably could not have) been published on its own merits but is being sold on the back of a popular television series (see also SchadlaHall, 2003). The book begins with a reference to Lara Croft, heroine of the best-selling Tomb Raider computer garnes, which since 1995 have attracted over 4 million individual buyers, and spawned two feature films in 2001 and 2003, of which the first film grossed more than US$60 million during its first week of release alone. The book ends with a reference to Time Team, the ten-year-old British TV documentary series, watched every week by over 3 million people in the UK. Now read these figures again and begin to understand the dimensions of the public appeal of archaeology. Interestingly, Archaeology is Rubbish portrays the approaches of Lara Croft and Indiana Jones on the one hand, and Time Team excavations on the other, as very different, even oppositional. However, reading this 'beginner's guide' to archaeology actually demonstrated the opposite to me. What unites Tomb Raider, Raiders of the Lost Ark and British-style excavations as portrayed by Time Team is a common emphasis on archaeology as the process of finding and retrieving material treasures which is something people love following. Moreover, Lara and Indy are stereotypically confronted with elaborate booby traps when out hunting for glamorous artefacts in spectacular settings. Archaeology is Rubbish presents archaeological excavations in Britain as different mainly in the specific kinds of obstacles to be overcome and discoveries to be made. Yet the overall narrative appears to be similar to that of the archaeological cliches so ubiquitous in popular culture. This book by 'the nation's favourite archaeologists' (from the associated press release) tells the story of a fantasy dig that readers are invited to undertake in their back gardens. Their small trenches are jeopardised not only by 'a dull, humourless individual who's never shown the slightest interest in anything cultural or historical' (p.84) and owns the land where you would like to dig, but also by real threats of having to deal with lawyers and insurance companies (pp.8-9) and a lack of adequate funding for both the local conservation laboratory (p.ll 0) and the desired bone analysis (p.ll?). When the professional diggers arrive, their work, too, proceeds in real hardship as they are 'incredibly poorly paid' (p.132, see also pp.5 and 189) and have to drink 'cheap instant coffee ... out of chipped mugs' (p.136). To make matters even worse, they have to work under constant pressure from both developers and their own employers who want to see them finish their projects quickly in order to earn more money and spend less. But what is all this compared with bringing 'back to life the story of your ancestors' (p.9)? Robinson and Aston insist that whereas 'one golden chariot is pretty much like another', who would not be prepared to make real sacrifices to find dust on a floor that 'can tell

Translating Ireland Back into Éire: Gael Linn and Film Making in Irish

Without films in Irish all the work done for the language in the schools, on the radio and by voluntary organisations is doomed to ultimate failure no matter how effectively it is done. Films in Irish, anonymous booklet published in 1950 by the Comhdhail Naisiunta na Gaeilge The translator invades, extracts, and brings home. George Steiner, After Babel THE language revitalization organization Gael Linn is rightly famous for its embrace of modern technology in its work trying to revive Irish as Ireland's vernacular tongue. (1) While its traditional music label is perhaps the most widely known of these initiatives, equally important were its forays into film making. Here I offer a short examination of these forays, focusing on the newsreel series Amharc Eireann (A View of Ireland, 1956-64) and on George Morrisson's two films, Mise Eire (I Am Ireland, 1959) and Saoirse? (Freedom?, 1961). Two aspects of these films are particularly important; one is their Griersonian character--and I will explain John Grierson's ideas about cinema--and the other is their quality as translations, translations of a mostly English-speaking country into a series of Irish-speaking images. Gael Linn seemed to visualize film as something that was social and nation-building rather than commercial, an orientation that went against the otherwise capitalist-oriented development policies of the Lemass government. In this regard its film production strongly resembled those of the National Film Board of Canada and the film units of the United Kingdom's General Post Office and Empire Marketing Board, all of which were at some point run by Grierson. That Gael Linn sought to put this idea of film into action through the use of translation brings to light some interesting tensions in the role of translation in Ireland's ongoing process of cultural definition. A mixture of the progressive/social-democratic and the nostalgic/conservative are, we will see, problems that plague both the language revitalization movement and the Griersonian idea of cinema. Thus, these Gael Linn films, far from being merely a cine-historical curiosity, are in fact embodiments of deeply paradoxical moments in both film history and Irish history. John Grierson (1898-1972) was an extremely influential figure in documentary cinema, though his legacy is a contradictory one. Born in Scotland, he first came to international prominence when he ran the film units of the Empire Marketing Board (1926-33; hereafter EMB) and the General Post Office (1933-38; hereafter GPO), both in the UK. This period is loosely known as the British Documentary Movement, and Grierson oversaw the production of a number of films that stand as monuments of documentary, such as Drifters (EMB, John Grierson, 1929), Song of Ceylon (EMB, Basil Wright, 1933) and Night Mail (GPO, Basil Wright and Harry Watt, 1936). Grierson went to Canada in 1938, charged with surveying the country's film production; he subsequently became the first head of the National Film Board of Canada, whose original brief was primarily the production of wartime propaganda films. He also consulted on film commissions in New Zealand and Australia, and did film work for UNESCO from 1946 to 1948. Overall Grierson's vision involved a socially oriented, non-commercial model for film, a model that was closely linked to strong government and national unity. He was influenced by Soviet cinema, whose important figures such as Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevlod Pudovkin saw film as a means to consolidate and unify the new, postrevolutionary state. Although many of the films made under his supervision (or by people influenced by his vision) were overly earnest or idealistic about working-class life, excessively dry, and vaguely patronizing in that educational-documentary sort of way, many Grierson-era films are also wonders of modernist aesthetics. Night Mail, for instance, features an editing style heavily influenced by Soviet film of the 1920s, a score by Benjamin Britten, and a W. …

Self Portrait: The Sense of Self in British Documentary Photography

This article investigates notions of 'Britishness' as articulated in British documentary photography from 1936 to 1989. It argues that documentary photography is richly revealing of not only its overt subject matter, but also, more interestingly, of the latent cultural attitudes encoded therein. Particular attention is paid to the work of Bill Brandt in comparison with British documentary photographers of the 1980s. This latter group provide both a contrasting and, it is contended, more dependable sense of 'Britishness' than their more celebrated predecessor.

The Documentary Photographer as Creator

The Documentary Photographer as Creator

The Piper Played to Us All: Orchestrating the Cultural Cold War in the USA, Europe, and Latin America

Review of a recent book on the Congress for Cultural Freedom by British author and documentary filmmaker Frances Stono Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta, 1999), leads into an examination of the cold war ideological contest in the United States, Europe, and Latin America. Particular attention is given to the Americas and U.S. efforts to manipulate the social sciences as instruments of hemispheric control. Saunder's book is compared and contrasted to other works on the cultural cold war, while extensive references are provided for further reading and research.

Cultural Freedom versus Cultural Spin

In his September 1949 presidential address to the American Historical Society, Social Responsibilities of the Historian, Conyers Read spoke of the current struggle of democracy against tyranny and insisted that professional historians contribute their skills: Total war enlists everyone and calls upon everyone to assume his part. The historian is no freer from this obligation than the physicist. Historians, he insisted, must help in asserting the nation's objectives, defining its ideals, establishing its standards and organizing all the forces of society in support of them. Samuel Eliot Morrison, during the same year was attacking Beard and a generation of historians for not measuring up as patriots and insisting that the younger generation write history fire in the eye, a history that would make a young man want to fight for his country in war or live to make it a better country in peace. Soon Allan Nevins demanded that American historians be intent [than they have been ] on proving our way of life, called decadent by our enemies has proved historically to be freer than any other in history.1 All of this more or less coincided with the establishment of the Congress for Cultural Freedom at a conference in Berlin in June 1950. Francis Stonor Saunders, a British documentary filmmaker, informs us that the Congress was part of a consortium established to innoculate the world against the contagion of Communism and to ease the passage of American foreign policy interests abroad (p. 2). A vast network of cultural institutions, journals, books, conferences, seminars, art exhibits, and awards was created to counteract what was seen as a worldwide Soviet propaganda campaign. Saunders's weighty volume is about this cultural cold war. She begins roughly with the notorious fellow-traveling Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in April 1949, and the protests against the proceedings by well-organized anti-communists funded by the Central Intelligence Agency. The volume's main narrative ends with the exposure of the CIA's covert penetration, influence, and funding of allegedly independent

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Humphrey Spender's humanist landscapes: photo-documents, 1932-1942

Working for the new illustrated weekly magazine Picture Post and for Mass Observation, a project to survey British society, photographer Humphrey Spender (born 1910) produced a body of powerful and poignant photographs in the decade from 1932 to 1942. His photographs embody with lucidity, detail, and breadth an entire complex of social relations in Depression-era and wartime Britain. This generously illustrated book is the first to examine Spender's photography in depth. Deborah Frizzell shows how Spender's influential work came to play a key role in the development of British documentary and photojournalism. Frizzell, who has worked closely with Spender in preparing the book, analyzes the aesthetic, critical, and art historical importance of his work within the genesis of British photojournalism; the place of his work within the broader dialogue of the British documentary movement; and the functions of his work within the context of the Mass Observation cultural anthropology project. She discusses how his merging of individual drama with an evolving social consciousness is at the heart of the British documentary movement and is paralleled in the prose and poetry of the Auden Generation and especially in the concerns of Stephen Spender, Humphrey's older brother. Illustrated with some seventy of Spender's own photographs, the volume also offers reproductions of drawings, prints, and paintings by such contemporaries as Humphrey Jennings, William Coldstream, and Graham Bell, and photographs by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Bill Brandt. This book accompanies the first exhibit in the United States devoted to Spender's work, to take place at the Yale Center for BritishArt from September 10 through November 9, 1997.

Re‐styling the real: British television documentary in the 1990s

Re‐styling the real: British television documentary in the 1990s

Reassessing the impact ofyesterday's men

This special seminar to explore the controversy surrounding the Yesterday's Men programme of 1971, and its subsequent significance in the history of British political documentaries, was held at the Institute of Historical Research, London, on 26 January 1994. The seminar opened with a re‐screening of the programme, which featured interviews with Harold Wilson, the then leader of the opposition to Edward Heath's new Conservative government, front bench opposition spokesmen including Roy Jenkins, Tony Crosland and Denis Healey, and the political correspondent Peter Jenkins. The discussion was introduced by Dr Jean Seaton and chaired by Professor Peter Hennessy. The principal participants were Joe Haines (Chief Press Secretary to Harold Wilson 1969–76), Brian Wenham (editor, Panorama 1969–71, Head of BBC Current Affairs Group 1971–78) and John Grist (Head of BBC Current Affairs Group 1967–71, Controller, BBC English Regions 1972–77), with further contributions from Philip Whitehead, Professor Ben Pimlott, Peter Rose, David Benn, Professor Colin Seymour‐Ure, Joanna Kayford, Rosaleen Hughes, Hugh Purcell, Murray Weston and Chloe Miller.

Ian Aitken, Film and Reform: John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement; Paul Swann, The British Documentary Film Movement, 1926-1946 (Cambridge Studies in Film)

Ian Aitken, Film and Reform: John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement; Paul Swann, The British Documentary Film Movement, 1926-1946 (Cambridge Studies in Film)

The British Documentary Film Movement, 1926-1946.

The British Documentary Film Movement, 1926-1946.

The British documentary film movement, 1926-1946

Preface Acknowledgments 1. Introduction: the British documentary film movement 2. The empire marketing board film unit, 1926-1933 3. The general post office film unit, 1933-1937 4. The general post office film unit, 1937-1940 5. The 'independent' documentary film, 1932-1939 6. The British documentary film, trade propaganda, and national projection, 1926-1939 7. The documentary movement during the war, 1939-1945 8. Conclusion Appendix Notes Bibliography Index.

Representing the Nation: British Documentary Film, 1930–45

Journal Article Representing the Nation: British Documentary Film, 1930–45 Get access Robert Colls, Robert Colls Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Philip Dodd Philip Dodd Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Screen, Volume 26, Issue 1, Jan-Feb 1985, Pages 21–33, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/26.1.21 Published: 01 January 1985

Satellite TV programming

The German TV viewer catches CBS news by satellite. The Italian farmer watches a dubbed British documentary on a Dorset farming community. Harrods' shoppers see Soviet sports on TV screens on offer in this London store. A Parisian opera lover tunes into a Vienna Opera production, brought to him live via broadcast satellite and his Left Bank flat's earth station. Many of Europe's viewers stimultaneously take in a Coca-Cola ad specially conceived for the international satellite market.

British documentary

British documentary