Technique of Film Editing, Reissue of 2nd Edition, 2nd Edition

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Film reportage of the kind we have just discussed touches mainly upon the surface appearance of events; like a

responsibly written newspaper report, it selects the most important facets of a given situation and presents them

fairly. Straightforward fi lm reporting does not strive for any deep aesthetic insight: it bears a similar relation to

genuinely creative documentary as a newspaper article bears to an imaginative passage of prose or poetry.

The high esteem in which documentary fi lms as a genre are generally held, is due mainly to the fi lms which

have probed beneath the surface of mere observation and have tried to convey something of the emotional

overtones and signifi cance of natural themes. Though their aims may have been widely different, the fi lms

of Dovzhenko, Flaherty, Ivens and Wright spring to mind immediately as examples of this more profound

approach to reality. In this account we are not concerned with the purpose for which the fi lms of these four

widely differing directors were made, but with the aesthetic problems underlying their production. Thus, for

instance, Flaherty’s aim in making Louisiana Story was obviously quite different from Ivens ’ in Spanish Earth ,

yet the purely aesthetic problems of producing an imaginatively satisfying continuity are essentially similar.

Replace the fairy-tale of Louisiana Story with real-life drama;

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replace the alligator with real bullets; replace the racoon

with young loyalist soldiers of Joris Ivens ’ The Spanish Earth: a comparison of problems can then emerge. At the end

of the alligator-racoon sequence, the director was free to choose whether the racoon should live or die. At the end of

The Spanish Earth there was no soldier to be reunited with his mother and friends: he was killed. It was not the script

which called for his death but a real, life-size bullet. The director could not re-shoot all the foregoing events, nor could

he arrange for shooting suffi cient material to cover the editing for the imposed change in ending. Thus the direction

and editing had to remain fl exible throughout the production in order to cope with the problems imposed by the

actual events. But once the story-line was fi xed, the essential editing problems in the two instances remain parallel.

For reasons of compactness, we shall limit our account of the editing of imaginative documentaries to the

work of Robert Flaherty: his fi lms have been most widely seen, and are in some ways the most consistently

representative of the genre. In restricting our fi eld in this way, it is of course not implied that Flaherty is the

only exponent, or even that he is the only one of major interest.

An imaginative interpretation of a natural event must, above all, preserve something of the spontaneity of the

event itself. Well aware of this necessity, Flaherty planned the continuity of his fi lms only in the very vaguest form

Chapter 8

Imaginative Documentary

1

Notes by Helen van Dongen .