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The Industrial Revolution as Catastrophe: Representations in 1930s Documentary Films
From: Science Museum
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Tim Boon |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
British documentary film is well known for its engagement with social issues. Less well noticed has been the place of historical narratives within filmmakers' representations of the state of the nation in the 1930s. Several filmmakers chose to portray the Depression as the result of the social and aesthetic catastrophe of the Industrial Revolution. At the Locating the Victorians conference in London, in July 2001, Tim Boon, head of collections development at the Science Museum, London, presented a paper explaining how aspects of the Victorian era were depicted in these documentaries. He has also published a paper, 'The Shell of a Prosperous Age: history, landscape and the modern in Paul Rotha's The Face of Britain (1935)', in the book Regenerating England: Science, medicine and culture in the interwar years. Here, he tells Fathom about the political convictions of the filmmakers, and the tight connection between such convictions and the employment of filmmaking conventions developed by Russian theorists. |
Tim Boon: What interests me is how the nineteenth century was seen from the twentieth century perspective. In particular, I'm exploring how industrialisation was thought of in the 1930s, and how it was represented in the documentary films made then. Two significant filmmakers of that era were Paul Rotha and John Monck. |
Fathom: What were these filmmakers' historical beliefs?
Boon: They believed in the 'catastrophic interpretation of industrialisation'. The historical arguments in their films encompass a golden rural age that was blown apart by industrialisation. In their view, unrestrained laissez faire capitalism in the nineteenth century had allowed the rich to get richer at the expense of the working classes. For them, the Wall Street Crash and the ensuing Depression were direct consequences, which affected the whole of the Western world. However, their outlook for the future was essentially positive--they believed that with the use of modern technology and the expert application of state planning, a new, more efficient and more rational world could be made. |
Fathom: Their films rank amongst the first to be made as 'documentaries'. How did this movement come about?
Boon: The term 'documentary' was effectively coined by the man usually seen as the father of documentary, John Grierson. Inspired by the film Moana, made by the anthropological filmmaker Robert Flaherty in 1925, Grierson defined documentary as 'the creative treatment of actuality', in which footage of real people in their own surroundings, as opposed to actors in studios, is manipulated to make an artistic product. |
Grierson was influenced by the experiments of famous Russian filmmakers, including Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin. They had developed a technique that applied the principles of dialectic to filmmaking. Dialectic presents a story in the format of thesis, antithesis and synthesis: an idea is stated, its opposite is represented and the synthesis brings together the two oppositions. The Russians believed that this approach could be applied to all levels of the filmmaking process. Their rules govern both microscopic and macroscopic details--how particular frames of film are put together and how overall narratives are structured. Thus a dialectical montage might direct the movement of a camera in one direction followed by the reverse, and could also constitute the statement of an historical event, followed by the overturning of those circumstances. |
Grierson and other documentary filmmakers of the 1930s were closely concerned with applying these principles to create meaning in the cinema. One man who also subscribed to these ideas was Paul Rotha. |
Fathom: How did Paul Rotha apply the principles expounded by the Russian filmmakers in Britain?
Boon: Paul Rotha made a film called The Face of Britain, completed in 1935.  This told the story of how England became what it was in the 1930s, explored the modern age and looked towards the future. Rotha organised his film as a four-part dialectic. The first section, 'Heritage of the Past', paints a picture of traditional rural England, as if it had existed since time immemorial. |
The second section, called 'The Smoke Age', describes the impact of the Industrial Revolution on people's lives. Rotha also portrays the aesthetic impact of industrialisation--how the beauty of the countryside was overturned. This is followed by 'The New Power' which explores the belief and hope that electricity, and especially hydroelectricity, would build a new Britain.
 
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The final section, 'The New Age', takes a broader look at the new, electrically-powered Britain, with its modern architecture, modern transport and forward-looking citizens becoming part of the new world. |
Another film, Today We Live, was produced by Rotha for the National Council for Social Service,  and released in 1937. Here, he used a highly-compressed statement of the catastrophic interpretation of industrialisation as a scene-setter for the rest of the film, which is about the construction of community halls--which was the business of the National Council at that time. In this film we see the use of this argument as an explanation of how we got to a world in which social services were required. Rotha modifies the historical account from The Face of Britain to show World War One as the culmination of laissez-faire capitalism. For him, the Depression is the natural sequel to the industrial age, which he sees as destroying traditional communities; hence the need to build community halls. |
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Rotha continued to use historical dialectic in his films, and not only around the topic of industrialisation, but with a shorter time scale, as in his World of Plenty (1943), which looks at world food supplies before, during, and after the Second World War. |
Fathom: What were Paul Rotha's influences?
Boon: Rotha belonged to a long line of liberal and left commentators, dating back to the era of Engels' Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) and also to Toynbee's Lectures on The Industrial Revolution in England (1884). These commentators produced works that described the squalid living conditions that workers experienced in the mid-nineteenth century, and highlighted the profound changes that people experienced in their lives, especially those who had moved to the industrial towns. Similar sentiments were expressed in 'industrial novels' such as Charles Dickens' Hard Times. |
An attachment to the state planning of society as a way of getting Britain and other nations out of the problems of the Depression was common in the inter-war period. Rotha was firmly placed on the political left, but such opinions weren't confined to subscribers to Marxism and Socialism--they were also shared by many in the Liberal and Conservative parties. The texture of the argument in The Face of Britain shows that Rotha was primarily concerned with making a more rational and technological society. He and many other people left-leaning people of this period took a very idealistic, even naïve view of the Soviet Union as a model of what could be achieved by rationalisation. |
Fathom: What did Rotha hope to achieve?
Boon: Rotha believed that there was an intelligent audience in Britain that, until this time, had been ill-served by what he saw as sensationalist Hollywood pap. He believed that people didn't welcome the stuff of fantasy but were looking for serious films that would inform them about the state of the nation so that they could discuss contemporary issues and become more effective and involved citizens. |
The problem was that it was actually rather difficult to get to see a lot of these documentary films. Cinema managers didn't like to show them, because they took the view that people went to the cinema to escape from reality. Documentary films were only seen in very particular places, including town halls, schools and film societies, and 'news theatres', cinemas mainly devoted to showing newsreels. But it is very difficult to know how the public reacted to Rotha's films, as sociological study of cinema audiences had not started at this time in Britain. |
Fathom: Who else was making films like this at the time?
Boon: John Monck produced and directed a documentary, Health for the Nation, which was commissioned by the Ministry of Health in 1938 to portray the health services of the nation. He had visited Russia and was converted to the idea that dialectical montage was the way to make films. His film takes a very similar line to The Face of Britain in that it paints the past as a bucolic paradise that was disrupted and destroyed by the arrival of the Industrial Revolution. Thus, the health problems experienced in the present could directly be attributed to the industrialisation of the nation. In its synthesis, the film goes on to review the history of health legislation and the health services which were available to the British public and provided by the state in the 1930s. Many of these were more like social services, and ranged from schools and disablement services to street cleaning and land reclamation. But over half of the film, designed to portray the present day, is located in history. |
My research has revealed that it was not only John Monck who was preoccupied with looking backwards for explanations. Officials at the Ministry of Health asked him to include, for example, the information that Britain had been the first country to have a railway system. So in that way they shared his vision that our current situation is rooted in history. This is quite a different from our present conception, that our health problems are considered to be a product of our time, of our genes and behaviour, and not the direct result of historical processes. This is probably because the types of health problems we suffer from nowadays in the West are very different, and less linked to poverty and social conditions. |
Fathom: Do you consider there to be a clear parallel between the two films?
Boon: There's an interesting parallel because they look back in the same way but they look forward slightly differently. The Face of Britain argues that scientific modernity and state planning would make a better world if governments acted on these principles. Health For the Nation propounds the idea that, despite the health problems that people experience, the Ministry of Health promises that the state will look after them. |
Fathom: The issues faced by today's society are very different to those of the 1930s. Can these documentary makers still teach us anything important?
Boon: I believe passionately in the importance of understanding the past. Knowing how we got here is essential in coming to terms with what the world is like, and our place within it. But in order to do that you've got to understand the past in its own terms. How the past represented its own past is significant here--for example how the Victorian period was seen in the 1930s could suggest a parallel to how we in the early twenty-first century are beginning to see the twentieth century. |
What we've seen from these examples is that peoples' emotional and politically subjective readings of history may have a much more persistent impact than what's happening within technical historical argument. Most of us don't think about industrialisation and the Victorian period in precisely the same way as people thought about it in the 1930s, because we don't see ourselves so much as a product of that period, and it's so much further removed from us. Therefore, compared to the commentators and filmmakers of the 1930s, we view that part of history through very different lenses. By studying the documentary films produced at that time, we can learn about the lenses they looked through, metaphorically as well as literally. |
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