Injury, Identity and Recognition: Rize and Fix: The Story of an Addicted City

Abstract

One of the early innovations that Grierson is credited with emerged as he attempted to bring to the screen the faces and bodies of the working class. He sought to portray them not as objects of ridicule, but as social agents in their own environments and with their own voices. This undertaking incorporated new sound technologies that allowed film-makers to convey the image and the voice of this subject in ways that supported Grierson’s social and aesthetic agenda. In 1934 he stated: ‘If we are showing workmen at work, we get the workmen to do their own commentary, with idiom and accent complete. It makes for intimacy and authenticity, and nothing we could do would be half as good’ (quoted in Winston, ‘The Tradition’ 39). From this time on, the victimised and the stoic worker, as speaking subjects, become a key feature of the representation of the social world in realist documentary.