Representing the People: The Documentary Film Movement and Mass Observation in the Thirties

Abstract

To throw some light on discussions about the ‘people’ and the ‘popular’, one need only bear in mind that the ‘people’ or the ‘popular’…is first of all one of the things at stake in the struggle between intellectuals. It is, I know only too well, difficult to be sure of one’s attitudes in a decade like this. Can we heroicize our men when we know them to be exploited? Can we romanticize our industrial scene when we. know that our men work brutally and starve ignobly in it? Can we praise it – and in art there must be praise – when the most blatant fact of our time is the bankruptcy of our national management? Our confidence is sapped, our beliefs are troubled, our eye for beauty is most plainly disturbed: and the more so in cinema than in any other art. For we have to build on the actual. Our capital comes from those whose only interest is in the actual. The medium itself insists on the actual. There we must build or be damned.