In Search of the People: The Journeys of J. B. Priestley

Abstract

Grierson and his young men, with their contempt for big. easy prizes and soft living, their taut social conscience, their rather Marxist sense of the contemporary scene, always seemed to me figures representative of a new world, at least a generation ahead of the dramatic film people…. But nearly all documentary films seem to me a very romantic heightening of ordinary life, comparable not to the work of a realistic novelist or dramatist, but to the picturesque and highly-coloured fictions of the romancer…. For plain truth they cannot compete with the printed word…. In short, their very medium compels these young men to be romantic in practice, no matter how realistic they may be in theory.