John Grierson

John Grierson was born in Deanston, Scotland in 1898. From an early age, his parents laid strong emphasis on their sons education as well as political and philosophical ideals. This upbringing can certainly be considered as one of the reasons why Grierson would later become a recognized European intellectual of the 1930s. He was part of the generation that matured in a post-war Europe, full of pessimism and cynicism, as well as conflicting political philosophies of fascism and communism. Despite of all the negativity in Europe at the time, Grierson pursued higher education in many prestigious universities, from University of Glasgow where he studied philosophy, to University of Chicago, where he focused his studies on the psychology of propaganda and the influence of media on forming public opinion. It was this study that eventually lured him into becoming a filmmaker as well as critic and a philosopher.

Today, John Grierson is widely considered as the father of British and Canadian documentary film, as well as the father of the “documentary” film genre. Grierson first mentioned the term when he reviewed Robert Flaherty’s film Moana (1926). He wrote that it had a “documentary value” and would later argue that basically the “raw” and “original” subjects or scenes were always better than their fictitious counterparts when trying to interpret the world. He would later go on to define documentary as “the creative treatment of actuality”. In order to discuss the implications of Grierson’s definition, we must try to explore the concept of a documentary, and look at some key characteristics of documentary film.

So what is a documentary film? Most people who didn’t have time to think about it would say that documentary is simply a re...

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...an (2005) or Exit Through the Gift Shop simply observe a unique individual and his story, while letting the viewer make out what the film was trying to convey.

So how do these definitions compare to Griersons?

“Creative Treatment of Actuality” implies that creativity is at the core of documentary. It suggests that documentary is not a real representation of the truth, but rather a form of truth that received “treatment” in the form of camera angles, editing and a narrative that convey the authors ideas and essentially manipulate the truth into his perception of it. Because the filmmaker has the ability to select, it enables reality to be presented in a manageable form, it portrays its real life subject in a way where subjective manipulation is disguised as objective observation. We are therefore presented with a manipulated ‘actuality’, rather than the real world.