Lye grew up in New Zealand and while at school became fascinated by the problem of composing motion (e.g., the motions of clouds) in his drawings and early attempts at sculpture. Then while living in Sydney, Australia, around 1923 [11] he saw Frank Hurley's documentary With the Headhunters in Papua and realised that film offered a solution. Seeing what film could do he joined Filmads Ltd, a local advertising company that specialised in animated film and, through making short animated advertising films for the cinema in 1923 [12] and experimenting on his own time, he learned the techniques of animation and editing. [13] In 1924 he moved to Samoa, then got himself deported in 1925, and returned to Sydney where he stayed for two years before working his passage to London, Great Britain, in 1927. There he focussed on animation and by 1929 had already produced one important animated film, Tusalava, which he made using First Australians' (Arrernte nation) motifs based on a totemic creature: the witchetty grub. [14]

Thus, not only is the British Post Office's GPO Film Unit (1934-1937) relevant to the history of independent video production through being a progenitor of activist film-making, but Lye himself is relevant to the history of experimental film and video because he more-or-less single-handedly invented the handmade film, anticipating, in his films for the GPO Film Unit, the techniques of colourising, rhythmical editing, multilayered images, synthetic and geometric forms, and collage that were used in experimental video through the late 1970s and 1980s. He also used scratching and other direct impression techniques such as painting on the film stock which, in the 1960s, also appeared in the films of Albie Thoms and David Perry, among others, when they worked together as Ubu Films, whom I will discuss below in the chapter on Experimental Film (Chapter 7).

Grierson's notion of documentary had a teleological aspect. His view was that film should transcend

“actuality by outlining a set of norms and instructions that would allow controlling and shaping vision and by extension subjectivity and agency.” [15]

and his method can be summed up in his statement that

“If you dramatized things, if you brought things into dramatic form, if you brought them alive as distinct from gave information you might find a way of illumining the modern world.” [16]

Thus, as Lars Weckbecker notes in his recent study of New Zealand's National Film Unit, film-makers should

“intervene in, strategically interact with, model, creatively treat and optimize actual events towards a set of socio- and psycho-political purposes.” [17]

What we're seeing here is a kind of positive propaganda in favour of the working people, where Grierson's intentions seem to have been to invert the proper order of society so that the working class might have a say in how they are governed. Thus he worked to produce a medium that allowed the people to say what they should be able to say without the inevitable censorship or condemnation: seeing documentary as a means for breaking the stereotypes that had been laid upon the working classes. It was important to show that they were as human and could be hurt as much as any wealthier class of people might be. He appears to have felt that the role of the documentary was not simply to report, a la television journalism (supposing objectivity there is at all possible), but to function as a source of civic enlightenment [18] and assist the subject(s) of the documentary achieve some political purpose, such as communicating with their 'government', communicating about social and local environmental problems and arguing against conditions imposed from outside or above (say, by developers or by the local council). [19] This of course is a means to participatory democracy.

While studying in the U.S. during the mid-1920s, Grierson had become

“profoundly concerned about what he perceived to be clear threats to democracy... [having] encountered a marked tendency toward political reaction, anti-democratic sentiments, and political apathy.” [20]

Then, in 1922, journalist and political philosopher Walter Lippmann [21] argued that the blame for

“the erosion of democracy [lay] in part on the fact that the political and social complexities of contemporary society made it difficult if not impossible for the public to comprehend and respond to issues vital to the maintenance of democratic society.” [22]

As Lippman reminds us,

“we can see how indirectly we know the environment in which nevertheless we live... [23] In [this] same way we can best understand the furies of war and politics by remembering that almost the whole of each party believes absolutely in its picture of the opposition, that it takes as fact, not what is, but what it supposes [my (SJ) emphasis] to be the fact.” [24]... Our first concern with [these] fictions and symbols is to forget their value to the existing social order, and to think of them simply as an important part of the machinery of human communication. [25] The only feeling that anyone can have about an event he does not experience is the feeling aroused by his mental image of that event. That is why until we know what others think they know, we cannot truly understand their acts.” [26]

For Lippman the operating principle

“is the insertion between man [sic] and his environment [sick] of a pseudo-environment [the press, a movie]. To that pseudo-environment his behaviour is a response. But because it is behaviour, the consequences, if they are acts, operate not in the pseudo-environment [whence] the behaviour is stimulated, but in the real environment where action eventuates. [27]

“Such behaviour then may best be described by Herbert Spencer's witnessing of the murder of a Beautiful Theory by a Gang of Brutal Facts... For certainly, at the level of social life, what is called the adjustment of man to his environment takes place through the medium of fictions.” [28]

'Fictions', as Lippman notes, that are

“a representation of the environment which is in lesser or greater degree made by man himself. [29] For the real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. [30] We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. [31]

“The argument here is that the construction of the counter-factual is not simply a disturbance of mind, it is the fundamental process by which society is controlled. This process might also be thought of as the construction of propaganda, be it in favour of those against whom you are arrayed or in favour of those whom you consider your allies in the debate. Each side has their own beliefs and their own notions of what is the truth, what is good and kind and what is anathema. Each will approach the other with its own propaganda and reproach the other for its apparent propaganda. As Lippman asks: “But what is propaganda, if not the effort to alter the picture to which men (sic) respond, to substitute one social pattern for another?” [32]

In Grierson's view, [the] way to counter these problems was to involve citizens in their government [using] the kind of engaging excitement generated by [media similar to] the popular press, which simplified and dramatized public affairs. [33]

For Grierson the solution was not the press but motion pictures and he became convinced that they could play a central role in promoting this process. [34] Thus Grierson's approach at the GPO Film Unit, which made documentaries showing British working class people as individuals possessing human dignity. [35] He sought to get the working class on the screen for the first time and his film about the North Sea and Scottish herring fisheries was the first English film that put a working man on the screen as other than a comic figure. [36]

Grierson's interest was in the decentralisation of communication. In a National Film Board of Canada documentary on him, he comments on his later work in India, arguing that communication should be set up as a process of self-determined planning, creating

“a belief in a future not imposed from the top but assumed from the bottom, so that the leaders of the villages are themselves the forefront of the whole exercise in persuasion [37] These included the fishermen in 'Drifters', the craftsmen in Industrial Britain, and the post-office and railway men in Night Mail.” [38]

After Grierson left the GPO Film Unit in 1937 he was invited to advise on the establishment of film units in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. On behalf of the Imperial Relations Trust he visited Canada in 1938, where he advised on the establishment of the Canadian National Film Commission in 1939. In Canada he was especially able to advance his socio-political views when he was asked on his initial visit to study the state of the government's film production. Up to that date, the Canadian Government Motion Picture Bureau, established in 1918, had been the major Canadian film producer. The results of Grierson's report were included in the National Film Act of 1939, which led to the establishment of the National Film Commission. In part, it was founded to create propaganda in support of the Second World War. [39]

Later in 1939 the Commission was renamed the National Film Board (NFB). Grierson was appointed as the Canadian Government Film Commissioner, (a position he held until 1945) and thus got the opportunity to implement his ideals as a film-maker. As Grierson noted later, the work of the NFB was to bring Canada alive to itself and to the rest of the world. [40] However, he was accused of showing Communist sympathies in several of the films the Board had produced during the war [41], and he was dismissed as Film Commissioner in 1945. He then returned to Scotland, but continued to make community documentary in numerous places around the world.

So:

Grierson was a radical, but not a revolutionary.

Meanwhile, in 1940 he had visited Australia, to advise the Commonwealth Government on the establishment of a national film board to produce documentary films in the national interest. [42] He made a series of recommendations to the then Prime Minister, Sir Robert Menzies, [43] that would eventually contribute to the subsequent Chifley government's decision to form the Australian National Film Board (ANFB) in 1945. [44] This, in effect, brought Grierson's definition of documentary to bear >in Australian documentary film-making. In 1946 Stanley Hawes, who had worked in Britain and Canada and had worked for Grierson, was appointed Producer-in-Chief. [45]

Of documentary Hawes had said,

“a documentary film is made in the service of the community, in the belief that the responsible spread of information cannot but improve the human condition.” [46]

and of Grierson:

“[He] was a communications man with a social conscience and he believed that painters, poets, writers and musicians should use their skills in the service of the community and project social problems into the national consciousness. Documentary is film in the service of humanity.” [47]

Hawes' comment is important if for one reason only. It makes for an ideology which places art-making, in its widest ramifications, at the forefront of a social policy driven by the people themselves, not by the market and those with the greatest financial resources. Grierson's view being that:

“The documentary film movement was from the beginning an adventure in public observation... The basic force behind it was social, not aesthetic. We were, I confess, sociologists a little worried about the way the world was going...” [48]

While Stephen Tallents, of the (British) Empire Marketing Board commented, in echoing Grierson's view of the role of the documentary, that

“Films could and should be employed to bring alive, with a penetrating vividness that should touch the imaginations of us all, the lives and the daily work of ordinary men and women in the new world that was growing up around us.” [49]

Thus