Drifters

“The herring fishing has changed. It was once an idyll of brown sails and village harbours – its story is now an epic of steam and steel.” – Drifters.

In a small, coastal village, a group of men gather in the late afternoon and head towards the harbour. The sea crashes against the rocky shoreline and the gulls glide and stare in anticipation. Hundreds of trawlers cram into the harbour; tall masts jutting through plumes of thick smoke. Huge cranes swing amongst them carrying crates of equipment and supplies, while a small army of men haul what they can carry onto the boats. The furnaces are alight, tons of coal being shovelled in to fuel the engines. Finally, the anchors are lifted, and the boats roll out to battle.

These opening scenes of John Grierson’s 1929 silent film ‘Drifters’ vividly establish the epic struggle which is about to occur on the open seas - man versus nature; old versus new; tradition versus modernity. But they also establish the major themes which characterised many of the films produced during the British Documentary Film Movement from the late 1920s and onwards – the importance of ordinary labour and the dignity of the working man. Filmed on location, using real fishermen and actual situations, writer-director-producer-editor-theorist John Grierson was attempting something unique in British cinema at the time – to present “the drama that resides in the living fact” (Hardy, F. (ed.), 1946. Grierson on Documentary, London: Collins.).

‘Drifters’ was the first practical demonstration of Grierson’s principles of documentary form and it was radically different to the vast majority of films being produced in Hollywood and Britain during the period. real people, not actors. real locations, not sets. real stories, not fantasies. Yes, the Lumiere Brothers had already shown the working man on the big screen decades before, but there is a huge and undeniable difference. The Lumieres had depicted the worker in his daily routine, whereas ‘Drifters’, edited in the montage style of Soviet cinema, creates a dramatic tension between the rhythmic machinery of the trawler and the relentlessness of the wind and sea. Rather than reporting the plain facts of the fishermen’s lives – where they live, what they eat – Grierson dramatizes their ordinarily mundane occupations. Helped in large part by the epic narration of the title cards, the fishermen’s labours are elevated to heroic acts, as man and industry are set against nature. Tradition and modernity battle it out, whilst the working man struggles valiantly to endure. Grierson said it is important “to make the distinction between a method which describes only the surface value of a subject, and the method which more explosively reveals the reality of it. You photograph the natural life, but you also, by your juxtaposition of detail, create an interpretation of it” (Hardy, F. (ed.), 1946. Grierson on Documentary, London: Collins.). Controversially for many of today’s documentary filmmakers and purists, Grierson believed that dramatization was an indispensable component of the documentary form.

Grierson was a progressive thinker, and he chose the herring fishermen of the North Sea as the subjects of ‘Drifters’ for specific, ideological reasons. He was a great admirer of the American documentary filmmaker Robert Flaherty. Grierson, however, had a problem with Flaherty’s choice of subjects for his films. For ‘Nanook of the North’(1922), Flaherty travelled to the icy wilderness of Canada to film the culture of the native Inuit population; whilst ‘Moana’ (1926) is an account of the daily rituals of the Pacific islanders of Samoa. Grierson believed that local subjects were of more value than Flaherty’s distant cultures in helping to reawaken public consciousness; he had a desire “to bring the citizen’s eye in from the ends of the earth to the story, his own story, of what was happening under his nose…the drama of the doorstep” (Hardy, F. (ed.), 1946. Grierson on Documentary, London: Collins.). Under Grierson, the overwhelming majority of films produced by the British Documentary Movement dealt, like ‘Drifters’, with subjects that were of immediate importance to British society – from the deplorable conditions of housing in ‘Housing Problems’ (1935), to the functioning of the London-to-Scotland postal train in the iconic ‘Night Mail’ (1936). His preoccupation with local issues that were pertinent to contemporary society originated from his desire to educate, and film was simply a means of educating.

Superficially, ‘Drifters’ can be viewed as a complete record of the economic process of a modern fishing industry. The boats leave the harbour, the men catch the fish and return to market to sell – from preparation, to locating the shoals, casting the nets, catching, cleaning, icing, auctioning and distributing the fish. Indeed, this is the simple sequence of events that unfolds on the screen. But an understanding of the cinematic climate into which ‘Drifters’ was released is vital to a full appreciation of the film itself.

In the 1920s, American studio films were dominating British cinema screens. Grierson’s earliest theories of a realist form of cinematic expression were established predominantly as a counteraction to the escapist fictional filmmaking coming out of Hollywood at the time. In his essay ‘First Principles of Documentary’, Grierson presented his theory of a new film form. He wrote that “the cinema’s capacity for getting around, for observing and selecting from life itself, can be exploited in a new and vital art form” (Hardy, F. (ed.), 1946. Grierson on Documentary, London: Collins.), and that “the documentary would photograph the living scene and the living story” (Hardy, F. (ed.), 1946. Grierson on Documentary, London: Collins.). He explains that

“the original actor, and the original scene, are better guides to a screen interpretation of the modern world…They give it power of interpretation over more complex and astonishing happenings in the real world than the studio mind can conjure up or the studio mechanician can recreate….The materials and the stories thus taken from the raw can be finer (more real in the philosophic sense) than the acted article.” (Hardy, F. (ed.), 1946. Grierson on Documentary, London: Collins.)

His disparaging criticism of escapist filmmaking unveils the passion with which Grierson propelled the documentary method of capturing and interpreting reality. He believed that the popular arts would one day replace the church and the school as the primary sources of information in society and he assumed his responsibilities as a filmmaker and film theorist with extreme austerity. For him, the documentary had a didactic purpose. He was convinced that the contemporary British public had become apathetic towards the problems in society and had ceased to be functioning members of the general social process. He sought to actively engage the public in social issues, and he insisted that the documentary filmmaker had a responsibility to inform the population and to strengthen a shared sense of citizenship amongst native communities - “to create a will towards civic participation” (Hardy, F. (ed.), 1946. Grierson on Documentary, London: Collins.). In a modern context, whenever we watch a documentary today, we typically expect to learn something; whether it is simply a few trite facts or to gain a deeper understanding of some aspect of the world we live in. This expectation is largely due to the early theories of John Grierson and his formulation of and subsequent influence on the documentary form.

It is no coincidence that ‘Drifters’ received its 1929 premiere alongside the first British screening of Sergei Eisenstein’s masterpiece ‘Battleship Potemkin’ (1925). Grierson was a dedicated and shrewd promoter, and it is primarily due to his innovative approach to distribution that he is often regarded as the father of British documentary. ‘Battleship Potemkin’ was perhaps the greatest influence on Grierson when he made ‘Drifters’. (Incidentally, ‘Drifters’ was well-received by critics, the press and general audiences of the day – in contrast to the controversial ‘Battleship Potemkin’). In the first instance, the dramatic, montage-style editing of ‘Drifters’ mimics the form of the Soviet cinema of the period. Grierson also shared a similar artistic philosophy with the great Soviet filmmakers such as Eisenstein, i.e., that film should be used to raise the consciousness of the viewer; to enlighten and inform, rather than to provide superficial escapist fantasies. Furthermore, the emphasis on the heroic working man is a trademark of early Soviet cinema; and, after ‘Drifters’, the working man became a regular stereotype in the films of the British Documentary Movement.

Since its release, ‘Drifters’, like ‘Nanook of the North’, has received widespread criticism of its methods. The scenes of the fishermen eating dinner in the boat’s cabin, for example, were reconstructed. An identical set of the interior was built on shore to allow Grierson and Cameraman Basil Emmott to work with less restriction. Similarly, the shots of the herring, dogfish and conga eels were filmed in a London aquarium. This, apparently, goes against the ethics of documentary filmmaking. However, when considering the technical and logistical limitations of filmmaking in the 1920s, surely some allowance must be offered. Irrespective of this, it is only since the advent of Direct Cinema and the application of journalistic tenets to documentary that such rigorous adherence to actuality has been expected. For Grierson, the documentary would use real people not actors, real scenarios not those of “unfettered imagination” (Hardy, F. (ed.), 1946. Grierson on Documentary, London: Collins.) – reconstruction was perfectly acceptable. In relation to this, it is useful to look at one of Grierson’s most famous elaborations on the function of documentary as he saw it:

“The documentary idea, after all, demands no more than that the affairs of our time shall be brought to the screen in any fashion which strikes the imagination and makes observation a little richer than it was. At one level, the vision may be journalistic; at another, it may rise to poetry and drama. At another level again, its aesthetic quality may lie in the mere lucidity of its exposition.” (Hardy, F. (ed.), 1946. Grierson on Documentary, London: Collins.)

Many highly successful documentaries have since made use of reconstructions to the derision of a significant portion of the industry. For me, if Grierson had in some way altered the truth (as Flaherty did in ‘Nanook of the North’) then the complaints would be justified. ‘Drifters’ remains an accurate and faithful portrait of the lives of the fishermen and, as such, the criticism is largely unwarranted.

Admittedly, for many viewers ‘Drifters’ will prove an incessant bore - a grainy black-and-white, silent film about fishing! It would be easy to dismiss ‘Drifters’ as being of value only to those with an interest in early documentary or the development of the fishing industry, but I think there are some other important points to be made that give the film a wider appeal. The cinematography by Basil Emmott, a pre-eminent cameraman of the period, remains exquisite and alluring; and it is especially difficult for modern movie-goers to appreciate the challenges he must have had taking large, cumbersome camera equipment into the confined spaces on deck AND on a rough sea. Secondly, Grierson’s direction is a perfect example of narrative structuring, successfully relating the operation of a single fishing boat to its wider industrial context. Furthermore, the exemplary montage editing truly does dramatize the mundane; it stimulates the imagination where straightforward relation of facts would serve only to exhaust and annoy. Although he oversaw the production of over a thousand films at the Empire Marketing Board and General Post Office Film Unit from the late 1920s to the 1930s, ‘Drifters’ was the only film on which John Grierson was credited as the director. The vast majority of the later films do not compare with the overall quality of ‘Drifters’; and, if only for this reason, the film retains its place as a crucial stage in the evolution of documentary form in Britain and beyond.

Watch

Country: UK
Budget: ₤3,000
Length: 61mins

Filmography:
'Battleship Potemkin’, 1925, Sergei M. Eisenstein, Goskino
'Night Mail’, 1936, Harry Watt and Basil Wright, GPO (General Post Office) Film Unit
'Housing Problems’, 1935,
‘Moana’, 1926, Robert J. Flaherty, Famous Players-Lasky Corporation
‘Nanook of the North’, 1922, Robert J. Flaherty, Les Frères Revillon

Pub/2008

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