Patrick D. MacFadden
Grierson I have always taken to be in the tradition of the Scottish 'dominie' or schoolmaster for whom education is the key to the Golden City. His father was a teacher, his forebears lighthouse keepers. Whenever I talked to him on the phone, he would always open with 'What's your good news?' And in truth he was a good news man, the gospel being that ordinary people, with proper guidance - a favourite Grierson word 'proper' - could make of their place and time a decent thing. He knew about war and he knew about the sea and he knew what both could do. He served on a minesweeper in the Great War, an occupation marginally less hazardous than serving the Canadian polity during one of its cyclical failures of nerve. He studied moral philosophy at Glasgow and had the measure of his fellow man. He saw also at Glasgow the socialist revolutionary John McLean carried from the jail after a hunger strike, broken in body and spirit. To paraphrase Auden, another who believed in lighthouses, if at times he was autocratic, it was 'a protective imitation for one who lived among enemies so long'. Grierson had seen 'the concupiscence of the oppression'. Something of that hard-earned canniness emerges later in his irritation with such windy notions as 'the free flow of information' (not the same as free expression), for he knew where the flow would come from.
My own enthusiasm for the pietistic soubriquet 'father of the documentary' applied to Grierson has always been under control. I am enough of a Freudian to know what can happen to fathers. And the last days of this storm-tossed man at the Film Board confirm one's scepticism. 'I have been in and out of every sea loch from Cape Wrath to the Mull of Kintyre and in every sheltering harbour east and west from the Butt of Lewis to Barra Head', Grierson wrote of his mine-sweeping days. But when the mine laid in Washington finally went up in Ottawa, there was no sheltering harbour in the north.
Two Grierson archives have now been established, one in Montreal and one at Stirling University in Scotland. The former includes six hundred and fifty pages of transcribed conversations between Grierson and Rod Chiasson of the CRTC, taped from late 1968 to late 1971.
Voilà! The beginnings of a cottage industry. Our best documentary artist Donald Brittain is, at this writing, busy among the Mackenzie King papers, with a view to putting umpteen hours on CBC television. To say the least, there is still much to learn about how the shifty gnome on the Rideau finessed his first Film Board Commissioner. And playwright Rick Salutin has a docu-drama, Grierson and Gouzenko, which was broadcast on CBC television in late January 1986.
The participants in the McGill verbal festschrift are a varied lot although all are keepers, to one degree or another, of the Grierson flame. Literally, in the case of Ian Lockerbie, Chairman of the Grierson archive at Stirling. Dr Lockerbie, in perhaps the best-realized essay of the collection, 'Grierson and Realism', challenges the view put forward by Alan Lovell in Studies in Documentary that Grierson's notions of the State in relation to society are neo-Hegelian. Lovell's conclusion: 'The value Grierson placed on the State lays him open to the charge of being implicitly totalitarian.' While Lockerbie disposes of this canard gently and firmly, the irony involved in Grierson's relations to the State will not be missed on others. Lockerbie might have added that Grierson's major conclusion, that what once was called art has been dialectically surpassed and replaced by the media/communications structure, is in its essence Hegelian. It is not a view that one hears challenged very much.
The papers presented here range from scholarly debate - 'to talk of reflecting reality is illusory' (Lockerbie) - to personal reminiscence - 'I attribute my whole life to John Grierson' (Louis Applebaum.) There is some disarmingly honest chat about the disastrous capital-cost allowance scams of the seventies: 'So we had an influx of competent lawyers and accountants; we spent two hundred and fifty thousand dollars setting up a deal. If any of the feature films began to look half as good as the beautiful four-colour prospectuses, we'd take over the world' (Harry Gulkin).
Grierson's biographer, Forsyth Hardy, has a lovely essay with new and interesting material under the heading 'Democracy as a fighting faith'. joining him from the United Kingdom are those whose names alone are synonymous with the history of the British documentary: Edgar and Daphne Anstey, Margaret Elton, Basil Wright; film historian Jack Ellis from Northwestern University contributes a fascinating coda to the internecine squabbles of the documentary brotherhood in Britain during World War Two; from Canada, Judith and Budge Crawley, James Beveridge, Colin Low, Tom Daly, Eldon Rathburn, Michael Spencer, Eleanor Beattie complete what moderator Peter Harcourt describes as 'McGill's gathering of the clan of the house that Grierson built'.
With all this warmth of memory and richness of debate, it is depressing to record that the published version is pockmarked with the most avoidable of solecisms. Charity is one thing; but the thought of a second printing of this otherwise estimable collection in its present form prompts me to speak up: There is an eminent French historian. But he does not sign himself LaDurie. Ronald Blumer has been around McGill and the Grierson business long enough to deserve better than Bloomer from his alma mater. No matter how parlour pink the then-prevailing geist was, the Crawleys did not perpetrate an Alexei Tremblay, Habitant, although they acquitted themselves masterfully with Alexis; no Adam Semansky or Marilee Pascal ever showed up at a Grierson seminar although Symansky and Merrily were frequent visitors; 'considered in the light of eternal judgement' is not usefully rendered in the Latin by the gnomic 'sub spatia'. The great German artist Kathe Kollwitz had a terrible enough life without ending up at McGill as Kollowitz; there is no magazine titled Cahier du cinema. And, thankfully, one has yet to encounter a 'cinéast'! If the universities cannot get it right, then who can?