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Industrial Britain represents a watershed in the development of the British
documentary movement, the moment when artistic achievement was first blended
meaningfully with social intent.
The film developed from John Grierson's opportunistic recruitment of Robert
Flaherty. Flaherty was an anthropologist-cum-filmmaker who shot to worldwide
prominence with Nanook of the North (1920), a documentary that detailed the
hardships of Eskimo life.
Anxious to secure a prestige director for the project (Anthony Asquith had
already turned them down) The Empire Marketing Board turned hopefully to a
near-destitute Flaherty. Soured by failure in Hollywood and inspired by the
high-seriousness of early Soviet cinema, Flaherty exchanged the exoticism of his
previous work for an appreciation of Britain's industrial workers. Many of his
sequences - like the English potter - were considered successful enough to merit
a subsequent release as shorts.
However, Flaherty's intuitive way of working (he refused to write a script
and instead filled reels of film with things that interested him, from static
shots of Saltash Bridge to electricity pylons) proved unacceptably extravagant
for a government agency. Flaherty was fired and it was left to Edgar Anstey to
edit Flaherty's fragmentary impressions into a coherent whole. Hence the
grandeur of Flaherty's imagery was accompanied by an assertive,
sociologically-minded editorialising that was temperamentally at odds with its
Canadian mentor. Almost by accident, the basic mode of documentary cinema in
Britain had been created.
Industrial Britain provides a dramatic illustration of how the young British
documentary movement grappled with the influence of the genre's founding father.
Flaherty's ethos was essentially that of a 19th Century conservative
individualist; he was attracted to the elemental extremes of nature and was
suspicious of the mechanisation of the modern world. In films like Housing
Problems (d. Arthur Elton/Edgar Anstey, 1935), on the other hand, the young
progressives of the British documentary movement would propound scientific
solutions to the social and economic problems of the interwar period.
EMB filmmakers learnt from Flaherty's aesthetic approach, but would
eventually dismiss his deeper artistic instincts as escapist. Thus as the
depression deepened, the amiably ragged Industrial Britain would become the
pointedly professional Coal Face (d. Alberto Cavalcanti,
1935).
Scott Anthony *This film is included in the BFI DVD compilation 'Land of Promise: The British Documentary Movement 1930-1950'.
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1. Mining (1:02)
