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A Profile of John Grierson, Godfather of DocCinema
The Godfather of DocCinema - BBC Two - Documenting John Grierson (2014)
by Peter Biesterfeld
“We believe 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."
—John Grierson, First Principles of Documentary
The orbit of John Grierson’s legacy touches almost everything we know
about documentary. The five-foot something Scotsman with an orator’s
voice single-handedly birthed the documentary form when cinema itself
was still in its infancy.
Just as Orson Welles pushed cinematic boundaries in the way Hollywood
stories were told, so John Grierson brought ground-breaking innovations
to non-fiction storytelling deployed and enjoyed by documentary
filmmakers 90 years later: actuality footage to tell a dramatic story,
the documentary interview, post-sync audio (looping) and multi-layered
sound design were foundational production elements introduced on
Grierson’s watch.
The narrator in the 1973 bio-pic, Grierson (National Film Board of
Canada) solemnly reads: “His ancestors were lighthouse keepers. He
himself spent a lifetime seeing to it that movies were made and used in
ways no man before him had imagined.”
Grierson made it his life’s ambition to put film to a social purpose.
“Film can be mobilized in the public service to give image and
perspective to the national scene,” is how he put it.
full:
https://www.videomaker.com/article/c06/19062-a-profile-of-john-grierson-godfather-of-doccinema
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