What did John Grierson mean when he said that documentaries have a social and political duty? What exactly is a political duty?

Since John Grierson, who founded the British Documentary Movement in the late 1920s, famously defined documentary as the "creative treatment of actuality", the genre has generally been considered to be historically bound up with the representation of the working class. While the British Movement condensed the public, self-conscious formulation of the genre, we shouldn't forget that it had actually been taking shape since the final decade of the 19th century. Documentary's "prehistoric" era, which spans from 1890 to 1920, is inextricably bound up with the struggles for civil rights and for the implementation and early development of the modern welfare state in the West, and with the revolutionary movements that triumphed in 1917. The production of images showing the disadvantaged classes was an ideological, symbolic and communicative tool typical of the liberal state, and has become a means for gaining social rights. As such, the ideology of social change is inherent to the documentary genre and its historical evolution. This is the main source of the debate around the ethics and politics of the genre, which talk of it as a "democratic art"..

Society's victims are the quintessential subject of the documentary genre. It could be said that the genre was historically constituted to represent these subjects, thus setting up a "tradition of the victim", to quote film historian and critic Brian Winston in relation to the Griersonian documentary. Nevertheless, we can also identify other divergent or conflicting ideas of how "the victim" was conceived by the documentary genre during the twenties and thirties. Against the liberal, paternalistic Griersonian current, there was a parallel current linked to the international worker's movement, which led to the creation of the different kinds of amateur associations that proliferated in Northern Europe and reached the United States. These Leagues worked to promote image-based culture among the working class, sought forms of emancipation through self-representation and tried to overcome the paternalistic model. Conquering the means of production meant mastering representation.

The documentaries often deal with subjects linked to the reformist policies of the Depression era and the New Deal and of the movement of workers' film and photography leagues. They describe social struggles and daily life, the effects of the economic crisis on the rural world and inflation among metropolitan industrial workers. They include recurring images of unemployed and precarious workers. The scenes of multitudes and working class characters on the streets are an attempt to shape the new emergent working class subject that is developing in two directions at once - through singularisation and de-subjectivation. One of the main problems of this period is the unresolved tension between individuality and mass movements, and the documentaries express this tension in images.

The program traces a course that begins with pioneers working in Russia. such as Dziga Vertov, Esther Shub and Alexander Dovzhenko, and America, like Robert Flaherty, and ends with the documentaries on the Depression in the US at the threshold of World War II, providing an overview of the rhetoric of the genre and its development during this period. The practices embrace multiple registers, from rudimentary information films and the use of archival materials to highly abstract, lyrical languages. While there have been many different forms of persuasion inherent to the documentary, the figure of the working class subject as victim has been central to the type of appeal to the public that the genre seeks.

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