The Confluence of Documentary Modernism and the Sponsored Film
Upon watching Master Hands for our week on sponsored films, I was struck by an unexpected connection. In its construction and aesthetic, the film very much resembles the mode of documentary modernism exemplified by Man With a Movie Camera and laid out polemically in Jors Ivens' "The Artistic Power of the Documentary Film" (1932). Ivens rails against the industry element of commercial narrative cinema, asserting that it "made incorrect use of your technical and scientific work and created a sort of 'art inflation'" (Bakker 227). As he goes on to describe the components that distinguish "artistic" documentary film, however, he lists traits that can be easily found in Master Hands, despite it being sponsored by Chevrolet.
Ivens strongly emphasizes the notion of "cinematographic rhythm" and its importance to the artistry of the medium. By rhythm, he primarily means editing and the sense of flow and tempo created by putting images together, the essential factor which distinguishes film from other art forms. He cites the development of sound as "an excellent ally" in creating the desired rhythm for a film.
Ivens' principles can be clearly applied to Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera, with its abstract cutting between objects of industry and urbanites on the move. The connection to Master Hands, however, is more surprising, as the sponsored film is even farther removed from what Ivens seems to want. Master Hands is almost entirely made up of shots of machinery, sometimes operated by workers, but it is the machinery which is most important. Although in theory, the film depicts the construction of an automobile, instead of employing a voiceover or titles for clarity of the process, it relies on avant-garde techniques to create a more fluid, impressionistic picture of the industry. A more clear explanation of the process is provided in Prelinger's shotlist (http://archive.org/details/MasterHa1936_2), but for a civilian watching the film the mechanics are quite unclear, and the film quickly takes on a more avant-garde feel as the viewer settles into the Wagnerian music and the repetitive, mechanistic visuals.
The Prelinger notes describe the style of Master Hands as "capitalist realism" that "uses the representational methods of the Soviet and German cinemas to strengthen its vision of American enterprise." I find this confluence and cross-pollination fascinating, as the two documentary genres are philosophically so far removed from each other. Master Hands pretends to be about the auto workers who build its products, but the shots chosen are primarily of the machinery, therefore glorifying the corporation itself rather than the human laborers. As a sponsored film, it is by definition the opposite of what Jors Ivens espouses in his treatise, but employs all the same techniques.
Master Hands therefore both proves and disproves Ivens's point. It does indeed co-opt the techniques of the avant-garde to serve its own ends, amounting to the "art inflation" Ivens describes. It does so, however, in a documentary mode without a scripted narrative, indicating that documentary film does not necessarily have the purity of purpose he ascribes it. Ivens writes that, in documentary, "It is not a series of external ideas, but the objects themselves which indicate their sequence in place and time" (Bakken 228). I would argue that both can be true in the documentary film. Indeed, most documentaries are built around thematic, polemical ideas as well as the dictates of the sounds and images. Master Hands is an example, as is Man With a Movie Camera, though the former has a more commercial ideological bent than the latter.
Just through the comparison of these two subgenres of documentary – the sponsored film and documentary modernism – we can see the murkiness of the boundaries of nonfiction film. Truth and ideology, artistry and corporate ambition all blur together. Delineating what is pure and what is mediated and for what reasons becomes a complex endeavor. Is there such a thing as a nonfiction film, when editing and mediation are at play?
Diana Bilbao