by Christopher Bruno
Among the very first packet of readings we were assigned were two pieces written by Terry Ramsaye for the Christian Science Monitor in 1922, "The Status of Non-Fiction Films" and "Non-Fiction Film as Propoganda." These pieces -- or, rather, my copies of them -- are unique among my Nonfiction Film History readings in that they are relatively littered with marginalia. I usually content myself with a highlighter, but in the case of these readings, I was equally liberal with a red pen. Part of it, no doubt, was that classes hadn't even begun yet and I was chomping on the bit to return to academia with fervor, having allowed seven years to pass between by undergraduate and graduate studies. But a bigger part of it was that I had found gaping holes in Ramsaye's argument and leaps of logic that I couldn't abide. If ten percent of my final grade was to be participation, my socially anxious and normally silent self could easily earn most of it discussing these two pieces alone.
Among my hastily scribbled notes were documentation? alongside Ramsaye's unsupported -- yet, surely, not entirely false -- assertion that "there are in most audiences patrons whose major interest is in the non-fiction subjects." Regarding Ramsaye's dismissal of the "star system" as "the simplest tool in the hands of the film salesman," I wrote presumptive and judgmental. And when Ramsaye surmised that "This preponderance of the dramatic picture is undoubtedly out of any proportion to the real taste of the public [as] indicated by the increasingly wide circulation of non-fiction book and periodicals," I wondered, Can such deductions be made across art forms? I took great umbrage with Ramsaye's dismissal of dramatic pictures as mere products of the star-based system of selling movies not only because of its bias and reductivism, but also because he neglected to posit what was to me and my red pen an obvious potential solution: What if stars were then involved in the producing and promotion of non-fiction works?
Ramsaye went on to make generalizations about the scant budget theaters allotted for nonfiction works ("usually less than 7 per cent... frequently less than 5 per cent") in relation to the screen time they occupied ("25 per cent") but made no concessions or considerations for the relative costs incurred in the production of a dramatic feature versus those of a nonfiction feature. Ramsaye is also presumptive about audience tastes, insisting that the preponderance of "dramatic features and 'comedies'" in many theaters is a product solely of the curatorial discretion of theater owners without any statistics to support his argument or consideration given to the tenets of supply-and-demand.
At the bottom of the page, I wrote, The last paragraph opens the issue up from distribution to production, however the author neither synthesizes the two, nor offers any elaboration upon the effect of a presumed overhaul of the non-fiction film production industry. While Ramsaye gently poked at these concerns in his next essay, he did so only through the rubric of "special interests seeking propaganda media." He asserts, with implied consternation, that "To a remarkable extent scenic, travel, and 'educational' pictures are vehicles for propaganda," to which my marginalia countered, Is this good or bad? Connotative vs. Denotative. And indeed, though he uses it frequently throughout the piece, "films of fact" remains a loose term, and the use of word "wholesome" implies a propagandistic intent on the author's behalf as well.
When it came time to discuss these pieces in class, however, I remained silent. Historically, anything I was assigned to read by a professor carried with it an air of authority; though we were asked to question and to engage with the material, what we were given was ultimately fact. One of the reasons I left my job as a high school teacher and abandoned my initial undergraduate pursuit of teacher certification was that I, to a great degree, believe in the lecture format and in the authority of the professor. A great deal of reform has gone on in the education field as of late which favors group and hands-on learning, and the adoption of these techniques was, in my estimation, detrimental to my efficacy as an educator. I, for better or for worse, still steadfastly believe that rote learning is in many cases the best way to receive and retain information. In a recent piece for The Atlantic ("Don't Give Up on the Lecture"), Abigail Walthausen argues that too much student-led discussion can be distracting and lead to misinformed dissemination of content. I've always liked a professor who tells me explicitly what they want and who exhibits authority through both lecture and through the readings he or she assigns.
One of the biggest steps in shifting my manner of academic application from undergraduate to graduate level has been in learning to process the meta-textual signifiers of any work under discussion. I remained silent about Ramsaye's works not because I suddenly thought my points were wrong, but because it was immediately apparent that the limitations and the perspectives of the time in which the articles were written was under observation as much, if not more so, than the articles themselves. It seemed superfluous and misguided to perseverate upon these textual errors once they were exposed as being endemic of the surrounding cultural climate. I was already accustomed to accounting for these kinds of qualifiers within films, but I had learned to do so through critical written work; it required an exponential expansion of my focus to accommodate critiquing the critique in such a manner.
This has been my greatest takeaway from this class: that fully contextualizing these works is a Sisyphean task that continually raises as many questions as it answers, if not more. Even when arguments and observations seemed self-evident to the point of obviousness -- as, I often felt, much of Jennifer Lynn Peterson's introduction to her book Education in the School of Dreams was, for example -- it became ultimately apparent that nothing about these works or their study can be taken for granted. A retrospective review of the syllabus yields a litany of roads not taken, of works both great and small, each with more to say than can ever be told.