Abstract

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Issue 10: 3 of this journal, edited by John Corner and Martin Stollery,
was partly devoted to the post-Second World War history of the British
(that is, Griersonian) ‘Documentary Film Movement’. Its focus–posed
in the title of their introductory essay–was to query whether the
‘Movement’ was in ‘decline or transition’ from the 1950s to the 1970s.
Such a question, as they acknowledge, arises primarily because of the
work of the BFI and its Senior Curator (Non-Fiction), Patrick Russell.
The latter’s interest in the vast collection of sponsored documentaries
in his care at the National Archive led him to conclude, in the light
of the extensiveness of the postwar holdings of such films, that the
received history of ‘decline’ made no prima facie sense. With John
Taylor, he edited a valuable collection of essays on this ignored body of
work,
Shadows of Progress: Documentary Film in Post-War Britain
(2010).