Creating the Griersonian Character and Breaking the ‘Yahoo’ Tradition

Abstract

In the 1920s and 1930s, John Grierson railed against the use of the individual heroic character in documentaries. He felt that the individual character was an outmoded ‘yahoo’ idea that promoted anarchy. He was interested in revealing the mass nature of society, and suggested using a ‘co-operative’ character. I argue that a co-operative character is one that shares a common goal with other characters in the film and where they work together towards that goal. I examine the co-operative characters found in Grierson’s Drifters (1929) and uncover archival material in which he discusses his creative process. Through this, and the creation of my own co-operative character film, Expect Delays (2018), I find that the co-operative character often lacks an expression of inner-self and therefore no guide for how to view the world contained in the narrative. Just as characters provide a guide for how the audience should interpret the world of the narrative, I found that they also provide a guide for the documentarian’s choices in the edit. Finally, I explore whether we still make documentaries with co-operative characters, or if the co-operative character is a solution to the story-driven documentary that is no longer used.