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| Randal Marlin (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
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| John Grierson (Photo credit: y.mclean) |
Randal Marlin, to whose revised edition of his book on Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion I recently devoted five posts, was remarkably generous in his comments on my rambling contributions. But on one particular point he objected, and that was when, in a headline, I wrote that he “rubbished” John Grierson, the founder of the National Film Board.
That did not surprise me: I expected a strong response,
and I got it. But the fact is, I did slightly overstep the mark, because the
word “rubbishes” was a word I summoned up when I was trying to reduce the
length of a headline, and it did not, in fact, catch my meaning exactly. What I
meant to say, I guess, was that Randal dismissed Grierson in a paragraph, and
did not take into account, as he should have done in a book devoted to the arts
of persuasion, the fact that the
National Film Board, whose senior staff was chosen by Grierson, trained by him,
and took their inspiration from him, did manage when it was at its peak, to
carve out for itself a field of action in which it was remarkably free to make
its own decisions, to an extent that was almost unheard of among similar government
agencies around the world at that time. Also I felt that that it did seem that
the grounds for Randal’s dismissing Grierson so airily was that he had been
implicated in the Gouzenko affair.
That was the burden of my complaint, and as you can see, it was
too long to be accommodated in a headline. In his response Randal wrote to me: “I
think you have a valid point of contention regarding the short shrift I give to
Grierson, but I think you go too far in claiming that I "rubbish"
him. I should perhaps have written ‘discredited in the eyes of key figures of
the establishment.’ ”
I might have
known, in fact, I did know, Randal being one of those omnivorous-reading
intellectuals, that he would have read everything available on the subject
before deciding to devote only a couple of hasty-seeming paragraphs to
Grierson in his consideration of
propaganda. I, on the other hand, have never read everything relevant on any
subject, one of the points I made at the beginning of my series of articles.
So, in his
letter, Randal reveals a deep knowledge of the subject, and asks that I make
clear to my readers, which I am happy to do now, that he was not out to “rubbish” Grierson,
whose contributions he has much admired:
“There are two books I read before writing the lines that you
represent as ‘rubbishing’ Grierson. One is by Gary Evans,
John Grierson and the National Film Board,
the other by Joyce Nelson, The Colonized Eye. The former, favourable to Grierson, gives more of the actual
testimony. The latter attacks Grierson from the left, on the grounds that he
was too cozy with the establishment, particularly the oil interests (there was
a Rockefeller-Mackenzie King connection, and the latter was the one who gave
Grierson his wartime propaganda powers), and also because his ideas supporting
the free flow of information meant that Hollywood came to dominate commercial
film distribution in Canada. On a world scale he was all for making films
supported by big business, because he thought this would help the maturation of
capitalism leading sooner to replacement by a more Marxist system. The counter
to that theory is, of course, that big business will call the shots and rein in
any revolution-inspiring calls for greater equality and justice in the world.
Curiously, I have the same problem assessing Grierson as I have with Walter
Lippmann, whom Chomsky has attacked vigorously. The charge against both is that
they don't trust the common people to form their own opinions, Both think that
the world is too complex and that it's up to more knowledgeable people to
decide for them by presenting simplified world pictures of the right sort.
True, Grierson wanted the elite to get feedback from the public, but so did
Louis XIVth. I reserve judgement on both of them until I get a fuller picture.
I spent a week at the University at Stirling some years ago looking at the
Grierson archives. I came away with interesting material, but I found his
handwriting too often unreadable.”
In addition,
writes Randal, he had read the Gouzenko archives, and
“at the moment, I'm not prepared to say that the Gouzenko
Inquiry gave no reasons to justify discrediting Grierson in the context of
giving him substantial bureaucratic power to shape the future of world thought.
The case against him would be that he may have lacked good judgement in
employing a Soviet informant, but also that he showed insufficient concern, by
his responses to the inquiry, about whether people he employed were Soviet
informants or not.”
Personally, I find
this to be too solemn a judgment, as anybody might guess from what I wrote in
one of my posts during the past week about my distaste for patriotism. Along
with that goes a kind of insouciance about spies and their machinations. The
Soviet Union, after all, was an ally during the war.
I met Grierson only
twice, and, like so many others was entirely charmed by him. So I did find the
grounds for Randal’s suspicion of him to be somewhat arcane: that Grierson be
judged not so much on his actual contributions to Western, British and Canadian
culture, as on what he might have done, as Randal wrote in a later letter, “had he been given the power he
sought, (whether) he would have imposed his ideas on the world rather than
giving alternative and contrasting views a fair shake in the ‘marketplace of
ideas.’ ”
I’m not
altogether in agreement with this: Grierson, after all, did have a good deal of
power. He used it during the war, as he freely admitted, to create propaganda
designed to make Hitler and the Germans look foolish, even admitting that on
the famous occasion when Hitler was seen on film dancing a little impromptu jig
of joy over some victory or other, it was all got up by Grierson manipulating
the picture (for which he made no apology at all). But more seriously, his
creation of the National Film Board, and the way it worked, was a work that
should have earned him more sympathetic consideration that he usually
gets. He could be denounced as
bombastic, vain, imperious, and perhaps not as sober in judgment as most people
with bureaucratic power, but when I knew him, when he so charmed the students
of McGill University, he was a little old man scrabbling to keep himself afloat
in this world, using his wits, skills and cleverness to keep ahead of the game.
I knew the woman in London who worked for him, helping him collect extracts
from documentary films made around the world for his show on Scottish TV, and,
according to her, it was a fact that most of these contributions he didn’t pay
for. Deplorable, I guess, except that the result of This Wonderful World was to turn audiences on to the wonders of
this world and its possibilities.
When I met him,
he had tasted power, used it with spectacular effect, and no longer had it, or
had any expectation of having it again.
Randal makes the
undeniable point that he “had
been given huge bureaucratic power, and he seemed to want to continue in some
such capacity after the war was over.”
But there is a kind of assumption that he was some kind of megalomaniac
monster who could not be trusted with power. This surely cannot have arisen
from his actual behaviour, his achievements in what he did in life. The National Film Board is his monument.
Finally, to give
him his full due, Randal makes the point that ..."I happen to
be an admirer of Grierson, and in particular of the National Film Board which
he founded. I show the excellent NFB film Grierson
to my Truth and Propaganda course
each year.”
So that’s the story, morning glory. It sounds as if Randal's lectures would be worth sitting in on.
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