The Tradition of the Victim in Griersonian Documentary

Abstract

Abstract A. J. Liebling once remarked that it was difficult for the cub reporter to remember that his (or her) great story was somebody else’s disastrous fire. Much the same could be said of the impulse to social amelioration, which is a central element in Grierson’s rhetoric and which, therefore, has become over this past half-century a major part of the great documentary tradition. Documentary found its subject in the first decade of sound, and by the late thirties the now familiar parade of those of the disadvantaged whose deviance was sufficiently interesting to attract and hold our attention had been established.

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