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John Grierson CBE (26 April 1898 – 19 February 1972) was a pioneering Scottish documentary maker, often considered the father of British and Canadian documentary film. In 1926, Grierson coined the term "documentary" in a review of Robert J. Flaherty 's Moana .
John Grierson (born April 26, 1898, Kilmadock, Stirlingshire, Scot.—died Feb. 19, 1972, Bath, Somerset, Eng.) was the founder of the British documentary-film movement and its leader for almost 40 years. He was one of the first to see the potential of motion pictures to shape people’s attitudes toward life and to urge the use of films for ...
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Jul 5, 2024 · John Grierson was pivotal in establishing the British documentary-film movement. He saw the potential of films to educate and inspire, organizing and leading efforts to produce documentaries focusing on social issues and public welfare. In the late 1920s and 1930s, under his leadership, many groundbreaking British documentaries were produced.
Many scholars believe film pioneer John Grierson "coined the term" documentary when he first used it in a film review for the New York Sun in 1926. This paper provides documentary evidence that another film pioneer - namely, Charles Urban - used the word in film terms and in English in 1907, nearly 20 years before Grierson.
- Mark Terry, PhD
Sep 15, 2017 · John Grierson’s ‘minor manifesto of beliefs’, ‘First principles of documentary’ (1932–34), is one such text, 2 a short work that John Corner describes as the foundational text of documentary theory. 3 Taking Grierson’s intellectual formation and his ‘shrewdly tactical’ manoeuvring into account, Corner summarizes the key arguments of ‘First principles’. 4 He notes Grierson’s initial contrast between ‘lower categories’, including travelogues, newsreels, educational ...
- Martin Stollery
- 2017
For Grierson, Flaherty’s re-enacted films about disappearing ways of life were too idyllic and too far removed from the pressing realities of the modern world where Grierson preferred to train his documentary lens. Grierson returned to England in 1927 with a highly charged social conscience and started to make the kinds of films he wanted to ...
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This selection of writings by Grierson attempts to illustrate both the continuities and discontinuities within his ideas, from the 1920s to the 1970s. ‘English Cinema Production and the Naturalistic Tradition’ (1927) contains Grierson's first definition of documentary film. It is an essentially modernist definition, which places emphasis on ...
