Illustrated Daily; 3121; Willard Van Dyke: Film Documentary Maker

We have all seen a good many documentaries, in fact television public or otherwise, has made the documentary an integral part of his broadcast format, but television did not invent the documentary. Its founders were for the most part still photographers who adapted their skills to that amazing new invention the motion picture. It would probably be more accurate to say that the documentary evolved into its present form, and one of the major figures in that evolution was Willard Van Dyke. Van Dyke was born in Denver in 1906. His father was a still photographer, and Willard himself began making magic with the camera at the age of 12, and in time he became one of the giants in still photography in this country. By the 1930s Van Dyke

made the leap from still to motion picture documentaries, and in rapid succession his work matured and his reputation grew, 1937 the river, 1939 the city, 1940 valley town, and they continued until the mid 1960s when he became the director of the film department of the New York Museum of Modern Art. Willard Van Dyke has a new career today, he lives in Santa Fe, but the experience of this master is being transmitted to another generation of would-be documentary makers at the University of New Mexico, where he teaches the principles of an art form he helped perfect. Willard, I want to test a theory on you. I have heard it said that an awful lot of the young still photographers of your generation who moved into documentary making did so less as I would have thought for the opportunity to experiment with new technology and new equipment, then for the opportunity

to use the medium that they saw as plainly adapted to dealing with social issues and addressing a social message as it were. Is that true? Oh, I think there's no doubt of that as far as Paul Strand is concerned, Ralph Steiner, myself, it was a feeling that motion picture medium could affect people more strongly than the still photograph, that you could say more with it, you could bring together various things like the music, the narrator, the soundtrack in general, as well as the pictures, and that that was more affecting. Would we want it to change the world? Was the assumption here that still photography was a kind of an elite medium, whereas motion picture was a mass medium? Is that what you're saying? Oh, I just think we thought that motion picture

was more effective. More effective as a medium? Yes. Your first documentary, of course, was the city, and an absolutely extraordinary group of people were associated in the production of film Ralph Steiner, Paralorant, Lewis Mumford, Aaron Copeland. Everything is really wonderful about Aaron Copeland's music is evident in the score of the film, the city, but I've always wanted to know which came first here, the chicken or the egg, the film or the score? Oh, the film. Aaron Copeland composed the music after the film was edited and he composed it to the visual images. He sat there with a movie along on his left hand and a piano on his right, and he noodleed on the piano a little bit and watched the film, and then he'd write down the notes of those were the right notes, and it was just absolutely to that. As a matter of fact, there were a couple of times when he asked us to either lengthen it by two seconds or

shorten it by a second or two. Oh, sure, sure. He was, of course, one of the giants of the American music. Was this his first experiment with a musical score for a film? Yes. Yes, it was. And subsequently he did, I think, four Hollywood films. Yes. We have a clip from the documentary The City. Why don't we take a look at it, and we can come back and perhaps talk a little bit more. Turkey, we're done with some wine, shall we? Come on, come on, come on, come on, come on,

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. . institutionalized suburb of America, which has been sort of an invitation to leave behind our debris and our unwanted residue and forgotten in the core city. That's often seemed to me to be the real legacy of Louis Mungford. Well, he would be very unhappy to hear that. I'm sure he would. He made a great distinction between the suburb and the planned community green belt, of course you know. The fact is, that's what it has happened, of course. He is carried on the credits of the city as having done the commentary when, in fact, if I understand it, he really didn't. Well, his ideas were there and he did do a commentary. But the commentary was rewritten by someone who was more aware of the spoken word than Mungford was.

Mungford looked at the written word and he dealt with the written word. But that's not the same thing as writing so that you listened to something. That's absolutely the case. Very often, if you look at something that has been written for either movies or television, in narrative form, it's awful writing simply because the spoken word can often obscure calmest places and all kinds of things that Louis Mungford would have probably found. Was he a pleasant man with whom to work? Oh indeed. And he was certainly a very, very pleasant, very articulate, very intelligent, a pleasure. When I made the city or Ralph and I made the city and when I made Valley Town, I was interested in getting a feel of the grit and the dirt and the smoke and so on. So the photography was quite different and I fell in love with the locations for rice. I just loved them.

So they looked beautiful to me. So I photographed them in a beautiful kind of way. But I think I also was doing that with people's products from time to time when I was making films. You mentioned, you mentioned Valley Town, which happens to be, I guess, my personal favorite of your documentaries. Before we take a look at it or pieces of it, can you give me a background that our viewers might bring it into focus? Yeah, I think so. There was a foundation in New York that was set up by a wealthy automobile manufacturer. And the purpose of the foundation was to teach economic theory or to examine economic theory, examine the way economics affected our lives and so on. And the foundation gave us some of money to New York University to make films along these ideas.

Well, I wasn't interested in making films that had dealt with diagrams and charts and graphs and all of that kind of thing. So I took the point of view that economics affected people and affected people's lives. And so that's how Valley Town came to be. The idea was to make a film that showed the effect of a labor displacing machine or labor displacing technique or whatever that was introduced at a time of depression and how that affected the depression and of course it increased the depression. Well it says app today in many respects. I suspect with just very few modifications in perhaps script. It could be shown today and people would think perhaps it had been made, not in 1939 or 1940 but in 1981 or 1982, why don't we take a look and we can come back. Okay.

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. . . . Well, I hope people were paying attention to this score in that particular clip. It was by Mark Blitstein. Could you tell me something first of all about the composer? Again, you got a first rate composer working with you on the documentary. Sure have. Mark Blitstein was a composer who did two or three very unusual, unique Broadway productions. He was very much influenced by Brecht and Wilde, who were the leaders of the German expressionist theater,

the didactic theater. When I came to think about the film, their approach kept coming to mind. And I thought, well, Blitstein is the right person to do the score for this. And he was marvelous because he had all sorts of really creative ideas. Maybe so creative that they were, they've affected the audience in a way that we didn't expect. Tell me about that. Well, for instance, there's, at one point, the family of the man who we see who is out of work, one of the men is out of work, and he comes home and she's cooking lunch. And her thoughts are heard on the soundtrack and suddenly her thoughts become a song. Well, our lips don't move and here is this voice.

And it's clearly the voice, not a trained operatic voice or anything of that kind. It's an actress who is singing that song. Well, this bothered the audience. It doesn't bother the audience anymore, but it did then. I hear that they tell you we're living in a wonderful age. The age of machines and gadgets and things, an age to wonder at. All right. I'm wondering. I'm wondering how much I... You can't do no more than try.

They say they're tearing down the mills. Why, if that was so, I know them. Someday, he'd walk right up here and never come back to us again. Tell me where is our place with work and joy and cheer. How far away from here, how far away from here. Did you know Buttsign before you started working on this?

Yes, I did. Did you work with him before? No. This is the first time it worked. It's an interesting example, in my opinion, of documentary using a score effectively to enhance rather than to obscure what is being done there. So much of it seems to me today to be cluttered and even gaudy on occasions. And fighting the visual image. And I don't think this fights the visual image. Is there a reason why that's happened? Oh, I don't really know. Musical scores tend to offend me these years. Maybe it's just my taste or maybe I don't know. You're not going to tell me you're like James Watt and you don't like the Beach Boys. No, I hadn't intended to say anything about that. You do have rather strong feelings about what we call the mix between the soundtrack, the visual track, and answers in any form shape or form. You don't think it's their handle particularly well today as I understand.

No, I think they're not. Could you explain to me why that's the case? I don't know why it's the case, but it seems to me that every time a documentary filmmaker is in doubt what he does is bring in a folk singer. I have nothing against folk singers. I use folk songs in one of my films too. But it just seems to me that they come in out of left field. And the lyrics are always, they always relate to the visual image. And I find it unimaginative. All right. I'll show you something that is imaginative. A clip here from the documentary, Valley Town. And in terms of imagery, I think it's one of the most compelling stuff I've ever seen. So why don't we take a look at that so our audience can know what we're talking about when we come back. So why don't we take a look at that?

So why don't we take a look at that? So why don't we take a look at that? So why don't we take a look at that? The only we had known we might have been prepared.

But the company never told us. Never gave us notice far enough in advance. We kept hoping. Things will be better. The old steel mill was there. We kept our eyes on it. Maybe they'll reopen. Maybe next month. But when they cut those smoke stacks out of the sky, we had nothing to look at anymore. Decent, fine workmen, every one of them. Their hands were trained. But now that training is no good. They're no more than unskilled men. They're finished. It may be years till they get good jobs, even in steel. But when I see something like that, and I'm struck by it, the thing that occurs to me is I hear bona fide social criticism there.

Legitimate bona fide social criticism is substance. Whereas very often I think in documentaries that are sometimes produced today, I smell sensationalism at the expense of social criticism. Am I inventing something in my head here or is that happening? Well, I would say something a little different from that is happening, but it ends up being the same way. The worst thing that ever happened to the documentary film was the fairness doctrine. Now, and its misinterpretation. It was first meant to be on the whole over a period of time, both sides of the question had to be handled. But television, not wanting to take any chances, has watered it all down. They don't give the artist the chance to make his statement and say, OK, that's his statement. Now, let's hear from somebody else at another time.

But they try to pack this thing into every single time. What you're telling me is quite ironic. What you're saying is basically television, which has taken the documentary format and made it an integral part of its broadcast system, has in fact robbed it if some of the vigor of which the pioneers put in when they were working in motion picture, has television destroyed the documentary? Oh, I think completely. As far as television, this comes there. Now, some people are making strong statements in documentaries that never reach the public, or only a small section of the public. That's happening today. But by artists, or propagandists, or track writers, or whatever you want to call us, who have given up on the idea that they can get a fair shake out of television. Well, thank you so much. Thank you, Hal. It's a pleasure. It's been a pleasure for us.

And thank you for joining us. I'm Hal Rhodes. Good night. I started out as a still photographer. I became a filmmaker in the 30s, because at that time I didn't believe that you could change the world of a still photographs. That was a time of great social and artistic ferment and optimism. And artists of all kinds felt that their work could make a real difference. The film of protest, the film of revelation, and try to bring to that film some of the aesthetic values that I think those films lost. And I mean, these films don't invite any other opinions than me.

It really is a privilege. The film's for a best quality creative film. You