Grierson, John

Grierson, John (1898-1972), British producer/director, founder of the national film documentary movement. Grierson was born in Deanston in Scotland. After graduating from the University of Glasgow, he lectured at Durham University. From 1924 to 1927 a Rockefeller research fellowship took him to the United States to study the relationship between the mass media and public opinion. There he met Robert Flaherty, whose Moana (1926) he described as “documentary”, later defining the term as “the creative treatment of actuality”.

On his return to Britain, Grierson joined the Empire Marketing Board (EMB) under Stephen Tallents, where he directed Drifters (1929), a documentary about North Sea fishermen; astutely he had it included in the same Film Society programme as the first British screening of the Sergey Eisenstein classic Bronenosets Potemkin (1925; The Battleship Potemkin). A brilliant publicist and persuasive polemicist, Grierson attracted young university graduates to the documentary movement at the EMB and, after 1933, to the GPO (General Post Office) Film Unit: Basil Wright, Evelyn Spice, John Taylor, Stuart Legg, Edgar Anstey, Arthur Elton, Norman McLaren, Pat Jackson, Humphrey Jennings, and Harry Watt, to name a few.

Among the best known and most influential of the GPO films are Song of Ceylon and Housing Problems (both 1934), and Nightmail (1936). Grierson left in 1939 to become Film Commissioner for the Canadian government and created The National Film Board of Canada, which quickly established itself as the foremost documentary unit in the world. Shortly after the World War II, he was caught up in the political witch-hunts that were sweeping North America. He resigned and, after failing to establish a film company in New York, worked successively for UNESCO in Paris, as director of mass communications and mass media, as Film Controller for the Central Office of Information in Britain, and, from 1951 to 1954, as joint executive producer of Group 3, which was intended as a training ground for new feature film directors. From 1957 to 1968, he presented the documentary series This Wonderful World for Scottish Television.