Grierson's ghost never dies: The Fiji Film Unit 1970-1985

Abstract

This article exlpores what happens when a documentary film form developed within a specific social, ideological, institutoinal, and aesthetic context—namely, the so-called British Documentary Movement, under the aegis of John Grierson—is deployed in several layers of argument involved, but I will pursue only one of them in the space available here. At a kind of metatheoretical level, it is arguable that Indigenous and Asian cultures are inimical to core values of the Western documentary project: in particular, to the belief in, and rhetorical power of, the material, historical word. In these societies, what might be called 'spiritual' or 'other' worlds have as much everyday reality as Griersonian 'actuality'.

Keywords

• documentary
• Fiji film
• postcolonialism
• British Documentary Movement