By João Ruy Faustino
Reviewed:
Drifters, dir. John Grierson (1929)
La Terra Trema, dir. Luchino Visconti (1948)
La Pointe-Courte, dir. Agnès Varda (1955)
It’s with these words that the history of English documentary film begins. The film Drifters is unfortunately the only one that English filmmaker John Grierson took full-credit for, even though he has an indisputable place in the history of his country’s cinema. The film is a masterpiece of montage and framing. Each of the shots flow seamlessly—all stages of the arduous process of herring fishing are shown to the viewer.
Grierson captures the North Sea fishermen on film in such a way that they seem to star in an epic. He glorifies them and their trade. He shows the triumphant ships on the high-sea during heavy storms. The women who stay on the shore and work at the canning factories are also protagonists. Each stage is represented and honoured. It’s not coincidental that the film was made during the apogee of the fragmentation of labour—the assembly line developed by Henry Ford.
The inevitable question of ‘glorification’ comes up: Is the film merely an homage to those working men, women, and families? Just a forefather of Ken Loach’s films in the UK, or Elio Petri’s La classe operaia va in paradiso (1971) to name just a few left-wing cinematic homages to the working class? Or may it be – seeing from the time-frame of its production – more associated with the heritage of nationalist filmmaking? One cannot simply ignore that, seeing how the British fishing industry has been used as an object fetish of a supposed lost national identity in recent political events. There might be a perverse reason why this film was paired with a short-film made by the propaganda office of the fascistic Portuguese Estado Novo, when shown in a film cycle at Cinemateca Portuguesa.
The film indeed has an almost idyllic aura—showing the dramatic difficulties of the trade only in passing. Fishing is a millenarian institution that people believed in and sacrificed their whole lives to contribute to. These fishermen look like they just chose to work, and endure all the hardships associated with their trade. They are crucially different from other quintessentially XX century working men figures—such as the likewise-glorified coal miners — as the fishermen’s profession did not come about amid industrialization. Their occupation is not ‘artificial’ at all, it has followed humans ever since their dawn, and it has acquired a mythic quality that after hundreds of years seems to be intrinsic.
Despite this, the fishermen appear to have vanished. It’s in part such phenomena that makes deindustrialisation so tragic: Not even the ‘jobs’ that had existed for ages resisted in meaningful ways. The fishermen who were the sons of fishermen, and who were the grandsons of fishermen vanished from our shores and from our shared cultural imagination. By belonging to the past and fully returning to myth, the figure of the fisherman indeed becomes something of a ‘problematic’ national symbol. Instead of something real and alive – with a voice – people place the fisherman in the past. Their ‘glory’ falls out of control.
While Drifters is a silent-film, the neo-realist Italian film La Terra Trema by Luchino Visconti gives the fishermen a voice. The film is purposefully blurry and intense, making it hard to clearly describe. Its story, like most neo-realist films, is emblematic and is more important than all the characters and even the specificities of the décor. The film is decidedly not character-driven, instead being powered by the struggle of the workers portrayed. The struggle for a good life, the struggle for the bare minimum to live is what the family of fishermen fight for. In a desperate attempt to escape the apathy and compliance that permeates the fishing town. In La Terra Trema fishing is definitely not an end, and the fishermen are made to be humans—instead of semi-gods.
By the 1960s there were already signs of the decline of fishing. As the vast ‘reserves’ of fish all over the Atlantic, Mediterranean, and other seas became depleted, it seems that a realisation came about. As noted in Margaret Visser’s essay for the London Review of Books, the myth of the fisherman needing to be stronger than all of nature slowly lost its purpose. It turned out that man was much stronger than mother nature, especially when allied with his technological creations such as trawlers. In Atlantic Canada, the cod population all but disappeared—and a once-proud, prosperous region became a husk of itself.
In La Pointe-Courte the filmmaker Agnès Varda barely shows fishermen fishing. The romance portrayed only uses the fishing town as a convenient and picturesque background, with not much meaning. The town looks poor, but also in decline. The romance is soft. The film shows many cats. No need for toughness anymore.
populate me animate sensitively the spirit of dwelling behind the big blue harbour storage tanks I would have children in animal masks appearing round lampposts and knowing the names of the boats coming in I desire fishermen come home to sand-floored cottages distant factory boats moored level with the breakwater wall my life has been a series of sailors’ knots tightened and loosed stronger than floodtides and briefly lingering traceries across my palm where the blood knot and perfection loop have slipped through my fingers I have hung out the laundry in front of the house on the Sabbath and had it back through the letterbox I have had it with all but the ship in a bottle the scene becomes sooner or later the heaped rigging unfurled with a yank on a string and the whole salty tale set down and forgotten between lace curtain and window.
– Landscape with Heavy Industry and Washing Line, David Wheatley