Dialogue des sourds

Marion Michelle with FIAF colleagues, 1957

I've written elsewhere of how my cousin Marion Michelle probably made cinematic history filming the first guerilla documentary, Indonesia Calling, for the famous Dutch filmmaker, Joris Ivens, in 1945. This was well before I was born. Marion was the same generation as my mother—they were first cousins—although of course we were cousins as well.

Since 1950, Marion had settled as an expatriate in Paris. I lived in Paris on two different occasions, once as a child of 11 in 1961 and again as a university student of 27 in 1977. It turned out, though I didn't know it, that Marion had extensive experience with the documentary film tradition as it developed in Europe. Marion was never one to toot her own horn, so I didn't learn about her association with Joris Ivens, how she had wrested the leadership of the International Federation of Film Archives from the derelict and imperious Henri Langlois, her sustained friendships with such giants of documentary film as Paul Strand and John Grierson until much later, until I myself had taken up documentary film in an accidental manner.

But all of this knowledge came well after I had known Marion best, back in 1977. Had it not been for my unexpected detour into filmmaking and a class on documentary film, I might never have learned about or appreciated Marion's accomplishments. To me, she was cousin Marion, and even at 27 I was myopically focused on my life and its curious trajectory. I knew nothing about Marion's history, but she knew everything about mine. This didn’t strike me as unbalanced. I’d never been much interested in the biographies of my parents’ generation. Nonetheless, bits and pieces of her former life emerged. She told me about a Joris Ivens retrospective at the Pompidou Center—she unfortunately had to go to a film festival in Italy during that time—and I asked her who he was. She couldn’t believe I had never heard of him.

.....“Pare Lorentz?” she quizzed further.

.....I shook my head.

.....“John Grierson?”

.....“Who are these people?”

.....“You didn’t watch any documentaries when you were growing up?”

.....I racked my brains. “Woodstock,” I offered.

.....She’d never heard of it. It was truly a dialogue des sourds, as the French expression goes, but Marion gave me a truncated version of her relationship with Ivens.

Of course I'd seen many documentaries, but they were on television—shows such as See It Now and 60 Minutes—and didn't count. Without thinking about it, what Marion and I were both referring to were theatrical documentaries. There'd been plenty of those, mosty government sponsored, during the Great Depression and World War Two, but with the advent of television, whose 16 mm films stock required much less in equipment and the fine resolution that the big screen demanded, theatrical documentaries fell into a trough that extended for two decades. I never saw non-fiction films featured on cinema marquees. Woodstock was the first documentary for which I paid the full price of $1.50 to watch in a theater. And I did it again that same year, 1970, for Gimme Shelter. 

The theatrical documentary was just beginning to rouse from its coma, but I didn't have much personal experience—and no historical knowledge—of the genre when Marion and I had our discussion seven years later.

When I went to the Pompidou screening of Indonesia Calling, I came away unimpressed. The subject matter didn’t engage me; the editing seemed choppy; the soundtrack, blaring and overblown; and the narration bordered on corny. Even with the Aussie accent, I recognized the ponderous Voice of God from the “educational” films shown during my high school travails (“The Defensive Driver”), and I was not a fan. When Marion came back to town, she didn’t ask what I had thought of the film, and I let that sleeping dog lie.

— Robert Philipson 

Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay in Early Docs of the Harlem Renaissance.

SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts.