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THE DOCUMENTARY TRADITION: From Nanook to Woodstock EDITED BY LEWIS JACOBS Hopkinson & Blake, New York, 1972; hardcover $10.00, paperback $5.50; 530 pages; illustrations, index.
DOCUMENTARY EXPLORATIONS: 15 Interviews with Film-makers BY G. ROY LEVIN Doubleday & Co., New York, 1971; hard-cover $10.00, paperback $4.95; 420 pages; illustrations, index.
THE NEW DOCUMENTARY IN ACTION: A casebook in Film Making BY ALAN ROSENTHAL University of California Press, Berkeley, 1971; hardcover $11.95; 287 pages; illustrations, index.
PERSPECTIVES ON THE STUDY OF FILM EDITED BY JOHN S. KATZ Little, Brown & Co., Boston, 1971; hard-cover $10.30; 339 pages; illustrations, index.
REVIEWED BY JAY LEYDA
Jay Leyda has translated and edited many of Eisenstein 's theoretical writings and lectures including Film Form and Film Sense. He is currently teaching film at York University in Toronto. His latest book is Dianyng, published by M. I. T. Press.
Despite the superficiality of this group of books, all anthologies or interviews dealing with the documentary film and published in 1971, each has its own job to do, and I should make clear at the outset of this summary that each does its job well. Lewis Jacobs' anthology shows us again how we can rely on his judgment and sense of historical development. We haven't had such an attempt to pull together the many strands of the international documentary film's history since Paul Rotha's pioneer work. Jacobs brings the record up to 1970. G. Roy Levin, in his 15 Interviews, chose the filmmakers working in 1970 who seemed to him to point in fifteen directions toward the future. This may be the most exciting of these four books. Alan Rosenthal's interviews all accent the practical, the how, solutions to problems common to all the filmmakers-chiefly American and Canadian-he talked with. John Katz took on the job of winnowing and shaping all these materials, to offer a method of teaching about filmmakers, about their metier and their wealth of problems.
The section of John Katz's anthology closest in concern to documentary films is "The Film as Communications, Environment, and Politics." In this section the last three articles, on the Newsreel and American Documentary Films organizations for political filmmaking and distribution, are the most informative. The Newsreel's use of film is presented in its sharpest...