Professional Documents
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Dai Vaughan: Between a Word and a Thing / You Encounter Only Yourself
Richard MacDonald and Martin Stollery
Readers of this journal may know Dai Vaughans pioneering book, Portrait of an Invisible Man: The Working Life of Stewart McAllister, Film Editor (1983), but are perhaps less likely to be familiar with other aspects of his wide-ranging career as a documentary editor and writer. After taking a BFI evening class in lm appreciation Dai Vaughan left his job as a junior draughtsman to become, in 1956, one of the rst students to attend the London School of Film Technique, the precursor to the London Film School. He worked as an assistant to the renowned subtitler Mai Harris, following which he joined two other lmschool alumni to form David Naden Associates (DNA), a cooperative specialising in editing services. As editor he has contributed to several landmark television series, including episodes of World in Action (ITV, 196398), Disappearing World (ITV, 197093) and Omnibus (BBC, 19672003). He also collaborated with ethnographic lm-makers David and Judith MacDougall and Melissa Llewelyn-Davies. In 2011 he was given a Special Award from the Royal Anthropological Institute for a lifetimes contribution to ethnographic lm-making. Dai Vaughans parallel career as a lm writer also began in the 1950s and has included contributions to many journals and magazines including Film, Films and Filming, Sight and Sound, Screen and, more recently, Vertigo. He was a founding editor, with Boleslaw Sulik and later Alan Lovell, of the journal Denition (19601). In addition to Portrait of an Invisible Man, his books include a BFI Classic on Odd Man Out (1995) and a collection of essays, For Documentary (1999). He has also published ction and poetry, including the novels Moritur (1995) and Totes Meer (2003). This interview, conducted in November 2010 after
Journal of British Cinema and Television 8.3 (2011): 430446 DOI: 10.3366/jbctv.2011.0048 Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/jbctv
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some initial correspondence, is the rst attempt at a critical overview of Dai Vaughans work on and in lm and television. Richard MacDonald/Martin Stollery (RM/MS): Was there a decisive experience, a lm viewing or reading that made you realise that this is how I want to make my career? Dai Vaughan (DV): I read in the paper that the Telekinema from the Festival of Britain, which I had never actually visited as part of the Festival, was going to be retained, largely due to a petition organised by Denis Forman, who was then head of the BFI and who is really one of the unsung heroes of British lm culture, and was going to open up as a national lm theatre that would show historical lms. I read that and I was fascinated because it said that they would be showing old silent movies with people like Buster Keaton and the Gish sisters. My parents had talked about these names and I thought it would be interesting to see what my mum and dad had been talking about. So I joined the National Film Theatre and went to their opening show which consisted of extracts from what nowadays we would call standard classic repertoire, Caligari and everything up to Norman McLaren. In the course of that they showed an extract from Battleship Potemkin, it was probably the Odessa Steps, I cant remember. I thought, this is amazing; Ive never seen anything like this before. And the fact that it was silent gave it an extra oomph. I was used to the way things are rather evened out by the use of background music in conventional lms. So I thought I must nd out more about this guy Eisenstein and I bought a copy of Film Form. I was bowled over by that because, suddenly, I found here was somebody discussing the way lms went together image by image, shot by shot. I wrote poetry as a kid, all teenagers write poetry, so I was interested he seemed to be talking about lm on the same level that someone like William Empson would talk about poetry. I had read Seven Types of Ambiguity, which was another one of those pow experiences in my late teens and I thought you can do that about lm. Not only that but then he started talking about montage working like Chinese ideograms, which is exactly what Ezra Pound had been talking about in relation to poetry. So I got into the whole interest in lm via having tried to write poems when I was young. I suppose my model, though I never articulated it, for what a lm is like would previously have been drama for obvious reasons. But the fact that you could see it in quite a different way, that you could see shots or images as a complex metaphor was a revelation. I still nd the idea exciting, that hasnt gone.
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Fig. 1. The journal Denition, of which Dai Vaughan was a founder editor.
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girlfriends from the Central School of Speech and Drama virtually had a pew. We used to go there every week and saw John Ardens rst play and there was this feeling we were all part of the same thing. Peace News had a regular column by John Arden, I had a poem in the New Reasoner and there was Free Cinema. We thought Denition was part of the same thing. RM/MS: In Denition you wrote an in depth study of Flahertys oeuvre and in the same year, 1960, a critical analysis of Man with a Movie Camera. What was the background to these pieces? DV:I had got it into my head that documentary rested on two basic planks, one of which was Flaherty and one of which was Dziga Vertov, with the difference being that Flahertys view was that you immersed yourself in a situation, rather in the way that observational lm-makers in the recent past have done, and then you learnt about it and if you had to set things up, you set them up: you couldnt get the camera into an igloo so Nanook had to build a half igloo. Is that cheating? Yes, but who cares? So it is coming out of your knowledge which is very thoroughly researched as to what you are doing. The other is that you start taking almost random shots of reality, with or without quotes according to your philosophical position, and then by putting them together you will automatically get some sort of truth because if you put bits of the world together some sort of truth will be generated. Most documentaries can be seen to fall somewhere between those two. I wouldnt like to reprint the Vertov essay now. I think I was right about the way the lm is structured but for some reason or another assumed that Vertov wasnt consciously trying to subvert the possible languages of lm whereas now I would assume that he was trying to do just that . . . the other thing, of course, politically, is that I failed to grasp the degree to which it was an attack on the NEP, an attack on the rich, partly because his idea of people being rich didnt look like our idea of people being rich.
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Fig. 2. The name board of DNA, the cutting rooms of which Dai Vaughan was a co-founder.
2005, we had 40 years of existence going through various premises and various numbers. It mutated over the years, it started as being a bit more of a cooperative than it nished, but nevertheless a lot of the same people stayed around. Martin Smith joined us within weeks as an assistant editor then became an editor. Sheila Brady joined two years later, started assisting me and then became an editor, and so it went on. So that was the unit and again a casual contact got us in with Granada, somebody we knew who had assisted me in some lms Id cut. This was when the explosion of 16 mm work in television happened and Granada suddenly found that they had more work than they had cutting rooms. When we rst started we wrote to all the television companies, BBC obviously and the ITV companies, saying, we are a group of lm editors and these are our services, and nobody took us up on it. But within a year Granada were calling us, we were up there all the time. So we got to know all these people some of whom are still my friends. It was a very rich moment; all the creative people seemed to have congregated at Granada, partly because of [Sidney] Bernstein and Formans attitude to things.
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RM/DS: Did you have a sense at that time, working on World in Action, that you were involved in a television series that was going to be remembered? DV: Oh yes, I think everybody did. It was amazing, in that ofce you had people there who hated each others guts but when it came to the job there was quite a remarkable esprit de corps about that place. We were constantly looking for new ways to do things. And the management, to be fair, were on our side; they wanted it too. There was a very strange feeling in Granada. Sidney Bernstein had insisted that every room in Granada should have a portrait of Barnum to remind us of what we were really about. Yet in spite of that he, and Cecil [Bernstein] too I suppose, I dont know so much about him, and certainly by choosing Denis Forman as managing director, they were hoping that experimental, I hate the word but you know what I mean, imaginative lm-making would actually be popular. The idea that you should be groundbreaking was considered a good thing; they were in favour of it. So they were a strange bunch, and I think, although we didnt realise it at the time, strange in a way that other television stations werent. RM/MS: Is it possible for you to generalise on the director/editor relationship when you were working on those Granada productions or did it vary greatly depending on the individuals? DV: It varied. We all took the view, almost embarrassingly so in retrospect, that editing was the job of the editors. I know that Denis Mitchell, on one of the This England [19657, 197780] lms I worked on which was peculiarly difcult, reached the point where he would call the director in to discuss it with him and he wouldnt let me participate, probably because he thought I would keep complaining about everything he said. One learnt gradually to be a bit more subtle. Ive always, with or without subtlety, tried to make sure the lm was as good as possible and that had to mean as good as possible in my view, which doesnt mean that I was impervious to anything anybody else might say. In fact you learn over the years to use criticism constructively. RM/MS: You wrote in the introduction to the essays in For Documentary that much of the thinking that went into the essays in that book came out of the work you did on Disappearing World. DV: Id forgotten I said that but I suppose it is true, yes and others. That was one of the earliest places where the idea of following spontaneous action was central. It wasnt the only place because Roger Graef
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they will be shocked about this and they wont know what is going on. And both Melissa and I resisted this whole idea. I may be putting thoughts into her head but I think she felt, what is an explanation? What do you mean by explain? That is what they do. And I was reminded of when I was a child we lived in London and my mothers family lived in Yorkshire and she had several sisters and whenever they met they would always embrace and they would cry. As a child I could never understand, why are they crying? Arent they glad to see each other? And my dad would say, yes that is why they are crying, and I had to learn to get used to that. I thought that if we just show this lm as it is, when the moment comes when they freak out, for want of a better word, we have to have created a situation so that, as with my aunties when they met, you sort of take it for granted, you dont ask the question what are they doing because, you know, that is what happens. And I think to an extent in that lm which runs for about one hour fty with very little commentary we got away with that. In David [MacDougall]s lms you dont have any commentary. Youve just got to make sure that if there is any explanation needed it is there in the dialogue, which it usually is. The weight of meaning, of comprehension is carried by the dialogue.
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RM/MS: So that is replicated in the structure of the book to a certain extent? DV: Only to an extent because obviously a lot of it is me rabbiting on about auteurism or just giving plain historical or factual material but I like to juxtapose it with other things so that the connection isnt smeared over. You have got to make the connection yourself. For example, I dont think I made the direct juxtaposition but people talking about the sort of guy McAllister was, somebody says, he was a free spirit, he was like Ariel and the next person says he was like Caliban. That is wonderful. I made no attempt to reconcile those two. RM/MS: You discuss briey in Portrait that your appreciation of gender politics was accentuated by working as an editor. Can you elaborate on that? DV: Well yes there is something feminine in status. Youve got to be a little bit devious about how you get your way. And you have a sort of equality which isnt quite an equality. There is a funny sort of relationship between a director and an editor. Anthropologists refer to a joking relationship. It is when the rules of your society determine that I am superior to you because of X, Y and Z but you are superior to me because of A, B and C, and there is a conict, so you make jokes. That is very much the relationship in the cutting room; the director is formally the ruling party but on the other hand they are in your room using your equipment so you have a certain status and it is your skill. RM/MS: Portrait is a major contribution to the debates on authorship. Were there any arguments about authorship that you were intrigued by or implicitly challenging through the book? DV: Not specically but I was interested in the fact that having rescued the director from oblivion the door was now closed on everybody else. That seemed a bit unfair, especially in lm of all media, conning to one person. I know there is a chapter in there talking about that. So it was addressing itself to the general debates which had been going on. I used to read Screen, which was a real lovehate relationship because it was written with such a doctrinaire set of positions. Whenever it came through the door my heart used to sink, oh God Ive got to read Screen, but I felt I ought to, these were highly intelligent people with interesting ideas, they might express themselves with a rather stilted language and as if they had the moral truth and nobody else had. And it was a bit hard to stomach sometimes, and if you used the wrong word, like reality, you were in trouble. Nonetheless there was enough of substance in it to think that it was worth slogging through this stuff.
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The funny thing is that is not what seems to have happened. I think that the lack of trust in some strange way has mutated into the ction area. Fiction lms always used to make great attempts to look like documentaries. They always used documentary styles to say this is real, even though you know it isnt real, to enhance your suspension of disbelief. That seems to have weakened whereas documentary seems to have ducked under the bar in some way. By using the rough and ready techniques they are managing to say this isnt a gimmick. Obviously it remains your responsibility to say well Im going to read that as a documentary, which in my view is what denes a documentary, it is how you read it. And you can of course be misled but that was always the case. But in ction lm you have got so far away, partly because more gimmickry is used in ction lms and when used in documentary it is so obvious. An example would be when I think back on The Lord of the Rings, what I remember is not moving footage, it is stills, and it is as if I am remembering a graphic novel. I know there was plenty of movement, quite dramatic movement but it all seemed to be movement which was trying to recapture the framing of a very well done graphic novel. So in a way the idea of a lm has become lost, it is as if real life has become the equivalent of animation rather than animation trying to copy real life. I dont know maybe that doesnt prove anything but I did nd myself thinking one day that it has gone the opposite way to what I was expecting. But I think there is an underlying loss of trust in the photograph and a lot of people think good riddance to it because it was always misguided trust anyway. But that remark that you quote abut the days of hope having gone, that was a bit of a throwaway remark and was deliberately provocative. It still niggles at me that there is some truth in that, that on some level, and we can dispute what the level is, that photochemical lm was a valid equivalent of the world and that by manipulating it yourself or endorsing the manipulations as a viewer of those images you could create something which was meaningful as a reection on the real world, and therefore in a sense that the real world became malleable and capable of change. That whole mindset seems to have been subtly undercut. I dont know I could be wrong. The other side of the thing about digital technology is what it does to the process as well as the result. With a Steenbeck you viewed the lm and to get back to the start you had to rewind. So youd rewind it fast but you would keep your eye on it and youd see something hiccup and youd think, theres something wrong there. And next time through you would look carefully and sure enough there was something that
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Motivations
RM/MS: As someone with many years grounding in lm production it is interesting that in your lm analysis you rarely attach a signicance to the contingencies of the lms production. DV: The problem is that a lot of the time you dont know. What gets irritating is when academics start attaching a great signicance in terms of directorial choice to something which you suspect, though you could never be sure, was purely uke. But when you are actually looking at a lm and saying why does this move me, why does it work, those considerations are probably on a different critical track. Ive always been convinced that the lm for you is the lm you have seen and what it means to you. In fact that has been a very central thing in the doubts that I have had about the academic treatment of lm. I am not hostile to, it is probably out of date now because I havent read academic writing for some time, but I am not hostile
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to the trends such as semiology, structuralism, all those things, very interesting insights came out of those. But one thing they do seem to almost deliberately bracket out of consideration is the way the human individual responds to a lm. I came across a wonderful quote very recently in a poem by Ingeborg Bachmann which said, between a word and a thing / you encounter only yourself. I thought wow, you might say it is obvious but I had never seen it expressed quite so succinctly and powerfully. In a way that seems to be something which certainly in the 1970s and 1980s, maybe still today, academic critics didnt take into account: that the hinge between the world and its representation is individual human consciousness, whether of the maker or the recipient it hardly matters, and that you always have to lter it through that. And that was really what was at the root of those debates we had in the 1950s about commitment and criticism. I do remember then being very, very impressed by Sartres collection What Is Literature? And this whole idea that the way we read a work of literature or by implication any of the other arts is an existential choice. That is what I was always keen on homing in on, what is really happening when we look at a lm. And funnily enough, perhaps because it has the appearance of being purely subjective or fanciful or not scientic enough the academic community seems to ght shy of that, sometimes with very positive results. The sort of analysis that people like Barthes were making works; you are persuaded by what he is saying, but there is an implication that these meanings occur in an abstract realm not in somebodys mind. When Godard said that every shot is a moral choice, I think he meant for the lm-maker; but it is true for the viewer too. RM/MS: Who do you imagine as the audience for your lm writing? DV: Anybody who likes what I write. I dont start with a target audience in mind for that or ction or anything, just an intelligent layperson. RM/MS: Are you hoping that you might be speaking to other lm-makers? DV: Oh yes I would like to think that people in the business would be interested in what Ive said, and to a large extent they have been. Ive had some good feedback, especially for Portrait of an Invisible Man. I dont have any proof of the readership of those books but I suspect that they are people who have a prior interest in documentary. Im also slightly saddened that there is this cordon sanitaire between what Ive written about lm and my ction. There is an overlap; Moritur was about a lm editor so you could say that it is a contribution to lm editing ethics.
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