Word: stott
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This is the ambitious task that William Stott sets out to accomplish in Documentary Expression and Thirties America. As a literary and cultural chronicle Stott's book is magnificent. But as an analysis that attempts to shed light on the relationship between thirties culture and the period's social and political history, it has serious flaws...
ALTHOUGH HE SKIMPS on documentary films and filmmakers, Stott does ample justice to the period's journalists and photographers. He shows how their work attempted to draw the attention of an insulated middle class to the "portions of unimagined existence" embedded in the lives of the poor, the damaged and the inconspicuous. He makes good use of such writings as Hemingway's reporting for New Masses and Edmund Wilson's for New Republic to illustrate the various strategies of documentary reportage...
...identifying with the plight of the journalists' subjects--the tenant farmers and migrant workers, the victims of the Spanish Civil War. Too often, though, documentary journalists concentrated more on their own responses than on the experience or the social predicament of the people whom they photographed and described. At Stott points out, there was something spurious about Margaret Bourke-White's photographs of smiling sharecroppers that seemed to shout at me, I'm so poor. I don't know how wretched I really...
...Stott does an equally impressive job pursuing the "documentary motive" as it moved outward from film and journalism to be felt and expressed in remarkably diverse areas of thirties life. He turns to the universities to discover large numbers of social scientists agreeing with the journalists of the period who questioned "the dubious authority of statistics and concluding generalizations." Confronted with the overwhelming proportions of the Depression, they rejected theoretical approaches wholesale and set out after the flesh and blood experience of "real people," the "human meaning" that would somehow make the thirties comprehensible...
Gradually, guerrilla warfare breaks out between the two men over the woman, the weapons being outsize marbles and broken milk bottles. Law makes, and makes off with Jane. At play's end, Stott sits reading the Persian erotica. There is a knock at the door. It is Law; the cycle is now complete. But are they perhaps homosexual buddies who have finally got rid of the divisive woman...