Migration Documentary Films in Post-War Australia By Liangwen Ku ...

Grierson and Hawes dominated the development of Australian documentary films for almost 30 years. As shown in an interview with John Morris, a former associate in the Film Unit, Hawes established principles for people in the Unit to follow:

So voice-over expository films were closely associated with classical perspectives. They prevailed in the production of migration documentary films in the 1950s and early 1960s. Migrants and Australians were ‘told’ about aspects of Australia by a formal, rational form of representation. In this period, other varieties of documentary film, such as lyrical, poetic, and dramatic stories that interwove sound and image in unexpected ways and expected the audience to participate, to feel, and to imagine, ‘disappeared in favour of the classical documentary style’ (Moran, 1987, p. 90). Between 1946 and 1954, the Film Division of the ANFB made over 200 films, most of which followed Hawes’s favourite styles. Moran (1991) observed this development and made a critique of the functioning of the Film Unit between 1953 and 1964. He commented that the films produced by the Unit during this period were ‘technically competent but dull and routine’ (p. 59). He employed the term institutional documentary to refer to these works. This concept ‘refers to a particular type of film, differentiated not so much by subject matter as by a specific context and approach’. Instead, institutional documentaries ‘speak with the collective and often anonymous voice of the body that gave rise to the film or program…the program speaks with an institutional voice…Institutional documentaries are produced for the purpose of informing and educating their various audiences’ (Moran, 1989a, p. 151).