Colsher Collin Colsher November 2012 Ken Russell and the Question of Authenticity: The Evolution of a New Documentary Art Form at the BBC John Grierson, in his seminal 1946 essay “First Principles of Documentary,” describes documentary as any film showing “natural material,” 1 meaning any film that captures what already exists in reality. Furthermore, the essay argues that non-actors and non-fiction represent the world of documentary better than actors or fiction. 2 Grierson adds that the “real” or “spontaneous” aspects of documentary are “finer” than any scripted work. 3 Likewise, director Joris Ivens, in his 1931 text “Reflections on the Avant-Garde Documentary,” gives more praise to documentary’s ability to depict natural events and material. Ivens surmises the “cameraman brings more to [documentary] cinema than a poet does” 4 and “the good filmmaker lives surrounded by the material world, by reality.” 5 Grierson and Ivens’s claims concerning documentary held considerable weight, particularly from the 1920s through the 1950s. However, Ken Russell would take a different and interesting approach to documentary in the 1960s. Russell’s BBC documentaries, primarily on the shows Monitor and Omnibus, were an iconoclastic departure from anything that had ever been done in the United Kingdom. Reenactments in documentary may be commonplace today, but in the early 1960s the “British Free Cinema Movement,” with its focus-on-real-subjects mantra, was at an apex. “Free Cinema” mandated that the standard method of documentary capture actual British working class people in their genuine environments edited into a straightforward encyclopedic film grounded in visual palpability. 6 Russell wanted his 1