Governing Visions of the Real. The New Zealand National Film Unit, Griersonian Documentary & State Publicity

Abstract

This study traces how documentary film by the New Zealand National Film Unit (NFU) historically came to be calculated and employed as a governmental technique to cultivate 'visions of the real' that were to advance economic conduct and democratic government by shaping subjectivity and directing agency towards a desired future. The NFU was established during World War II, and throughout the 1940s and 50s, the period under study in this thesis, it was organised as the film production wing of State publicity within the executive of State government. Throughout this period, NFU documentary film was marked by a teleological transcendence of the material surfaces the camera could record in specific locations. It variously arranged, interpreted and evaluated actuality, hence encoding a certain 'vision' for popular audiences about what is and should be real. At the same time, the investments in and purposes of film production were rendered transparent and the films evaded controversy, heterogeneity, ambivalence and critique in favour of simplification, recognition, intuition and affect. Such practices, it is argued, need to be discussed in reference to historical problematisations of the operation of knowledge and power in the conduct of modern democratic society. Such problematisations are traced back to Walter Lippmann and John Grierson. The latter developed a programme for democratic government through the use of documentary film that shaped the approach to film production taken by the NFU. By drawing on Michel Foucault's concepts of the dispositive and governmentality, this thesis sets out to trace and discuss a shifting dispositive of 'visions of the real'. This dispositive encompassed a heterogeneous ensemble of calculations, reports, policies, arrangements, techniques, strategies, practices that related to and 'ordered' how New Zealand and its population came to be envisioned through NFU film. Specifically the projection of workers and Māori is discussed, since these groups became a focus of NFU film production. This thesis concludes that NFU documentary film, in a departure from earlier State film production, set out to render the interpretative and 'visionary' aspects of an embodied and subjective vision disposable and hence governable in order to produce a harmonious, cooperative, economic and docile population. In the process the vision cultivated through film became increasingly abstract, generalised, de-limited and normalised, while increasingly being unable to distinguish between actuality and its strategic realisation and treatment for governmental purposes.