Who was John Grierson?
John Grierson was born in 1898 in Scotland, the son of the headmaster of a village school. After WW I he went to Glasgow University, graduating M.A. in philosophy in 1923. From 1924 to 1927 he was in the U.S. on a Rockefeller Research Fellowship in social science, studying at Chicago, Wisconsin, and Columbia universities. He was a frequent contributor to U.S. periodicals, writing on problems of education and public information. He specialized in the psychology of propaganda and made a study of the development of newspaper and film media. In 1928, John Grierson returned to England, where he joined the Empire Marketing Board and organized the E.M.B. Film Unit, first as director and later as producer. The purpose of this group of filmmakers was to bring alive in terms of cinema some of the essential but taken-for-granted phases of modern life. While with the E.M.B., Grierson personally directed Drifters, a film about the North Sea herring fishermen, which laid the foundation for documenta
