Smashing the goldfish bowl: how the Grierson sisters helped pioneer British documentary

As part of the BFI’s Film on Film Festival – our festival honouring the medium of film itself, where every film is projected from a print – we are also celebrating the creativity of Ruby and Marion Grierson, sisters who have been overshadowed by their brother John Grierson, a legendary figure in the history of documentary filmmaking.

Ruby was born in 1904 and Marion, the youngest of the siblings, in 1907, and while their eldest brother John has been referred to as the father of British documentary (a mother was not required for this new arrival, it appears) the sisters also played a pivotal role in the development of the genre.

John Grierson first coined the term ‘documentary’ in the 1920s, and the received story of the ‘documentary boys’ – the nickname given to members of the British documentary movement in the 1930s – belies the fact that there were many pioneering women filmmakers working alongside them. Some of these achieved a degree of recognition at the time, while most were little known outside their immediate circle – and they all remain largely overlooked, together with their films.

Marion Grierson began filmmaking after early attempts to make a career as a writer. She ingeniously succeeded in getting herself a place on a publicity tour of Canada, planning to stay on there and find work writing. She did find a job on a local paper, the Regina Star in the midwest of Canada, but after a couple of years she returned to London in the late 1920s.

She then began working as a film editor with the encouragement of her brother John and rapidly became an accomplished filmmaker, though always modest. Her early film So This Is London (1933), screening as part of the Film on Film Festival, was widely admired and achieved international fame – it was shown chiefly outside the UK, through her work for the Travel and Industrial Development Association (the precursor to Visit Britain), which is likely to be a factor in the lack of awareness of her work in the UK.

As she became more involved in what later became known as the British documentary movement, Marion remained constant in her belief in filmmaking as a collaborative process. She said in an interview:

“We could all cope with camera work, editing, writing scripts. We could do all the jobs really, a lot of it was technical, manual and nobody jibbed at doing it… We all discussed each other’s films and in fact loaned each other material from the films… Night Mail for example has pieces from everybody’s films… I have two shots in it of Edinburgh film.”

This apparent lack of desire to raise her personal profile may well have contributed to the lack of recognition of her name in film history. However, her films deserve celebration, beautifully combining visual and sound techniques with wit and penetrating observation, perhaps most notably in the lyrical Beside the Seaside (1935). Remarkably, this film was made the year before Night Mail (1936), which is much loved and heralded for cinematic flourishes previously used in Marion’s films.

Ruby Grierson also played a pivotal role in the success of the early days of the documentary genre. She wasn’t totally convinced by her brother John’s acclaimed films and didn’t mind telling him. He later spoke about how she challenged him: “The trouble with you is that you look at things as though they were in a goldfish bowl. I’m going to break your goldfish bowl.” 

Ruby went ahead and smashed the glass, and she was probably the first filmmaker to encourage the ordinary people appearing in documentaries to speak to camera, as opposed to the customary voice-of-God commentary speaking on their behalf. This radical approach started with her uncredited work on Housing Problems (1935). She told the working-class residents who feature in the film: “The camera is yours. The microphone is yours. Now tell the bastards exactly what it’s like to live in slums.” The residents’ vivid accounts succeed in bringing home the horror of living in the slums.

For the film Today We Live (1937) Ruby worked with co-director Ralph Bond, and it is a more conventional dramatised documentary, following the predominant approach of the 1930s. It consists of two neatly interwoven stories, featuring non-actors re-enacting their real-life experience of establishing two community projects. Ruby directed the first narrative, which follows a women’s group converting a barn into a village hall in South Cerney, Gloucestershire. The second strand, by Ralph Bond, follows unemployed coalminers as they build an occupational centre in the Rhondda Valley. Both parts of the film vividly convey support for the struggle of the working-class communities.

Ruby went on to make more than 10 films, before her life was tragically cut short. One of my favourites is They Also Serve from 1940, a new print of which is screening in the Film on Film Festival. It’s a potent tribute to “the Housewives of Britain” and another dramatised documentary which maintains a strong sense of empathy, this time in the domestic realm. The film follows a day in the wartime life of ‘Mum’ – as she is always called – who is ever-smiling in her support of her weary husband and truculent daughter. Despite it all, she counts herself lucky.

Ruby made further films for the war effort, but while making a film about the evacuation of children to Canada, the liner they were travelling on was torpedoed. She was among the 258 people killed, including children.

Marion and Ruby Grierson both contributed some wonderful films to the British documentary movement during their relatively brief filmmaking careers. We will be screening four of their films during the Film on Film Festival, two of which – Beside the Seaside and They Also Serve – are the first new prints to be made using the brand new black-and-white processing equipment in the BFI National Archive’s Film Laboratory. Do come along to the world premiere of these special prints.

The BFI Film on Film Festival runs 12 to 15 June 2025.