Grierson, John (1898-1972), was a British director and producer of documentary films that influenced the techniques of modern movie production. Grierson believed that material filmed from real life, rather than in a studio, could be more effective and convincing than fictional material. He introduced the word documentary in 1926 to identify a specific type of nonfiction motion picture.
Grierson headed the film unit at the Empire Marketing Board, a government agency established in 1926 to encourage people to buy goods made in the British Empire. In that post, Grierson directed Drifters (1929), a movie about the North Sea herring-fishing fleet. He directed only one other film, The Fishing Banks of Skye (1934). However, he produced many other documentaries and supervised the work of younger filmmakers.
Grierson was born on April 26, 1898, in Kilmadock, now in Central Region, Scotland. He was educated at Glasgow University and the University of Chicago. In 1939, Grierson moved to Canada, where he established the National Film Board of Canada, which became noted for its high-quality documentaries. He resigned from the Film Board in 1945 and traveled to the United States, where he formed a company to produce films that promoted international understanding. Grierson served as director of mass communications for UNESCO from 1946 to 1948. A collection of his writings was published as Grierson on Documentary (1946). He returned to England in 1957 and hosted a television program from Scotland that showed documentaries from throughout the world. Grierson died on Feb. 19, 1972.
