Who shot Mr Khrushchev?
TELEVISION STUART HOOD
It was an extraordinary experience to watch on television film of Khrushchev perambulat- ing slackly in the grounds of his dacha. I was reminded, not altogether irrelevantly, of pic- tures—can it have been film?—I once saw of the Kaiser cutting wood at Doorn, adapting him- self to the narrow confines of exile. What the National Broadcasting Company of America allowed us to see, inexpertly photographed, the hero of a home movie, was the man who had once been one of the two or three most powerful statesmen on earth. The boss who decided to send the rockets to Cuba peered at the world through a split fence—an old-age pensioner of the state, who by virtue of being alive bears witness to some sort of change in the political mores of the Soviet Union.
There was, I suppose, rather over five minutes of film—perhaps ten—enough to have made an item in Twenty-Four Hours, to have served as a peg on which Cliff Michelmore or Kenneth Allsop might have hung a few reflections on the mutability of fate and the uncertainty of greatness. Unfortunately, NBC decided to puff the footage up into a fifty-minute documentary and to attribute to the occasion an importance it hardly deserved. The inflation took two forms. One was to supplement the film of Khrushchev with newsreel film culled from a large number of sources—some of it familiar, some of it fairly jaded by now—and to string it all together with a soletnn, jejune commen- tary designed to ensure that the American viewer had right thoughts about the Soviet Union and about Khrushchev. It was the worst kind of American script, condescending, naive and slipshod; it was read by an NBC commen- tator who apparently judges his audience to be entirely moronic. The other technique employed to inflate the film was more questionable. It was to marry what was clearly silent footage of Khrushchev with a recording of his voice and to convey the impression, by a sustained suggestio falfi, that what the viewer saw was some sort of interview with Khrushchev; which it clearly was not.
What was it then? How was it procured? Who shot it? Interviewed on Twenty-Four Hours, the American producer, Lucy Jarvis, who contrived some years ago (with official approval) to film in the Kremlin, not un- naturally shuffled. So one was thrown back on one's powers of deduction. I am inclined to think that the film was shot by someone who knew Khrushchev and whom Khrushchev knew—a friend or acquaintance who did not arouse his suspicions. My reason for thinking so is that it was not shot with a hidden camera and yet the old man was throughout extra- ordinarily relaxed. How it got out of Russia is a matter for surmise; there are a number of ways in which a small roll of film could be smuggled .through the Russian customs. Film has come out before and no doubt will again. The recording of Khrushchev's voice was probably made independently of the film. The quality of the recording was extremely bad—a fact which seents to suggest that the instrument
was not a normal type of tape-recorder. It may conceivably have been one of the new bugging devices, in which case the CIA ought to do something about the quality. Khrush- chev may or may not have known that his inter- view was being taped; it did not greatly matter, since his replies were thoroughly orthodox.
Since I am engaged at this moment in making a documentary film, the programme raised in my mind certain questions concern- ing truth in the documentary—a term which has come to be applied to a number of different types of programme. Not all of them lay claim to absolute veracity. Perhaps the only genre which can rightly do so is the news documen- tary, since it consists—or should consist—of unrehearsed, unrepeatable events. It is the only true cinema verite. Even in the field of news- film, however, the techniques of film-making demand certain slight deceptions. Thus pic- tures of the interviewer must be shot after the interview is, in fact, concluded, if one wishes to intercut them with pictures of the inter- viewee. The technique is now so common it passes almost unremarked. It is open to abuse but rarely if ever abused.
Most other documentaries diverge from the truth, which we may define in this context as the record of a unique event, to a greater or lesser degree. They will, for instance, contain sequences, which have been re-created, staged.
mounted for the camera. The reasons are -usually technical—the need to have adequate lighting, to wait for a jet to pass, to repeat an action so that it may be filmed in close-up, to get footage of some unexpectedly interest- ing event for which the cameraman was not prepared. Documentaries of this kind are true in the sense that what is filmed is typical of what happens or can happen.
The NBC film purported to belong to the first category but to my mind it stretched the con- ventions very far indeed—beyond the point. in fact, that I find acceptable.
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