Popular Culture Review Vol. 8, No. 2, August 1997 | Page 23

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experimented with an impressionistic documentary, with traditional
narration and chronological progression replaced by a circular
narrative structure that examined real events from multiple
perspectives. Like his fellow documentarians, Agee served as a
human camera capturing the nuances of daily life, except his camera
observed life through a multiplicity of lenses.
The Writer as Camera: Objectively Recording Daily Life
O bjectivity became the watchword for many of the
documentary writers of the Thirties. They thought of themselves as
human cameras focusing on the people, places, and events of the
Depression, dutifully chronicling the smallest detail and the subtlest
nuance. "Talking to living people and observing their actual behavior
seemed more important, and more honest than creating fictional
characters or issues," Pells wrote in explaining the documentarians'
commitment to objectivity (p. 196). This faith in objectivity also can
be traced to the development of Scientific naturalism in the 1930s.
Rejecting abstract, a priori rationalism, many social scientists sought
value-free scientific inquiry that minimized or eliminated the
personal factor. The goal of scientific objectivism was to devise
methods of collecting and analyzing data that rule out errors due to
individual variability in subjective attitude. Many scholars held
that building a scientific body of knowledge involves restudying,
remanipulating, or remeasuring observable, physical phenomena. By
developing and refining objectifying devices and methods, the social
scientist could eliminate his or her values and preconceptions
(Purcell, 1973, pp. 15-22). According to Edward A. Purcell, Jr., the
scientific objectivism of the Thirties was not only intellectually
appealing, but socially necessary as well:
After 1929, facing the misery of the Depression on one
side and the challenge of Marxism on the other, social
scientists embraced their new methodology even more
firmly. ...M ost believed implicitly or explicitly that
their new methods provided a practical way to resolve
social problems as well as a convincing answer to the
inevi tability of Marxian class conflict. The great
majority of social scientists confidently ignored the
upsurge in Marxist thought and rhetoric because of