Jules Bucher

Jules V. D. Bucher is the jack-of-all-trades of American documentary and one of its busiest men. By 1940, he had been a producer for the Harmon Foundation, photographer for the child psychology series at Yale University and for the American sequence of Rotha's New Worlds For Old, editor of Men and D ... ust and besides countless other activities had photographed the world tours of Julien Bryan. He worked closely with Bryan on the latter's Inter-American series, in particular making a fine directorial job of the document of the Aymara Indians, High Plain (1943). In 1945, for the O.W.I. Overseas news-reel, he directed and photographed the brilliant five-minute film The Window Cleaner. One of the few examples of humour in American documentary, it was a dry study of a day in the life of a mild, elderly workman calmly attending to his job as he hangs like a fly from the facade of the Empire State Building. In marked contrast with the sententious official tone of too many Government documentaries, The Window Cleaner joyously seized upon a detail of the American scene which told its own story without editorialising. read more