Leadership Quote by John Grierson

Grierson is trying to give aesthetic dignity to what might otherwise look like industrial noise: the idea that new media forms are not side effects of technology but its most politically charged output. In this sentence, “manifestations” does a lot of work. He refuses to name a single artwork, film, or movement, treating culture as evidence - symptoms of a deeper shift. That’s the documentarian’s move: art as social data, style as a readout of history.

His specific intent is to claim “creative leadership” for artists working inside modern systems - especially cinema, which Grierson championed as the social art of the machine age. He’s not celebrating gadgets. He’s arguing that when the “technological pattern” changes, it rewires attention, taste, and the very choreography of daily life. “Thought and appreciation” signals that perception itself is being reorganized: what people notice, value, and believe becomes newly programmable through modern infrastructures of communication.

The subtext is a bid for authority. By framing cultural change as something that “attends” technology, he positions the director (and the documentary project) as an interpreter of inevitable forces, not a mere entertainer. There’s also a quiet collectivism here: technology alters “human relationships,” so the artist’s job is public-minded, almost civic - to guide society through its own redesign.

Context matters: Grierson built Britain’s documentary movement between wars, when mass media, industrial labor, and the state were tightening their grip on everyday life. His syntax is dense because he’s writing toward institutions - funders, bureaucrats, reformers - insisting that film isn’t ornament. It’s governance by other means.