We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
BRUCE WOOLFE, ROTHA, AND "RISING TIDE"
This is Paul Rotha's second documentary under Bruce Woolfe, and Gaumont-British have publicly announced that it marks their entry into the field of documentary. Fine. Like Contact, Rising Tide is a three reeler — a size which, in documentary, requires both ambition of idea and solidity of design. One can wander discursively or descriptively over one reel, or a reel and a half. Thereafter it is the theme that counts. Rotha knows this. Contact has the theme that air transport brings the nations closer together. Rising Ride has the theme that great construction plans (in this case the building of a Southampton Dock) are intimately related to the economic life of the country.
This is a fine theme, but of course a dangerous one, because it goes to the heart of economics. It means that if the film is to be dramatically or humanly true, the development of the theme must be economically true. And the whole idea is too near to our common concern to allow of rhetorical or other superficial solution. Here, if anywhere, cinema has to be right, as well as good looking, to justify itself.
The film describes lines of unemployed, and very dramatically, to introduce the problem. It sets about the building of the dock, and describes it in really terrific photography. It opens the sluices, and fills the basin. It brings in the ship. But what then? Magically, and without explanation, somehow, just somehow, by no more than a temporal juxtaposition of sequence, the world is set to work again. The cotton factories whirl — and very magnificently — the steel workers in rhythmic splendour fill their furnaces. Much photography indeed, but no economics. By what extra efficiency in Southampton, of all places, Lancashire commands new markets, by what process of rationalization the dole line decreases, is not explained. "Life follows art," said Oscar Wilde. Yes, but it only does so if it is true art going to the heart of things and revealing their growing point. Rising Tide will not pass muster, and Rotha knows it won't. But see his relation to the business. Some of the material he fell heir to, and the idea was given him already half digested. He was, in other words, not his own master in the formulation of the problem, and all he could really bring to it was his eye for pic
37