Documentary News Letter (1940)

12 DOCUMENTARY NEWS LETTER FEBRUARY 1940 NEW DOCUMENTARY FILMS These Children are Safe. A Strand Film. Production: Taylor. Direction: Shaw. Camera: Jago. Music: Alwyn. Commentary: Hilton. Distribution: Anglo-American (theatrical). THIS IS SPONSORED by the British Council and will be widely shown abroad. Shaw has stuck very closely to the title. The children we see are safe and happy. Their health and educational problems are being dealt with — in various surroundings. Everyone is being helpful and pleasant. Whether or no this is a fully accurate picture of conditions in the early autumn of 1939 (conditions now are hardly relevant, being so different), it is quite certain that it is a fairly wide and genuine reportage of the kids adapting themselves to their new surroundings. It is superbly well directed (Shaw has a special genius with children) and the photography is outstandingly good. A fellow-critic has described Hilton's commentary as "coy". We concur. Shaw's work needed something better. Transfer of Power. Production: Elton. Direction: Bell. Photography: Beadle. Diagrams: Hodker. and Protection of Fruit. Production: Elton. Direction: Tharp. Photography: Rodwell and Hillier. Distribution: Non-theatrical from Petroleum Films Bureau, 15 Hay Hill, W.l. 35 mm. and 16 mm. TRANSFER OF POWER has Created a new style of diagrammatic film, one of the most difficult forms of documentary. It is interesting to compare its treatment with the Atlantic Film efforts along the same lines, as in Mouvements Vibratoires. Transfer of Power, just as efficient as the latter, avoids somehow the cold and dry French approach. Transfer of Power is perfect, too, in many other ways ; not only are the diagrams themselves treated with simplicity and imagination, but the difficult balance between the diagrams and the straight shooting is fully attained. And, above all, clear explanation, both by visuals and commentary, of such an intricate subject, is successfully achieved. This clarity is the main problem in films of this kind. Protection of Fruit is a documentary film in which the reason for production is the use of oil in the orchards of various countries. Its main purpose is the showing of the life history, effect and prevention of different types of fruit pests. The diagrams and photography are good. The microscopic camera work excellent. Protection of Fruit has not only a pleasant quality of its own but a kind of Wellsian touch about it. African Skyway. A Strand Film. Presented: Taylor. Camera: Jago. Sound cutting: EUitt. Distribution: Anglo-American (theatrical). By a civil aviation expert. ALL WHO ENJOY travclogues will like African Skyway — a new film for Imperial Airways — which runs for about 30 minutes. It is well connected and one's interest is held throughout. I was quite sorry when the film ended. The film deals with the air route pioneered by Imperial Airways from Cairo to Cape Town. The flying is incidental to the film, which shows life at several of the towns which are ports of call on the route. I would have preferred a little more of this because one had only a brief ghmpse of Khartoum after quite a long stay in Cairo ; similarly, I would have liked to have visited places in between Kisumu and Durban. The film, in my opinion, could be lengthened without the risk of its interest flagging. It opens with some shots of various jungle animals taken presumably from a low-flying aircraft. I found it hard to accustom myself to the movement for a few moments. It might have been better to have a few shots first from a stationary camera to allow the eye to become focussed. The photography is excellent throughout. The high-lights to my mind were a flying boat landing among the dense shipping in Alexandria harbour, a really glorious shot of the Murchison Falls, native women descending from a bus at the equator, and the Sunday native dance at a South African gold mine. The sound is good and not obtrusive, while the commentary is adequate and never facetious, which is rather unusual these days. If you use the air mail you must see this film and next time you stick on your blue label you will stop and think of the many stages through which your letter passes on its destination and the wonderful organisation behind the Empire air routes. Karoo. Production: G.B.I. Direction and Photography: Schauder. Editing: Chambers. Commentary: Emmett. Distribution : G.F.D. (theatrical). AS THE TRAVELLER on the "Union Express" from Cape Town to Johannesburg starts his journey, he climbs through magnificent mountain scenery and comes out on a dry, brown, dull plain, covered with sparse shrubs and grasses, through which the train rolls monotonously for hours. This is the Karoo, an area of about 100,000 square miles, more than three thousand feet above sea-level, with an annual rainfall which seldom exceeds twelve inches. This region is the location of the film Karoo, which tells the story of a typical sheep farmer, showing his continual efforts to provide water for his flocks, the protection of the sheep, the shearing, and the sale of the crop in Port Elizabeth. It is one of a series of films made by Leon Schauder in collaboration with G.B.I., and as a serious attempt, by a South African, to show an aspect of South African life on the screen, it marks a great step forward in the development of that country's films. The director has chosen his types with care, and no one will easily forget the old farmer. The shooting, too, is frequently impressive, and always attractive. But here lies one of the film's weaknesses, for the director seems to prefer a pretty picture to a lucid one, and in his concern with pictorial beauty he fails to get to real grips with his subject. There seems, for instance, to be no justification for including the Cape Town sequence, except as an excuse to use the shots of a liner leaving Table Bay. The appropriate Afrikaans music could have been morecftective by being more sparingly used. Love on the Wing. Production: G.P.O. Direction: McLaren. Camera: Jones and Gamage. Dufaycolor. 35 mm. Distribution : not fixed. IH'CI 001 *.' By an artist and commercial designer I SUPPOSE IT is inevitable that what first strikes an artist about this film is the painted back-| * ground. The action all takes place in front of onei i of those bare Chiricoesque settings that seem to have crept into the repertoire of even the commercial studios. In the unfamiliar world of the, gjvi films one clings to the familiar fantasy. It's a very, ^^ pleasant world this one, nice colour and looks ) j^^ warm. When the action starts it looks like ballet broken loose from the laws of gravity. Bouquets are certainly due to Mr McLaren for his handling, of the story. The little figures, drawn in simple, fat white outline, grow and change with alarming and gay vitality. Possibly the action is a little fast for the unsophisticated eye. Some of theJjiQ, allusion of the drawing is lost because such extreme simplification of ideas (lovers kissing become two mouths kissing and so on) requires a little interval for the idea to get across to the audience. I suspect that Mr McLaren has tried to. |^ force too many pictorial ideas into the film.| i^j. Anyway it's a fault on the right side. j ~.^ ny U ain aim igai Mia alwl ina ^SA l»aie imiK Uen tead itai Cargo for Ardrossan. Direction: R. I. Grierson. Assistant: Keen. Camera: Jeakins. Production: R.F.U. Distribution: Anglo-American (theatrical). HERE IS AN unpretentious documentary wdth tlti|lilisti( precious virtue of never getting too big for its: boots, which Miss Grierson keeps firmly to the ground she has chosen — the relationship between two sharply contrasting yet economically inseparable communities. The mode of life of the Scottish island of Islay is shaped by the mixed cargoes which arrive byl steamer from Glasgow, ninety miles away — aui adulteration of native simplicities which ha?been known to provide many a pessimistic theme for the primitive-seeking escapists amongst our directors. The oil tankers which tie up at the wharves of Ardrossan bring, not only to Glasgow but also to the people of Islay the means tc tempting modem comforts and untraditiona! mechanisations. Yet Miss Grierson finds nc slackening of moral fibre in her islanders. She observes and records their day to day behaviom with an unsentimental affection which illuminates the least spectacular of the human virtues and demonstrates that the people of Islay an no more likely to be seduced by commerc< than is the Chief Tester back in Glasgow whonr we see supervising, with magnificent composure the first try-out of his enormous new Diese engine. The film ends with a reminder that even oi from Ardrossan cannot still the troubled water which condition the life of a small island. Ye the storm sequence is not used as a melodramati' climax. Here again, economy and under-state ment, and a brilliant but unobtrusive camera present commonplace drama in terms of thos 'less obvious but more fundamental elements tha seem to spring quickest to the eye of our womei directors. lei Biar sail ijie iiiii'a