Documentary News Letter (1940)

DOCUMENTARY NEWS LETTER APRIL 1940 ment of international information by which they can tell the world about their efficiency, their power, their confidence and their will to win. You will see the new mood in two films which have just come in from England. There is not much peace in The Warning. It is a picture of England preparing for death and disaster; and you see the old England made grotesque by war as in a distorting mirror. There is no peace in The Lion Has Wings. That masterly work of film documentation is England actually at war, zooming and roaring above the clouds. It is also the film at war. And you will have more and more as the days go on. If I may make a forecast, they will be far more real, far more documentary, these films of war, than we have ever seen before from English studios. Canada, too, is gearing her use of films to wartime necessity. The Chairman of the National Film Board announced the other day that an ambitious film on Canada's mobilization had been initiated. That you wiU see, I expect, in the exciting form which March of Time gives to its treatment of world events ; and all the world will see it. I hope we shall see too the economic mobilization of this country which makes Canada the power house behind the Allies. And now I want to say a word about information and propaganda which is in all our minds at this moment. I have been for a long time interested in propaganda, and it is as a propagandist, I have been from the first interested in films. I remember coming away from the last war with the very simple notion in my head that somehow we had to make peace exciting, if we were to prevent wars. Simple notion as it is, that has been my propaganda ever since — to make peace exciting. In one form or another I have produced or initiated hundreds of films ; yet I think behind every one of them has been that one idea, that the ordinary affairs of people's lives are more dramatic and more vital than all the false excitements you can muster. That has seemed to me something worth spending one's life over. I should be an unhappy person if I thought all this had vanished with the war. But strangely enough, the war has only seemed to accentuate people's hunger for reality. It is proper that the film should take its place in the line of defence, as in duty bound. It is proper that it should use its powers to mobilize the full effort of the nation. But one way, too, in which we can maintain our defences and keep our spirit for the struggle ahead, is to remember that the aims of our society '% lie beyond war and in the love of peace. It will be a pooi information service which keeps harping on war to thi, exclusion of everything so that our minds become narrow anc. ,i anaemic. It will be a poor propaganda which teaches hatred till it violates the sense of decency and democracy which tei; thousand years of civilisation have established. It will be aij inefficient national information which does not keep the horn fires of national activity burning, while the men are off to th, war. In war as in peace, strength lies in hope, and it will be th wisest propaganda which keeps men rich in hope. I only know this — that war will have achieved its final fea of destructiveness, and we shall have been brought to the ver brink of spiritual suicide, if we lose the sense of what we ar defending. But on this serious question of the relation of peace thought and war thoughts, I am going to quote from another authoritiEiiit — the great French writer, Giraudoux. He is today director C[ the French Ministry of Information. Addressing the children of France the other day at the opening of their school yeai( he said : "Thirty-eight thousand of your teachers have had to tak machine gun, bomb and grenade and all the abhorred tools (| destruction to form a rampart behind which you will \\ ^^^ sheltered this winter — to learn from the masters left to you-| ^ and from your school books — your country's inviolable love (.\ ^\^ peace fe, "Young sentinels, learn a true history, a true geography,] moral without hatred, lessons in things which have nothing i do with gunpowder and bayonets." So there you have it. There are two sides to propaganda, ar, two sides to the film at war. We shall go on mobilizing the fil to give the news and the story of a great historical event, that sense we shall use it for all its worth to secure the preser But we shall also, I hope and trust, use the film more and mO| J to secure the future and serve the still wider needs of the peep y of Canada. War films, yes, but more films, too, about tl every-day things of life, the values, the ideals which make li| worth living. We shall use the film, I hope, to give visU( significance to the words of the Canadian Prime Minister wh^ he said that the spirit of mutual tolerance and the respect fF fundamental human rights are the foundation of the nationj unity of Canada. In that way we may rescue, from these barren days trouble, something we can hand on to the future. THE BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE IN WARTIME An Officer of the Institute discusses its Work and Aims over the first Six Months of the War. MORNING OF Saturday, September 2nd, 1939: Peace. The British Film Institute is at work "encouraging the use and development of the Cinematograph as a means of entertainment and instruction." Morning of Monday, September 4th; The British Film Institute is still forwarding its aims and objects, but with certain significant differences. There was, for example, the question of evacuation. Hi dreds of thousands of children had moved out into the count The schools were overcrowded and working double shil teachers were harassed, billeting arrangements were often from satisfactory. The film, educational and entertainme. provided an ideal way of keeping the "refugees" quiet a I happy for at least a few hours every day.