Documentary News Letter (1944-1945)

10 pOCUMENTARY NEWS LETTER JANUARY AND FEBRUARY 1944 FILM OF THE MONTH Lone White Sail. Production: Moscow Children's Film Sludio. Direction: Vladimir Legoshin. TOThat makes a good children's film or Tor " the matter of that, a good children's story? Adults in general tend to plump for whimsy and sentimentality, probably because they like that sort of thing themselves and it helps to satisfy the unresolved adolescence in their natures. And so we get parents eagerly buying, reading and then shoving down their children's throats reams of Winnie the Pooh and The Wind in the Willows or forcibly taking them to see Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs or The Wizard of Oz. The children of course cons;ientiously and considerately enjoy themselves, but really, as a matter of fact, they don't think much of it. The world to children is just as real as it is to us, but because of their freshness, their small size compared with adults and the fantastically slow ticking of their life-clock, everything seems ten times as vivid, ten times as real and ten times as important. And so their meat is something much more like, say, Hans Andersen {Big Claus and Little Claus was just about my favourite story), where everything is startlingly real, clear and matter of fact, but many times life size. Which is why Lone White Sail is not only a first class film anyway, but a first class film for children, even better than Emil and the Detectives. The Story Lone White Sail is a story of two 12-year-old boys' adventures after the 1905 revolution. They live on the shores of the Black Sea, so naturally they get mixed up with a sailor from the Potemkin re-entering the country from Rumania. Then after the proclamation of the so-called Liberal Constitution, they help the sailor and his friends in their unsuccessful revolt, and later help the sailor in his escape from prison. But it is not so much the story, good as it is, that counts; it's the details. One of the boys is a working class lad, grandson of a supremely (and, it looks, deservedly) unsuccessful fisherman, the other comes from a middle class family and is a young student. These two make a finely contrasted partnership, Gavrik, the fisherlad, tough, selfreliant and adult already, the student inexperienced in the ways of the world but imaginative, well-meaning, terrifically anxious to help and, because of his social status, very useful. There must be very few people who don't find their childhood, or children their lives, mirrored in some way or other in the film. Best of all perhaps is the scene where Gavrik and his pal take the escaped sailor to see Gavrik's elder brother, who is a revolutionary stalwart. Whilst the two men talk secretly, Gavrik and the student go round and make friends with the rest of the family, and there's more of working-class life and revolution in that one scene than in all of Eisenstein and Pudovkin's films put together. But the whole film is full of things like that, all as bright and real as day, but all just slightly more than lifesize, to fit the child's viewpoint ; and incidentally shot from the children's eyelevel. There's a truly magnificent fishwife who would be the terror of any fisherman, lei alone of his son. There's granddad coming home boozed again, denouncing all fish salesmen (hear, hear) and having to be put to bed. There's the plain clothes cop, the villain, rather like Fritz Rasp in Emil and the Detectives, comic, squinting and awkward but somehow very dangerous, just like the farmer who when you're apple-scrumping always manages to catch you in spite of his clumsiness. There's the appalling baby brother of the young student, with his hoarded money-box and the quick horrifying glimpse of his birthday party. There's the beautifully economical period scene of the declaration of the Liberal Constitution with the business man kissing his coachman — "Hurrah! At last we're brothers." Smack, smack. "Drive on you swine!" There's the nice button-game that Gavrik always wins, and the student's father's unfortunate attempt at enforcing tidy habits on his son. There's the burly sailor, just a little more powerful, more silent and more heroic than life, whose final friendly handshake puts the student on top of the world, standing on the cliff top and declaiming to his admiring friends his favourite poetry-piece, Lone White Sail, as the boat disappears romantically into the distance, taking the sailor to fresh deeds of heroism. In fact all the film is in the heroic mould. "My brother's going to get the sailor out of gaol to-day." "How on earth will he do that?" "Why blow up the gaol of course." And blow up the gaol he does, the explosion, very nicely, coming over a title in the same way that Gavrik earlier had been content at the shooting gallery with just aiming (and then having a lemonade) instead of actually firing. But the whole film is like that, you get down to the real stuff, the lemonade, without wasting your time and money over the shooting gallery. Incidentally the photography is superb. It certainly is a pleasure to see Lone White Sail again amid so many of the dreary slush and falseness of the wartime films ; it looks as good as or even better than when we first saw it five or six years ago. It is a funny thing that since the Soviet Film Industry announced its new policy of Socialist Realism so few of their films have come up to scratch in that particular line. We've had all sorts of would-be realism that just turned out to be propaganda or daydream, like Natasha, and people with a strong style of their own, like Dovzhenko, have carried on in the same good old way, but of all their films seen in this country the only ones so far that could be said to be really successful examples of Socialist Realism are The New Teacher and Lone White Sail. Perhaps Realism comes a little awkwardly to the Russian temperament, or maybe now is a difficult time for it. Realism, I should say, arises from the confidence engendered by an optimistic philosophy, which presents you with a cut-and-dried solution to the problems of the universe. If you are confident enough that you have the solution to all problems, you must believe that to set down things just as they are is to prove your case; the difficulty being only to decide what they really are, I or instance the great nineteenth century age of scientific materialism gave rise to the confident art of men like Zola, whose wonderful literary edifice was based on some doctor's piddling little theory of heredity by which he reckoned to explain the workings of the universe. The theory is dead but the books live on. But when the great tide of science and realism represented by men like Zola and Dickens, swept into Russia, the result was men like Tol stoy and Dostoevsky, who may have thought they were being realist, but who were something very different. They simply hadn't got it in them to believe the scientific nonsense. And of course as time went on and people began to realise that scientific materialism was ushering in, not the millennium but armageddon, optimism gave way to defeatism and realism to escapism. Today as we struggle gradually towards a faith better founded and more practical than the brave new world of the nineteenth century dreamers, a new realism begins to show itself again. And what better place to show itself than Russia? But apart from Gerasimov and Legoshin, there has been not all that much sign of it yet. It would be interesting to know more about Vladimir Legoshin: this is, I think, the only film of his to be seen over here. Gerasimov obviously gets his confidence from being one of the younger generation, from growing up with and being part of the constructive epoch of the revolution. The director of Lone White Sail seems so much at home with all sorts of people and problems that it would be difficult to believe that he is a young man who has never been outside the U.S.S.R. But in any case the war — and this is one of its greatest horrors — must have set Russia back dreadfully, and it may be years before we can hope for films like Lone White Sail and The New Teacher again. In the end, though, the new Socialist Realism is bound to come and, it's up to us in England to be in there with it. Assignment :— India {Continued from page 9) sun shone, one could make perfectly good pictures with natural light, but if it were overcast, artificial light would be needed. As nobody knew at what time Gandhi would speak, it was necessary for us to take all precautions, and Bob erected some photofloods above the speaker's dais, like spotlights on a stage. The meeting opened on a gloomy note with some maidens chanting a dirge, and as soon as that was over, a messenger came to us and said that Gandhi insisted that the lights were put out. This we did with very poor grace, and sat waiting and praying that when his turn came to speak, there would be sufficient natural light for us to make our shots. At last he got up and Bob was stealthily making a few shots, when all of a sudden, an Indian still photographer jumped up and let off a flash bulb. The old man stopped speaking, attendants rushed in and threw the photographer out, also tried to do the same thing to us. Then ensued a long discourse on the evil ways of photographers, and the threat that if he heard so much as the noise of another camera, he would leave the meeting. Concluding with some bitterness that he had forgotten what he was talking about. You can imagine how popular we were with the thousands of followers who had come from all parts of India to hear the words of wisdom tall from the old man's lips. With the entry of Japan and the United States in the war. any misgivings we might have had thai India would never make front page news, vanished. And when Sir Stafford Cripps visited India, two months after our departure, our editors were able to release two consecutive March <>/ Time issues, which incorporated scenes of every aspect we had covered during our eight months production.