Documentary News Letter (1944-1945)

26 DOCUMENTARY NEWS LETTER No. 3 1944 We Need National Information Board (continued) best be used. The vast field of film education is not one which the nation can afford to leave to the vagaries and uncertainties of commercial exploitation, misdirected effort, and private profit. The say must be with the people through their Government. It is time for all those who believe in the film as a social force to realise that there is a grave danger of all the work and progress so far achieved receiving, at best, a severe setback and, at worst, a mortal blow, if combined operations are not put in hand to ensure that the services of public information we have acquired during the past five years shall be jetained. It is not necessarily (or even sensibly) a matter of retaining the present somewhat unwieldy M.O.I. ; it is a matter of seeing that the vital services now within the M.O.I, are not cancelled, or split up, or scattered to the four winds by being parcelled out to various Government departments. Not for the first time in these columns we stress the need for a National Information Board — a creative body representative of all branches of information, education and public morale. It would in effect consist of the M.O.I, services outside the accretions of censorship and other wartime clobber. It would deal in terms of films, radio, television, posters, printed and illustrated matter, exhibitions, discussion groups and brains trusts, wall-newspapers, and any other media which enable the people of a democracy not merely to draw closer to each other for free discussion and for co-operative action arising from discussion, but also to present a true picture of themselves and their aspirations to the rest of the world. The Overseas Aspect Not least important is the overseas aspect, and particularly so in relation to the Commonwealth. In the Dominions for instance the nuclei of such information services exist; and in Canada these services have, partly on experience gained by workers in England during the 'thirties, been developed to an extent fully equalling and in some respects surpassing our own. Moreover, the value of such an Information Board in relation to international bodies would be enormous. Already we have the I.L.O. in action again; we have the urgencies represented by UNRRA, which may prove the first form of a permanent world secretariat of supply ; we have UNIO ; and so on. If we in Britain are to play our part in these world wide activities an Information Board such as we suggest is essential. Without it, we should be left to the tender mercies of the Foreign Office and the British Council. It is perhaps too early to lay down the exact constitutional form in which we should co-ordinate our educational and informational services. The Information Board we propose could be set up in various different ways. But whatever constitution is chosen, there are certain factors which must be regarded as sine qua non. The first of these is the maximum possible freedom from the trammels of routine civil service administration. The second is that the proposed organisation should not be an appendage of any existing Government department (not even the Board of Education). The third is that the public interest should be freely and fully represented on the board, and that the board should be answerable for its actions in parliament through a Cabinet Minister who would be a member of it. And finally, the functions envisaged must not be sidetracked into mere co-ordination of effort (important though this would be), but must be initiatory and creative. The essential thing, here and now, is to see that our information services do not go by default in the post-war period. We urge all people of goodwill to see, through proper machinery of democracy, that the nation retains and gets what it needs. NOTES OF THE MONTH The Purchase of E.R.P.I. an event of major importance which has recently taken place in the United States has received surprisingly little publicity in this country. We refer to the purchase of E.R.P.I. (Electrical Research Products Inc.) Film Library by Encyclopaedia Britannica. A subsidiary of the West Electric Co., it was one of the largest and most important producers of classroom films (and some others of a direct educational nature) anywhere in the world. The terms under which it has changed hands are therefore very important. This is the situation, roughly speaking. The Encyclopaedia Britannica belongs to the University of Chicago, one of the more notable and important universities of the North American continent. Superficially, therefore, J E.R.P.I. is passing into suitable academic hands. What has now happened, however, is that E.R.P.I. has become "Encyclopaedia Britannica Films Inc". The Chairman of the Board of this new body is the Vice-President of Chicago University and the Board itself includes the President of Chicago University and two United States Government officials (the O.P.A. administrator and the UnderSecretary of Commerce). Amongst the others we find the President of Dartmouth College, the president of Encyclopaedia Britannica, the president of the Book of the Month Club, the chairman of the Quaker Company, a representative of the noted publishers Simon & Schuster, and the president of the Studebaker Company. To this list must be added Mr. Marshall Field, who is probably one of the richest men in the world and an important newspaper publisher; and Mr. Henry Luce, of Time, Life and Fortune. It will be noted that Mr. Luce's organisation also controls the film series March of Time. It is now said that the Eastman Kodak educational library is also being acquired by this group. The general picture, therefore, is of a great centralisation of visual media of education, which is not necessarily a bad thing. The presence of names such as those of Luce and Marshall Field, with their remarkable control of important printed periodicals, suggests that a move may be in progress by what we may describe as the right wing progressives for a considerable control over a major educational field. On the Board also are some prominent industrialists whose presence reminds us of the conception of America as a great trading country and of such phrases as "The American Century" ; nevertheless it would be going much too far to suggest that this new move in the visual educational field is in any way consciously devoted to "selling America", or to any other forms of similar propaganda. All those concerned in the future of documentary film, particularly on an international basis, will be interested in the future development of this big new project, which represents on the one hand the academic attitude and on the 1st other hand those wider fields of public education and information I which are linked with popular media such as the press, radio, films and so on. In this connection we note that Mr. Luce recently bought a block of shares in the Blue Network, one of the major American radio companies. Nor would it surprise us to learn in the not too distant future that some arrangement had been come to pi with Walt Disney Films to include their educational work in the whole set-up of which Encyclopaedia Britannica Films Inc. is the corner-stone. Meantime, we note with interest and satisfactior pi that John Grierson has now joined the Board of Encyclopaedic i Britannica Films Inc. A Good Laugh Without in any way wishing to detract from a film which we havi n not yet seen and, for all we know, may be extremely good, we quoti iy below the opening of a two-and-a-half page publicity hand-ou circulated by Two Cities Films Ltd. Here it is : "Much has been said and written about the possibilities of tn< it Documentary film, a vast source of entertainment and instruction a rv yet barely tapped. True, the war has given us several outstanding (:• Documentaries, conceived and made by experienced directors ancp?-: {continued on page 38)