Documentary News Letter (1944-1945)

NEWS LETTER CONTENTS LIBERTY FOR WHOM? FOR WHAT? 41 DOCUMENTARY — A NATIONAL ASSET 42, 43 NOTES OF THE MONTH 43 C.B.C. TALK ON VISIT TO NORMANDY AND brittany, by John Grierson 44 NEW DOCUMENTARY FILMS 45, 46 movie parade, by John Huntly 47 FILM SOCIETIES 48 the "cinemette", by Richard Delaney 49, 50 Memphis belle, by S/Sgt. James F. Scanlan 51 correspondence 52 Ol . 5 NO. 4 1944 Published by Film Centre, 34 Soho Square, London w.l ONE SHILLING LIBERTY FOR WHOM? FOR WHAT? rHE blurred shadow of the post-war world is falling across the sharply defined economic issues of the war. Many a wartime iroblem of commerce and trade required and received a ruthless olution. Efficiency had to come first. Now there is hope in many luarters, not only that there may be a slackening of wartime restricions on the freedom of the individual, but that there may also be a eturn to the supposed benefits of laissez-faire in the field of conomics. It is assumed that laissez-faire and liberty are ynonymous. Liberty for whom? War-time production has been in the interests >f the product and the consumer. Is it a real gain to contrive that leace-time production shall be in the interests, not of these, but for he principal benefit of the producer? In distortion of old economic heories laissez-faire has come more and more to mean the producer's liberty to make a profit. ' These considerations spring to mind following certain bitter xcitements which have recently rocked the fiim trade press of Jritain and the U.S.A. It begins in Britain with the Monopoly Retort and in the U.S. with a certain alarm affected at what may be he line of development at the National Film Board of Canada. In ach case the flesh of readers is required to creep at the prospect of jovernment intervention in the film industry developing to the >oint of complete Government control. The careful reader will, of ourse, discover that the foundation for these fears is non-existent : hat no one in Britain seriously believes in the immediate prospect of omplete nationalisation, nor does anyone in Canada suppose that a ubstantial part of Hollywood's studio space is to be taken over and un by the Canadian Government. Yet nothing less than these are le bogeys conjured up. The intention is, of course, to force the Government out of any onnection with the industry by mobilising the public against the ■nagined threat of nationalisation. One of the British film trade apers appears to have blossomed an Ottawa correspondent largely oncerned with carrying on the anti-Government fight, whilst a lading U.S. periodical devotes great space to biassed accounts of le British situation, carefully giving the impression that all sections ;|f the industry are strongly opposed to the recommendations of !ie Palache Committee in respect of Mr. Rank's monopoly. \ Here indeed, in this very distortion, lies the crux of the matter. ,0 what extent is the opposition to any Government activity in the lm field an opposition to any attempt to associate the world's film ldustries with the public interest? To what extent is such opposition ;lt by any except those vociferous sections of the industry which do not identify their role with the public good ? It will be found that the people who make films, the people who have a creative function in this creative medium, are not wildly in favour of the liberty of expression alleged to derive from private enterprise and the profit motive. A great deal of recent attention has been attracted by an American plan designed to establish a closer relationship in the film industry between product and market. At first sight it would appear that the intention is to carry out a survey of public needs with the idea of planning production to satisfy them. What could be better? Closer inspection, however, will show that the plan boils down to a method of preparing the public to receive and welcome the product which the producer wishes to market. The process is not, find the need and create the product, but, find the product and create the need. This high-sounding audience survey is a guide merely to the methods of publicity demanded by the product in hand. It has long been clear that the public in the cinema gets, not what it wants but what it is given, what it is profitable to give. It takes it and is taught to like it. Publicity has become a trade activity on a level of importance with the actual job of film-making. This is the position under the present set-up and neither Hollywood nor Rank's advisers want it disturbed by Governments stepping in and raising awkward questions about the film as a public service. For they realise that public service doesrft mean giving the public what you happen to have piled up on the counter. So it is that the Ottawa correspondent of The Cinema dismisses as "arty" the ambitions of Canadian Citizens' Films Councils in "the proper development and supervision of moving pictures as a medium of visual education and for the creation of influences in the presentation of commercial films". So it is also that the Motion Picture Herald objects to a statement that the film industry may be foreseen "assuming the wider responsibilities of a public utility" and objects also to the proposition that "films are an integral part of the new policy toward the public aware that adequate information is the foundation of government by the people". A rumour reported in this periodical that the Provisional Government for the Republic of France proposes to "place the iron hand of absolute Government control" on the French film industry is horror enough to bring a main editorial to a speechless end. As an abiding policy we are primly told this could not square with "liberation". We welcome that word liberation in reference to the world's film industries. But is it from the "iron hand of absolute Governmental control" that we need to be liberated?