Documentary News Letter (1944-1945)

CONTENTS THE FIRST SIX YEARS NOTES OF THE MONTH non-t in the ridings (J. Maddison) BOOKS REVIEWED FILMING THE EUROPEAN CAMPAIGN (Capt. D. Bull) NEW DOCUMENTARY FILMS TALES FOR CHILDREN POINTS FOR DISCUSSION FILM SOCIETIES CORRESPONDENCE our country (Dylan Thomas) STATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF M.O.I. FILMS 92. 85,86 87 88,89 89 90,91 , 93, 94 93 94 95 95 96 96 by Film Centre, 34 Soho Square, London w.l ONE SHILLING THE FIRST SIX YEARS On September 3rd the Ministry of Information will be six years old. Its sixth birthday will be a critical one, for the late GovernIment proposed to stifle it as soon as the war with Japan had been won, and its dissolution had already begun. Brendan Bracken said many times that he thought the work of his Ministry to be II disagreeable imposition on the public only made necessary by the war situation. He even publicly insulted his own staff by saying that they joined with him in wanting to shake the dust of the M.O.I, from their shoes as soon as possible. He had no appreciation, apparently, of the permanent value of many of the services of information built up during the war; or if he appreciated their value, he feared their very success and sought to kill them all the more vigorously. Now Brendan Bracken has gone. His Ministry has survived. There are few of his staff who will not feel relieved. The new Government will find the Ministry of Information pretty well in full working order, and will be able to consider its future at leisure. There will be time, for instance, to weigh evidence before deciding whether to keep the services of information in one department or whether the functions of the various divisions of the M.O.I, should be handed over to other government departments. Though the biggest Producer Division of all — Films Division — has no obvious home (we hope that not even the Treasury in its sillier moments would put it under the Stationery Office) there are niches for most of the others. It would be possible to transfer the Foreign Divisions to the Foreign Office. The Empire Division could be divided between the Dominions Office and the Colonial Office. The Home Division could go to the Home Office, and so on. While the relative virtues of centralisation and decentralisation are being pondered, no doubt the achievements of the divisions themselves will be assessed. Was it good or bad that the Publications Division found itself compelled to avoid participation in the ideological fight with fascism and to concentrate on plain objective statements — and excellent many of them were — about the tactics and strategy of the war? Was it true that the Campaigns Division was weak because it was mainly controlled by Advertising Agents? Have the Regional Offices of the Home Division, in spite of some odious undemocratic traits exhibited by a minority of their officers, come to fill a place of great importance in our national life which should be perpetuated? On such points we shall express no opinion at this stage, but we feel it right here to attempt a short assessment of the work of Films Division. First it must be noted that, unlike any other Division of the M.O.I., Films Division was not a new invention. It grew naturally out of the G.P.O. and E.M.B. Film Units, and its work must be judged against a perspective which stretches back to 1929 and which embraces not only Target for Tonight, London Can Take It, Desert Victory, World of Plenty, Western Approaches, Our Country and The True Glory, but also Drifters, Industrial Britain, Night Mail, North Sea and Song of Ceylon (made by the E.M.B. Film Unit for The Ceylon Tea Propaganda Board). True, for a few months at the beginning of the war Films Division was headed by Sir Joseph Ball, at one time Director of the Conservative Party Research Department and in charge of films for the Conservative Central Office. Sir Joseph had as lieutenants, among others, Alderman Joseph Reeves and Oliver Bell. The only result of his stewardship seems to have been The Lion Has Wings which Vincent Sheehan says he saw a few months later being run as a comedy — in Berlin! When Sir Kenneth Clark became director of the division, to be followed by Jack Beddington in the Autumn of 1940, staff and administration were overhauled, and the E.M.B.G.P.O. tradition restored. The failure of the Ball regime was because he did not, perhaps could not, realise that he was facing a public which did not require sobstuff appeals to make it fight (it had made up its mind already about this) but which was hungry for objective clear information, which the documentary school had always claimed could be given a dramatic and emotional appeal of its own. It was this new frame of mind which compelled the powers to bring out again what perhaps they hoped had been put away for good — the contentious, obstinate, unruly yet disciplined, documentary school of film makers who had been trained under Tallents and Grierson and whose pre-occupation with a world of new social values was in key with the new public temper. From that day to this Films Division, though it has occasionally sat down in the middle of the ring with flaring nostrils like a circus horse, has on the whole moved patiently, if sometimes slowly, forward. Today, considering the record of documentary films compassing scores of masterpieces and near-masterpieces since Drifters, one thing is certain. The question of the comparative merits of private enterprise and public enterprise as a means of securing documentary, educational and instructional films is academic, for there has been hardly any private enterprise at all except the strange altruistic, unplanned, unbalanced and now apparently abandoned adventure of Gaumont British Instructional from about 1932 to (continued overleaf)