Documentary News Letter (1944-1945)

DOCUMENTARY NEWS LETTER 103 Vredens Dag (The Day of Wrath). Palladium Films, 1943. Script: Mogens Skot-Hansen, Poul Knudsen and Carl Dreyer. Direction: Carl , Dreyer. Photography: Carl Andersson. Music: Poul Schierbeck. Principal Players: Thorkild Roose, Lisbeth Movin, Sigrid Neijendam, Preben Lerdorff, Albert Hoeberg, O. Ussing, Anna Svierkier. Those who saw Carl Dreyer 's Jeanne a" Arc (1928) usually place it with such classics of the silent screen as Potemkin and Caligari. His eight preceding films seem to have missed attention in Britain. Perhaps only one of them, Du skal cere iin Hustru {Thou Shalt Cherish Thy Wife, 1925), reached here. It was released under the title of The Master of the House, and cropped up in a few cinemas in back streets. Anyone who saw it roust have been struck by its sensitive handling of character, for Dreyer has always turned his orilliant powers of direction to the study of personal relationships. After Jeanne a" Arc Dreyer made only one nore film — his first talkie — before the outbreak of war. This was Vampyr (1933), recently shown oy the London Film Institute Society in Lonion. Most people find it the least successful of lis films. After making it, he became a journalist jntil, to the great gain of cinema, he returned to lirection in 1943. In that year, with the Germans Kcupying his country, he produced Vredens Dag or the Palladium Film Company. It was a boxoffice failure but, in my estimation, just as Jeanne cFArc is now ranked as one of the master)ieces of the silent film, Vredens Dag will pre.ently be hailed as one of the great sound film nasterpieces. Dreyer has taken for his theme the persecution of witches in the seventeenth century. One vould have thought the affinity between the persecution of the witches and the persecution of he Jews would have stood out a mile, but the Germans did not notice anything. Like all Dreyer "s work the film deals with complex and iubtle relationships, this time between a saintly oishop, his mother, his young second wife and lis son by his first wife. His second wife is also he daughter of someone supposed to have been l witch, and neither she nor the audience knows whether she has inherited the powers of her nother. Is it coincidence or witchcraft that her wishes come true? In a moment of despair she wishes her husband dead, for she has fallen in ove with his son by his first wife. He is struck lown on his way home from visiting a sick man. J she responsible? She does not know. She is isked to declare that her husband has died a latural death. She cannot answer "Yes", and we are left supposing that she will meet the awful :nd of a witch whom she has seen persecuted and ournt alive — a brilliant and terrifying episode at he beginning of the film. A bare account of the plot cannot possibly :onvey the subtlety of Dreyer 's direction or the superlative qualities of the photography. Rarely will one see finer direction or finer playing than n the part of the tortured witch (Anna Sviericier); the bishop's young wife is played most subtly and seriously by Lisbeth Movin, who is otherwise well known in musical comedy. Every :amera angle is perfectly adjusted both to character and mood. Camera movement, the dramatic use of white, and the masterly handling of the sound track prove Dreyer to be one of the greatest film directors alive to-day. In him, Denmark has a great contributor to European culture. TWO INDIAN FILMS Quite by chance these two films from India were projected together at a private view, and they show that two very definite trends are developing in Indian short film production. Tree of Wealth was made by the Government Film Unit, and In Rural Maharashtra by a commercial company (Prabhat Films) for the Government. The former was well made, nicely photographed and very thorough. //; Rural Maharashtra was flung together, very uneven to look at and as haphazard as a film could be, And yet, of the two, there is no doubt that the latter is the more important from the point of view of the future of Indian short films. The Tree of Wealth, glossy and presentable as it undoubtedly is, represents a very dangerous trend in film making which is not peculiar to India alone. (It must be emphasised that both films were made by Indian film units and that the same European spoke both commentaries which, incidentally, sounded as though they had been written by the same person). The Tree of Wealth tells about the coconut palm and the different things which it produces. It was shot on very lovely locations in Travancore and shows us the villagers at work collecting the nuts, extracting the oil, preparing the fibre for mats, plaiting the leaves for roofs and, in general, making use of the many products of this useful and good-looking tree. All this the film does very well; everything that is going on is interesting and is pleasantly shot, and the commentator gives just the amount of information we need to make us feel we are understanding the subject. And yet this film, made by Indians, in India, might just as well have been made by a Fitzpatrick, so detached is the handling of the subject. Detachment, of course, has its place among all the many possible methods of approach to a film subject, but if it is going to be used, it should not be mixed with sentimentality. Goodness knows, there have been enough films made in Britain which have set out to prove that this or that industry is both quaint and important, without us wishing to see another country falling into the same error. Now let us look at the second film, //; Rural Maharashtra. This must, to the makers of the film, have seemed a very similar subject — village life in a part of India. The film is technically inferior to the other, but the people who made it were obviously enthusiastic and excited by the subject and what they found to film. So, of course, the result is entirely different; the film is exciting to look at and enlarges our knowledge of India. Enthusiasm carries us across the parts of the film which are superficial and through the dull patches of photography, and even makes unimportant some of the most disastrous trick wipes in the history of film making. -Because we want to know what the next shot is going to be we forgive the many faults of film construction, and that is in itself one test of good film making. (The intensity of purpose has even affected the commentator, who, although still using such adjectives as "fascinating", does enter into the spirit of the film). Integrity of purpose is perhaps the prime necessity of short film making. The Tree of Wealth has not got it and In Rural Maharashtra has. The latter is likely to be more difficult for an audience to accept but it will make an impression; the former will be enjoyed by everybody and remembered by none. The makers of both films would profit by seeing a film called Eskimo Arts and Crafts from the Canadian National Film Board. This film shows people doing things which are far more extraordinary to us than anything shown in the two Indian films and yet presents them so sensibly that we are not at all surprised and accept them as extremely reasonable things to do. It is to be hoped that films on similar subjects to the ones which the Information Board of India is tackling can be shown to the Indian technicians, not so that they shall imitate the method of their making, but so that they can study the manner of the approach. These two films also demonstrate very clearly aspects of a problem which is obviously bothering Indian film makers very much, and it is one which will also be causing a lot of trouble to other countries when they start making their own short films. Roughly the problem is this. Suppose that you have a film industry which is not yet up to world-market standards, and that, on top of this, your films are made in a language which is not understood in countries other than your own. Suppose, further, you want to spread knowledge of your country abroad by means of short films and can get quite a considerable showing for them. Should you then import foreign technicians to make films which hate the currently accepted technical gloss? Should you set your own technicians to work to imitate the films of other countries? Or should you take a long term view and hack out your own path? And in all the cases mentioned, what do you do about the commentary? To have it written and spoken by your own countrymen will preserve a flavour of the land in which the film is made but may be irritating for the foreign audiences for which it has been designed. To have the film presented by a European writer and speaker will mean it is almost bound to take a too detached view of the subject. This is what the Informations Films of India unit is up against and, on the whole, it is tending to follow the course which results in a polished film bearing happy comparison with, say, an American short, but which does not quite succeed in developing fully the film medium as a means of natural expression. Until the problem of India's future is satisfactorily settled, it is true to say that they will not be able to make really good Indian films. The ones which they are sending out of India at the moment have an extra importance because of the present difficult political situation and it is worth while considering them seriously. Let us hope that while Information Films of India are making their present programme they are also training a large number of young technicians who will, when the time comes, be ready to form the nucleus of a truly National Film Board.