Documentary News Letter (1944-1945)

40 DOCUMENTARY NEWS LETTER THE CINEASTES W^hen talkies first began to whisper, a great " many of us knew that our days were numbered. We were the cineastes, the people who made independent films because we loved cinema rather than because we wanted to make money. There were cineastes in London, Paris, Rome, Berlin, New York. We tried to make highbrow pictures, and we were often pretentious. But the things we were trying to say in film needed saying, if only as an over-emphasis to place against the crudities of commercial cinema. We made short abstract films, which were like a painter's still-life composition put into motion, we made films which were dreams. And though our films only reached small and special audiences, we managed to contribute to the technique of cinema. Yes, you will find our names in the books devoted to the history of cinema. But the talkies, we knew, would cook our financial goose. We worked with a fine margin of profit over loss. The extra expense of sound recording would make it impossible for us to carry on. So, of course, a great many of us, up to the last minute, tried to pretend that the fatal day would not come. We used to say, "I think we ought to listen a little more to silence". Carl Freund, the unrivalled cameraman of the golden era of Ufa pictures, said to me: "Think of the horses in a sound film. Horses won't refrain from doing all they're told not to." Perhaps you will see the substance of a cineaste by Oswell Blakeston more clearly if I tell you about one or two of my own films. There was, for instance, Light Rhythms. This short picture, which I made with Francis Bruguiere, was an attempt to photograph light itself, and not just objects in light. We drew beams of light, intensifying them at will, across paper surfaces or surfaces in relief, and we rewound and rewound the same film in the camera until, by multiple exposures, we had completed the moving patterns in light. We made this picture with a camera we bought in a junk shop. .It was quite unsuited to trick work and would only take small lengths of film. Often, at the end of a day, it would burst open and throw the whole day's work to ruin on the floor. There was a cheap demon in it. But when it was finished, Stuart Davis booked Light Rhythms for the Shaftesbury Avenue Pavilion (the Academy of its day) and afterwards it went to the Tivoli. Provincial towns demanded this film which was made without actors and scenery, and which featured only light. The Manchester Guardian said: "At one flight it leaves all other advanced films behind." Copies went to New York, South America, Barcelona, Berlin, Paris. After Light Rhythms, I went to Switzerland to make a film to shock the avant-garde. When it was shown in Paris, an infuriated diehard ensic rums MADE BY WRITER DIRECTORS: PRODUCTION ASSISTANTS CAMERA: ANIMATION : EDITING: ADMINISTRATION: PRODUCTION SECRETARY: EXECUTIVE PRODUCER : KAY MANDER J. B. NAPIER BELL JOHN RHODES KITTY MARSHALL JOHN SOUTAR A. A. ENCLANDER PETER BROWN DOUGLAS KENTISH CYNTHIA WHITBY ALICE FENYVES ADAM DAWSON EILEEN ROYDE R. S. CAMPLIN, A.C.A. D. F. PICKIS JOYCE LYNCH BARBARA COLE R. K. NEILSON BAXTER BASIC FILMS LIMITED 18 SOHO SQUARE LONDON, W.I GERRARD 7015 MEMBER OF THE FEDERATION OF DOCUMENTARY FILM UNITS hurled his seat through the screen. Real success! This picture was supposed to be pictorial film criticism. Just as pictorial journalism is shown in the news-reels, I wanted to outline a future for pictorial film criticism, to take its place in the news theatres. I tried to epitomise a lot of current stupidities ; for example the superficial use of symbols visually alike but essentially different. The scene which caused the riot. . . . Well, you know how a film-fan identifies herself (or himself) with the heroine (or hero) in the drama? Actors in my film were shown dissociating themselves from the audience and leaving the cinema in disgust. Two things happened while I was in Switzerland which I think are worth noting. One: I discovered a back-street cinema which still had the mechanism to rock the floor of the theatre during sea pictures. Two : a Continental film comedian went up the mountains, played his accordion and brought down an avalanche. The most important part of my Swiss picture was that Edmund Meisel wrote music for it. Meisel was the composer of scores for silent films. At the Taunstein Palast, Meisel conducted an orchestra of seventy — including a jazz band, six tuba players and a group of musicians with quarter tone instruments — for the opening night of Walter Ruttman's Berlin. The film was the story of a day in a great city, and the music told that story. The musicians were distributed throughout the theatre, in the balconies, under the roof — everywhere. At moments of climax, the audience had the sensation of being drowned by sound. When the spectators left the theatre, there was no break in continuity. Members of the audience paused at the corner of the street and said, "This is exactly what the director and the composer were doing." Had Meisel lived, he might have done remarkable things for the sound film. He was experimenting, just before his death, with light rays photographed directly on the sound track. He thought, by means of the beams, he could record an orchestra without musicians. Since Meisel's day, the creator of a cartoon film has drawn frog noises directly on the sound track. A technician spent a hundred hours drawing the sound track of four words. But nobody has done what Meisel wanted to do — produced music of a kind that has never been heard before. Well, Meisel seems to have landed us in Berlin. The outstanding cineaste of Berlin was Lotte Reiniger. Perhaps you remember her silhouette films — black animated lace? They were world famous in their day. Lotte herself was built on generous lines with a wonderful deep laugh. Quite the wrong type, one would think, for making exquisitely delicate films. Later on, when Hitler ordered the professional women of Germany to parade before him in their unions, Lotte marched alone carrying a sign: lotte reiniger bund. After that, escape was a matter of hours. When she fled to London, I met her. "Good God," she said in her deep voice, "when do the bloody pubs open?" But Paris, of course, was the real centre of cineastes. There were A. Cavalcanti, E. Deslaw, Edmund Greville, Jean Renoir, Rene Clair, (Continued on page 42)