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DOCUMENTARY NEWS LETTER
Editorial Board: Edgar Anstcy, C.cofTrcy Bell, Sinclair Road. John Taylor, Basil Wright
JANUARY-FEBRUARY 1947 VOL 6 NO 55 PUBLISHED BY FILM CENTRE 34 SOHO SQUARE LONDON Wl
65 FILM — RADIO— THEATRE
66 NOTES OF THE MONTH
67 UNESCO'S WORLD PLANS '
68 WHY NO LABOUR FILMS?
69 FILMS AND MICRO-BIOLOGY
70 BRITISH MEDICAL *FILMS
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71 FILMS IN MALAYA AND EGYPT
72 DOCUMENTARY RADIO
73 DOCUMENTARY THEATRE
74 NEW DOCUMENTARY FILMS
76 FIRST DAYS OF DOCUMENTARY
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NOW IS THE TIME
In the field of public information there can be little doubt that the outstanding event of recent months is the UNESCO Conference in Paris. Matters 'educational, scientific and cultural' are the bricks with which the edifice of international understanding will eventually be built, and this latest attempt to lay down foundations is at once modest and imaginative — modest from financial compulsion and imaginative from the devotion and optimism of most of the delegates. An account of the programme of action in Mass Media which was adopted in Paris will be found elsewhere in this issue. In its insistence that help should be given to peoples ill-supplied with the means of mass communication it supports an old-established doctrine of the documentary movement; and in its references to the world-wide distribution through all appropriate media of informational themes of outstanding international significance, it touches upon a possibility which has long been a documentary pipe-dream — the possibility that One World might, in times of crisis and need, be stimulated to think as one.
The British documentary film-makers who attended the Paris Conference in one capacity or another were stimulated (as they had been also during the course of the British Film Festival in Prague) to find that the post-war re-establishment of contact with fellow workers reveals a fortifying identity of view as to future needs and as to the contribution which the documentary method can make towards meeting them, not only in the field of film hut in the whole area of information.
The documentary method — the 'creative treatment of actuality', as John Grierson defined it. is for international use on all class levels. It is as appropriate to the self-articulation of a leper colony as to the collaboration of Governments. Also it is for use in all appropriate media. Film is the medium which in the pioneering days lay handiest; it was adopted and. as a consequence, much critical attention has been concentrated upon it which might in part have been directed to comparable developments in other media.
The UNESCO 'Feature-story' project is a reminder that the Press not infrequently presents the story behind the spot news with all the dramatic and aesthetic devices of considered narrative and, in doing so, gives what might have been an ephemeral piece of reporting the deeper and more prolonged impact of literature. In literature itself there have been and will continue to be 'documentary' novels, where the lover and his lass take on the no less dramatic mantles and the enhanced stature of the world and his wife.
In this issue of DNL we draw special attention to the achievements of the documentary method in two other media — the theatre and radio. Montagu Slater writes of the creative treatment of actuality on the stage and Laurence Gilliam deals with feature production— that side of BBC work which has paralleled the development of the documentary film more closely than is generally realized.
The documentary film has learned from both these other media. The 'Living Newspaper' stage technique which made its debut in New York in the second half of the nineteen-thirties today demonstrates its persisting influence in such films as World oj Plenty and Land of Promise ', just as the multi-voiced commentaries of documentary and the unrehearsed screen interview are not oblivious of the achievements of the cameraless microphone.
Stage and radio, too, have borrowed from screen documentary and have often employed almost identical stones ; and this is as it should be. (n\en adequate purpose in the theme, the particular medium employed can be lefl to dense from material circumstances. Aesthetes may object to this insistence on the pre-eminence of purpose, hut let them in that case read the I \ I S( ( ) programme. Here is a job to be done, urgent enough, exciting enough and potentially rewarding enough to encourage us to postpone tor a while >et OUT trip to the L-nA of the rainbow of art tor art's sake. au^\ to get busy
instead with the employment ol the documentary method wherever
it is appropriate; and tor social purposes which cannot wait for the arrival of the Muse.