Documentary News Letter (1947-1949)

DOCUMENTARY FILM NEWS 27 Germany 1947 Summer in Peine by Graham Wallace peine is a small country town lying between Hanover and Brunswick in the British Zone of Germany. The town and the surrounding district or Kreis had been selected as the location for a short documentary on Germany today. The film dealt with the work of an English civilian officer working in the Control Commission for Germany -the Kreis Resident Officer. It was a monthly release for the COI and was intended to show something of the work of an individual in the CCG and of life and conditions in Germany. Life in Peine is typical, on a small scale, of life all over Germany. Here we find all the problems of the Black Market, shortages of clothing and food, overcrowded accommodation, idle factories and refugees that were the concern of the central character of our film — the Kreis Resident Officer. The production unit making the film was a mixed one, with English and German technicians working together. The director and unit manager came from the Crown Film Unit; the cameraman, his assistant, editor, electricians, production manager, script girl and sound technicians came from the Junge Film-Union of Hamburg. Our film was a joint production of these two units. It was late in August when we arrived in Peine to start shooting our film. It was something of an experiment for a mixed crew of English and German technicians to work together on a film. We did not know how it would turn out. At first we were stiff and strange towards each other, living together in a German hotel, with the language barrier preventing mutual understanding. After a few days, when the barrier of nationality ha j been dropped, we became a team of technicians working together to make a film, conversing in a mixture of bad English and guide-book German, with the exception of the cameraman who claimed to speak five languages fluently and certainly had good English. The concept of a straightforward factual documentary film dealing with real people and their daily work was foreign to the German technicians. Their Dokumentarfilm and Kulturfilm production consisted for the main part of excellent instructional films or pretty studies of 'Spring in an Alpine Valley' and other wellworn themes. To take a camera and lights into a small hall packed with truculent refugees from the East was a new experience for the German technicians. They had to be convinced that it tt.iN not necessary to engage an actor for every part in the script. Once our technique was understood, they willingly fell in with the straightforward presentation of our theme, without undue elaboration. Shooting a film in Germany is very much harder than working under the most trying conditions in England. There is an almost total shortage of film-making material and equipment and there is the personal problem. The fust thought of every German technician is food. Like everyone else in Germany, they are strictly rationed on a low level, though they are entitled to draw heavy workers' rations. Even these, by English standards, are meagre indeed. Of course the English members of the unit were able to help out with part of their rations. By our present-day standards German technicians are poorly paid, but their wages are settled by the German administration. Much of their salary went to buying extra food. Transport is difficult for Germans. We had to wait five or six days before the camera assistant and This still from KRO Germany 1947 is reproduced from COI's Monthly Review of January by permission of the Controller of His Majesty's Stationery Office Graham Wallace is Director of 'KRO Germany 1947', a joint production of Crown Film Unit and Junge Film-Union, Hamburg. The film was issued as a monthly release for January, 1948, and is reviewed on page 31. electrician could get a permit to leave Berlin and travel on the inter/onal train to join the unit in Peine. Local transport in the waj ol a car or lorry was almost unobtainable: at one time we transported .mm lights through the stieets of Peine on a horse-drawn We had brought with us as much as possible from England. All our stock, both negative and positive, bulbs for the lamps and all the oddments like camera tape, empty tins, chalk, black paper and Windowlite— all unobtainable in Germany. Our worst headache proved to be the pro cessing of our film. We had decided to have it processed out in Germany rather than go to the trouble of flying it back to England and then sending it back to Germany for viewing and editing. Our experience showed that this would have been the easiest and quickest course to follow. There are several laboratories working in the British Zone, but they are small and improvised establishments, possessing only one machine for developing and printing. They are subject to frequent current cuts and cannot work for days at a time, until there is a guarantee of current being available for long enough to run a roll of film through the bath. During our twenty days of shooting we had only seen one small batch of rushes, though we had been promised a five-day delivery period. After the shooting was finished we found all our material lying untouched in the laboratory, with many excuses for the delay in processing. In desperation we sent it all to a laboratory in Berlin and were able to view our rushes a week after the completion of shooting! When shooting interiors we ran our lamps off the local electricity supply. This was never constant for more than a few consecutive minutes. All the members of the unit had to stand by the lamps ready to move them forwards or backwards with the voltage fluctuations. The cameraman could never put his light meter down for a minute, but had to be continually checking and rechecking the light so that we cou\<.\ have it constant for long enough to do a take'. From the people of Peine we had manv varied reactions to our shooting in their town In general they were helpful and generous with their time, but there were exceptions. 1 here was the Burgomeister of the town \t first he willingly consented to appear in the film. I atei on. when required for some retakes, he was most reluctant to appear. Apparently he had been accused by his colleagues on the t ouncil of undue 'collaboration' with the English and he was fearful for his ic-election at the forthcoming municipal elections. Then there '.■. the refugees in a school hall; three hundred ol them living together in cramped quarters, sleeping on straw on the floor I he) regarded out operations as a put-up propaganda job h\ the English and demanded to know what we aie going to do about sending them back home or giving them proper accommodation. \g.un and again we received great help and k ontinued fool < olmmn l •