Documentary News Letter (1947-1949)

DOCl MEN \ \H\ I II M M \NS 87 Edinburgh 1948 by John Grierson the Edinburgh show this month is going to be a big show and an important one, and we will go into that later. To keep the decencies and the proportions, I should begin by saying that the Edinburgh show was always a big show anyway. This year as last it is a Testis al with pictures from everywhere and of all kinds, stretching all across and inside the denotation and connotation of the documentary thing. Twenty-seven countries are show ing. they say, and the best is present. Bob Flaherty is there with his new one, Louisiana Story, and yet another brilliant evocation of the damn fool sense of innocence this wonderful old character pursues: his eye keener than ever, sensibility ever softer and so on, and Frances still around. Rossellini is there with his Berlin Zero and a turning camera on cat-feet which should interest the longshotmidshot-elose-up boys in their technical vitals. Canada, bless the Chinook wind which thaws its winters, presents itself in the rough and tough European time with perhaps the best of all reportage items on European itself. It had no reason, except in its native and national generosity, to make it at all. France is there with the brilliant edition by Nicole Vedres of the Edwardian years of Falliere: not so much nostalgic as witty and civilized. Norway is there with its big Nordic tale of Norwegian wartime bravery in the Battle oj Heavy Water. Documentary looks quite a thing in the Edinburgh programme, as though it really was an idea that had started something, in reportage and interpretation, inside countries and across boundaries, for the illumination of much. But — and I have been holding the but on a now longish string — Edinburgh isn't an accident in all this. It might have been Geneva and wasn't, or New York and wasn't, or Paris and wasn't. It might have been Warsaw and wasn't; and that is an item all by itself of which more will be heard. The point is that Edinburgh has served the documentary idea from its inception with more continuity, more common sense, more constructive effort in film societies, film clubs, cinema quarterlies and whatnot, and more of the stuff that it takes when it comes to the critical punches than any other city. If there is a centre today which deserves more than any other to be regarded as the city where our wares can ail-properly be shown and our accounts kept, it is surely this place in tne north, with its rock behind it and its fuddyduddy old sense that there might be sin itself in pursuing the shadow instead of the substance. For all this we are indebted to a few unique characters who really believed it all from the first, and simply, and by sheer strength of their own sense of service, became the conscience of an idea which could all too easily have slipped without them. Just to mark out the group and put it on this all too inadequate record, let us note down the central names of Norman Wilson, Forsyth Hardy and Charlie Oakley' Now that it is all a big, big show and everyone takes it for granted, let us note also that even in this latest stage of international coming together and being constructive and real about international coming together, documentary is still their local theirs. It has been hard work for them over the years. They were not film men and had no reason, except in their faith in others, to give their time, energy and organizing capacity to the service of those of us who drew the dough and took the bows. I hope, in this year's Festival, they have the feeling that they have matured a personal work of great and unselfish order, worth a dozen and one sentimental and uncreative excursions into international necking. For British documentary itself the occasion is especially important. It is easy to knock British documentary around at this moment and say that it looked a poor stick and a sad squirt at Brussels last year and that Roberto on the other hand is wonderful, which he certainly is. But it should be equally easy to remember, it the will is there and if the smartypants and the people we will always henceforth remember as our 'warm admirers' can think in proportion, that British documentary is still much the biggest operation in the whole international set-up. In its very size it has its special problems which should at this stage be respected and worked on : of organization, of finding pattern within an extending field, of keeping its eye on an ever more difficult but more real aesthetic ball, of renewing and refreshing its political sense in the light of new circumstances, of maintaining its original fervour in the discovery of new talents and in the provision of experimental opportunity for them. All this will appear in Edinburgh, or should, as the stuff of the world goes across the Scottish screens. It will be simple for the sideliners togoooh! aah! with Flaherty. It will be much more difficult to note that single swallows don't make a summer and that, whatever the present weather may be like, ours collectively iscertainly a summer. Therefore the meeting of the documentary people themselves, with the thrashing out of their problems, their needs and their shortcomings, is going to be one of the more important occasions at Edinburgh and in the history of the documentary development. Wright on national documentary, Elton on international documentary, Pearson on colonial documentary, Alexander on second feature documentary, Rotha on documentary's influence on feature production, Manvell on the aesthetic of documentary, have together the opportunity of bringing the whole thing into new focus and fit for the size of the privilege which national needs and international implications have brought it. They have a task of leadership to attempt more momentous than at any time before. They have the ureal new problems of peace time to face up to and definition to make of what documentary has to give in illumination of the technological, scientific, colonial, international and, in general, economic changes which are upon Lis. For presenting the documentary effort everywhere, for reminding us that documentary is not only an established medium o\~ public service but a medium continually revealing new forces and requiring new efforts, all of us in its profession must be grateful for the screen and the platform winch 1 dinburgh now so handsomely provides us. One suspects that it comes easil) to the capital of a countrv which for si\ centuries has given so much encouragement to so manv adventurers that it quite reasonably sutlers the illusion o\ being the capital of the world.