Documentary News Letter (1947-1949)

Record Details:

Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.

Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.

DOC I \U \ I ARY FILM NEWS 113 he says it kills art and means that one is serving 'a robot organization'. Karl seems equally upset that two Danish documentary directors, including Bjarne Henning-Jenson2 have decided to make commercial features, in spite of the fact that many of us find their commercial work powerful, striking and sincere. If the Roos school has its way and compels the film artists to deprive themselves of both official and commercial sponsorship, all that may be left for them to do is what a malicious critic said Swinburne did — that is, to sit in their own excrement and add to it. What the Roos school wants, in common with American big business and reactionaries all over the world, is freedom to use resources without control, privilege without reponsibility, and suckers for sponsors. The films of the documentary school, from Night Mail to A Matter of your Freedom, have their origins in the realities of the outside world. Their raw material is life. They gain both their motive power and their drama from the reciprocal pressures always to be found between people and their social, political and governmental organizations. It is therefore not only right, but inevitable that documentary looks to government for its finances, and has a very deep interest in seeing that its films meet the wants of the public whose needs have called them into existence. The documentary school finds beauty in an appeal to the mind no less than to the senses. The very clarity of good exposition is a pleasurable quality in itself. For this reason, documentary has developed an aesthetic to contain at once Hydraulics and Listen to Britain, Chants Populaires and We are the Railways. The range of documentary is as wide as literature itself. Within it, you will find the simple teaching film, the advanced scientific film report and the lyrical film poem. It is worth remembering that what Theodor Christensen calls the 'alldominating British information film' embraces Lord Siva Danced, Steps of the Ballet. Waverley Steps, Three Dawns to Sydney and Four Voices of Malay — to mention only five notable British films released since last Christmas. The Roos school wants to make the film 'an individual branch of art'. For them, film experiment is a method of finding a 'freer form of expression'. They seem more concerned with how to express themselves than with that they say. On one of the rare occasions when a government seems to have given a completely free hand to private inspiration, the result was Pan and the Girl3 a film which has taken a deal of living down, and one which is greatly inferior to the same director's The Corn is in Danger* which has its roots firmly in agricultural propaganda. For the documentary school, almost every film, from Colour Box to The Corn is in Danger, and from The Film of Denmark? to The Feeling of Hostility, is an experiment. For each subject presents new problems in shaping and expressing material so thai it may be comprehended, not only intellectually, but also with all the feeling that a work of art can evoke. If the documentary school can call up a whole host of notable and experimental films in its support, the Roos school is oddly shy of naming films. They prefer to find their support in personal witnesses rather than film titles. Having excommunicated Grierson as a deviator, or even a destroyer of true film art, they rely on Cavalcanti. Winifred Holmes, ken Lye, Irmgard Schemke and 'the bulk of cinemagoers'. I do not know the views of Irmgard Schemke. 1 do know that the Roos school have no idea at all what the bulk of cinemagoers think, feel or say. They must have introduced the cinemagoers as a bluff in the hopes that no one would call it. I do know the work of Cavalcanti, Winifred Holmes and Len Lye. Cavalcanti made his living in France by making commercial features, and his name by making Rien que les Hemes and the charming, sensitive, gay but unimportant En Rode. Grierson hired him in the middle thirties to help with the GPO film unit. His technical virtuosity is great, and everyone profited and is grateful for his skill as a craftsman, critic and teacher. Almost his only personal expedition into film making at this time, the comedy Pett and Pott, was a failure. He then worked in a general way on many films, and his contributions to the sound tracks of Night Mail and Coal Face were notable. He stayed on with the GPO film unit after Grierson had left, and was the producer of a number of excellent films, including two of the first wartime documentaries, The First Days and Men of the Lightship. Towards the end of his time with the government film unit he seemed to become disgruntled. In 1940, he left documentary for what I suppose he hoped would be the greater and more invigorating freedoms of the studios. Since then, most of his commercial films, if sensitive and tasteful, have been commonplace. Cavalcanti's most significant contributions to the art of the film have undoubtedly been made within the framework of British government sponsorship. At his best, he was a solver of problems in bringing alive the public services on the screen. Though I do not wish to pooh-pooh Winifred Holmes as a film critic, I am prepared for the Roos school to have her. Finally, Len Lye, Jorgen Roos is really cheating by introducing him at all. Lye is a New Zealander — a schoolmaster and an artist. He came to London in the early thirties with Jack Ellit, a New Zealand musician and expert on jazz. Together thej made Tusilava, an abstract film which few people saw, and fewer remember. Except for a puppet film which has never finished, Tusilava was Len Lye's only expedition into self-expression for its own sake, tusilava had no point because it had no purpose However, it is probable thai Lye's later and more creative film work had its origin here. Tusilava must tune been the first film ever to be made by drawing directly on the celluloid. It was not till Len Lye had an opportunity to use his great talents for public information that he made films of real experimental or artistic value. Colour Box and Rainbow Dance were both propaganda films for the GPO Savings Bank, and Trade Tattoo inter-dominion trade. Should Jergen Roos argue that these films prove his case, because their content is divorced from the aims of their sponsors, he must think again. All three get their inspiration directly from their subject matter. The Jorgen Roos fantasy of how Colour Box came to be made must be skotched, too. He says: 'When Lye came to his boss in the GPO and said: "I want to make a film without a camera", Cavalcanti answered: '"Well, we haven't very much to lose — go ahead." ' First of all, Grierson was Len Lye's boss, and not Cavalcanti. Secondly it was only by an effort that Grierson was able to mould both the inflexibilities of the Savings Bank, and Len Lye's artistic aspirations, so that each side could contribute to the joint affair which culminated in Colour Box. Len Lye's early films came straight out of the public service. If you would follow his influence and see where it has taken root, you will have to go to Ottawa, where it is flourishing under the benevolent but also careful sponsorship of the National Film Board of Canada. The splendid and imaginative works of Norman Mac-Caren and his colleagues are at once major contributions to the art of the cinema, and ten thousand miles away from the preciosities of the Roos school. When the film history of the last twenty-five years comes to be written, I am afraid that Jergen Roos's The Escape is likely to be dismissed as pastiche. The historian will surely look for the aesthetic, creative and dramatic roots of Danish documentary in such works as The Film of Denmark, Motherhelp Sugar. People in a House, The Corn is in Danger. A Matter of Your Freedom, Cutter H.l\, Potatoes, Generator Gas, Pay Your Taxes Gladly and The Toad6. 1 Karl Roos. Poet and documentary scriptwriter. Wrote the poetic commentary I •■ \ Matter of Your Freedom (1946), the record of the Danish underground movement. Reviewed by Winifred Holmes in Sight and Sound. Vol. 15, Wo ''0. 1948. In another article he regrets that two able Danish documentary directors 'now direct practically only commercing films' 2 Director of Ditte —Child of the Peop Those Dratted Kids, both seen private. on. I Edinburgh. '■ Documentary in Denmark, No, 61. 1945 4 Documentary in Denmark . V, > 59, 1 1'44 5 Documentary in Denmark. Wo l. i • * Respectively Documentary in Denmark. Nos. I; 25; 28; 40; 59; — ; 47; 52. 56; 68;