Documentary News Letter (1947-1949)

DOCUMENTARY FILM NEWS For the sources of the contemporary documentary we must look not to the interest film but to the work in America of Robert Flaherty and to the Russian cinema, which, bursting on an affrighted world, taught a young Scot, JohnGrierson, among others that the ordinary man, living and working, was in himself heroic and his work in itself exciting. So much that is valuable has been said and written about the development of the documentary film in this country — I recall in particular a lecture delivered before the Royal Society of Arts by Sir Stephen Tallents himself that I should be tedious were I to go over the ground again. Today the farmer, the cook, the doctor, the engineer, the naturalist can learn from the factual film; he can assimilate new methods and involved techniques through this visual medium ; he can learn about the behaviour of butterflies and the workings of blood transfusion ; he can learn how to make steel, how to drive a tank, even how to make short pastry. All over the country specialized audiences are grappling, helped by the instructional film, with fresh ideas and techniques. But when we come to look we see that the triumph of the instructional film is a direct result of the war we have just survived. Modern war means that unskilled men and women have to learn at speed highly skilled trades; they have to learn the handling of machinery, the working of engines of destruction : the cinema can help them. Modern warfare means that people have to be persuaded to do things contrary to their custom and their nature; they have to be persuaded to part with their children, to leave their homes, to eat unaccustomed food, to accept unaccustomed guests. The need for some instrument to perform these tasks of persuasion as well as instruction gave the cinema its chance. And, its powers once displayed, the film has held its place as a weapon of propaganda and information. We should, however, be belittling the functions of the non-fiction film in society were we to overlook a less tangible contribution. In the 'thirties one or two documentary producers began to experiment with a type of film which, though its setting was fact, permitted the intrusion of imagination into character and story. North Sea, for instance, made in 1938 by Cavalcanti and Harry Watt: this story of the ship-to-shore radio service off the north-east coast of Scotland used trawlermen and radio operators as its actors, but in its shaping of plot allowed itself an element of fiction. Extraordinary things were to proceed, during the war, from this marriage of fact and imagination : Target for Tonight, Western Approaches, Fires Were Started, Coastal Command, to name a few: films with not only truth, not only visual beauty, but also human warmth. The documentary film in this country has not always been free of pedantry. But there was no pedantry in the portraits of the airmen in Target for Tonight, none in the touching conversation piece in Fires Were Started, with the firemen singing 'One man went to mow' while they wait for the alarm call. And suddenly the audience which watched these reflections, these reconstructions rather, of the life around it — suddenly the audience was united in a new understanding and sympathy. Suddenly we were taken back to those days of the cinema's innocence when a good film was a good film for everybody. And here, in my opinion, was the triumph of the cinema in war-time. Education for a limited object is important: education for the professions or the crafts. It is important to know about silage and smoke abatement ; it may even be important to know how to make short pastry. Education is the skeleton of life: without it society collapses. But society, like the human being, cannot persist as a skeleton only. The story-documentaries made in this country during the war brought into the cinema the living breath. All this — the documentary film in wartime, the instruction in new techniques of living, the crystallization of national sentiment in the group of fiction-documentaries, the growth in short of what Grierson called 'the creative treatment of actuality' — is our common experience. But in the age of speed even the war years recede from memory, dwindling and fading like a view seen from the last coach of a train; meanwhile a new generation grows up to which our common experience has become dead history. I said just now that the majority of those who go to the cinema have never seen a silent film. Millions today in this country will never have heard of Target for Tonight. Target for Tonight was made in 1941, and in the lightning life of the cinema seven years is a long time. But the new cinema-generation are going to the films in greater numbers, probably, than their parents before them. The cinema has become a habit with children. They go, of course, to the children's matinees, where they see pieces of varying quality. Some of the new entertainment films being made for child audiences are very good: I do not hope to see a more charming story of adventure than Bush Christmas. The residue from the past, on the other hand, is sometimes deplorable: though I am not of the party which believes that the cowboys-and-Indians piece will necessarily breed a race of hooligans. A riskier part in moral education, I fancy, is played by the crude films of urban violence which are to be seen in cinemas for adults : films in which every argument is settled with an automatic, and making an arrest means shooting a man dead. The whole question of the attendance of children at cinemas is at present the subject of a Government inquiry. In the meantime the schools are concerning themselves with the idea of turning the weapon of the cinema to their own use. The employment of the film as an instrument of education within the school has been a matter of slow growth in this country'. The number of projectors in school use even so lately as 1946 was comparatively small: according to one estimate, seventeen hundred silent projectors and four hundred sound projectors: according to another, a total of three thousand of all types. (Whether the disparity in the estimates is to be accounted for by the secrecy of the schools, or by the deficient mathematical education of the inquirers, I am not prepared to say.) America is far ahead of us here : in Chicago alone there are a thousand school film projectors, in New York eleven hundred. But with the setting up of the National Committee for Visual Aids in Education a new era has, presumably, begun. Teaching films and films strips are produced, scrutinized and used in increasing numbers : geography films, films about natural history and the crafts. Obviously this is laudable, since most children learn more easily through their eyes than through their ears; and I stand selfcondemned as a reactionary when I say that, as an obstinately literary type, I am thankful that my formal education is over. But even my kind might have benefited by a little visual aid in, say, geography, where the use of the film as an adjunct to the text-book might serve to correct, for example, the belief, common in my youth, that the population of modern Athens went about in white nightdresses, caught, rather unbecomingly for the full figure, high round the chest. The cinema, then, is taking its place in laying the foundations of education. Yet I cannot help feeling that the film in schools has other functions than to impart the principles of, say, chemistry. If we look back at the life of the other arts — for I persist in regarding the cinema as an art — we find that they existed for themselves before they were put to alien practical uses. Or rather I should say that they had their origin in humane and religious needs before they became didactic instruments. Man wrote poetry before he began to use language as a means of teaching algebra. The development of the cinema has been so sudden that, almost before it has established its right to existence for its own sake, we are putting it to practical uses. Well, it is to the good that the films should be an instrument in a society which needs more and more instruments. But 1 think we should not forget that, even w ithin the circle of education, the cinema has a right to be looked at for itself. We use drawing to teach accuracy of eye, we use language to teach geography. But we also teach literature : in our more reckless moods we even teach art. It is useless to complain of the moral and social ill-effects of the cinema if we do not ever suggest to children in the schools, to the new generation of audiences, that there are good films and bad, just as there are good books and bad. In other w ords I should like to see others follow the example of certain enterprising and enlightened continued on page 12