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lEWS LEHER
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DOCUMENTARY — THE CREATIVE INTERPRETATION OF REALITY
VOL 2 No 1 PUBLISHED MONTHLY BY FILM CENTRE 34 SOHO SQUARE LONDON W1 FOURPENCE
1 NOTES OF THE MONTH
3 "SECRETS" 1919-1940
hy Mary Field 5 "secrets of life"
List of the Series
7 FILMS OF the month
The Great Dictator Our Town
8 DOCUMENTARY BOOKINGS FOR JANUARY
9 NEW DOCUMENTARY FILMS 10 FRANK PERCY SMITH
by Grahame Tharp
12 MASS OBSERVERS
by Ewart Hodgson
13 FILM SOCIETY NEWS
13 CORRESPONDENCE
14 BOOK REVIEW
14 FILMS IN MEXICO
15 NEWS FROM CANADA
16 FANTASIA
Review of Disney's Cinesymphoi
18 FILM LIBRARIES
Bruce Woolfe
BRUCE WOOLFE wiU always be remembered as the man to whose initiative we owe the unbroken series of Secrets of Nature films of which 1940 marked the twenty-first anniversary. It would be impertinent for us to recapitulate for D.N.L. readers the educational — let alone the aesthetic — value of the series. These films, with the aid of Percy Smith's greenhouseFull of gadgets, have revealed to us, in a manner possible by no other medium than the film, the secret and beautiful pattern of natural growth, the terrifying and inevitable cruelty of the biological pattern ; they have increased our knowledge together svith our sense of wonderment ; and often enough they have pointed a moral (not with Mr. Emmett's assistance) more coni'incing and at times more poetical than that of a fable by La Fontaine. The Secrets of Nature (now called Secrets of Life) films, from the first to tfie last, are still available to schools and
universities all over the world. So too are a number of strictly educational films of which The Amceba and the Sea Horse are probably the most famous. As Mary Field in another page of this issue points out, Bruce Woolfe's services to British Films are by no means confined to the Secrets of Nature series. For many years he was virtually the only pioneer, the sole patron, of a truly British film industry strugghng slowly out of a cosmopolitan and by no means entirely honest tangle of fortune hunters, disappointed journalists, financial manipulators and the like. But the list of those who subscribed to a presentation salver given to him at a recent lunch shows that his work is not unhonoured by men of endeavour and intelligence. It might well be claimed that, on the merits of Secrets of Life alone (and particularly because of their immense prestige value abroad), a knighthood should be the least that the nation should bestow on him.