Film and Radio Guide (Oct 1945-Jun 1946)

36 FILM AND RADIO GUIDE Volume XII, No. 1 lating them to the wider social and political scene. We are getting nearer to the documentary idea when we consider “The March of Time.” This exciting series, of international repute, might be described as “Newsreel Plus.” It is a form of film journalism, reporting world events and discussing their reasons and causes. The technique employed is slick and dramatic and subtlety is avoided. The commentator almost shouts his words at the audience. Loud music fills in any gaps. “The March of Time” is more exciting, and far more satisfying, than the newsreel because it takes a subject and discusses it from several viewpoints. It lacks the fundamental social analysis of the best documentary films, but it reports and interprets the events of history in an intelligent and stimulating way. I think, however, that it is often unsatisfying because it fails to get at the real roots of events. It digs below the surface but never quite deep enough. Recently it made a film on the Negro problem in America. So far as it went, it was a courageous effort. It unreservedly condemned race hatred and quoted the views of many people and organizations fighting for equality between Negroes and white people. But it ignored completely the American trade unions, where there is no color bar, and where Negroes, who work side by side with white workers in the factories, are freely elected as union officials. The film failed to show the economic reasons underlying race discrimination. In short, the film was good reporting but poor analysis. Nevertheless, “The March of Time” has done a consistently good job in bringing alive world events. It has exposed the rot Ralph Bond tenness of the Fascist regime in the countries to which it has spread, recorded the democratic achievements of countries like Sweden, dramatized the resistance movements in Europe, reported and analyzed the naval war in the Pacific and the land war in Burma. It has taken the routine events of Peace and War and fashioned them into exciting screen material. I have described “The March of Time” as something half-way between the newsreel and the documentary film. The word documentary has been used to describe many types of film — for instance, the scientific, the instructional, the educational. The documentary technique has been employed to make hundreds of training and instructional films, designed to make people, whether in civilian occupations or in the Army, more efficient at their jobs. You may think the making of these films is simple and easy, but they require much skill and imagination. If, for instance, we are asked to make a film showing how to thatch a corn stack, we must not be content to show only the technique employed by the thatcher. We must infuse into the film the rhythm of work. It is a quality that is never found in textbooks because it cannot be described in words. But it can be shown on the screen, and a film director must know how to reveal this quality with his camera. The great advantage of the film over other means of expression is precisely this ability to penetrate beyond its foreground subject and reveal a new and deeper dimension in an event, a person, or a method of work. From its inception documentary has been concerned with education in the widest sense of the word. Documentary producers are also propagandists, anxious to use the film for progressive purposes. They use the phrase “bringing alive” not in the sense of putting a series of photographs on the screen, but with the purpose of making our audiences more aware of what they must do to achieve changes they desire. The real world and real people are the raw material of the documentary film. I have just seen a film about child delinquency in Scotland. It is called “Children of the City.” It shows what happens to a group of children who are arrested for breaking into a shop and stealing. One of the children is put under the care of a probation officer, another is sent to a reformatory, and the third to a child welfare clinic where he receives expert psychological treatment. What makes the film “come alive” is its insistence that such things as juvenile crime will occur so long as we have slums and housing conditions not fit for human beings to live in. No one seeing this film could arrive at any other opinion than that probation officers and reformatories are not the real solution to juvenile delinquencv, however sympathetic