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You are not asked to seek difficulty for the sake of difficulty or to despise the good subjects which lie to hand. Even the easier and more romantic subjects (spring on the hills, for example) will bear a new and fresh description. The main point is that amateurs should not be ashamed of the subjects which educational or industrial or civic or other propaganda organisations are liable to present to them. It is good to remember that Leonardo, Michelangelo, and El Greco were all paid propagandists.
A consequence of this argument is that purposive amateurs should devote themselves to documentary and be done with it. That is where the educational and propaganda work lies; and, as already suggested, that is where amateur work is likely to find its highest level.
For the sake of convenience it is good to remember the main divisions of documentary work. There are three schools. The first is the newsreel or popular journalist school. It calls its pictures " interest" pictures, because it only takes from the subject what it knows (and any fool will agree) to be interesting. If in the village of Cuckold's Green the parson's whiskers are six inches longer than any other parson's, and the village idiot can waggle his ears faster and wider than any other village idiot, that is its sufficient gambit for a description of English village life. In its more soulful moments it takes to scenics and conjures ham and egg effects from sunsets: red filter, F8 or thereabouts. The second school is the Flaherty school, a deeper affair altogether. It is exotic in its material. It is concerned with native life, native manners, native philosophies, but only with natives who wander on halcyon isles or battle against epic horizons. It does not regard the unemployed of Coatbridge as natives. If it impinges on the modern school it is in recherche du temps perdu. It will teach you all you need to know about shooting the simpler communities, and will tell you better than any how to make natural phenomena drape themselves into a continuing story. The third school is represented by Wertov and Turin in Russia, Ruttman in Germany, Ivens in Holland, and by the E.M.B. group and Rotha in Britain. It deals entirely with industrial and modern material. All its films are made under educational or propaganda auspices, and are so financed. Its method of treatment varies. It is sometimes impressionist, sometimes symphonic, sometimes analytical; but it avoids both the personal story and the discursive. It is concerned to build up mass descriptions and build a theme out of its sequence of mass descriptions. On the technical side it deals in tempos, rhythms, images. Deprived of the journalistic reference of the newsreel method and the romantic appeal of the Flaherty method, it is concerned to find the sociological implications of its subject matter.
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