Cinema Quarterly (1934 - 1935)

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TWO PATHS TO POETRY JOHN GRIERSON The most interesting event in recent months was, for many of us, the arrival of Paul Rotha's Shipyard. I shall not pretend to review it, for I am too close to these films to worry about the particular value of this or that. What concerns me, and I hope some others, is where they are leading. In documentary we are in course of making not individual films or individual reputations, but new ways of looking at the life about us. We are bringing new material to the imagination. Movements, and schools of approach, are everything. And there is something sufficiently distinct in Rotha's work to mark it as a separate tendency: distinct at once from the romanticism of Flaherty, which all the young men have now respectfully discarded, and from the hard-boiled and certainly more academic realism of the G.P.O. group. I shall try to analyse this Rotha quality and estimate it. Forget all about Rotha's writing when you consider him as a film-maker. He is, as every student of film appreciates, our film historian; and he is the keeper of our conscience as much as the keeper of our records. On questions of film movements and film influences of the past he is an analyst of quality. As a creator of film he happens to be none of these things. The history of his subject matter does not concern him nearly so deeply as its good looks in still and tempo. Analysis of his subject matter — of the influences which affect it and the perspectives of social and other importance which attend it — is not so important to him as the general impression it gives. For lack of a better title I should call him an impressionist. The other day Clive Gardiner, the artist, was asked to do a painting of that grand machine which twists wires and makes cables. He told me afterwards that what he went for was the feeling of electricity and that in fact he " painted the shimmer of the thing." So did Monet; so did all the other impressionists; and brilliantly, as anyone who has seen the new Monet rooms in Paris will testify. Great mural stretches there are, four to the immense oval of each room, pouring into the subdued light the deep shimmer of trees and pools and waterlilies. This was impressionism, till the old tough Cezanne broke into the shimmer, teased out the forms again and gave them solid structure. No one, however, in noting the change 194