Cinema Quarterly (1934 - 1935)

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silence has not caused the studios of the world to stagnate. Is it not that Hollywood and Elstree are now technically on a par with France, Germany and Russia ? I think this factor is the one which makes the Continental film seem less remarkable than it did three years ago. Technically the scores are level. The battle is won on content. And it now appears that novelettes are written in France and Germany, just as they are in America and England. J. S. Fairfax-Jones. B.B.C.— THE VOICE OF BRITAIN Production: G.P.O. Film Unit. Direction: John Grierson, Stuart Legg. It would have been easy for a film of the B.B.C. to be a joyless jumble of dull mechanical explanation, self-conscious programme picturization, and solemn sermon on policy. The G.P.O. film is admittedly diverse ; but not only is there a plan behind the diversity but an individual approach which is established and maintained. The film dramatizes its material but humanizes it as well, so that its different compartments have vitality and the whole has unity. Its content may be described as a chronicle of a day's broadcasting in Britain, although it is hardly as naive as that might suggest. Certainly it starts with an early morning service conducted by the Rev. Dick Sheppard, but its independent character is immediately established as the camera is released to build up with a few quick strokes the placid picture of a listening countryside. The film is always more of an illumination than a summary, and as it reviews the activities at Broadcasting House — routine, preparation, rehearsal, performance — we are not aware of the time-table as the only link but feel drawn into the drama. There is, for example, the S.O.S. message for the mate of a Scottish drifter informing him that his mother is lying dangerously ill at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, which we hear broadcast in the impersonal detached voice of the announcer, and then watch being picked up by the vessel at sea, the message meanwhile rippling on in gently echoed fragments. Again, there is the episode of the two-minute delay in the regional link-up, caused by a Highland village concert running late — an episode which a lively camera and a sensitive microphone, quickly establishing the character of the regional centres, make dramatic and moving. It is this seeing eye of the film which is its outstanding virtue. It operates everywhere, inside Broadcasting House as well as outside, ranging the panorama of a listening Britain. Only in the children's hour sequence is it oddly clouded with artificiality. Towards the end of the film come the faces of the representative great men — the politicians, kept silent; Wells, Chesterton, Shaw, Low, and Priestley heard in characteristic phrase. 237