The Cine Technician (1939)

IlltK' ll!\ 1937 THE CINE-TECHNICI AX 57 We rose at 6.30 a.m., worked out of doors — sometimes from 11 a.m. till 5 p.m., or during the whole morning and again in the afternoon ; sometimes all day and through till after nightfall, when the dangerous drop in temperature occurs. We all had bouts of fever, which we generally overcame by a night of sweating ; except the producer, who had to endure a fortnight of malaria, a legacy from his previous tropical experiences. Facilities in a British colony are only possible by one means. Once the Colonial Office had read and approved of the adaptation of our story facilities were arranged in Africa on a most generous scale. Wherever we went, instructions from the Colonial Office preceded us, and our requests were met with courtesy and despatch. It was therefore possible, as an instance, on our vovage out to land at 9 a.m. at Takaradi (on the Gold Coast), motor 80 miles to Cape Coast, where we reported to the District Officer and shot stills of the old Portuguese castle ; then to drive back to Takaradi — taking in Elmina Castle on the way, where we shot all the necessary movie material and stills in four hours — and return to the ship by sailing time, 7 p.m. A good 10 hours' work. The following day was spent at Accra — landing by mammy-chair and surfboat — calling on the Governor, Sir Arnold Hodson, a charming man who, among many distinctions, wears no topee on a cloudy day, and pursues the strange hobby of writing and producing an English pantomime annually, which is performed exclusively by native school children. He allowed us to shoot scenes in and around his residence, formerly the Danish castle of Christiansborg. These old castles and forts of Africa's Slave Coast are magnificent buildings with a bitterly romantic history. Next day we landed at Lagos, Nigeria's chief port. With help both general and particular from many people we four set off within three days on our two-thousandmile railway journey through the country, living in a railway coach composed of a living room, bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, servant's quarters, and an observation platform. We spent a day on the banks of the Niger River at Jebba, reputed to be one of the hottest settlements in the whole continent, close to the place where the explorer Mungo Park was drowned. It was here that we first had the experience of finding our wooden number board too hot to hold in the naked hand. The climate on the coast was hot and steamy and sapped one's energy in a most unpleasant manner, but as we travelled north, inland, the heat became drier and the sky less overcast. Our coach and van were hitched on to passenger and fast goods trains, according to a very elastic schedule, and we had only to send a telegram to the next stopping place to have the very obliging railway officials change the schedule to our convenience. A remarkable amount of the goods traffic of the Nigerian railway consists of nuts ; ground, or pea, nuts transported from the south (where they grow) to the north, whence caravans convey thousands of sacks-full into the interior. And there are kola nuts, eaten as a stimulant, which are hospitably handed around as cigarettes are in Europe. They are by no means cheap ; a market basketful costs about 10/-. We often used them as gifts in return for services rendered ; and cows were used also as payment. In return for two cows and four hundred gallons of native beer (which looks like milky tea and tastes very odd) a pagan chief in the plateau country near Jos summoned 1,500 natives lor us ;it a day's notice, and staged a dance which lasted far into the night. The most expensive item of this dance was the firewood, which we needed for a bonfire, for these plateaux, 4,000 feet above sea level, are nearly treeless, and in tact resemble the more dramatic landscapes of Dartmoor, with rockshills rising out of rolling grass-land. The natives ol the plateaux are pagans (i.e. not Mohammedans) and are friendly, graceful, and nude. The men wear a sheath oi plaited straw, and the women a bunch of leaves, or a little straw seat with one leg, which hangs behind them between the buttocks. Like all the natives of Nigeria they always carry loads upon the head. From Jos we travelled on to Kano, a sprawling mud cit}' with several hundred thousand inhabitants, and the biggest market in Africa, which has been a junction for over a thousand years. Here the Emir took a keen interest in our work, and several of the younger native members of his administration service helped us most generously and intelligently in the tasks of organising crowd scenes. This district of some 2,000,000 inhabitants is ruled by the Emir, as certain provinces in India are ruled by Indian princes. We spent a week in this fascinating city, and exposed several thousand feet of film. The mud architecture here is simple and well-proportioned ; bold patterns cut in the surface of the walls distinguish the more important buildings. The interior walls of some of the rooms in the Emir's palace are painted with similar patterns in vivid colours, gold, and silver, which gleam in the dim light from narrow openings in the thick mud walls. The roofs of these mud buildings are supported on arches of wood, and the rooms are high in proportion to their floor area. A few mud houses are still in use in the European quarter outside the native city, and some of these were copied as sets in the film. The rest of our time in Nigeria was spent in and around Lagos, where the abnormal continuance of the rains was a handicap. Thus only our producer could return on the ship on which we had planned to sail home. At the last moment, so as to have a further week in Nigeria, I arranged to fly back to England ; and as the Imperial Airways' route was not yet in use for passenger traffic I took the only other route — motor barge from Lagos along the inland lagoons to Cotonou on the coast of French Dahomey ; thence by air, north, from Dahomey to Niamey on the Niger ; along the Niger to Gao (near Timbuctoo) ; a long hop across the Sahara to Laghout, an oasis south of the Atlas mountains ; Algiers ; Marseilles ; Paris ; London. Six days. The route has much to commend it. The planes are reliable, their crews efficient and cheerful. There are good hotels right across the desert, and the views over the desert are unforgettable. I reached London on the same day as Wellesley, and my entire expenses were only £15 more than his. A fortnight later the other two arrived by boat with further excellent material which they had shot during their extra week in Southern Nigeria. They had with them, moreover, a railway van full of native costumes, furniture, a crate of cactus, and a monkey. And so our production was enriched by a number of invaluable shots and a great deal of authentic detail work in settings, story points, acting, and general atmosphere, which we could never have injected into the film l>v merely hiring a gang of "experts" and working to their views second-hand.