The Cine Technician (1939)

Dec. -Jan., l(.)37-8 T HE CI N E-TECHNICl A N L68 to go on originally was the newsreel. There the story was in the ready-made interest of the material. We have set ourselves the more laborious task of cutting off slices of industrial, social and everyday life and trying to make that hitherto unpromising material look sufficiently like a story to carry people's interest. Why did we do this? Why not concentrate on the exciting things and be sure of making the theatres and making money, and so forth and so on, as per W ardour Street? The answer is: 1. we were more interested in these seemingly dull things; 2, we were not necessarily interested in making the theatres, when we knew that in the halls of the country there was more seating capacity than there was inside the circuits ; 3, we were not all of us interested in making money. Why again? Because some of us started out to be instructors of the citizenry. As Michael Arlen once said of his writing we may not be good teachers, hut we have at least the fortune to be born ones. So we take a particular pleasure in telling the citizenry, as best we can. how their community works. We find the film an excellent medium for doing so and, in fact, a necessary medium for doing so. You can only bring the complicated processes of the community alive in a medium which allows for both simplification and drama. And film does that. It is also a magnificent carrier. It not only dramatises the description and the exhortation, the lesson and the lecture, but it can shoot them out to every lecture room in the country. There are more than a hundred thousand of them. This explains why we have plenty to do and a vast field to work in, and why, though we like playing the Carlton and the New Gallery and are always privileged when we play the film societies, we do not depend on them. Of late, we have a minority movement in our midst which does not share these views about theatre circulation. As distinct from the old sociological guard, it has a hankering for the bright lights and says — sensibly enough — Why avoid an audience of so many millions? Why not make our documentaries just a little more exciting (though a little more superficial), a little more popular (though a little more evanescent), edge them in with the Garbos and put them on a strong commercial footing? Well, it depends on what you consider your job to be. The mood of the vast majority of theatres is entertainment, release, and essential frivolity, and why not!' It is the mood in which most of us go to the vast majority of cinemas, and again, why not'? To meet the terms of that mood means — and every technician knows itreducing every item on the programme to entertainment, release and essential frivolity. Exceptions are possible, but they prove the rule. I have watched March of Time struggle to get its commentary on national and international affairs into theatre terms and I know what a laborious and sacrificial struggle it is. First the subject has, in itself, to be exciting; and that means concentrating on battles and bombs or one or other of the more celebrated forms of hell and havoc. Or it must be a novelty. Or it has, necessarily, to have the elements of controversy. In fact, like mass journalism the world over. By the time a recipe has been worked out which will capture the ordinary citizen in terms of his theatre mood, many important subjects have been eliminated. We argue as follows. You have only to catch the same people in a different mood (say the mood in which you are reading this article) to make these other important subjects possible. Where to get them ? In the specialised theatres and in the hundred thousand lecture halls of what is railed the non-theatrical distribution world. In [act one necessary ball ol our work has been to build up that circulation. It runs at the moment to ten million pi p a year. It will run to twenty million presently. This is not to say that we deplore the minority viewpoint which hankers lor the theatres. The March ot Time has done valuable work not only lor entertainment hut lor public education. It has raised t he status oi the newsreel to the responsible position enjoyed by the best ot our popular papers. And there is room lor more work ot this kind in the section of the programme Kit over for the interest shorts and the second features. But, as 1 see it, the theatre documentaries will not be able to get away from the theatre conditions they have sought. They will have to cultivate the art of amusement; they will be unable to ignore the immediate, attractions of hokum; and they will lor the most part be limited in their themes to the stuff of excitement. As a rule. D. F. Taylor and Alexander Shaw have gone from Strand Films to make Conquest of the Air for Korda ; and we shall see presently how they have come to terms with this new problem. However they succeed in this case, there is nothing to prevent the development of a valuable second feature type, based on fact and building it dramatic quality on documentary lines. It is significent, however, that wherever such a type has succeeded in the past it has mostly been when the film dealt with one or other of the Services, where war and accoutrements thereof added substance to the factual description, or where death and disaster stalked behind the story. Our Island XhIidii is an example ot that to-daj . I cannot think of an exception. Flaherty's Xanook, Aran and Eh pliant Boy had these elements and succeeded. Moana, as beautiful a film as any, had none of them and failed. Berlin, for all its quality, failed for similar reasons in the commercial houses. BBC. Tin Voice of Britain gol by, but just; more through the presence ol Henry Hall and other B.B.C. celebrities than through its account of a public service. Son// of Ceylon, a better and deeper film than any of them excepting always Flaherty — never had a look in. nor did we expect it to. Expect, then, a documentary future among the second features, but within limits and mosth military. Similarly the future among the interest films will be strictly limited by the nature of the market and the size of it. Two feature programmes do not now, when a newsreel or cartoon or a March of Time have been added, allow for much else. And even then the market is flooded with American novelty shorts which are sometimes good and always cheap. Showmen, who tor the most part regard the interest as .i fill-up, will naturally prefer a short which is given away with the feature to one they have to pay for. There are two hopes for the documentary film from the new Films Act. lie is already promised five per cent., which work out at lo seconds every hundred minutes, but with a bit ot pushing he expects to gel tell per cent. His second hope is in the development ot intelligent showmanship throughout the country : the growth of a new generation of showmen who, always within the terms of entertainment, will see the value of a subject which tries to go just a little deeper than the others. Already we have had a great deal to be thankful lor in this direction. We have had a great backing from the newspaper critics and showmen like Earl St. John Eckman, Arthur Jarrett and Sidney Bernstein have given [Continued on page ij<>