The Cine Technician (1938-1939)

76 T U E C T N E T E C II N I C I A N September-October, L936 DOCUMENTARY FILMS dth. T H E A T R E I HAVE often been told by my friends in the studios that, were it not for the fact that people can see some of our films for nothing, we should go out of business tomorrow. The ordinary public, they say, would never pay to see a documentary. I have always been surprised that such opinions should occasionally be held, since whatever else you may think about documentary, it does penetrate the theatres pretty widely. It is worth remembering that, though the word "documentary" was only invented in about 1925, the idea of documentary, that is the screen interpretation of things as they are, rather than a fictional interpretation, has been common in the cinema from the beginning. The earliest box-office successes somewhere in 1898 were simple pictures of streets and traffic and trains. So powerful was the effect of a train coming towards the camera that it is said that people left their seats in panic. Not very long afterwards, the news reel developed and kept alive a taste for factual presentation. But by 1917 the fiction film had secured almost an absolute hold on the cinemas. Nevertheless, a few imaginative men in America saw in the film something more than a means to present slapstick comedy and sexual entanglement. James Cruze in his Covered Wagon subordinated a personal story to the epic struggle of the wagon trail across America. John Ford took for his hero a railway when he made The Iron Horse. In England, "Bruce Woolfe reconstructed battles of the War. He turned his attention to the scientific film, and produced his famous Secrets of Nature series. Robert Flaherty, working alone, made Nanook of the North. These early docu [Coi4itesy : Strand Film Co., Ltd. mentaries were not tendencious. On the whole they did not attempt to influence public opinion. Russia was faced with the problem of interpreting to her people the new society which she was building. She began to use the film not only as a medium of entertainment but also as a medium of education and propaganda. Turin made the film Turksib, which not only described the building of a railway, but also interpreted its use to the people it was going to serve. From that time the documentary film became associated with propagating not only information, but ideas and points of view. A little later Sir Stephen Tallents, secretary of the Empire Marketing Board, faced with the problem of bringing alive the Empire to its people, also turned to film. In 1929 John Grierson made Drifters for the E.M.B. Drifters was also important because it was second feature in length and not a short. Following this success, the E.M.B. turned seriously to films and within a year or so produced the "Imperial Six." These were short films distributed by Ideal. They were a public success and included Industrial Britain by Grierson and Flaherty, Country Comes to Town (Wright) and Upstream (Elton). These films, which really established the documentary movement in England, were all designed for and circulated in the theatres. They showed once and for all that films about industry and commerce, imaginatively treated, could hold their own beside the typical entertainment short of the day. In spite of success in the theatres it was clear that not all films of value could be handled in this way, either because of their propaganda content or because of their