Documentary News Letter (1942-1943)

DOCUMENTARY NEWS LETTER FEBRUARY 1942 THE LAND By RICHARD GRIFFITH D. N. L. is glad to publish this review of Robert Flaherty's film The Land. Reproduced by courtesy of the National Board of Review Magazine of U.S.A. The Land: Production: The Agricultural Administration of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Direction and Narration: Robert J. Flaherty. Commentary: Written by Russell Lord. Music: Richard Arnell. pare lorentz called Robert J. Flaherty "a wandering poet", and it is a simpler and more beautiful description than any of the encomiums the critics have thought up. There is the grace of poetry on everything he has done from Nanook to Elephant Boy, and of all the screen's masterpieces these films are freshest and most alive when seen today. He has been a wanderer in time as well as in space, for the societies and customs he has filmed were one and all left over from the world's primeval past. But now the fascinating arc of his camera's voyage of discovery has swung full circle and Flaherty brings us a film of his own country— the United States. More specifically it is about the land on which that country is built, and which has seemed in the past decade to be falling away beneath us. For The Land is that new kind of documentary which other men have built on the Flaherty form, which does not merely lyrically celebrate a way of life marshals facts about it, raises issues, dramatises arguments pro and con. Like The River, the new picture is a sort of government report on the state of the union — but how much more dramatic, how much closer to us. than any written report can ever be! It is beginning to seem, in fact, that documentary is the new democratic art of our time, a propagandist art, perhaps, but backing up its persuasion by argument and statistics and the consciences of its enthusiastic makers. It will seem a pity to some that Flaherty, in dropping his old form and adopting the i.ew, should have to begin on material which previous films have made familiar. Lorentz's pioneering Plow that Broke the Plains, and his masterpiece. The River, have told us before what wind and un and wasteful greed have done to the soil of our country. The Grapes of Wrath has dramatised with heartbreaking power the tragic fate of the thousands of farmers dispossessed by erosion and forced into the serfdom of day labour on the great fruit and vegetable farms of California. A hundred films (it seems) have shown man sacrificed to the juggernaut of the machine. So the movies have made words like erosion, sharecropping, and technological unemployment come to life for us before. Now Flaherty does the same job over again, and he has to treat all three subjects at once, so that the film falls abruptly into three parts, with a brief, unemphatic coda which tries, not ver> successfully , to show what the government is doing to check erosion, stabilise farm prices, and put the farmer himself back on the land he owns. In short, the picture lacks that wholeness and gradual building toward a climax which have hitherto contributed to the pleasure of seeing a Flaherty film. This is a fractured film, its skeleton is awry, the bones stick out through the skin. But I think Flaherty meant it that way. Edith Sitwell in her poems, Stravinsky in his music, deliberately adopted a jagged, staccato form to express the confusion and distress of their vision of the modern world. And Flaherty, travelling through his own country for the first time in many years, forsakes the graceful smoothness of his "primitive" films for a form which suggests the horror of his broken journey. "Here we saw this," he says, and passes on, but not indifferently. If ever there was a personal film, this is it. It is a cry, a groan ; it has for me the terrible simplicity of the Book of Common Prayer, or of the Book of Job, which Flaherty quotes in the commentary. "If my land cry against me. or that the furrows likewise thereof complain ; I et thistles grow instead of wheat, and cockle instead of barley." The images are equally as beautiful and near and part of common experience. Flaherty's relentless camera. Helen Van Dongen's editing (her part in the film is a great and important one) make a machine cutting corn into The Machine, cutting lives. And we see those lives, cast off, broken down by the roadside, in the eyes which one starving woman turns into the camera. There is a dulled animal curiosity in those eves, and some pain because she is squinting agamst the sun, but hardly anything human any more. A man who brings his camera to such sights emerges not the same. It is hardly strange that the film is little more than a cry of pain, that Flaherty cannot tell us what to do to help, can only shout at us at the end of the film to do something. To many people the tragic beauty of The Land will not be sufficient to compensate for the fact that it provides no blueprint. But I have been thinking for a long time that films should pose the problem and leave it in the lap of the audience, for it is we who must answer for our lives, not our teachers, not our artists. And I say now that this film is important and perhaps great because it means that Flaherty in the fullness of his years has come back into the modern world, to work alongside the rest of us. All his films and his filmmaking have been a timeless escape from the terrible vision he thrusts at us here. But for him who is joined to all the living, there is hope. VICTORY IN THE WEST An article abstracted by a correspondent in the New World from a German brochure on the Nazi film Victory in the West. 01 k ton respondent writes: "The astonishing point is that the German thinking contains so much of the old European preoccupation with aesthetics. That is to say, that in spite of their overt emphasis on activism, the manner of thought underlying the article is still non-activist. For example. note how the writer thinks in terms of counterpoint (an old non-activist conception surely) and the nature of such images as 'Landscape of Sombre Beauty', "Landscape . . . Ravaged by Guns', 'Darkness, Light . . .', and 'This is Goya". The images are not functional in progress towards a result but mark time in the atmospheric light of the old order. I confess I am a trifle surprised. For my part I would say — if this article is to be generalised from -that the Nazi mind is not as tough as it pretends to be and there is still room for better barbarians than they. In other words. there is still hope for the more savage English." "Art? — who cares, we want reality in our war films, hard, naked reality!" That is what the German soldier says. First of all, let us define that vague term, "art". Some of us seem to believe that art is a sort of little white lie, a kind of attractive bluff. And indeed they might well be right about it when they measure art by the mendacious insincerities which use the label. But a true poet is no soft-mouth, a true artist is no rosy-glass painter. He is a realist — more concentrated, less accidental than reality itself. And so is the film man who wants to show a living picture of this war, a picture which shows the true spirit of our age. "You get no documentary by joining together documentary stills. You get no history by joining together historical events. It is order, the showing up of relations which turns chronology into history. And thus it is the will, the idea behind the film, which turns dead celluloid into a living documentary. To do this the film director must be a poet. "There is still another point where the war documentary touches upon the basic elements of artistic creativity. Art requires the utmost unreserved devotion — the sort of devotion which was required of the men who made this film — the devotion of the soldier who stakes his life to get things done. Thus life and art become one in the narrow borderland of death. A pictorial chronology of the war was not enough. A documental} must look at the bitter face of reality, without flinching, but only the artistic concentration of the material, the montage of the many hundred thousand metres of exposed film. could give that supreme reality that was demanded. And he who has seen this finished film will never make the silly statement that art is a lesser truth than reality. "A poetical report of the war holds more truth than a war diary; a poetically edited film raises its truth from the level of conglomerated accidents to that of an essential truth. It is in this sense that the army documentary has grown into a work of art. It contains as big a slice of reality as a newsreel, and it is bigger than any newsreel because it includes the enemy's point of view so as to give a total view of the whole situation. " thus the army documentary combines hard realism with creative editing and sweeping music. There is the infantry theme 'marching, marching' accompanied by close-ups of marching feet, advancing, advancing, crusted with dust, hut advancing. And then counterpoint breaks in with another theme, and we dissolve into other feet, marching too, but tired, in torn boots — prisoners' boots. And thus the other themes are built — weariness, dust, battle, landscapes of a sombre beauty, landscapes mown down and ravaged bv guns: panzer attacks at night, the darkness lit by burning enemy tanks, this is Goya the war seen through an artist's eyes the noble cathedral of Rouen, standing upright over the burning town; or the Maginot line with its criss-cross pattern, ornaments of light and shade, all of it stressed by Windt's score which frees film music from its rdle of subservience. Picture and sound are equal partners, a comradeship of war on the