Documentary News Letter (1942-1943)

DOCUMENTARY NEWSLETTER! CON II NTS \I STERI1 V? NO! ES Ol I HI MON I H INDI \ \ si COND CHAN< I MORI SI Hi (Ol Ml MS by Oliver Bell i.s.x. FILM NEI DS NEVi DOCl MENTARY 1 II Ms W I II \\ 1 OUR I ROUBLES Too! by Mary Loser FILM SOCIETY NEWS -by R. S. Miles VOL 3 NO 4 PUBLISHED MONTHLY BY FILM CENTRE 34 SOHO SQL ARE LONDON Wl AUSTERITY ? dn the 21st March, the 931st day of the war, in a West End food ;hop, two women stopped at the vegetable counter and asked the jrice of the French beans. The man said, "Seven and six a pound, vladam." One woman turned to the other and said, "It's incredible." The shopman said, "Yes it is, isn't it. Last week they were twentylye shillings a pound." And so with the new French beans and the spring of the third /ear of the war, a great call goes out from our various leaders, ">ig and small, for a greater war effort. Austerity — urgency and all hings nasty. (Johnson put away the brandy — tell the girl in the spare room to ;et out— and lay out my hair shirt.) The one thing that seems to have missed them is that it is difficult o be urgent unless you have some pretty solid idea to be urgent ibout. If you are urgent just for the sake of being urgent, it's like i broody hen sitting on a nest with china eggs in it. What's the good )f being austere unless you have to. All this business of scourging nd hair shirts, deliberately not eating, sleeping in a stone cell .eems to be very teutonic. At least it is the kind of thing that the Herman leaders recommend for the German people. There is quite certainly a lack of urgency in this country, but it omes from a people who have been mobilised for over two and half years, and even now do not feel that they are really involved n the war. The people of Britain are most likely the most grown-up people n the world. Everything that has happened to a people has happened o them and they know by experience what is right and what is vrong. Everywhere people are talking. A soldier says, "The guns are >ut too close together and so when we are firing on a traverse, the rew of B gun have to leave their gun while A gun fires— they'd >e blown off if they didn't." A woman in an aircraft factory says, The owners of the factory take 1\ per cent on all wages earned, "here are twenty thousand people in the factory. Say the average rage is five pounds a week, that means the employers rake in 7.500 a week profit on their employees." Everywhere people are complaining about the way the war is un. This most likely happens in any country at war — because war anyway so appallingly inefficient— but if you have a people who now and believe in what they are fighting for, they will get over he difficulties. Continually since the war started the country has been fed with series of slogans of one kind or another which are supposed to interest the people in the war— to give them inspiration to fight and endure. Does anyone think that these mature English people are going to give everything (including their lives) for politicians' catch phrases? The answer is obviously— No. The British people can and have won more difficult battles than this one— and they are still the only people the Germans are afraid of. But the old ideas they fought for are worn out. Telling people to be austere and urgent, giving them slogans, is not going to make them fight. If they have something to fight for they will soon become urgent and make their own slogans — as the people of Russia have done. Obviously high-powered propaganda coming from every source of information is going to cover up the truth to a certain extent, but surely this is not the kind of thing we are working for. It's not what we are supposed to be fighting for anyway. The greatest job of propaganda would be to put our own country in order. Conscript every man and woman in the country. Conscript all land, all raw materials. Conscript all means of production. Two weeks ago in Sheffield outside a smart hotel were 73 cars. Inside there was a very good dinner for lO.v. del. Outside again were streams of factory workers, on the way home, carrying newspapers with a speech on austerity. Can anyone in their right minds think that when those factory workers go on the job in the morning — these people who have been doing an eleven-hour, six-day week for two years or more — can anyone believe that they will start their machines more determinedly next morning. The amazing thing is that the people who have done so much with so little encouragement still stick at it. They dig up a million allotments when asked to, and they still see people around them who have all the food of all the kinds they want. They willingly wait patiently in queues — Service people stand willingly for a twelvehour train journey — they accept the loss of husbands and brothers at sea, and they still see a mass of private cars around them. They see a thousand breaches of decency, a thousand costly mistakes, and still they keep on. The apparent strategy of the war over the last year, as fai as Britain itself is concerned, seems to be not unlike that of the first year of the war. The Germans evidently believe that a democracy will not move unless it has to. That if a country is held in a state of emergency for too long, it will fall to pieces internally. They were right about France, but they have been wrong about Britain. First the people were more mature and more stable than the French, and secondly Russia's fight gave them inspiration at the most dangerous moment. But even so, if the Germans apply the ■"lease