Documentary News Letter (1942-1943)

DOCUMENTARY NEWS LETTER MAY 1942 FEATURE FILM PROPAGANDA during the first two years of war the film was making its contribution to the war effort almost exclusively through the medium of the short documentary. For the most part feature films continued to provide simple, peacetime-style entertainment and many people in the film industry appeared to be content with this situation and happy in the role of providing for cinema-goers a means of vicarious escape from the painful fact of war. The majority of film-makers, however, Felt that they were professionally equipped to play a more serious part. They did not wish simply to provide light entertainment for people engaged in a life and death struggle : they wished to make films which would themselves be weapons of war. As a consequence our screens have lately been swamped with propaganda features— films about the war from British studios which are beginning to be supplemented by Hollywood's first reactions to Pearl Harbour. We have the advantage in Britain of something ike a year's output of propaganda features based an some consideration of the problems of relating propaganda and entertainment, and it is to be toped that Hollywood will study our failures and (Successes before letting loose their own inevitable flood of war pictures. For — let us face it— 1 jur own failures outnumber our successes and • iilthough by now we have had plenty of opporf, ;unity to arrive at mature decisions the problems '.) )f the feature war film are by no means solved. ie To begin with there still exists a tendency to m pelieve that entertainment value and propaganda l. /alue must be two separate considerations. Without entertainment value a film will be a comnercial failure and therefore the mistake has 0 )ften been made of arranging for the entertaini0 nent value first and then trying to add such lr propaganda emphases as will not impair the «i ntertainment. On this line of reasoning we generally finish up with an old-fashioned thriller ncorporating odd irrelevant lines of dialogue iibout freedom, persecution, fascism ; or one of !he characters will hold up the action while he nakes a wordy and self-conscious speech about l!' democracy. Hollywood has been particularly M ;uilty of this technique and was self-consciously employing it to slip in a good word for democus acy long before America came into the war. It is h hangover from the days when gangster films !V( vere being made acceptable to public morality • ommittees by the addition of a pious peroration ibout graft-free government. The obvious weakness of this type of film is he clear division between what is regarded >y its producers as entertainment and what has e,j »een added as propaganda. The audience is over of the distinction. They see a conventional llm made according to a familiar story-formula .nd either they immediately recognise the propaganda for the awkward appendage it is or they .re suspicious of the pill which has been so mperfectly sugared. I So much for the plots which wear their propaganda pinned on them like a war-service badge, "here is another type of propaganda feature ivhich exhibits a similar weakness. This is the i|ilm with a war-time plot which obeys identically ihe same dramatic conventions as have become jraditionally associated in the cinema with j'urely fictional themes. Here the war backI round of realism and fact is subsidiary to a perlonal story of romantic adventure — often a simple love story — and the war is used only to provide a topical atmosphere. Into this category fall such films as Ships with Wings (the aircraft carrier was only a background for the old story of the reckless flyer in disgrace retrieving his reputation and the respect of the boss's daughter by giving his life for his comrades) ; Pimpernel Smith (absent-minded professor becoming the instrument of justice), and One Night in Lisbon (traditional spy melodrama). Films of this kind are bad propaganda because they present the war in absurdly romantic terms and their entertainment value is impaired by the conflict in the mind of the audience between the hard facts of real war and its glamorous embellishments in the film. Let us consider what has been achieved by the many recent films which have been specifically about the war and have not merely used it as background or made passing references to it or to underlying political and philosophical issues. Amongst the most important films in this category are 49th Parallel, The Big Blockade, One of Our Aircraft is Missing, The Day Will Dawn, The Foreman Went to France (all British), together with a big batch of American films on the Gestapo. These films take themes such as antiNazism in the occupied countries, the temperamental clash between individual democrats and fascists, the economic war against Germany, the menace of secret Nazi organisations in the United States, and seek to present all these in entertaining form. The Big Blockade was the most ambitious of them, attempting as it did the fearsome task of presenting a complete picture of economic warfare. The producers clearly felt that they had on their hands a very large propaganda pill which would need to be generously coated. The result was a sour-sweet hotch-potch, a curious compound of academics and box-office tricks, which failed to be either informative or entertaining. The plain fact was that the film had attempted too much. One of Our Aircraft is Missing and The Day Will Dawn were less pretentious, yet failed for other reasons to present a convincing picture of the experiences of British fugitives in occupied territory. These films, one felt, were the product of studio-bred imaginations. The episodes and the dialogue, gestures and glances that composed them, came not from the war but from some scenario-writer's handy guide to box-office appeal. The people in these two films were not real — and that was not simply because they were played by familiar actors, handicap though that is in this type of film. The characters were lay figures without that indefinable something in gesture or appearance that distinguishes the man from the mummer. In 49?// Parallel, however, Michael Powell did achieve something quite remarkable with familiar screen faces. Here was a film with an idea — the personal clash between individual Nazis of different types and a number of representative democrats. The idea was good as entertainment and good as a propaganda opportunity. Within the simple theme of the film, propaganda and entertainment were fused — it was the propaganda itself that was entertaining. 49th Parallel simply proves once again that the presence of an imaginative idea (that rare asset) will guarantee the success of any film whether it be for entertainment or propaganda. The Foreman Went to France, the last on our list of films about the war, is in most ways the best. The rea son for its superiority, both as entertainment and propaganda, over One of Our Aircraft is Missing is especially interesting. Both films are based upon a real war-time occurrence yet One of Our Aircraft is Missing lacks confidence in the dramatic power of the actual event and has consequently embellished it, translated it out of terms of ordinary human behaviour and tried to prove too many generalisations about occupied Holland. The film has outgrown the strength of its original anecdote. The Foreman Went to France sticks to its story and tries to stick to its human beings. The French are there all the time, not too much emphasised, not pointed out crudely as heroes or saints to prove a propaganda point, but left to move easily and naturally through the scenes as decent people with their weaknesses as well as their strengths. This surely is the way to use an entertainment medium to make propaganda for the things we are fighting for. Don't try to tell the whole story of France or Holland or Norway or Britain, but take some people and show what happens to them in a credible war situation — it may be a real situation or an imaginary one — provided it is credible that doesn't matter. The really important thing is that the people you choose should stayhuman. The public doesn't believe that the war is being fought between an army of plaster saints on our side and an army of creatures with horns and tails on the other. Outside the cinema they never meet people from either category and it is useless to make propaganda in terms of beings that exist only in the cinema. If you do so your propaganda will relate only to a cinema war and — if it has any effect at all — it will create a glamorised dream image of war which is vastly more dangerous than if you had no propaganda at all. War cannot be conducted according to the romantic traditions of behaviour which motivate conventional film scenarios. The propaganda power of realistic treatment and the inhibitions of conventional treatment are admirably demonstrated in The Next of Kin. The opening reels are cluttered up with conventional nonsense but wherever the film has to deal with situations or behaviour on which its army audiences are expert it becomes realistic, and in consequence makes first-class propaganda and firstclass entertainment. For the first time in a studiomade film we see a real battle between real soldiers. The Russians understand completely the importance in propaganda of realistic treatment and credible human beha\iour. Their biographical films of other wars still make good propaganda in this. Compare General Suvorov with Hollywood's Sergeant York. The flesh and blood of the latter story has been hidden by a lacquer of glamour and romance. It becomes simply a new novelettish adventure of Gary Cooper's. The New Teacher, a pre-war Soviet film on education, is war propaganda because it is propaganda for a country clearly worth fighting for. It is a country inhabited by people who look, laugh, complain and struggle like people, not like movie-stars. For a source both of propaganda and entertainment let the British and American studios go back to the people who are fighting this war. Let us see not only why they are fighting and how they are fighting but let us be inspired by the fact that the war does not change them — they remain human beings.