Documentary News Letter (1942-1943)

DOCUMENTARY NEWS LETTER MAY 1942 This is Colour. Production: Strand Films for Imperial Chemical Industries. Producer: Basil Wright. Location Direction: Jack Ellitt. Camera: Jack Cardiff. Sound Track: Richard Addinsell. Dylan Thomas. Marjorie Fielding, Joseph MacLeod, Valentine Dyall. Made in Technicolor. Subject: The history, production and use of British dyes. Treatment: This film is a sight for sore eyes. In a world which war is making drabber every day, with its camouflage, its khaki and its rationing of paint and wrappings, This is Colour gives us seventeen minutes of pure visual pleasure. The treatment fortunately is academic, thus coordinating what might have easily turned out to be a colour riot. It first discusses colour in general terms of landscape, of prisms, of sunlight and of a red rose in the moonlight. The discovery of new dyeing methods leads us on to experiments with dyes and then to their manufacture. In a superbly mysterious sequence, with the camera moving slowly across the dark paraphernalia of the dye factory with its flamboyant splashes of colour, we see the dyes being prepared and applied. The rollers turn, placing colour upon pattern and colour upon colour, reeling out yards of gaiety. So far the film has swung along, now it stops. A gabbling voice endeavours to review, in too neat poetry, the uses of colour in the world to-day. Scarlet tooth-brush is followed by green hot-water bottle, bookjackets by window curtains. This sequence is not only jarring, it also shows up one of the great deficiencies of the use of colour in film. The coloured image lingers in the eye for much longer than the black and white, and quick cutting produces an irritating blur. ~ it as if aware of this coloured hiccough, the film makes up for it by ending superbly. A voice says: "Now let all the colours dance", and the last sequence is a beautifully conceived movement of colour in abstract shapes. Poetry, movement and colour combine to enchant the eye and ear. Propaganda Value. Perhaps exports are not of such vital importance nowadays. If this is so, the march of events have left the vital propaganda message of this film behind. But it still remains a good film and does its job superbly well. Mobile Engineers. Production: Strand Film Co. Producer: Donald Taylor. Director: Michael Gordon. Camera: Bernard Browne. Script and Commentary: Reg. Groves. Played and spoken by men of the National Industrial Mobile Squad. M.O.I. 5 minutes. Subject. The mobile squads of engineers who travel from factory to factory helping to train new workers, and who constantly evolve new methods of speeding up production. ~ tment. The film kicks off with a nicely directed dialogue scene in a railway carriage, in which we meet the gang of mobile engineers on their way to a new job. Unfortunately the rest of the film, which shows what they do at the factory, is commentated somewhat facetiously by one of them, and there is no further dialogue. As a result the film is a bit remote, although the activities of the engineers are clearly enough explained. The making of a new jig might surely have been treated with more warmth and excitement. The film is well edited and moves at a good pace. Propaganda value. This film is chiefly an informational job. It tells us that there are these mobile engineers, shows us the problems they meet and how they solve them. It impels no action or thought of action. If its theme had been the urgency of increased production and if the story of the engineers had been clearly presented as part only of the extra efforts needed from everyone, its propaganda value would have been excellent. Storing Vegetables Outdoors and Storing Vegetables Indoors. M.O.I, for the Ministry of Agriculture. Production: Realist Film Unit. Direction: M. S. Thompson. Camera: A. E. Jeakins. Commentator: Roy Hay. Non-T. Subject: These two films are part of a general series sponsored by the Ministry of Agriculture. The first shows how to store potatoes and carrots in clamps. The second deals with the indoor storing of shallots, runner beans, onions, beets, haricot beans and tomatoes. Treatment: The simple, straightforward technique adopted is admirable for this type of instructional film. The commentaries state the essentials and leave time for absorption. Photo graphy is very good and the direction doesn't wander into by-passes that have nothing to do with the matter in hand. Propaganda value: As one of those unfortunate people who heartily detest gardening but have had an allotment pushed on to me, I found both films helpful in the extreme. Having been pushed to the point of actually putting stuff in I want to know what to do with it when it comes up. The films tell me that clearly and precisely, but I would complain that it all looks a darn sight easier than (to me) it actually is. The lad making the clamps, for instance, is blessed with soil that practically fights to get on his spade before it touches the ground. Not so with me or judging from what I have seen, with a lot of other sweating allotmenteers. Maybe in future films it would be a good idea to take these factors into account and deal with some of the difficulties that confront the average bloke who is trying to anticipate the threatened food shortage this coming winter. THE GOLD RUSH AGAIN Robert Waithman reports on the revival of Chaplin's film in New York Reprinted by courtesy of the News Chronicle the sudden sight of Charlie Chaplin in the Gold Rush on the canopy outside the Globe Theatre on Broadway stops you in your tracks. You haven't seen those words for sixteen or seventeen years and there's a bitter-sweet nostalgia in the look of them. The crowd streaming past the theatre is largely made up of 1942 soldiers and bluejackets out for the night on Broadway. They can go into this and other theatres for little more than a quarter of the usual admission price. You notice a lot of them are going in. "A revival with a new commentary written and spoken by Charles Chaplin and incidental music," the sign says. You remember the incidental music last time — the tinny but penetrating and tireless music that came from behind a musty felt curtain in the orchestra pit. Golden days, innocent days, days when there was no blot upon the honourable trade of paperhanging, days when a man who spoke of retiring to a previously prepared position could only have meant he was going to live on his pension at Brighton. You walk up a lush carpet and sit down in the darkness and there he is, the little tramp prospecting in Alaska. His movements are steadier now because Hollywood in its wonderful way has somehow reprinted the film so that it can be shown at the modern speed instead of with the old flicker. And now the confident and cultivated voice of Mr. Charles Chaplin is breaking in with bits of talk. He has an actor's voice capable of ranting melodrama or simple pathos. " 'Get out of here!' Black Larsen cried," Chaplin shouts at one point as he tells the story he is watching on the screen ; but at another point where heroine Georgia is visiting the lovelorn Charlie in his lonely shack Chaplin is saying softly, "There she stood, her loveliness lighting the room. . . ." He calls his image "the little fellow" through out the commentary. The Chaplin who is speaking is 53 and his hair is white, and he is looking back on his own past. Sometimes he sounds achingly fond of the picture and its people. The acting of his leading lady, Georgia Hale, was often ludicrous by modern standards and her make-up would have driven Max Factor mad. But Chaplin loves her. When she first appears he speaks her name gently and tenderly, as though he were talking to himself. And there is the saloon and Charlie's trousers are falling down as they fell down in 1925. 1925. — Locarno and the League and the I) ashington Arms Conference. Charlie starving in the cabin has cooked and is eating one of his boots, spitting the nails out carefully and with refinement and Big Jim is going mad and they are rushing in and out of the cabin doors. 1925. — "// ain't gonna rain no more" and the Dayton monkey trial: the year before the General Strike. When the cabin was swinging over the precipice and Charlie opened the door and hung over the abyss from the knob there came from the modern Broadway audience that same highpitched roar as used to drown out the music of the pianist. You believed it had gone with Channel swimming and the Charleston ; but it hasn't. It is still there in everyone's throat, waiting for Charlie Chaplin to awaken it. You come from the theatre and there's a big lighted sign looking down Broadway. It says, WE MUST WORK AND FIGHT FOR OUR LIVES. The news sign is spelling out sugar RATIONING TO BEGIN MAY 5. Two young Marines brush past and one is saying ". . . If you can use machine-guns so much the better. ..." There was the music of a tinny piano and there's the music of machineguns. One generation may hear both and another may come which will hear neither.