Documentary News Letter (1942-1943)

DOCUMENTARY NEWS LETTER JUNE 1942 the new corporate elements in society and to the dramatisation of social problems: each a step in the attempt to understand the stubborn raw material of our modern citizenship and wake the heart and the will to their mastery. Where we stopped short was that, with equal deliberation, we refused to specify what political agency should carry out that will or associate ourselves with any one of them. Our job specifically was to wake the heart and the will: it was for the political parties to make before the people their own case for leadership. 1 would not restate these principles merely out of historical interest. The important point is that tiiey have not changed at all and they are not going to change, nor be changed. The materials of citizenship to-day are different and the perspectives wider and more difficult ; but we have, as ever, the duty of exploring them and of waking the heart and will in regard to them. (Documentary is at once a critique of propaganda and a practice of it.) That duty is what documentary is about. It is, moreover, documentary's primary service to the State to be persisted in, whatever deviation may urged upon it, or whatever confusion of thought, or easiness of mind, success may tiring. Let no one tell you that a few brighteyed films or a couple of Academy awards — from Hollywood of all places! — mean anything more than that a bit of a job was done yesterday. To-morrow it is the same grind with ever new material — some easy, some not so easy — to be brought into design ; and no percentage in it for anyone except doing the rightest job of education and inspiration we know how for the state and the people. Considering the large audiences we now reach and the historical stakes that depend on Tightness of approach, it is a privilege worth a measure of personal effort and sacrifice. If there is common agreement in the "strategy" 1 have indicated, differences in daily "tactic" will not seriously affect unity. We should see equally straight regarding the social factor in our work over the thirties. It was a powerful inspiration and very important for that period. Without Housing Problems and the whole movement of social understanding such films helped to articulate, I think history would have found another and bloodier solution when the bombs first rained on the cities of Britain. But that Indian summer of decent social intention was not just due to the persistence of people like ourselves and to the humanitarian interests of our governmental and industrial colleagues. It may also have marked a serious limiting of horizons. It may have been an oblique sign that England, to her peril, was becoming interested only in herself. Some of us sensed it as we reached out in every way we knew for an opportunity of wider international statement. We did not, I am afraid, sense it half enough and we share the guilt of that sultry decade with all the other inadequate guides of public opinion. The job we did was perhaps a good enough job to have done at all, but our materials were not chosen widely enough. Nothing seems now more significant of the period than that, at a time so crucial, there was no longer eager sponsorship for worldthinking in a country which still pretended to world-leadership. Russia had its third International and Germany had that geo-political brains trust which, centred in Haushofer, spread its influence through Hess to Hitler and to every department of the Reich. In the light of events, how much on the right lines Tallents was and how blind were the people who defeated his great concept! For documentary the effect was important. The E.M.B. which might have done so much for positive international thinking, died seven years too early; and it was hardly, as we comically discovered, the job for the G.P.O. There was the brief bright excursion to Geneva: there was that magnificent scheme for the l.L.O. ; there was my own continuous and fruitless pursuit of the bluebird we called the Empire and the momentary hopeful stirring in the Colonial Office under Malcolm MacDonald; there was the Imperial Relations Trust, five years too late, and affected from the first by the weight of impending events. The international factor, so necessary to a realist statement of even national affairs, was not in the deal. It is, of course, more vital than ever to a documentary policy. We, the leaders and the people and the instruments of public opinion, have been out-thought by Russia, Germany and Japan because we have been out-thought in modern international terms. Because documentary is concerned with affecting the vital terms of public thinking towards a realistic comprehension of events and their mastery, its duty is plain. To use the phrase of these present days, you can't win the war, — neither "outside" nor "inside" — without a revision of the public mind regarding England's place in the world and the larger morale that goes with a sense of being on the bandwagon of history. Thumbing a ride to the future is not nearly good enough. I look back on Munich as representing a milestone in my own outlook on documentary. From that time the social work in which we had been engaged seemed to me relatively beside the point. Munich was the last necessary evidence of how utterly out-of-category our English political thinking was and how literally most of our political leaders did not know what it was all about. From that point it seemed clear that we had, willy-nilly, to relate the interests of the English people to new world forces of the most dynamic sort — physical, economic and ideological. It was inevitable that our first instinct should be to put our head in the sand and in a last frantic gesture, try to avoid the implications of the future; but the significance of our indecision in regard to both Germany and Russia was plain to see. World revolution had broken out on the biggest possible scale, and to the point of having people like Churchill recognise it as such. Win or lose, the economy of England and her place in the world were under threats of serious alteration and, however we might presently hide our eyes, people's minds had to be prepared and made fit for them if what was great and good in England was to survive. It was not much concentrating on changes in a status whose quo was being challenged from every active corner of the world and apt to be blown to historical smithereens. Internal social issues were no longer enough when the deeper political issues had become the whole of realism. This was one person's reaction. I knew it meant the exploration of a healthier basis for the public instruction which documentary represented than the reactionary regime at that time allowed. But 1 was altogether doubtful of where the journey would lead. I hoped, vaguely I must admit, that youth and the viewpoints their world position imposed upon them would bring a measure of progressive strength from the Dominions. I did not know how that strength could ever be articulated in time to save documentary from its greatest set-back : the assumption of official sponsorship by the old, the obstinate and the inept. That period, thank heaven, is over and, in the combined strength of what you have so hardly won the right to do in England and what has now been developed elsewhere, it should be possible to create a new strength of thought and purpose. You must not allow anyone to forget the part of Beddington in this: and of Elton. Beddington was, personally, under no obligation to the documentary viewpoint and, like myself, he is under compunction as an official to think of other considerations besides those which are the especial considerations of the documentary group. The documentary idea may be the most progressive and most valuable one for a department of propaganda, and I would even maintain that it is the only approach which could, developed, match the depth and thoroughness of the German and Russian approaches. But it cannot in practice be the whole menu. There have to be "corn" departments too and a good practical propagandist will have a pretty selection of them if he is to keep the "fules and bairns" satisfied, save himself from fighting a hundred unimportant battles, and hold his energy for what is long-term and fundamental. The danger, 1 frequently observe, for both the propagandist and his purpose, is when the success of the corn begins to overshadow what is fundamental. It is because of this danger that the documentary idea is so necessary a guide and its constant propagation the best service a paper like D.N.L. can do to organisations like Beddington's and mine. Because it insists on comprehension it may be a hard and academic taskmaster but you certainly can't fool around with it. There is perhaps a point where the official mind is apt to say: — it is all very well in peace-time for the documentary people to turn the public occasion to their special purpose, but in war it is different. This sounds plausible, but