Documentary News Letter (1940)

DOCUMENTARY NEWS LETTER AUGUST 1940 normal peace-time needs. But the battle for and against Commercialism, which has been raging at full force ever since the opening of the last century, is still the most vital, the most crucial, struggle of humanity. Collectivism, now extending in various forms over the larger part of modern civihsation, uses all its power to reduce the sphere of commerce operating through individual money bargains, in favour of direction by the State, which represents the collective purposes of society and the public view regarding the good of the citizen. Collectivism stands for closer solidarity, Commercialism for more individual independence ; every inch of ground is fiercely contested in the struggle of these rival tendencies. Photography of economic life can show people at work in factories, in mines and on the land; it can show their effort and their skill; their comradeship and good sense. But the photograph does not show whether they are making a profit or a loss, which from the commercial point of view is the main significance of their labours. The circle of gainful bargains in which they form a link cannot be caught by documentary shots, any more than the island nature of Britain can be represented by a sequence of sea views. This inevitable omission naturally produces the impression that the process of manufacture is based not on the consideration of costs and receipts in money, but on some objective criterion of usefulness, implied in the emphasis which the picture lends to the visible outside features of the people at work. In fact, the dramatisation of the human and technical aspects of production which must be the main documentary approach to economic life represents a technocratic view of production which is essentially coUectivist. Because, if the nature of economic production is such that its value can be correctly appreciated from outside — without reference to commercial considerations — by the public to which the film appeals, then it ought to be even more certainly assessible by the public authorities, which hence would be fully competent to take its direction in hand and would, in fact, be clearly entitled and obliged to do so. It is by virtue of this coUectivist implication that the documentary style originally arose in the Russian propaganda film which for the first time represented work on farms and in factories with the emphasis of a public triumph. And the same implication persists in the documentaries made in capitalist countries which ring true only if they represent public enterprises where the valuation of products is more or less uncommercial, being largely based on the approval of public opinion — whereas documentaries sound hollow when dramatising private undertakings, because they leave out the balance sheet with the prices and profits (along with the managers and owners) which in reality are the prime movers of the action. This is the point where the new diagrammatic film representing economic life by motion symbols sets its ambitious task. The film, or rather sequence of films, Unemployment and Money, which was reviewed in the June number of this paper, demonstrates how this new approach goes straight at the commercial side of economic life. Its main theme is precisely that grand circle of commercial exchanges, too vast to be seen by any single observer, which guides all individual economic activities in a system of highly divided labour. Just as the island nature of Britain is made visible symbolically on a map by a closed curve representing its coast line — which no other explanation, no amount of photography or of verbal description can represent with equal clarity — so does the motion symbol of monetary circulation, consisting of a rotating belt of definite width and rate of gyration which is the principal feature of this film, unambiguously establish the concept of this circulation, which no verbal explanation (and certainly no photography) can clearly impart to the popular mind. My experience with adult classes and higher school forms suggests that this symbolic notation is easily absorbed by any person of normal intelligence and can then be used asi a firm basis for further pictorial and verbal arguments. The film when demonstrated and explained in its entirety — which, requires about three to six lectures — seems to succeed in establishing a new plane, or stage, on which the major phases of business fife are visibly enacted, within reach of the understanding and interest of popular audiences. Unemployment and Money consists of six reels. In the first the symbols are directly intelligible pictures, figures of men and women. The men represents the citizens as producers, the women show the citizens as consumers. From the homes the men move out in one direction along a circle to their jobs at the places of production, while the women go out in thei|fee opposite direction, along the same circle, towards the shops. The goods produced by the men start flowing around the circle towards the shops, the money spent by the women goes round to meet it. The second reel transforms the notation into the abstract form of which the gyrating money belt is the most essential feature. The argument which opens in the third reel and goes on with increasing complexity through another three reels, represents the changing tides of monetary circulation which determine the unstable prospects of business life. Wfe' see the paradoxical interplay between Thrift and Enter prise which results in alternate phases of depressions with undeserved misery to the workers, and of booms with unjust gains to the employers. We see the mechanism of that exaspera^ ting and immoral uncertainty which makes people cry out for coUectivist dictatorship. And yet on this new plane the commercial view of economic life is firmly established against coUectivist prejudice. The necessity of conducting economic life by the grand circle of exchanges which is made possible only by the circulation of money is clearly ascertained even while the evils of monetary disturbances are being demonstrated. And there results a determination to check these evils while maintaining and cultivating the essential mechanism of commercial life. Ultimately, it should be the task of the economic diagram film to give a firm basis to popular economic thought by a visual scheme which explains the commercial mechanism, while the documentary film would illustrate the events arising from this mechanism, and would, moreover, exercise control over the commercial theory by facing it with the results which it bears in practice. Meanwhile, there is a vast amount of work to be done to develop the economic diagram film and its use in teaching and discourse to a level at which it can become really effective ; I hope that Unemployment and Money may indicate to the careful observer a number of directions in which this work is to be pursued. m ita jivili nitiJ Ive ipk K ■the m w Tlif m M itir iiil lis. to i k lor kiio tool ■jde mil i\( taa aies nil