Documentary News Letter (1940)

DOCUMENTARY NEWS LETTER NOVEMBER 1940 go to work day after day without having the least idea how what they are doing fits into a general pattern of the national life. Of course, there are books to tell them how their country is governed ; but that isn't what they want — they want to be made to feel that they are actors in a great, thrilling drama, essential ingredients in a marvellous experiment, and this can only be done through one medium — the film. It is now over ten years since a small band of young film directors, the chief of whom was John Grierson, recognised that the film, by giving the dramatic significance of everyday life and work, could become a great instrument of democratic education. They evolved a new type of film which they called by the rather austere name of the Documentary. Thanks to their outstanding skill the documentary has hkd an influence out of all proportion to its cost or its distribution. It is to their technical approach that we owe great films like The Good Earth or Grapes of Wrath, where the dramatic value of the film depends on its air of absolute truth. But, of course, the pure documentary film cannot often be shown in an ordinary cinema. People in an ordinary cinema have paid their money to be entertained, and entertainment means escape — escape above all from everyday life. But to look at documentary films one must be in quite a different frame of mind : one must want to know the truth, to understand the mysteries of a technical process, to be made conscious of one's rights and duties as a citizen. And so these films have been chiefly shown in town halls, village halls, institutions, public libraries, and similar centres of the serious minded. Now in the past documentary films have been made and shown by all kinds of bodies — educational, commercial, technical; but to-day the Government, through the Ministry of Information, is undertaking the showing of such films on a scale never attempted before. We are sending round seventy-six mobile film units which can be set up in country districts. We are lending fifty projectors to local organisations, and we are arranging hundreds of shows in cinemas out of normal hours. Altogether we shall be giving at least a thousand shows a week. Some of the films shown wifl come from the film library at the Imperial Institute; but the majority will be made by the best of the younger film directors speciafly to suit the times, and will deal with all those war-time services and activities which the Government is organising; and all the hundreds of ways in which people are working for their country. They will show the worker how his health is being cared for under the new conditions of war, and how he can change from one job to another in order to make the best use ^of his skill. They wiU show a village school where a teacher is coping with all the new problems created by evacuation. Or they will show the making of an aeroplane propeller, where the utmost refinements of measurement produce every day works of art as carefully calculated as a Greek temple. That is something worth remembeing when we read in the newspapers accusations of muddle and inefficiency. I have said that films of this kind don't compete with the ordinary cinema. We shan't show pure entertainment films on our circuit. But we shan't be limited to mere instruction. We shall include films like Men of the Lightship, which record great feats of heroism, or some of our five-minute films Uke Miss Grant Goes to the Door, which help people to remember Government messages by putting them in a dramatic form. And in this way I think we shall do something to meet that most pressing problem — the deadly boredom which threatens a great section of the country during the coming winter. Other organisations will supply amusement : but the trouble about boredom is that it can't be relieved by amusement alone — as anyone with children knows. The mind has to be seriously occupied, to be extended, as it were, for a short time every day. And how can it be better occupied than in getting to understand the vast complicated structure of which we are a part, and for which we are in part responsible. 5-MINUTE FILMS FOR SEPTEMBER AND OCTOBER Title Theme Director Production Unit Released YESTERDAY'S OVER YOUR SHOULDER Engineering Training Thorold Dickinson D. & P. Studios 9/9/40 MISS KNOW-ALL Gossip Graham Cutts D. & P. Studios 16/9/40 CHANNEL INCIDENT Dunkirk Anthony Asquith D. & P. Studios 23/9/40 THE FRONT LINE Dover 1 Harry Watt G.P.O. 7/10/40 *ASHLEY GREEN GOES TO SCHOOL School Services in War-time John Eldridge Strand 14/10/40 fBRITAIN CAN TAKE IT Blitzkrieg on London Harry Watt and Humphrey Jennings G.P.O. 21/10/40 Shortened version of tlie non-tlwatrical film Village School, reviewed in our last issue, t Adapted from London Can Take It, reviewed in this issue