Documentary News Letter (1940)

DOCUMENTARY NEWS LETTER DECEMBER 1940 15 outward and visible sign of that mysterious and to politicians menacing object — Public Opinion. Out of these crowds the producers saw that they could make a satisfactory link between the general and the particular, between the clashing armies or the pronouncements of premiers and the puzzled or placid or suffering but always curiously self-contained individual, who in his circumscribed local life is also an aspect — philosophically if not politically just as disturbing — of Public Opinion. The Ramparts We Watch therefore starts with a generalised statement about the U.S.A. of 1914, and then, to mirror attitudes and ideas in a more coherent form, takes us to an American small-town community, which remains throughout the film as the example of individual lives and opinions. This balances against the more generalised statements of the commentator. The small town is not the small town of the Hardys or the Bumsteads, nor could it with much accuracy be pinned to this State or that. Nor, on the other hand, is it a symbolic small town; but rather something betwixt and between, a kind of actuality microcosm of American citizenship. We meet a lot of the inhabitants of this town, from the Congressman and the Editor of the local paper to various ordinary families, some wealthy and influential, some poor; some of English descent, some of German, some still immigrant, such as the Austrian factory hand with his wife and daughter. But the most striking thing is the way we meet them and get to know them. They are not pushed in our faces, established and labelled, at the beginning of the film. Their first appearances are anonymous. From newsreel shots we are led imperceptibly to staged small-town scenes in the same mood ; and among the crowds, or in the shops, or in the small houses, the characters make their first appearance. We do not at first know which of them we shall see again. Thus we get to know them through time, just as we learn of their hopes and fears, which means their opinion, through time. And this makes them very much our neighbours rather than Hollywoodian simulacra. A large and anonymous cast, behaving rather than acting true to life, successfully wins our interest and our sympathy, rightly looms as large in the screen space as the figures of Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, Hoover, King George V, and even little old Hitler, who inevitably pops up in the later reels, directing the blitz on Poland from an Olympian railway carriage, Goering obsequious in attendance, and the tight-lipped generals awaiting orders and hoping that the Fuhrer is still right. American critics will no doubt be able to say if The Ramparts We Watch is an accurate picture of U.S.A. opinion during the World War. To the average Englishman the most striking point which emerges is the reluctance with which the people of the States came round to the idea of entering the last war. So many British people think of that event as being an automatic explosion after the Lusitania episode, and the March of Time version, by its emphasis on the period after the Lusitania sinking, appears to give the true version, a version indeed which is not merely more sympathetic but also very instructive in relation to present happenings. The detailed study of public opinion ends on New Year's day, 1919. The film then switches us direct to 1940, with, among other things, a reel from the Nazi film Baptism of Fire, complete with the original English commentary as recorded in Germany for propaganda purposes. (From this reel, by the way, one can understand how useful a film this must have been to the Fifth Columnists of Scandinavia and the Low Countries.) Completed before the Presidential elections. The Ramparts We Watch is bound to have a somewhat cautious conclusion, but a final return to the New Year's party of our small town in 1919 gives a kick to the finale which is all the more effective in that it depends on implication, not statement. It is to be hoped that The Ramparts We Watch will be shown over here in its entirety. Whatever renters or exhibitors may think about it, it is highly probable that the public (of our larger cities at any rate) would enjoy the whole ninety minutes worth; for the film is about something which very closely affects us ; and it also reminds us that it might have been about ourselves. THE CITY Production: American Documentary Films under the auspices of the American Institute of Planners. Direction and photography; Rudolph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke. Commentary: Lewis Mumford. Music: Aaron Copland. This film was the subject of controversy in the U.S.A. A copy has belatedly reached this country. Two D.N.L. reviews follow. IT IS NOT easy, when deeply moved, to sit in sober judgment. Yet this is necessary if criticism is to be of value. Now the only certain statement the present reviewer can make is that this film will challenge you from one angle or another and in whatever way you fee! yourself implicated. Its terms of reference could fairly be defined as "the significance of humanity in contemporary industrialised society." When you see the film you may feel that it brings the stubborn mockery and the beauty of life unbearably close, or that sometimes it is laboured. You may feel one of a dozen unpredictable things about it. Whilst admitting certain faults, it is one of the greatest documentaries ever made. A thesis rather than a review is demanded and this has already been done in Lewis Mumford's The Culture of Cities. The City is based on Lewis Mumford's famous book The Culture of Cities which analyses the historical phases and modern social consequences of metropolitan life. Like many social documentaries from the United States, it addresses its appeal to the heart rather than the head. American film-makers dealing with social and economic problems are generally reluctant to leave the unembellished facts to tell their own story and beget their own emotional reaction. They believe that the facts must be aided by elaborate artifice of camera, cutting bench and recording studio and sometimes by conventional emotive imagery. To some of us the method seems to reveal a lack of confidence in the ability of the audience to see, understand and feel for itself. It is as if the director's emotions were an essential part of the story and that these must be revealed before the audience can draw conclusions of its own. Mumford's book is written with feeling, but he does not indulge his hatred for the modern consequences of industrialisation at the expense of the scientific analysis of cause and cure. The City does less than justice to his practical approach to the problem. The facts to which it limits itself could have been adequately expressed in five minutes screen time, yet the attempt to convey the director's feelings about them occupies five reels. The theme of the film is that life was comfortable, healthy and safe in the New England township of the pre-industrial age, that industry and commerce have made life in the modern metropolis, uncomfortable, unhealthy and unsafe, and that if people choose they could even to-day, by proper town planning, live in comfort, health and safety again. Since the case against the social organisation of the big city is now common knowledge the key section of the film clearly is the final section which deals with the cure. But it is here that the film altogether ceases to be factual. We are shown scenes of model towns which may be located in Mars for all the information the film gives about them. There are recurrent scenes of boys riding bicycles or delivering newspapers which are apparently symbolic of the new order, yet we are given no hints of what sort of people are able to live in it, what their work is, what they earn and pay in rent, or of how this earthly paradise was built. If what we are shown is ideal rather than real, surely we need some better indication of how it may be realised than is provided by the repeated exhortation to choose between the good life and the bad? We choose the good. Then what? The best section of the film is the New England sequence on life before the coming of the industrial age. The film is beautifully photographed throughout and in this historical sequence the unquestioned ability of the production team to create atmosphere and mood finds full and legitimate scope. In the modern metropolis the essential characteristics of everyday life are well observed. Yet the citizens on the sidewalks whose unstudied gestures and mannerisms have been brilliantly caught by concealed cameras are not left to themselves to make their city come alive on the screen. They must be assisted by automata built up on the cutting bench in f!ash-cut "montage" sequences which borrow their inspiration from the film archives. The scenes of industrial slums are the best that have ever been made. The whole film provides a sad example of how the theme and material for a potentially great picture have been spoiled by laying on the colour too thick with a worn-out brush.