Documentary News Letter (1944-1945)

DOCUMENTARY NEWS LETTER JANUARY AND FEBRUARY 1944 Educational Film by G. Patrick Meredith Visual Education Centre, University College, Exeter 'T'he future is being anxiously scanned by all •*■ who are concerned with educational films whether as producers, administrators or users. There are two major problems : who is to finance production? And who is to control it? It is not always true that he who pays the piper calls the tune. If it were true in educational film production the choice and quality of films would either be commercially dictated or state-dictated. The former is undesirable. The latter, whether you like it or not, is contrary to English educational policy, which has always avoided any centralisation of education which would give the government of the day direct control over the classroom. Europe to-day is an object-lesson of the opposite policy. It is fairly obvious that we shall have mixed finance in educational film production. Extensive plans are now being laid down by a number of great industrial and commercial concerns for the production of sponsored films specifically educational in character. These will be freely distributed after the War. Then there are the various film production companies, large and small, who have to make a profit on their productions. Ultimately these films will be paid for out of public funds. There is also the possibility that a successor to the M.O.I. Films Division may take a hand, again financed out of public funds. The teacher's share We can look upon this situation as a grand opportunity for a terrific scrap or we can look upon it as a problem to be solved. The one guiding idea to take us through the maze is the realisation that ultimately all these films have to be shown to children, by teachers in classrooms, in order to satisfy educational needs. This is sometimes overlooked. The teacher, then, should have a direct say in production policy. If we can devise machinery for making educational needs articulate, and for giving the educational world the final say in production, we can avoid the perils of both commercial and political dictation. (And socialists who want political dictation must admit that they want it only when they are in power.) Now how can the teacher be enabled to play his part? Perhaps his biggest contribution to the educational film problem is his expert sense of relative difficulty on the one hand, and his sense of the relative importance of topics in the existing curriculum on the other. On both of these points film producers often go sadly astray, and this single fact is more than anything else responsible for the considerable measure of scepticism which still exists in the teaching profession. It is not the producers' fault. They cannot be experts in both the studio and the class-room. The fault lies in the lack of the machinery of collaboration. The producer is at fault if he imagines that there is any resemblance between the educational film situation and the feature film situation. You get your regular twenty million habitues going to see feature films with very little effective discrimination — there is no rival entertainment on a comparable scale. But if teachers are dissatisfied with the educational films pro vided, they just won't play ball. Panels for previewing films already produced, while very necessary, are no solution. The teacher must have an effective voice in production right from the start if the final product is to be as perfect educationally as it is photographically. All this has been said before, especially in Scotland, but we still lack the machinery to make the principle operative. The director's job We must beware of over-simplification. This problem is inherently complex. Give a topic to your film director and he at once starts "seeing" it pictorially. Being thoroughly familiar with the whole range of techniques at his disposal he easily selects those which best suit his purpose. Few teachers have that familiarity. They know what they want in terms of hard factual and intellectual content, but the intrinsic peculiarities of the film medium prevent them from fully realising either the difficulties or the opportunities. Yet it is not enough for the teachers to offer merely a list of topics on which they require films. We have to respect the creative prerogative of the film director. He is first and foremost an artist. At the same time he has to recognise that he cannot have quite the free hand in educational films that he has in documentaries. In making an educational film he becomes a worker in the "education industry". This means that the synthesis achieved in the film must do more than satisfy his own aesthetic proclivities and the intellectual needs of the situation — his ordinary documentaries have to do that anyway. The educational film must be capable of being used by the teachers without playing havoc with their normal handling of the topics. It is useful to distinguish four types of educational films. I shall call them the Essay-type, the Chapter-type, the Paragraph-type and the Sentence-type. The Essay-type is your background film. Here the director can and should have wide latitude. He has opportunities to rove over a much wider range of possibilities than the teacher and can introduce material which just would not occur to the latter. The classroom view is apt to become restricted. The background film can open a window on the world. It may even tell the teacher something about the wider relevance of the subjects he is teaching. The length, both of this type and of the Chaptertype should be determined not by the length of an Edwardian music-hall turn but by the needs of the theme and the children's capacity for attention. The Chapter-type is your straight teaching film and is the hard core of our problem. The Paragraph-type is a silent segment lasting perhaps two or three minutes or even less and dealing with a single unit process, movement, growth, change, etc. The Sentence-type is similar to the Paragraph but the unit is smaller. It is exemplified in the Loop-film. These last two types are needed in large number to supply the dynamic material required in so many lessons. They offer no serious problem other than in the technique of handling them, which still needs exploration. As far as production is concerned, lists of topics on which, these short films are required should be furnished by the teachers and the films should be bought outright by the schools. The real problem is the Chapter-type. If this type is to survive, some quite new machinery will have to be devised to bring about the necessary integration of the educational and cinematic aspects. It is quite useless for producers to force pre-fabricated bundles of knowledge on the teachers. As a profession they won't take it. And they have a case. I do not claim that the teachers' case, as sometimes expounded, is altogether water-tight. They tend to adopt a proprietorial attitude to the curriculum. Their curriculum tends to get out-of-date through inertia. They sometimes forget that society on the one hand, and science, scholarship and art on the other have rights in the curriculum. A static curriculum is no preparation for a dynamic world. The tendency to regard the teacher as the one expert who knows what's what, while understandable, cannot go unchallenged. But if the challenge comes from commercial interests it is obviously unacceptable. Some means must be found (and we are busy at Exeter finding it) for encouraging progressive-minded teachers up and down the country to get to intellectual grips with the film as an educational medium. The film is a self-contained medium in its own right, owing little directly to any other media — indeed suffering from the jealousy of these — and having its origin in the technical progress of photography. As a self-contained medium it has its own laws, its own inner structure, its own stylistic devices, its own "vocabulary" and "grammar" and, — be it noted — its own logic. So accustomed are we to taking our traditional verbal logic as the only possible logic (though the logicians themselves in recent times have produced an amazing crop of divergent logics even of the verbal variety) that the notion of visual logic as a thought-system, with characteristics having little or nothing in common with our verbal logics, comes as a shock. This is a {Continued overleaf) SIGHT and SOUND A cultural Quarterly MOMIILY FILM BCLLETIN appraising educational and entertainment values Pubbshed by: The British Film Institute, 4 Great Russell Street, London, W.C.I.