Documentary News Letter (1944-1945)

DOCUMENTARY NEWS LETTER 89 to go to all kinds of trouble and personal inconvenience to ensure an efficient service. Drawn from local Information Committees, these contacts have included librarians and schoolmasters, municipal officers and town councillors, trade unionists and industrialists. The volume of local goodwill towards non-theatrical film engendered in this way has been vital to its success. Film has played its part in Yorkshire in spreading specialised knowledge and skills essential in war. Its first major use was as a weapon of mass-instruction in Civil Defence, where well organised cadres of fireguards, wardens, and others studied, through non-theatrical film, antigas procedures, rescue techniques and methods of combating changing types of incendiary bombs. In those parts of the region relatively unmolested by the enemy, films have made a principal contribution towards maintaining keenness and efficiency. Though ready-made audiences were not there as in the case of Civil Defence, a vast amount of specialised film activity has gone on in other civilian fields. Where films have been tied closely to specific drives, as in Blood Transfusion and Mass Radiography, it is not surprising that spectacular results have been obtained in this region. Much has depended on the "film-mindedness" of officials of other Government Departments and of local authorities. The annual Dig for Victory campaigns in the West Riding have been good instances of the effectiveness of this sort of coordination. Gardening films have indeed been amongst the most-admired and least-criticised of official instructional films. The main criticism levelled against them has been that they have made things seem too easy — shrewdly countered by one amateur gardener's observation that this might well be because films actually did make things easier. An interesting development in the later war years has been the series of instructional and training films for such technical and professional workers as boilerhousemen and fuel engineers, doctors and nurses. Agricultural teaching films have brought the results of expert study to the farmer and farm worker. In this region, the effective use of these films has been organised with the ready co-operation of the County Executive Committees. Each year technical officers, experts in various fields of agriculture, have assembled for a full day's conference to see new films, to appraise them and to determine the best manner of using them. On the last occasion this was followed up by written contributions which were embodied in a comprehensive document and sent via the Films Division in London, to the producers of the films. The main conclusions reached at this Conference were (a) that these instructional films were an extremely useful addition to the technical officer's equipment and that their quality was improving; (b) that variations in local conditions were still not taken sufficiently into account when making the films and (c) that methods were sometimes depicted which remained matters of controversy amongst experts. A suggestion was made that handbooks summarising the contents of the films and providing footnotes to any special procedures and locations used would go far to meet these criticisms. It may be added that, for the layman, to see films in the company of specialists is a stimulating and at times chastening experience. FOne experiment made here in Yorkshire during the past eighteen months, though it falls strictly outside the scope of the present article, deserves mention. This has been a series of mass demonstrations of medical films to doctors and nurses in public cinemas. Seven of these shows, for instance, have been presented in Leeds to audiences of upwards of 1 ,500 at a time, and five in York to audiences of about 800 for each show. These shows have given doctors and nurses some idea of how film is being used for popular instruction in social and preventative medicine, and have indicated to them the potential usefulness of the cinema in medical teaching. The occasions have been impressive of themselves, for seldom can such large audiences of this type have met regularly together. Looking back, certain impressions predominate. Innumerable voluntary organisations (including many possessing their own projectors and calling upon the Central Film Library) have come to look upon the regional office for guidance and advice in the use of films. One has noticed over the years the increasing maturity of the work of short film producers (compare, for instance, Fireguard, useful in its day, with the moving realism and fitness for purposes of Rescue Reconnaissance). Significant has been the growing tendency for audiences to meet together to see programmes developing a single theme in a well-balanced way. And from a personal point of view, one has come in retrospect to see all this work as a new, different, less formal but quite genuine kind of public education. This discursive summary has provided no exact statistical analyses; the following details do, however, give some notion of the size of the total effort involved over the past five years : — Over 20,000 shows given in village halls, schools, canteens, workshops, libraries, town halls, church halls, clinics, fire stations, first aid posts, clubs, wardens' posts, community centres and hostels, council chambers and amid the discreet luxury of a spa assembly room. Total audiences of some four million people, including industrial workers, doctors, rural workers, teachers, industrial trainees and university students, civil defence workers, nurses, agricultural discussion groupers, parents, children, stevedores, boilerhousemen, amateur gardeners and rabbit keepers, Make-do-and-Menders, and Kitchen Fronters, Bevin boys and land girls. pre-service youths and Young Farmers and all sorts of ordinary men and women. More than 500 different film subjects presented, single copies of some of these being used more than 200 times. A team of up to twelve projectionists, backed by a small maintenance and clerical staff, has carried on this work. Four of the five original 16 mm. projectors have been in continuous use since 1940. Each has done at least 2,500 shows and been hauled, jolting, some 50,000 miles across the two Ridings from Spurn Point to Sedbergh, and from Flamborough Head to the Borders of Derbyshire. A final tribute is due to the men (and women!) and machines, who have helped to make non-theatrical film a feature of war-time life in Yorkshire. BOOKS REVIEWED An Index to the Creative Work of Erich von Stroheim. Herman G. Weinberg. 1943. An Index to the Creative Work of David Wark Griffith. (Part I). Seymour Stern. 1944. An Index to the Films of Charles Chaplin. Theodore Huff. 1945. Special Supplements to "Sight and Sound", published by The British Film Institute. If one had told Chaplin or Griffith in 1920 that in another twenty-five years people would be drawing up iconographies of their work and preserving it in museums they would have thought you mad. (Not so Stroheim who was self-consciously — almost too self-consciously — an "artist" with an eye to posterity). But it has happened, and Messrs. Weinberg, Stern and Huff have led the way with their carefully documented booklets. The films people used to laugh at till they rolled off their seats, the villains which they tried to boo off the screen, are now being labelled and put in show cases. In the process something has been lost and it is difficult now to conjure up the impact of comics like Chaplin and films like The Birth of a Nation. Today, people take their films as part of the entertainment landscape. Thirty years ago, or less, they had the effect of the epic and the popular ballad. They were the art of the people and, as such, were thought wicked and vulgar by all who prided themselves on being respectable and cultured. Today, what the story film has gained in polish it has lost in gusto. Experiment and the art of the cinema is to be found now, not usually in the entertainment film, but in the documentary film, and the documentary film makers have a way to go yet before they can command the vitality and the universatility of Griffith and Chaplin. In passing, one question to Messrs. Weinberg, Stern, Huff and the British Film Institute. If one has a bibliography one can go to a library and consult the books it lists. But if one has an iconography of films, one can go nowhere to consult the films mentioned ; half of them have been lost for good. Is anyone getting round, not only to preserving such old films as remain, but to reproducing them on 16 mm. so that all can study them? Soviet Cinema. Herbert Marshall. The Russia Today Society. 1945. Is. This is a short history of the pre-war Soviet cinema, followed by an account of the Soviet cinema during the war, with an appendix on future plans. There are useful notes on the training of film technicians, on the organisation 6f the Russian film industry, on the use of 16 mm., on censorship, on colour, stereoscopy and dubbing. The book would have been a deal more interesting if it had been a little more critical and a little less naive. For example, we do not believe that the statement, "N. Doling is engaged on preliminary work for a film on biology to be called The Law of Love, a film demonstrating the maternal instinct, the feeling of parental loyalty in the animal world," is the happiest way to describe the plans for a new scientific film ; nor do we learn much more about stereoscopy by being told that the screen is "composed of 36,000 very thin copper wires running in different directions in conformity with certain calculations". Finally, with only eight pages of illustrations, was it necessary to take up space with a portrait of the author?