Documentary News Letter (1944-1945)

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100 DOCUMENTARY NEWS LETTER THE PARIS SCIENTIFIC FILM CONFERENCE In 1934, M. Jean Painleve and Doctor Claoue inaugurated an annual series of scientific film conferences in Paris. The seventh of this series, interrupted by the war, took place on October 12th, 13th and 14th at the Palais de Chaillot. This Congress was arranged by the Institut de Cinematographic Scientifique and was supported by the Association pour la Documentation Photographique et Cinematographique dans les Sciences, an organisation with some ten thousand members in France. British non-theatrical films were an important element in the programmes. Below, John Maddison, who represented The Ministry of Information and the Scientific Film Association at the Congress, gives some impressions of the occasion. The French cinema, from first impressions, appears to have preserved much of its liveliness and power of improvisation. Conversations and press reports made it clear that its greatest problem remains the lack of studio space and materials. This was underlined by the note of tragedy in prevailing comments on the fire which, a day or two before, had destroyed the larger part of the important Victorine Studios, the only ones on the Mediterranean Coast. Valuable sound recording equipment had been lost but elaborate settings for Duvivier's film Panique had escaped. Jean Renoir's La Regie du Jen, banned by the Germans in 1940, had reappeared the week before, and had been withdrawn for lack of commercial success. I did not see it, but everyone agreed that it was an unconventional and intensely personal film, more violent in form than La Bete Humaine. Indeed one critic described it as the most violent work seen in the French cinema in fifty years. Among films showing at first-run houses were Bresson's Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, a stylised but tawdry intrigue, in spite of a script by Cocteau, and Came and Prevert's Les Enfants du Paradis, begun under the Occupation, a story of Paris in 1840, and a film to note. My first contact with Jean Painleve, my host at the Congress, was through a paragraph in an evening paper announcing that he had been attacked by a vampire! Later in the day, he himself smilingly gave me the facts in his cinema laboratory in the basement of the Arts et Metiers Science Museum. He had just finished a short interest film about a real vampire, which had proved a little difficult to handle. This film Le Vampire was shown at the end of the Congress. After opening with a sequence devoted to strange beasts and marine creatures which have given rise to myths and legends, Painleve uses material from Murnau's silent film Nos Feratu to introduce a realistic study of this rare and terrible animal attacking its victim, a South American rodent. The commentary to the film is witty and at times macabre and the accompanying jazz melody is haunting and melancholic. The whole thing is a jeu d' esprit in the French manner and would serve as an interesting contrast to a Secrets of Nature film in any Film Society programme. A NEW VISUAL EDUCATION UNIT is being formed by PAUL BOTHA of FILMS of FACT Ltd Dr OTTO NEUBATH of ISOTYPE INSTITUTE LTD / 2 3 To further the animated diagram and chart technique already demonstrated in the films "Land of Promise", "World of Plenty", "Total War in Britain", and "Blood Transfusion." To make complete films in the Isotype method, like "A Few Ounces a Day", of which a medical subject "Endocrinology of the Menstrual Cjcle" in colour is the first. To explore other visual educational techniques in film and strip-film, and conduct experiment and research. 25, Catherine Street, Covent Garden, London, WC2. TELEPHONE TEMP. BAR 5116/7 8 The son of a former Prime Minister of France, Painleve is an interesting character. He gave up medical studies for films and one may best describe him as a scientist who has fallen in love with the cinema. During the occupation, he was an active member of the Resistance but took no part in film-making. In 1944, after Paris was liberated, he was appointed Director General of the French Cinema Industry. Earlier this year, he left this post to take over the Institute Cinematographic Scientifique in order to devote himself to experimental cinematography. His interests there include research into stereoscopy with a triple vibrating wire screen, and the development of a standard projector with a cooling system efficient enough to give with safety a fairly brilliant still picture even when using flammable stock. French technicians have perfected a substandard cinecamera operating at 5,000 frames per second, and I watched Painleve filming with it the dissolution of a glass bottle under the impact of a rifle shot. He projected' the negative of it later and this short sequence was very striking. Painleve maintains (and it is a contention with which our Scientific Film Association strongly agrees) that scientific methods ought to be used in a more organised way to lead to improvements in cinematography itself. To quote his own words, there should be research "pour le film" as well as "par le film". Apart from the work done by commercial laboratories, he looks forward to the establishment of a State Research Centre investigating such problems as stereoscopy and colour and the improvement of emulsions and lenses, etc. The fact that out of 33 films presented at the Congress, only one came within this category of research appeared lamentable to him. This was a film demonstrating a method for faking backgrounds called Simplifilm. It was presented by its inventor, Dufour, with all the enthusiasm of a compatriot of Melies but without the rare sense of decor of that genius. Simplifilm uses a metal chamber, containing a special optical system, placed before the camera, and mounted on a stand which rotates with it. Cut-outs from photographs and picture post cards are placed in an aperture in the middle of the chamber, and when shot, these two-dimensional settings blend quite successfully with the players and objects on the set. Models also can be placed in the aperture. The lighting is naturally rather flat, but the device undoubtedly offers interesting new possibilities for inexpensive trick work. At the six sessions of the Congress, films from France, Great Britain. Canada. America. Italy, the U.S.S.R. and Switzerland were shown. The first films to be presented were two medical subjects by the late Dr. de Martel who committed suicide in the summer of 1940 rather than live to see the Germans in control. Trepanation pour