Documentary News Letter (1944-1945)

DOCU1V1ENTARY NEWS LETTER THE CHAIN AND THE LINKS Impressions of a Film Officer in Latin America {In Santiago, which is a large city, the Nontheatrical films organisation depends almost entirely for transport on a Chevrolet converted van. This is normally driven by a certain Senor A veline Lopez, who also ranks as head operator. Unfortunately, of Lopez' three possible assistants, none is competent to drive the van; and during a recent period when Lopez fell ill, the Films Officer himself took over his duties, as this seemed an admirable opportunity for a first-hand check on the work being done; it is one thing to supervise the work and obtain detailed reports, and quite another to see for oneself, on the spot. For this reason the following impressions, by the Films Officer, of his experiences may be of interest.) nineteen-forty; a bright autumn day. Somewhere in London stands a man with a film camera. He is making a film about London Transport.1 There is a blitz on ; the atomic bomb is still a secret thing of the distant future, but a London blitz, 1940 vintage, is not a joke. An air battle goes on, out of sight, almost out of hearing, very far overhead. It leaves in the sky those curious white vapour trails, from aeroplanes in fast flight. The cameraman sees a chance for a good shot. He gets the vapour trails above the facade of a building, with a lamp in the foreground to give distance . . . from here, shift to an omnibus, a line of omnibuses ; London Transport goes on, as the vapour trails very slowly dissolve. The cameraman is the first link. Then come laboratory, titling, packing, dispatch . . . (torpedoes, a cold sea, perhaps death . . .). And so we come to the last link in the chain. Nineteen-forty-five. By the calendar, it is winter, or very early spring. By English standards, it might be summer. A big school, run by Canadian priests for eight hundred Chilean boys; only four hundred can fit into the hall at one time. The priests are kindly, but a little vague; the boys come tumbling in, clean, neatly dressed, but noisy as a kennelful of puppies. They squabble over seats. They crowd round the projector. They ask — the eternal question from schoolboys— "Have you brought a comic?" We haven't. We console them with stories of London Transport's railway trains. Lights out. But the talking and chattering by no means stop. The assistant operator, with much experience, tells me gloomily that "this is the worst school of the lot; we might as well show silent films". It is true that only those well up in front can hear the commentary . . . and none of them seem to be paying a great deal of attention . . . are we wasting our time? Is the last link too weak to carry the message which started, in London, in 1940? As we go from London to Quebec,2 from Quebec to Caen,3 and back to England for a "Cinesports", I wonder about this. Leaving aside Quebec and Caen, and considering London . . . they have seen, at any rate, the tube trains, the buses, the trams ; neatness, order, efficiency. They 1 City Bound 2 Peoples of On-bet (Canadian) » You Can't Kill a City live, and many of them will continue to live, these boys, in Santiago, a city notable for the chaotic condition of its transport. Many of them have parents in the car-owning class — but even so. . . . We cannot even begin to underline the point. We cannot even whisper that British organisation, even in wartime, means you can get from place to place in relative comfort, whereas in Santiago, even in peacetime, it is too often a major battle to get on a tramcar. Estames en Chile. But even so ("Now boys, please go out quietly]") — even so, if just a few of these youngsters, the next time they try to climb on to a crowded omnibus remember fleetingly that "they do these things better in London", then, perhaps, we are not wasting our time. Nineteen-forty-five. A Crown Film Unit camera outfit chasing the flying-bombs all over London to catch and film one as it falls4. . . . And for the last link, let us go somewhere very different. Another school ; but a school far from the centre of Santiago, a Chilean State school, a poor school for poor children in a poor street. There is nothing in way of an assembly hall here ; there is, at the back of the ramshackle building, a "patio" ... in England it might by courtesy be called a back-yard. Benches are brought. We seek some sort of electricity supply, and eventually find it in the "kitchen"— a wooden, lean-to shack separated from the main building, and remaining erect, presumably, through the sheer will-power of the cook. Many of the boys are dressed in little better than rags ; but they crowd round the projector, just like their clean and well-dressed fellow-citizens in the other school, and . . . "Have you brought a comic?" One boy seems shy, but he wants to ask a question. He waits till we have connected up, and the rest are scrambling for seats. He is no better dressed than any of them, but: "Have you brought a newsreel showing the atomic bomb?" The better-dressed ones never asked that. The best we can do for him, at the moment, is the flying bombs. But there is another contrast; these boys can hear as well as see what is being shown them. Before we start, the "director" of the school, a large man with a paunch who probably gets paid a salary slightly better than that of a junior typist in a commercial firm, gets to his feet : "Now boys, you are not in a theatre, nor is this a 'fiesta" ; you are in school" (it is eight o'clock in the evening, and no one compelled these boys to stay behind). "There will be no shouting, or talking, or giggling; you will please behave yourselves." The "director" has personality; there is no trouble. Did he, perhaps, tell them about the atomic bomb? Or do they think for themselves, perhaps with their parents' help? . . . Here, at any rate, we are not wasting our time. One could go on indefinitely ; but it would become boring. Let us end with a few fleeting, and disconnected, impressions. Girls are nearly always better behaved than boys (as regards film shows). We went to one State school for girls, a big modern school in a large, light, airy building. The assistant operator, on the way there, said : "This is one of the best places." I soon saw why, from his point of view; « v.i. this school always has its shows at five o'clock and they invite the operators to tea beforehand ' (coffee, really, but very good). This school has its shows in the gymnasium. The girls sit in rows on the floor. They are quite silent throughout: one cannot tell if they are interested, bored, or just well-disciplined. But as we packed up the apparatus afterwards, a group in a corner was practising a dance movement they had just seen in a physical-training film,5 and getting it more or less right. At any rate they had not been asleep. An open-air show, away at the back of beyond. An unpaved street, full of mudholes. The long-suffering van crawls over and through them to a dingy house indicated by my long-suffering assistant, and stops. It is instantly mobbed. "Peliculas . . . peliculas!" Assisted by far too many willing hands, we get out and set up the apparatus. Our initial audience is about a hundred and fifty; we project against the wall of a house across the road, and there is, as always with open-air shows, much climbing of ladders to obtain electricity from highly unlikely and dangerous places. Within ten minutes we have about a thousand people watching, in awed silence, the shots from the German concentration camps.6 The poorest people are always the mosf hospitable. The man at whose invitation we went insists that we have a glass of wine with him. We learn that all these people live quite a long way from the nearest cinema (and a fair way even from the nearest tramline); they will willingly stand for an hour in the street to see films. There are, in Santiago, more isolated spots like this than one supposes; and in fine weather they are among the best places to visit, from the point of view of results. The "Cinesports" series is always remarkably popular. I have only heard one adverse comment. An elderly teacher at a girls' school suggested to me that possibly scenes of men boxing and wrestling were "a little brutal . . . not very good propaganda for the English, who after all were always gentlemen.'" Senor Don Emilio Gonzalez, second-in-command of films and in charge of programmation and organisational details, lost a son at the hands of Franco's men in the Spanish Civil War. He will never tell anyone the details; but when he first saw B.O.N. 256 (concentration camps) he made a sort of vow with himself to show it to everybody in Santiago. At the present rate of progress he will probably succeed. Incidentally, this newsreel, when it first arrived on 35 mm., was censored here "adults only". In spite of this, we took a deliberate risk with the 16 mm. copy, and we show it everywhere we can. So far, we have never had even a suspicion of a complaint, although we show it in schools. And so it goes on ; modern, up-to-date schools, social and political clubs, ill-lit streets which are almost slums. The last link in the chain. Perhaps the other links would care to know that, as far as we can tell, the message does get through. 5 Invitation to the Dance • B.O.N. 256 •-'