Documentary News Letter (1944-1945)

28 DOCUMENTARY NEWS LETTER PRODUCERS OF AGRICULTURAL FILMS FOR Students Factors of Soil Fertility Lime Soil Nutrients Land Drainage Gardeners Simple Fruit Pruning II inter Work in the Garden Cultivation Storing Vegetables Indoors Storing Vegetables Outdoors Garden Tools Sai ing your own Seeds Farmers Clamping Potatoes Stooking and Stacking Potato Blight Hedging Ditching Making Good Hay Making Grass Silage Clean Milk Reseeding for Better Grass Th ea t rica I .1 udiences The Harvest Shall Come KAY'S KAY'S Laboratories Film Studios Technical Managers Studio Manager FINSRURY PARK, N.4 Eric Van Baars A. E. Newton 72a CARLTON HILL 22 SOHO SQUARE, W.l ST. JOHN'S WOOD E. YV. Stimson N.W.8 INDIA STREET, GLASGOW Tel. Maida Vale 1141 Tel. Glasgoii' Central 9377 A. J. Furness Film Strips Produced 55 nun & Sul) standard Processing REALIST FILM UNIT 9 GREAT CHAPEL STREET, W.l Member of the Federation of Documentary Film Units BOOK REVIEWS The Documentary Film, 1922-1945. (The Museum of Modern Art, New York. 1946.) This is the printed programme of a series of film shows arranged by Miss Iris Barry to be presented at the Museum of Modern Art between January and July this year. People who take the whole syllabus will be able to see masterpieces from half the countries of the world. Here are newsreels by Pathe made in Seville in 1909; Kino Praxda from Russia. Nanook of the North, Bruce Woolfe's The Battle of the Somme (it is a little sad that one cannot see this early British masterpiece without crossing the Atlantic), The Covered Wagon, Grass, Berlin, and The Plow that Broke the Plains. The British school is represented by a score or more of films — Housing Problems, Enough to Eat, Night Mail, Song of Ceylon, Industrial Britain, Transfer of Power, The Londoners, and many others. Drifters alone is missing because "the negative has been mislaid somewhere in Britain." Luckily it has been found again, and perhaps Miss Barry will be able to squeeze it in, for no historical review of documentary can be complete without it. Here too is a splendid selection of the best wartime films from Britain and America. The printed programme is detailed and accurate; it is a work of reference in itself. Altogether the occasion is a notable one, and British documentary is under an obligation to Miss Barry for so magnificently displaying its works. Bernard Shaw Among the Innocents. E. W. and M. M. Robson. (The Svdneyan Society. 1946. \s. 6d.) A wild and not altogether successful smack at Bernard Shaw, whom the Robsons not only accuse of besmirching the British way of life, and insulting the Royal Family, but also make responsible for everything they conceive to be iniquitous in British films from Colonel Blimp to The Madonna of the Seven Moons. The Art of the Camera. Frederick Young. The Film Director. Charles Frend. Screen Writing. Bridget Boland. The Film as a Visual Art. George Pearson. The Documentary Film. Donald Alexander. (The British Film Institute, 1946.) These booklets are reprints of lectures given at the Film Institute's 1945 Summer School devoted to Film Appreciation. Frederick Young, Charles Fiend and Miss Boland attempt a brief and objective description of the processes of film making from their own particular points of view, and their three books together make a useful and interesting symposium. Pearson and Alexander approach their subject from a critical rather than from a descriptive point of view, and it is interesting to contrast their outlooks. Pearson has all of thirty years' film work behind him. His reputation dates back to the 'twenties when he became a famous director of silent films. Today he is making no less useful if less spectacular films for the peoples of Africa at the Colonial Film Unit. For him the film must appeal directly to the emotions or it is nearly valueless. One feels he would not recognise, or at least would not like, the school of film aesthetic with its roots in public service and public education which Alexander expounds in his most stimulating paper. Not that Alexander would avoid emotion, but for him emotion must grow out of the circumstances dealt with in the film, and not out of a