Documentary News Letter (1944-1945)

DOCUMENTARY NEWS LETTER 41 TWO FEATURE DOCUMENTARIES Land of Promise. Production: Films of Fact. Director: Paul Rotha. Associate Director: Francis Gysin. Distribution: Film Traders Ltd. 70 mins. Personnel Selection — Officers. Production: Shell Film Unit for M.O.I. Production Consultants: Film Centre. Director: Geoffrey Bell. Camera: Sidney Beadle. Diagrams: Frank Rodker. Distribution'. C.F.L. 1 hour, 40 mins. both these films run to feature length, but that is their only point of similarity. In all other respects they represent two poles of documentary technique, the one demagogic, the other pedagogic. Indeed, both of them have the faults of their merits. Land of Promise, in its enthusiasm, lands, at one or two points, too neatly on to its demagogic pole; while Personnel Selection — Officers rejoices at times too obviously in its pedagogic purities. Nevertheless, each film is an object lesson to documentary workers in the pursuit of statement and technique within a carefully selected and clearly planned field; an important point, this, in times when a film may start as a non-theatrical one-reeler and end up with a circuit-booking as a second feature or, more astonishingly, vice versa. In Land of Promise Rotha has out-plentied World of Plenty. From the experience gained in the earlier film, he has achieved a greater concentration of fact and emotion, and has at the same time sought, not unsuccessfully, to simplify his argument by personalising it to a degree which, in World of Plenty, was only hinted at. As a result, Land of Promise grips you. The admirable personalities of Miles Malleson and John Mills impinge with salutary violence, and carry you unprotesting from Isotype to Isotype. What is more important, the film has passion — passion in the sense that the wickedness of slums, and slums' concomitants, in modern society, is pushed home at you in a way which could (as a compliment) be described as Dickensian, were it not also so scientifically correct. Here indeed is the film's major merit, for a universally applicable lesson emerges, and the implicit parochiality of the subject in comparison with World of Plenty is at these points forgotten. Vivid the images, brilliant the editing, dramatic and frightening some of the sequences, ingenious the sound track. But — and it is only a medium-sized "but" — the commentary from time to time button-holes you too much, and perhaps, like the mariner, will not stop more than one in three. And surely the final peroration bears too obvious a mark of the period between VE Day and the General Election? Still, with all criticisms made (and Land of Promise is too notable a film not to merit criticism) here is something that will stir muddy thoughts and, better still, will rub the more reluctant noses in the mud from which, hitherto, complacent goloshes have provided protection. Geoffrey Bell's epic of personnel selection switches us right to the other extreme. It is the third film to be made on that astonishing phenomenon, the emergence of the army as a pioneer in the fields of psychologically accurate methods of job allocation. The first film in the series was Neuro-Psychiatry, which dealt with the psychological maladjustments on the treatment of which Army selection theories are in part based. The second was Personnel Selection — Recruits, which was concerned with the blanket intake of conscripts, and the scientifically planned methods devised to put the right man in the right job. Now Personnel Selection — Officers does what is filmically the most difficult job of all — the analysis of the methods by which leaders and leader-types (using the words in the democratic sense) are to be found. Like its predecessors, it uses a cool and objective technique; the superb diagrammatic qualities of the Shell Unit are employed with undiminished brilliance; and a steady, unhurried pace fits the film for the specialised audience for which it is designed. But a new and exciting quality appears in this film which was lacking in the others. This quality arises (very suitably) from the subject rather than from the treatment. For here you have a study of a group of young men with varied characters and backgrounds but with identical aims, each and all of whom are being assessed by wide and searching criteria representative of the best that modern expertise can devise. Out of all the ingenious group and individual tests to which they are submitted there emerges not merely an efficiently objective description, but also a drama of human relationships and human endeavour. One is excited by the suspense (in no way artificially contrived) about who will make the grade and who will not — excited because Bell has been searching enough in filmic analysis to get under the skin of all the people he presents. Therefore, the film, which has no shape in the normal sense of the word, has a curious shape which is, one supposes, the shape of the curve, or part of the curve, of individual existence. All this, by the way, is summed up in the brilliantly shot sequences of psychiatric interviews, which are surely high spots in objective movie work. Where Personnel Selection ()//icers at times fails is in the stickiness which comes from a too obvious enthusiasm in rigid objectivity. Granted that in many places a hand microphone had to be held well in camera-foreground — an obvious necessity where group or individual tests had to be spontaneously recorded, and where rehearsal would have stultified the film's purpose — yet there are moments when this technique appears, in editing, to have been retained only to remind us how cold-blooded the film is trying to be. And as it is not as a whole cold-blooded, the result is unfortunate. Both Laud of Promise and Personnel Selection — Officers are films which prove that documentary, as ever, is not content to rest on its laurels, but continues to seek new methods and new impacts on audiences of all types, which means, by the way, you and me. BASIL WRIGHT BASIC Films COMPLETED HOMES FOR THE PEOPLE Odham's Press LOCAL STUDIES VISUAL UNIT Ministry of Education DEPTH CHARGES Admiralty IN PRODUCTION COUNTRY SURVEY Central Office of Information RADAR D.S.I.R. HISTORY OF THE WOOL TRADE Ministry of Education TAKE THOU Evans Medical Supplies BRISTO . TYPE I/O Bristol Aeroplane Company BASIC FILMS LIMITED 18 SOHO SQUARE LONDON, W.I GERRARD 7015 MEMBER OF THE FEDERATION OF DOCUMENTARY FILM UNITS