Documentary News Letter (1944-1945)

Record Details:

Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.

Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.

DOCUMENTARY NEWS LETTER 43 revue. I talked at midnight to Joris Ivens and Henri Storck in a vegetarian restaurant about movement in cinema still life: the wind rocking a chair, the sea sifting sand, the unseen hand which tugs a rope by the quay. Then, when I finally got back to my hotel, Charles Dekeukelaire broke into my bedroom with a hand projector and insisted on showing me his last film on the bedroom wall. I got up out of my chair and intercepted the projector ray, only to find a ballet performed by apples projected on my stomach. I remember there was a grand presentation of a Czechoslovakian film about a condemned man's last request for a prostitute. The girl who went ruined herself "in the profession". That was the theme of the tragedy. . . . And that was Brussels! . . . 1 don't mean that all cineaste activity came to an immediate full stop at the same time. Some cineastes managed to make compromises and fit into some corner of the new industry. There was Len Lye, for instance. Len's first film was a highbrow cartoon about the beginning of geological shapes, and ended with a conflict between land and water. An allegory, maybe, of an exterior force attacking the true spirit of the artist. And Len ought to know about that. He worked his passage over from Australia, and came out of the stokehold bald. Young, bald and handsome, Len has a "sang Freud" and a way of putting little "impress-me-nots" in the shade. Len's compromise was to paint patterns directly on celluloid (thereby cutting down overhead costs) and selling the film for advertising. It was the Art and Craft side of films. And the cineaste mind has persisted, only the new cineastes cannot afford to put their ideas into practice. Take A. Kraszna-Krausz, the Hungarian film critic. K.K. would like to combine cinema, television, colour and stereoscopic photography into a new magic. He said to me, "Imagine the new machine in your room. It is possible to turn a knob and tune in to Africa. Then you have a televised, stereoscopic coloured image of a man in your room, a solid figure who, so to speak, walks on your own carpet. Then you turn another knob and tune in to Iceland. From Iceland you can summon a woman. The Lap woman and the African man are brought together by your will. Would it be too fantastic to say that you can let them get to know one another? At any rate, I think you can get what I'm driving at. My new tele-cinema would help every man to become a creator, to project his personality into an infinite number of situations of his own choosing." Alas, it would cost a fortune to prove that it did or didn't. BRIEF ENCOUNTER Sir, In your fifty-first issue, your reviewer of feature films flays Brief Encounter in a manner which is quite unjustified and in my opinion, very bad taste. Only a cynic or person completely out of touch with the life of average normal people could describe this film as "this slight story of two middle-aged people in search of a bed which became vaguely comic instead of being noble or pathetic". That comment just isn't true, and any reviewer capable of such writing is in my opinion not suitable for the general standards of D.N.L. DEREK STEWART GREENPARK PRODUCTIONS LTD. Managing Director RALPH KEENE Welcomes to its Staff : DIRECTORS: WRITERS: CAMERAMEN: BUSINESS MANAGER: John Eldridgc Humphrey Swingler Jack Common Laurie Lee George Still Martin Curtis John Terry THE FILM PRODUCERS GUILD LTD. GUILDHOUSE, Upper St. Martin's Lane, W.C.2 DATA Announces completion of four films about current problems "THE BRIDGE" A report on reconstruction in Yugo-Slavia brought back by Arthur Calder Marshall, Jack Chambers and Wolfgang Suschitzky. "EDUCATION OF THE DEAF" The first of two films made by Jack Ellitt with the Department for the Education of the Deaf at Manchester University " BIRTHDAY" The problem of infant mortality in Scotland, and how mothers can make the best of present facilities. Directed by Budge Cooper. "SCIENCE JOINS AN INDUSTRY" The story of the long cleavage between cotton industrialists and research workers which led to the Shirley Institute. Made by James Hill. Documentary Technicians Alliance Ltd.. 12 Sono Square, W.l. Gerrard 2826