Documentary News Letter (1947-1949)

66 DOCUMENTARY NEWS LETTER NOTES OF THE MONTH The Role of Documentary in the Cobb Lecture to the Royal Society of Arts (part of which we reprint on a later page), Sir Stephen Tallents referred in his concluding remarks to the present position and significance of the documentary film. Amongst other things he made the following points, which we feel to be worth wider circulation: 'The outstanding factor is the growing importance of documentary. This is no place to discuss, in any but a few sentences, why the arts of public interpretation have in the last decade suddenly assumed such importance. There is no need in the closing months of 1946 to stress the extreme need for better understanding between the world's peoples. The opening words of the constitution of UNESCO put it well — "Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed". Within the British Commonwealth the need for better interpretation is surely even more urgent today than it appeared to the EMB when it started its work twenty years ago last May — and is still inadequately faced. Within our own coasts we have to meet the demand for helping a greatly increased electorate to understand what is being done, and what is proposed to be done, in their name and for their benefit by central and local government; to understand, too, the cooperation that is required of them. I am not clear that this need is even now clearly and imaginatively grasped in Whitehall. In local government, if you had met, as I did last Whit Monday, some 700 members of the National Association of Local Government Officers for a discussion of public relations, you would have understood how great was the need and how keen the desire to meet it among those who serve our local authorities. We still have the problem of making the fruits of scientific research more promptly available to those who should profit by them. We have unlimited opportunities of visual education and training. Each of these broad territories could be broken up into many specialized fields. In every one of them the documentary film, so largely independent of differences of language, so compelling to all of us who depend upon the eyes and the imagination, has a unique part to fill.' Relations with Czechoslovakia in film circles generally and certainly for those British personnel who were present the outstanding professional event of 1946 was the Festival of British Films in Prague. The understanding and hospitality with which the British representatives were received has already become legendary and it is likely that the positive results achieved will be found to have significance outside the field of films. Plans are far advanced to hold in London a festival of Czech films and, although we are unlikely to equal the magnificence of the earlier occasion, it is to be hoped that the British Foreign Office and the film industry will realize that they are operating in the fertile and fateful field of international public relations. Tyranny of the Dollar 'can the French film industry survive the agreement between theFrench and American Governments, and remain as an instrument of national expression for the French people?' This question was raised by Hollywood's Screenwriters' Guild as soon as the terms of the French-American loan agreement were made known in July, 1946, and formed the basis of a very instructive correspondence between the Guild and Eric Johnston, president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America. The following points emerge. The agreement passed a heavy sentence on French film-making, a fact that has received far too little publicity. French producers who asked for additional protection in the home market in the post-war period have in fact been given less than before. Be fore the war they produced some 1 20 feature films a year ; they even managed to turn out 70 films a year during the occupation. Now they are screwed down to a probable maximum of 48, while Hollywood is free to bring in every American film dubbed into French. In return the wide open spaces of the United States are made as easy of access to the French as the moon. So much for Johnston's statement that 'the moving purpose behind the agreement was the desire to promote the ideal of world unity by removing some of the restrictions which isolate one nation from another'. The violent reactions which the agreement produced in Fraace have been equally inadequately reported in the press. The Screenwriters' Guild in their letter to Johnston quote a number of leading French film people, condemning the agreement and calling for its immediate revision. They did not mince their words. 'Hollywood has obtained from the representatives of France what the Nazis would never have dared ask of us during the occupation.' Acts and Action the new Films Act is due at the end of this year. The various sections of the film trade have already prepared their several proposals for new legislation, while Hollywood is doubtless devising its stratagems. In the meantime the Board of Trade continues its attempt to improvise stop-gap measures. One of the principal problems is to give independent producers, of documentary as well as feature films, greater access to the screens. Whether steps like the recent setting up of a Government sponsored film selection board to arrange circuit distribution for 18 independently produced feature films a year, will have any real effect remains to be seen. At least it shows that the Board of Trade is alive to some of the implications of monopoly, so fully analysed in the Cinematograph Film Council's Report of 1944 on Tendencies to Monopoly. The least satisfactory aspect of such arrangements is the way they are made to depend on the courtesy of the big film combines. The agreement which Dalton concluded with the circuits in 1944 limiting their further expansion was purely a gentlemen's agreement resulting from an exchange of letters. When challenged on this point Government spokesmen have repeatedly stated that further and more definite action must wait on the introduction of more comprehensive legislation when the new Films Act is framed. Now then is the time to be taking them at their word and to be thinking of the measures which can be introduced in 1948 to ensure that the public has more opportunity of seeing in the cinemas the better films that are or can be produced. D.N.L. Changes Documentary News Letter welcomes to its Editorial Board Sinclair Road, organizing secretary of the Federation of Documentary Film Units. Road belongs to the younger generation of documentary workers but already has made his mark. He is respected both in the counsels of the important documentary production companies of which his Federation is composed and amongst the officials of the bodies with whom the Federation negotiates. He has recently published some effective articles on documentary problems which add freshness to the more tradition-ridden effusions of his older colleagues. At the same time we must reluctantly remove from our list of Board members the name of Arthur Elton who retires, temporarily we hope, to pursue his Film Centre duties in Germany. Elton, acting on behalf of the Central Office of Information, is to take charge of film affairs in the British zone of Occupied Germany. For the greater part of 1946 Elton was representing Film Centre in Copenhagen w here he was invited to advise the Danish Go\ eminent in the production of a group of documentaries which will shortly be available for international distribution.