Documentary News Letter (1947-1949)

DOCUMENTARY NEWS LETTER 73 ploring new fields too. With the end of the war. B.B.C. feature men have been ranging across Europe with recording cars to bring back authentic sound pictures from France and Sweden, Italy and N ugoslavia, Belgium, Holland and Denmark, for the series 'Window on Europe' in the Home Service. In the I ight Programme a new popular audience has been found for documentary, provided the subjects dealt with are of general interest and the presentation popular. A new series, 'Focus', is attempting to put the spotlight on such subjects as 'Drink', 'Gambling'. "Coal'. 'Housing'. The aim is purely Objective; to present facts, opinions, and ! ads in such an easily understandable and entertaining way that no literate adult could fail to catch the drift. A similar job was done on the post-war crime wave by the two series 'It's Your Money They're After' and 'There's no Future in It'. Then there is the Third Programme, only two months old as I write, and already the feature programme as practised by Louis MacNeice, Rayner Heppenstall, Douglas Cleverdon, Stephen Potter, and Nesta Pain, has proved equal to the rarefied atmosphere. True, features in the I bird Programme tend to be mainly literary in character but a pointer in the opposite direction was provided by the outstanding success of Hiroshima, John Hersey's 'New Yorker" narrative, which scored a new high in appreciative reaction from the listener research poll, Incidentally, the two greatest post-war successes in documentary radio have both been war stones, Hiroshima and The Man from lichen. I eonard Cornell's reconstruction of the experiences in a concentration camp of the Jersey schoolmaster. Harold le Druillenec. It is my own belief that the current reaction against stones of the war both m radio and films has been accepted fai too uncritically. I believe that the war has been such an overwhelming experience in the lives of our generation, that its distillation into all forms of art, radio and films included, has not seriously begun. What we have seen and heard so far have been but sketches, hurried dispatches from the threatened outposts of present experience. Therefore. I believe that the apparent confusion and frustration among writers and producers whose war has been taken away is a transient phase. There is no easv way 'back to peace" and thei no quick and easy path 'away from war'. Documentary producers in all fields would clear their own minds if they avoided the catch phrases of the box-office prophets of 1946 as pointedly as thev ignored the wishful headlines of 1939. There is only one way ahead for documentary. The slow, steady, mapping of the jungle of ignorance and prejudice. DOCUMENTARY THEATRE by MONTAGU SLATER Playwright, Librettist and Novelist recently Michel Saint-Denis was telling me how Andre Obey wrote Le Viol </< Lucrece. The writer — he is now the chief of the Corned ie I rancaise — had joined Saint-Denis and his company somewhere in provincial France where thev were playing in small halls and barns and getting a more direct contact with the audience than a conventional theatre could then attain. Obey visited them at some performance — it must have been in the late "twenties — and because he felt this way of working with the audience was important he threw in his lot with the Compagnie ties Quinze, and wrote for them \ <><■". lucrece and La Bataille du Marne. Lucrece (1930) is one of the formative plays of our time. It used cinematic notions. Anyone who saw Aman Maistre in the miming sequence of Tarquin's walk through the corridors at midnight is not likely to forget it in a hurry. But its main innovation was the introduction of narrative and comment in the persons of the chorus, a man and a woman, I e Recitant and La Recitante. who are not only the interpreters between the audience and the play but become in the end the duel characters. The notion came I think more from the company than from the author. 1 oi a long time Obey found himself unable to write these parts. I can feel these people but I cannot hear their words,' he said. One day with Saint-Denis he listened to the radio description bv two narrators of the Davis c up final. Now I know how to do it," he said, and wrote the play. What has this to do with documentary*? \ lull account would take more space than I have. but two aspects stand out: the sense that n was urgent to revivify the relation ol audience ,\xw\ artist, and the appearance of new techniques — radio and sound film — come at the same time and spring from the same soil. Both affect the stage. The result is not only a new conception of realism but the return of poetry to the stage, the radio and the film. I iv e years later it is impossible to keep autobiography out of these things — the Compagnie des Quinze reached England and consciously under the influence of Lucrece I wrote what I called 'a documentary play' taster 1916. 1 his was the lime of i and Night Mail. The word documentary was becoming known but I at any rate was using it in a narrow sense. I meant that although the play was m verse as well as prose and tried to use all the resources o\' the theatre it was based in the literal sense on the documents, just as Lucrece had been. Meanwhile in the I mted States the writers in the Federal Theatre Project had invented the 'Living Newspaper'. Power and One Third of a Nation convinced the most cynical dramatic critics that a new force was coming into the theatre. English documentarians were quick to that the 'Living Newspaper' technique had much to offer to the screen as well as to the Paul Rotha .m^\ Miles Malleson (whose ' // oj Dorset, sent on tour by the II ( m 1936, was a pioneering play seeking a new audience it not a new technique) studied attentively the scripts as well as the perform an the I ederal Theatre diving Newspapt London, I nit) ITieatre put on Busmen (1937) about the London bus stnke. a Living paper' which was too preoccupied with the particulai instance to 51 Itl next vear. during the Munich ciisis. I nit) authors wrote a 'Living Newspaper overnight on ( ;ci hoslovakia. I he lnsttruits of Paul Rotha's studies m the technique were seen during the war in H Plenty: later in Land oj Promise, with M Mallcson's collaboration, he went even nearer i he stage form. Towards the end of the war W.I Williams, \U( \. anxious to use everv method interesting (he soldiers in current all i suaded Michael MacOwan to produce an \IK'A play unit tor the presentation of I ivmg Newspapers'. Several plays were put on with success, the outstanding pair being Great Swap (a too optimistic account of I end lease) bv 1 ed Willis and Jack Lindsay, and Where do we go from hoc' ion full employment and planning) by the same (wo writers plus Bridget Boland. After the war .lack I and Bert Coombes wrote I lu duced at the Scala m that year bv "Theatre about the nationalization of coal and its problems. It is worth noting that the ABCA unit dropped the title 'Living Newspaper', finding it was misleading, and called their productions 'Documentary Plays'. In film, the word documentary extends from films set to poems like Our Country, l the Men. Green Mountain Bi ick Mountain (all Dylan Thomas), through films that are part poetry like Night Mail (in which Auden was the poet) and Song of Ceylon, through films which are the screen variants of 'Living Newspaper" like World of Plenty and Land of Promise, and through all sorts of other variants to the straight instructional like The Care ami Maintenance the Tractor. The vague phrase I have just used, 'all sorts of other variants' covers in fact the great body o\~ documentary and some of its major achievements. Le propre de ce qui est vraiment generate est d'etre fecond. The interaction of stage and screen is a large subject and one to be treated generally. I began with Saint-Denis and Obey and 1 believe the recall of poetry to stage and screen is one of the grand achievements of what we call documentary. I could make a case for a paradox that would replace the classic phrase, "the poeirv is in the passion' with '(he poetry is in the document': but this is only because the passion and the poetry are both exposed in the fresh!) discovered detail, the apparent!) small but significant fax image which, as any interpreter o\' dreams will say. is cardinal. This again arises because documentary rediscovers a living relation with the audience, whether the simple relation like 'You tractor drivers will be interested in this it tells how to maintain your t' "i oil mothers will be interested in this becaus how to cue lor your children's the more complex relations established bv films like Diai th) and / 8 »me thing manifestl) more important than (he l< meal corollaries like attempts on the stagt break out of the picture I'm: I hornton \\ ildei ' ■ < In these too the audiencc-n the im portant thing. I he stage dev ict are more or less successful means to an cn<\ I end is. I think, to bring back p bv a deeper, more intimate sense and not onl) this intensity bul sen wider world on i Hence the use o\ narrative (Shakespeare em; si/ed its importance in the ehon Henry I i hence the u p.K-trv. and the emph \ d in