Documentary News Letter (1947-1949)

76 DOCUMENTARY NEWS LETTER THE FIRST DAYS OF DOCUMENTARY By Sir Stephen Tallents, K.C.M.G., C.B., C.B.E. These extracts from the Cobb Lecture, delivered at the Royal Society of Arts in November, 1946, are reprinted by permission of the Editor of the Society's journal. In them Sir Stephen Tallents tells for the first time the inside story of the beginning of documentary. It is to Tallents that documentary owes the greatest debt, since it was through his efforts that finance, facilities, and, .above all, freedom to experiment were achieved. His description of the earlier battles in Whitehall will make interesting reading in parallel with Forsyth Hardy's book, Grierson Documentary'. on no movement, I should be prepared to wager, has ever had a more clearly defined birthplace than that of the British documentary film, and the nursing home in which it first saw the light was Mr Amery's room at the Dominions Office on the morning of April 27th, 1928. Six men were present at that accouchement, of whom five are still living — Mr Amery, Mr Walter Elliot, Sir John Craig (now Deputy Master and Comptroller of the Royal Mint and Engraver of His Majesty's Seals), Mr John Grierson and IjNone of them it is safe to say, saw just what would come of that meeting. But some of us at least felt that it was important. I — partly because it had amused me, but partly also because I felt it was significant — made a detailed note of it at the time ; and, as I have seldom done with the record of an official meeting, I kept the note. I will describe what passed at the birth presently — and this is perhaps the moment to warn you that my talk will deal more with the history of the early documentary film movement than with its latest developments or its future prospects. It is always better to speak of what one knows first hand. But before I tell the story of the birth, let me recall briefly how that bedside meeting came about. (Mr Amery was Chairman of the Empire Marketing Board. Mr Walter Elliot was Chairman of its Film Committee. I was the Board's Secretary. Very early in our work we had been impressed with the opportunity, which cinema presented, for bringing the Empire alive to the imagination of the public. One summer afternoon in 1926 — the first summer of our work — I had driven to lunch with Mr Rudyard Kipling in his house at Burwash. Mr Kipling, who had so far fought shy of the films, confirmed our belief in the possibilities of cinema and held out hopes that he would himself guide the making of a film for us. This seemed to me a magnificent opening. I had little difficulty in persuading my Board to pursue it. I had much more difficulty in selling the idea to an extremely sceptical Treasury. In the end, however, I got leave to employ a man PHOTOMICROGRAPHY A new production Unit specializing in cine-biology J. V. Durden in charge of Production Producer— John Taylor PHOTOMICROGRAPHY LTD WHITEHALL, WRAYSBURY, BUCKS named by Mr Kipling as particularly suited to work with him ; and we embarked on a film of fancy called One Family, which began gloriously with shots of society ladies impersonating the different Dominions in the Throne Room at Buckingham Palace and ended its career less happily after a week's run in the Palace Theatre. In justice to its maker, I should add that he produced, as a by-product of his big film, a particularly charming short film, Southern April, which Miss Lejeune praised on its appearance as an example of 'what lovely things can be done with a camera and a microphone by a man both of sensibility and idea'. While One Family was still in embryo, a man called at my office one morning with a letter of introduction from Robert Nichols, the poet, which described my caller as having ideas in harmony with those which I had discussed with the writer. My caller gave his name as John Griersonjl found that, after service in minesweepers during the war, he had gone out to the United States as a fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation and had there studied psychology in terms of American cinema. He had never as yet himself made a film. Q took to Grierson at once, and felt that here was a man that we needed and must enlist in the service of the EMB. I cannot say with equal truth that I fully grasped at that first interview the theories which he expounded to me^For their full comprehension I would refer you to that interesting book, Grierson on Documentary, which Mr Forsyth Hardy has lately edited and in which he has gathered Grierson's writings and talks from 1926 till almost the present day. But I think I can briefly summarize what Grierson was thinking at that time. He was shocked at the meagre content of community life everywhere. Its enrichment depended, he thought, on a better understanding of the stuff of which it was compounded. That better understanding could not be secured by the orthodox methods of academic education. 'Education,' he was to say of the public a few years ago, 'has given them facts but has not sufficiently given them faith.' It was necessary to touch the imaginations of the people — not merely to impart facts to them ; and their imaginations could best be touched by eliciting and presenting to them in a dramatized form the exciting material which he found in the real life around him. With One Family on the stocks. I could not hope to get the Treasury at that stage to allow us to emploj a second film officer. But one of the great virtues of the EMB was that we had a certain discretion to spend mone> for experimental purposes. 1 therefore commissioned Grierson to prepare a series of memoranda on the use of the film in other countries. He produced memoranda showing in particular how the non-theatrical distribution of films was going ahead m France and German) . He also suggested that we should arrange, in the cinema that the 1 MB h.ui lately installed at the Imperial Institute, a scries of private showings of significant films. Grierson bj now was thirsting to trj out his ideas in the actual making of a film. We, our minds convinced bj his conversation and our eyes opened bj what we had seen at the Imperial Institute, were anxious that he should have that