Documentary News Letter (1947-1949)

DOCUMENTARY FILM NEW S Venezuela A RAMBLE by 'you've been to New York and South America,' said the editor, 'how about an article?' It was true that much could be reported from across the Atlantic. Documentary is ubiquitous in opportunity if not in accomplishment. The world — as every new applicant for a new job will tell you — teems with subjects. Yet what finally enabled me to embark, on this article with some show of enthusiasm was a shorter and simpler expedition than the transAtlantic crossing. It was a trip down Charing Cross Road to Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux. And if, as a result, I write not a word about foreign parts, I suspect that Chaplin's latest film has more to say to documentary film-makers than the jungles of the New World, whether they be of chromium or coconut palm. Note first that Monsieur Verdoux is a film arousing passionate controversy. Whether or not the wit, the sentiment and the slapstick is accepted without an increase in blood pressure, you may be sure that the moral speculations of the film's climax will lead to disputations as bitter as those which have traditionally been reserved for a Cocteau premier. And the reasons are not dissimilar. For here is someone trying to use the cinema for a personal statement on matters in which we all regard ourselves as expert. Moreover he is clearly possessed by a truly passionate desire to state his case; the whole purpose and manner of the film is subordinated to the need to make a sharp criticism of society. The violence of the audience reactions is the measure of his success. It is important that Chaplin's climax, in which he suggests that the individual who murders to defend the economic position of his family, may be no more guilty than the nation that goes to war in defence of its way of life, gets an immediate response from working-class audiences. They are pleased also by the direct assaults upon 'respectability' and upon the complacencies of religious jargon. It may not be fanciful to suggest that Chaplin is attempting something not dissimilar from the aim of Shaw's earlier plays (Mrs Warren's Profession, Arms and the Man, for example), but with the important difference that Chaplin appears to reach immediate and direct contact with a working-class audience. Perhaps we should regard Chaplin as embarking in this film on a new career as 'The Poor Man's Shaw' or Shaw without the long words. Some of the vicious middle-class and intellectually snobbish reactions to the Chaplin climax would seem very familiar to GBS. It is true that when he speculates verbally and clumsily on the nature of evil, Chaplin is merely inept, but more than compensating is the beautifully appropriate stylization of his miming (compare not unprofitably Jean Louis Barrault) which goes often deeper than cinema words have yet learned to probe. Watch also his masterly contempt for his backcloth and the way he deliberately uses the screen cliches of train-wheels, feet runing upstairs and the Eiffel Tower to accentuate his satire on the feverish daily whirl of the business-man. He rightly assumes that it is Chaplin and what Chaplin has to say that is the attraction, that the sets and the continuity devices are props to be ignored or themselves satirized. to Verdoux EDGAR ANSTEY But what has all this to do with documentary? Let us turn for an answer to the current production schedule of the Central Office of Information. Let us read the titles. Here are documentaries which undoubtedly employ, and often with great efficiency, the whole gamut of cinematic devices known to man. They embrace everything under the sun from the bottling -of pickles to a coloured cartoon about satellite towns. They stand or fall, not by stars or stories, but by their ideas. Why then do the titles make curiously gloomy reading — even for the devotee of documentary. Is it because of an inescapable conviction that these films — unlike Monsieur Verdoux — will have nothing new to say, notrriBg that anyone has passionately wanted to get across to an audience and for which the medium is a means and not an end? Have British documentaries become dull because in spite of the crying need for them to revise and restate the social democratic philosophy their makers succeed in saying nothing which has not already been said only too often in print or over the radio — or indeed in earlier films? The number of feature productions which have anything original to say is, of course, also negligible. But they are able to maintain audience interest by their fictional content. They have a tale to tell, normally a familiar one revamped, but at any rate a tale. Do we reach the conclusion that the documentary film-maker who is eschewing fiction must substitute personal opinion and controversy? I believe that at any rate we should reexamine the role of the individual in the production process. The world is coming slowly to accept the view that although the provision of food, clothing and shelter must be subject to mass disciplines these may well be dangerous instruments on the level of philosophical interpretation and belief. It is already clear that anti-individualist doctrines will not give us full and flexible power over any art-form. Let us not forget that in the earliest days of documentary the element of 'interpretation' was held to be essential and new interpretations do not spring from bureaucracy. To approach the current documentary problem from this point of view reveals clearly the danger of administration becoming senior partner to production in the control of documentary policy. For official films the Department must name the informational task: the film-maker must be left free to provide the screen solution. Recently I viewed a group of Continental documentaries most of which put our own work to shame for liveliness of purpose and treatment. Yet in the middle of one of them — a beautiful Italian film of shepherd life and a powerful piece of Italian public relations — a civil servant at my elbow in a stage whisper to her neighbour remarked, 'Not a very clean farm, is it?' Visions were immediately conjured up of the fate of this film had it passed through British official hands. One can readily imagine the deletion of all the key sequences on the grounds that the agricultural methods shown were not of the most modern order. So we do not need to visit the tropics for a salutary piece of advice on documentary. Let us make a pilgrimage instead to the feet of the courageous Mr Chaplin who had something to say and was not turned from his purpose until he had said it. Let us not forget that in the early days of documentary film-making in this country, something not dissimilar was wont to happen. In these days it is more common to sit back and complain that no one offers any good subjects to make. No one ever did. DFN COMPETITION No. 1 It is the year 1588 after the defeat of the Armada. Great social, political and economic changes are taking place in Elizabethan England. The Films Division of the Queen's Privy Council has been ordered to make a scries of six films to introduce these changes to the public and to bolster up the morale of the people after the war with Spain. One film each is allotted to the War Office, the Admiralty, the Board of Trade and the Mir.i, tries of Health, Agriculture and Education. We offer prizes of a guinea and half a guinea for the best selection of titles (with suggested Elizabethan script writers) for these six films. Entries must reach the Editor before February 1st and results will appear in the March issue. BRITISH DOCUMENTARY We welcome British Documentary which has just been established as a body representative of all those engaged in documentary film production and distribution in this country. The broad aims of British Documentary are to develop : (1) The technical and artistic quality, and the social and cultural value of documentary films. (2) The freedom of expression and the moral and artistic responsibility of documentary film workers. (3) Proper financial conditions tor the production and distribution of documentary films. (4) Adequate distribution for every subject which is produced. (5) International co-operation, h\ exchange of films, workers, and ideas, and by joint productions, through the World Union of Documentary. It is, in fact, as a result of a series of open meetings held to discuss the World Union of Documentary, set up in Brussels last June, that the new organization has come into being. A number of immediate and practical functions for British Documentary have been agreed. They range from acting as the platform for documentary opinion and policy to providing a central meeting place and club-room. Membership of British Documentary is open to all those working in documentary film production and distribution; there is also a category of associate membership for those who have done service to the documentary movement.