Documentary News Letter (1947-1949)

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28 DOCUMENTARY FILM NEWS To the Seven-Headed Board of Review of DFN sirs: When you set up that Reviewing Panel, 1 had my doubts as to how you would fare if some of your less composite selves got the gang into a judgment that was seriously challenged. This, so to speak, is it. If you tell me your composite self has no body to be burned, and no soul to be damned, you had better listen a moment, for I am going to have a shot at both. I am concerned, if you please, with the page of criticisms on recent Canadian films in your January issue. I am concerned for two reasons. The first is that I was once associated with the National Film Board in a local, more or less Red Indian capacity, and have a regard for the people who work there, and I could not believe on the face of it that they were as bad as you compositely, or uncompositely, said they were. The second reason is that I went to see four of the seven films you reviewed and now say quite simply, for what it is worth, that your criticism was thoughtless, and from any serious point of view, either in documentary leadership or documentary criticism, inadequate. Here is a group of films all coming from a not unnotable unit. There are people like McLean, Beveridge, Jackson, Blackburn, Applebaum, Weisenborn, Budge Crawley, not to mention Stuart Legg, around, and they are all pretty good people with a good sense of documentary and, shall we say, a certain measure of taste, and yet DFN cannot find a good word to say for any one of seven of their films. This one Broncho Busters is 'just a programme filler', Tomorrow's Citizens 'purports to examine' this and that and 'suffers from severe indigestion' and is 'slick, shallow and smug' (just nark at them, Stuart!), and 'does not succeed'. Another one 'falls from the frying pan of dullness into the fire of obscurity'. Montreal by Night is yet another 'programme filler'. Condition Improved, which is about occupational therapy, save the mark, was no great good because 'it may be questioned whether such a survey which consists essentially of linked examples is really the most convincing approach to the subject'. For good measure, there is a certain sniffing at the NFB information sheets as though your august composite Panel was not concerned in reviewing the films but in reviewing the good old hooey which goes with publicity sheets the world over. I have in my time kicked some films around, but I doubt if I ever was totally sore about seven in a row and when I see seven good men and true being sore about seven in a row I find it quite a phenomenon. I even doubt if it is possible, either in good criticism or good manners. Good manners we shall leave aside, except to say that the Canadian boys can be articulate too, and it does nobody any good to be superior, and start a slanging match over each other's films which no one can win. Who, for example, is anyone in documentary to talk about a 'mere programme filler' when so many of the damn things don't even manage to hit a theatre programme? Whatever their virtues or failings, the Canadian films referred to did manage to do just that. As for good criticism, I would say, in general, that one element of it is to say what is good as well as what is bad and it is only the tyro who finds a warming virtue in the continuing negative. But let us take them one at a time remembering that, of the films mentioned. Tomorrow's Citizens and Montreal byNight were made for theatre showing and the ten-minute attention of a mass audience. I see that Bronco Busters, in a snappy innuendo, is described as 'static' and only moves because it happens that there are some fast horses and dogies in and around. It is. moreover, a 'pretty ordinary piece of film-making which could have been made anywhere on the North American continent'. Here is one re son viewer who says the picture is fast and that it is the best rodeo item, with more working detail, that has come along in a long while and that it will certainly excite the children everywhere. For my money, I would have liked to see more of the Royal Show aspect of the Calgary Stampede, with the big Herefords in from the foothills, but the atmosphere is good and ordinary Calgary and nowhere else I assure you, and not without a certain reference back to windbreaks and sundry other aspects of progressive farming which I thought moderately thoughtful on the part of somebody. Maybe it is true that the local idiom in Canada is a trifle corny, but whose local idiom is not, if you follow my meaning? I'd say that here often is fast and sensitive camera-work and good reportage in anyone's language: of the boys from the farm showing their paces at a local agricultural show in the shadow of the Rockies. The film looks it and it is and does not pretend to do any more. When did I last see a film as good about the Bath Show? Tomorrow's Citizens is another, more serious matter altogether. The task was to produce a serious film editorial for theatres on a world subject: in ten-minute length. To my knowledge, it had never been done before and represented an experiment which was important for all of us. I have, myself, been so technically interested in the problem that I must have seen the film seven or eight times. Your review does not seem to be even conscious that in seeing a ten-minute theatre discussion of educational principle and ideology, it was seeing a very rare bird indeed, not to mention a very literate account of the ever-recurring gap between technological progress and educational substance. There could be a deal of argument about the formula used. My own complaint is that the film proceeds too much by assertion and too little by easy illumination; but. I'm damned if I can see at this stage how a one-reel editorial form can do otherwise, any more than the shortened editorial forms of, say, the New York Daily News. The tabloid shape tends to a propaganda shape and it is true that Tomorrow's Citizens hits you on the head and is done with it. But when your review talks of 'biting off more than it can chew' and being 'slick, shallow and smug' this, too, is proceeding by assertion and with a vengeance. In my view, it is not 'shallow' because it does in fact raise what has been one of the profoundest problems before education since Marx first posed it in the Poverty of Philosophy a hundred years ago. Nor is a film 'slick and smug' which goes to the pains of fitting the subject within a world framework which includes Fundamental Education and to the courtesy of including an almost incredible variety of international illustration. I would have thought, among other things, that a film which attempted to describe the British documentary school's theory of 'bringing the world alive to the citizen' was worthy of greater consideration. That apart, I would certainly have expected a professional journal to take note of the superb use of sound to pace and punctuate the narration, the extraordinary economy and integration achieved by the development of visual metaphor, and the dry editorial violence of. say, cutting 'the proper study of mankind is man' into the baby chittering to death after Hiroshima. However these one-reel editorials develop — and we shall hit the theatres everywhere if ue can develop them simply, clearly and dramatically— here, I suggest, is an object lesson in what a pioneer effort involves in the matter of technique. It should not have been missed as such, if only to develop the appropriate argument and clear the ground for further effort. I shall say less of Montreal by Night, for it is, as you say, 'a modest little film', but wh\ please are you so rattled that, having little to say for the film itself, you dive into the in {Continued on page 35)