Documentary News Letter (1947-1949)

30 DOCUMENTARY FILM NEWS FILMS OF THE MONTH ^ International Voices of Malaya. Crown for Colonial Office through COI. Made by: Ralph Elton and Terry Trench. Photography: Denny Densham. Commentary: V. S. Pritchett. Music: Elizabeth Lutyens. Unit Manager: Eric Hudson. Assistant Directors: Clive Freedman. Yussef Khan, Lee Meow Seong. Assistant Camera: Osman Bin Sansubin. Sound: Red Law, Jock May. Sound Editor: Jean MacKenzie. Assistant Editor: Paul Shortall. 'Orang-wayang-gelap' — maker-of-shadowshows. Years ago. a former co-operative organizer from Malaya so described me on the flyleaf of a book he had written. I hereby formally renounce all claim to the title in favour of the man who has really earned it — Ralph Elton, with his new film. Voices of Malaya. Let me not be misunderstood. The title was a high compliment, and Elton deserves it. So does Terry Trench, who edited his way through the mass of material Elton shot. Voices of Malaya has been made by a team gifted with what a student in another film, not yet completed, describes as 'the cosmological eye'— the capacity to look out beyond the windows of Government office and film studio and comfortable Englishman's castle to the red, yellow and black men and women who mostly people this world in the process of rebirth, and, rare gift, to understand without patronizing them. In the first minute or two, I was not sure. Five races of Malaya — Five Faces — perhaps it was only to be another enlightened travelogue. Alexander Shaw, who was there ten years before Elton, and who made that film, will, I think understand and not be offended. But, even in these sequences, once the Sakai had been disposed of, without too many drumtaps or dances, there already began to be a difference. Each new race came visually, by boat, and did not depend for their introduction on the words. And the words themselves, freed from the necessity of being obvious, were expressing so much that was vigorous and unembarrassed. In the Malay sequence there was an uncommented shot looking at first high up a palm-tree from its base to a monkey shinning down towards us, and then tilting down the whole tremendous length with the beast until he reached the Malay waiting for coconuts at the bottom. (Denny Densham, by the way, has done a job of photography on this film, which puts him well up in the ranking list of documentary cameramen.) That shot was so memorable, that, although no words covered it, enormous weight was carried over into the speech of the ambitious Chinaman, hundreds of feet later, who explained that his people did not wait at the bottom of trees for coconuts, but sent the whole family up to fetch them down. So, on to the Europeans, and to the Indians who flocked from their own overcrowded country into rich Malaya to work for them. Shots of railway engines and factories, and a cynically written commentary, spoken with fruity self-satisfaction, to explain the value to Malaya of Western progress. Volte-face again : after twisting the tails of his countrymen, Elton is mature enough to give them full credit for their hospitals and their schools. Singapore spreads across the screen, and we recognize it fairly for that mixture of the very good and the very bad that is every modern city. And then, suddenly, visually. Singapore is smashed, and we are pitchforked into the middle of one of the very few intelligent reports that have reached us from those countries where the war was a matter of solid oppression by alien armies of occupation, instead of only a question, however terrifying, of bombs and threatened invasion. I remember particularly the Japanese officer at his tidy desk being served so decorously with tea in a dainty cup, remember it perhaps mainly because of the contrast, after the ultimate victory, of the English officer sitting at the same desk, now cluttered with bumph, swilling tea from a gigantic mug, and settling down, for want of a secretary, to thump away at his typewriter over the fade-out. That's maybe not a very important example of Elton's reportage, but it will serve as a proof of how far he has managed to get from reliance on mere words. Wait for the aftermath, the skeleton who might be man, woman or boy, lying not as a dead still-life on the pavement, but living and enjoying the cigarette which somebody is lighting for him, and you will see what I mean. Of course, there isn't enough of it, there never is, but very few shots are wasted, and the sum total is somewhere near the journalistic impossibility of making what happened in Malaya, and the quality of the people who live there, at least as real as, say, the story of France be tween 1939 and 1944, and as sympathetic as the members of the French 'Resistance. The film doesn't end very well. Who can end such a film well nowadays, when the best that can be said is that the five races are at least settling down with equal rights of citizenship, and trying to make a go of it? I think I should have finished more quickly, and got out of the difficulty that way, but, after all, it was not Elton's fault that Indonesia was only just across the road, so to speak, and that tact prevented him from drawing parallels. His film deserves the widest possible theatrical showing, and if the renters want it shortened, well at least he has left himself a convenient way of pacifying them. ir Industrial Five Towns. Greenpark for Board of Trade through COI. Producer: Ralph Keene. Director: Terry Bishop. Associate Producer: Paul Fletcher. Camera: Ray Elton. Additional Photography: Jo Amsor. Story: Randall Swinger. Editor: Peter Tanner. Music: Guy Warrack. Distribution: Theatrical at present — later non-T. CFL. 50 minutes. To anyone who has never been to the Potteries, nor into a works devoted (this verb springs to mind after having seen the film) to the making of china, Five Towns will give a rounded and essentially human account of that craft. And what a craft it is! There is no more lovely nor satisfying industrial sight than the master-potter creating a sharply intelligent vase out of the dullard lump of wet clay on his wheel: and it is to the credit of the director that we are allowed Voices of Malaya