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FRENCH DOCUMENTARY
has been no consistent programme of documentary sponsorship, with the possible exception of the steady output from the Ministry of Public Health of simple informational films on hygiene, child-care and tuberculosis. On the one hand, Government finance was provided for films like Francois Campaux's Matisse (1946), a study of the artist's life and work, while on the other the Ministry of Agriculture backed Dmitri Kirsanov, best remembered for his silent film Menilmontant (1924), to make Mortes Moissons (1948). A feature-length film of considerable interest in its documentary approach and imaginative sound track, it took on a strangely morbid air for an official film designed to keep farmworkers on the land. The general thesis was 'don't be dazzled by the city's bright lights, because they only shine on pimps, prostitutes and thieves'.
Since the Bill of Aid was introduced in 1948, considerably more public money has been put into film-making and with effect. Part of the money has been available for short films under the intelligent direction of Chausserie-Lapre at the Centre National and Henri Claudel (son of the dramatist), at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Nevertheless, in the absence of a national programme, French documentary production has mostly continued on the same unsatisfactory basis. Planned Government sponsorship may induce rigidity, but the other method — taken to extremes in Italy — of subsidising short filmmakers to produce films which distributors find commercially acceptable for the cinemas, has few merits.
In the years immediately following the war the aftermath of the Occupation and the Resistance was inevitably strong. Apart from the official film, Le Journal de la Resistance (1945), based entirely on news-reel material shot during the fighting by a group of film-makers led by Painleve, Jean Gremillon, Louis Daquin, Pierre Blanchar and others, the most successful was Bataille du Rail (1946). Directed by Rene Clement, who before the war worked on occasional documentary films and in 1943 made a short film on the railways, Ceux du Rail, this film was also financed partly on a Government advance and partly by the railwaymen's Resistance group. Based on the latter's resistance to the Germans, it was a sincere and dramatic piece of documentary reconstruction. The scene where the hostages lined up to face the firing squad, a grim island in the midst of a bustling railway-yard, was given a sense of poignant triumph as every engine whistled in
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