Filmindia (1941)

Propaganda Or Documentary? By Alexander Shaw (Alex Shaw is our new expert on documentary films. He is in India to produce documentary films for the Film Advisory Board. In this article, exclusive for "filmindia", he gives us his idea of a documentary. Alex is a modest man and modestly he has given his thoughts, which are worthy of attention The Editor.) All films are propaganda films. iThey are propaganda for a way of living or a way of thinking. It is [inevitable and the better the film the more influence this hidden message has. Story writers and directors are bound to put into their work something of their own atti Itude to life as well as something of I the official attitude of their com I pany. j Fortunately their message is ; usually a simple and a kindly one. Be good to your mother, they say. i|They say also that Right wins [through and that two children in I the suburbs are a better thing than I a chorus girl in a pent-house. (We all know what happens when someone tries to have both — they get Miss Norma Shearer after them) . The American message is a very wholesome one at the moment. But there have been times, such as during the great gangster cycle, per [ haps the greatest period in American films when they preached quite a different message. Be tough, they said. Sock your old mother in the jaw and have three chorus girls in three pent-houses. You can be lords of the earth if you can muscle in on a racket. So all over the world young men turned the brims of their hats down over their eyes, talked out of the corners of their mouths . and planned masterly robberies. Fortunately it usually stop I ped at the planning, although not always, but the film had proved that it could influence enormous numbers of people and it is only because people are fundamentally sensible, that, when it has preached silly creeds, it has not done more harm. SUBTLE INFLUENCE OF FILMS I am not suggesting that after seeing r Donald Duck cartoon the audience are going to become aggressive and boastful as soon as they leave the cinema and knock down all the policemen in Hornby Road. But they are going to be influenced by the implied message of a story film about ordinary people. It is this subtle influence which makes the film so important. Neither literature nor the stage can so affect peoples' ordinary every day lives and thoughts. I would not suggest that the film can bring about great changes in big things, that any film could do the work of a Plato, a Voltaire or a Marx and change the entire course of human thought but only that it can change peoples' attitudes and ways of living. Thus all films are really propaganda films. Now propaganda is a beastly word. It is aggressive and patronising. It suggests that there is a small group of people who know everything and that they are going to impose that knowledge on everybody else. The Germans and the Italians have always been very fond of the word and they have made some very good 'propaganda' films. When I say that they were very good I mean that they were very well made and that at the end of each film they usually had the audience standing on their feet and cheering and up to that point they were good. But blatant propaganda must stand the test of reason when the lights in the cinema go up and the audience faces the journey home. The German "Triumph of the Will", a film of the Nuremberg rally, swept the audience with it in a hysterical whirl of banners and torches and faces but when the last bars of the loud emotional music had faded and the lights went up Mr. Alexander Shaw the audience were left with a question— what was all that fuss about? WHAT IS A DOCUMENTARY? In Britain and America the film which set out to tell people about real life instead of the fantastic lives of the studio characters was called 'documentary' and this change of title was significant. The documentary film was not going to shout and bluster its way across the screens, it was not going to magnify and distort. It set out to inform and sometimes to persuade by telling the truth and dramatising peoples' everyday lives. Such films as 'Drifters', 'Song of Ceylon' and 'Night Mail' opened up a new world of dramatic possibilities. They looked at the stories behind everyday things and turned those stories into screen terms. They showed that it is not necessary to go to night clubs or terrace flats to find drama, that there is drama in everything if people know how to look for it. Such films are no more propaganda films than the American or French story film. They set out to entertain and in the course of doing so they present the audience with a new way of looking at a subject or they suggest that there is another (Con. on page 68) 5