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EPILOGUE
interest and the British Transport Unit continued with its conventionally competent output which lacks real creative inspiration. Little has been made which can even be remotely likened to the pre-war and wartime periods of British documentary. Since the abolition of the Crown Film Unit in 1952, Government sponsorship of films through its Central Office of Information has become ineffectual and negligible. Most industrial sponsorship, except for the Shell Film Unit, has become cautious and conformist. In fact, one of the few documentaries I have seen of late which had any kind of 'social significance and integrity was a BBC television film, Night in the City (1957), made by Denis Mitchell and the Corporation's Manchester Unit. A great deal of day-to-day reporting, some of which passes illegitimately under the name of documentary, is carried out by television, both by the BBC and the independent programme companies, but little of it has any lasting value. Only one genuine documentary (other than We Are the Lambeth Boys) emerged from Britain in 1958, Basil Wright's lyrical and very beautifully-made personal interpretation of ancient and modern Greece, The Immortal Land, and even this did not take its gifted director much further forward than his classic Song of Ceylon (1935).
In the animated cartoon field, the Halas Batchelor unit continued a steady stream of technically good work and tried its hand at a feature-length cartoon of George Orwell's Animal Farm (1954) with mixed results. A new name in this genre was Richard Williams, whose highly original, imaginative and courageous The Little Island (1957-58) rightly gained much critical applause. Another specialised form of film-making which has been well developed in the United Kingdom has been films made for child audiences, commissioned from the various short film-making companies by the Children's Film Foundation, now industryaided. One of this series, The Salvage Gang (1958), directed by John Krish, was better in all ways than many feature films in the same year though made for about a tenth of the cost of an average feature picture.
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