Film and TV Technician (1957)

May 1958 FILM & TV TECHNICIAN 263 department, except the Ministry of Labour, in intimate contact with the public and suffering from a surfeit of public disfavour. He took the EMB Film Unit with him and renamed it the GPO Film Unit. From it stemmed another famous series of films : Night Mail, 6.30 Collection, Weather Forecast, Under the City, The Copper Web, North Sea, and a score of others. The gas industry, locked in combat with electricity, took the film under its wing and gave us Housing Problems, Enough to Eat and Children at School. Tea brought Song of Ceylon. The BBC gave us BBC — The Voice of Britain, and the Ministry of Labour, Men and Jobs. The Shell Film Unit was founded in 1933 and early undertook a programme of films on physics and aviation. It is often supposed that the term "documentary" applies to a technique of film making. It does not. It refers to a point of view on the part of the maker. It happens that films fitted this point of view peculiarly well and became its principal instrument of expression. A decade earlier radio might have been the choice. Twenty-five years later it is no accident that John Grierson is conducting a TV programme in Scotland. The job of the original documentary film makers was to bring alive the world around them at a moment of ferment engendered by the rise of social democracy as we know it today. So the subject matter of many of the films was found in housing, nutrition and communication. These things were central in the public thinking of the thirties, and the first documentary films were part of the social life of their time. When the War came in 1939, the documentary movement was small, but strong. It seized the initiative and was entrusted with the task of bringing Britain's war effort alive. It expanded many times over. The result was that the movement gained in size but lost in direction. The Documentary came to mean a kind of film without actors. Experimental techniques and styles hammered out in the '30s quickly became formulae. It is to Canada that one must look for the complete flowering of the pre-war British documentary movement. Even the Crown Film Unit, inheritor of the traditions of the GPO Film Unit, sometimes took on the airs of a society lady in a ringside seat at a circus, and finally behaved in a way calculated to secure its own demise. But at its best it was responsible perhaps for the finest war film of all — Humphrey Jennings' Fires Were Started. Today the need for the creative interpretation of actuality is as great as ever, but the subject matter of the films is changing, and the purposes are different. We are facing a crisis in education when the old classical and liberal values are being found wanting and the new scientific and technological ones not yet wholly accepted. This is why the liveliest contemporary documentaries are occupied, not with housing and Problems book and left Free Cinema unsuccessfully to pursue a freedom Captive Cinema has long since commanded. If today some British documentaries seem a little dead-beat this is anything but true of the films coming out of Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. There a documentary film movement is bubbling up beside the developing social and economic forces. The foremost exponents of the documentary film today bear names which sound strange and far away in the purlieus of Soho Square. Atma Ram of India, A documentary in the making — " Venezuela Fights Malaria ", produced by (nidad Filmiea Shell, directed by Boris Woron/.ow nutrition, but with the interpretation of science and technology. One result is that Approaching the Speed of Sound shared a Venice prize with Every Day Except Christmas. It stems directly from the old EMB Aero-Engine and early Shell films like Power Unit and Springs. For all its solid elegance. Every Day Except Christmas displays a sense neither of social nor of economic reality. Lindsay Anderson parades his engaging and ebullient cast like a missionary showing off converted cannibals to a visiting bishop. So marked is his lack of social awareness in a subject one would have supposed he would have found bristling with social problems, that it suggests there may not be much place today for the so-called social film. Television has taken over the job and has found a direct approach to its subject matter that eludes contemporary documentary. Michael Peacock, Caryl Doncaster, Peter Hunt, Peter Morley and Michael Ingrams have taken a leaf out of the Housing Abou il Naga of Egypt, Ebrahim Golestan of Iran and Nestor Lovera of Venezuela have taken the standard and are carrying it to new heights. One of the more significant films of our time is a 16mm. Egyptian documentary with the strange title of Tie Up Your Camel and Leave the Rest to God. That documentary is the only creative contribution Britain has ever made to the art of the film is not to be doubted. We can be proud that its point of view and principles are recognised by film makers all over the world. We are honoured that many of us have been called to help the new documentary film find its feet. We can be reassured, too, for the new overseas movement has produced not only new possibilities and purposes, but new jobs. It is up to us to keep up with the inspiration and freshness of the new overseas documentaries. The disciplines of the movement are open to everyone, but they leave little room for the man with his eyes on his feet and not on far horizons.