Movie parade 1888-1949 : a pictorial survey of world cinema (1950)

[Jl 1 2 • FILMS OF FACT HE invention of the cinema means that a new recording device is available for the historian. The simple news items of fifty years ago give a fascinating if superficial view of European and American society. The newsreel anthologies now being made, such as Nicole Vedres's witty Paris 1900, show what can be done to reconstruct a past period through the short films which have survived the half century. Now that the cinema is used to record many visible aspects of our time and the preservation of films is being carefully undertaken in a number of countries, the future historian will possess an immense advantage over his predecessors: he will be able to see past communities come to life in their own terms on the movie screen. He will be able to watch the protagonists of history speak along with the ordinary citizen and the fictional character. We are only just beginning to realize the importance of the sound film for this purpose: the heretoday-and-forgotten-tomorrow atmosphere which surrounds most fiction film-making certainly should not apply to films of fact. The film of fact is an all-embracing term for the newsreel and record film, the instructional film and documentary proper. A film may record the actual assassination of a monarch or the dissection of a particle of living matter filmed by photomicrography. A film may set out to teach a principle in engineering or it may seek to show the world as a whole that the nations must co-operate or starve. All these films are films of fact either because they witness a happening or because they consciously try to prove what seems a logical social argument to the film-maker and his sponsors. The borderline between instruction, education and propaganda is always a debatable one. A film of advocacy which seems to its makers to be a film of fact may, of course, turn out to be unconsciously a work of fiction, but because it deals with what appear to be facts it will be classed as an instructional, propaganda or documentary film. Such films are like text-books, posters or journalism; they may be biased, but by intention their makers think of them as dealing with facts. Hitler's Triumph of the Will is therefore a factual film by intention. It is fact as seen from a particular if prejudiced point of view. The factual film is often sponsored; that is, governments or private interests meet its cost in order to promote a film that they hope will benefit their cause, which may be anything from basic education to advertising. In Britain documentary and instructional films have been promoted with a view to earning their living at the box-office (for example the Secrets of Nature series), but few, if any, have been financially successful. Hundreds of films have also been made at the expense of the Government (those, for example, produced by the Ministry of Information's Film Division during the Second World War). Documentaries financed by film companies have to earn their production costs through rental to cinemas or educational authorities, whereas Government-sponsored films are usually distributed or exhibited free of charge as part of the public information service. The production costs of documentaries are fractional compared with those of fiction films, unless, as in the case of exceptional films like Western Approaches, they are deliberately made on the same scale as main-feature productions intended for exhibition in the cinemas. Most Govern ment-sponsored documentaries are today intended for showing semiprivately to the innumerable voluntary organizations which abound in a country like Britain or in educational establishments. This form of distribution is called non-theatrical, as opposed to theatrical exhibition in the cinemas. Many films are also made for specialized professional audiences only, such as film-records of surgical operations; films are used for even more specialized purposes such as the diagnosis of disease or for advanced scientific experiment, for example at the Institut Pasteur in France. Many countries have an established system of State sponsorship for factual films, for example, Britain, Canada, Denmark, Czechoslovakia, Australia and the U.S.S.R. In other countries, such as America, France, Italy and Sweden, where factual film production is frequent. Government sponsorship is rare or spasmodic and the film-makers have to rely on private or commercial sources of finance. In this case the subsequent distribution of these films is difficult to achieve on a satisfactory basis. In spite of the inhibiting and frustrating eff'ect on some film-makers of working for Government departments, this form of sponsorship is effective since it guarantees an agreed rate of costs for production and normally ensures the distribution of the finished film to those audiences to which it will be most useful. It was probably the travel film which first excited audiences with a vision of an outside world in action which previously had only been revealed by engravings and photographs or through the writings of travellers and explorers. The earliest catalogues issued by British film producers include film-records from many parts of the earth, as well as descriptive films, like Williamson's Country Life series of 1899, which showed the public something of occupations little known to the average citizen. For fifty years the film has been widening the outlook of mankind, bringing the ends of the earth gradually together. As early as 1910-13, Herbert Ponting accompanied Scott's expedition to the Antarctic with a film camera. Today, to take another example, the African peoples are being instructed in matters of health and agriculture by means of films which they themselves assist to make. Many countries unable to finance feature-length fiction films find their way into production through making short factual films. Similarly the amateur can contribute, working possibly on substandard film. Research scientists, under-water swimmers, soldiers crouching in the midst of violent warfare, have all made use of the movie-camera. Motion pictures have been made by means of cameras placed in pilotless aircraft flying high over the Bikini atom bomb explosions; record films have resulted from cameras attached to rockets racing at fantastic speeds into the stratosphere. Exposed at over two hundred frames a second the camera has recorded the wing movement of the humming-bird in gentle slow-motion, whilst in the late Percy Smith's nature films the growth of plants spread over days has been reduced to motions lasting a few seconds. The motion picture is now a tool of science and also of history, a faithful verbatim recorder of momentous speeches and the proceedings of national and international congresses. It has become as important to mankind as the printing press and the radio transmitter. 124