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168 PROBLEMS OF STYLE IN THE FILM
they undertook to complete Turksib six months ahead of schedule. They kept their word. Thus it happened that the dialectic interaction of life and art was palpably manifested in the story of this film. Turksib was a documentary and in it the reality of building was turned into art. Then when the effect of the film was to speed up building, i.e. to influence reality, art again was transformed into reality. This new reality is on the other hand again a subject for art and new works of art will again influence it. Thus life and art run parallel, inspiring, urging, directing each other's efforts.
Another splendid film is Zuiderzee by Joris Ivens. Men reconquer land from the sea. An invisible force is made visible in this film : the directing intelligence of man, just as an invisible wind is made visible by the bending of tree-tops.
SHOWING MAN
Thus can the documentary film fulfil its great vocation as the pictorial chronicle of mankind. For everything that happens, happens in the last resort to men and through men. You want to show a great civilization, great technical progress? Show them in the men who work; show their faces, their eyes, and then we shall be able to tell what that civilization means and what it is worth. You want to show the harvest of the fields? Only the ploughman's face will lend expression to the face of the earth. This is the decisive document among all documentary pictures. The tragedies of ocean storms can only become five experience through the microdrama of the sailors' faces.
WAR FILMS
The value and significance of documentary films will naturally depend in the first place on what sort of a reality it is which they reveal. But this book deals not with reality — its subject is the cinematic presentation of reality and therefore, however sensational the theme of a film may be, it will be discussed here only if it demonstrates the specific possibilities of the film medium. The newsreels relating to the war also