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11
The Film ot Fact
INTRODUCTION
Genres
The other type of non-story film is the film of fact, so called because it shuns fiction in favor of unmanipulated material. In order to avoid dealing at length with classification problems insoluble anyway it is perhaps best to enter under this title the following three genres which may be supposed to cover all relevant variants: (1) the newsreel; (2) the documentary, including such subgenres as the travelogue, scientific films, instructional films, etc.; and (3) the relatively new species of the film on art. True, this last genre comprises a group of productions which have all the traits of experimental films, but the balance amounts exactly to the kind of films which John Read, a young art film maker, has in mind when he says that "one makes films about art and artists for the same reasons that one makes films about ships and shipbuilders or savage tribes in remote parts of the world."1 * Otherwise expressed, many of these films have a documentary quality. It would therefore seem justified to treat the whole genre within the present chapter.
Characteristics
Except for those sequences of art films which picture works of artworks, that is, which reach into the dimension of unstaged reality without
* Read directed a film about Henry Moore. The films on Walter Sickert, John Piper, and Stanley Spencer he made at the B.B.C. Television Service were supervised by Paul Rotha who headed B.B.C.'s TV Documentary Department in 1953-5. (Personal communication by Mr. Rotha.) This may account for Read's insistence that art films should be documentary films about art and artists.
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