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THE FILM OF FACT 203
locales before his lens with an irrepressible sense of participation. There are in fact documentaries which mark a transition between straight records and more personal readings. For instance, In the Street, a documentary about New York City, has an emotional quality absent, or at least largely subdued, in Housing Problems. On the one hand, this film is nothing but a reportage pure and simple; its shots of Harlem scenes are so loosely juxtaposed that they almost give the impression of a random sample. A child behind a window is seen licking the pane; a woman with a terrible face passes by; a young man languidly watches the spectacle in the street; Negro children, intoxicated by their Halloween masks, dance and romp about with complete self-abandon. On the other hand, this reporting job is done with unconcealed compassion for the people depicted: the camera dwells on them tenderly; they are not meant to stand for anything but themselves. (As a notebook-like assemblage of on-the-spot observations, the film is also expressive of an outspoken, very cinematic susceptibility to street incidents. These assets, however, are not without a drawback; the lack of structure which results is at variance with, and weakens, the film's emotional intensity.)
Documentaries like In the Street still cling to the form of the matterof-fact account. But this need not be so. The film maker's concern for unbiased reporting (which inevitably entails straight photography) may yield to an urge to picture reality in the light of his views and visions. His formative impulses will then prompt him to select the natural material according to his inner images, to shape it with the aid of the techniques available to him, and to impose upon it patterns which would not be fitting for a reportage. As long as his imagination is kindled by the given objects his film will more likely than not realize potentialities of the medium. Veracious reproductions are thus superseded by pictorial penetrations or interpretations of the visible world.
Documentaries of this kind— part of them can be traced to the avantgarde of the 'twenties— are not infrequent. Here belongs, for instance, Ivens's Rain, whose theme represented a challenge to his "aesthetic craving" rather than an obligation for him to revert to photographic "simplicity"; Painleve's The Sea Horse, which reveals the wonders of the submarine universe; and Night Mail, in which Basil Wright and Harry Watt evoke the nightly run of a postal train from London to Edinburgh as it might be experienced by those in love with the road. In all three films the directors' quest for poetic expression is subordinated to their involvement in the objects themselves. The poetry of Night Mail, which at the end even emancipates itself from the visuals to assume independence of a sort in Auden's spoken verse, is still the poetry of the real postal train and of the night enveloping it. What characterizes these films is indeed their