THE FACTUAL FILM

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 412, 16 May 1947, Page 10

THE FACTUAL FILM

r From a talk by

SIR STEPHEN

TALLENTS

1) in the Third Programme of |

the BBC

of Dartington Hall created an organisation called the "Arts Enquiry." It was to produce four reports-on the visual arts, the factual film, music, and the theatre. Its report on the visual arts came out some little time ago. Music and the theatre have yet to appear. The report on the factual film has just been published. * Those who would like to know what Britain has done and where she stands to-day in the production of the different breeds of factual film will here find what th€y want. Those who already think they know the story will find this report an invaluable book of reference. Every one of them, I suspect, will find, too, that the book knows more than he does. The summary opens with an emphatic sentence. "The documentary," it says, "is Britain’s outstanding contribution to the film." Partly bécause I was there when documentary -was born, but mainly because there lies behind the story of its fortunes so much that has a bearing on the other types of film described in this report, I am going to take British documentary as the spearhead of my subject But don’t let me, in so doing, give you too narrow a view of the report’s scope. It examines in detail, for example, the use of the film in education; the need for more films; -for films more nicely adapted to the requirements of different age groups; for proper collaboration between teaching advisers, subject experts,’ and film producers; for standardised projectors. The educational film has clearly a long way to go before "it approaches the mature quality of the BBC’s broadcasts for schools. However, to-day there are some signs of life in that field. Teachers who have seen in the services what training films can do should be a usefal influence. Then again the, report handles our newsreels rather severely, afid it remarks that no attempt has yet years ago the Trustees

been made, though one had been announced, to provide an interpretative news service like the well-known American March of -Time or the Canadian World in Action. "Remarkable Headway" Those are only a few of the missed opportunities which the report uncovers, You can set against them its striking demonstration of the growth in the "non-theatrical" showing of factual films -showing outside the picture houses, in factories and village halls, libraries and social centres. In 1931, I remember, there were just 350 organisations borrowing films from the little library at the Imperial Institute. It had no travelling projectors attached to it, and it was serving about a million people a year. The Ministry of Information changed all that. It developed the library and equipped itself with mobile projectors. By 1940 it was serving an annual audience of seven million. Three years later that audience had grown to 18,500,000. Yet, as the report says, "the demand for shows had been far in excess of the equipment and films available." Here, perhaps, is the most encouraging feature in the whole report-the certainty that the public would welcome a sight of far more factual films than they get at present, if only g films could be produced in sufficient "numbers, and if proper arrangements could be made for their projection. How came it that, in this otherwise rather frustrated company, British documentary has made such remarkable headway? The first credit is due to a single man and the team that he gathered about him. Twenty years ago this February, a young man called at the office of the Empire Marketing Board with an introduction from Robert Nichols, the poet. The caller was John

Grierson. He was lately back from the United States, where he had gone with a fellowship to study psychology. He had there made a study of the public’s reaction to films. He had never made a film himself; but he had strong views, which he unfolded to me eloquently, of what wanted doing. Himself the son of a Scottish schoolmaster in the old tradition, he maintained that most of what then passed under the name of education was addressed only to the mind and never touched the imagination. He wanted to see a new form of education, that should stir men’s imaginations by bringing, out the drama in the daily life around them-give them, as he once said, faith as well as facts. That’s all too brief a sketch of Grierson’s ideas. You will find his own exposition of them in a book called Grierson on Documentary which Forsyth Hardy edited and brought out last summer. We at the Empire Marketing Board were already convinced that the screen could give us a unique opening for "bringing the Empire alive," as we used to say; and we wanted to enlist Grierson in our cause. But, on Rudyard Kipling’s confident advice, we had already embarked on a long romantic feature film. The best we could do was to get Grierson to study for us what we could learn from existing films, British and foreign. Thus, very soon, we found ourselves at Grierson’s suggestion watching displays that ranged from The Covered Wagon to the Secrets of Nature series; from Flaherty’s Nanook of the North and Moana to those unforgettable early Russian pictures Potemkin, Turksib, Storm Over Asia, and-a favourite of mine-Earth. "Drifters’-a Milestone By now Grierson wanted to make a film of his own and the E.M.B. not less keenly wanted to give him the opportunity. The Treasury, to put it mildly, did not favour the idea. But fortunately Grierson had served in minesweeping drifters while the Financial Secretary to the Treasury had written a book called The Herring: Its Effect on the History of Britain. So we got it agreed that Grierson should try his hand on ever so little a film of the North Sea herring fisheries. There were plenty of crises during. its production; but 19 months later-in November, 1929-the Film Society showed to an enthusiastic audience the film that has since become a myth in documentary history, Drifters. From that day, working at first in ludicrously primitive quarters, the E.M.B Unit went ahead. The E.M.B. itself was destroyed. Its Film Unit escaped to the Post Office and there made some notable .experiments in sound. W. H. Auden and J. B. Priestley wrote scripts, Benjamin Britten, Walter Leigh and Maurice Jaubert wrote music, for films that put the work of the Post Office dramatically on the screen. Various commercial undertakings joined in the movement — the Ceylon Tea Propaganda Board, the Orient Line, Imperial Airways, the gas industry, the oil industry, ater Imperial Chemical Industries." So, first under the wing of the Government, then with the encouragement of big business, the British documentary film established itself. Things like that do not happen by accident. In part the stimulus came from

within. Grierson had a fine gift for inspiring others. By careful selection from hundreds of would-be recruits, he gathered round him a small group of men and women which included at one time or another most of the senior doctimentary producers of to-day; and ever since, as the report says, "documentary production has always been undertaken by a unit working as a group." There was in that first young group fine internal loyalty, lively internal controversy, and a solid front to the outside world. Both its spirit and its structure, with its frequent exchanges between the public service and the commercial companies, its interest in the craft of film criticism, deserve study. But it needed something more than the organisation of an enthusiastic group to put British documentary in the proud place it now holds, The truth, I am sure, is that there is an imperative call today for wholly new methods of popular interpretation, always, of course, in addition to the well-tried medium of the national and local press. Government departments and local authorities alike are feeling the lack of means to explain convincingly to the public the vastly increased and complicated tasks which they have got to tackle. Industry has to find new ways of bringing alive not only to the public but also to its own huge and specialised staffs the complexity of its undertakings. Every agricultural research worker recognises the need for new methods of conveying the fruits of his work to the farmer. Every Colonial civil servant in the field is searching for new ways of helping backward populations to learn new methods in public health and cultivation. We want to encourage visitors to come, or to return, to these islands. All of us are conscious of the urgent need of new media by which people may speak ta people through the bars of different tongues. That is no more than a sketch of the .world-wide demand .for new media of interpretation which to-day gives a new importance and a new urgency to every one of the activitiesdocumentary and newsreel, class-room film and,film of training, films of travel, and record, and research-with which this report is concerned. The Practical Approach And now a word about the practical approach to this bewildering wealth of opportunities — by those who provide the raw material for these new interpre--tative processes, and those whose jolt

it is to present that material to the public in a form which will appeal to the imagination.. "God help the government," Lord Melbourne once said, "that meddles with art." Those who would support his lordship might well call as evidence the classic story of Alfred Stevens and the Wellington Memorial. I could summon up more recent examples from my own experience. Yet here, i in the documentary film movement, is an example of government génerating a new art form. That, however, as every documentary © director knows, is not the end of the story. Not many people, I fancy, like portraits of themselves as the true artist sees them. Certainly government departments and -if, I think, less° markedly-big industries are often far from appreciating

the portraits of themselves which the journalist, the poster artist, or the film producer paints. To him who has to ‘provide the raw material I would say: Choose the man, who is to handle your raw material, very carefully. Take any amount of pains, and make him take any amount of pains, to ensure that he has got under the skin of your material. Then give him a pretty free hand and realise from the start that his problem is not easy. You will sometimes have aq failure; but, if your interpreter brings it off, you will have a handsome reward in the better understanding of. your. problems by the public. You may well have, too, a second not less valuable reward in the encouragement that the portrait will give to those whose work it depicts. The importance of this secondary stake was brought home to me vividly when, first in Mr. Attlee’s and then in Sir Kingsley Wood’s day as Postmaster-General, we were called upon to publicise Post Office activities, and did so by employing, among other media, some of those we are discussing here. I have often felt that the outstanding achievement of films like "Night Mail," "Six-Thirty Collection," "Under the City," and "We Live in Two Worlds" was the sense of appreciation which they gave to many faithful, workers in the Post Office. A Touch of Imagination And now for the interpreter. He is right to demand considerable freedom in the treatment of his material. But the price of his freedom is a real mastery of that material, a real craftsman’s sense of it. He must not be content, with making a superficial travelogue of his subject. The authentic makers of documentary films at any rate are not likely

to make that mistake. They have always been inspired with a lively sense of social purpose and have pioneered their way into fields which the Continent has not yet approached. But if British documentary is to retain its present leadership in the world, it needs one thing more. Casting back over the films-and for the matter of that, the broadcasts ---which have touched my imagination and still haunt my memory, I ask myself why it is that I still remember so vividly-so as not to be invidious, let me take two foreign examples-the Cossacks in Potemkin, driving the crowd down the harbour steps of Odessa, the poetic script and the beautiful voice of ‘the narrator in R The River, Pare Lorentz’s film of the Mississippi. I always maintain that the answer is to be

found in a sentence which John Stuart Mill once wrote in a letter to Thomas Carlyle: "It is the artist alone in whose hands truth ‘becomes impressive and a living principle of action." Quoting those words, I am not-think-ing of anything pompous or highbrow. In fact, as I used them, there slipped into my mind a memory of that gay little film Colour Box, which Len Lye made in the ‘thirties. In the early days of documentary, Grierson has since reminded us, he was besieged by wouldbe apprentices who were enthusiastic, as he put it, "for art, for self-expression and the other beautiful what-nots of a youthful or simply vague existence." I sometimes wonder whether that welljustified resistance movement has not lingered on after the early danger was overpast; whether our modern makers of documentary always pay quite enough attention to, for example, the quality of their English and the voices chosen to deliver it. A week or two ago a White Paper of unusual gravity recorded the "extremely serious economic position" of our country. Among the remedies which it proposed it included the re-equipment of industry. It also stressed the need for "rousing the nation" to appreciate the danger. Both that remedy and that need have a bearing on my present subject. For among the new equipment that we require 1s a more sensitive, a more powerful, and qa wider-ranging national system of communications, that will appeal to the imagination through the eye as broadcasting has learned to appeal to it through the ear. Anyone who wants to think out such a system, or better still, to contribute to it will.find in the report under review a good companion.

*THE FACTUAL FILM. Published on behalf of the Arts Enquiry by P.E.P. Oxford University Press.