POWER FROM THE RIVER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 414, 30 May 1947, Page 17

POWER FROM THE RIVER

(N.Z. National Film Unit) T is clearly impossible for me to notice in this column every short film that comes my way, but when anything as good and as important as this appears it merits special attention. I have in the past sometimes found occasion to criticise certain aspects of the National Film Unit, and probably will again; but this time I think they have excelled themselves. ‘Power from the River" is quite the most ambitious and, in many ways, most successful venture of the Unit to date. Indeed, if one leaves out of account "classic" documentaries of the type of Pare Lorentz’s The River, it is not easy to think of many factual films produced overseas which are markedly superior to this New Zealand effort. And The River, after all, dealt

with a theme which is universal and ageless and therefore it could employ the techniques of poetry to produce its emotional effect, whereas "Power from the River" has a straightforward story to tell about a particular emergency in a defined situation; it has an immediate and clear-cut job of work to do. That job is to present to the public, in the "educational shorthand" of the documentary method, the story of why electric power is short in the North Island and of what is being done to solve the problem. Technically, the film is of a high standard; in all except one or two scenes, where the acting is too plainly amateurish, it succeeds admirably in dramatising facts as well as recording them; the editing is brisk; the musical background heightens the effect without being obtrusive. And this’ film, a true documentary, has of course oné big advantage; it deals with running water, and. this water-motif, as I have remarked before, is a natural winner on the screen. The Waikato River is the real star of the film-and a notably photogenic one, too.