"Nutrition
TheCm. ema.
WE are apt to forget, among the gangsters and the grand, passions, that the cinema has other uses than fiction, and yet it is the Gas Light and Cake 'Company which is responsible for the' most interesting film I have seen for a long time. This Company deserves the highest praise: For the secoad time it has undertaken a work _which should. have been the responsibility of the Ministry :: of Health. There is no gas propaganda in Nulriiiim, any more than there was in Housing Problems Both pictures Are the work of Mr. Edgar Aristey, who is contributing something new to the documentary film. The documentary film has sometimes hovered too uneasily- on the edge art and storytelling. The G.F.O. Unit in Song of Ceylon produced the most-aesthetically satisfying 41in ever made inthis ; country, but di* have been times—in Night knit, for example-..7:-Wheis the demands Of instruction and the instinct to create a work of art have Conflicted. The final sequences in Night Mail were , aesthetically satisfying, but earlier, in the film one was aware of hesitation : We Were shown too Many technicalities for atmospheric purposes, we Were -shown too few for understanding.
In Housing Probleins Mr. Aiistey Was superbly Untroubled by the aesthetic craving : he used the camera ii ii first7'., class reporter, and a reporter too truthful; too' vivid, to fuid a place on any modem newspaper. He produced- a- poignant - and -convineing document simply- by taking his eamera anct his microphone into the slums; the terrible tiny peeling' room's, up the broken stairways, info the airless courts and letting the women talk in their own Way about the dirt and rats' and bugs. The method was simple, certainly, but it cannot have been easy, it lutist have needed human qualities more common among Russian than gogfish directors. (Compare the' charaCters in HOusing Problem i *With the frightened inined-Oht— personalitieA. 'With Censored seripti whom the B,B.C. present as " doeuthentary.").
Nutrition has everything which ?busing Problems had (the same human _interest' handled with the finest, self-effacing sympathy) and a 'great deal More beside. It goes deeper and speaks with, more authority. It takes the 'statistics, the categories of food (energy, body building, protective), and presents the problem at different dramatic levels : tbe chemist in his laboratory examining his rats (the small, under- sized, piebald creature, who scrambles in a scared way beneath his plump capitalist 'companion; has been fed -on a typical working-class diet), Sit John. Orr on -his' experimental farm, the' 'medical Officers of- Bethnal Green 'and-StoCktan-On-Tees in conference, the 'street markets; the Bluccoaf boys' oh their-. playing fields, the working-class- boys in :their 'back' stree*: Professor Julian 'Huxley -speaks the: admirable,-' quite "On- political commentary, which is interiteeloccasiOnaily 'for Mr. Herbert Morrison to describe what the Landoil County Conned is doing for elementary • schoolchildren, 'for -Medical- officers to' discuis the proper balancing (if diets, -for working women themselves to speak with' 'a sad courage -of their housekeeping, of cabbages at sixpence a pound; of.the- inevit- able hungry Thursdays. It is the foodS Which build and the foods. which proteet that are most expensive: the energy foods, which the children need least, are cheapest, and who can blame the parents if they choose to give their children the foods which will -at least prevent their feeling their starva- tion ? And a long. parade goes past the camera of cheerful child faces above under-developed bodies.
Mr.. Anstey has had no aesthetic end -in view : he- has wanted' to explain the problem clearly and to make the fight for better diets personal by means of showing the actual sufferers, the actual investigators, but there is always an aesthetic delight_ in complete competence. Conrad once wrote an essay in praise of .the literary merits of the official Notices to Mariners,.And as the -film reaches its end, the summing-up of the .commentator -coinciding -with' a quick repetition of images; one is aware of having attended not only a vivid and authoritative lecture but a contribution to Cinema.
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