Wings Over Wardour Street BOOKS OF THE DAY
By GRAHAM GREENE
IN a few months now it will be possible for us to sit in our own homes and watch a film by television. Neither sound nor the improved colour in Becky Sharp represented so revolutionary a
change, for they left film production in the same hands, the hands of large-scale financiers able to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on a single film, but forced for the same reason to get their money back from the public the easiest and quickest way, to take no risks. That is one aspect of the star system : a comparatively inexpensive insurance against fallible directors, fallible story-writers : the quality of the films may vary so long as the public taste is stabilised on the star.
But what is going to be the effect of television on these huge financial organisations ? Their position on the face of it looks desperate. Mr. Dallas Bower, who speaks with technical authority, for he has been a sound recordist, a film editor and a director, foresees the necessity of handing over to television all that at present we mean by Cinema and inventing a new style, even a new type of theatre, with which television cannot compete. This is the very interesting subject of his book, though we have to reach it by way of some cheap and ingenuous social digressions. His post-television theatre is in the shape of an arena, with the screen, a cylindrical screen, in the centre, played on by four overlapping projectors. The screen is translucent ; when the theatre is in darkness we shall see no screen, but solid figures moving in the round.
The idea of " solid cinema " seems less fantastic than the
idea that the great companies_ will be prepared to scrap their present theatres and begin to build anew. That must depend, of course, on the success of television as a creative, and not a merely reproductive, medium.
The film companies, at any rate in this country, may not be in immediate danger ; they have the stars, and television will have to appeal on other than star terms. Nor has the B.B.C. in the past (we have only to remember the broadcast play) developed at all the creative side of broadcasting. The first cinemas to suffer will be the news cinemas, though even they may be allowed a breathing space, if the B.B.C. fails to realise that direct television of any kind is impracticable. (Even Mr. Bower speaks of direct television for news events, political speeches, talks by distinguished people, &e. But you cannot televise news directly and get results which for clarity, excite- ment or even apparent authenticity can compete with a news film where half a dozen cameras have been employed, the best shots chosen and the film edited ; and even if you wish to televise a talk with no more than the features of the speaker, the close-up should surely be arranged as carefully as were the close-ups in the B.B.C. film made by Mr. Grierson's unit, and that, too, means film and film cutting.) Mr. John Grierson in a preface to Mr. Rotha's Documentary Film states the case against the B.B.C.:
" The B.B.C. has been conservative till now in the use of its instruments. Its producers have used the microphone very much as the early film makers used their camera. They have accepted it as an essentially immovable object to which all action or comment must be brought.. . . A few simple deviations there have been in the so-called actuality' programmes (in this borrowing from our documentary example), but they have been so tentative and ill- equipped, that for all its years of work and national fields of oppor- tunity the B.B.C. has created no art of microphonio sound and, in its own technique, not .a single artist."
Documentary Film. By Paul Rotha. (Faber and Faber 12s. ed.) Plan for Cinema. By Dallas Bower. (Dent. es.) The B.B.C., of course, can reply that it is a department of public relations. From the broadcasting of a village fire- brigade to the Empire broadcast on Christmas Day its most important object is to teach one man how another man lives. We are not, the B.B.C. may argue, primarily concerned with art any more than with entertainment in the sense of dance orchestras and plays. But I think Mr. Grierson and Mr. Rotha, who, as producers of documentary films, are equally concerned with public relations, with "making things known that need to be known," would be justified in retorting that nothing equals the persuasiveness of art and that as makers of documentaries they have developed an art unattained in any other branch of cinema, that under the direction of Mr. Cavalcanti the G.P.O. Film Unit is the first to realise the enormous possibilities in the editing and the invention of sound. Mr. Grierson sees in television an even wider field for the documentary method, and surely one is not " kill-joy "vi believing that it is there that the main future of television must lie, with story films occupying no more important a part in the programmes than plays do now. (I say story films because there is obviously no future for the direct television of plays.) We cannot yet speak of the " art " of broadcasting ; if tele- vision enables one documentary film to be made of the quality of Song of Ceylon, of Coal Face, of, even with all its faults of simplification and sentimentality, Mr. Rotha's The Face of Britain, it will have introduced into broadcasting a creative element which at present it entirely lacks. There is the real threat to Wardour Street, the gradual realisation by the public of the finer excitement to be got in their own homes with documentary than in the super-cinema with the stars. There will always be an audience for the spectacular story film, but a very big audience is needed to cari1y the costs.
Mr. Rotha is rather afraid of the word Art in relation to documentary films. Good photography, a pretty picture, skyline poses in the Flaherty manner, certainly do not make a good documentary film ; but neither, as he points out, does bare realism. The news-reel is the closest the cinema comes to realism, but a news-reel is certainly not documentary, for the object of documentary is more than mere communication of fact ; it is interpretation, persuasion, and the creative element, the art of documentary, lies there. The first part of Mr. Rotha's book, so admirable when it reaches the actual making of documentaries, is rather tiresomely Marxist. He uses the word propaganda rather than persuasion because no object is so important to him as the political. But in that sense documentary has obviously little future in television under the present system. We fear our own vices, and it is interesting that Mr. Rotha, whose films are seldom free from a certain prettiness and self-consciousness, should be so afraid of the word art which Mr. Grierson, a producer almost aggressively free from style for style's sake, uses with admirable boldness. If propaganda, Mr. Grierson writes, takes on its more political meaning, the sooner documentary is done with it the better. " Art is wider than political doctrine and platform solution. . . . It may, like polities, realise the social ills, but it must also sympathise more widely." To sympathise more widely. . . . I can think of no better distinction between art and propaganda, and with that object in view art may surely be allowed to find its way even into Broadcasting House. If it does, then indeed the wings are over Wardour Street.
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