The Film Society. At the Tivoli.
AT its opening performance of the seasori, last Sunday, the Film Society showed Wilfried Basse's Deutschland Zwischen Gestern and Heute, which won the first prize for educational films at the Venice Exhibition this year. Basse has tried to give a panorama of German life, past and present ; there are glimpses of peasant farms and' of mediaeval relics in the Older cities ; and gradually the film leads up, through impres- sions of city traffic, popular entertainment and open-air sport, 'to a brief final glimpse of a Nazi labour camp. Many of these impressions are very vivid ; they are well chosen and neatly woven together ; but a documentary film that runs for a full hour needs a less amorphous theme and a more clearly-defined purpose.
A far better picture, also in Sunday's programme, was Weather Forecast, one of the first sound-films made by the G.P.O. Filth Unit under John Grierson. Directed by Miss Evelyn Spice; a gifted young woman hitherto unknown, it sketches brilliantly the issue of a gale warning through the co-Operation Of the Air "Ministiy, the Post Office and the B.B.C. ; the reception of the warning by seamen, fanners, and so. on ; the arrival of the gale, and at Iasi the return of fine Weather. There is here a natural dramatic seqnence- prelude, climax and resolution—which has helped Miss Spice to give her film shape and balance ; but her skill is equally
'evident hi her use of natural images and fragments ofdialogi' .
to establish a convincing .background which is thoroughly realistic and yet never dull. This seems to be'the right Way of giving artistic meaning to documentary detailsjnot by Mg the facts to a romantically perSonal interpretation, but by helping the facts to speak hannoniously fOr themselves.
CHARLES DAVY.
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