FACTS AND THE SCREEN
By SIR STEPHEN TALLENTS " TT is easier to write poetry that is far away from life, but it is I infinitely more exciting to write the poetry of life—and it is what the whole world is crying out for, as pants the hart for the water brook." So, within a year of his death, W. B. Yeats in America wrote to his son in Ireland. The words might serve as the motto of the devoted group who within the last twenty years have created and sustained the British documentary film, and, in so doing, have, in the opening words of the latest and fullest record of their achievement, made "Britain's outstanding contribution to the film." That record is The Factual Film, a Report of the Arts Enquiry, just published by the Oxford University Press (12s. 6d.). Its 250 pages contain the most accurate record that exists, or is ever likely to exist, of the development of the type of film for which John Grierson, reviewing Flaherty's Moana, in 1926, borrowed from the French the title "documentary."
The book has been for fifteen months in the hands of the printer. Even so, it speaks for the vitality of the movement whose progress it traces that it should, as its preface notes, have been passed already at points by the march of the documentaries. But it speaks also for the validity of the Report and its recommendations that, scrutinised in summary by many eyes during their production, they should not merely have anticipated but influenced several of the recent changes in official film organisation. The reading of it carries my memory back to a dramatic meeting in Mr. Amery's room at the Dominions Office on April 27th, 1928, when he and Colonel Walter Elliot, in the name of the Empire Marketing Board, wrestled with Mr. A. M. Samuel, then Financial Secretary of the Treasury, for liberty to launch John Grierson on the making of his first film. Thanks largely to Mr. Samuel's interest in the epic annals of our herring fisheries, the struggle ended in a pact ; and the resulting film, Drifters, on a Sunday afternoon in November, 1929, secured as much applause from a Film Society audience as the famous Potemkin, with which it shared the programme. That evening was as momentous an event in the history of documentary as had been in the history of cinema, just over thirty years before, the first public showing in a cellar below the Grand Café in the Boulevard des Capucins of the Lumiere brothers' moving pictures.
The young directors of today would find it hard to picture the ramshackle accommodation—one small workshop in a place called Dansey Yard—which cradled the documentary movement. (I say the "young" directors, for most of their seniors were themselves trained in that hovel or the scarcely less primitive quarters which succeeded it.) They would find it difficult, too, to realise the sceptical hostility with which in many official quarters this new instrument of government was long regarded. The day was far distant when an assenting House of Lords could hear a Minister, as it heard Lord Cranborne two years ago, call the film "perhaps the most valuable of all methods for bringing home to the people of this country what the Empire 'really looks like and really is:" I find it a symbol of that revolutionary change that the Treasury, once so stubbornly suspicious of the venture, should today be commissioning a couple of "Public Relationship Films" for the benefit df the Civil Service. Yet in those early days the seeds were sown—and sown deliberately— not only of the British documentary film movement but of the great system of non-theatrical distribution which the Ministry of Informa- tion developed so effectively during the war.
This Report of the Arts Council fills in the years between—the early years, when the E.M.B. Unit, transferred to the shelter of the Post Office, experimented bravely with sound, enlisting W. H. Auden and J. B. Priestley to write scripts for them and Benjamin Britten, Walter Leigh and Maurice Jaubert to write their music ; the middle years, when great business undertakings—the gas, the oil and the chemical industries—sustained a momentum which had started on Government impulse ; the latter years, in which the Ministry of Information, under Mr. Jack Beddington's guidance, produced as an instrument of war an impressive annual output of films, some to win international repute, others, not less technically accomplished, to win their effect on home screens.
What is the significance of this story and what its promise for the future ? The documentary film was conceived and has flourished because it has met in part an invading modern need for new methods of interpretation. That need is felt increasingly today wherever children are taught or craftsmen instructed. It is felt whenever scientific research—in agriculture, for example, or medicine—yields discoveries which should be promptly incorporated in practice. It is felt by every industry that is alive to the advantages of explaining its complexities to the public and to its own employees ; of encourag- ing its employees, too, by the knowledge that their unseen work is at last seen and appreciated. It is felt by every Government depart- ment and local authority that is awake to the necessity for winning not only the understanding but the co-operation of those whom it serves. The need is clamant in the British Empire, whether for the quickening of sympathies or for the enlightenment of backward communities. In world affairs the need is starkly and poignantly evident this winter of a common language in which people majT speak unto people.
In the satisfaction of these varied needs the documentary film, with its world-wide passport of visual appeal and its growing range, has a splendid opportunity. Current programmes of production suggest that some attempt at least is being made to fulfil each of them. British makers of documentary films have from the first seen their task as one not merely of informing the people but of stirring their imaginations by dramatising the too little observed and yet more rarely comprehended daily life about them. They have never lacked a sense of social puipose. But what is the quality in a film which ultimately steals the imagination of the viewer and engraves his memory ? Certain films, certain sequences, certain shots, even, in films, have a unique appeal to both imagination and memory. Examples of such films and such passages—to draw only upon My own limited experience—are the rain falling upon apples in DeNjenko's Earth ; the views of the Potteries at the beginning and of ships sailing outward bound at the close of Industrial Britain, that film in which Flaherty with Grierson's help first showed that the grey skies of the English midlands and the labour of men beneath them were fit subjects for the screen ; Basil Wright's Song of Ceylon, made more than ten years ago, but only last winter discovered and ecstatically praised by the American paper Time; the beauty of script and voice , in Pare Lorentz's The River. In all these films there is a mice of the artist's magic ; and British documentary, I dare prophesy, will maintain its so far uncontested pre-eminence only if it enlists unsparingly, to support its other qualities, the mind and eye and voice of the artist.
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