Documentaries

Last week Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art began showing 15 of Britain's documentary war films to small though ardent daily audiences. Intended to convey specific wartime advice entertainingly to the home population, they deal with such subjects as the dangers of gossip, the activities of the Home Guard, how the R.A.F. keeps its score of downed Nazi planes, etc. They are on view in Manhattan strictly as examples of cinema art.

Why the British Government considers them unfit for national U.S. distribution is another British propaganda mystery. Acted for the most part by the ordinary, everyday citizens of England with the assistance of an occasional pro, they reveal without exaggeration or undue flag-waving a nation grimly going about the business of fighting for its life.

Best of the lot is Spring Offensive, a two-reeler designed to acquaint the British countryside with the reasons for and methods of plowing under 10% of the nation's grassland for food crops. It is an almost perfect example of the high technical quality and emotional drive of the artfully made documentary.

Spring Offensive opens with a cast of East Anglian farmers and tradesmen organizing their local government for the land reclamation task. With the homely talk of people transacting their everyday affairs, they plan their campaign, put it into action. The rest of the tale is told through the eyes of a small boy evacuated from the city. He sees one old farm, gone to pot since World War I, rehabilitated with the aid of pooled machinery and labor. He learns that there must be no more of this business of farming the land properly only in wartime.

The other documentaries, except a few which use professional actors to play a specific incident (e.g., a re-enacted journey to Dunkirk and back in a small motor-boat), faithfully follow the method of Spring Offensive. One, Squadron 992, takes a balloon-barrage crew through its organization and training to its ultimate destination in Scotland to protect the Firth of Forth Bridge. Another, Village School, is a heart-warming account of a day in the life of a country schoolteacher plagued with an overload of local and evacuee pupils.

Although all of the documentaries are grim reminders of the tragic significance of the war for Britain, not one is without its leavening of dry humor. There is a lift to the way a Dover anti-aircraftman dismisses the daily shelling by Nazi big guns across the Channel. Says he: "Aye, we see a flash, count 60, and there she is."

There is a sense of the sanctity of the British home in the way a housewife holds the military at bay while remarking incredulously to her husband inside: "Here's a man wants to put a balloon in the back yard." And there is a suspicion of an ancient animosity in a Scottish soldier's reply to the hungry query of his newly-arrived comrades from London: "No. No haggis. They're breedin'."

It is thanks to a bright young Scot with a quick blue eye and a newshawk's nose that Britain went into World War II with a large and competent staff of trained documentary makers on hand, and a public which liked and respected their product.

John Grierson turned up at the University of Chicago in 1924 as a research fellow. Fascinated by the role of the U.S. press in making Americans out of Europeans, he wandered through the country watching how the papers did it. The popular press, especially the Hearst press, he decided, was a great leveler, a great Americanizer.

John Grierson took this impression of the U.S. press back to England and put it to work. Documentary films, not newspapers, were his medium. By dramatizing the actual workings of a complicated world, these one-to-three-reel shorts would help make Englishmen better citizens by acquainting them with the tasks of England and the Empire.

His first film, Drifters, an account of Britain's fishing industry, was a triumphant success. By 1929 the British Government was sold on documentaries, and the General Post Office and other Government departments established film units. They furnished the money; Grierson the talent.

When World War II began, John Grierson was in Ottawa making documentaries for Canada. In England his trained colleagues were turning out some 50 documentaries yearly. When the Government awoke from the cold shower of Dunkirk, it set these Grierson-trained technicians to making war documentaries. Soon the Ministry of Information was supplying every British cinemansion with at least one picture a week.

Last week's documentary spectacle at the Museum of Modern Art was well worth the attention of the U.S. Govern ment and Hollywood. An instructive example of how to use the cinema to help a nation rearm, it was also an important lesson in how to show a people what it has to fight for.

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