FILMS

The record of the Ministry's connection with films is very difficult to write. It is easy to say that from the beginning we had a Films Division and that this Division was recognised as the central agency for the production and distribution of official films. There is not much difficulty, either, in giving a brief account of the history of our work in that field. After a shaky start the Ministry fell foul of the Select Committee on National Expenditure on the score of a venture into the financing of a large scale commercial film. The Committee recommended and the Minister of Information publicly accepted the proposition that, as a general rule, public money should not be employed in the financing of commercial feature films. It is only a sidelight to recall that the particular film that caused the row proved after long delays to be extremely poor British propaganda and to net a clear profit of £100,000 for the Treasury. Diverted by this incident, the Ministry turned to the kind of film-making which, in my view, its true development would have lain in any event, namely the making of documentary films. In this field the volume of output increased year by year. Each week by arrangement with the cinema exhibitors a five minute film made by the Ministry was accorded free showing time in the cinema theatres of the country. After 1942 the weekly five minute film became a monthly 15 minute film, but the arrangements for free showing remained in force. In addition each year produced a few films of a length and quality that enabled them to be sold for commercial distribution: others were made available to the trade free of charge for them to distribute and show outside our weekly or monthly showing times. Apart from these channels of entry into the cinema theatre, the Ministry produced an annual output of films for non-theatrical showing and organised a system of mobile film projectors which covered the country on a regional basis. These home activities were carried on side by side with a large scale business of adapting news reel and film material for showing in overseas and foreign theatres and arranging the export and distribution of the films so prepared. Except for the purposes of certain special schemes such as the emergency production of British films for distribution in recently liberated territories, the Ministry did not concern itself with the export or distribution of British commercial 65 - 64 -films, confining itself to the handling of news reels and British Government films.

This is the history of the development of a very large scale business but I search in it in vain for any significant decisions of policy which are likely to afford guidance on future occasions. Once the general policy of abstaining from commitments in respect of commercial features was accepted it was inevitable that we should plunge into the documentary field. We did plunge and acquired a very considerable reputation from the products that followed. The documentary was still a comparatively new technique and it happened to suit the British conception as to what would be an appropriate mode of propaganda for the war of 1939-1945. To a large extent therefore the conditions and the technique produced the films. An appreciation of what we did achieve and of what we failed to achieve would be an extremely interesting and valuable document but I am not qualified to make it. It needs expert knowledge of the film process itself and a more detailed familiarity with the work and output of the Films Division than I possess. But, as I think that the subject of the Government's relations with film production is of the first importance and in no way less important by reason of the cessation of war conditions, I record my impressions for what they are worth.

I think that we can start with the proposition that the Ministry's film work was good. It was a pioneer in the use of documentary films for Government purposes : it had a few considerable successes in production: it maintained throughout the war a big and creditable output of films calculated to stimulate some interest in and shed some illumination on the numerous aspects of war-time life, and its work compares very favourably with the record of any other official film agency. Yet before the war ended my personal feeling had been one of increasing dissatisfaction at the difference between our actual achievement and what it still seemed possible to achieve.

Primarily, it depends on what one looks for from Government film making. Start at the bottom - trailers or “flashes”. The technique is purely that of advertising. The Government can use them, of course, but it is of no significance whether they are made by any commercial producer that can

[These passages do less than justice to the pioneer work on documentary films which was carried out by the Crown Film Unit (formed by Sir Stephen Tallents and inspired by Mr. Grierson) first under the Empire Marketing B.D. taken under G.P.O. M/h.F. took this over as a going concern.]

handle the business. Now it is not by this time of the day anything remarkable that serious subjects can be acceptably illustrated in film terms. Yet most Government Departments make no real effort to distinguish between an acceptable film and an impressive film. Consequently it seemed to them an achievement if we had made on commission from them a film which was a reasonably attractive illustration of some subject to which they wished to draw the public's attention. The existence of these eager but undiscriminating patrons was bad for our film making. It meant, in my view, that far too large an element of the total output consisted of films that were neither particularly bad nor particularly good but were, essentially, the product of some publicity idea or theme rather than an expression of emotion realised in visual terms. Personally, I think of the film as a vehicle for reflecting or conveying emotion, but I can appreciate the standpoint of the documentary maker who views it primarily as an essay in social analysis. My point about the Government “publicity” film is that it derives from neither of these conceptions and, though it may be clever and competent and please its sponsors, it amounts to nothing worthwhile in making any real impression on its spectators. In other words it is not worth bothering about.

This is not to say a great deal. It only means that Government Departments, if they are going to use films as a medium of general publicity (I will come to instructional films later) must get beyond their delighted surprise at seeing a film created and pass on to a serious consideration of the qualities of a film that make it memorable and convincing when exhibited. Otherwise the work of the official film organisation will always be swamped with commonplaces.

But, apart from all this, I could never feel that our film subjects were sufficiently near the middle of the target as an expression of war experience. The outstanding successes “Target for Tonight” and “Desert Victory” stand out so much because they were exceptions. But, on the whole, our timing of subjects seemed astray and many of our films gave me a feeling that we were presenting rather a scrappy side-issue of the war than a deeply-felt central theme. I have no doubt that the over-concentration on “Security” which distinguished so much of the war effort 67 - 66 -had a large responsibility for this. Too little effort was made by the Service Departments to find a reasonable way round “Security” difficulties, and whole subjects were put out of court because there were elements of secrecy involved in then. This drove our film people to concentrate on domestic and social subjects which, though certainly entitled to their share of the picture, were thrown into rather undue prominence.

But I think that another contributory cause of a certain flatness of tone in our pictures was the tradition and technique of the documentary film world. It was a world of self-conscious austerity: emotions were “Hollywood”, excitement was “Hollywood”, even professional actors and audible non-dialect speeches tended to be “Hollywood”. These traditions of honesty and spareness were a useful training from which to advance towards a technique of film making under the intense emotional stresses of a world at war. How excellent and truly felt were “London can take it” and “Christmas under fire”. But my feeling is that somehow we failed to advance from or even retain that early receptivity of mood and the documentary technique and formulas proved too rigid and inelastic to meet adequately the demands that the war made upon them. Too often our films were half hearted in creating intensity and their handling of narrative was consistently weak. Take the Crown Film series of “big” films that followed “Target for Tonight” - “Coastal Command”, “Ferry Pilot”, “Close Quarters”, “Before the Raid”. Not one was really on the nerve, yet they included the war subjects. The individual characters had little intrinsic interest and the incidents accordingly lost tension. Compared with the dramatic skill and intensity of “Next of Kin” and “The Way Ahead” they remain vague and remote in my mind. Even “Western Approaches”, which I would place considerably higher than its forerunners, is, I think, vulnerable on the same score, though it gains greatly by increased power of characterisation. Even so, I doubt if it did as much to illumine the heroics of the merchantman at sea as Charles Frend's picture “San Demetrio”, made for Ealing Studios, and lacking none of the essentials of a good documentary.

Against the comparative weakness of our handling of the central war subjects it was, to me, no sufficient consolation to find the Ministry producing excellent little films about the life of a doctor in the Highlands, 68 - 67 -the significance of a builder's job in the war or the contrasting beauties of the agricultural districts of England.

In truth, this question of the choice of subject would always be a crucial one in Government film making, if it is to be something more than a pedestrian record of duty done. It is a union of inspirations that is needed to make a good film in this field. There is a dilemma. If the film maker is left to his own inspiration, as to a large extent he always must be, he will probably produce some excellent films, but they will be of little significance or utility, as subjects, for the Government's purposes. From that point of view, therefore, it is supporting research, not production. On the other hand, if the film maker is regarded as essentially the executive agent of the publicity director he will produce films that are admirable for purpose and “policy”, but in all probability null in their impression on the intended spectator. The problem of organising Government film production, as I see it, is the problem of so arranging the relations of the instruments that films are not brought into existence except on the impulse of a genuine “policy” need and a genuine film maker's inspiration. I believe that the organisation best suited to produce this result is an independent film corporation financed by and producing for the Government, but not acting as a mere service agency expected to produce films to order.

All this is quite distinct, in my mind, from the real instructional film, a. film not designed to entertain or to impress but to inform and instruct a specialised audience whose interest in the subject is assumed. Such films have no natural place in the cinema theatre, and the problem of their use is bound up with the problem of their distribution outside the theatre. We made numerous films of this kind during the war years for such Departments as Home Security, Health and Agriculture. Some were highly successful in their vein. The indications are that the domestic Departments of Government are becoming very much alive to the possibilities which such films offer in the technique of democratic Government, and the post-war demand for them should be big. They do indeed offer opportunities of advancing public education in social and industrial natters, and they do not present the same inherent difficulties in planning or producing that 69 - 68 -leave me so uncertain of the future of Government film making in the wider sense.

The non-theatrical film distribution service which the Ministry took over and developed during the war was the medium for the distribution of these instructional films. It was based on the 16 mm film and the mobile projector. Given a much wider installation of fixed projectors in schools, halls, institutes, etc. than can exist for some years to come it could equally well be based on static projectors and effective circulation from central libraries. The films that we fed to the non-theatrical service during the war were not solely, or even, primarily, the instructional films, that I have been speaking about. The bulk of these films were general information films, specially produced, adapted from our theatrical films or acquired from other organisations such as the Canadian Film Board. This was inevitable and right under the conditions we were then meeting, since about a third of our non-theatrical shows were given in factories at the “break”, and another series of shows was designed to give six shows a year to country villages, which lacked much regular contact with war events. But, with the passing of war conditions, the case for the maintenance of the non- theatrical scheme to show general information films will be much weaker, if only because communications and working conditions will return to normal. I do not doubt that such a service could still be useful and enlightening in the form of a general adult education on current affairs, but I doubt if any Government looking for economies would regard it as sufficiently necessary or important to justify indefinite maintenance. I do not happen to agree with that, but that is because I do regard the film as potentially a great educator and I do not see this work being done - yet - adequately by the commercial theatre or the unaided private organisation.

The possibilities of the instructional film as an aid to the practice of Government remain. Such films could be made by independent commercial producers. But if the demand is likely to be constant and the technique special it seems to me an obvious advantage that the production of such films should be entrusted in the normal course to whatever agency is recognised by the Government as the central official film agency.