Cinema: Documentaries Grow Up

The kindest epithet for the average documentary film is the word dull. The kindest thing to say about people who inflict such documentaries on cinemaudiences is that they confuse reality with fact. They think that photofact is intrinsically superior to photofiction, and indulge an even more mistaken idea that there is something undignified in entertaining the customers. But several recent British documentaries (some already released, others soon to be) prove that all it takes to make screen fact as good as the best screen fiction is the know-how.

The Silent Village, produced by Humphrey Jennings, is a reenactment by Welsh miners of the story of Lidice, the Czech mining village whose male population was executed by the Nazis, in revenge for the killing of “Hangman” Heydrich. Out of all the uneasy efforts to commemorate that grim tragedy, The Silent Village emerges as the one conceivably adequate memorial. The film shows the official Nazi sound-truck rolling incongruously through the streets of the beautiful Welsh village, shows it croaking: “Achtung! Achtung! (Attention!)”, shows the village’s men, women & children listening to the Nazi commands, some with anger, some with disgust, some with resignation, all quietly. The luckless bravery of the conquered is shown in the slow glance with which a miner glances behind him for pursuers at a secret meeting in the hills; powerless loathing is shown in the slow movement with which a housewife pulls down an open window and shuts out the sound-truck.

The Welsh villagers feel deeply and simply the fate of the Czecho-Slovakian miners they might have been. The makers of the film have had the great good sense to do their jobs unobtrusively, and to leave the rest to the reverent, simple acting of real, deeply moved, everyday human beings.

Listen to Britain (also produced by Humphrey Jennings) is a venturesome attempt to focus attention on the sounds of a nation, rather than on its sights. Some of it is dull because: 1) the sights predominate and are of themselves commonplace; 2) the literal sound issues too predictably from the literal image. But toward the end, sound predominates. At a Myra Hess daytime performance of Mozart’s Concerto in G Major, in London’s war-stripped National Gallery, quietly the Queen appears, among the bemused faces of her subjects. As the magnificently formal music falls from the air, the camera disengages itself from the concert room, steers soberly, at second-floor height, through disformed, tragic London.

These Are the Men takes news shots of the Nazi leaders howling their wares (in German) and puts into their mouths (in English) thumbnail autobiographies, each of which is a monstrous self-indictment. This shrewd cinema effect is muddled more than helped by a gifted but rhetorical commentary by Welsh Poet Dylan Thomas.

Kill or Be Killed, directed by Len Lye, is a sample British Army training film, which quietly dramatizes the protracted, silent, sinister contest between a Nazi sniper and a British soldier. The British soldier is as stolid and unheady as a pint of bitter. The Nazi, who gets killed in spite of his telescope sight and his fancy camouflage, is smart and dangerous, but loses his nerve. The butcherlike utilization of his corpse as a decoy clinches the picture’s simple lesson: killing is no contest between good and evil, admits of no valuations except those of craft and self-preservation.

A World of Plenty is a lecture about food and international hunger, past, present and future. Written by the late Eric Knight, edited by Paul Rotha and clarified by the animated charts of the Isotype Institute,* this documentary is amusing, honest, exciting, intelligent, understandable, always for two reasons: 1) common sense about moving pictures; 2) common sense about human beings. Reason No.1 makes every shot count while the commentator talks. Reason No. 2 saves the film from two of the banes of pedagogy: technological jargon and talking down.

*Which handles Dr. Otto Neurath’s ingenious quantitative symbols(men, machines, etc.) to bring sociological statistics to life (TIME, Sept.18, 1939)