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Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925) influenced many British directors including
Grierson. The documentary movement also attracted support from such
luminaries as E. M. Forster, W. H. Auden and Benjamin Britten. This reinforced
its intellectual credentials and ensured that it continued to have a
disproportionate influence on notions of what the feature film should achieve.
The risk was that the documentary became out of touch with the population it
was supposed to reach. Night Mail (Basil Wright and Harry Watt, 1936) with
contributions from Auden and Britten might be now considered a seminal work,
but this does not mean that it was popular at the time.
Realism was not so much a fully-fledged philosophy as an aspiration.
Elements were found in feature films which were by no means realistic,
examples being the Blackpool scenes in Sing as We Go (Basil Dean, 1934)
and the Isle of Man TT races in No Limit (Monty Banks, 1935). The stylistic
disparity between realism and genre comes out clearly in Sons of the Sea
(Maurice Elvey, 1939). This moral-boosting story of a spy who tries to discover
British naval secrets relies heavily on location shooting around the Royal Naval
College at Dartmouth. While this anchors the film in real locations, a laboured
scenario and some leaden acting make the story spin into melodrama.
With the Second World War came a deluge of documentary films to explain
war aims and exhort the population. That strange hybrid the documentary
feature was supported in Britain by a government which perceived its value in
blending propaganda with entertainment. The fictionalised documentaries Fires
Were Started (Humphrey Jennings, 1943) and Western Approaches (Pat
Jackson, 1944) are almost indistinguishable in approach from commercial
feature films which utilise documentary elements such as The Bells Go Down
(Basil Dearden, 1943) and San Demetrio London (Charles Frend, 1943). The
interesting questions, never completely answered, are whether audiences
responded to such films as entertainment, propaganda or information, and how
their responses varied geographically, demographically and by occupation.
With the ending of the war, many documentary film-makers moved into
feature films, so it is not surprising that documentary techniques were carried
over into their films, the crowd scenes in Ken Annakin’s Holiday Camp (1947)
and the cattle drive in Harry Watt’s The Overlanders (1947) being obvious
examples. Other directors including Thorold Dickinson and Cavalcanti
sloughed off their documentary credentials and showed a willingness to play
with the medium as in Cavalcanti’s ‘Ventriloquist’s Dummy’ episode in Dead of
Night (1945). Dickinson’s Pushkin adaptation The Queen of Spades (1949)
might have pleased critics, but audiences were reluctant to follow them on this
artistic journey. The film was expensive to make at £232,500, but twelve
months after its release in April 1949 it had not recouped its costs at the box
office.
3
Interest in realism was reinforced by the neo-realist films produced in Italy.
In part the style was a response to shortages of power, studio space and film
stock, but there was also an ideological commitment to portray ordinary people
which must have gratified documentary film-makers in Britain. Although neo-
realism is now regarded as a key development in cinema history, the films were
little seen by British audiences, who showed scant enthusiasm for films without
English dialogue. The appeal of neo-realism was to a metropolitan elite who
could attend screenings at specialist cinemas. One rather shaky bridge across
this cultural divide was Children of Chance (Luigi Zampa, 1949), a neo-realist
film shot in Italy but with British principals speaking English. This story of two
girls who are sent back to their home village in Ischia by the Allied
administration was re-shot by Zampa as Campane a Martello (1949), with Gina
Lollobrigida in the lead role. Unfortunately the British version was little seen, so
this intriguing experiment in co-production was never repeated.
With the wartime blurring of any distinction between the documentary and
the feature film, the movement of film-makers between the two forms and the
influence of critics like Edgar Anstey and Paul Rotha, both former documentary
directors, it is hardly surprising that the documentary maintained its status in
the postwar world. It was an article of faith that film should be true to life,
though this ignores the question of what audiences wanted. The success of
Gainsborough melodramas such as The Wicked Lady (Leslie Arliss, 1945) and
the escapist comedies of Herbert Wilcox suggests that the paying public had
other ideas.
Several film-makers set out their attitudes towards realism, even if they
strayed from their declared path. The Paris-trained Cavalcanti wrote in 1947:
‘We [junior technicians in France] backed the straight commercial film
and we were right. They survive today while all the “Art” has been
forgotten... We took refuge in the Documentary Film. And that to us was
not art either. We wanted to tell simple stories in a simple way. Realism
seemed the slogan that we cherished above all, though later this too
became an experimental ground.
4
Here realism is elided with simplicity to distinguish it from art, yet the final
sentence suggests a desire for something closer to Vertov’s playfulness which
is apparent in Cavalcanti’s contribution to Dead of Night already referred to.
Though Went the Day Well? (1942) might be described as a fantasy in
documentary style, his other work of this period strays far from realism: a salute
to the music hall with Champagne Charlie (1944), an adaptation of Dickens’
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