From the Cheap Seats

It’s perhaps a wee bit early to be talking about the best DVD of the year but if there’s a better release than the BFI’s splendid Land of Promise this year, I’ll be a very happy little chap indeed. As I’m sure you’re aware, it gathers together many British documentaries made between 1930 and 1950, taking us through those years of profound social change.

It’s a vanished world, of course: even the names of the production companies are enough give the modern viewer a jolt (the Empire Marketing Board?) One of the great attractions of this set is surely the time travel it allows, journeying to a country so familiar and yet so different. It’s a country bedevilled by problems of poverty but one filled with optimism and a touching faith in experts to solve the problems. Hindsight adds a poignant patina to many of these films: the optimistic souls who people these films didn’t know there was a war coming, nor what its cost would be.

But if Land of Promise offered nothing but nostalgia and social history then it would outstay its welcome long before the end of the fourth disc. It’s the quality of the filmmaking that makes it so worthwhile. This is the work of real filmmakers – some of Britain’s best – who knew how to compose a shot, edit the footage and structure their material.

These aren’t documentaries as we’d understand the term today, trading in facts and stories. What these films really document is how their creators felt about what they saw. For instance, Shipyard (directed by Paul Rotha) shows us far more than the nuts‘n’bolts of shipbuilding; we get a sense of the politics of the time (a worker ruminates that he’d never get to travel on the ship he helped build) and an insight into the men away from their work, racing their dogs.

Even less self-conscious films, such as Workers And Jobs, do their jobs in a more imaginative way than many of the public information films later generations are familiar with, using non-professional actors in real locations. (Which is not to diss the raw power of those later public information pics: I remain scarred to this day by the one warning children not to go with strangers. Indeed, I vociferously fought my mother’s plans that I open a Post Office Giro Account because the actor who advertised it played The Stranger in that terrifying, white-knuckle production. I still feel a cold stab of fear when I buy stamps, in case the man behind the counter asks if I’d like to see some puppies.)

What this set illustrates is how broad a church the English documentary movement was. They also show how far some of these filmmakers had diverged from the gospel of John Grierson. Grierson was the high-priest of the documentary movement, who did so much to establish its dominance. Grierson preached that ‘Documentary’ (real, honest, intellectual) was somehow superior to ‘studio’ pictures (meretricious melodramatic soufflés). His was a puritanical dogma that maintained that you could do either one or the other and that only a fool would chose to make entertainments.

Inevitably, this colours discussions not just of the films Grierson produced but the entire documentary tradition, usually to its detriment. But while many (most?) documentarians paid lip service to his nostrums, it’s clear from the films themselves that there were few true believers. Look at that most celebrated of British docs, Night Mail (available separately) which used such realist devices as – er – studio reconstructions and lyric verse to tell its story.

Directors like Hitchcock, Powell and Lean believed that ‘the documentary boys’ looked down their nose at the commercial directors, who felt patronised by Grierson’s edicts. Yet those self-same documentary boys often sailed far away from true realism to pursue their visions: few were so dogmatic that they didn’t re-stage shots or even make stuff up.

Land of Promise shows how many of Grierson’s flock had outgrown his narrow strictures and were making films that, yes, were broadly realist but also personal, artistic and imaginative. Most famously, of course, there’s Humphrey Jennings, whose poetic sensibility profoundly annoyed Grierson. He felt Jennings was an apostate from the true religion but he’s arguably the finest of all British filmmakers.

So if they were willing to create their own realities, why not go the whole hog and add a beginning-middle-and-end story? Why didn’t they extend their critique of British feature films to showing how it should be done? Looking back with the same hindsight that makes films like Housing Problems so poignant, I can’t help but wonder what might have been if the rigid bifurcation between the two disciplines – this artistic sectarianism – hadn’t been so ideologically charged.

Some directors jumped between the trenches, notably Alberto Cavalcanti (who supervised Night Mail and directed Went the Day Well?; we shall return to him in forthcoming weeks.) And Jennings’ Fires Were Started (which, again, you’ll have to buy separately – like that’s a chore) is, basically, a fiction feature film, no matter what its genealogy. Both men validated the documentary tradition and showed how it could enrich other formats. As an enthusiast for British fiction films, I wish more had followed, not least because it would have made it a lot easier for me to see their work.

There’s no use carping over what never was or re-fighting ideological battles long after the generals are dead and gone. There are some remarkable films here, from some of our finest filmmakers. If you have any interest in British filmmaking then Land of Promise is a mandatory release. There’s loads more in the archives too: let’s hope that Volume Two is forthcoming.