Venue:
Oddball Films, 275
Capp Street, San Francisco
Date: Saturday, December 3, 2011 at 8:00PM
Admission:
$10.00 - Limited Seating RSVP to programming@oddballfilm.com or
415.558.8117
Program Features:
Song of
Ceylon (1934, B+W)
The first part of the film
depicts the religious life of the Sinhalese, interlinking the Buddhist rituals
with the natural beauty of Ceylon. Opening with a series of pans over palm
leaves, we then gradually see people journey to Adam's Peak, a centre of
Buddhist pilgrimage for over two hundred years. This is continually intercut
with images of surrounding natural beauty and a series of pans of a Buddhist
statue. Part two focuses on the working life of the Sinhalese, again
continually stressing their intimate connection to the surrounding environment.
We see people engaging in pottery, woodcarving and the building of houses,
whilst children play. The third part of the film introduces the arrival of
modern communications systems into the fabric of this 'natural' lifestyle,
heralded by experimental sounds and shots of industrial working practices.
Finally, in the last part of the film, we return to the religious life of the
Sinhalese, where people dress extravagantly in order to perform a ritual dance.
The film ends as it began, panning over palm trees.
Made by the GPO Film
Unit and sponsored by both the Empire Tea Marketing Board and the Ceylon Tea
Board, Song of Ceylon is one of
the most critically acclaimed products of the documentary film movement. It was
hailed at the time of its release by author and film critic Graham Greene as a
cinematic masterpiece, and received the award for best film at the
International Film Festival in Brussels, 1935.
The film is a
sophisticated documentary, notable for its experimentation with sound. It
features crucial input from Brazilian Alberto Cavalcanti, who helped with the
soundtrack, as well as composer Walter Leigh, who experimented in the studio to
create a number of sound effects.
The
film's soundtrack was carefully put together in a studio because technical
limitations precluded the ability to record synchronized sound. Leigh
constructed a number of 'exotic' sounds, reflecting ceremonial practice and
interweaved them with anthropological narration. At times these sounds are
disconcerting in the way that they are used: gong sounds, for instance, are
treated and manipulated to increase their harshness. The most striking use of
experimental sound occurs in the third section of the film, which depicts the
effects of telecommunications systems on the native lifestyle. A montage of
industrial sounds and electronic waves are mixed together, creating an
expressive, yet rather dissonant, sense of the encroachment of modernity.
The third section of the film is the most disconcerting
of the four sections and initially contrasts with the other sections. Yet
overall the film is structured in a 'circular' manner, emphasizing that
continuity can occur despite the onset of an initially alien way of life. The
first two sections focus on native rituals and working practices, always
stressing the Sinhalese in relation to their natural environment. The modernity
of the third sequence initially implies that nature and tradition are
endangered by advanced industrialism, but in the last section we return again
to the natives partaking in another ceremony, while industrial sounds become
merged with the 'traditional' sounds.
Ultimately, then, Song
of Ceylon imparts the message that
nature and native traditions can coexist harmoniously with modernity. The film
proposes a benign, rather than ruthless, message of progress, stressing the
benefits of technological innovations. At the end of the film, the camera pans
over palm leaves, while a gong sound is also heard, reprising images and sounds
featured at the start.-Jamie Sexton
Night Mail (1936,
B+W)
Night Mail is one of the most critically acclaimed films to be
produced within the British documentary film movement. It was also among the
most commercially successful, and remains the film most commonly identified
with the movement. By 1936, film output at the GPO Film Unit was divided
between the production of relatively routine films promoting Post Office
services, and more ambitious ones experimenting with the use of sound, visual
style, narrative and editing technique. Night Mail is firmly in the latter category.
Although it was
primarily directed by Harry Watt, Basil Wright developed the script, and had
overall production responsibility for the project. The resulting film was
edited by Wright and Alberto Cavalcanti; John Grierson and Stuart Legg were
also involved in its production. The music score was arranged by Benjamin
Britten and Cavalcanti, and the rhyming verse used in the film - spoken by Pat
Jackson - was written by W.H. Auden, who also acted as assistant director.
Night Mail is an account of the operation of the Royal Mail
train delivery service, and shows the various stages and procedures of that
operation. The film begins with a voiceover commentary describing how the mail
is collected for transit. Then, as the train proceeds along the course of its
journey, we are shown the various regional railway stations at which it
collects and deposits mail. Inside the train the process of sorting takes
place. As the train nears its destination there is a sequence - the best known
in the film, in which Auden's spoken verse and Britten's music are combined
over montage images of racing train wheels.
Although the
narrative is concerned with issues of national communication and integration,
the thematic centre of the film is more closely linked to representations of
the regional environment. This elevation of the regional above the national is
reinforced by the portrayal of the railway as separate from the metropolitan
environment, and little attempt is made to link the railway and its workers
with the city. The film also channels representations of modern technology and
institutional practice away from an account of the industry of postal delivery,
and into a study of the train as a powerful symbol of modernity, in its natural
element speeding into the countryside.- Ian Aitken
Documentary, public
information film, morale booster; propaganda film - these are descriptions that
could be applied to many of the 10 to 20 minute shorts that flourished and
reached a peak of expression in the 1930s and '40s. Humphrey Jennings' films
covered the whole of the Second World War in Britain. His quiet, emotive style
produced some of the most memorable film images of the War; those from London
Can Take It (1940), Listen To
Britain (1942) and Fires Were
Started (1943). Those titles, for
the GPO and Crown Film Unit, were American funded and produced for American and
British release.
Listen To Britain's title might suggest a strong sound element. There
are the very recognizable sounds that one might expect in a wartime film: the
evocative thunder of the 1000 horse power Rolls Royce Merlin engines of
Spitfires and Lancasters, the cacophony of wartime heavy industry - tank factories,
steel works, steam trains - but also the sounds of music; the egalitarian free
classical music concerts, and radio; Workers' Play Time, musicians, Flanagan
and Allen performing live at a lunchtime factory concert.
But it is the images,
particularly the studies of people that are the real star. The gaunt, tired
faces in this most desperate part of the war seem only slightly aware that
Jennings' camera is there. In a factory, a young woman handles heavy precision
metal drilling/cutting machinery, almost in a trance, her body and hands
skillfully heaving the heavy equipment into precise position. At a concert,
another young woman, standing against the wall alone, stares through or past
the camera. She is defiant, self-assured, and independent. We know with
hindsight that in the comparative austerity and repression of the immediate
postwar period, women would not enjoy the same limited equalities, liberty and
sexual freedom that they did in the war.
The editing in Listen
To Britain is trademark Jennings:
simple comparisons between scenes from everyday life and the manic, unreal
struggle of the war effort. -Ewan Davidson
The Oil in Your
Engine (1969) a technologically innovative film about the
properties of oil in automotive engines produced by the makers of the biggest
petroleum disaster in history-British Petroleum. The psychedelic visuals and
experimental soundtrack, combined with the innovatively framed shots makes
their “science” of oil lubrication all the more bizarre. Nominated for a BAFTA award (British
Academy of Film and Television Arts).
About the GPO Film
Unit
The post office film
unit established by Sir Stephen Tallents in 1933 will be forever associated
with John Grierson and his idea of documentary cinema. During his spell in
charge (1933-1937), Grierson oversaw the creation of a film school that he
attempted to direct towards a socially useful purpose. J. B. Priestley
remembered, "if you wanted to see what camera and sound could really do,
you had to see some little film sponsored by the post office or the Gas, Light
& Coke company."
This early strand of
the GPO Unit's filmmaking is best represented by its 'masterpiece', Night
Mail (1936), which borrowed from the
aesthetics of Soviet cinema to turn an explanation of the work of the travelling
post office into a hymn to collective labou\r. To quote Priestley again,
"Grierson and his young men, with their contempt for easy big prizes and
soft living, their taut social conscience, their rather Marxist sense of the
contemporary scene always seemed to me at least a generation ahead of the
dramatic film people."
However, the
significance of Grierson's project at the GPO Film Unit would be more apparent
in its eventual influence than its immediate impact. What is perhaps more
important to stress is that this idealistic strand was not the only or,
perhaps, even the most important part of its work.
The GPO Film Unit had
been established as part of the post office's new public relations department.
It was a typically experimental move. For much of the interwar period, the GPO
was the largest employer in Britain: it had around a quarter of a million
employees and was at the cutting edge of business organization and
technological research. Thus, for example, massive government investment in the
telephone network saw the production of instructional films such as Telephone
Workers (1933), an early attempt to
help train a large staff that was spread over several geographically distinct
sites.
As well as creating a
national communications infrastructure, the GPO was attempting to introduce
commercial ideas of customer service into what was then a government
department. Thus one job of the GPO Film Unit was to find ways to bridge the
gap between the stern norms of communication in the Civil Service and popular
understanding. The serious impulse behind entertaining musical fantasies like The
Fairy of the Phone (1936) was an
attempt to find new ways to communicate with the public. This was an essential
requirement if you believed, as Stephen Tallents, the GPO's Head of Public
Relations did, that popular expectations of government were evolving. As he put
it, the idea of government as being negative was being superseded by the idea
that government should be positive, moving from "the preventing of the bad
to the encouraging of the good".
The work of
experimental artists and filmmakers such as Lotte Reiniger, Norman McLaren and
Len Lye can, then, be understood as part of a wider GPO project, exemplified by
Giles Gilbert Scott's Jubilee Telephone Kiosk and the development of services
such as the Speaking Clock and '999', to move government into closer and more
harmonious contact with the British people.
First and foremost,
the Film Unit was responsible for promoting the reputation of the GPO,
emphasizing the scale and success of its technological ambitions. This task
informed the bombast of films like the comparatively big budget BBC - The
Voice of Britain (1935), as well as
the internationalist idealism of We Live in Two Worlds (1937), which envisaged how new communications
technology would herald the coming of a global civilization. This thematic
technophilia was also reflected in the Unit's method, especially in the sound
experiments organized by the Brazilian émigré Alberto Cavalcanti. Among the
GPO's sonic achievements was the first use of recorded speech (6.30
Collection, 1934), modernist
experiments in sound montage (Song of Ceylon, 1934) and the employ of now feted composers such as
Benjamin Britten, Maurice Jaubert and Darius Milhaud.
This characteristic
of the Unit's work became more evident after Grierson was replaced by
Cavalcanti and a theoretical approach to 'realism' became less important than
developing a variety of inventive and colloquial idioms. At the most obvious
level, the Unit pursued celebrity endorsements - persuading cricketer Len
Hutton and family to appear in What's On Today (1938), for example - but this approach also began
to prompt interesting experiments in film form.
Harry Watt's The
Saving of Bill Blewitt (1936) is
often referred to as the first 'story documentary'. The film combined real
locales and non-professional actors with a narrative based script. Let off the
leash by Cavalcanti, Watt began consciously to blend the aesthetic and social
commitment of the early Grierson documentaries with narrative devices borrowed
from Hollywood. This resulted in the GPO's most theatrically successful
production, North Sea (1938), which wore its 'educational' brief more lightly
and made an overt attempt to entertain. According to Denis Foreman's memoir,
such fusions later fascinated the Italian Neo-Realists.
Cavalcanti's reign
also saw the production of Humphrey Jennings' masterful Spare Time (1939), an imaginatively edited catalogue of
working-class Britain at play. Playful and humane, Jennings' delightfully
undidactic film was exhibited at the New York International Exhibition of 1939
as an example of an emerging 'new Britain.'
On the outbreak of
the Second World War, the GPO Film Unit became the Crown Film Unit, and its
morale-boosting mode was effectively nationalized, a move which resulted in the
production of patriotic wartime classics such as London Can Take It (1940), Target for Tonight (1941) and Listen to Britain (1942). Now led by the sensitive producer, Ian
Dalrymple, this was perhaps the Unit's most triumphant phase, ironic
considering the amount of governmental opposition that Tallents and the Film
Unit had faced in peacetime.
Although the GPO Film
Unit was eventually subsumed by the newly created Central Office of Information
in 1946, and many of the filmmakers from its golden age migrated into
commercial film production and television, the post office continued to make
films. Early GPO efforts like Cable Ship (1933) and Under the City
(1934) had found their audience among children and in the provincial village
halls of various voluntary organizations; later post office films concentrated
on these more narrowly defined educational purposes. Indeed, later children's
programs such as Postman Pat were
arguably the long-term result of the public affection for the post office which
the GPO Film Unit had been established to embed some 50 years earlier.-Scott
Anthony
Date: Friday, December 2, 2011 at
8:00PM
The Green Sea Turtle
with Jacques Cousteau (1970, color)
Aqua Frolics (1950, B+W)
