Octave

I wonder if anyone here can answer a question that's bugged me for a while. Where were the short British documentaries of the 30s and 40s first seen? Were they shown as shorts before features, and if so, how regularly were they a part of going to the cinema? I can imagine something like "Coal Face" being shown before a feature, and maybe even something as long as "Night Mail," but what about something as long as "A Diary for Timothy" (40 minutes)? And what about the feature-length documentaries? Were they distributed like other features?

Also, does anyone have a sense of the extent to which they were aimed at audiences in the colonies or in the States? "London Can Take It," for instance, certainly seems to be aimed at a non-British audience, but who? Americans?

I'd also appreciate any recommendations of basic reading on the documentary movement.

Many thanks,
Tom

AdrianTurner

A good question this and in a possible answer I quote from the Cinema One book, Studies in Documentary, by Alan Lovell and Jim Hillier (Secker & Warburg, 1972):

'Grierson's particular interest in the cinema as a method of social propaganda made it essential that the films should be seen by as wide an audience as possible. At first he concentrated on getting them shown commercially, and indeed through the 1930s British documentary films were shown in normal commercial cinema programmes. For example, the first six films made by the EMB were sold to Gaumont British Distributors. However, commercial exhibitors were never enthusiastic about including documentaries in their programmes. So Grierson looked for other outlets. Noting that here was a potentially larger audience outside the commercial cinema than in it, he encouraged the growth of a non-theatrical audience, which included schools, film societies, YMCAs, various women's organisations, trade unions and many other bodies.' pp15-16.

Steve Crook

What ho Tom,
Last night's episode of The Nation on Film on BBC4 was looking at "Selling Salvation". This series mainly looks at home movies taken by people before and during WWII but this one included some documentaries made by Christian groups to help sell their message. This included The Mother's Union making a documentary showing young girls at parties getting drunk and taking drugs and then being raped in an amazingly graphic sequence for the time. There were also some films, docu-dramas I suppose, made by the Billy Graham Crusade and other Evangelical and Born Again groups. This was contrasted by the humbler output of people who ran a shelter in the local church crypt for those who were "down on their luck".

Many of these were shown to the group that made them, but others, like the one about the church crypt, were shown wherever they could to raise funds and get supporters.

Always an interesting series

Steve

WickedLadyKiller

The non-theatrical screenings of documentaries remained an important outlet for the movement throughout the war, when many of the films were distributed through the Ministry of Information, a department which frequently banged on about the success of its Mobile Film Units.

For example, in the year ending August 1943, the MoI claimed that its non-theatrical screenings had been seen by a total of 15.5 million people.

Two points need to be thought about when looking at this figure, though. One, that this does not include the number of people who saw documentaries during their theatrical release (if they had one): Desert Victory, for example, seems to have done good business. Two, that although this figure seems large, and although many in the documentary movement seem to have been pleased with the opportunity to screen their films so widely, the number of people attracted to non-theatrical screenings pales in comparison to the number of people who went to the cinema in the same period.

"Made from peanuts, I suppose"

Steve Crook

And those figures don't say how many of those people saw those documentaries voluntarily. They could well include the staff of large factories involved in wartime production who would be given some time off to see some of them to remind the workers how vital their work was

Steve

WickedLadyKiller

Very true. Series like Worker and Warfront were produced specifically for industrial workers. Although more of a newsreel than a documentary, some episodes were made by some big names in the documentary movement, for example Paul Rotha.

And we shouldn't forget the canteen choruses! Numerous wartime films show Workers' Playtime style singalongs - see Millions Like Us, Old Mother Riley, Detective, etc - and the film Playtime for Workers relocated some of the best-known artists to a studio and tried to capture the spirit and energy of these performances. According to the reports I've seen it was less than successful.

"Made from peanuts, I suppose"

orpheum

Remember that many big companies such as Ford and many government organisations eg MOI(Later COI) had non theatrical 16mm libraries.So these films could be shown for example in schools and libraries or canteens.I used to hire a lot of these films when i used my 16mm p[rojector at home.
Alas with the introduction of video in the 1970s these libraries more or less disappeared

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Octave

Many thanks for all the thoughts here. What an awfully helpful forum. I'm glad I found it.

Mr Dean

The most often quoted instance of making a documentary for the American market was Humphrey Jennings' Listen to Britain (1942) which had an added foreword by the Canadian Leonard Brockington, introducing the film to an American audience to show the resilience of the Brits (and Canadians). Ironically, America had already entered the war when the film was released. I'm not sure that Jennings was too keen on the added intro and it isn't present on some of the DVD copies (including, I think those circulating in the US).

Re screenings, you may not to be aware that the Co-operative Retail Societies in the UK also ran cinemas in Co-op Halls or as part of/attached to their stores in the 1930s and 1940s. These showed the Co-op's own films as well as commercial features. Some 'workers films' on 16mm were certainly shown in Co-op cinemas and I would guess that some documentary films from EMB etc. as well.

In the early days of the documentary movement (late 1920s/early 1930s), the main screening space was in the early Film Societies such as the London FS in (I think) the Regent Street Polytechnic Cinema (the Cameo-Poly when I went there in the 1970s).