“AT the Front in North Africa” is a fact film made by Darryl Zanuck during the first stages of the African campaign. It follows American tank troops into their landing at Bone, through an undecipherable air attack, to a routing of Mark IV tanks at the battle of Tebourba. With thirty-four men under his supervision Zanuck still couldn’t erase the impression that these were shots taken by an amateur photographer who found himself turning a camera on doings he never expected to see. Like a scared rabbit, the film runs out of the middle of one event smack into the tail-end of another, stays strictly away from people and glances nervously at airplane and tank battles out of the corner of an eye. Mr. Zanuck doesn’t, in this manner, get inside of facts.
To explain deficiencies in films like this one, army and newsreel people have some valid excuses. Censors allow scarcely any battle film to get to the public (one commander, for instance, was just swerved from destroying all the film on Pearl Harbor). The terrain and the kind of light in the jungles of Guadalcanal and other tropical battle areas called for the kind of camera work of which most Service crews are not yet capable, and much of the fighting in such areas is at night. Modern warfare is immensely difficult to photograph because air battles are too fast and cover too much distance during their course for a camera to hold in focus, and in engagements of tanks and infantry there seems little for the camera to get hold of. Cameramen, while allowed to take reels and reels of soldiers eating and tanks disembarking, are frequently barred from the battle zones. Such reasons as these would seem to explain a good deal.
The main historical value of “At the Front” will be the officially posed pictures of Gens. Mark Clark, Cunningham and Anderson with Darlan and our own Pétain man, Robert Murphy. The view of the terrain our men are fighting in is interesting, since it definitely does away with the picture of darkest Africa most of us grew up with. The narrative for the movie is excellent because there is so little of it and because of the words at the close of the battle: “This morning when the battle started this was a conquered valley in the hands of the enemy; now it is a free valley.” “At the Front,” like “The Battle of Midway,” is in bleary technicolor, mostly hazy blue atmosphere in which details can only be approximately picked out. These only film records of our troops at war are hardly the place to use such an imprecise medium.
In addition to the physical difficulties, there is something else behind the ineptitude of films like “At the Front.” This is the fact that Americans know very little of how to make movie documents. Americans who made fine ones before the war, like Flaherty, Lorenz and Strand, aren’t making war documentaries, and their earlier work had no effect on Hollywood. While Hollywood in its story films depended entirely on cast-iron plots of flashy incident to get their pseudo-life and pseudo-movement, no one, not even the newsreel companies, examined human actions and behavior in detail with the motion-picture camera. Whereas Eisenstein in Russia, Ivens in Holland and Grierson and Legg in England were watching the daily life in fields, factories and coal mines with their cameras, not only in documentaries but in story films as well. So that American directors generally, without their preconceived plot to use, are unable to film actuality and get from it its meaning and emotion, a technique which can’t be acquired in a day.
In Canada, in England and in Russia experienced workers are, to quote Dovzhenko, “recording the visual aspect of war completely and unflinchingly,” consequently outranking the Americans. This is apparent in any Russian film. One of their most powerful jobs is one out now called “A Day of War—Russia, 1943,” which was shot by 150 cameramen, some sixty of whom were killed doing it. In every part of it there is just what American documents lack—the pinprick in each episode that makes it something more than ordinary.
April 5, 1943