“DOCUMENTARY” is a word that has always been used loosely in the movie vocabulary, and since the war has brought English, Canadian and Russian documentaries to our attention, the term has been taken up and really flung around. It has got to the point where anything good in movies is called documentary. Actually, the difference between the documentary and the story film in the final esthetic evaluation is unimportant. There is not a good documentary without a story, and there is not a good story film without what is called the documentary technique. All the qualities of that technique—photography that is consistent with the nature of the subject in value, intensity and design, movement in images to parallel in rhythm the idea being expressed, the dependence on showing a story rather than telling it, people straight from everyday life in dress, talk and manner, and the environment as a living, natural part of their life—are all qualities that started in the story film and appear wherever a good movie, called documentary or otherwise, appears. While the story film over the past decade has depended more and more on superficiality and less on art, the documentary has hit a much higher average in quality, a fact which may be responsible for the wide gulf imagined between the two kinds of film. But either the documentary or the story film, to be any good, will express the essential nature of the subject, which is human life in one form or another. Whether the start is from actuality or from the imagination, there is only one way to photograph a mail box, and that is the best way in terms of the desired end, and there is only one way to show an idea or a story in the movies, and that is also the best way. As soon as either kind of film means to be art, the distinction between them becomes very unimportant.
Two short movies (not equally, but both called, documentary) sent to this country by the British government, “World of Plenty” and “Silent Village,” are of good quality, but on the thin side emotionally. Made with the coöperation of the Czecho-Slovakian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the South Wales Miners’ Federation and the people of the Swansea and Dulais Valleys, “Silent Village” reënacts the martyrdom of Lidice, using the people and civilization of the town of Cwmgiedd, South Wales, as the medium. With the neatness and dispatch of “The 39 Steps,” most of the story is left to your imagination and previous experience, the movie merely giving you the necessary directives. A prohibitive order over the loudspeaker by a raucous voice implies that the Nazis have come (repeated symbolically by the village brook, which had been running quietly in traditional brooklike manner, but now churns violently and noisily). The failure of that order to change the expression of the bleak, uncommunicative face of a Welsh washerwoman, shows a stony determination to resist any tampering with the traditional Welsh life. It is a lyric, satisfactory business for its twenty-five-minute length, and as a memorial to the people of Lidice, it has a fitting love and dignity.
“World of Plenty” is commendably composed out of newsreels, maps and advice from statesmen, farmers, doctors and housewives, to show that the right control of the production, distribution and consumption of food is helping us to win the war and will lead us to a world of plenty unlike anything we have had. It uses all the film lying around from pre-war years that showed starvation in this country, India and Britain, while food surpluses were dumped into the sea. Invariably there is not enough of this shown for the audiences to be left with any kind of guilt. For the edification of American audiences, there is plenty of room given to the beauties of Britain’s point rationing, the level of health the English are sustaining, blitz or no, and a great pat on the back for us for our help.
“World of Plenty” is on the lecture side of movie-making. It is as diligent, clear and all-inclusive as a schoolteacher, and as stiff, prim, dry and long-winded. Like a very neat but complex outline, it tends toward big A, little a, and 1, 2, 3, 4, rather than people, happy or sad, starved or stuffed. None the less there is a good deal of quiet humor in the selection and direction of people who talk to you as well as in the dialogue of the late Eric Knight, especially in one bit where a question is popped abruptly at a housewife as she is walking to the store: “I say! You did give me a fright!” she says. The graphs and maps are accompanied by an African drum played by a Gene Krupa fan—how this combination was arrived at I don’t know, but it is certainly entertaining. The movie pounds home the four freedoms, when that conception is embarrassingly and noticeably absent from our own films.
July 12, 1943