Eye for Fact

Most movies ask the audience to use only one eye--the eye trained on the world of make-believe. Documentary movies often ignore that eye, sometimes too self-righteously, and concentrate on the other eye--the one trained on the actual world. At their worst, documentaries turn actuality into something insufferably boring and unreal. At their best, they give reality a new clarity and beauty.

During the war, mass U.S. audiences had their first real chance to see some of the finest and some of the worst documentaries. Now that the war is over, and most documentary makers are wondering what next, the Film Library of Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art is exhibiting the most imposing list of documentaries (over 100) ever assembled. The films range from early newsreels and the first documentary masterpieces (like Robert Flaherty's 24-year-old Nanook of the North} to Walt Disney's wartime educational films and samples of the Army and Navy's shrewd Screen Magazine.

Besides being shown at the museum until mid-July, some of the films will be distributed to 350-odd organizations throughout the U.S.: colleges, Parent-Teacher Associations, clubs, even prisons. The museum program does not include every documentary of first-rate interest. (Notable omissions: all newsreels since 1931; issues of MARCH OF TIME since 1940.) But cinemaddicts who still doubt that the documentary is growing up might do well to paste the following titles in their hats, and to see them--in parish house, college, jail, or Manhattan--if opportunity offers:

P: Basil Wright's extraordinarily beautiful Song of Ceylon, made for a British tea association. The film bears about the same relation to ordinary travelogues that Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn bears to a cheap pottery catalogue.

P: Major John Huston's The Battle of San Pietro, most humane, most moving, most nearly perfect of war pictures documentaries.

P: The Triumph of the Will, a Nazi film made in order to impress the German people and to scare everybody else--a frightening example of cinema's potential for propaganda.

P: Housing Problems, an English film as touching and delightful in its use of unrehearsed interviews as it is dully deadpan in its title.

P: Pare Lorentz' The Plow That Broke the Plains and The River, which broke ground for U.S. documentaries.

P: Willard Van Dyke's tragic study of technological unemployment, Valley Town.

P: The English Target for Tonight and Desert Victory, first film masterpieces of the war.

P: Colonel Anatole Litvak's furious, emotionally pulverizing The Battle of Russia.

P: The War Department's beautiful, melancholy, subtly composed Attack!, The Battle for New Britain.

P: Let There Be Light, Major Huston's newly finished film about the treatment and cure of psychoneurotic war casualties.

P: The Cummington Story, OWI Overseas' proudest production, about European refugees and New England villagers.

P: With the Marines at Tarawa, a combat film which is almost as brief, terrible and final as a jump off a skyscraper.

Now What? In the U.S., the documentary film has usually been treated like a poor relation. During the war, it was treated like a poor relation who might just possibly have oil in his backyard. And oil was struck--along with a lot of goo.

But civilian distribution of factual movies was fairly begrudging, and public reception was fairly apathetic. Today, there is no longer any patriotic motive for showing documentaries in theaters. The nontheatrical market--some 35,000 projectors in schools, parish houses, union halls, etc.--is still uncertain. Commercial producers hesitate to risk much in a risky medium. Documentary films run the danger of being controlled by sponsors with an ax to grind and little concern for what interests people. (Likeliest sponsors: the Government, private industry, unions, educational institutions.) Too few documentaries have straight theatrical vitality; and too few of those which do have it are exhibited widely enough to develop a reliable mass audience. Peace has left high & dry a greatly expanded, war-trained personnel. Its future--and the future of the documentary--is still anybody's guess.

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