A Master on Movies
Dworkin, Martin S.
A Master on Movies ROTHA ON THE FlLM, A SELECTION OF WRITINGS ABOUT THE CINEMA, by Paul Rotha. Essential Books, Inc. 338 pp. $7.50. Reviewed by Martin S. Dworkin From the very start, Paul...
...His closing "Postscript," written late in 1957, berates the British film industry for neglecting the vital, enveloping problems of modern Britain—like Anglo-American relations, old age, capital punishment, automation, and juvenile delinquency—while perennially ". . . turning back to the heroics of the last war, and to more suburban middle-class comedies, more dreary musicals (our most unsuccessful genre) and the ubiquitous crime-thriller...
...In his films, like Contact, The Face of Britain, Shipyard, Children of the City, World of Plenty, and The World Is Rich, there may be seen the integration of viewpoint, presentation, and political direction that characterized documentary during its most influential years...
...the democrat appears to want the commissar's resources and authority to make films for democracy...
...and the particular politics of government support of non-theatrical, informational film production...
...In fact, documentary is the political art of this century, seeing the present world in terms of a future democratic socialism —and itself providing the means whereby the world may be persuaded to bring the future about...
...In all the refreshingly spirited thrusts and ripostes on behalf of the documentary charisma, there remain unsolved dilemmas about the financing, control, and artistic autonomy of documentary film production...
...Rotha yearns for a fully nationalized film industry...
...The documentary movement in Britain, led and inspirited by John Grierson, was by its nature involved in politics: the overall politics of national planning that brought in the Labor government and the "new" Conservatism...
...The articles on documentary in Rotha on Film review the running battles with the "Stuffed Shirts" of the 1930s, who preferred Britain to be presented as a scepter'd isle of quaint commoners and quainter aristocrats...
...The essays on subjects of film history are interesting, less explosive than the rest, generally reflecting the occasional purposes they were meant to serve—appearing almost as asides on the part of the author of that massive, openly opinionated compendium of movie history, The Film Till Now...
...Rotha's passion for film, as film maker and film critic, is essentially polemical...
...Reviewed by Martin S. Dworkin From the very start, Paul Rotha writes that, "To excavate and republish old writings about the cinema without refurbishing is no doubt asking for trouble...
...The earliest essay included in the book, on "The Technique of the Art-Director," first published in 1928, ". . . caused the author's instant dismissal from the British studio in which he was then working as an assistant art-director...
...Rotha was Grierson's leading follower—soon a leader in his own right, as film maker and as theoretician and critic...
...And just as many of the pieces gathered here were first fired as separate volleys in running battles over the intentions and impact of the movies, so the collection itself is meant to lay down a barrage against contemporary attacks upon his older, and still argued ideas...
...But the "trouble" he has in mind is not the problem of preserving topical judgments of ephemeral experiences...
...More to the point of Rotha's whole approach to film and to writing about it, he speaks of the opportunities such a collection affords to the "young tyros" to be so much wiser, now that it is so much later...
...At the same time, Rotha berates the new sophisticates, who affect disdain for the enthusiasm and social consciousness of the old documentary movement...
...In his definitive study, Documentary Film, Rotha explicated a philosophy of documentary as the highest propaganda, as a political art...
...Those pieces treating documentary films are characteristically embattled on behalf of an approach and technique that became one of the most influential devices for persuasion of the century...
...There are prices to be paid, and not only on the screen...
...The newer pieces, "postscripts," and other contemporary remarks blast at the new Stuffed Shirts who want new films about Ye Olde Englande, instead of about "democracy in its working-clothes and with its sleeves rolled up," in Grierson's phrase...
...The selections in between exemplify Rotha's many choices of terrain on which to skirmish...
Vol. 22 • August 1958 • No. 8
