'This Modern Age and the British Non-Fiction Film'
'The Post-War British Film Industry and The Way We Live

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Front Pages

This file contains the cover page, abstract, table of contents, table of illustrations and a list of abbrevations and acronyms used frequently throughout the text.

Introduction

This section introduces the thesis and provides an overview of its contents and arguments.

Chapter 1: British Cinema and the Ideology of Realism

This chapter discusses the various cultural and institutional factors which influenced the production and reception of non-fiction films during the period under discussion, principally censorship, the Documentary Movement, specialised exhibition and the emergence of an intellectual film culture during and after the war, through the activities of educationalists such as Roger Manvell and publications such as Penguin Film Review.

Chapter 2: The Newsreel

Chapter 2 deals with the post-war British newsreel. It argues that a system of distribution introduced in 1943 as a wartime austerity measure, known as the 'Supplementary Contract', had far reaching consequences for the issues which were covered in newsreels and the ways in which producers approached them. The Supplementary Contract sought to conserve supplies of film stock by forcing cinemas in a given area to share newsreel prints, and removed the right of cinemas to cancel their newsreel contract. Producers, therefore, did not have to exercise the same degree of caution over public opinion as had been the case in the 1930s. Due to the post-war economic crisis, Supplementary Contracts remained in force until September 1950. This chapter argues that newsreel coverage of the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945 set a prececent that, after the war, enabled newsreels to tackle controversial subjects with increasing regularity.

Chapter 3: The Magazine Film

This chapter discusses the magazine film, or cinemagazine, and is based primarily on a case study of This Modern Age, a series of 41 films released by The Rank Organisation between September 1946 and January 1951. Most histories of non-fiction film in Britain attribute its origins to the 'Documentary Movement', a group of filmmakers who promoted a public service role for the cinema, analogous to Reith's BBC. They largely rejected commercial involvement on the grounds of political interference and having to compromise to fit an 'entertainment' agenda. This Modern Age, therefore, has tended to be written off as a crude attempt to imitate its better known American counterpart, The March of Time. I argue that this comparison is crude and misleading, and that This Modern Age addressed major political and social issues in depth and in a way which prececed the emergence of a documentary tradition in independent television by over two decades.

Chapter 4: The Feature Documentary

Chapter 4 continues the discussion of the commercial film industry's non-fiction output, and is based on case studies of three feature length productions. The Way We Live (UK, 1946, dir. Jill Craigie) was a one-hour documentary which promoted the town planning movement and argued for the wholescale reconstruction of bomb-damaged cities. A controversy arose in the summer of 1946 when it was rumoured that Rank attempted to shelve the film before its release, allegedly because he disapproved of its left-wing message. Theirs Is the Glory (UK, 1946, dir. Brian Desmond Hurst) was a dramatised reconstruction of the Battle of Arnhem, stylistically very similar to the 'story documentary' genre developed by Documentary Movement filmmakers, and remarkable for its frank admission of serious errors and intelligence failures in the opertaion's planning. XIV Olympiad - The Glory of Sport (UK, 1948, dir. L. Castleton Knight) was a feature-length compilation of newsreel footage from the 1948 Olympic Games in London, produced entirely in Technicolor.

Chapter 5: Non-Fiction Film and the Government

Chapter 5 considers the effects of the changes following the dissolution of the wartime Ministry of Information and its replacement by an office without portfolio, the Central Office of Information, in 1946. The Documentary Movement continued to regard Central Government as its spiritual home, and hoped that its wartime prominence would be maintained and enhanced by the new Labour government deciding to make films a cornerstone of its 'information' strategy across a number of departments. The role of Paul Rotha and John Grierson is examined during this period, and political debates about the nature and extent of official film production in peacetime are examined through case studies of Children on Trial (UK, 1946, dir. Jack Lee) and Four Men in Prison (UK, 1949, dir. Max Anderson). In conclusion, the series of events which resulted in the dissolution of the Crown Film Unit in 1952 are considered.

Conclusion

This section brings together the debates and issues raised in the preceding text in order to emphasise the principal argument of this thesis, namely that the commercial film industry played a much wider and more significant role in the devlopment of non-fiction film in 1940s Britain than writers who emphasise and celebrate the role of the Documentary Movement ackowledge.

Appendix 1: This Modern Age Filmography

This appendix relates to chapter 2. It contains the credits, production and release data for the 41 issues of This Modern Age.

Appendix 2: The Bernstein Questionnaire, 1946-47

This appendix relates to chapters 1, 2 and 5. It contains a transcript of the results of a questionnaire circulated by the owner of a chain of cinemas, Sidney Bernstein, to his customers in the winter of 1946. This data gives a wide-ranging impression of filmgoing habits and customs during the period covered by this thesis.

Bibliography

This section contains full details of all written sources, published and unpublished, used in the research for this thesis.

Filmography

This section contains full details of all moving image sources, apart from those listed in Appendix 1, used in the research for this thesis.