The story of the North Sea herring fisheries, filmed at Lerwick, in the Shetlands, Lowestoft and Yarmouth and in the North Sea.
~~~

— Henry K Miller, From Battleship Potemkin to Drifters, BFI booklet wrote:

The London Film Society’s screening of Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) and John Grierson’s Drifters (1929) on Sunday 10 November 1929, at the Tivoli cinema in the Strand, is the most celebrated double-bill in British film history. Potemkin, making its British debut more than three years after it shook the film world, had a formidable reputation to live up to. Drifters, on the other hand, was the first film of a director whose only prior filmmaking experience was the preparation of the American release print of Potemkin.

Eisenstein’s film was subject to a ban from which the Film Society, as a private club composed — proverbially at least — of intellectuals, socialites, and bohemians, was exempt. Though 16mm copies circulated from 1934, it would not be seen again in a London cinema until 1936, and the national ban was lifted only in 1954. Drifters, meanwhile, announced the birth of a movement that dominated British film culture for decades — in part by assuming the mantle of the Soviet directors who had inspired it, above all their theory of montage.

The belief of Grierson’s proteges that ‘England’, as Paul Rotha put it, ‘is the most fertile country imaginable for pure filmic material’ was fortified by the presence in the country at the end of the 1920s of Eisenstein himself, and his ‘astonishment at the almost complete neglect by British film directors of the wonderful material that lay untouched’. Basil Wright, similarly, paid tribute ‘to that first clear formulation of film theory put forward by Eisenstein during those lectures in an upper room in Great Newport Street in the winter of 1929’.

1.

Publicity advertisement for Drifters, Stoll Herald, 1929

— Jamie Sexton, for the BFI wrote:

John Grierson was extremely interested in modernist art, which he thought expressed the energies of a new age. He was attracted to ‘city symphony’ films – such as Manhatta (USA, d. Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler, 1921) and Berlin: Symphony of a City (Germany, d. Walther Ruttman, 1926) – because of the way they portrayed the modern city in a poetic manner. He was most interested in Soviet films, however, particularly those of Sergei Eisenstein.

Drifters premiered at the Film Society on November 10, 1929, on the same bill as The Battleship Potemkin (USSR, d. Sergei Eisenstein, 1925), which was receiving its British premiere. Grierson had previously helped to title Eisenstein’s film for an American showing and its influence is clearly revealed in Drifters. Like Potemkin, Drifters employs montage in an expressive manner, creating dramatic tension in the absence of any psychological characterisation. Both films also use ‘types’ (non-professional actors) instead of actors in order to create a more ‘authentic’ reality, and both films make use of extensive location shooting. Grierson, nevertheless, always stressed that he was keen to make a film with distinctively ‘British’ characteristics, which he saw as moderation and a sense of human importance. Drifters is, therefore, slower paced than Potemkin, and focuses on more mundane, less inherently dramatic events.

The focus on a modern, industrialised Britain is also a feature of Drifters and, in the absence of a strong cause-and-effect narrative, one of the central themes is the tension between tradition and modernity. Thus, at the beginning of the film, titles read: ‘The Herring fishing industry has changed. Its story was once an idyll of brown sails and village harbours – its story now is an epic of steel and steam. Fishermen still have their homes in the old time village – But they go down for each season to the labour of a modern industry’. This link is also implied at the end of the film, as the catch is delivered to a modern, international market.

Grierson clearly sides with modernity, hence his constant focus on the machine parts of the trawler’s engine. However, the focus on natural elements (sea, birds, fish), and the rather perfunctory attention given to the marketing of the fish at the end of the film, imply that his feelings about modernity are ambivalent. While the film celebrates industrialism as an evolutionary stage in history, it also respects the links between man and nature.

Patrick Russell, Senior Curator (Non-Fiction), BPI National Archive, BFI booklet wrote:

Review of Drifters in The Film Weekly (November 1929)

Sir Stephen Tallents, head of the Empire Marketing Board, was an imaginative civil servant dedicated, in his phrase, to ‘the projection of England’. The first lasting product of this project is Drifters, a very particular projection of Britain. Its unpromising premise, a herring drifter followed down the East Coast from departure in Scotland to market in East Anglia, yielded a potent intervention into national culture.

The EMB sought to promote Empire trade and ‘bring the Empire alive’. The choice of the modern herring fishing industry as its second film’s theme was pragmatic politics. Director John Grierson felt an affinity for the subject, but also undertook extensive research prior to shooting. Not to be forgotten is the contribution of cinematographer Basil Emmott, with the experience his director entirely lacked. But Drifters’ impact was largely due to Grierson’s opportunism. He seized the chance to put theories into action then promoted the result to the right people. The month before Drifters’ West End premiere, its first audience was the cineaste community attending the London Film Society meeting at which Battleship Potemkin also had its first British screening. Grierson undoubtedly made a smart move by showing Drifters first, giving its viewers the subliminal impression (even if factual grasp of the chronology proved otherwise) that, rather than he cribbing Eisenstein, Eisenstein had cribbed him.

Critical applause was widespread, spanning the journalistic spectrum. The left-liberal Manchester Guardian and conservative Daily Mail were both positive. For the Sunday Worker, Drifters was ‘a work of art […] that has some social purpose’. For the Daily Telegraph it was ’emphatically a very worthy British film’. Drifters’ equivocation set a pattern for mainstream documentary. It projected national identity, but not through flag and crown. It celebrated the worker, but as a symbol more than as a person in his own right. It balanced its enthusiasm for progress with a hint of nostalgia for fading pasts. It was open to fortuitously recorded events: the appearance of a whale in the film was a matter of luck. But it incorporated them into a construction assembled to represent the intended reality. Below-deck scenes were necessarily recreated onshore. More to the point is Grierson’s recollection of waiting for weeks to get ‘a real storm, an intimate storm, and if possible a rather noble storm’.

Crashing waves had been in the cinematic toolbox since 1895. Commercial fishing as source material was almost as ancient. Industrial processes had been documented on film since Edward VII was on the throne. Journeys between places had been supplying a narrative framework for decades. But Grierson fused these into something more complex and exciting. The waves took on metaphorical as well as visual force, the processes a national as well as technical significance. Montage made connections — though it feels too gentle by comparison with Potemkin’s much more authentically jolting cuts, between much more striking individual shots. It’s creaky now. The lack of interest in the fishermen’s psychology is beside Grierson’s point but leaves the film with a gaping absence, which would matter less in a short than in a feature. And the underwater fish sequences are interminable! Drifters was a public relations tool which ultimately did its best PR on its own behalf. Grierson later commented, tongue slightly in cheek, that it was ‘more important to make a myth than a film. And Drifters was one such. It even got to the point that people wrote about it without ever having seen it, and that always tickled my propagandist fancy’. It would be easy to advance revisionism by claiming that today’s audiences inevitably emerge from screenings scratching their heads wondering what the fuss is about. But that would be another oversimplification. Viewers still spot Drifters’ vigour and ambition as quickly as its defects. Drifters the film doesn’t stand up too badly for its age. Drifters the myth is still working magic on many who haven’t seen it, and even on those who have.

2.

Jason Singh, Beatboxer, vocal sculptor and sound artist wrote:

When I first saw Drifters I was overwhelmed by Grierson’s ability to capture different moods, attention to detail, the beautiful colour techniques and the incredible sensitivity towards committing the lives of those above and below water to film. It was a real challenge to create a sound and music score to a silent film that already felt complete in every way. After much thought (and fear) I decided to watch and absorb the narrative and respond creatively when it felt right to do so. What transpired was the feeling to mimic and draw out the natural and abstract melodies and rhythms of the everyday routine and also create sounds that would enhance the emotion, fear and struggle for survival underwater. In all cases I was mindful not to take away from the magnificence of the original silent film, but to complement it using innovation and sensitivity.

I hope that I have done justice to a film that was not only relevant to the era in which it was made, but which also speaks directly of the current economic and social issues facing fishing communities around the world and, indirectly, of the irreversible impact mass fishing has upon nature and the Earth.

— Jason Singh (All the sounds and textures in the score have been created vocally by Singh and manipulated using effects, hardware samplers and software.)

3.

4.

This is from the BFI release, The Soviet Influence: Battleship Potemkin + Drifters. The film is presented tinted and toned, as originally intended, with a new score by Jason Singh.

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https://nitro.download/view/2E057225656C0C3/Drifters_-_John_Grierson_(1929).mkv

Language(s):None
Subtitles:None

The post John Grierson – Drifters (1929) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Granton Trawler follows the small fishing vessel, Isabella Greig, as it carries out its dragnet fishing along the Viking Bank off the Norwegian coast of the North Sea. Grierson used the film to teach budding directors how to analyze movement photographically and how to make use of sound for contrapuntal editing. The soundtrack is made up of crude rhythmic noises that represent the thumping of the ships engine and atmospheric sounds congenial to being present on board. There is no commentary. The sounds were all post-recorded, simulated in the studio. (One of the fisherman’s voices is Grierson’s). Although not credited, Alberto Cavalcanti is known to have created the soundtrack as one of his first creative duties after arriving at the Unit.

It was shot during the Empire Marketing Board period and was finished after the unit had been transferred to the GPO. Surprising to Grierson, who had spent the First World War patrolling the seas on mine-sweepers, the weather between the Shetlands and the Norwegian coast was more than usually rough and Grierson, for the first and perhaps the only time in his life was, if not seasick, at any rate sick of the sea. He was using a tripod, as he insisted all Empire Marketing Board camera men should, and, with the tripod falling over in the stormy weather, the camera was waving all over the place.

When he returned to London and looked at the material he was gloomy. “See what you can do with it”, he said to Edgar Anstey. Anstey had been somewhat despondent himself, but he began to make some interesting discoveries. When the camera had fallen over it had been left running and there were remarkable shots of the sky giving place to the deck of the boat and the horizon rising and disappearing overhead. He found that with this material he could create a storm in film terms irrespective of what the reality had been.

It was a classic illustration of two of Grierson’s theories: you make the film from the material and not the words in which you first expressed the idea; and you let the film grow in the way it wants to go. Grierson, who had not forgotten the truth of his own teaching, was delighted. Granton Trawler has toured the world in festivals and retrospectives ever since and it remained a firm favourite of Grierson’s all his life.

— Steve Foxon, for the BFI

‘The silent cinema’, Alberto Cavalcanti told representatives of the international avant garde at La Sarraz, Switzerland, in September 1929, ‘is dead. Its decline provoked a crisis so violent that we have neither composure, nor recoil”. Every director had to confront the fact. By the time Drifters was released as a silent film a few months later, John Grierson had made his peace and embraced sound. None of the music which had been used to accompany it, he wrote, ‘gave me the film I cut. […] If sound is part of the life of a film — and it was from the beginning — let it be organised like the rest, and synchronised, so that no one-horse orchestra can murder it’. Nor were his ambitions limited to mere music:

The wide-open world of sound is there for the taking, to be built to the purposes of art, not by strings and brasses and winds (though heaven knows they do it well), but in the simple registry of all the whispering nuances of life itself. […] There must be a poetry of sound which none of us knows, a country whose satisfactions have been till now the monopoly of the blind. Meaning in footsteps, voices in trees, and words of the day and night everywhere.

The rise of the talkie hastened the avant garde’s fall, and Cavalcanti turned his hand to what he called ‘idiotic vaudevilles’ for Paramount-Joinville, becoming skilled in the new technology. At the Empire Marketing Board, meanwhile, though the success of Drifters had enabled Grierson to recruit a band of young intellectuals to his film unit, his Civil Service masters refused to pay for sound equipment, confining the unit’s work to the vault. Eventually Grierson allowed a batch of films, known as the Imperial Six, to be sold to a commercial distributor and given soundtracks ‘out of the spirit of our filmmaking’. By the time of their release in late 1933 the EMB had been dissolved.

In the meantime Grierson had made Granton Trawler, an impressionistic recapitulation of his debut. He shot it himself during a weekend aboard the titular boat between the Shetlands and Norway and gave the footage to Edgar Anstey who edited it in a ‘feverish all-night session’. It was first shown at Edinburgh’s Ritz Cinema in September 1933, just before the EMB’s closure, ‘for the benefit of the crew and friends of the Isabella Greig, the trawler filmed, and the fishing community generally of Granton and Newhaven’. Soon afterwards, Grierson followed his boss Sir Stephen Tallents over to the General Post Office and there, at a small studio in Blackheath, his unit was finally wired for sound.

At about this time, Cavalcanti came to London, ‘fed up with the talk, talk, talk, talk’, and was introduced to Grierson by his former cinematographer Jimmy Rogers (a participant in Hans Richter’s Film Society workshop back in 1929). Granton Trawler was among the first films he organised sound for, and it was released in the first batch of GPO Film Unit productions in the autumn of 1934. John Betjeman, then film critic of the Evening Standard, calling the series ‘epoch-making’, wrote of Granton Trawler that ‘instead of the usual maddening commentary I was allowed to hear the real noises of life aboard a fishing smack’. Although Grierson was at the time under intense pressure from the Treasury to confine his work to ‘the legitimate requirements of Post Office publicity’, Granton Trawler clearly exceeds them.

— Henry K Miller, BFI booklet

granton.trawler.1934.1080p.bluray.x264-bipolar.mkv

General
Container:	Matroska
Runtime:	10mn 38s
Size:	890 MiB
DXVA:	Compatible
Minimum settings:	Met
Video
Codec:	x264
Resolution:	1440x1080
Aspect ratio:	4:3
Frame rate:	23.976 fps
Bit rate:	10.8 Mb/s
Audio
English 2.0ch FLAC @ 857 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/5C016B7EC56AB6D/granton.trawler.1934.1080p.bluray.x264-bipolar.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post John Grierson & Edgar Anstey – Granton Trawler (1934) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

SYNOPSIS
Made in 1936 NIGHTMAIL has become an icon of the British documentary movement. The budget was only £2,000 and the film was made as a promotional film for the Post Office services. The GPO film unit deserves a posthumous Oscar.

The quality of directing, lighting and camera work in this documentary beats that of many of today’s films and brings an almost Hitchcockian atmosphere and tension to the screen.
This is the story of the Travelling Post office from Euston station in London to Glasgow in Scotland, in the days when the railways were efficient, frequent and run by proud workers who wore waistcoats, ties and hats and spoke politely to one another like the team that they were. It is surprising how old the men all seem now, in these days of youth culture, gentle character-full faces bearing no guile, tired and lined but proud and honest. The journey begins with the great spoutings of steam and turning of oiled wheels and the sound of banging doors, cries and whistles that emanate from all mainline stations and follows the trains from station to station throughout the night as they pick up mail along the way. A weird and wonderful Heath-Robinson device had been invented whereby bundles of post could be hurled onto a moving train as it passed through the station, propelled from a rope net on a pulley with such precise timing that it would land with a forceful thud onto the moving train. Long before emails and mobile phones had been dreamt of the only means of co-ordinating the system and ensuring safe delivery was the telephone, and this was used to perfect effect as the arrival of the Night Mail train would be phoned through from one station to the next down the line, accurate to the last minute, this being essential for the bundle to be aimed and “fired” at the right moment by those on the look-out. Rushing through sleeping towns and landscapes, main stations and rural ones, the efficiency of the Travelling Post Office and the men who worked on it throughout the night to get the post to its destination is awe inspiring. There is nothing mundane about it – it almost has a spiritual quality about it not dissimilar to the night-life photographs of Brassai.

The ultimate section of the film is positively inspired, when the score by Benjamin Britten is combined with the words of W. H. Auden in time to the sounds and rhythms of the train, making one want nothing more than to be on that train, to be part of the workforce, to be part of the team that works for the Night Mail that delivers the post to letterboxes all across England. It evokes the England of John Betjeman and of Alan Bennet, of strong tea and washing on lines, of lonely sheep and flint walls, of industrial chimneys and cloth caps, of invention and hard-work, of grand-fathers and family reunions, of childhood and of old age, when the work is done and stories are told of how it was.

https://nitro.download/view/819C9804181A246/Night_Mail.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:N/A – Silent

The post Harry Watt & Basil Wright – Night Mail (1936) first appeared on Cinema of the World.