| Dylan Thomas Arts Documentary in Second World War |
Television Arts Feature |
| 1942 Documentary on CEMA , Talking Pictures TV , October 16, 2020 |
Talking Pictures TV interleaves its film programming with historic documentaries. A slot in the small hours of the morning this week was headed “IWM: CEMA (1942).” The 17-minute documentary is in the possession of the Imperial War Museum and its subject is the Committee for the Encouragement of the Arts and Music. In the first period of the Second World War the seed was sown. The state made itself a participant in cultural life. The production title declares: “The National Films Council of the Department of Information presents CEMA.” Beneath the title: “Foreword by the Rt Hon. R A Butler MP President of the Board of Education.”The film is credited to Charles de Lautour, Alan Orbiston, Peter Scott, Dylan Thomas, Desmond Dickinson. Musical direction is by Muir Mathieson. The producer is Strand Films. Dylan Thomas' work on 17 Strand films in the 1940s appears in “A Poet at War”, below 13th October 2014. The style of the film is certainly historic. A poster is unfurled and then Butler speaks. He is not comfortable before the eye of a camera. Leaders then did not speak to a lens. Accents from the 1940s jar to the modern ear. But Butler's words are to the point. The Council, formed in the first winter of the war, is there “to bring pleasure and inspiration to those millions who were, as it were, blacked out in the general black-out all over Britain at that time. This Council took music and the arts, and still takes them, to factories, mining towns, sea-ports, which may have suffered in the war or may be cut off from their normal sorts of entertainment.” Tchaikovsky chords sound. The opening of the first piano concerto is the most rousing in the canon. The music plays over life in a canteen. A wartime boy in standard grey shorts and buttoned-up jacket plays a rill on a whistle. The scenes move to an artist at work, modernist canvases; an actor in front of her mirror applies make-up. The aim, says the Minister, is “to send out companies of our best actors in first-rate plays, actors and plays that the country has had far too little opportunity to see up to now.” Already in 1942 new town planning is in the air. The film moves to the central images of England, the ones that sustain: trees in blossom, “Greensleeves”, a parish church hosting a concert. A performance in rehearsal features the Old Vic doing Falstaff. It plays later before a packed hall which rocks with amusement at the merry wives. A dramatised scene takes place in an art gallery with flavoursome dialogue. In front of a surrealist canvas: “What is this,a chamber of horrors” “I like paintings of everyday life.” “S'all right but I like battle scenes.” “I like that but I don't know why.” “What's the point of all this here art?”, asks an Everyman (illustrated). “Pretty pictures don't win anything.” The expert responds. “We all know what we are fighting against. But don't you think we sometimes forget what we are fighting for.” Working man: “Not pretty pictures.” Expert: “But they're part of it. We've got to fight. Because if we didn't we wouldn't be free. Free to work, to play, to listen, to look at what we want.” The final scenes play out in factories, the civilian nation at work, welding, drilling, at a lathe, hammering. A chain hoist moves shells, a tank is lowered onto a truck. The message is clear, art and work, artists and workers are a unity. It closes with a written board as to the purpose of CEMA. Butler has spoken the words: “...bringing the best to as many of our people to cheer them on to better times.” This is a feature that enlightens an era and the spirit which that era released. Half of the film can be seen online at the Museum archive. https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/1060008351 |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
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