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John Grierson turned up at the University of Chicago in 1924 as a research fellow. Fascinated by the role of the U.S. press in making Americans out of Europeans, he wandered through the country watching how the papers did it. The popular press, especially the Hearst press, he decided, was a great leveler, a great Americanizer.
John Grierson took this impression of the U.S. press back to England and put it to work. Documentary films, not newspapers, were his medium. By dramatizing the actual workings of a complicated world, these one-to-three-reel shorts would help make Englishmen better citizens by acquainting them with the tasks of England and the Empire.
His first film, Drifters, an account of Britain's fishing industry, was a triumphant success. By 1929 the British Government was sold on documentaries, and the General Post Office and other Government departments established film units. They furnished the money; Grierson the talent.
When World War II began, John Grierson was in Ottawa making documentaries for Canada. In England his trained colleagues were turning out some 50 documentaries yearly. When the Government awoke from the cold shower of Dunkirk, it set these Grierson-trained technicians to making war documentaries. Soon the Ministry of Information was supplying every British cinemansion with at least one picture a week.
Last week's documentary spectacle at the Museum of Modern Art was well worth the attention of the U.S. Govern ment and Hollywood. An instructive example of how to use the cinema to help a nation rearm, it was also an important lesson in how to show a people what it has to fight for.