Drifters.
(Pescadores a la deriva)
(GB, 1929) [B/N, 49 m.]
IMDb
Ficha técnica.
Dirección, Guión y Montaje: John Grierson.
Fotografía: Basil Emmott.
Productora: Empire Marketing Board / New Era Films.
Enlace:One of the best gem from 1926-1946 british documentary film movement. Great cinematography ever.
Producer/director and film theorist John Grierson is the founding father of the British documentary movement; in fact, it was he who first used the word "documentary"—derived from the French word documentaire used by the French to denote travelogues—to describe Robert Flaherty's 1925 film Moana in a film review for the New York Sun. After obtaining his degree in philosophy from Glasgow University, and serving on a British minesweeper during World War I, he worked as a lecturer at Durham University. In 1924, he received a Rockefeller Research Fellowship to study the effects of media on public opinion in the U.S. He returned home in 1927 intrigued with the idea of using film as an educational medium. In 1928, with government sponsorship, he founded the Empire Marketing Board (EMB) where he made his first film, Drifters (1929). The film's popularity encouraged him to gather together an elite cadre of talented filmmakers who made 100 documentaries before the EMB dissolved in 1933. The unit then moved to the General Post Office (GPO) where with higher budgets and better conditions they produced such fine works as Song of Ceylon. He directed one more film, The Fishing Banks of Sky, in 1934. In 1937, he left GPO to found the Film Centre, an advisory and research organization for documentary filmmakers. Two years later he founded the prestigious National Film Board of Canada where he worked until 1945. He then came to the States and formed The World Today, a company designed to make films to promote international understanding. In 1947 he became director of Mass Media at UNESCO for 10 years, after which he became a host for the British television show This Wonderful World. — Sandra Brennan
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. — Jamie Sexton
John.Grierson.-.Drifters.(1929).-.British.Documentary.Film.Movement.-.vhsrip.auess.avi 
Subtítulos (descarga directa): castellano.
Traducción al castellano de Oski.
Editado por marlowe62, 06/12/2008.
