Thoughts on the Film Festival

Elsewhere on the Borders, the Borderline Film Festival is still going on, but here in Hay all the films were clustered around last weekend.
It was a pity that the cinema in a lorry didn't make it to Hay. Apparently they broke down, but some films were put on at Baskerville Hall, and a minibus was put on to ferry people over there.
One person I spoke to enjoyed the Welsh films very much - there was Dan y Wenallt (a version of Under Milkwood) and Dark Horse, about a community that buys a race horse.
I was most interested in the vintage films - the sort of thing that it's hard to find a copy of. For instance, I'd never seen Night Mail all the way through, so it was fascinating to see the whole thing - and to ponder the fact that in those days the Royal Mail had its own film unit!
Because Night Mail is only 24 minutes long, it was paired with Housing Problems 1935, a 13 minute long film about slum clearance and how much better the new estates were going to be. One of the new estates was Quarry Hill in Leeds - which was knocked down in 1978 after it, too, had got run down and awful to live in. But in 1935, those flats really were a lot better than the old Victorian terraces that people had come from.
Later in the afternoon, I was back at the Parish Hall (which also housed the Fairtrade Cafe for the weekend) for a lecture with film clips by Ian Christie. He'd just flown in from Czechoslovakia, and had to leave Hay that evening because he was on grandparent duty the following morning! He gave a fascinating talk, on women directors of the 1940s and 50s, starting with a short film called They Also Serve, which was about how housewives in 1940 could help the war effort. You could tell it was early on in the war - she sent off her daughter to work with a packed lunch that included a banana! Ruby Grierson, who made that film, had also worked on Housing Problems, prompting the ordinary working people with questions while sitting right under the camera. She died during the war when the ship she was travelling on from Canada was torpedoed.
And to follow up on the housing problems of 1935, there was a short film called Homes for the People from 1945 - when the Luftwaffe had got rid of a lot of the old slums! It was an election film for the Labour party - very different from the election broadcasts of today! They had a vision of a better country for all, with decent homes for all. I'd quite like to be able to vote for that Labour party! Someone in the audience asked how election films were distributed - and the answer was that no-one really knows now. Some may have been shown in ordinary cinemas, or they might have been distributed to local party members who hired church halls to show them. It's been forgotten.
The Labour party were also responsible for the film about equal pay for women, from 1951, and made by Jill Craigie, who married Michael Foot. She met Michael Foot when he was the MP for Plymouth and she was making a documentary about the town called The Way We Live. The equal pay film got cheers from women in the audience - with only a very few changes, the same thing could be broadcast today. We really haven't progressed very far. One of the places they filmed was a factory in Pontypridd which I'm sure I've passed on the way to Cardiff. It was intended to provide work for ex-miners with lung problems, but most of the workforce was female - because they were cheaper to employ, and the ex-miners were still out of work.
There was another clip, with a very young Diana Dors, of a feature film about girls who went to the bad, and we were shown the trailer for another (in colour!) called The Passionate Stranger, which was about an Italian chauffeur having an affair with his employer - including a hilarious sequence where Ralph Richardson, as the husband, careered down a hill in a wheelchair that the brakes had been tampered with. I'm sure it was supposed to be terribly dramatic at the time.
And at the end, there was a sequence from an almost silent film called Together, about two deaf-mute men who lived in the East End of London, which was beautifully shot. The maker of that film was Lorenza Mazzetti, who studied art at the Slade, and the men were an artist and a sculptor, Michael Andrews and Edwardo Paolozzi.
Sadly, though, many of these women film makers were unable to continue as directors, basically because of the sexism of the industry, and several of them took jobs in continuity or other areas of film when they were unable to make films of their own.