Intermedial Relationships of Radio Features with Denis Mitchell’s and Philip Donnellan’s Early Television Documentaries

Writing of the closure in early 1965 of the Radio Features Department, Asa Briggs identifies one of the reasons for the controversial decision as ‘the incursion of television, which was developing its own features.’ ‘[Laurence] Gilliam and his closest colleagues believed in the unique merits of “pure radio”. The screen seemed a barrier’ (The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Vol. 5, p. 348). Rather than the screen being ‘a barrier’ for them, a number of the creators of the emerging television documentary were from the late 1950s onwards able to transfer and transform distinctive techniques of ‘pure radio’ into highly effective visual forms. Two key figures were the producers of ‘poetic’ documentaries Denis Mitchell and Philip Donnellan, who employed layered voices, imaginative deployments of music and effects, and allusive juxtapositions of sound and image, to develop an alternative (although always marginal) tradition to the supposedly objective approaches of current affairs and, later, verité filmmakers. And a dozen years after the dismemberment of the Features Department, Donnellan paid tribute to it in his glorious but little-seen film Pure Radio (BBC1, 3 November 1977). Taking important early films by Mitchell and Donnellan as case studies, this paper explores the impact of radio features on television documentaries in the 1950s and early 1960s, and assesses the extent to which the screen in its intermedial relationships with ‘pure radio’ was a barrier or, in the work of certain creators, an augmentation

The technique of film editing

411 p.; 21 cm

Free Cinema, observación en 16 milímetros: coloquio Lassally-Mazzetti-Reisz-Robinson

En febrero de 1956, más de dos años antes de la Nouvelle Vague francesa y treinta y nueve años antes del Dogma 95, un grupo de cineastas promovían su manifiesto en el National Film Theatre de Londres. Llamaron a su programa «Free Cinema» y llevaron sus cámaras a la calle, para capturar una mirada nueva, naturalista e improvisada sobre Inglaterra. Cuarenta y cinco años más tarde, los cineastas Karel Reisz y Lorenza Mazzetti, el crítico David Robinson y el director de fotografía Walter Lassally volvieron al National Film Theatre para asistir a una proyección de la sesión inaugural del Free Cinema y participar en un coloquio. La discusión, de la que Minerva recoge ahora amplios fragmentos, fue moderada por Kevin MacDonald