German Story
Husband and wife, Andrew and Annelie Thorndyke were the directors of this quite marvellous compilation film. This is a film that Jay Lido, who’s a film historian that I respected very greatly, wrote a compilation film book about called Films beget Films. Its a very interesting and intriguing compilation of historical German archival footage, starting at the turn of the century and finishing at the victory over fascism at the end of the second world war. Its remarkable material, obviously they had the entire East German and Hitler archives to plunder to get the cream out of the archive, and I must confess they did make a very good job of it. Its a very powerful film.They got marvellous music by a leading German composer, Paul Dessau with great editing that makes it an excellent piece of work. After a lot of trouble we managed to get a censor certificate because, a lot of the political films we had great difficulty in or failed to get certificates for them. Especially Joris Ivens’ ‘Songs of the Rivers.’

Songs of the Rivers
They are showing this towards the end of May and this is another beautiful compilation and which was sponsored by the World Federation of Trade Unions. They were scheduled to have a conference in Vienna and were fed up to the teeth of the usual, boring films of people making speeches, so they asked him to make it because he is a very imaginative director. The East Germans said that they’d be willing to sponsor and support it. Joris directed it in 1954, he started it in Vienna by inviting a group of progressive filmmakers from all around the world, from Russia, China, all over Eastern Europe and he based it on the rivers of the world. He managed to get Picasso to do the poster, Paul Robeson to sing the songs, Shostakovich to write the music for the songs and he got Berthold Brecht to write the lyrics. Its an incredible galaxy of the cream of progressive creativity. The final programme I want to talk about is called Condemnation and celebration.

Condemnation and Celebration
This film is really my tribute to many of the people hove helped me. For Ivor Montague, who was a friend of Chaplain, Eisenstein and Hitchcock, its "Peace and Plenty’ which is the film he made in January 1939 for the General Election in Britain. It never took place of course because of the war but the film remained. Its a very good electoral film and very interestingly made with puppets of Chamberlain and the rest made by Charles Laughton’s wife Elsa Lanchester, really good stuff. It cost £1000 to make which, in those days was real money.Then there is another film by another friend of mine called Anthony Simmons about the Japanese fishermen who were caught in the 1950’s American nuclear tests in the Bikini Atoll and what happened to them. That’s ‘Japanese Fisherman’, Very moving.Then another film called ‘Reportage from Vietnam.’ Its a very straightforward piece of reportage and we end up with a beautiful tribute made by another dear friend of mine called Santiago Alvarez of Cuba who died recently, alas. He made this film really about the 79th years of Ho Chi Minh’s life. Its very beautiful and its really made in a very imaginative manner and filled with a lot of beauty and fantasy, its a lovely tribute to dear old Uncle Ho Chi Minh.So that’s the series.

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