ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors have surveyed the didactic film in its two manifestations, the educational film and the documentary. It was accepted as a matter of common sense too obvious for discussion that there was a difference in kind between the film of instruction, which was to be objective and neutral and without conscious intention to impose a point of view, and propaganda. “The camera cannot lie,” they used to say. But as was shown by Pudovkin’s famous example of intercutting shots of difTerent things into the same shot of a woman’s face, whereupon she seemed to be expressing different emotions, the film can lie even if the camera cannot. Such delicate points would not arise with a public better educated in the nature of what they are watching, and with a better understanding of the relation between reality and film.
