'See the Other Half of the World': Stanley Forman, Educational and Television Films and Left Film Culture in Britain

Alan Burton, University of Leicester

Our basic aims have remained, to create a modest distribution and production centre which would have as its prime objective not financial gain, but the promotion of films – both features and documentary – that will enhance people’s lives, and help strengthen them in the struggles that face our planet in the 21st century and beyond.

(Stanley Forman, Educational and Television Films, 2000)

The post-World War II decades were a difficult period for the Left in the Western democracies. Socialist culture had to contend with the suspicion and hostility generated by the Cold War towards not only Soviet society and culture, but also Left politics in general. Throughout the 1950s in Britain, it also had to combat the widespread impression of the increasing irrelevance of socialism in a period marked by a new affluence and framed within a newly confident Conservative hegemony which lasted until 1963. First Plato and later Educational and Television Films (ETV) (from which the original films have been digitised here) established themselves in this unfriendly environment with the intention of using cinema in the broader struggles for social democracy and to help in the recognition and acceptance of new socialist regimes established since the end of the war. Plato/ETV under the stewardship of Stanley Forman faithfully served this ambition for the second half of the twentieth century (1951-2002), promoting film shows, supplying films from its library, and latterly acting as a specialist film archive providing footage for broadcasters.

 

Left Film Culture in Britain

Stanley Forman

Plato Films

Educational and Television Films

'Socialism on Film': The Resource

Bibliography

 

Left Film Culture in Britain

There emerged a widespread if disparate Left political film culture in Britain as cinema established itself in the twentieth century. The earliest identified moving picture show sponsored by a Left organisation was held at the Hollingworth Industrial Co-operative Society on 7 December 1897. This would have featured a travelling showman with his typical selection of short films and these would have been the attraction to draw the members who would also have been required to listen to some speeches about the Society and the wider Movement. The arrangement was common across the Left in the period up to the First World War and film shows would have been organised by various Labour, Socialist and Co-operative groups. Of these, the Co-op was the first to become engaged in producing moving pictures, arranging for the filming of its factories and cultural activities and screening them to inform members of their business and to attract new recruits.

Left political film culture in Britain was particularly active in the decade leading up to the Second World War. The Great Depression, the rise of fascism and the inspiration for some of Soviet Communism made for a highly-charged political atmosphere and a greater awareness regarding the political potential of cinema. Many saw the need to develop the cultural struggle as preparation for the political struggle. The period saw the establishment of several important film groups, more filming and many more screenings. The Federation of Workers’ Film Societies (FWFS) was established in 1929 to help local groups arrange film screenings and the FWFS was close to the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). The Masses Stage and Film Guild was associated with the Labour Party and similarly facilitated screenings, where possible of such Soviet classics as Battleship Potemkin (1925), which had been banned by the censors, an action interpreted as politically motivated. Some film production was commenced at the Atlas Film Company which was close to the FWFS, and three issues of Workers Topical News appeared as a socialist counter to the newsreels of the capitalist film firms. The Workers’ Film and Photo League and the Socialist Film Council also managed some film production, mainly on the sub-standard 16mm format which was cheaper and more amenable for screenings. Kino appeared in 1933 as a distributor and it also funded a mobile cinema van to take film shows out to where they were required. The Workers’ Film Association was established in 1938 as a joint venture of the Co-operative Movement, the Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress, although the Co-op was the main driving force in an ambitious programme of filmmaking, distribution and exhibition. The first film production of the WFA was Advance Democracy (1938), which combined staged scenes, historical reconstruction and documentary footage, and called for workers to resist fascism and to defend hard-won workers’ rights.

The outbreak of war in 1939 curtailed much of the film activity on the Left. Many of the film groups quickly ceased their activity as men join the forces and equipment and materials became scarce. Only the Workers’ Film Association carried on, although in a reduced capacity, importantly acquiring the rights to distribute some Soviet films on 16mm.

After the war, there was piecemeal activity with film on the Left. An important figure in Left culture in the period was Ivor Montagu and he sensed the need for a new cinema organisation to distribute suitable films and to support film shows. Montagu had formed the Progressive Film Institute (PFI) in the 1930s as a film organisation for the Left, and this had been particularly involved in films associated with the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), one of the great political causes of the day. He now encouraged a young communist Stanley Forman to form a new cinema outfit, initially to be based on the film collection of the PFI, but to gradually acquire films from the socialist world, establish a film library and distribute prints to communist and labour groups as well as the burgeoning film society movement.

 

Stanley Forman

Stanley Forman was born Israel Forminsky on 26 December 1921in Whitechapel, East London, the son of a tailor’s baster who eventually set-up his own successful business. Stanley’s parents had escaped from poverty and pogroms in Russian-controlled Poland and were seemingly illiterate. At age 13, Stanley rejected Judaism, although he always remained proud of being Jewish. Fired up by the Spanish Civil War and street battles with fascists in nearby Cable Street, he put his faith in social justice, joined the Mile End Communist League and thus exemplified the secular Yiddish radicalism of the period. His education came essentially from hours spent in the Marx Memorial Library and attending its lively lectures. He joined the Labour Party League of Youth when he was fifteen and then the Young Communist League, becoming its cultural secretary in 1937-38. In the late 1930s, he worked for the German Jewish Aid Committee in Bloomsbury and during the first year of World War Two as an organiser for the Communist Party in Leeds. His war was spent serving in the Essex Yeomanry, with which he stormed the beaches on D-Day and fought through Holland and onto Germany. He ended his wartime service as an interpreter in prisoner of war camps and as a warrant officer in the Field Security Service where he was in charge of de-Nazification for the port of Kiel, but was hastily demobbed by the authorities when his politics became apparent. He returned to Leeds, where he married Hilda Sybil Davies, an executive officer at the Ministry of Supply, whom he had met through the Young Communist League before the war.

 

[This is an extract of an essay. The full essay is accessible to subscribers and purchasing institutions]