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Upstream is an unusual Empire Marketing Board short. The first half of Arthur
Elton's film faithfully follows the efforts of two groups of Scottish salmon
fisherman ("industrious simple folk with the strength of giants") as they
collect the day's catch.
Most EMB films preached progress, but the primitive methods of the fishermen
in Upstream - a loan wader walks out to sea along precarious nets and then
transports his fish by donkey - are heavily romanticised. The EMB team
generally considered narrator Andrew Buchanan a suspiciously lightweight figure,
but here his whimsy is given embarrassingly free reign ("'Twas twilight, and the
sunless day went down over the waste of waters").
As a result, Upstream is an oddly unbalanced short. The second half of the
film is a fairly brisk summation of a salmon's life cycle in the EMB's more
familiar didactic mode. Indeed, so different is the second half to the first
that it is no surprise that the latter sections were separately released as
Salmon Leap.
John Grierson was a British public sector mirror image of the Hollywood
moguls; his passions could undo his business sense. He famously recruited Harry
Watt because he was an old ship hand, and paid his dues to his First World War
minesweeping colleagues with Drifters (1929). The erratic Upstream appears a similarly
surprising indulgence.
Scott Anthony
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1. The return to shore (1:52)
