The Empire Marketing Board (EMB) was a bizarrely innovative anomaly of
interwar Britain. Directed by Sir Stephen Tallents, its brief existence
encompassed everything from documentary cinema to yoga demonstrations.
Established to bring 'the Empire alive', the EMB sought to tie new commercial,
scientific and cultural bonds between the UK and its increasingly
independent-minded colonies.
However, the EMB first came to wider public notice through its controversial
use of modernist posters. These utilised leading industrial artists such as
Edward McKnight Kauffer and Frank Newbould (both of whom had been 'discovered'
at the Empire Expo at Wembley in 1924), as well as established fine artists such
as the Nash brothers.
More significantly, the intervention of Rudyard Kipling, and the appointment
of the ambitious Chicago social sciences scholar, John Grierson, led the EMB to
create a film production unit in 1928. German health films such as Influenza,
and the popular British wildlife series, Secrets of Nature (1922-33), influenced the EMB's
socially-useful output.
As with the Soviet filmmakers that Grierson admired (bemused civil servants
were treated to afternoon screenings of pioneering work by Eisenstein and
Pudovkin), poor equipment and material hardship shaped the EMBs abrupt
filmmaking style. The scarcity of resources meant that early EMB shorts were
simply re-edits of existing footage that had been donated by the Canadian
government, while dull commissions would be brightened by gentle
experimentation. Traces of Dovzhenko sneaked into Arthur Elton's first film,
Shadow on the Mountain (1931), an otherwise dry report on an attempt to breed a
grazing grass persistent enough to brave the Black Mountains.
However, the depression transformed the EMB into a harder-edged governmental
advertising agency. In order to widen the appeal of 'home goods', the celebrity
aviator Amy Johnson was paid to swoop over London as part of a massive
multi-media campaign to encourage people to 'Buy British' and spend the country
out of the slump. Even Grierson's Drifters (1929) - a film now popularly
credited with inventing the documentary tradition and determining the 'realist'
mode of representation that would dominate British cinema - has its roots in the
British Trawlers Federation 'Eat More Fish!' campaign. But the EMB's efforts
were in vain. By 1933, tariffs were considered the only solution to the UK's economic ills and the EMB was disbanded.
Ironically, after Tallents' innovative-but-marginal organisation was scrapped
its influence grew substantially. By shooting a group of exceptional modernist
architects, artists, filmmakers and writers into the orbit of far-sighted
patrons such as Jack Beddington at Shell and Sir Francis Goodenough of the Gas, Light and Coke Company, the EMB laid the basis of a new cultural infrastructure. Institutions such as the GPO, London Transport, Imperial Airways, the BBC and the second Ministry of Information increasingly came to rely on former EMB
staff, collaborators and promotional ideas.
The bulk of the EMB's film output is now ignored, with only atypical
feature-length documentaries like Drifters, Robert Flaherty's Industrial
Britain (1931) and Basil Wright's Song of Ceylon (1934; completed at the GPO) retaining significant critical interest. However, the film unit functioned best as an experimental film school. It offered a sympathetic home to wayward talents like Flaherty and provided filmmakers like Wright, Paul Rotha and Harry Watt with a unique apprenticeship. The creative hothouse of the EMB film unit also spawned controversial film histories, book-length investigations into
film-financing, intellectual film journals and created a sizeable non-theatrical audience for factual film.
If films like Fires Were Started (d. Humphrey Jennings, 1943) and Target For Tonight (d. Watt, 1941) established the postwar primacy of British documentary, their achievement was only made possible by the faltering first steps of the
EMB.
Scott Anthony
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