:42:01
was the way documentary
was being put on a pedestal,
:42:04
especially in Britain in the 1930s.
:42:07
It was as if the rest
of film making didn't matter,
:42:10
it was only commercial,
only storytelling.
:42:13
The documentaries of John Grierson
and the young film makers around him
:42:18
were being put forward as
Britain's only truly creative cinema.
:42:22
Obviously, that would've been
red rag to a bull
:42:25
as far as Powell was concerned.
:42:27
And in fact, I think we can see
Edge Of The World
:42:30
as belonging to a real movement
that was sweeping the world.
:42:34
It was a movement to document
:42:36
the lives of communities
that were disintegrating
:42:40
and that would no longer exist.
:42:42
You can see it happening in France,
:42:44
in Holland, where
Joris Yvens was working,
:42:47
and Yvens then went to America
and made films about rural America.
:42:51
And Pare Lorentz made
two extraordinary films
:42:55
just around this time, in America,
:42:57
The Plough That Broke The Plains
and The River,
:43:01
both films inspired
by Roosevelt's New Deal
:43:04
and the Farm Security Administration.
:43:07
Films that tried to show
:43:09
the kind of forces of nature
that people were up against
:43:14
who lived in the country
and by the banks of the great rivers.
:43:18
Edge Of The World clearly belongs to
that great desire of the '30s
:43:22
to use cinema to show,
predominantly, city dwellers
:43:26
the kind of, erm, struggles
:43:29
that those who lived by the sea
or on the land faced.
:43:35
As the seasons turn,
:43:37
Ruth is now desperate
to make contact with Andrew,
:43:41
because their coming together
:43:44
has resulted in a pregnancy.
:43:47
And she knows that she's going to
give birth to Andrew's child
:43:52
but she has no way of reaching him,
:43:54
except through this extraordinary
primitive and yet poetic means,
:43:58
the letter boat.