 Donald Alexander enjoyed a rich career over several decades
working exclusively in cinema and non-theatrical documentary film as a producer,
director, writer and editor, among other roles.
After shooting an amateur film on social conditions in the Rhondda Valley,
Alexander was taken on by Paul Rotha at Strand Films in 1936. At the time,
Strand was the leading independent documentary unit, undertaking films (for
various sponsors) occasionally more explicit in their social consciousness than
those being made under John Grierson at the GPO. Alexander's Eastern Valley
(1937) exemplifies this. He also directed two noted shorts for the Films of
Scotland Committee.
For most of World War Two, during which the British documentary movement was
co-opted to the war effort, Alexander made films for the Ministry of Information
at Paul Rotha Productions, before setting up (with other former Rotha employees)
the co-operative film unit DATA (Documentary And Technicians Alliance). Several
sponsors commissioned films from DATA after the war, most frequently the
National Coal Board. Alexander was later employed directly by the NCB, setting
up its in-house Film Unit in 1953 and directing or writing many of its
productions both before and after his stint running the unit ended in 1963.
As with many documentarists of his generation, Alexander's career offers its
own distinct perspective on the evolving relationship between film and society.
Like Edgar Anstey, he grew from prewar apprentice filmmaking to a major postwar
public service role running an indirectly state sponsored film unit. Like Anstey
he employed there both experienced contemporaries (such as Ralph Elton, and his
own wife Budge Cooper) and younger filmmakers new to the industry (such as
Rodney Giesler and Euan Pearson).
It should be no surprise that ideological shifts are also evident in
Alexander's films over time, a perhaps more critical political stance in some
prewar work evolving into direct spokesmanship for official policy. This shift
does not simply reflect the dependence of Alexander's generation of
documentarists on sponsors for films that inevitably reflected the sponsors'
viewpoints. It also reflects the shift in public policy from Depression-era
capitalism to mixed economy consensus, a consensus incorporating many broadly
progressive thinkers (filmmakers included) who would have held more oppositional
views in their youth. In Alexander's case, the contrast between his 1930s films
made in Welsh mining areas and his later career conveying the official views of
the NCB (albeit with some subtlety) is partly explained by coal nationalisation
having changed the ideological basis on which the coal industry was run.
Issues of class and even nationality are also raised by Alexander's biography
and output. An interesting distant parallel might be drawn with a younger
filmmaker, Lindsay Anderson. Both were of Scottish origins and bearing
distinctively Scottish names, but of English upbringing and Oxbridge education.
Alexander's voice can be heard as a commentator on several films, particularly
internal films for the NCB by definition aimed at a working-class - and
disproportionately Scottish and Welsh - audience, and it is unmistakeably that
of the British upper-middle class from which many of the 1930s documentarists
originated. Yet while his filmmaking traversed the UK, some of his most
apparently personal work was undertaken in Scotland. He is an interesting case
study in the largely implicit relationships between Scottishness, Englishness
and Britishness - often entangled with class issues - expressed in some socially
purposeful film making of his period.
Some viewers may find traces of a distinctly Scottish sensibility in all
Alexander's work (as they have with John Grierson, with whom, incidentally,
Alexander apparently shared a mutual antagonism). Perhaps this can be seen in
his highly practical, even self-effacing, approach to making films nonetheless
strongly informed by an underlying social ethic. In terms of Grierson's famous
definition of documentary as the 'creative treatment of actuality', Alexander's
creativity seems largely to have lain in finding effective filmic solutions to
the challenges posed by sponsor requirements, rather than in self-expression.
His films, though often visually strong and cleverly structured, generally avoid
stylistic flourish. Whether or not this apparent selflessness in pursuit of
public service is a distinctively Scottish trait, it certainly reflects the
ideals of a key strain in the British documentary tradition, that drawn more
towards film as a tool for shaping civic values than towards documentary subject
matter as fodder for artistic statements. It is unsurprising that filmmakers
like Alexander remain generally uncelebrated compared to, say, the much less
prolific Anderson.
From this perspective, Alexander's final professional engagement as the head
of a university Audio Visual department (at the University of Dundee, for ten
years from 1969) may be judged a fitting rather than disappointing coda to his
career.
Patrick Russell
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FILM & TV CREDITS
