SEARCH REALITY

production and consumption imposes on the mass Thus phrases such as 'crisis of identity', 'one-dimensional man', 'the politics of experience, 'crisis of communication' and words such as "alienation', "liberation' and so on, dominate thought and action.

For confused, irrational and liberal thinkers the struggle to real only too often resolves itself into escape TrOM reality itself, the hippie's 'freaking out' being quite closely linked in cause and effect with the 'freaking in' of the do-gooder activist or the Fabian. Both are ways of avoiding reality.

Another way of coping with the disintegration human relations and the breakdown communication the more subtle, yet equally misguided, subordination to apparent reality. This method is the one most favoured by television and film makers and consists in 'factual reporting' or 'un-intrusive witnessing' of people and events.

We have in the last three weeks been able to see what such an approach can actually produce clarification. talented, sincere intentioned team, consisting of producer Roger Graef, cameraman Charles Stewart and soundman Mike McDuffie, have been probing the break-down of communications in the most vital spheres of human life. For the five-part documentary series, they chose to investigate the fields industry, the family, school, politics, and-coming next week-diplomacy. Using the so-called cinema-verité technique, the idea was to immerse the camera into situation tension, unobtrusively, and to allow reality to take its course. The series has been applauded for its truthful method, without anyone having examined the nature of the truth involved.

The tension which amined in the Plessey factory in the first episode, was one which arose over the possibility of redundancies which might evolve from the visit of an Organization and Methods agency. Certainly we were shown the attitudes both workers and management and the conflict of their interests, but only to the limits to which their consciousness and the consciousness of the film-makers extended. The very approach and title of the programme is a wrong one in relation to the field of industrial relations.

Roger Graef set out to produce a picture of 'The Space Between Words', to show how two different groupings have difficuch communicating with other, but the problem is not one which is based on words as such, but on the clash between two classes-the capitalist class, whose agents . are management, and the working class. It is not a question of finding the right verbal formula-the contact key, but of struggle.

This is where the verité (truth) part of cinema-verité falls apart. So does the assumed objectivity of the producer.

One has the distinct impression that Roger Graef would like to send management and workers off to an idyllic Esslin Institute so that they can sense and feel each other and live in love and understanding.

In the same way the film, which dealt with the breakdown in communication in a family, made compelling viewing, highlighting as it did the very real hostilities and antagonisms which exist within this society's ideal human unit-the family.

But again all the complex problems which arise within the family unit, the confrontation of one neurosis with another, the mythology of ideal, non-materialistic, loving relatedness, the crises, are part of the totality of human existence in which one's whole way of life and one's being are determined by the economic, social and cultural forces at work in the system.

This also applies to Graef make men hostile to. and sceptical towards each other.

In the field of politics Roger Graef has shown the same superficiality in approach.

Nixon, Senate Committees, the Supreme Court and the Justice Department are perhaps suitably real-politic to fit with realcinema, but a suspect 'neutrality' in the face of the phenomenon constitutes a real subordination to the pervading culture.

There are two concepts of Marx from which Graef would have benefited had he applied them to his programmes 'The