CONQUEST OF THE AIR

UK, 1940, 70 minutes, Black and white.
Laurence Olivier, John Abbott,
Directed by Zoltan Korda, Alexander Esway, John Monk Saunders, Alexander Shaw, Donald Taylor.

Conquest of the Air is an imaginative documentary from the 1930s, with the date in some sources as 1936. But references are made to action and characters in 1938 as well as the coming of World War II. It ends with a brief speech by Winston Churchill. Which may mean that the film was begun in the mid 30s, further edited and added to and made public at the outbreak of World War II with the Churchill speech.

The first part of the film is voice-over documentary with images from human explorations of flight, beginning with Icarus and his failure, through various theorists, to some disastrous exhibitionists like Simon Magus performing before Nero and falling to his death, a pattern repeated throughout the Middle Ages. There are some interesting mini-dramas from the Middle Ages including the attempts of Franciscan friar, Roger Bacon, to pursue philosophy and engineering for purposes of flight only to be condemned by his superior to 10 years confinement to his cell without books. This kind of speculation continues through the later Middle Ages, to the Renaissance, especially with Leonardo da Vinci and one of his disciples wanting to test a machine without the master’s permission only to finish in disaster. Other monks also pursued experiments, some dying like a superior wanting to get quickly to a conference in Paris and one surviving and giving lectures in Rome.

With the age of reason and Enlightenment, there were many pursuing the possibilities of human flight, one speaker explaining to the audience that of his own strengths, a man could not fly. The next development was the hot air balloons and some drama of various flights in France.

With the 19th century, the documentary becomes more explicit on this, the attempts at flight as well as the issues of mechanics and engineering, many examples being shown, especially the German,, who was influential on the Wright brothers. There is a good sequence reminding us of the achievement of the Wright brothers.

Then it became the period of ‘those magnificent men in their flying machines’, competitions, especially between France and England, all kinds of different flying machines, some absurd, some particularly inventive. But it was World War I which hastened the development of planes and their capabilities, the film offering vivid images from World War I, including the Red Baron, and the realisation of the destructive power of dropping bombs from planes.

However, it is the 1920s which shows the enormous developments, especially for elite pilots, men and women, including Jean Batten and Amy Johnson, who experimented with long flights. Tribute is paid to these flyers and to their vision, for long haul flights like those of Charles Lindberg or Ross Smith and Kingsford Smith, moving into the 30s with the development of planes for mail delivery, for cargo, and eventually, for luxury flights for paying passengers. Quite a deal of footage is devoted to these developments of the 1930s, contemporary images and newsreel documentary footage. Attention is also given to Zeppelin and the development of the Zeppelins with some graphic photography of the crash and burning of the Hindenburg.

The film is interesting in terms of the history of flight. Contemporary audiences can go back to the perspective of the 1930s and the amazement that it was in 1903 that the Wright brothers flew in North Carolina, that it was only 11 years later that planes were employed in World War I, that 20 years after their experiments there was commercial flying, and within 30 years extraordinary developments in design, physics, engineering.

While the later material is from actual footage, with some scenes reconstructed, during the first part of the film up to the end of the 19th century, the film-makers have designed a series of tableau vivants, some very brief but elaborately staged, creating a sense of period. Sometimes there is dialogue as in the Nero scene with Simon Magus, the condemnation of Roger Bacon, some dialogue with Leonardo da Vinci (filmed from the back) and an Italian sequence which stars Laurence Olivier and a French sequence about hot air balloons featuring John Abbott. Many character actors, some to emerge as stars in the British industry, take on small roles and receive no credits.

5 directors are credited with direction. This was an ambitious project for the 1930s and is worth looking at for information as well as for learning something about the cinema styles of the period.