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| Directed by Evelyn Spice Cherry |
| United Kingdom, 1934 (documentary, 18 minutes, black and white, English) |
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Film Description: "Weather reports are collected by wireless, cable and landline from meteorological stations, coastguard stations, shipping and airplanes from all over Europe and the Atlantic, messages giving latest details pour through the Public Telegraph Office and on to the Meteorological Office where all the details are entered on the maps. From these maps the forecaster can detect impending changes in weather conditions. The forecast is then published by telegram, teleprinter and wireless to aircraft, shipping, coastguards and the farmer. The actual gale warning is drowned in the increasing hubbub of messages and the racketing of teleprinters and merges into the howling of the gale, the roar of the waves and the squealing of gulls as the coastguards hoist the South Cone, the seaman makes for port, and the farmer's wife shuts up the chickens. While the gale rages reports continue to come in, and the forecaster is able to announce better weather ahead as the storm is wearing itself out. The South Cone is lowered, the wind and the waves subside, the skies clear and serene quietness settles everywhere." -- British Film Institute (source) |
| Film Credits (partial): | |
| Produced by: | John Grierson |
| Production Company: | GPO Film Unit |
"[Weather Forecast] was particularly noted for its soundtrack. Using minimal commentary and sparsely placed atmospheric music, sounds are often separated from their original images and superimposed over other visuals. The teleprinter is heard over the sea; the sound of the ship overlaps shots of the land. Sound effects are used to dramatic effect: the wailing of the wind, the creaking of cables. A medley of male and female voices delivering the forecast blends with sounds of the storm to add a sense of urgency. The sync sound dialogue adds a human, conversational tone. As the storm begins to abate, the fisherman, putting out his nets, begins to hum, the sound mingling with the wind and the waves."
-- Barbara Evans
(source)
"Miss [Evelyn] Spice has successfully attempted, in Weather Forecast, to condense a complicated series of incidents into an expressive pattern. She shows us the reception of weather reports at the Air Ministry, the sending out of a gale warning through the co-operation of the Post Office and the B.B.C., the arrival of the gale, and the eventual return of fair weather; and she does it so well that all this becomes, for the spectator, a clear and graphic experience, reinforced by the film's clever and original use of sound effects and fragments of dialogue. A particularly promising aspect of Miss Spice's work is that she does not attempt, in the older documentary tradition, to impose on her facts a romantically personal interpretation. Instead, she enables a world of daily routine to come to life on the screen, so that it speaks not with her voice but with its own."
-- Martin Herne
(source)
"I should like to call your attention to a small film that should appear shortly in one of the West-End theatres. This is 'Weather Forecast,' a two-reel documentary made for the G.P.O. Film Unit by Evelyn Spice, who has been quietly plodding along in routine work for the Grierson outfit ever since it grew from two rooms to two floors in Oxford-street, under the auspices of the Empire Marketing Board. Miss Spice is one of those remorseless women who learn and learn, and go on learning until they really know, and then give you the results of those assimilative years in a statement so simple and comprehensive that you wonder why there should ever have been a difficulty about it. Her present explanation of the real facts behind the weather forecast as we hear it nightly over the wireless is beautifully clear and sensible, and it is completely free from the documentary film's besetting sin of self-consciousness."
-- C.A. Lejeune
(source)
"Among the early films designed to present and explain the myriad communications activities of the General Post Office were Cable Ship, Six-Thirty Collection, Weather Forecast, Under the City, and Droitwich. [...] Weather Forecast (1934) is the most sophisticated of these early films, for here director Evelyn Spice has presented not only the general aspects of the forecasting methods, but also the dramatic effect of such broadcasts on a specific group of ships, aircraft pilots, and farmers. The film's use of direct sound effects is distinctive, and it makes its major points through these and through visual images, rather than through straight narrative."
-- Richard Meran Barsam
(source)
"Good use of diagrammatic maps to show positions of British stations, foreign stations, and Atlantic shipping from which weather reports are received; weather charts and maps showing course of air currents, causes of depressions, etc. Informative commentary; asynchronised sound effects composed of sound effects of objects screened, e.g., airplane, teleprinter, broadcasting, and waves, incidental dialogue, and music."
-- Monthly Film Bulletin
(source)
"Directed by Evelyn Spice, the second woman director to emerge from [John] Grierson's banner, [Weather Forecast ] tells the story of the collection and dissemination through Post Office channels of information relating to weather conditions, taking in its stride the network of sources from which news of impending weather changes come, the deductions arrived at from this information, the distribution of them and the hundred and one parties affected by this service. Spice's shooting is worth careful watching. She is bringing something to her handling of documentary material, particularly human material, which we have been unable to get. it is, perhaps, an entire lack of selfconsciousness and, if she will pardon the criticism, her complete lack of interest in style. Despite its undoubted careful planning, her shooting seems just to happen in a matter-of-fact manner with no pretensions to angle or composition. "
-- Paul Rotha
(source)
"Evelyn Spice directed Weather Forecast, which became the most famous of the 1934 group of G.P.O. films. It had a well-defined central theme, the prediction and eventual onset of a storm, round which the accessory phenomena of meteorology, telegraphy and telephony were most ingeniously grouped."
-- Raymond Spottiswoode
(source)
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