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it gradually built up a large 16mm informational film-lending collection. (Shirley and Adams 1989: 175) In an interview with Gordon Glenn and Ian Stocks, Heyer was asked directly about Grierson’s influence. [H]is total effect was really very small. It was men such as Alan Stout, John Metcalfe, and D.W.K. Duncan, men in top social and academic positions and who had the respect of the political people, who really laid the basis – as members of the Government Documentary Film Council. (Glenn and Stocks 1976: 121) Heyer continued his involvement with the burgeoning film society movement in the 1940s in New South Wales and Victoria, which had promoted an increased interest in culturally and formally diverse films, in particular documentaries. Heyer also became involved with Alfred Heinz, Alan Stout, Frank Howard, Neil Edwards and Frank Nicholls in the first Melbourne Film Festival held at Olinda in 1952, a culmination of Melbourne’s film society movement, itself partly indebted to the Realist Film Association, as we have seen. The New South Wales film society movement also gathered momentum in the early 1950s. By 1950 prominent film societies in Sydney included the Sydney Film Society, the University Film Group, the Independent Film Group and the WEA Film Study Group. By 1951 Sydney joined Melbourne in starting a Realist Film Association. The Sydney Film Society had among its members filmmakers from the DOI’s Film Division [including Heyer]. It published its own journal, Film. (Shirley and Adams 1989: 176) Heyer brought to his position as the first Senior Producer at the National Film Board not only a sound knowledge of many facets of feature film production and documentary film but also some background in the film societies’ alternative to commercial film exhibition. That is, he had read about and seen a range of film from around the world. Like Coldicutt and Holmes, Heyer knew film in an international context, albeit more cinematic than political and he brought that knowledge to bear on what was basically, pace Allan Stout, the production of government propaganda films. The formation of the Australian National Film Board brought together two disparate groups of people. On one hand, there were the Department of Information ‘practitioners’ and the bureaucracy who had been involved in the production of newsreels; on the other hand, there were ‘independent’ ‘documentary’ film-makers such as Heyer, Lee Robinson, Catherine Duncan and their ‘establishment’ supporters such as Alan Stout of Sydney University. This split reflected the difference between ‘newsreel’ an information tool, and ‘documentary’ an avant-garde art form. In the interview with Ansara, Heyer speaks of how a certain bifurcation existed from the inception of the ANFB. I was aware of the fact that most people who were cameramen were newsreel cameramen and very good at it. They were not cinema people. By that I mean they’d never [been]
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