Rescued by Rover (1905)
Yüklə 1,18 Mb.
|
|
Mark Glancy, The 39 Steps, London, I B Taurus, 2002. Pauline Kael, ‘Three Films’ in Albert Lavalley (ed.) Focus on Hitchcock, New Jersey, Prentice Hall, 1972. Albert Lavalley (ed.) ‘Introduction’ in Focus on Hitchcock, New Jersey, Prentice Hall, 1972. Tania Modleski, The Women who Knew Too Much, London, Routledge, 1989. John Orr, Hitchcock and Twentieth Century Cinema, London, Wallflower, 2005. Donald Spoto, ‘The 39 Steps’ in his The Art of Alfred Hitchcock, London, Fourth Estate, 1992. Robin Wood, Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, London, Faber, 1989. Sarah Casey Things to Come (1936) [Production Company: Alexander Korda Film Productions. Director: William Cameron Menzies. Screenwriters: H.G. Wells. Cinematographer: Georges Perinal. Music: Arthur Bliss. Editors: Charles Crichton and Francis Lyon. Art director: Vincent Korda. Cast: Raymond Massey (John Cabal/Oswald Cabal), Edward Chapman (Pippa Passworthy/Raymond Passworthy, Ralph Richardson (The Boss), Margaretta Scott (Roxana/Rowena, Cedric Hardwicke (Theotocopulos).] If science fiction is about creating a sense of wonder and imagining the future while reflecting on the past then Things to Come should certainly be considered one of the key films of the twentieth century; the fact that it is a British film, depicting a future Britain at the cutting edge of scientific innovation and cultural rebirth, makes it all the more significant in the face of Hollywood dominance of the science fiction genre. Describing the film’s cultural and artistic impact Christopher Frayling (1995: 12) declared ‘Things to Come is to Modernism as Blade Runner is to Post-Modernism’. Its vision of human survival after years of war is an unflinching depiction of what technology and science can offer in a free society. Yet, deep at the heart of the film, there is an unerring sense of caution, a warning to those who would rebel against progress that democracy comes at a price: stand together and the future will be bright, stand alone and society will crumble. Adapted from his novel, The Shape of Things to Come (1933), H.G. Wells wanted Things to Come to endure as a measurable marker for the world’s potentials and a solution to its great ills, yet both the book and film’s ‘most memorable achievement was [their] prediction of the outbreak of the Second World War’ (Wagner, 2004: 209). Wells felt that it was his duty to make Things to Come a true depiction of what a future utopia could be like. Themes such as pacifism, scientific planning, egalitarianism, and freedom imbue the film with a sense of purpose. W. Warren Wagner (2004: 199) sees Things to Come as a “full-blooded ‘romance of revolution,’ a tale of how humankind faced and met the grave challenges to its survival in the twentieth century and persevered to build an integrated world civilization.” Such a revolution would take years to come about perhaps, but the sheer scope was not beyond the producers of the film who strove to combine Wells’ literary vision with the very latest in filmmaking techniques and set design. Before discussing the generic qualities of the film it is important to recognise the critical and cultural contexts in which the film was produced. Clearly Wells felt that it was his film, after all it was his story, yet the contributions made by the likes of Korda and Menzies help to truly make this a ‘key British film’ and therefore must be addressed. It is interesting to note that Alexander Korda was best known for producing historical films ‘which addressed questions of class and gender from different stylistic and ideological perspectives’ (Street, 1997: 40). Films produced by Korda in this period, for example The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), emphasised the relationship between the proletariat and aristocracy, showing working-class British audiences that they ‘enjoyed a special bond with upper social echelons’ (ibid: 41). Things to Come can be considered alongside Korda’s other works since it is undoubtedly a historical film - the outbreak of the Second World War, the bandit era and the arrival of the airmen, and the future city of 2036 make up the three historical periods of Wells’ future - but also the film’s concentration in the last act on the conflict between technocrat Oswald Cabal and artisan Theotocopulos reflects both Korda’s desire to show sympathy for the working class and support for the role of educated scientists in modern society. Jeffrey Richards believes this part of the film ‘is replete with irony’ for the present-day audience since it is the artisan rather than the scientist who acts as the ‘identification figure for many’ (Richards, 1999: 21). The former represents the ‘back to basics’ ideal that counteracts the damaging effects of technological expansion promoted by the latter. Of course, for Wells, Korda, and Menzies the positives offered by the modernist attitude toward technological progress and the values of science far outweighed any negatives that such a battle between technocrat and artisan could bring about – World War Two, after all, was just around the corner and it was up to the British public to look beyond petty squabbles: For all the artificiality of some of the special effects, the ‘period’ awfulness of some of the dialogue, the cut-glass accents and impeccable upper-class English manner of the juveniles and the hamminess of some of the acting, it remains a visionary film of compelling power, awesome imagination and uplifting optimism. (Richards, 1984: 280) If Alexander Korda offered Wells’ vision a home on the British cinema screen then it was William Cameron Menzies and Vincent Korda who gave it life. Both were well respected for their artistic and design talents, Menzies being influenced by F.W. Murnau and Sergei Eisenstein (Frayling, 1995: 28), and Korda by the modernist designs of Oliver Hill’s furniture, Le Corbusier’s garden landscapes, and Norman Bel Geddes’s futuristic aircraft (Richards, 1999: 18-19). Such visual inspiration places Things to Come’s visioning of ‘Everytown’ alongside science fiction’s other great futuristic city, ‘Metropolis’. Fritz Lang’s New York inspired Metropolis (1926) has become the prototype for modern depictions of the urban landscape (see for example Blade Runner, 1982), with the consequence that the city in science fiction is now largely the signifier of a dystopian future since Metropolis blamed technology, bureaucrats, scientists, and machinery for humanity’s moral failures and the continued subjugation of the working class. Some might contend that the prevailing theme at the heart of science fiction is not a sense of wonder, as suggested earlier in this essay, but instead an uncompromising belief in the battle between man and machine, technology and society. To see scientists and the futurist city held up as an example of what might be our best possible utopia in Things to Come stands in stark contrast to the vision offered by Lang in Metropolis; where the city and its despotic rulers hold workers at the mercy of the monstrous machine, humans being merely fodder for the production and consumption driving the capitalist system. H.G. Wells and Vincent Korda were at pains to point out the potentials for ‘Everytown’ of the future; it was a completely new start after the ravages of war had taken their toll on the population: people would be able to retreat below ground, to live as one in a pristine world of white. ‘Metropolis’, according to Wells, was a dystopian city based on the skyline of a contemporary cityscape, New York, and offered nothing new; skyscrapers were already, by the time of the film’s release, visions of the past rather than the future. For Janet Staiger (1999: 110), ‘If Metropolis accepts divided labour as a prerequisite for a successful future, in Things to Come the final narrative crisis ironically… asserts its necessity’; the division of society into technocrats and artisans is both inevitable and integral to the pursuit of utopia and Wells’ original dream. Both films contend that the city’s sprawling urban space holds the key to achieving utopia, yet the subtle differences between their artistic inspirations and iconic visual imagery help to endorse Things to Come’s claim for being a key film, not only in a British context but also within the context of the entire science fiction genre. Contemporary critics’ fondness for claiming Metropolis as progenitor of the archetypal science fiction cityscape is not unwarranted, nevertheless, Things to Come offers viewers more than just a futuristic city. Certainly, its iconographic imagery can be seen as inspiration for other key films of the genre, for example the enclosed cities of THX-1138 (1971) or Logan’s Run (1976), but equally its philosophical message, of technology as saviour, stands out as unique amongst science fiction films. (1) For David Desser (1999: 87), ‘More than in Metropolis, and more than in most science-fiction films, technology is imaged as humanity’s positive side,’ and is a recurrent motif in other adaptations of H.G. Wells stories such as The Time Machine (1960). In a genre that frequently hails postmodern dystopian cities as humanity’s inevitable habitat, British examples include A Clockwork Orange (1971), 1984 (1984), and Brazil (1985), Things to Come challenges this negative attitude and in fact speculates that through cooperation and the recognition of common goals the modern city is only the launch-pad to a wider, brighter world; science, and those who can master it, will take humans to the stars. The final act of the film sees Oswald Cabal send two young ‘astronauts’, his daughter and Passworthy’s son, into space using a rocket fired from the giant Space Gun. While a large crowd attempts to stop the launch, roused by the individualist Theotocopulos, Cabal tells Passworthy why the peace and tranquillity of ‘Everytown’ had to be sacrificed: Rest enough for the individual man. Too much, too soon, and we call it death. But for Man: no rest and no ending. He must go on – conquest beyond conquest - first this little planet with its winds and ways, and then all the laws of mind and matter that restrain him; then the planets about him, and at last, out across immensity to the stars. And when he has conquered all the deeps of space and all the mysteries of time, still he will be beginning. Such belief in the possibilities and wonders of space travel is a largely American trope in science fiction, an extension of the national obsession with the frontier, yet we can also see it played out here in the climax of Things to Come. Not only is the film progressive in its representation of technology but it is also pre-empting the surplus of British and American science fiction films that would be released in the 1950s where spaceflight, spaceships, and interplanetary conquest were central themes that made the genre even more popular with audiences. The Space Gun, its rocket projectile, and the influx of cinematic spacecraft that were to follow, symbolise both the genre’s fascination for technical gadgetry and special effects and also Western culture’s fetishisation of technological consumption: ‘Spaceships are the emblems of the technology that produces them; a technology of cultural reproduction, rather than science’ (Roberts, 2000: 154). Things to Come was not popular with audiences in 1936, however, soon after war had broken out people realised H.G. Wells’ vision of the future was an accurate one. The film’s lack of impact at the box-office should in no way detract from its overall cultural significance: as a science fiction film it laid the foundations for countless others to borrow and reproduce its iconographic set designs, flying ships, and themes of space travel and technological utopianism; yet, more importantly, as a key British film Things to Come even today still challenges the generic dominance of Hollywood, having set out to imagine a future world of progress and peace almost twenty years before America had turned its attention to space. Notes
Further Reading David Desser, ‘Race, Space and Class: The Politics of Cityscapes in Science-Fiction Films’ in Annette Kuhn (ed.) Alien Zone II: The Spaces of Science Fiction Cinema, London, Verso, 1999. Christopher Frayling, Things to Come, London, British Film Institute, 1995. Jeffrey Richards, The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in Britain, 1930-1939, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984. _____, ‘Things to Come and Science Fiction in the 1930s’ in I.Q. Hunter (ed.) British Science Fiction Cinema, London, Routledge, 1999. Adam Roberts, Science Fiction, London, Routledge, 2000. Janet Staiger, ‘Future Noir: Contemporary Representations of Visionary Cities’, in Annette Kuhn (ed.) Alien Zone II: The Spaces of Science Fiction Cinema. London, Verso, 1999. Sarah Street, British National Cinema, London, Routledge, 1997. W. Warren Wager, H.G.Wells: Traversing Time, Middletown, Wesleyan University Press, 2004. Lincoln Geraghty
[Production Company: British National Films. Director and producer: John Baxter. Screenwriters: Walter Greenwood, Barbara Emery, Rollo Gamble. Cinematographer: James Wilson. Music: Richard Addinsell. Editor: Michael Chorlton. Cast: Deborah Kerr (Sally Hardcastle), Clifford Evans (Larry Meath), Geoffrey Hibbert (Harry Hardcastle), Joyce Howard (Helen Hawkins), Mary Merrall (Mrs Hardcastle), George Carney (Mr Hardcastle), Frank Cellier (Sam Grundy), Martin Walker (Ned Narkey).] Love on the Dole, following the novel and play of the same name, focuses upon the working class experience of the Depression of the 1930s. The idea for the film was initially proposed in 1936 but it was not seen as suitable subject material for cinema audiences until 1940 when the project was given the go-ahead. It is frequently cited as an example of censorship in British cinema, reflecting the changing concerns and priorities of ‘the Establishment’ in Britain between the late 1930s and early 1940s. It was initially vetoed by the censors for showing ‘too much of the tragic and sordid side of poverty’ (Mathews 1994: 53) but by its release in 1941 it was felt the film would enable audiences to see themselves as fighting for a better future without the unemployment of the 1930s. The film examines the feeling of entrapment and longing for escape felt by a working class alienated firstly by the unremitting grind of their work and later by mass unemployment. Set in fictional Hankey Park during the economic depression that hit Britain after the Wall Street Crash of 1929, Love on the Dole appears to have a clear left-wing, socialist agenda. The social analysis offered is not simplistic: the tension between the generations within the working class (most obviously between Mr Hardcastle and his son and daughter, Harry and Sally) is revealed and characters are not shown as ‘good’ simply by virtue of being members of the working class. Those who drink too much (Ned Narky) are portrayed as abusive 'wasters'. The possessive and violent male is exposed in the character of Helen's father, heard off-screen beating his wife. Mrs Nattle runs her ‘clothing club’ for nobody’s benefit other than her own. Sam Grundy, the bookmaker, in addition to his cold manipulation of Sally is shown exploiting the way the men dream of escaping their lot through a win on ‘the horses’. However, these negative images are counter-balanced by the potential for a better future embodied in the heroic, if rather idolised, Larry (Clifford Evans), the innocent Sally (Deborah Kerr), and the simple, hard-working Mr and Mrs Hardcastle. (1) Larry attempts to prevent violence and hold to democratic principles even in the struggle against what is clearly an oppressive system, and despite his passionate hatred of that system. The extent to which this use of what could be called ‘character types’ is successful is debateable. Certainly, some characters might be seen as too one-dimensional and the ‘lessons’ they embody for the audience might be said to be too obvious, perhaps even patronisingly didactic. This could also be seen as a feature of devices within the film’s construction. In the opening minutes there is a shot of a headline proclaiming an economic upturn (on a newspaper being used to encourage the fire to draw) only for this to symbolically ‘go up in flames’. Just as off-putting for the audience, and perhaps contributing to its lack of box-office success (Aldgate 1994: 342), there is no sign of a conventional comforting resolution; Larry is killed, Sally has her innocence taken away and to achieve an escape from poverty for herself and her family abandons her ideals, and Mr and Mrs Hardcastle are left with little other than the knowledge that they did their best in impossible circumstances. So, does the film show a socialist future as envisioned by Larry as an impossible dream or do his ideals remain the essential ‘message’ of the film? How should we ultimately read the film? Do Sally’s final actions represent defeat or the emergence of a strong, independent woman? Certainly the position of women in society is raised as an issue; Sally, for instance, says, ‘You marry for love and find you've let yourself in for a seven day a week job with no pay’. The words of Labour MP and member of the wartime coalition government, A.V. Alexander, given at the end make the wartime message and peacetime promise clear: Our working men and women have responded magnificently to any and every call made upon them. Their reward must be a new Britain. Never again must the unemployed become the forgotten men of peace. Is this a fine liberal message, or a condescending attitude to take towards a working class audience that suffered unemployment in the 1930s and is now sending its young men to war just 20 years after the last major conflict in Europe? The film does present positive images of working class figures and does offer a socialist challenge to the status quo; Baxter films Larry, for example, making a strongly socialist speech almost directly to camera. But it is also an attempt to negotiate a potential crisis in capitalism by seeking a compromise that does not involve the overthrow of that system. The real political message is that improved social conditions for the working class are a necessity if the capitalism is to be maintained. (2) There are strong elements of social realism (the smoke from the industrial chimneys and the drab greyness of the back-to-back terraced houses in the opening) but this is also a melodrama. Emphasising censorship and socialist politics can mean this aspect of the film is not given due attention. Essentially this is Sally’s story rather than Larry’s; any character development that occurs takes place within her character, and the central action within the film is her decision to become Grundy’s mistress. American censors did not pass the film until 1945 and then only on condition that it was implied Grundy would marry Sally (Slide 1998: 99), suggesting they saw the moral implications of the central female character’s actions as vital to any reading of the film. Deborah Kerr’s opinion was that the film was more appreciated in America than Britain. (3) Was this because for British audiences the drama of the woman’s position was lost within an overriding experience of being preached at? Love on the Dole has, justifiably perhaps (although this is essential to melodrama), been accused of being overly sentimental (4) but is generally recognised as also showing real understanding of the working class experience. The realities of working class life are closely observed; see, for example, how Grundy turns Harry's win on ‘the horses’ into a publicity coup that ensures more people will willingly lock themselves into the dream that he sells (the concept behind the national lottery is nothing new!). Unemployment and the accompanying hardships including the millstone of debt are all examined; yet people are also shown as having a certain dignity and even humour. What they all share is a desire to escape the harsh conditions of their existence. The women do this through a drink (at home) and a séance, and the men through a drink (in the pub) and betting. The young all hope to escape the place itself; although for Larry, personal escape is not enough, he wants freedom from poverty for all. But, Larry’s vision of the future is trampled not simply by the police as agents of the status quo but also by the violence of his own side, the working class. And Sally is reduced to selling out on the moral, principled stance she and Larry believed in. As Larry says, ‘It's this place.... it gets everybody in the end’. To begin with Sally believes, ‘They can take away our jobs but they can't take away our love, can they?’ (although even here she phrases it as a rather desperate question). With Larry dead she pragmatically takes the only way out with Sam Grundy. Has she sold out or is this straightforward commonsense? Or are such judgements out of place, can we only observe and not presume to judge? What would be the range of responses from an audience in the 1940s? Despite the fact it was unusual to see sexual matters dealt with within a contemporary context rather than being transposed into Regency or Restoration settings in order to bypass the censors (Aldgate 1994: 164), would the majority simply see Sally’s actions as part and parcel of the reality of life? Baxter was clear about how he saw this film and filmmaking during the war. Love on the Dole could be seen to contain a radical message and yet it was also clearly in his view propaganda for the war effort. As a producer at British National he was interested in films that promised better times and showed audiences why they were fighting. He felt audiences should be given: pictures that will show them just what they are fighting for, pictures with a glimpse of the better world we all envisage after the sacrifices and hardships are through (Taylor 1988: 37) I felt that the successful outcome of the war depended in no small measure on the loyalty and hard work of, for want of a better term, ‘the working man’ (Brown 1989: 78) Before the war this film was seen by the censors as advocating unacceptable socialist change; despite the male hero’s advocacy of peaceful protest one scene shows striking workers not only marching through the streets but fighting the police. Putting such material before readers of a novel or an audience attending a play was one thing but ‘the Establishment’ was unlikely to allow a film like this to be made for a mass audience at a time of continued economic depression. But, by 1940 the war had ensured almost full employment. And, as James Park suggests in British Cinema: The Lights That Failed, in some ways filmmakers enjoyed more freedom during the war than before since a nation that was in its propaganda so strongly in favour of freedom of speech could hardly argue British institutions should be exempt from criticism. (Park 1990: 67) Notes
Further Reading Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards, Britain Can Take It: The British Cinema in the Second World War, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1994. Geoff Brown and Anthony Aldgate, The Common Touch: the Films of John Baxter, London, BFI, 1989. Andrew Higson, ‘Space, Place, Spectacle: Landscape and Townscape in the ‘Kitchen Sink’ Film’ in Andrew Higson (ed) Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema, London and New York, Cassell, 1996. Tom Dewe Mathews, Censored, London, Chatto and Windus, 1994. Stephen C. Shafer, British Popular Films 1929-39: the cinema of reassurance, London and New York, Routledge, 1997. Anthony Slide, Banned in the USA: British films in the US and their Censorship, 1935-60, London, I.B. Tauris, 1998. Sarah Street, British Cinema in Documents, London and New York, Routledge, 2000. Philip M. Taylor, Britain and the Cinema in the Second World War, London, Macmillan, 1988. John White Listen to Britain (1942) [Production Company: Crown Film Unit. Directors and editors: Humphrey Jennings and Stewart McAllister. Cinematographer: H.E. Fowle. Sound: Ken Cameron. Cast: Chesney Allen (himself), Bud Flanagan (himself), Myra Hess (herself, pianist), Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother (herself, uncredited)] Humphrey Jennings (1907-1950), the main creative force behind this short yet powerful documentary film, was an established poet and painter as well as a sublime film-maker, who was much influenced by the European Surrealist movement of the 1920s and ‘30s. (1) With those artists, he shared a desire to explore the symbolic in the everyday and, as can be seen throughout Listen to Britain, chose to use ‘an impressionistic style dependent on juxtapositions and association.’ (Aitken 1998: 216) He was certainly a careful observer and recorder of his nation at a time of crisis, but he was also very much an artist who created images and sounds that were laden with meaning and open to various interpretations simultaneously. If his subject matter was often quite ordinary, his expressive mode was quite unique and it is the distinctive visual poetry inherent in his films that has been lauded by subsequent generations of British film-makers and critics. In his extensive biography of this most extraordinary of film-makers, Kevin Jackson describes the film as ‘a total work of art [with an] intense visual beauty.’ (2004: 252) Jennings began directing films in 1939, on the eve of the Second World War. Rather than hinder him, the war in fact gave impetus to his ideas and created the conditions for his best work to be produced. In particular, they allowed him to bring to the screen images of ordinary people, sharply glimpsed as they go about their everyday business during wartime, whether farming in East Anglia (Spring Offensive 1940) or contributing to the war effort in the industrialised north (Heart of Britain 1941). These early pictures, and others like them, were in many respects pieces of crude propaganda accompanied by didactic commentaries, and yet they already revealed the poetic tendencies of a director for whom the associative possibilities of the image were crucial. Listen to Britain was one of several films made by Jennings between 1941 and 1945 that show the development of a coherent, personal style and a very individual approach to the depiction of a nation at war. As director and writer Lindsay Anderson points out, ‘They are all films of Britain at war, and yet their feeling is never, or almost never, warlike.’ (2) Instead of aggression, they are inspired by nationalistic pride in the spirit of the ordinary people of Britain facing up to great adversity, and by a sharp sense of the importance of tradition and community. With Listen to Britain, Jennings abandoned the strategies of commentary voiceover and linear narrative altogether and focused attention on the technique of associative editing, building up and synthesising oppositions and connections through a careful layering of image and sound. The overarching theme he thus develops is the evocation of a strong and deep sense of national unity, linking places and people from across the country, all walks of life, and as they are involved in many different activities. As Aitken points out, ‘films such as Listen to Britain are an intense reflection on this belief in the underlying unity of the nation […] and could only have been made during the war, when there was a focus on the issue of national identity.’ (1998: 216) After the war, the political and social divisions which had been concealed for the sake of the war effort were again exposed, and the unity of experience evoked by Listen to Britain was no long as sharply relevant. Jennings also shared with the Surrealists a desire to urge people to awaken from a complacent stupor, to reject preconceived beliefs, and to produce more spontaneous cultural forms. He was concerned with the capturing of small moments that might shed light on the meaning of broader experiences, and called for the central role of the artist to be reclaimed, and redefined if necessary, given the twentieth century priorities of industrialisation and capitalism. Perhaps more importantly in the context of this film, Jennings appeared to hold an unshakeable admiration for what he felt were the distinctively irritating qualities of the English, stating in an essay of 1948 that: The English are in fact a violent, savage race; passionately artistic, enormously addicted to pattern, with a faculty beyond all other people of ignoring their neighbours, their surroundings, or in the last resort, themselves. They have a power of poetry which is the despair of all the rest of the world. They produce from time to time personalities transcending ordinary human limitations. Then they drive other nations to a frenzy by patronising these archangels who have come among them, and by indicating that any ordinary Englishman could do better if he liked to take the trouble. (in Aitken 1998: 222-3) (2) Such thoughts appear to have acted as the motivating force behind Listen to Britain, made by Jennings in collaboration with the editor Stewart McAllister, for the Ministry of Information at the Crown Film Unit as part of a propaganda campaign. Drawing on an already established montage tradition in British documentary, the film offers, as Higson describes, ‘apparently discrete fragments of sounds and images of the home front at work and leisure, juxtaposed with images from the traditional iconography of pastoral England and the new iconography of the war period.’ (1995: 201) The apparent fragmentation, however, is overridden by a powerful sense of ideological unity that results from the associations between images which are implied rather than stated. The idyllic opening images and sounds of a rustling, brightly lit cornfield followed by a peaceful coastal scene at sunset are sharply interrupted by those of people listening in their blacked-out homes to radio warnings of imminent attacks, with the buzzing of planes overhead. The overarching sense of communal spirit and shared experience is then quickly conveyed by the next lengthy shot of a dance hall, with a static high-angle camera watching as couples hold each other tightly and move in unison and harmony across the wide space of the frame. Moreover, there is a neat coming together, sometimes almost a collision, of the contemporary with the traditional (shots of tanks charging through a rural village), the rural with the urban, the low with high art. The various scenes of different musical occasions help develop these contrasts while also reinforcing the idea of communality and shared experience: factory canteen sing-a-longs with music-hall double act Flanagan and Allen are joyfully presented, while moments later classical pianist Dame Myra Hess is shown playing Mozart in the National Gallery before a diverse audience that includes the Queen. In this way, the idea of harmony between classes is reinforced and, as Higson notes, ‘national identity is proposed as the sum of this productive variety.’ (1995: 202) The iconography is remarkable for its blend of image types familiar from 1930s social documentaries by the likes of John Grierson with those that revealed sights that were less common on the cinema screen. While the former showed the worker in his or her place of toil, with an emphasis on both the splendour of the machine age, and the determined spark of humanity within the industrialised workplace, the latter provided opportunity for new sets of pictures of leisure and communal activity outside work. Alongside evocative images, sound is lovingly crafted into one great symphony that conveys mood, creates dramatic emphasis, and flags up connections between people and places. Whistles are blown and steam hisses to signal the arrival of a train at its destination; birds twitter amongst the cornfields; Big Ben tolls; horses’ hooves clip-clop along the cobbles; leaves shimmer on the trees; spitfires roar overhead; machinery clanks incessantly. All provide, as Leonard Brockington points out in his introduction, ‘the trumpet call of freedom, the war song of a great people, the first sure notes of the march of victory.’ (5) The shared experience of music-making is reinforced in many scenes, and the music that is made serves to link the various elements of a film that rejects conventional linear narrative strategies and places emphasis instead on evoking nostalgia. Canadian soldiers sing as they reminisce on the train; women whistle along to the radio as they work; piano music is heard as schoolchildren play outside; the muffled sound of the dance hall music is still heard as the camera moves outside to observe the home brigade as they put on their helmets and prepare to report for duty. Not everyone is impressed by the film’s poetic charm, instead claiming to find it scarily manipulative in a way that is reminiscent of critiques of Leni Riefenstahl’s seminal but controversial documentary work in support of the Nazi regime, Triumph of the Will (1935 Germany). Indeed, one response on the Internet Movie Database comments that the film film’s great efforts to convey the idea of shared community seems to leave it horrifyingly devoid of any sense of individual identity. ‘After all,’ claims the amateur reviewer, ‘if you can make something as light as wheat flowing in the wind look like rows of well-organized troops with bayonets, you can certainly sell the idea of a perfect society as a strict, organized conglomerate of so-called ‘superior people’ in all of their blank-faced homogeneity.’ (4) The explicitly and unashamedly romanticised celebration of all things British, with the masses singing ‘Rule Britannia’ as the images return to timeless ones of cornfields and clouds, has also been greeted with some inevitable irritation. Nevertheless, Listen to Britain’s main purpose was to develop a sense of purpose and unity, however illusory, for its primary audience during wartime, while also serving to remind those British audiences that saw it what they were fighting to protect. More than that, it went beyond the standard informational expectations of documentary film-making at that time and offered 19 minutes of what Mike Leigh describes as ‘exemplary storytelling’. (6) For audiences today, it continues to offer indelible images and sounds that convey an impression of what Britain might have been like for those living during World War Two, and which have become part of the imagined sense of that war. Notes
Further Reading Ian Aitken (ed.) The Documentary Film Movement: An Anthology, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998. Andrew Higson, Waving the Flag: Constructing a National Cinema in Britain, Oxford, Clarendon, 1995. Kevin Jackson, Humphrey Jennings: The Definitive Biography of One of Britain’s Most Important Film-makers, London, Picador, 2004. Robert Murphy, British Cinema and the Second World War, London, Continuum, 2000. Sarah Barrow
Michael Powell (1904—90), a ‘Man of Kent’ (Powell 1987: 6), and Emeric (Imre) Pressburger (1902—1987), born into the Jewish middle class of Miskolc, Hungary, together created the single most impressive group of films in British cinema. As ‘The Archers’, between 1942 and 1957 the pair lead a superbly gifted team whose key members were often European émigrés – art director Alfred Junge, , composer Josef Zmigrod (‘Allan Gray’), , cinematographer Georges Périnal,. Pressburger had been one of the most valued screenwriters in the German film industry before Hitler’s rise to power, and he was intimately familiar with European cinema. Blimp’s moving evocation of ‘Englishness’, like Hollywood’s projection of American values, was very much the creation of foreigners in exile. To properly appreciate the scale of the Archers’ achievement, Blimp should be considered together with A Canterbury Tale (1944), I Know Where I’m Going (1945), A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Black Narcissus (1947) – ‘that rare thing, an erotic English film’ (Thomson 2003: 696) – and The Red Shoes (1947), as a superb sequence which portrays a complex vision of national identity and Britain’s post-war dilemmas. (Wheale 1997: 107-115) Blimp remains the most ambitious and elusive of these films, their unique qualities best celebrated by the Scottish novelist, A. L. Kennedy: Within those celluloid worlds, film was allowed to be fully itself: articulate beyond any limits other than those of its own nature. Light and colour were manipulated to produce images as delicate as painting or still photography; which could enunciate subtexts, atmospheres and tones of emotion . . . It has always hurt, just a little, to watch things so beautiful and so resonant in so many parts of my mind. (Kennedy 1997: 14) The film’s paradoxes begin with its title. ‘Colonel Blimp’ was a despicable, reactionary figure created by the cartoonist David Low for the Evening Standard in 1934. Low’s Blimp possessed no redeeming qualities, but stood for the failure to adapt to changing circumstances that characterised so much of British institutional life at the time, in the colonies and ruling institutions as much as in the armed forces. Winston Churchill’s unreasoning and, eventually, illegal opposition to the film may have stemmed from his fear of being identified with Blimp, just when his conduct of the war was under severe question. More than this, the agitation at Cabinet level shows how much wartime administrations valued the vital contribution of feature films to morale on the home front (just as true in Moscow and Berlin as London). Clive ‘Sugar’ Candy VC, CB, DSO, possesses none of the original Blimp’s vicious stupidity, though he looks exactly like Low’s character, and we first meet him in a Turkish bath, which was the cartoon Blimp’s preferred recreation. By contrast, Roger Livesey’s Candy is an endearing old fellow, a true national hero of the Boer War campaigns, yet he is also someone who has become stranded in time. Candy’s defining trauma occurred back in 1902 at the moment he unwittingly fell in love with Miss Edith Hunter, and after he had lost her to his duelling antagonist, Oberleutnant Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff. Clive Candy has become frozen at the point of his love that can never be fulfilled. He is condemned to a vain repetition in his search for the simulacrum of his lost beloved, Edith. Partly as a consequence of this personal tragedy, he also feels the need to create and defend an increasingly anachronistic ideal of England and the English soldier. This identification of Edith Hunter with Englishness is also powerfully endorsed by Theo during his questioning under the Enemy Aliens Order when he arrives in London as a political refugee. His speech, written specifically for Adolf Wohlbrück, is profoundly moving, and must have drawn deeply on Emeric Pressburger’s own experiences (double brackets indicate a cut, single brackets an addition to the final screenplay): And very foolishly I remembered the [[English]] countryside, [the gardens,] the green lawns [[where I spent the long months of captivity]] … [And] a great desire came over me to come back [[here]] to my wife’s country. (Christie 1994: 250) Clive Candy’s notion of soldiering is brutally dismissed by the two American officers he encounters in Flanders. As he is driven away by ‘Armstrong’ (a regrettably stereotyped black soldier, played by the uncredited Norris Smith, and the only false note in the film), one remarks to the other that Candy’s campaigns ‘weren’t wars. Those were just summer manoeuvres’. (Christie 1994: 201) But time after time, the film also seems to endorse Candy’s values and perspective, either emotionally, or in stronger, pragmatic terms. When Candy receives a despatch announcing the Armistice cease-fire the mise en scène is frankly theatrical, providing an ironic frame for Candy’s question to Murdoch: ‘ …do you know what this means? Murdoch: I do, sir. Peace. We can go home. Everybody can go home!’ Murdoch has ‘the common soldier’ view, and John Laurie delivers his lines with great feeling. But Candy takes an elevated tone: ‘For me, Murdoch, it means more than that. It means that Right is Might after all … Clean fighting, honest soldiering, have won!’ (Christie 1994: 211) Immediately we hear the song of a skylark rising into the sky, and celebratory music fades up. The lark song on cue is simultaneously ridiculous and poignant, both affirming and mocking of Candy’s naïve credo. A notorious propaganda poster, current when the film was being made, proclaimed, ‘Your courage, your cheerfulness, your resolution, will bring us victory.’ This was widely seen to be a divisive appeal, in which the mass of the population would make sacrifices so that the British establishment could be preserved. If the pronoun had been ‘Our’ rather than ‘Your’ then the call would have immediately become more inclusive. The confrontation between James McKechnie’s ‘Spud’ Wilson and Roger Livesey’s elderly Candy presents a stark opposition between Blimpish values and the pragmatic, even brutal new spirit that is required to oppose and destroy the Nazi threat – ‘Moderation in war is Imbecility’, read an advert from August, 1942 sponsored by the Co-op, and quoting Lord Macaulay. Ambitious young Second Lieutenant Wilson, who has progressed rapidly through the ranks by pure merit, will use ‘any means at my disposal’ to defend the country, including breaking agreed rules. Ian Christie’s edition of the screenplay shows some crucial revisions. Asked early in the film what H.Q. means by making Exercise Beer-Mug ‘like the real thing’, the original text has Wilson reply, ‘obviously [[prisoners must be bayoneted to death, women must be raped,]] (Wow!) our losses divided by ten and the enemy’s multiplied by twenty!’ (Christie 1994: 80) The double-bracketed section was cut in production, and given the sensitivities already inflamed by the film one can see why Spud’s severe ironies had to go. Yet there remains a threatening brutality in the contrast between young men in battle dress waving their rifles around in the steam room and the naked flesh of vulnerable elderly men, a scenario that summons images of the Fascist massacres even then taking place in Europe. ‘Blimp is a film dominated by women.’ (Macdonald 1994: 210) While Candy’s hopeless love for Edith Hunter is the reason for his belatedness in a rapidly changing world, each of Edith’s incarnations frankly opposes Candy’s anachronistic views on the conduct of war and the nature of the enemy. ‘Hunter’, ‘Wynne’, and ‘Cannon’ are names that suggest masculine aggression, and Deborah Kerr succeeded in creating three very distinct, yet linked characters out of the minimal number of lines given to her roles. Paradoxically, Edith is the most directly outspoken of the three, even though she is the most severely restricted by an hourglass figure and the conventions of her time. She is accused of being a ‘suffragette’, four years before the first recorded use of the word, and she adroitly manoeuvres Candy into confronting Kaunitz in the Berlin café. Barbara Wynne is the most enigmatic of Candy’s three loves, and her denunciation of German atrocities during the failed visit to Theo in the P-o-W camp is all the more striking, delivered as it is by her apparently reserved character. Angela ‘Johnny’ Cannon and her boyfriend Spud embody the new, youthful Britain that increasing numbers of people yearned for in the midst of war, a genuine meritocracy that would finally shake off the burdens of class and established privilege. Yet the liberation from the repressive conventions of gender enjoyed by Angela/Johnny is also compromised. She has to adopt male values and attributes in order to operate in the brave new world of 1943, even as she is still characterized as ‘Mata Hari’, the seductive vamp who knocks her boyfriend out at the beginning of the action. The couple chase each other around the roadhouse tearoom to the music of Glenn Miller on the juke-box (‘War has become/Like a juke-box tune that we dare not stop’ – Auden, For the Time Being, 1944), an American soundtrack that has forever blown away the elegant lilt of Mignon’s aria and the Café Hohenzollern of 1902. A.L. Kennedy notes that just one of Blimp’s small but telling tragedies is an absence of children. The two sons of Edith and Theo have become Nazis and so are lost to their parents, Clive and Barbara were not blessed with a child – did Barbara die during childbirth in Jamaica? – and when Clive jokes before his duel that he has learned the outlandish name ‘Oberleutnant Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff’ so that he can tell his grandchildren whose ear he cut off, we know that this will never come to be. Candy himself becomes the child of his time, ‘a kind of holy fool, walking the battlegrounds of his century, underestimated and overlooked’. (Kennedy 1997: 51) Further Reading James Chapman, ‘The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) Reconsidered’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 15:1, 1995. Ian Christie (ed.) The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, London, Faber, 1994. A. L. Kennedy, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, London, BFI, 1997. Kevin Macdonald, Emeric Pressburger. The Life and Death of a Screenwriter, London, Faber, 1994. Michael Powell, A Life in Movies. An Autobiography, London, Methuen, 1987. David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 4th edition, London, Little Brown, 2002. Nigel Wheale, ‘Beyond the Trauma Stratus’: Lynette Roberts’ Gods with Stainless Ears and the Post-War Cultural Landscape’, Welsh Writing in English, vol. 3, 1997. Nigel Wheale Yüklə 1,18 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
|