Humphrey Jennings

Keith Beattie

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780719078552
• eBook ISBN: 9781847797278
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

From dramatic reflections on the Blitz to insightful examinations of post-war conditions, Jennings' startling documentary films redefined the genre. The book carefully examines and explains the central components of Jennings' most significant films, and considers the relevance of his filmmaking to British cinema and contemporary experience.

1 Modernity, myth, colour and collage:
the early films

The early stages in a career are problematic. Biographers and other writers seeking to assess the work of creative individuals either pass over the formative years in a subject’s career on their way to discussion of the ‘mature’ work, or scrutinise the early work for signs of burgeoning creativity. Generally, assessments of Jennings’ career fall into the former category, and his early films are either ignored or noted only briefly. According to Kevin Jackson, Jennings’ biographer, Jennings’ early work ‘seems almost hermetically sealed … from his private intellectual concerns’.¹ Contrary to such an assessment, Jennings’ foundational films do connect with and inform his early and ongoing intellectual preoccupations. His lifelong concern with aspects of technological modernity is evident in his earliest films, Post Haste and Locomotives (both 1934), with their focus on locomotives as symbols of modern experience. In another way his films The Farm (1938) and English Harvest (1939) apply and exploit features of a myth of rural England, an ideological strain which Jennings analysed in his studies of British poetry and which he also deployed in various forms in a number of later films. Jennings’ early work also includes a number of films shot in colour. Working with the British Dufaycolor system, a rival to the US Technicolor process, the films were in many ways experiments in the use of colour stock. While Jennings worked exclusively with black-and-white after the 1930s, the early experimentation with colour presaged his later innovations and experiments with documentary form, particularly his use of reconstruction and a collagist associative montage. In these various ways, then, Jennings’ early films point to a number of concerns and themes that characterise his later work. Typically dismissed as negligible, Jennings’ films of the 1930s embody themes and practices that he would develop across his filmmaking career.

The engine of modernity

Jennings began to make films in 1934, the year he joined the Film Unit of the General Post Office. In that year he made, in addition to Post Haste and Locomotives, the short film The Story of the Wheel, a simple narrative from prehistory to the advent of the steam engine. Jackson passes over these works as ‘modest to the point of invisibility’.² Certainly the films are simplified narrative accounts, though to dismiss them outright is to ignore the fact that the films reflect in part Jennings’ developing ideas concerning the complex and unsettling place of machines within society and, as a related intellectual strand, his reflections on the emergence of a technologically based modernity. In these ways the films can be seen as ideational antecedents of his monumental (unfinished) study of this theme, Pandæmonium.

Jennings was concerned in Pandæmonium to examine the effects of the Industrial Revolution, a process he understood to have been experienced across three centuries during which time thought and action were mechanised. He called the book an ‘imaginative history’ of the Industrial Revolution, and he adopted a method which he summarised in terms of the presentation of ‘Images’ (selected quotations and passages from writings from various periods), each of which is arranged ‘in a particular place in an unrolling film’.³ The method was enacted in the form of a wide collection of excerpts from sources as diverse as scientific reports, letters, autobiographies, diaries, novels, polemical tracts and philosophical treatises produced within the period 1660 to 1886. The work opens with a description from Milton’s Paradise Lost of fallen angels constructing ‘Pandæmonium’, the Palace of Devils. The extract inaugurates the central theme examined within the narrative, the creation of a mechanised and materialistic hell behind which, yet still recoverable, are the lost spiritual values of an older, more satisfying, moral order. Observations from the nineteenth century on the spread of factories embody the theme, as captured in Dickens’ description of ‘Coketown’ as a ‘town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves … It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye … and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously … like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness’.⁴ The conflict between industrial machinery and the degradation of nature is posed in many quotations from the era, and the fatalism which infused much Victorian thought concerning the effects of the machine is amply demonstrated in the selected passages. More particularly, Jennings identifies through the use of various excerpts a spreading industrialisation and its relationship with a resistant culture, one that the later social observer Raymond Williams described in terms of a ‘whole way of life’.⁵ Indeed, Jennings’ line of thinking in Pandæmonium can be situated within the ‘culture and society’ tradition of social critique, with its roots in the Romantic movement analysed by Williams.

In another way, the intellectual montage of the work reflects a central aesthetic practice of modernism, that of collage. Pandæmonium exploits the potential to create meaning inherent in a Benjaminian juxtaposition of extracts released from their original contexts to reveal a narrative implicit within the combination of fragments. In this way the ‘choice of texts refuses any simple, reductionist understanding of the Industrial Revolution and bears testimony to its massive complexity and cultural ambiguity: it is both the “stupendous system of manufacture” and the exploitation and degradation of working people’.⁶ Another, more inclusive ambiguity informs the work: industrialism is represented as both a cause of social degradation and a site of societal regeneration. Industrialism may have wrought deleterious effects on physical landscapes, yet such effects can, in an openly utopian inflection of thought, be controlled within a future in which science, technology, poetry and philosophy together function to serve the needs of society.

Occupying a central place within the analysis is the railway and the locomotive engine. Pandæmonium includes twenty-five entries related to ‘The Railway’, more than any other reference to industrialisation. Elsewhere Jennings emphasised the significant cultural implications of the coming of the railway: ‘Not only did it create a new architecture and a new type of engineer, new culture of the railway ticket and the railway station – but it altered irrevocably the nature of dreams and of childish fantasy (ambition to be an engine driver) … It has given us a different conception of space, of speed and of power. It has rendered possible mass activities – the Cup final, the monster rally, the seaside holiday, the hiking excursion – whose ramifying effects on our behaviour and mentality almost extend beyond imagination’.⁷ In Pandæmonium the experiential impacts of the railway are outlined in equally portentous terms. The railway inaugurates mass transportation; as one extract states: ‘At a recent meeting of the Metropolitan Railway Company I exhibited one million of letters, in order to show the number of passengers (thirty-seven millions) that had been conveyed during the previous months’.⁸ Other extracts depict the train compartment as a place of social engagement, coincidence and fortuitous meetings. Underwriting each effect of the new technology is the experience of speed: an extract in Pandæmonium from 1839 describes the movement of a train as ‘the likest thing to Faust’s flight on the Devil’s mantle; or as if some huge steam night-bird had flung you on its back, and was sweeping through unknown space with you’.⁹

According to Jackson, Jennings’ prose-poem ‘The Iron Horse’ (a description of a steam locomotive in terms of the well-known equestrian metaphor), published in June 1938 in the third edition of the London Bulletin, was the earliest prose sketch for the work that would become known as Pandæmonium.¹⁰ In the next issue of the journal, Jennings, serving as editor, included extracts from six texts, among them R. M. Ballantyne’s The Iron Horse (1891). Jackson concludes that ‘It is reasonable to assume that, from this time [1938] onwards, he was engaged in the prodigious task of researching Pandæmonium’.¹¹ Given the importance in Pandæmonium of the impact of industrialisation and a technological modernity, as centrally represented by the railway and the locomotive, it can be reasonably assumed that Jennings’ ideas on this topic are traceable back at least to his earliest films for the GPO, the railway-themed Post Haste and Locomotives of 1934.

Post Haste constructs a history of the 300 years of the post office through a method reminiscent of Pandæmonium – a collagist assemblage of extracts from various historical documents. Stuart Legg argued that Post Haste may be one of the earliest examples of a film composed of still images.¹² The soundtrack is also innovative, combining a range of voices reading various descriptions, noises of steam trains, hoof beats, a post horn and sounds of modern modes of transport. The narrative begins in the seventeenth century with the inauguration of a public postal service. The development of the service is illustrated by drawings of mail sorting and delivery on horseback and by stagecoach. The introduction of the railway, and its significance to the postal service, is emphasised in the account, as is the introduction of the Penny Post. The role of the railway in speeding delivery is reinforced through reference to mail sorting in a Post Office railway carriage, and to the track-side hooks which automatically collect mailbags from the moveable sorting room. Beyond such practices, the film outlines the economic expansion of the Post Office, which incorporated the Parcels Post Company in the 1880s and led to the modern Post Office. The function of transportation in the development of the Post Office is extended through reference to varieties of contemporary modes of transport used to expedite mail delivery – vans, trains and aeroplanes.

Like Post Haste, Locomotives is an account of technological development, without the reference in Post Haste to an attendant expansion of business practices. The theory of steam power is sketched through reference to a whistling kettle, which in turn is used to introduce the operation of steam pumps in the mills and mines of the eighteenth century. The same uncomplicated technological determinism motivates the conclusion of the narrative, with its focus on the development of the steam railway engine and an attendant expansion of railways across the countryside. In developing its narrative the film includes numerous shots and close-ups of the workings of models of steam engines. The detailed attention to the mechanical operations of the engines – in effect, a celebration in expressive visual terms (and musical accompaniment: the film is cut to sections of Schubert’s Rosamunde) of the power and efficiency of technology – is matched by a similar attitude to mechanised power in Arthur Elton’s Aero-Engine, also produced in 1934. Writing two years earlier in his manifesto ‘First Principles of Documentary’, Grierson had set out his opposition to what he interpreted as the pure formalism of a modernist work such as Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Die Symphonie eines Grosstadt (Berlin: The Symphony of a Great City, 1927), a film which, among images of what Grierson called a ‘cross section’ of the city, opens with close-ups of a train as it approaches Berlin.¹³ According to Grierson, ‘What [is] more attractive (for a man of visual taste) than to swing wheels and pistons about in a ding-dong description of a machine, when he has little to say about the man who tends it, and still less to say about the tin-pan product it spills?’¹⁴ The criticism could have been aimed at Jennings, and points to the difference in aesthetic tastes that was to mark the relationship of Jennings and Grierson in coming years.

Jennings edited both Post Haste and Locomotives, and though the editing is more workmanlike than inspired, it does point to his capacity in this regard, which is commonly overlooked in the critical attention given to the role of editors such as Stewart McAllister in the production of Jennings’ later films. The fact that the shots were largely edited from archival footage reflects conditions within the GPO Film Unit in which the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series editors’ foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Modernity, myth, colour and collage: the early films
• 2 Work and leisure: Spare Time
• 3 Sound, image and nation: Words for Battle and Listen to Britain
• 4 Documentary reconstruction and prognostication: Fires Were Started and The Silent Village
• 5 ‘What will befall Britain?’ A Diary for Timothy
• 6 An ambiguous national iconography: Family Portrait
• 7 Legacies
• Afterword
• Filmography
• References
• Index