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  • Humphrey Jennings, the Left and the Experience of Modernity in mid twentieth-century Britain
  • Ben Jones (bio) and Rebecca Searle (bio)

Humphrey Jennings is best remembered today for the films he directed for the Crown Film Unit during the Second World War. For Lindsay Anderson, who did much to establish his posthumous reputation, Listen to Britain (1942), Fires Were Started (1943) and Diary for Timothy (filmed 1944–5 but released in 1946) were Jennings’s finest achievements, capturing, with a poet’s eye, ‘the best of us’ in wartime.1 Subsequent scholars have largely followed Anderson’s direction and this trio of wartime ‘greats’ have received extensive analysis in works by Colls and Dodd, Aldgate and Richards, Stansky and Abrahams, Winston and Eley.2 While Jennings’s wartime documentaries have achieved a secure place within the canon, postwar films such as Family Portrait (1950) fare less well in the critics’ eyes. In the seminal article ‘Only Connect’ (1954) Anderson argued that Family Portrait lacked the passion of his wartime documentaries: ‘For reality, his wartime films stand alone; and they are sufficient achievement’.3 While in 1954 Anderson conceded that neither the ‘beautifully finished’ Family Portrait nor the earlier Dim Little Island ought to be ‘dismissed’, his attitude later hardened. In 1981, in a postscript to his original assessment, Anderson argued:

In the end they can be dismissed. In fact they must be. They demonstrate only too sadly that the traditionalist spirit was unable to adjust itself to the changed circumstances of Britain after the war. By the time Jennings made Family Portrait for the 1951 Festival of Britain, the ‘family’ could only be a sentimental fiction, inhabiting a Britain dedicated to the status quo.4

In Anderson’s reassessment, the Jennings of 1950 was a ‘traditionalist’ parading a ‘fantasy of empire’ and seeking refuge in the past.5 This scathing critique has heavily influenced subsequent scholarly interpretations of the film. For Angus Calder, who quotes Anderson approvingly, Family Portrait was ‘sentimental and confused’.6 For Paul Addison, Jennings was guilty of [End Page 190] peddling ‘sentimental guff’, in a film which encapsulated ‘the sublime sense of insular content reflected in various corners of the festival’.7 The film historian Andrew Higson concurred, arguing that Family Portrait’s backward-looking nostalgia indicated a conservative retreat from Jennings’s liberal, heterogeneous representations of wartime experience.8

In this article we challenge such interpretations, which posit a sharp disjuncture between Jennings’s wartime and postwar films. Indeed we argue that all Jennings’s films, from about 1937 onwards, need to be understood as but one part of a wider, polymorphous attempt to comprehend modern Britain. Jennings was more than a just a filmmaker. He was also a critical practitioner of surrealism, a founder of Mass Observation, a poet, a painter and a historian. This article builds upon the research of Kevin Jackson, Michel Remy, Kevin Robbins and Frank Webster, who have considered various aspects of Jennings’s work beyond his wartime film-making.9 In particular, we focus our analysis on a theme that united Jennings’s disparate cultural practices in both peace and war: the attempt to document the British experience of modernity. While Jennings did not use the term modernity, he was trying to capture the profound impact on everyday life of a range of overlapping economic, social and cultural transformations since the mid seventeenth century. These included the birth of industrial capitalism, significant technological developments and the emergence of new modes of perception which had fundamentally altered the way that people understood the world and their place within it. We therefore use the term modernity to mean this wholesale transformation in experience which Jennings sought to document historically and which, at the time of his death in 1950, he perceived to be still in process.

Although that concern is evident throughout Jennings’s career, this article will concentrate on the two works which represent the fullest exposition of his ideas. The first, Pandaemonium, was a project that Jennings began in the late 1930s and pursued during the remaining thirteen years of his life. Posthumously published, this ambitious book documented the ways in which industrialization and modernization were experienced in Britain...

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