Humphrey Jennings (review)

Images of British national identity are complex, and even unsettling. Umpteen television commercials have invoked the idyll of the countryside to sell butter or cheese, or have presented hoary-handed Northerners wandering down terraced streets, fortified by a particular brand of breakfast cereal. For those who came of age during the Thatcher era, these images remind us of the Little Britain nostalgia that was one of the more depressing aspects of the 1980s. They seem to ignore this country's racial diversity, to be part of a nostalgia for the Second World War and its myth of one nation pulling together.

Judging from this fascinating book, the documentary filmmaker Humphrey Jennings had a lot to do with creating these images. As Keith Beattie points out, sequences from Jennings's most famous documentaries have been used in many later films about the war, so much so that they are almost an act of history in themselves. Here are lyrical evocations of wheat fields, horses and ploughs, of waves crashing against rocks, of the sacred dead petrified in churches, and sturdy British workers drinking in pubs. This is a united, white Britain, the picture preserved in aspic and endorsed by the British National Party.

Yet, as Keith Beattie shows in his detailed examination of some of Jennings's finest work, these associations are very misleading. It is true that he was concerned with national identity and drew deeply on long established myths to define it. Nevertheless, his work is subtle and nuanced. Perhaps because Beattie is Australian, and therefore a sort of British insider-outsider, he is sensitive to these undercurrents, and he is able to show how the director's art made those nuances possible.

Jennings's background had a major influence on his style as a filmmaker. A Cambridge graduate, and a contemporary of William Empson and Michael Redgrave, he was a poet, painter and an early champion of the Surrealists. In the 1930s, he began making films for the GPO Film Unit under the rather grumpy supervision of John Grierson, but found his voice during the Second World War when he directed classics such as Listen to Britain (1942) and Fires Were Started (1943) for the Crown Film Unit. These films were supposed to be propaganda calls to unity and fortitude. Yet, like Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger in fictional cinema, the ostensible purpose of the work was rendered complex by a poetic strain. What John Ford was to the American West, Humphrey Jennings was to wartime Britain's vision of itself. The key to this was ambiguity, both in content and in style.

As Beattie shows, Jennings's films do not assert a unified point of view, but present a series of diverse forces in balance and a skeptical view about the future. His varied images suggest this. On the one hand, there is the myth of the countryside as a secure haven from the storms of the world. On the other hand, he depicted life in the industrial north, with its mineshafts, terraced houses and smoke. The past mattered, but it was not fixed; it informed the present and reached out into the future. In editing terms, too, the filmmaker was elliptical and undogmatic. One of Beattie's best chapters concerns Jennings's use of collage, the way in which images were juxtaposed in dynamic patterns, while sound, in particular music, created surprising associations.

Perhaps the most memorable example is in Listen to Britain when a sequence of workers singing in a factory segues into the music hall duo Flanagan and Allen crooning "Underneath the Arches" to a large audience in a canteen. This sound, in turn, blends into shots of Dame Myra Hess playing Mozart at the National Portrait Gallery. The effect is surprising, emotional and creates a unity out of very different elements. As the author says, it is a form of poetry, a black-and-white spectacle, something to enjoy rather than to analyse.

All this is very different from the didactic approach that Grierson championed. Jennings was bold in other areas too...