1

Humphrey Jennings’s ‘Film Fables’:

Democracy and Image in The Silent Village

Masashi Hoshino

This is the Author’s Original (preprint) version. For the final version, see Modernist Cultures

15.2 (2020): 133–154 [https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/mod.2020.0286].

This essay is the British Association for Modernist Studies Essay Prize winner for 2018.

Abstract:

This essay explores modernism’s aesthetic and political implications through examining the works of . The essay takes as a starting point the tension inherent to the democratic aesthetic of Mass Observation between the individual observers and the editors who write up. This tension can be effectively examined in terms of what Jacques Rancière calls

‘film fables’: the Aristotelian ‘fable’ of dramatic action and cinema’s ‘fable’ of egalitarian treatment of ‘passive’ images. The essay argues that the paradox between the two ‘fables’ can be observed in Jennings’s works, especially in his essays on Thomas Gray, his ‘report’ poems, and The Silent Village (1943), a dystopian propaganda film set in a Welsh village invaded by

Nazis Germany. By looking at these works, the essay illustrates how the utopian longing for

‘pure art’ in modernism is related to the impossible idea of ‘democracy’.

Keywords: Mass Observation; Documentary; British Surrealism; propaganda; Jacques

Rancière 2

‘They Speak for Themselves’

In their article ‘Poetic Description and Mass-Observation’ published in New Verse in February

1937, Charles Madge and Humphrey Jennings present the method for their newly launched project of Mass Observation by juxtaposing three quotations respectively from a contemporary novel, a description of a historical event, and an observation by a Mass Observer who ‘has simply been a recording instrument of the facts’.1 Among these passages, Madge/Jennings argue that the third is the most objective. This statement seems odd, considering that the observer’s report is written in the first person and reads like a personal recollection, whereas the other two are written in the seemingly more ‘objective’ third person. However, the

‘objectivity’ of the report is indeed heightened through a reflection on its subjectivity: ‘Such observations as the insolent or “confidential” manner of the ’bus conductor, though subjective, become objective because the subjectivity of the observer is one of the facts under observation’.2 Here the observer herself is an object of observation, and for that reason her observation becomes ‘objective’ despite the subjective tone of the text itself. Madge/Jennings write: ‘MASS-OBSERVATION is a technique for obtaining objective statements about human behaviour. The primary use of these statements is to the other observers: an interchange of observations being the foundation of social consciousness’. 3 Thus, a state of mutual observations engenders a certain sense of collectivity, a democratic coexistence of observers whose observations are juxtaposed without any hierarchal order. By this method,

Madge/Jennings explore, in Jeremy Noel-Todd’s words, ‘the possibility of democratically

Quoted passages from the Humphrey Jennings archive at Pembroke College, Cambridge are copyright The Humphrey Jennings Estate and are reproduced with permission. I would like to thank the Estate for allowing me to use these materials. 1 Humphrey Jennings and Charles Madge, ‘Poetic Description and Mass-Observation’, New Verse, 24 (1937), 1–6 (2). 2 Ibid., 2–3. 3 Ibid., 3. All italics in the subsequent quotations are in the original sources unless otherwise noted. 3 transcribing, rather than authorially “inscrib[ing]”, the poetic consciousness of a people’.4

In this regard, the ‘mass’ in Mass Observation are not only the observed but also the observers themselves. As Nick Hubble points out, whether ‘Mass Observation’ means observation ‘of’ the mass or ‘by’ the mass is a question that has been raised since the beginning of the project.5 As Madge/Jennings claim in another essay, Mass Observation ‘is among other things giving working-class and middle class people a chance to speak for themselves, about themselves’.6 In this way, Mass Observation aims at a new form of collective poetry, not only

‘about’ the ‘mass’ but also written ‘by’ the ‘mass’. However, this ideal of collectivity faces a dilemma; as the reports cannot become something more than mere raw materials without someone who edits them, when collected reports are aligned as a body of text, the subjectivity of the editors necessarily governs the entire text. Madge/Jennings declare that their aim is to

‘de-value considerably the status of the “poet”’ so that it ‘makes the term “poet” apply, not to his performance, but to his profession, like “footballer”’.7 Yet, there is still need for the editor who assumes larger responsibility than that of the observers, just as a football team needs a manager who directs it. The democratic ideal of mutual observations is therefore always interrupted by the process of writing up, of presenting the text.

This ambivalence can be observed in May the Twelfth: Mass-Observation Day-

Surveys 1937 (1937), Mass Observation’s first book-length report published under the names of Madge and Jennings. The book attempts to capture the collective consciousness on the

Coronation day of George VI. It consists of reports sent in by Observers from all over the

4 Jeremy Noel-Todd, ‘Mass Illuminations: Jennings, Madge, Rimbaud and the “Popular” Prose Poem’, Critical Quarterly, 57.3 (2015), 51–65 (57). 5 Nick Hubble, Mass Observation and Everyday Life (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 2. 6 Humphrey Jennings and Charles Madge, ‘They Speak for Themselves: Mass Observation and Social Narrative’, in The Everyday Life Reader, ed. by Ben Highmore, 2016, pp. 148–52 (p. 148). Originally published in Life and Letters, 17 (1937), pp. 37–42. 7 Jennings and Madge, ‘Poetic Description’, 2–3. 4 country, answers to the questionnaire handed out in the street, and telephone reports by

Observers who surveyed events in London. The editors write: ‘By these three methods, three kinds of focus were obtained […]. Close-up and long shot, detail and ensemble, were all provided’.8 The book’s method makes it read like a written documentary film. Thus, May the

Twelfth can be compared with not only modernist day-novels such as Mrs Dalloway and

Ulysses,9 but also with a certain type of documentary film. Brian Winston argues that although the distinction between documentary and dramatized films are often made by the former’s lack of narrative, many of them are actually ‘narrativised’ by organizing the content into a certain timescale, usually a day. Winston sees this characteristic in Jennings’s wartime propaganda film (1941), which presents images seemingly non-narrativized yet organized into a ‘strongly inscribed diurnal pattern, in this case from afternoon to afternoon’.10 This strategy is effectively used in films of the ‘city symphony’ genre, such as Walter Ruttmann’s

Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (1927) or Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929).

The latter, for example, declares at the outset that it ‘is an experiment in cinematic communication of real events without the help of intertitles, without the help of a story’. And yet, as Winston points out, the film starts with images of the people waking up in the morning, thereby framing its content into a narrative of a day in the life.11 Another ‘city symphony’, Rien que les heures (1926) directed by Jennings’s mentor at the GPO Film Unit Alberto Cavalcanti, introduces itself as ‘not a depiction of the fashionable life and elegant life, but of the everyday

8 Humphrey Jennings and Charles Madge, May the Twelfth: Mass-Observation Day Surveys 1937 (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), p. 90. 9 For a discussion of the similarity between May the Twelfth and the modernist day-books, see James Buzard, ‘Mass-Observation, Modernism, and Auto-Ethnography’, Modernism/Modernity, 4.3 (1997), pp. 93–122 (p. 111). 10 Brian Winston, ‘Life as Narrativised’, in The Documentary Film Book, ed. by Brian Winston (London: BFI, 2013), pp. 89–97 (p. 92). 11 Ibid., pp. 91–92. 5 life of the humble, the down trodden. Painters of every nationality depict the city, but only a succession of images can bring it to life’. This reads like a manifesto of how documentary cinema captures myriad impressions of everyday which can be incorporated in neither a traditional narrative form nor a static image. Just after this intertitle, an image of a clock turning midnight signals the beginning of the day, and the same shot recurs at the end, thereby closing the 24-hour time frame.12 In this way, the film presents fragmentary images not in a narrative as a set of dramatic actions, and yet in a form which could be considered as a narrative which coincides with a certain passage of time. This strategy is also observable in May the Twelfth, which attempts to capture everyday lives of the unnamed people by a succession of images.

Jacques Rancière’s notion of ‘film fables’ is helpful in clarifying the troubled relationship between this form of documentary and the traditional, linear narrative mode.

Rancière pits his concept against the Aristotelian ‘fable’, i.e., the plot as an ordered action. The

‘film fable’, by contrast, addresses a different order of ‘Life’, which ‘has nothing to do with dramatic progression but is instead a long and continuous movement made up of an infinity of micro movements’.13 By the use of the mechanical camera-eye which records the ‘sensible’ that is not ‘intelligible’, the film is expected to thwart the fable of dramatic action by presenting

‘pure’ images, thereby emancipating art’s autonomy from the servitude to the intellect. The two

‘fables’ are guiding principles respectively of what Rancière calls the ‘representational’ and

‘aesthetic’ ‘regimes of art’. The former entails the hierarchy of subject matters or genres, whereas in the latter, everything, even a banal everyday object, becomes available to art, and

12 For a discussion on the ‘city symphonies’ in relation to modernist writing, and the importance of the image of the clock in the genre, see Laura Marcus, ‘“A Hymn to Movement”: The “City Symphony” of the 1920s and 1930s’, Modernist Cultures, 5.1 (2010), 30–46 (31–32). 13 Jacques Rancière, Film Fables, trans. by Emiliano Battista (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), p. 2. Hereafter cited as FF in the text. 6 in this sense the latter is democratic in its egalitarian treatment of subject matters of art.14 The

‘aesthetic regime’ is therefore largely identified with art of what is often called the ‘modernist’ era. Yet, Rancière does not simply celebrate the ‘aesthetic regime’; rather, he is interested in the paradoxical relationship between the two ‘regimes’. Rancière points out that the aspiration to ‘pureness’ of art characteristic to the ‘aesthetic regime’ remains ‘an inconsistent utopia’(FF

3). The ‘pureness’ of images dreamed of by film-makers such as Vertov is possible only by some sort of active work, because the ‘camera cannot be made passive because it is passive already, because it is of necessity at the service of the intelligence that manipulates it’ (FF 9).

In other words, just because the camera can technically depict everything, it is at the mercy of the artist, and its ‘passivity’ that ‘supposedly crowns the program of the aesthetic regime of art lends itself just as well to the work of restoring the old representative power of active form of arranging passive matter’. For this reason, the ‘film fable is a thwarted fable’ (FF 10–11).

Cinema therefore entails a double negation of the dramatic action and of the idea of

‘pure’ art, thereby constituting ‘an active dialectic in which one tragedy takes form at the expense of another’ (FF 4). This dialectic entails a ‘counter-effect’, i.e. the restoration of the

‘representative’ order of the fable of action. Rancière names Listen to Britain as ‘a limit example’ of this counter-effect. Although it is a war-propaganda, it portrays the British people at peaceful moments. Rancière argues that Jennings’s ‘exemplary use of the paradox inherent to the film fable’ enables him to succeed in the ‘paradoxical political choice of showing a country at peace to win support for its war efforts’:

The peaceful moments that make up the film—a face and light glimpsed behind the

window, two men chatting as they watch the sunset, a song in a train, a dance contest—

14 For a detailed account on the ‘regimes of art’, see Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. by Gabriel Rockhill (London: Bloomsbury, 2006). 7

are nothing other than the moments of suspension that punctuate fiction films and that

invest the constructed verisimilitude of the action and the story with the naked truth,

the meaningless truth of life. The fable tends to intersperse these moments of

suspension/moments of the real with action sequences. Jennings, by isolating them in

this strange ‘documentary’, highlights just how ambivalent this play of exchanges,

between the verisimilar action characteristic of representative art and the life without

reason emblematic of aesthetic art, really is. (FF 17)

At first sight, Jennings’s aesthetics of everydayness seems exemplary of the ‘aesthetic regime of art’. However, the ‘pureness’ of art achieved by the de-figuration of the old fable is again thwarted by the artistic operation that governs the work to become a propaganda film. This

‘counter-effect’ makes the film an effective piece of propaganda. Jennings’s film lets the images

‘speak for themselves’; yet, the seemingly achieved dream of the ‘aesthetic regime’ is ‘thwarted’ by another ‘fable’ punctuated by Jennings’s montage.

Rancière’s discussion enables us to reconsider May the Twelfth’s aim at ‘objectivity’.

Its treatment of individual reports as resources for collective poetry is suggestive of the

‘aesthetic regime’ in the sense that it uses everyday objects for art without imposing a hierarchy.

And yet, the book is unable to sustain such a democratic principle; as the collected reports are edited by Madge and Jennings, the egalitarian principle of images is subject to the editors’ direction, just as ‘passive’ camera-shots cannot remain ‘passive’ in the making of film. This difficulty inherent in the project’s democratic aesthetic might have led the project to the later situation in which, in Jed Esty’s words, its ‘attempt at a radically democratic and decentralized representational apparatus [...] ended up becoming normative and even statist in its effect’.15

15 Jed Esty, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003), p. 45. 8

However, Madge/Jennings suggest a possibility of overcoming this limitation through the educational aspect of the project. At the end of the book, they write:

By publishing this book at this stage we are fulfilling another of the tasks of MASS-

OBSERVATION, that of inviting observers and potential observers to contribute both

to the analysis of material here presented and also to the future construction of

MASS-OBSERVATION on a truly democratic basis.16

‘At this stage’ suggests the authors’ awareness that the project’s democratic aim is far from achieved. As Benjamin Kohlmann argues, the limitation of May the Twelfth’s democratic aim can be seen in the ‘enduring centrality of the role of the bourgeois poet’; Madge/Jennings’s work is informed with ‘a keener awareness that—societal conditions being what they were— any writing performed by the masses would continue to be troubled by the spectre of the “dead” bourgeois poet’.17 And yet, by declaring that they are going to involve future observers not only in the observation but also in the analysis, Madge/Jennings aspire for a truly democratic relationship in the future between the observer and the observed. This growth of the democratic community is based on the growth of individual observers; the act of observing ‘heightens’ the observer’s ‘power of seeing what is around him [sic] and gives him new interest in and understanding of it’.18 In this sense, Mass Observation’s texts should be regarded as fragments of the process towards a truly democratic community, though its vision is always postponed by the process of editing, which cannot but reduce the multiplicity of the reports to certain individuals’ work. Madge/Jennings recognize the difficulty of achieving such a truly

16 Jennings and Madge, May the Twelfth, p. 414. 17 Benjamin Kohlmann, Committed Styles: Modernism, Politics, and Left-Wing Literature in the 1930s (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014), p. 153. 18 Jennings and Madge, May the Twelfth, p. iv. 9 democratic basis, and it is in this very fact that we can detect the movement’s utopian impulse.

In what follows, I argue that the tension we have seen can be observed in Jennings’s other works. By examining Jennings’s lasting preoccupation with the two ‘fables’, this essay explores how his modernist works strive to let both the people and the images ‘speak for themselves’. Although this attempt faces the limitation inherent to the ‘film fables’, I argue, his failure registers a fleeting utopian moment of ‘democracy’ and ‘pure art’.

‘Plagiarism Is Necessary’

In 1934, Jennings sent his essay entitled ‘A Passage in The Progress of Poesy’ to T. S. Eliot for consideration of publication in The Criterion. Eliot liked the article but thought it was too long, and asked Jennings to shorten it. Jennings did not reply, and the article was never published.19

In it, Jennings argues that a passage in Thomas Gray’s The Progress of Poesy (1757) is filled with phrases borrowed from other poets such as Milton, Cowley, and Pope.20 Comparing

Gray’s poem (subtitled ‘A Pindaric Ode’) with Pindar’s odes, Jennings argues that the former celebrates matters external to poetry itself such as military conquests, while the latter celebrates

Poetry itself, thereby making Poetry ‘both the Conqueror and the narrator of that conquest’.

Here, Jennings sees ‘a distinction between poetry as description, and what is now called “pure” poetry’. Thus, there are two kinds of poetry: ‘“Augustan” poetry’ which ‘belongs to the concept of rationalist empire and so consists of a description of a royal or heroic or military action’, and ‘Prophetic poetry’ which ‘belong[s] to the individual visionary’. Jennings sees in Gray the

‘duel’ between these two kinds of poetry, or between ‘the meaning of the words as descriptions

19 Kevin Jackson, Humphrey Jennings (London: Picador, 2004), pp. 128–132. 20 Humphrey Jennings, A Passage in The Progress of Poesy (1934), typescript, Humphrey Jennings Papers, Pembroke College Library, University of Cambridge (hereafter HJP), p. 4. 10 of action or “plot”, and the effect of the same words as “poetry”’.21 In Gray’s ode, the latter is closer to a victory. Jennings concludes:

It will be therefore not enough for Gray’s poetry to describe other poetry—the

function of poetry as description has been conquered also—it must celebrate Poetry

without making descriptions even of poetry. This can only be satisfied if the poem

be made of quotations, for quotations do not describe. It presents. It presents Poetry.22

Jennings calls Gray’s ‘scheme of writing with a selection of other poets’ language (or more simply, of constructing his poem out of quotation)’ ‘plagiarism’.23 This is not to condemn

Gray’s lack of originality; as the epigraph for Jennings’s essay taken from Lautréamont says,

‘Le plagiat est necessaire [Plagiarism is necessary]’. As the reference to Lautréamont suggests,

Jennings conceives ‘plagiarism’ as similar to the Surrealist technique of collage. In his first manifesto, Breton also criticizes the novelistic description of Dostoyevsky in favour of the

‘poetic’ attitude of Surrealism.24 Jennings’s challenge to the narrative of ‘description’ by the method of ‘presentation’ also resembles the documentary cinema’s counter-position of the ‘film fable’ to the Aristotelian fable. In this regard, Gray’s poetry can be seen as a prototype of montage.

Jennings employs the method of ‘plagiarism’ in his prose poems. A piece published in the June 1936 ‘Double Surrealist Number’ of Contemporary Poetry and Prose consists of three ‘reports’. The first ‘report’ goes:

21 Ibid., p. 32. 22 Ibid., p. 37. 23 Ibid., p. 10. 24 André Breton, ‘Manifesto of Surrealism (1924)’, in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1969), pp. 1–48 (pp. 6–8). 11

The conditions for this race, the most important of the Classic races for three-year-

old fillies, were ideal, for the weather was fine and cool. About one o’clock the

Aurora again appeared over the hills in a south direction presenting a brilliant mass

of light. Once again Captain Allison made a perfect start, for the field was sent away

well for the first time that they approached the tapes. It was always evident that the

most attenuated light of the Aurora sensibly dimmed the stars, like a thin veil drawn

over them. We frequently listened for any sound proceeding from this phenomenon,

but never heard any.25

A description of a horse race is interrupted by an account of Aurora. This passage is composed of quotations from two sources without acknowledgement; the first and the third sentences are taken from an article on a horse race from The Times, 8 June 1935, and the other sentences are from The Three Voyages of Captain Parry (1833).26 By juxtaposing materials taken from different contexts like readymade objects, the Aurora from the 19th century expedition to the

North Pole intrudes into the everydayness of the horse race of the present day. This method of collage reminds us of Tzara’s instruction to make a Dadaist poem by mixing words from a single newspaper article.27 Jennings’s fellow British Surrealists such as Charles Madge and

Roger Roughton also wrote poems made of excerpts from newspaper articles.28 Yet, what

25 Humphrey Jennings, ‘Three Reports’, in The Humphrey Jennings Film Reader (hereafter HJFR), ed. by Kevin Jackson (Manchester: Carcanet, 1993), pp. 290–91 (p. 290). 26 ‘Racing’, The Times, 8 June 1935, p. 5; ‘The Three Voyages of Captain Parry, in Quest of a North-West Passage to Asia’, in Greenbank's Periodical Library, 3 vols (Philadelphia: T.K. Greenbank & Co., 1833),

III, pp. 537–78 (pp. 552–3). 27 Tristan Tzara, Seven Dada Manifestoes and Lampisteries, trans. by Barbara Wright (London: John Calder, 1977), p. 39. 28 See Charles Madge, ‘Bourgeois News’, in The Disappearing Castle (London: Faber and Faber, 1937), 12 characterizes Jennings’s collage is his juxtaposition of quotidian objects with mysterious scenes. His poem effectively uses the image of a horse race as a quotidian event, which is interrupted by Captain Parry’s expedition, though Parry is not named in the poem. Instead,

‘Captain Allison’, the horse’s name, appears in the poem. The two unrelated texts are linked by the fact that they are both about a ‘Captain’, thereby making an insensible connection between the everyday life in England and the mysterious experience in the imperial periphery.

Comparing Jennings’s ‘report’ to a Mass Observer’s report, Tyrus Miller argues that Jennings’s

‘has little of the telegraphic breakup of narrative and syntax found in the observer’s rapid jottings’. 29 Yet, as Miller rightly argues, its ‘lack of narrative, thematic, and referential cohesion’ puzzles readers who try to understand what this poem is actually a ‘report’ of.30

It must be noted that although Jennings employs Gray’s method of ‘plagiarism’,

Jennings’s ‘reports’ do not simply embrace ‘pure poetry’; rather, by bringing up a social dimension in poetry, they question such ‘pureness’. The first two paragraphs of the third ‘report’ are taken from the satirist William Hone’s account on the death of Lord Byron, and the third is a description of the first railway accident in history during the opening of the Liverpool and

Manchester Railway in 1830, in which the politician William Huskisson died. The last paragraph is taken from Hone’s passage about the tomb of John Oliver, a mill owner in

Sussex.31 Of three ‘reports’, only this does not deal with the horse race, though the railway

pp. 41–45; Roger Roughton, ‘Final Night of the Bath (assembled from passages in “The Evening Standard” of June 6, 1936)’, Contemporary Poetry and Prose, 8 (December 1936), p. 166. For a discussion of these two poems, see Noel-Todd, 58–59. 29 Tyrus Miller, ‘Documentary/Modernism: Convergence and Complementarity in the 1930s’, Modernism/Modernity, 9 (2002), 225–41 (231). 30 Ibid., 232. 31 William Hone, The Yearbook of Daily Recreation and Information (London: William Tegg, 1832), pp. 691, 737; Wilfred Steel, The History of the London and North-Western Railway (London: The Railway and Travel Monthly, 1914), pp. 42–43. 13 passage starts with a description of fine weather which resembles the beginning of the first

‘report’:

It was a delightful sunny day. The enthusiasm was immense. At Parkside the engines

stopped to take water. Mr. Huskisson having got down from his carriage, the Duke

beckoned him to his side and they were just shaking hands when a cry went up from

the horrified spectators who perceived that the body was that of Lord Byron being

carried to Newstead. Reason never recovered from hideous coincidence. The journey

was completed amidst a deluge of hostile rain and thunder, missiles being hurled at

the coach in which the Duke was riding.32

This paragraph consists of quotations from the original text, except for the underlined sentences of which I have been unable to find the source. In the original context, spectators observe

Huskisson to be run over by the train, whereas the poem replaces Huskisson with the body of

Byron. The next paragraph presents an image of a tomb by the sea. If the texts are read logically, readers would think that it is the tomb of Byron, though it is actually that of Oliver the mill owner. Each of these texts is therefore about three different dead men; however, as the title of the ‘report’ ‘The Funeral of a Nobleman’ suggests, the poem superimposes the poet, the first victim of a railway accident in history, and the industrialist, thereby presenting a compound image of poetry, railway, and industry. In this way, the historicity of Jennings’s poem arises through a ‘hideous coincidence’ of images, which, by situating the images in super-sensible historical relationships, suggests a sublime dimension of the whole historical process.

32 Jennings, ‘Three Reports’, p. 291. Underline added. 14

‘Profanation of Art’: Modernism and History

Jennings’s questioning of ‘pure poetry’ makes him belong to what Peter Bürger calls the

‘historical avant-garde’ such as the Dadaists and Surrealists who started questioning ‘art’ as an

‘institution’ in the early 20th century.33 Kathleen Raine, in her preface to the posthumously published collection of Jennings’s poems, writes that she ‘believe[s] that there are some readers of those prose poems for whom they will have something of the value that the work of Marcel

Duchamp has for painters’.34 Jennings had a great interest in Duchamp. In his essay ‘The Iron

Horse’ published in London Bulletin in June 1938, Jennings compares machines invented during the Industrial Revolution with the ‘pseudo-machines’ made by artists such as Duchamp,

Man Ray, and Ernst. According to Jennings, the ‘pseudo-machines’ are created for a

‘profanation of Art’, which is ‘parallel to the engineers’ “profanation” of primitive “sacred places” of the earth’. Jennings’s point on ‘sacredness’ can be considered in relation to Walter

Benjamin’s argument that the ‘cult value’ of art gained by artworks’ uniqueness has been eclipsed by the ‘exhibition value’ of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.35 Just as the railway conquered mountains which Ruskin called the ‘cathedrals of the earth’, the ‘pseudo- machines’ conquer the ‘cult-value’ of Art. Jennings’s example is Duchamp’s ‘La Mariée mise

à nu par ses Célibataires, même’, a work made of glass and several metallic materials, which give it a mechanical appearance. Jennings published his translation of Breton’s essay on the work in the next issue of London Bulletin. Breton argues that Duchamp challenges the present state of art, which is equivalent to ‘where writing was before Gutenberg’.36 ‘Pseudo-machines’

33 Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. by Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1984), p. 22. 34 Kathleen Raine, ‘Introduction’, in Humphrey Jennings, Selected Poems of Humphrey Jennings (New York: Weekend Press, 1951), not paginated. 35 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, ed. by Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), pp. 217–51 (pp. 224–5). 36 André Breton, ‘Passage From “The Lighthouse of the Bride”’, trans. by Humphrey Jennings, London 15 therefore illustrate a challenge that ‘Art’ faces in the age of mechanical reproduction.

Yet, Jennings’s emphasis on the break from the past coexists with his preoccupation with the residual from the past within the present. In ‘The Iron Horse’, Jennings quotes

Duchamp’s description of his work:

The pulse needle in addition to its vibratory mvt. is mounted on a wandering leash.

It has the liberty of caged animals—on condition that it will provide (by its vibratory

mvt. actuating the sex cylinder) the ventilation on the pole [at the drum].37

Like machines conceived as ‘pseudo-animals’ (the train as an ‘iron horse’), Duchamp’s

‘pseudo-machine’ is visualised as an animal. However, Jennings considers that Duchamp’s work represents an uncanny return of the ‘omnipotence of thought’ in the modern age. As Tyrus

Miller points out, ‘the artist-engineer, in this view, retains a residual connection with the sacred as well’.38 Thus, Jennings’s modernism cannot be separated from his interest in the complex temporality in the work of art.

This point can be further explored by looking at Jennings’s reading of modernist texts.

In his BBC broadcast in 1938, Jennings names T. S. Eliot as a poet who ‘is beginning to do what I have for weeks and weeks been asking poetry to do—namely, to talk about something fairly ordinary, fairly up-to-date, in a fairly straightforward way’. Jennings draws this evaluation from his reading of Eliot’s ‘The Boston Evening Transcript’ (1915). The poem,

Jennings argues, presents the poet as ‘one of the readers instead of a poet aloof from the world

Bulletin 4–5 (July 1938), 17–19 (17). 37 Marcel Duchamp, ‘The Green Box’, in The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. by Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson, trans. by George Heard Hamilton (London: Thames and Hudson, 1975), pp. 26–71 (p. 45). Parentheses and square brackets are in the original. Jennings quotes this in French. 38 Miller, 232. 16 with a big hat or a laurel crown’.39 The poem certainly offers an ordinary and up-to-date scene of daily-life, but whether it is really ‘fairly straightforward’ as Jennings says is questionable; the projection of time onto space (‘If the street were time and he at the end of the street’), for instance, may be too symbolic to be regarded as ‘straightforward’.40 For Jennings, however, this derives from the poem’s ‘analysis of everyday emotion’, and in this analysis the poet ‘can remind us that there are still mysteries—we haven’t discovered everything—and these mysteries reside in the humblest everyday things’.41 Jennings clarifies this point by discussing the use of the word ‘inexplicable’ in The Waste Land:

The poet pictures himself just outside a pub in Lower Thames Street with the usual

noise of the bar and the melancholy sound of a mandolin playing. These are the part

of life which is explicable—the rational, everyday part of life which we think we

have complete control over. But the poet brings up the ‘inexplicable splendour’ of

the church—the inexplicable part of life, those parts which we have no control over.42

Jennings argues that the churches in the City designed by Wren are ‘sort of ancestors’ of the surrounding modern buildings, and Eliot’s celebration of their ‘inexplicable splendour’ is ‘a kind of ancestor worship’, which is likened to that of the Trobriand Islanders. Jennings’s reading of the everyday element that is residual from the communal past can be understood in the context of what Jed Esty calls the ‘anthropological turn’, which is ‘the discursive process by which English intellectuals translated the end of empire into a resurgent concept of national

39 Humphrey Jennings, ‘The Poet and the Public’, in HJFR, pp. 255–82 (p. 275). 40 T. S. Eliot, ‘Boston Evening Transcript’, quoted in Jennings, ‘The Poet and the Public’, p. 275. 41 Jennings, ‘The Poet and the Public’, p 280. 42 Ibid., p 281. 17 culture’.43 Jennings’s interest in the City of London, the centre of the British economy, seems to be an apt example of Esty’s argument that British modernists started casting an anthropological gaze not only to the peripheral but also to the central areas within the British

Isles. Like other late modernists, Jennings is also preoccupied with the possibility of reimagining a national community. To do so, the poet has the task of ‘extracting an idea of

“what I am” from the past’ for the community; and for this task, the poet has to talk ‘about the things that the community knows about, the things that they’re interested in’, and to look ‘on the community’s past—at the figures, the monuments, the achievements, the defeats, or whatever it may be, that have made the community what it is’.44 To relate to the public, the poet has to grasp not only the present but also the past so that s/he can share common experiences with the community that have defined their present.

Jennings’s preoccupation with the complexity of temporality can be most strongly seen in Pandæmonium, the work on which he worked from the late 1930s until his death, which consists of quotations from miscellaneous texts from the period 1660–1886 and Jennings’s commentary on them. It was left unfinished, and published for the first time in 1985. In the introduction, Jennings stresses that the work presents ‘the imaginative history of the Industrial

Revolution’,45 which means that despite its subject matter, the work focuses on the human consciousness rather than the material events. This emphasis on the discursive history is motivated by his notion that the whole historical process is ‘inexpressible’ and ‘uncapturable’.46

To deal with this uncapturable history, it is important to ‘“present”, not describe or analyse’.47

43 Esty, p. 2. 44 Jennings, ‘The Poet and the Public’, p. 282. 45 Humphrey Jennings, ‘Introduction’, in Pandæmonium 1660–1886: The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers, ed. by Mary-Lou Jennings and Charles Madge (New York: Free Press, 1985), pp. xxxv–xxxix (p. xxxv). 46 Ibid., p. xxxvi. 47 Ibid., p. xxxv. 18

The emphasis on ‘presentation’ obviously derives from Jennings’s study of Gray, yet it also reminds us of the stress on ‘passivity’ in the documentary aesthetic of the 1930s, which can be seen in the writings such as Christopher Isherwood’s 1939 novel Goodbye to Berlin (‘I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking’) or Storm Jameson’s essay

‘Documents’ (‘[the writer’s] job is not to tell what he felt, but to be coldly and industriously presenting, arranging, selecting, discarding from the mass of his material to get the significant detail, which leaves no more to be said, and implies everything’).48 Yet, as I have already discussed, the idea of camera’s ‘passivity’ is problematic, for, as Jameson’s passage suggests, such ‘passive’ images are arranged according to the intellect of the artist, therefore they can never be separated from ‘thinking’.

Jennings is aware of this complexity. In ‘Who Does That Remind You Of?’ published in London Bulletin in October 1938, he writes that photography is the ‘system with which the people can be pictured by the people for the people: simple to operate, results capable of mass reproduction and circulation, effects generally considered truthful (“the camera cannot lie”) and so on’. However, he goes on, ‘intellectually the importance of the camera lies clearly in the way in which it deals with problems of choice—choice and avoidance of choice’.49 Here we can see the relevance of Rancière’s point that the camera images cannot become ‘passive’ just because they are ‘passive’ already. This means that Jennings’s ‘presentation’ of the

‘imaginative history’ in Pandæmonium is subsumed into the choice made by Jennings himself, thereby postponing a truly democratic juxtaposition of images. Jennings writes that ‘Life’ is a

‘synthesis’ of parts composing interactions ‘infinitely more complex than any analytical machine can follow’.50 Jennings’s attention to the complexity of ‘Life’ reminds us of Rancière’s

48 Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin (London: Vintage, 1998), p. 98; Storm Jameson, ‘Documents’, Fact, 4 (July 1937), pp. 9–18 (pp. 15–16). 49 Humphrey Jennings, ‘Who Does That Remind You of?’, in HJFR, pp. 230–31 (p. 230). 50 Jennings, ‘Introduction’, p. xxxvi. 19 notion of ‘film fable’ which addresses ‘Life’ as ‘a long and continuous movement made up of an infinity of micro movements’ (FF 2). Like Rancière’s ‘film fable’ which questions the old

‘representational regime’, Jennings’s modernist aesthetic challenges the linear understanding of history. Jennings argues that the ‘Images’ in each quoted passage are ‘the knots in a great net of tangled time and space—the moments at which the situation of humanity is clear—even if only for the flash time of the photographer or the lightning’.51 At these moments in history,

‘clashes and conflicts suddenly show themselves with extra clearness’, and ‘through that clearness [the moments] can stand as symbols for the whole inexpressible uncapturable process’. 52 However, as can be seen from both Jennings and Rancière’s emphases on infiniteness of ‘Life’, the ‘Life’ cannot be rationally comprehended but only momentarily glimpsed. Just as Rancière’s ‘film fable’ is always ‘thwarted’, for Jennings, a recognition of the totality of history is always postponed. ‘Life’ can be approached only as a sublime existence, which, being unrepresentable as such, can be glimpsed only through ‘presentation’ of images

‘plagiarized’ from multiple temporalities.

‘Documents’ and ‘Monuments’

The difficulty in Jennings’s pursuit of the ‘imaginative history’ is testified by Pandæmonium’s destiny to be left unfinished. Yet, I argue that the most successful case of Jennings’s challenge to the narrative of modernity can be seen in one of his propaganda films. Jennings’s reputation as the ‘only real poet’ of the British cinema was established by his wartime films such as Listen to Britain and (1943).53 Although Jennings’s propaganda films effectively

51 Ibid., p. xxxv. 52 Ibid., p. xxxvi. 53 Lindsay Anderson, ‘Only Connect: Some Aspects of the Work of Humphrey Jennings’, Film Quarterly, 15.2 (1962), 5–12 (5). For a recent discussion on Fires Were Started, see Michael McCluskey, ‘Humphrey Jennings in the East End: Fires Were Started and Local Geographies’, The London Journal, 41.2 (2016), 20 use everyday images while avoiding violence, their conservative implications should be critically reflected. Angus Calder notes how Jennings’s films have become resources for the

‘myth of the “Blitz”’ which ‘would encapsulate […] a moment of ideological conservatism as a moment of revolution’ that has ‘somehow produced a “welfare state”, thereby ‘divert[ing] attention from the continuing need for radical change in British society’.54 In his criticism of the nostalgic appropriation of the ‘People’s war’, Owen Hatherley writes that in Jennings’s films, ‘even the English eye most inclined to resist the call of “progressive patriotism” succumbs to the portrayal of England as this idealised, egalitarian family’.55 Hatherley argues that the conception of Britain as ‘family’ (which can also be seen in Orwell’s The Lion and the

Unicorn which Jennings praises56) ‘stretches from the “social imperialists” or the Empire

Marketing Board’s notion of an imperial family, to the cosy home economics of David

Cameron and George Osborn’.57 Glyn Salton-Cox also argues that Jennings’s A Diary for

Timothy (1945) reinforces the heteronormative vision of the post-war welfare state, which was complicit with the suppression of homosexuality after the war.58 For all these problematic aspects, however, Jennings’s works still bear some moments in which the unreachable democratic ideal is momentarily glimpsed in the gap between two ‘fables’.

This can be most strongly seen in The Silent Village (1943), a fictional re-creation of a tragic event in 1942 in a Czech mining village called Lidice under occupation by Germany where all men were executed and women were sent to the concentration camp for a retaliation

170–89. 54 Angus Calder, The Myth of the Blitz (London: Pimlico, 1992), p. 15. For Calder’s analysis of Jennings’s films, see pp. 234–44 of the same book. 55 Owen Hatherley, The Ministry of Nostalgia (London and New York: Verso, 2016), p. 121. 56 Jennings’s ‘Letter to Cicely Jennings (10 May 1941)’, in HJFR, pp. 28–29. 57 Hatherley, p. 123. 58 Glyn Salton-Cox, Queer Communism and the Ministry of Love: Sexual Revolution in British Writing of the 1930s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2018), pp. 39–41. 21 to the assassination of the German official . The film re-enacts this story in

Cwmgiedd, a Welsh-speaking mining village.59 Jennings cast local people, stayed with one of the miners during the shooting, and talked to the villagers during the production. He was very proud of this process and called the film ‘a real handshake with the working-class which we have not achieved before’.60 In what follows, I argue that if the collaboration with the miners was Jennings’s political achievement, it also represented the high point of his aesthetics.

After the opening sequence of everyday images of the village, the film tells the audience: ‘This is life at Cwmgiedd in the western valley of Wales, and such too was life in

Lidice until the coming of Fascism’. Then, the Germans arrive and the villagers organize a resistance. Towards the end of the film, after the village’s men are executed, the film tells: ‘That is what the Nazis did to the village—the village of Lidice in Czechoslovakia. But that is not the end of the story’. In the final part, the miners of Cwmgiedd declare their solidarity with the people of Lidice. In this sense, the film’s style shifts from documentary to fiction, and then to propaganda. As Keith Beattie suggests, the ‘dual representation’ of fiction and documentary is crucial in assessing the film’s effect.61 The film’s documentary images seem to have been ‘real’ enough to satisfy many Welsh audiences. For example, Arthur Horner, the President of the

South Wales Miners’ Federation, writes that Jennings ‘has put Wales on the screen, the real living Wales, its lovely land, its peerless people, in a way that has never been done before’.62

59 The idea of making a film about Lidice set in Wales was originally suggested by the Czech émigré poet Viktor Fischl. On this point, see Keith Beattie, Humphrey Jennings (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2010), p. 93. 60 Jennings, ‘Letter to Cicely Jennings (29 January 1943)’, in HJFR, pp. 76–78 (p. 77). 61 Beattie, p. 94. 62 Arthur Horner, ‘Lidice Lives Again in This Film Triumph’, Daily Worker, 10 June 1943, p. 3. For other responses from Welsh viewers, see Ivor Rosser, ‘Cwmgiedd Folk See Themselves on Screen’, Western Mail South Wales News, 31 May 1943, p. 3; Jim Griffiths, ‘The Silent Village’, Western Mail South Wales News, 15 June 1943, p. 3. For a critical response, see Keidrych Rhys, ‘Lidice Film’, Western Mail South Wales News, 4 June 1943, p. 3. 22

However, some regarded this ‘realness’ as the film’s weakness as a fiction; a review in

Liverpool Daily Post argues that the film ‘wants dramatic credibility. Precisely because this village is so authentic, so completely Welsh [...], one had the utmost difficulty in believing that the Nazis had really got there’.63 The mix of fiction and documentary is not unique to The Silent

Village (the 1937 film Today We Live, directed by Ruby Grierson and Ralph Bond, also consists of documentary and re-enacted parts, and it is partly set in a Welsh coal-mining village, casting the local residents). It was the film’s dystopian narrative that puzzled some viewers. The reviewer of Documentary News Letter writes: ‘The strangely oblique approach robs the film of any direct impact because it has been translated into “It might have been like this” not “It was like this”’.64 Donald Alexander, a director of films about Welsh miners Rhondda (1936) and

Eastern Valley (1937), responds to this critique, questioning its dismissal of the film’s speculative narrative. Alexander argues that The Silent Village is ‘an honest co-operative attempt to imagine a situation which is almost unimaginable’.65

An article in Picture Post argues that the film is not a fiction ‘because it recreated an event in recent history’, but a documentary ‘in so far as hardly anything in it was staged and it described men going about their daily lives’.66 Yet, the plot of the occupation of Wales is certainly a fiction. The film indeed simultaneously narrates and shows two different stories through the plot and the images. In this sense, the film counterposes Rancière’s two ‘fables’.

Although the film narrates the story of invasion and massacre, the images are curiously devoid of violence. We hear gunshots but do not see the shooting or even the German soldiers, except for some silhouettes. The ordinariness of the images is incongruous with the extraordinariness of the narrated violence. This paradox makes the film awkward for a piece of propaganda. In

63 ‘Review of The Silent Village’, Liverpool Daily Post, 10 June 1943, p. 2. 64 ‘Review of The Silent Village’, Documentary News Letter, 5 (1943), 216. 65 Donald Alexander, ‘Correspondence’, Documentary News Letter, 6 (1943), 232. 66 ‘A Welsh Village Makes a Film in Honour of Czech Lidice’, Picture Post, 3 July 1943, 16–18 (18). 23 his discussion on Eisenstein’s General Line (1929), Rancière argues that a propaganda

must give us a sense of certainty about what we see, it must choose between the

documentary that presents what we see as a palpable reality or the fiction that

forwards it as a desirable end, all the while keeping narration and symbolization in

their respective places. (FF 29)

Like Eisenstein, Jennings disrupts the border between documentary and fiction, thereby leaving an unsettling feeling in the audience. What makes the reviewer of Documentary News Letter deny the film’s propaganda value is this instability of the separation between these two orders of reality.

In his discussion on Listen to Britain, Rancière draws attention to these two orders by using the concepts of ‘documents’ and ‘monuments’. ‘Documents’ are written records of history, ‘the text on paper intentionally written to officialize a memory’. To this, cinema, along with other arts of the ‘aesthetic regime’, opposes ‘monuments’, ‘that which preserves memory by its very existence, that which speaks directly, by the fact that it was not intended to speak’.

By ‘monuments’, Rancière refers not only to statues or buildings but to domestic objects ‘which show a way of being of the quotidian, a practice of work and of commerce, a meaning of love or of death which is inscribed there, in itself, without anyone who thought about historians of the future’.67 In this regard, Jennings’s interest in the everydayness can be considered in terms of his preoccupations with ‘monuments’, in which the traces of history are inscribed without intention. The ‘mystery’ he saw in Eliot’s poem refers to such a ‘monument’, for it enables the poet to relate to the public by evoking the communal past. The attention to such ‘monuments’

67 Jacques Rancière, ‘L’inoubliable’, in Jean-Louis Comolli and Jacques Rancière, Arrêt sur histoire (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1997), pp. 47–70 (p. 55). All quotations from this essay are my translation. 24 in The Silent Village is crucial in presenting the authentic images of Welsh village life: the people in the street, the village shop, or the pub. The ‘monuments’ are however also important in ‘thwarting’ the film’s ostensible aim of national war-propaganda. The film indeed reveals an internal division within the country by drawing a parallel between the German invasion and the conquest of Wales from the 11th century. In the film, the Germans ban the Welsh language so that the villagers cannot secretly organize. There is a scene in which a school teacher teaches her pupils as follows: ‘The conquest of Wales was a very slow process. It started in the reign of William the 1st. […] And that Wales was a very mountainous country...’. As her voice fades out, the image fades into Carreg Cennen, the Welsh castle built on top of the mountain in the time of the conquest. The castle serves as a ‘monument’ that speaks for the past without words, just as the ‘inexplicable splendour’ of Wren’s church incited Eliot’s ‘ancestor worship’. As

Rancière emphasizes, ‘monuments’ include not only buildings but also quotidian objects. The film also draws on many other ‘monuments’ from the everyday life of the village, thereby situating the narrative of German invasion as part of a long process of the conquest of Wales.

By associating the anti-Fascist war with the ongoing struggle of the Welsh people against suppression of their own culture, the film implies the Fascist element in the English imperialism.

In his review of an essay collection The Character of England (1948), Jennings acknowledges the ‘violent’ and ‘savage’ aspects of the English.68 The Silent Village implies a critique of such a ‘savage’ aspect which tends to be forgotten in wartime patriotism. In this respect, as Angus

Calder writes, ‘[t]he ideological “instability” of The Silent Village is very satisfying’.69

This is however not to say that ‘monuments’ are superior to ‘documents’ in their presentation of reality. What is important here is the dialectic of ‘film fables’ which reasserts the ‘intelligible’, the ‘meaning’ that belongs to the ‘representational regime of art’. Rancière

68 Humphrey Jennings, ‘The English’, in HJFR, pp. 236–43 (pp. 238, 237). 69 Calder, p. 261. 25 argues that ‘the clear opposition between monument and document only leads to its immediate abolition’. In his/her task to decipher the ‘silent testimonies’ of ‘monuments’, the historian ‘has to assert, under what they say, in opposition to what they say intentionally, what they say without thinking, what they say as monuments’.70 In other words, the historian has to render the testimonies of ‘monuments’ into ‘documents’, the written words. Yet, the historian’s interpretation is again translated into the visual language. ‘The new history’, Rancière argues,

‘assures its speech only by the incessant transformation of the monument to document and of the document to monument’. Therefore, at the heart of the ‘film fables’, there is this ‘romantic poetics which operates constant conversion of the signifier to non-signifier and of the non- signifier to signifier’.71

This unstable relationship between the plot and the images is crucial in assessing the ideological and utopian functions underlying The Silent Village. The film’s utopian dimension can be seen particularly strongly in the scene where the villagers are forced by the German authority to register their identities. Within the plot, this scene should be regarded as a gloomy moment when the rule over the villagers is completed. However, on the level of image, it is the moment of triumph, because this scene achieves precisely what Jennings wanted to do in Mass

Observation, that is, to let the people ‘speak for themselves’. The villagers tell their true names, ages, and occupations in front of the camera, thereby ceasing to be just nameless ‘masses’. In his radio talk about the film, Jennings says that in the scene of registration, the villagers ‘were playing themselves and themselves as the people of Lidice—that’s to say, making an imaginary transformation of themselves’.72 By this ‘imaginary transformation’, the villagers become a sort of double agents of fiction and documentary; they are submissive victims of Fascist

70 Rancière, ‘L’inoubliable’, p. 55. 71 Ibid., p. 56. 72 Humphrey Jennings, ‘Radio Talk: The Silent Village’, in HJFR, pp. 67–75 (p. 72). 26 violence on the level of the plot (or as ‘documents’), but they are dignified individuals speaking for themselves on the level of image (as ‘monuments’). In this way, Jennings smuggles a celebration of the people’s agency into the tragic anti-Fascist plot.

By drawing on the paradox between telling and showing, The Silent Village also makes use of the paradox between the ‘people’ in the propagandistic discourse and the ‘people themselves’. The shift from the ‘representative’ to the ‘aesthetic regime’, from the hierarchical organization of genres and subjects to the egalitarian treatment of all objects as resources for art, corresponded to the shift from the old hierarchical society to the age of democracy. Yet, the art in the age of the ‘aesthetic regime’, most notably cinema, always reverts to the

‘representative regime’, leaving the dream of ‘pure art’ as a momentary glimpse. Likewise, democracy rests on something which cannot be statically observed:

The people through which democracy occurs is a unity that does not consist of any

social group but that superimposes the effectiveness of a part of those who have no

part on the reckoning of society’s parties. Democracy is the designation of subjects

that do not coincide with the parties of the state or of society, floating subjects that

deregulate all representation of places and portions.73

The ‘people’ in democracy is therefore the sum of ‘part[s] of those who have no part’, those who belong to the society but at the same time excluded and denied to be perceptible in the

‘regulated’ forms of politics. However, as Slavoj Žižek points out, just because the ‘part of no- part’ is systematically denied its consistent presence, ‘authentic democracy’ can be only

73 Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. by Julie Rose (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1999), pp. 99–100. 27 occasionally glimpsed in ‘a momentary utopian outburst’.74 Nico Baumbach argues that what is central to Rancière’s work is the ‘impossible idea’ of ‘equality without conditions’.75 Such an idea of democracy remains a momentary dream of the ‘aesthetic regime’, which is always thwarted by the representational one.

The democratic moment in The Silent Village also suffers from this unsustainability of

‘authentic democracy’. The last scene of the film represents the return to the ‘representational regime’. After hearing a radio broadcast saying that the ‘name of community [Lidice] is obliterated’, one of the miners speaks on behalf of the others:

The name of the community has not been obliterated. The name of the community is

immortalized. It lives in the hearts of the miners the world over. […] [W]e stand in

the forefront of the struggle today, because we have the power, and the knowledge

and the understanding to hasten the coming of victory. To liberate the oppressed

humanity.

This speech might be interpreted as broadening the film’s scope from the narrow national propaganda to the call for international solidarity. And yet, aesthetically, the multiplicity of the images of the ‘people themselves’ are subsumed into the individual heroic figure. Jennings recounts that his meeting with the miners’ agent D. D. Evans gave him ‘a sort of feeling of international solidarity which is one of the basic things in the picture’.76 Jennings records this experience in an unpublished poem:

74 Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London and New York: Verso, 2009), p. 266. Žižek criticizes Rancière in pp. 418–9 of the same book. 75 Nico Baumbach, ‘Jacques Rancière and the Fictional Capacity of Documentary’, New Review of Film and Television Studies, 8.1 (2010), 57–72 (57). 76 Jennings, ‘Radio Talk’, p. 69. 28

Meeting at last with DAI DAN brought me to the gates of life

DAI DAN in the garden bending over the earth

DAI DAN with coal on his face

DAI DAN with beer on his knee

DAI DAN in carpet slippers

On the top shelf Lenin

On the wall Budenny

DAI DAN on the hill-top—over the coal-canal

DAI DAN for the earth and under the earth

DAI DAN for the air and sky

DAI DAN for the falling waters

DAI DAN for the people themselves77

In the image of the miner, Jennings connects the ‘international solidarity’—symbolized by

Lenin and the Soviet marshal Budenny—and ‘the people themselves’. In this regard, the speech of the miners’ leader in the film’s last scene can be regarded as Jennings’s attempt to let the people ‘speak for themselves’ through him, which nonetheless reduces the directness of the

‘people’ into a single voice. We can see Jennings’s uncertainty concerning the idea of the

‘people’ in the draft of the poem; although the entire poem is typed, ‘the people themselves’ at the end is added by hand, which suggests Jennings’s hesitation over writing it. Even though

Jennings stands at ‘the gates of life’, he is aware of the impossibility of reaching the infinitely complex ‘Life’ itself. By this return of the ‘representational regime’ in both aesthetic and political senses, the last scene of The Silent Village testifies to the difficulty of realizing the

77 Humphrey Jennings, an untitled poem, undated typescript, HJP. 29 dreams of ‘pure art’ and ‘democracy’. Yet in a fleeting moment, through his failure to maintain the utopian impulse for the ‘people themselves’, Jennings presents a glimpse of community that is more radical than the ‘regulated’ vision of the ‘people’. In its showing of a ‘momentary utopian outburst’, The Silent Village helps us reflect on modernism’s ambivalent relationship with democracy in the age of the ‘People’s War’.