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THE COMMUNICATING VILLAGE: HUMPHREY JENNINGS AND SURREALISM NEIL GEORGE COOMBS A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of Liverpool John Moores University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy January 2014 1 Acknowledgments. With thanks to my supervisors Dr David Sorfa and Dr Lydia Papadimitriou for their support during the process of writing this thesis. 2 Abstract This thesis examines the films of Humphrey Jennings, exploring his work in relation to surrealism. This examination provides an overview of how surrealism’s set of ideas is manifest in Jennings’s documentary film work. The thesis does not assert that his films are surrealist texts or that there is such a thing as a surrealist film; rather it explores how his films, produced in Britain in the period from 1936 to 1950, have a dialectical relationship with surrealism. The thesis first considers Jennings’s work in relation to documentary theory, outlining how and why he is considered a significant filmmaker in the documentary field. It then goes on to consider Jennings’s engagement with surrealism in Britain in the years prior to World War Two. The thesis identifies three paradoxes relating to surrealism in Britain, using these to explore surrealism as an aura that can be read in the films of Jennings. The thesis explores three active phases of Jennings’s film work, each phase culminating in a key film. It acknowledges that Spare Time (1939) and Listen to Britain (1942) are key films in Jennings’s oeuvre, examining these two films and then emphasising the importance of a third, previously generally overlooked, film, The Silent Village (1943). These explorations allow an examination of the way that Jennings’s films articulate the relationship between surrealism and the everyday, the sublime and the uncanny. The thesis asserts that there is a specifically British form of surrealism that has developed from the historical 3 situation of Britain in the period from 1936 to 1946, one that draws from the national identity of Britain. The symbolic domain of British surrealism and its praxis can read in the films of Jennings and the auratic traces of Jennings’s films thread through the work of subsequent filmmakers. This thesis describes these traces as the communicating village. The thesis’s consideration of Jennings’s films in relation to surrealism offers a means by which to examine the work of subsequent filmmakers and to assess the importance of surrealism to British cinema. 4 Contents Introduction 1. Chapter 1: Humphrey Jennings and Documentary I. The Definitions of Documentary p. 8 II. Documentary Histories p. 16 III. Humphrey Jennings and Documentary p. 27 IV. Documentary and the Avant-Garde p. 37 V. Critiques of Grierson’s Documentary Movement p. 43 2. Chapter 2: Humphrey Jennings and British Surrealism I. Three Paradoxes of Surrealism p. 52 II. The International Exhibition of 1936 p. 66 III. Mass-Observation, Romanticism and Surrealism p. 73 IV. Humphrey Jennings’s Films and the Three Paradoxes p. 82 3. Chapter 3: Surrealist Factors in the Films of Humphrey Jennings I. Jennings’s Films and Surrealism p. 93 II. Jennings’s Films Prior to Spare Time (1939) p. 104 III. Spare Time (1939): Surrealism and the Everyday p. 119 IV. From S.S. Ionian (1939) to Words For Battle (1941) p. 138 V. Listen to Britain (1942): The Surrealist Sublime p. 155 VI. Jennings: The Sublime and the Uncanny p. 179 VII. Fires Were Started (1943) p. 186 VIII. The Silent Village (1943): Surrealism and the Uncanny p. 197 IX. Jennings’s final films p. 224 Conclusion p. 248 5 Introduction They contain in little a whole world– they are the knots in a great net of tangled time and space – the moments at which the situation of humanity is clear. (Jennings, 1985, p. xxxv) Over the course of a brief filmmaking career that lasted from 1934 to 1950, Humphrey Jennings directed thirty documentary films. The longest of his films is eighty minutes but the average length of a Jennings film is closer to twenty minutes. Despite his relatively small cinematic output, Jennings’s work has become highly influential and also emblematic of British national unity. Jennings has been written about from a range of perspectives: Kevin Jackson’s biography, Humphrey Jennings (2004) along with his research into and publication of Jennings’s writings on film, The Humphrey Jennings Film Reader (Jackson, 1993), have given us a solid overview of Jennings from a historical perspective. Philip Logan has developed this work in his systematic examination of Jennings’s life and career, Humphrey Jennings and British Documentary Film: a Re- assessment (2011). Keith Beattie’s Humphrey Jennings (2010) examines Jennings’s innovative approach to filmmaking, exploring how Jennings’s techniques of collage and symphonic ambiguity are relevant to British cinema and national identity. This thesis builds on the work of these authors, and the others who have written on Jennings, by exploring the specific relationship between Jennings as a surrealist and filmmaker working in Britain in the first half of the Twentieth 6 Century. The aims of this thesis are to read the films of Humphrey Jennings in relation to surrealism and to explore how surrealism can be seen to have informed all of Jennings films. The thesis does not assert that his films are surreal texts, it does however explore how his films can be effectively read through surrealist practice and examines how his films relate to broader surrealist ideas. The international surrealist movement concerns itself with a revolutionary attempt to reconfigure the world through the breaking down of boundaries between different states of existence such as the conscious and the unconscious or dream and reality. This revolutionary purpose was communicated by Breton in the first Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) and has been re-articulated by surrealists in their writings and art up to the present day. As Jennings’s work may not appear immediately revolutionary, this thesis explores whether the effective longevity and influence of Jennings’s films is related to his engagement with the surrealist movement and attempts to articulate how this relationship is figured in his work. As Jennings is best known as a key figure in the history of the British documentary film movement, the first chapter of this thesis positions Jennings in relation to writing on documentary film history and the development of documentary theory. The chapter explores how writers on documentary have responded to the work of Jennings and how this response has developed over time. It considers the relationship between documentary and the avant-garde in order to begin to draw parallels between documentary and surrealism that are developed in 7 subsequent chapters. It concludes with the argument that Jennings remains a key figure in relation to the history of documentary. The second chapter examines surrealism in Britain and Humphrey Jennings’s relationship to the movement. It starts by attempting a definition of surrealism in relation to three paradoxes: firstly, that surrealism is placeless and timeless yet born in a specific place and time; secondly, that surrealism is an international movement with distinct national identities; thirdly, that surrealism explores individual freedom through collaborative work and the abdication of the individual. The chapter progresses to explore the development of surrealism in Britain and considers Jennings’s films in relation to the three paradoxes. The third and most substantial chapter of the thesis consists of detailed descriptions and analyses of all of Jennings’s films in relation to surrealist ideas. It identifies three key periods of work by Jennings and the films that best represent the approaches applied in these periods. The three films considered in detail are Spare Time (1939) in relation to surrealism and the everyday, Listen to Britain (1942) in relation to the surrealist sublime and The Silent Village (1943) in relation to surrealism and the uncanny. The thesis concludes with an assessment of the relationship between Jennings’s films and surrealism and suggests areas for further investigation. 8 Chapter 1: Humphrey Jennings and Documentary. As Humphrey Jennings is a key figure in the history of documentary filmmaking, this chapter explores his work in the context of documentary theory and maps how the interpretations of Jennings’s work have changed as the production of and critical responses to documentary film have developed. The chapter examines the development of critical histories of documentary from 1926 when the term was first used and how it has evolved into Bill Nichols’s articulation of six documentary modes (Nichols 2001). The chapter then explores how writers on documentary have responded to the work of Jennings and how this response has developed over time. It concludes with the argument that Jennings remains a key figure in relation to both the history of documentary and to contemporary film production. The Definitions of Documentary. John Grierson, founder of the British documentary movement is credited with the first use of the term in his review (Greirson 1926) of Robert Flaherty’s Moana (1926). He subsequently defined documentary as the “creative treatment of actuality” (Grierson 1946, p. 11) and this relationship between ideology, practice and a pre-existing reality is at the heart of continued attempts to explore and define documentary filmmaking. From 1926 until the present day, developments in documentary practice and theory have evolved in response to technical and cultural transformations, leading writers on the subject to explore the conventions of the documentary as if it were a genre. This chapter explores Humphrey 9 Jennings’s relationship to the genre and is therefore chiefly concerned with documentary film rather than work produced for television, which has become the main site of exhibition for contemporary documentary production.
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