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Birdwise Scott WD 2020 Doct ! ! ! “THE PLACE OF IMAGINATION”: HUMPHREY JENNINGS AND THE BIOPOETICS OF EVERYDAY LIFE ! ! ! SCOTT BIRDWISE ! ! ! A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ! ! ! ! GRADUATE PROGRAM IN CINEMA AND MEDIA STUDIES YORK UNIVERSITY TORONTO, CANADA ! ! ! ! ! ! September 2020 © Scott Birdwise, 2020 Abstract This dissertation seeks to reanimate discussion of British artist and documentary filmmaker Humphrey Jennings by reconsidering his body of work in light of the biopolitical transformations of modern life. While biopolitics is a familiar paradigm in the humanities and social sciences that understands how the category of life, in the figure of the population, became the primary object of political management and control, Jennings is famous for his poetic documentary films about the everyday life of resistance during the Second World War. Remembered as the cinematic poet of ordinary people, Jennings combined his concern with everyday life with his ongoing interest in Classical and Romantic traditions of poetry and painting modulated by the formative influence of Surrealism, to become perhaps the most significant British documentary filmmaker of the first half of the twentieth century. Bringing together a concern with everyday life with questions of poetic form and meaning, then, I use the concept of biopoetics to examine how Jennings repeatedly returns to an animating tension between the poetic imagination of the people, on the one hand, and the management of the population on the other. I argue that it is as a biopoetic vision devoted to documenting the emergence of the people as the collective subject of poetry and modernity (and simultaneously the population as expropriated object of power and information) that everyday life took on its urgency for Jennings as the “place of imagination.” In order to draw out how Jennings’s oeuvre is animated by tensions within the people/ population, my argument moves roughly chronologically through a selection of his projects, including his critical writing, poetry, painting, and documentary films considered against the background of their institutional and historical contexts. This includes Jennings’s artistic, !ii editorial and organizational contributions to British Surrealism and the social research organization Mass-Observation in the 1930s; his unfinished “imaginative history” of the Industrial Revolution, Pandaemonium (which preoccupied him until his death in 1950 at the age of 43); and his documentary films made under the auspices of the Crown Film Unit during the war. In each case I examine how Jennings’s use of an array of poetic and cinematic techniques emerges from a biopoetic desire to at once document and transform the everyday life of the people. ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !iii Dedication For my grandparents, Chuck and Georgie Birdwise and Bill and Stasia Limebeer. ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !iv Acknowledgements First, I would like to extend my thanks to my committee: Janine Marchessault, my vigilant supervisor, who was there from the beginning of my time at York University and, through the various twists and turns at my time at York, never wavered in her generosity and support; Ken Rogers and Brenda Longfellow, who have been with me since my comprehensive exams and whose feedback has been invaluable to my scholarship; Ben Highmore, my external examiner, who generously agreed to join my committee last year and, with, much-appreciated graciousness and patience, remained to provide his invaluable expertise and insight; and Markus Reisenleitner, who joined my committee later in the process but whose contribution proved to be equally thoughtful and significant. To all of you: your attention and intellectual labour is noted with sincere gratitude. Other members of the York community that deserve my heartfelt thanks include faculty members Michael Zryd, Philip Hoffman, Sharon Hayashi, Seth Feldman, John McCullough, and Temenuga Trifinova; Graduate Program Administrator Kuowei Lee, whose unflagging attention and enthusiasm has been another constant at my time at York; as well as my peers and friends in the PhD program: Tamás Nagypál, Re"at Fuat Çam, Genne Speers, Jessica Mulvogue, and Clint Enns. I also extend my thanks to fellow film and culture travellers and comrades: Matthew Croombs, Owen Lyons, Philippe Theophanidis, Sara Swain, Salah Hassanpour, Ryan Mitchell, Terrance McDonald, Joshua Synenko, David Davidson, and Yuval Sagiv; and my dear friends: Kurt Tang, James Missen, Christian Martius, Ian Fryer, Maggie Low, Jason Norris, Joseph Gorman, Justin Gobeil, Iga Mergler, Alejandro Cairncross, Mariful Alam, and Adam MacGillivray. !v I am also thankful to my family: my mother, Moira, who enthusiastically and so importantly believed in my project from the beginning; my father, Doug, who unwaveringly supported my efforts through thick and thin; and my brother, Ross, who read everything I sent him and always responded with something thoughtful. I would also like to thank my aunts Gwen Limebeer, Susan Birdwise, and Cindy Birdwise Lecocq for their support. Finally, I would like to extend my deep gratitude to my partner, Emily McKibbon, who joined me on this journey just as I decided to devote much of my time to Jennings — and who, in this joyful madness, provided me with so much love and a good dose of sanity too. The research and writing of this dissertation benefited from the support of the Joseph- Armand Bombardier CGS Doctoral Scholarship, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !vi Preface “This is for Everyone” ! “This is for everyone.” Sir Timothy Berners-Lee tweeted this message from a home office revealed inside a modest household at the centre of Stratford Stadium during Isles of Wonder, the widely praised historical pageant designed by filmmaker Danny Boyle and author Frank Cottrell- Boyce that opened the London 2012 Olympics Games. Linking the domestic space of the home — a little suburban castle — to a vision of the public sphere, the tweet, typed on the vintage NeXT Computer Berners-Lee himself used to launch the first site on the World Wide Web 1.0, was screened on thousands of LCD lights across the stadium’s stands (see Image A.1). As one journalist’s headline put it, the real-time “landscape video” transformed the attendees from “people into pixels for multimedia spectacular.”1 The utopian technological spectacle, visible to a billion viewers on television and millions of followers on social media, arrived as the culmination of the sequence devoted to the “pandaemonium” of the Industrial Revolution, announcing a transition to the “Dawn of the Digital Age” — the ultimate realization of the “British genius” emerging from the social and industrial toil endured by generations past.2 It is significant that a filmmaker was tasked with directing the multimedia spectacular of Isles of Wonder. Danny Boyle, known for the popular neo-noir Trainspotting (1996) and the global phenomenon Slumdog Millionaire (2008), has made a career of representing multicultural, international Britain, celebrating (and sometimes critiquing) the diverse flows of images, bodies, #1 Karen Friar, “Olympics opener turns people into pixels for multimedia spectacular,” ZDNet (July 28, 2012) https:// www.zdnet.com/article/olympics-opener-turns-people-into-pixels-for-multimedia-spectacular/? fbclid=IwAR3E2dahD__U2gJVapIdM_AKjzY6_68GaL%E2%80%A6 (accessed September 1, 2018). #2 The ceremony, as Danny Boyle writes in the programme accompanying the event, “celebrates the creativity, eccentricity, daring and openness of the British genius.” Danny Boyle, “Welcome to the Isles of Wonder,” in London 2012 Olympic Games Opening Ceremony Official Programme (London: Haymarket Network, 2012) 11. !vii capital, drugs, music, and energy — in short, culture — that traverse the political boundaries of the postcolonial nation. Boyle’s vision of present-day Britain likewise informs his staging of the history of the Industrial Revolution. According to the programme for the Olympic Ceremony, there is a narrative of progress, what he calls a “golden thread,” weaving together the spectacle and energy of the scenes of the Industrial Revolution inaugurated in the late seventeenth century with the “digital revolution” of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Situating the design for Isles of Wonder in a redemptive social-technological telos, Boyle writes: But we hope, too, that through all the noise and excitement you’ll glimpse a single golden thread of purpose — the idea of Jerusalem — of the better world, the world of real freedom and true equality, a world that can be built through the prosperity of industry, through the caring nation that built the welfare state, through the joyous energy of popular culture, through the dream of universal communication. A belief 3 !that we can build Jerusalem. And that it will be for everyone. In Isles of Wonder, Christopher Bryant argues, Boyle presented a “people’s history” of modern Britain, a story of the nation that “really was about the people.”4 In this sense, Boyle’s popular ceremony thus realized one of the central mythopoeic dreams of the cinema. As Georges Didi-Huberman reminds us, filmmakers in the so-called primitive and modern periods, from the Lumière brothers to Sergei Eisenstein to Leni Riefenstahl and beyond, were obsessed with !3 Boyle, “Welcome to the Isles of Wonder,” 11. British Library curator Luke McKernan considers
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