Humphrey Jennings by Kevin Jackson

[DB7]

Cinema: Humphrey Jennings by Kevin Jackson
REVIEWED BY CHRISTOPHER BRAY

HUMPHREY JENNINGS
by Kevin Jackson
http://www.timesonline.co.uk
Picador £30 pp448

Humphrey Jennings. The name is so anonymous-sounding it might have been that of a carpenter or manufacturer of preserves. Yet it belonged to the most singular of the talents that clustered around John Grierson’s British documentary movement during the 1930s and 1940s. While the bulk of their work is now only of sociohistoric interest, Jennings’s films still speak to us as films.

Grierson and his acolytes were utilitarians. They believed their documentaries could make people into better members of society. Not so Jennings, who thought aesthetics more important than agitprop. Although he shared the Grierson gang’s instinctive leftism, he was never quite trusted by them. As Grierson once joked to a colleague: “Let’s go down and see Humphrey being nice to the common people.” Nice to them he was, though as Kevin Jackson points out in this scrupulously weighted biography, Jennings also “had a surprisingly old-fashioned pride in employing servants”.

It came with the territory. Jennings was born in 1907, the son of an artist mother and an amateur architect father. Their Walberswick home in Suffolk was a place of paintings, poetry and politics. In bed with flu, the 11-year-old Humphrey pronounced himself bored, whereupon he was handed a copy of Plato’s Republic and told to get on with it. By the time he left the Perse School in 1926, Jennings had proved himself a first-rate athlete, orator, actor, set designer, poet, linguist, classicist and historian. One’s envy increases when he fetches up at Pembroke College, Cambridge, to read English. Jennings was lucky enough to be an undergraduate just as the subject as we know it today was being invented. One of his tutors was I A Richards who was working on what would become Practical Criticism. Among his fellow students were William “Seven Types of Ambiguity” Empson and Jacob “The Ascent of Man” Bronowski. That guy over there was John Maynard Keynes, and those two bickering blokes were Bertie Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein. To Jennings, already burning with learning, Cambridge offered less a baptism of fire than a warm welcome. He felt instantly at home. Three years later he took a starred First.

Multitalented, Jennings had no idea what he wanted to do when he graduated. Or rather, he had lots of ideas. He was going to do postgraduate research. He was going to be a painter (though heavily derivative, the horse’s head Jackson reproduces crackles with energy). He was going to be a poet. Unable to make up his mind, Jennings did what so many brilliant young men in his position were doing: he went to Paris.

He came back a surrealist bricoleur, working on collages of such mysterious juxtapositions (a swiss roll and a mountain?) that the bigger mystery is how he got tugged into the documentary swirl. In fact, Jackson argues convincingly, there was no mystery because those ostensibly realist tracts are everywhere tainted with what André Breton called “psychic automatism”. A Diary for Timothy (1946), for instance, seems at first glance like a piece of author-free reportage about the state of post-war Britain. Nonetheless, its often startling movements from image to image make for a work of mood-swinging self-awareness.

Jennings was always at pains to remind his audience of the constructed nature of his pictures. He was a realist about realism. Far from believing that the camera couldn’t lie, he believed it had to lie if it were to stand any chance of telling the truth. Fires Were Started (1943) uses collage technique, blending the iconography of documentary (it “stars” real East End firemen working during the Blitz) with the dictates of fiction (from that observed reality the picture traces a near conventionally structured narrative arc) to conjure up a work of compacted poetic truth. As Jackson says, the film takes you on a “journey from the everyday to the timeless and back again”.

Jennings’s own journey from the everyday to the timeless was over all too soon. He was 43 when, scouting locations on the Greek island of Poros, he lost a handhold climbing, and plunged to his death. How different post-war British film might have looked had he lived. In this wondrously adoring book he does just that.

[Paul E]

"The only true poet of the English cinema"
Just bought this. I really can't agree with (the usually sound) Michael Powell when he describes documentary makers as 'frustrated feature makers' (or words to that effect). If Britain made a major contribution to cinema in the 30s it was surely through documentary film - not just Jennings but Cavalcanti, Len Lye, Norman MacLaren and others. Very likely in the 30s the ordinary British persons first encounter with surrealism (if not through a London Transport or Shell Oil poster) would be through a five minute short made for the GPO! Check out Len Lye's N or NW (about such a prosaic matter as using the post code properly) if proof is needed.....

[Steve Crook]

Paul E: "The only true poet of the English cinema" Just bought this. I really can't agree with (the usually sound) Michael Powell when he describes documentary makers as 'frustrated feature makers' (or words to that effect). If Britain made a major contribution to cinema in the 30s it was surely through documentary film - not just Jennings but Cavalcanti, Len Lye, Norman MacLaren and others. Very likely in the 30s the ordinary British persons first encounter with surrealism (if not through a London Transport or Shell Oil poster) would be through a five minute short made for the GPO! Check out Len Lye's N or NW (about such a prosaic matter as using the post code properly) if proof is needed.....

Powell just had a bee in his bonnet about documentaries because he knew that all documentaries have an element of fiction and selective editing. Flaherty's Man of Arran (1934) was heavily staged, he got the islanders to use some fishing techniques that they abandoned many years before. But it was also (or mainly) the way that the critics seemed to be in love with documentaries and considered them to be the only original British films.

Pressburger's grandson, Kevin Macdonald, did a very good documentary for Channel 4 about Humphrey Jennings in 2000.

Steve

[Paul E]

Worth a read although I think too much of Jackson's focus falls on Jennings' rather indifferent poetry and painting rather than on his legacy as a filmaker. Although written with obvious affection the result is a Jennings portrayed as something of a dilettante. Also, Jackson digresses lengthily on the backgrounds of some of Jennings' associates but at the same time is guilty of crucial lapses of research (for instance, Jackson appears to be unaware of the significant essay Jennings wrote on his involvement as producer of Birth of the Robot (Len Lye's colour film for Shell). The greatest weakness of the book though is its failure to place clearly Jennings' role within British modernism, especially in its commercial manifestations.

[Clinton Morgan]

He should have a DVD release. A box of three or four discs consisting of all of his films, including the Kevin McDonald ("Come out and git yer boy!") documentary and with commentaries by Christopher Frayling, Jeffrey Richards and Mike Leigh.

I love 'Spare Time'. There was a time when Channel 4 would show the Jennings/Grierson/Calvacanti documentaries in the afternoons. Ah well, at least they're showing St Trinians films.