Directed By: Humphrey Jennings & Stewart McAllister.
We’ve
all seen at least snippets of those American WWII shorts – like Frank Capra’s
Why We Fight series – that played in movie theaters during WWII to help win
over the home front during the war. These are basically propaganda films,
despite what Capra claims. But not all propaganda films are a bad thing – they
can be, when they are made by Leni Riefenstahl for the Nazis, and try to
disguise the horrible evil being
perpetrated by Germany, but they are not necessarily so.
Listen
to Britain, made by Humphrey Jennings (along with his longtime editor Stewart
McAllister) though is a completely different type of “propaganda” film for the
WWII years. Apparently Jennings felt the harder you pushed the message, the
more people tuned it out, so in Listen to Britain, he doesn’t really push it at
all. This is a documentary with no narration, and no dialogue, but is simply
about the day in Britain during that time. The government department in charge
of these things felt the need to add an unnecessary prologue, with a stuffy
professor describing the movie, and reading poetry. It wasn’t needed, and is
best ignored.
Because
there is no narration, Jennings let his images and the sounds he captures speak
for themselves. What Jennings is “selling” though is national unity. His camera
moves throughout Britain, showing the working class men, mothers and children,
concerts and high culture. Of course, Jennings avoids any of the bad things
happening in Britain at the time – there are no bombed houses on display, no
signs of rationing anywhere, just a portrait of normal Brits going about their
lives – working hard for King and country. The film’s message is clear – we’re
all in this together, and this is what we are fighting for. But Jennings knew
better than to try and shove this down the audience’s throats. He has shots of
plane flying overhead (and the sound of those planes is a recurring motif in
the film’s masterful sound design – alongside singing workers, and Myra Hess
performing Mozart). It takes almost 10 minutes before you even glimpse a
soldier – and then through the loving eyes of a mother who watches her children
playing, before glancing at a photograph of a soldier, presumably her husband and
father of her children.
This
is probably why Listen to Britain still ranks among the best films of all time
on some polls (the Sight & Sound Critics Poll of 2012 has it in a tie for
183rd of all time – among the films it tied with or John Ford’s The
Grapes of Wrath, Steven Spielberg’s E.T., Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line
and Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past). Jennings isn’t trying to whip the
audience up into an angry, righteous fury to go out there and crush the
Germans. He is quietly selling an idyllic homelife – and his film reaches more
for the heart than for the head. The film is masterfully assembled, and must
rank among the most influential documentaries of all time, even if it isn’t
very widely seen (certainly not on this side of Atlantic anyway). Everyone
remembers Riefenstahl, and not many remember Jennings. That’s a shame, because
as evidenced in Listen to Britain, Jennings was a much more subtle director – a
visual poet, and master at editing and sound design. If, as Roger Ebert said about
Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, that the film wouldn’t win you over if you
weren’t already a Nazi, than it can be said about Jennings film that even now,
71 years later, the film can still move you – even if we’re more aware now of
just how much we are being manipulated.
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