The Imagination at War: Visionary Poetics in Humphrey Jennings’s “I See London” and <i>London Can Take It!</i>-Reference-Cited by-同舟云学术

The Imagination at War: Visionary Poetics in Humphrey Jennings’s “I See London” and London Can Take It!

Published:2023-06-01 Issue:1 Volume:32 Page:1-30
ISSN:0847-5911
Container-title:Canadian Journal of Film Studies
language:en
Short-container-title:Canadian Journal of Film Studies / Revue Canadienne d'etudes cinématographiques

Author:

Birdwise Scott¹

Affiliation:

1. Toronto Film School, Yorkville University, Toronto South Campus, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Abstract

Résumé: Cet article réévalue l’image convenue du documentariste Humphrey Jennings, passé à la postérité à titre de poète cinématographique de « la guerre du peuple ». On y étudie le contexte poétique visionnaire de son poème “ I See London”, composé pendant la guerre (1941), et de son film London Can Take It! (1940), en contextualisant leur représentation de la vie quotidienne pendant l’urgence nationale que fut le Blitz ; cette contextualisation s’appuie sur les paradoxes qui animent la poétique postsurréaliste déployée par Jennings au sujet de cette guerre du peuple. Nous défendons l’idée que l’apport le plus important de Jennings au moral de l’Angleterre pendant la guerre repose sur la manière dont il affirme la capacité collective de la population à s’adapter aux conditions de guerre totale – conditions extraordinaires qui, comme le montre le cinéaste, possèdent leurs propres éléments (extra)ordinaires de rythme et de routine. Cependant, au lieu de normaliser simplement les paradoxes de l’époque, nous suggérons ici que Jennings fait appel à l’imagination poétique afin de protéger les dimensions historiques et symboliques du mode de vie de la population, évitant ainsi de réduire celle-ci à la position d’objet cible de la destruction.

Publisher

University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress)

Subject

Visual Arts and Performing Arts

Link

https://utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/cjfs-2021-0028

Reference70 articles.

1. J.F.C. Fuller, “Gas Will Dominate in Next War,” Maclean’s (1 November 1923): 34.

2. Arthur Rimbaud, “Letter to Paul Demeny, Charleville May 15, 1871,” in Arthur Rimbaud: Complete Works, ed. and trans. Paul Schmidt (New York: Harper Collins, 1975), 116.

3. Lindsay Anderson, “Only Connect: Some Aspects of the Work of Humphrey Jennings,” Sight & Sound 23.4 (Spring 1954): 181; reprinted in Film Quarterly 15.2 Special Humphrey Jennings Issue (Winter 1961–62): 5; and in Humphrey Jennings: Film-maker, Painter, Poet, 2nd ed., ed. Marie-Louise Jennings (London: British Film Institute, 2014), 87.

4. John Grierson recruited Jennings to the General Post Office (GPO) with Alberto Cavalcanti’s recommendation in 1934. The GPO became the Crown Film Unit in 1940 under the British Government’s Ministry of Information during World War II. For critical discussion of Jennings’s wartime films, see, among the vast body of scholarship, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, “Humphrey Jennings: Surrealist Observer,” in All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema, ed. Charles Barr (London: British Film Institute, 1986), 321–333; Bjorn Sorenssen, “The Documentary Aesthetics of Humphrey Jennings,” in Documentary and the Mass Media, ed. John Corner (London: Edward Arnold, 1986), 47–64; Peter Stansky and William Abrahams, London’s Burning: Life, Death and Art in the Second World War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 71–125; Jim Leach, “The Poetics of Propaganda: Humphrey Jennings and Listen to Britain,” in Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video, ed. Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998), 154–170; Brian Winston, Fires Were Started (London: British Film Institute, 1999); Geoff Eley, “Finding the People’s War: Film, British Collective Memory, and World War II,” American Historical Review 106.3 (2001): 818–838; Jeffrey Richards, “Humphrey Jennings: The Poet as Propagandist,” in War and the Media: Reportage and Propaganda, 1900–2003, ed. Mark Connelly and David Welch (London: Bloomsbury, 2005), 127–138; Philip C. Logan, Humphrey Jennings and British Documentary Film: A Re-Assessment (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2011), 121–282; and James Chapman, “Documentary at War,” in A New History of British Documentary (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 90–122.

5. See Angus Calder, The People's War: Britain 1939-1945 (London: Pimlico, 1969)