Humphrey Jennings und die britische „Home Front“ (German Edition)

The film was nominated for the inaugural Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in , but lost against four other Allied propaganda films. It is noted for its nonlinear structure and its use of sound. For the American release, Listen to Britain opens with a foreword spoken by Leonard Brockington added by a "nervous civil servant" [2] as there were fears that Americans may be confused by the ambiguity of the film's message.

Before the introduction was added, Edgar Anstey in The Spectator thought the film would be a complete disaster. However, Anstey admitted that Listen To Britain "had enormous influence overseas" [6] and the film went down very well with audiences. Roger Manvell then working as the Films Officer in the South West and later North-West of the country, claimed he always tried to show the film as the:. The success of Listen To Britain in influencing British public opinion vindicates Jennings and shows "boundary lines in the debate over social utility and aesthetic pleasure are not as distinct as they may seem.

Listen to Britain may be considered as artistic or poetic but the film is based on ambiguity and doubt. Mass Observation , co-founded by Humphrey Jennings in , found in the war's early years that the public considered it "un-British to shove propaganda down your throat", so Jennings realised that he would have to take a different approach to succeed. The film is therefore part of what Stuart Legg called the 'Poetic Line', [10] in spite of Anstey and Anderson's beliefs that poetry and propaganda were incompatible, [2] and the use of poetry in relation to the constraints imposed by the audience and motivations of Jennings and the Ministry of Information in making the film is central to understanding the film as a work of propaganda.

In Listen to Britain , Jennings is selling a myth of national unity; that in spite of pre-war differences all classes were united in war socialism but it's a bottom up view that highlights individuality, the "unity within difference". The use of sound was vital in this, allowing the montage of shots to imply hidden meaning, such as the sound of an unseen aircraft on a seemingly peaceful day.

Edgar Anstey feared the "beauty" would detract from the message [2] and when the film was released in America, an introduction was added because the art had made the message ambiguous. Only at the end was the film's ambiguity dropped as Rule, Britannia! A 'voice of God' narrator is absent but Jennings uses the vastly different sounds from people of different classes at home or in the work place as the voice of the people.

These sounds, and especially the songs, help unite the viewer. Jennings conceals his own voice behind an impersonal style so the viewer can listen to the sounds of Britain. Leaving in the serendipitous stumbling child [4] and Jennings' obsessive technique, pointed out by Mike Leigh , [4] of getting the actors to scratch their noses, adds to this sense.

The Heart of Britain () - IMDb

This non-perfected style contrasts markedly with more traditional, overt propaganda. While Jennings ignores many genuine problems, such as showing un-bombed homes or menus not ration cards, the use of sound without narration allowed Jennings to mask the propaganda as the meanings were not imposed on the viewer.

This allowed the audience to make up their own mind from the images and the music alone, [13] and this apparent freedom, along with the many, diverse voices, helps conceal the true nature of the message [14] as Goeffrey Nowell Smith explains. Jennings makes the tensions in the myth's construction central to the film. Jennings highlights class distinctions and hints at the tension between the forces for and resistant to social change.

Accepting the myth's fragility, the scene with the music hall double act Flanagan and Allen performing to a working class audience cuts straight to the Queen enjoying the music of Myra Hess at one of the London National Gallery 's lunch-time classical music concerts. Whether the classes are united with the Queen among her people or rich and poor are permanently divided is up to the viewer. In Mein Kampf , Hitler talks of the success of British propaganda in World War I [18] believing people's ignorance meant simple repetition and an appeal to feelings over reason would suffice.

Taylor believes Britain's war socialism represented genuine unity, allowing Jennings to admit these tensions given the public's distaste for overt propaganda. In , the London-based band Public Service Broadcasting released Waltz for George [22] which uses images taken from several Ministry of Information war films, though mostly from Listen to Britain , to accompany the radio report on the soldiers returning from Dunkirk.

The same year, they also released London Can Take It [22] with both audio and video taken exclusively from Jenning's propaganda documentary of the same name. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Left incomplete at his death, the manuscript - or a greatly shortened version of it - was eventually published in as Pandaemonium, and was welcomed as a masterpiece.

But that was by no means all. Jennings was also a poet and an innovative literary critic, whose work on the poetry of Thomas Gray was greatly admired by TS Eliot.

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He edited an original-spelling text of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis; he designed sets for the stage, notably for high-profile premieres of works by Stravinsky and Honneger; he worked in Paris as a professional textile designer; he taught in a public school; and he was a talker of Coleridgean dimensions. Sceptics have suggested this diversity was a weakness - the sign of a magpie, a dilettante who could not settle down to any one serious piece of work.

There is a measure of truth in this, and had Jennings been killed in one of the early Luftwaffe raids on London - as he nearly was - it is doubtful that his early demise would have seemed like a major blow to our cultural history. But it is also possible to see all of Jennings's earlier callings as the various strands of raw material that come together in his wartime films.

British documentary

The easiest way to make the case for Jennings's films is to show the best of them and let them, in the Mass Observation phrase, speak for themselves. The next best thing is to direct people to an influential article by Lindsay Anderson, "Only Connect". Originally published in , this article initiated the postwar reassessment of Jennings's films, and put forward the much-repeated proposition that he is the "only true poet" the British cinema has ever produced.

When film students ask me why I consider this handful of films so valuable, I often begin by pointing out how ill-suited they are to the task they are meant to perform. What, after all, is war propaganda meant to do? To say the enemy are sub-human swine who should be exterminated without mercy; that our side is free, brave, beautiful and absolutely certain to win?

Well, if that's the task, Jennings obviously got the wrong orders. There's hardly a moment in his films that demonises the Germans: As for Jennings's portrayal of the British, we are eccentrics and oddballs, hobbyists who like a quiet life with quiet pleasures. But we can be brave and selfless too.

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Where Leni Riefenstahl - Hitler's cinematic poet laureate - might exult in showing a muscular stormtrooper or a graceful Aryan athlete in mid-air, Jennings will show an old geezer spitting out a plum stone, or a kid clumsily dancing in the playground. Jennings is too tactful to underline what her fate would surely have been under Hitler. Jennings was a realist, who shunned the expedient lie or palatable spin. The projectionists who took government-backed films out to factories and barracks reported that audiences booed and stamped whenever they detected "flannel" - what our coarser times would call "bullshit".

But for films such as Listen to Britain they whistled and cheered. For once, the silver screen was showing them a picture of themselves that they could recognise, and a view of the war that rang entirely true.