Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 5 No. 18, June 2001
Henry Breitrose
Behold Their Quarter'd Fires
Brian Winston _Fires Were Started_ London: British
Film Institute,
1999 ISBN 0-85170-773-4 79 pp. Humphrey Jennings was arguably the
most talented of the first generation of British documentary
filmmakers, and Brian Winston's book, written as part of the
British Film Institute's 'BFI Classics' series, is an
affectionate appreciation of Jennings's _Fires Were
Started_. Winston describes quite accurately describes the
film as Jennings's 'masterpiece' (1), and his book is a
celebration of its qualities that stops just this side of
hagiography. Humphrey Jennings was a man of many
parts: a student of the critic William Empson, a surrealist
painter, an imagist poet, an essayist, a broadcaster, a
critic, and a man deeply interested in the condition of
England. Influences are easier to spot than prove, but it is
tempting to speculate on the relationship between Empson's
ideas and Jennings's work. Empson's _Seven Types of
Ambiguity_ was a gravamen of the New Criticism, which
focused on the close reading of the text itself as a
methodology for exploring the aesthetic structure of
literature. Empson studied with I. A. Richards, who with C.
K. Ogden wrote _The Meaning of Meaning_ (1918), which
shifted the enterprise of literary criticism from
impressionistic idealism and musings on the lives of the
poets to a rigorously text-centered (and fatally
de-contextualized) empiricism. This intersection of empiricism and
art seems to connect both Empson and Jennings: Empson in his
insistence on close reading and critical taxonomy (vide
_Some Versions of the Pastoral_), and Jennings in his
exquisitely closely-observed documentaries, and his poetry.
On screen and the page, Jennings evolved a poetry of the
real. Imagism rejected generalities and cosmic evocations
and derived its artistic power from the accretion of
specific images. In Jennings's films the images were
reconstructions of empirical observation. His poetry could
be more direct: I see a thousand strange sights in the
streets of London I see the clock on Bow Church burning
in daytime I see a one-legged man crossing the
fire on crutches I see three negroes and a woman with
white face-powder reading music at half-past three in
the morning I see an ambulance girl with her arms
full of roses I see the burnt drums of the
Philharmonic I see the green leaves of Lincolnshire
carried through London on the wrecked body of an
aircraft . . . (from the poem 'I See London',
1941) In 1937, Jennings founded Mass
Observation with Tom Harrisson and Charles Madge. It seemed
less a social research organization and more a movement
dedicated to the empirical description and documentation of
various aspects of life in Britain. While Jennings's
involvement with Mass Observation was brief, it demonstrates
his commitment to the inductive logic method of documentary:
finding the general by accreting the specific, constructing
a whole from the sum of its parts, asserting the universal
by the summation of the individual. Jennings's method of making sense of
the world, one piece at a time, animates _Fires Were
Started_, and gives the film its authenticity, even now,
almost 60 years after it was made. Winston recognizes this,
and his book attempts, successfully in my view, to
understand how such a time-bound genre as documentary can
have more than historical significance for today's
viewer. By the time it was finished, _Fires
Were Started_ was a film that explained the operation of an
agency that was no longer in existence, The Auxiliary Fire
Service. The AFS operated in the earliest days of the blitz
as part of an amateur civilian defense system, riven by
territoriality, small-mindedness, and slavish adherence to
bureaucratic rules. None of this appears on the screen. This
system was replaced by a proper National Fire Service.
Jennings briefly acknowledges this in an introductory title,
which tells one less than meets the eye, but precisely which
fire service serves as the ostensible subject of the film is
unimportant. What distinguishes the film is a set of richly
detailed evocations of heroisms, large and small. Jennings,
and his partner in making sense of the world with images,
editor Stuart McAllister, create a depiction of an idealized
wartime Britain in which economic circumstance, social
class, accent, and, to a remarkable extent, even gender, are
made subsidiary to the task of ensuring the survival of the
nation. John Grierson, the great impresario of
British documentary, brought Humphrey Jennings to the GPO
Film Unit and the Documentary Movement, but unlike Grierson,
whose over-arching Clydeside ideological agenda compelled
him to advocacy as a first principle of documentary,
Jennings's posture was that of an observer. Grierson found
financial support from the establishment's left hand to
support the making of films dedicated to ameliorating the
social effects caused by the establishment's right hand,
Jennings had other interests. It was Grierson, the
self-styled enemy of art in the documentary, who hired
Jennings, much as he did other artists of that generation,
such as Benjamin Britten, William Coldstream, and Wystan
Hugh Auden. Britten, Coldstream and Auden abandoned
documentary and the collaborative art of film for their own
autonomous arts, but Jennings wholly embraced documentary
and made it all of a piece with his other
passions. _Fires Were Started_ is a documentary
by the standards of its own time, but Brian Winston points
out that it seems less of a documentary in our time. Indeed,
by the postmodern standards of his previous book,
_Claiming
the Real_, [1] _Fires
Were Started_ is hardly a documentary at all. By some trendy
current standards, nothing is a documentary. Everything is
but an imaginative, i.e. fictive, discourse. But Winston has
a keen eye for evidence and is not loathe to revise his
views. Documentary has evolved since the days of Grierson,
and while Winston claims that today's audiences regard the
various permutations of fly-on-the-wall 'Direct Cinema' as
paradigmatically documentary, he accepts that the visible
evidence of _Fires Were Started_ is difficult to deny.
Writing about Grierson's famously elusive definition of
documentary as the 'creative treatment of actuality',
Winston wrote: 'Surely, no 'actuality' (that is,
evidence and witness) can remain after all this brilliant
interventionist 'creative treatment' (that is, artistic and
dramatic structuring) has gone on. Grierson's enterprise was
too self-contradictory to sustain any claims on the real,
and renders the term 'documentary' meaningless.'
(59) Pretty strong stuff. But is the use of
observational filming, stock footage, and witnesses
attributes that define documentary, or are they merely
useful superficial tropes with which to give the spectator
the illusion that underneath it all there lurks a credible
epistemic system? Woody Allen was on to this problem in
1983. His film _Zelig_ is a clever satire on the
evidence-and-witness formula. The witnesses -- writers Susan
Sontag, Irving Howe, Saul Bellow, singer and 20s Parisian
icon Bricktop, clinical psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, and
historian John Morton Blum -- talk to the camera about the
remarkable Leonard Zelig, the 'human chameleon' who became a
celebrity in 1920's due to his ability to look and act like
anyone around him. He was defined solely by his context. We
see Zelig in 'B-roll', identifiable newsreel footage,
interacting with Woodrow Wilson, Babe Ruth, Adolf Hitler,
and others. Of course, Woody Allen's Zelig, who literally
was all things to all men, was a fiction, but a useful
fiction, and made clear, to those with eyes to see, the
essential truth claim of documentary, which is that its
truth fundamentally depends on the truthfulness of the
filmmaker, rather than on structural tropes or technical
means. In all fairness to Winston, who lived
with Jennings's film for some months, he drastically revised
his previous dicta, and while the truth claims of _Fires
Were Started_ differ radically from the observational
fly-on-the-wall or reflexive fly-in-the-soup direct cinema
paradigms, it certainly is a documentary. As Grierson rather
modestly put it in the original coinage, when describing
Robert Flaherty's _Moana_, 'it has a certain documentary
quality'. [2] The documentary quality, I believe,
derives from the correspondence between the subject matter
on the screen and what we know from history, but even more
importantly, from the ways in which Jennings uses images and
sounds to create a credible model of the world on the
screen. The problem that Winston had to
overcome is that _Fires Were Started_ is about as far as a
film can get from today's dominant paradigm and still be a
documentary. It was scripted and re-enacted. As Peter
Stansky and William Abrahams have pointed out, [3]
the cast consisted of non-actors, who were playing
themselves, albeit with fictional names and in some cases,
imagined histories. Auxiliary fireman William Sansom, whose
name was changed (he became Barrett in the film) was
correctly described as an advertising copywriter in the
film. Sansom had previously written some short stories and
would eventually become a well-known writer, but Winston
errs in asserting that his occupation was misrepresented in
the film. In his previous writing, Winston would
have had us believe that there is no distinction between
fact and fiction in film, and that because all films are
constructed, they are fictions. He makes much of the
possibilities of digital manipulation, and the fact that
image editing programs like Photoshop render obsolete the
belief that the camera doesn't lie. It doesn't matter,
because whether or not the camera lies, the filmmaker can.
But it was ever thus. Colin Young noted some years ago that
the camera tends to lie, and the audience tends to believe.
Even a film consisting of one continuous take, unedited, is
constructed in the sense that a decisions were made as to
where to point the lens, when to turn the camera on, and
when to turn it off. Inescapably, human intentionality,
imagination, and intervention mediate the representation.
They stand between subject and spectator. Winston's previous insistence that
documentary is an impossible all-or-nothing enterprise
caused Trevor Ponech and Carl Plantinga, neither of whom
have much difficulty discriminating between the dancer and
the dance, to point out that the synthetic properties of
film are irrelevant to its status as fact. [4] The
conditions of documentary are set by the pro-filmic
material, i.e. what the filmmaker takes to be the subject,
and the filmmaker. Grierson, who hired artists by the
carload, all the while derogating artistry in documentary,
might have agreed. [5] I think that he would have
greatly enjoyed Brian Winston's appreciation of _Fires Were
Started_. Stanford University California, USA Footnotes 1. Brian Winston, _Claiming
the Real_ (London: British
Film Institute, 1995). 2. John Grierson, Review of _Moana_
(unsigned), _New York Sun_, 8 February 1926. 3. Peter Stansky and William Abrahams,
_London's Burning: Life, Death, and Art in the Second World
War_ (London: Constable, 1994). 4. Carl
R. Plantinga,
_Rhetoric
and Representation in Non-Fiction
Film_ (Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1997); Trevor Ponech, _What is
Non-Fiction Cinema: On the Very Idea of Motion Picture
Communication_ (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press,
1999). 5. In 1926, Grierson, ideological in
theory but deeply pragmatic in practice, wrote: 'It
frequently happens that a theory (be it every so blue-eyed
and blonde) can be neatly stabbed in the heart by the fact
of the matter; and the critic must forever be fearful of the
rod of correction wielded by practical men and practical
circumstances.' 'The Seven Obstacles to Progress', _Motion
Picture News_, 11 December 1926, p. 2225. Copyright © _Film-Philosophy_
2001 Henry Breitrose, 'Behold Their
Quarter'd Fires', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 5 no. 18, June
2001
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol5-2001/n18breitrose>.
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