COMMENTARY

Jennings was a poet and painter as well as a film-maker. He was strongly influenced by romanticism, idealism and surrealism, and was a member of the organising committee of the 1936 Surrealist Exhibition in London. In 1937 he also founded, along with Charles Madge and Tom Harrisson, the organisation Mass Observation, which attempted to explore and record popular cultural phenomena. In his films, Jennings is concerned to explore the revelation of the symbolic in the everyday, through the use of an impressionistic style dependent on juxtapositions and association. Jennings believed that, within the collective consciousness of a people, a distinctive ‘legacy of feeling’ could be discerned, which could be captured symbolically through art. The task of the documentary film-maker is to record these manifestations through symbols. For Jennings, then, the documentary film-maker is both an observer, capturing what emerges from within the legacy of feeling within the nation, and a creative artist, embodying what is observed within an image containing a multiplicity of meanings.

Jennings's style is most apparent in Listen to Britain (1942). Here, there is a move away from dependence on linear narrative, and an emphasis on associative editing. Sound and image are built up through a series of oppositions which express the underlying unity beneath apparant contradiction. Listen to Britain is an expression of the connectedness of experience; it projects a fluid and ambiguous space, within which meanings evoke a sense of national identity.

Jennings was strongly influenced by the notion that English national identity had been transformed by the industrial revolution, and that the organic unity of English society had been disrupted by laissez-faire capitalism. In many respects, films such as Listen to Britain are an intense reflection on this belief in the underlying unity of the nation. Some critics have argued that Jennings's films, effective though they are, could only have been made during the war, when there was such a focus on the issue of national identity. After the war, in films such as Diary for Timothy, the contradictions and oppositions which are synthesised in Listen to Britain often remain unresolved. In the post-war period, notions of the connectedness of experience became less appropriate, as political divisions developed within Britain. Jennings's concern with the unity of experience underlying apparent division was, in many respects, close to the theoretical model employed by Grierson in Drifters.