The Next of Kin
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
No booking required
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The Next of Kin started as an army training film that Ealing Studios was going to help the government to make. The finished film is still a training film, but Ealing added £50,000 to its budget to make it fit for general release. The fusion of fiction and documentary filmmaking is one of the defining features of Britain’s wartime cinema. This partly explains the way the film, unusually for a feature, lacks a main character, unless one counts Mervyn Johns’ mild-mannered Nazi spy. The point was that we were all in this together, and we all have a responsibility to guard against betrayal. At that time, fear of fifth columnists was out of all proportion with the paltry number of Nazi agents and sympathizers actually at work in Britain. The film insists on the need not just for loyalty in principle, but on the need for constant vigilance. It illustrates the slogan ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’. Hence the film’s disconcerting opening title, announcing itself as ‘the story of how YOU unwittingly worked for the enemy’.
This screening is part of a season of films on Treason & Betrayal, organised by the BISR Guilt Group and The Birkbeck Institute for Moving Image (BIMI).
It is an unhappy country that has frequent recourse to the law of treason. The last person to be prosecuted for High Treason under British law was William Joyce, ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, in 1945. Born in the USA to an Irish-American father and an Anglo-Irish mother, he had taken German citizenship in 1940. He possibly owed allegiance to Ireland, to Germany or to the USA as much as to Britain. However, he had neglected to cancel his British passport before broadcasting for the Nazis. That sealed his fate. Political loyalties might look so self-evident as to admit of no debate. But one loyalty often has to be set against another. Joyce probably reckoned his loyalty to fascism trumped all others. In democracies in which governments are confronted by a loyal opposition, it is not always easy to identify the core loyalty that unites all citizens. If political divisions become bitter and intractable, accusations of treachery can start to fly, even if no one is impeached or arraigned for treason. Treason and betrayal are often woven into elaborately fanciful fictions in spy films. However, the films we are watching relate closely to reality. That is partly because they represent historical events. The Mother, Vsevelod Pudovkin’s Soviet propaganda film of 1926, represents the failed 1905 revolution, while the British film The Next of Kin (1942) purports to show how Nazi agents were gleaning military secrets from seemingly innocuous conversations, and sending them to the Berlin. As the slogan of the time had it, ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’. The film dramatizes the slogan. Arguably, these two films do not merely represent reality, but, as works of propaganda, they seek to intervene in it: in the Soviet case, to uphold the legitimacy and even the historical necessity of the Soviet regime, and in the British film to inculcate a new understanding of what loyalty and betrayal mean in practice. Their intervention in reality occasionally leads them away from realism towards ritual, symbolism, and ideologies of gender. Our season on Treason and Betrayal will continue in the summer term with screenings of Dennis Potter’s television play Traitor (1971), starring John Le Mesurier as a defector reminiscent of Kim Philby (courtesy of the BFI Archive), and Jean-Pierre Melville’s masterpiece about the French resistance, of which he was a member, L’Armée des Ombres (1969).
Contact name:
James Brown