Pandemonium: Films By Humphrey Jennings
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
Fires Were Started (1943) 75 min
Birth Of A Robot (1936) and Spare Time (1939)
Steve McQueen’s recent Blitz directly evoked the imagery of Humphrey Jennings’ dramadoc Fires Were Started, made in 1943 with volunteer firemen re-enacting their roles at the height of the London blitz, and a recreation of a raging riverside fire that was as terrifying as McQueen’s is today. This provides a good opportunity to revisit the only feature-length film by Jennings, venerated by Lindsay Anderson as ‘the only true poet of British cinema’.
Although Jennings will always be most strongly associated with his films of Britain at war, he was a many-sided figure: poet, Surrealist painter and pioneer ethnographer, as a founder of the Mass Observation movement, with Charles Madge and Tom Harrisson. Two pre-war films evoke these commitments. Birth of a Robot, made in partnership with Len Lye, used stop-motion animation to create an inventive advertisement for Shell; and Spare Time an early essay film that explored Britain’s leisure pursuits with a Surrealist’s eye for the bizarre. Pandemonium was the book that remained unpublished at Jennings death, recording the impact of the industrial revolution on English culture.
Contact name:
Matthew Barrington