History seen by a visionary poet
Lindsay Anderson
PANDAEMONIUM: THE COMING OF THE MACHINE AS SEEN BY CONTEMPORARY OBSERVERS by Humphrey Jennings Deutsch, £9.95 (f12.95 in 1986) For some of us — a comparative hand- ful, I suspect — the appearance of this book is an amazing happening, a myth suddenly, unexpectedly assuming subst- ance. We have known about it for ages: the immense typescript, gathering dust some- where, of quotations about and around the Industrial Revolution and the triumph of the machine. A collection of texts assem- bled and annotated by the unpredictable, elusive Humphrey Jennings, his never- completed, never-published, yet surely overwhelming magnum opus. And here it is, without warning, condensed into quite an ordinary-sized book, not exactly over- whelming, but certainly gnomic, stimulat- ing to mind and imagination. I call Humphrey Jennings 'unpredict- able' because you could never be sure into what art or intellectual activity his restless creativeness would lead him. Was he a poet? A painter? An analytic (or synthe- tic) social visionary? A film maker? He Was all of these, and most certainly the last. The Barry Normans of our BBC culture may ask 'Humphrey who?', but this kind of common ignorance in no way diminishes the extraordinarily beautiful poems-on-film which were Jennings's most enduring achievement.
I suppose that as a result of the chat about this book these films may now be properly shown. For who, apart from frequenters of the National Film Theatre or the Hampstead Everyman, has any clear impression of the still-vibrant poetic ener- gy of Spare Time, Listen to Britain, Fires Were Started, Diary for Timothy — films unique in the finesse and individuality of their style, their powerful combination of intelligence and feeling? They express a patriotic ideal which you will find nowa- days only in the hearts of the very simple, or on the tongues of self-deceiving politi- cians. It took the huge emotional pressure of wartime to inspire a sensibility as soph- isticated as that of Humphrey Jennings to make such an ideal into art.
Jennings was absolutely exceptional in his combination of intellectual curiosity and wit with deep and subtle human response. It got him into trouble with his colleagues in the documentary movement.
Grierson himself thought he was arty: his tone, I guess, was more sneery than approving when he said that it took Jen- nings to discover 'the Louis Quinze prop- erties of a Lyons' Swiss Roll'. Basil Wright has recently recorded (and apologised for) his own mistaken idea that Spare Time, a look at Northern working-class leisure habits that dared to combine irony with fondness, was 'patronising to the working classes'. And of course poor Edgar Anstey earned himself a special place among the dunces of criticism when he attacked - and in this journal too — Listen to Britain: `The rarest piece of fiddling since the days of Nero . . . it will be a disaster if this film is sent overseas.' It is really extraordinary that Jennings survived in the propagandist and, yes, patronising tradition of British documentary cinema. It was during the war that Humphrey Jennings started work on Pandaemonium. Years before he had gathered material on the Industrial Revolution as the basis of a series of talks to miners in the Swansea Valley. When he was making his film in Wales about the destruction of Lidice (The Silent Village) he got the idea of shaping this material into a book about the coming of the machine, from the late 17th to the late 19th centuries. It was to be a synoptic view of a social development which Jen- nings came to feel was a catastrophe, even if an inevitable one. A history book in a way, but an imaginative history. Jennings's method in compiling this anthology was characteristic of his creative method — of the way he conceived, developed and assembled his films. He called his selected passages 'Images', each given its `particular place in an unrolling film'. He also called them 'Moments' 'Moments of Vision'. His aim was to present the feeling as well as the facts of the transformation of life in our country by the adoption of industrial methods. He wanted his history to be comprehensive, but not objective. Jennings came to feel more and more strongly that industrialism, with its atten- dant triumph of materialism, has involved `the expropriation of poetry'. By that he meant the destruction of the imaginative faculty which is an indispensable function of man. But — and it is in this that his book is creative, not didactic — he does not present this view as a thesis. He suggests it, he implies it, he leaves much work, reflec- tive and itself imaginative, to the reader. So this book is itself a kind of poem.
Jennings never exactly finished Pan- daemonium. He worked at it, on and off, for six or seven years. He died tragically at the age of 43, on location for a film on the Greek island of Poros. He had assembled an enormous number of quotations, though not finalised his selection and had not finished his notes or his introduction, or fully selected his illustrations. Charles Madge, his friend and fellow Mass Obser- ver, has done marvellously in editing and arranging this formidable material — from diaries, histories and works scientific and literary; from writers as various as Milton, Blake, Faraday, Tennyson, Melville, Dick- ens, Engels and William Morris, as well as a host of vivid chroniclers and diarists of whom few of us have ever heard. You can read these Images any way you like, creating your own montage by dipping here and there, or accepting the Jennings- Madge montage as assembled in the book. Either way you will be illuminated and enriched.
Jennings's daughter Mary-Lou writes factually and revealingly about her father. She does not feel that Pandaemonium could never have been a completed work. I'm not sure. Jennings perhaps was pur- suing a vision, an intuition which could never have been more complete than it is here. And couldn't it have been, shouldn't it have been a film? Don't these literary visions cry for the complementary images of Jennings the film maker? Of one thing we may be sure: no one but Jennings himself could ever have done it. Here it stands then: a monument to one of the unique artists of our time, a visionary poet.
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