In Our Country, directed by John Eldridge, the steadfastness of the British people is a source of reassurance to a sailor on leave. With stirring words by Dylan Thomas, rousing music from William Alwyn and camerawork from Jo Jago, this film gives an intimate view of British life on the Home Front. Also includes Humphrey Jennings's penultimate film 'The Dim Little Island' wherein Vaughan Williams, Osbert Lancaster and others dispel the image conveyed by the title.
Made for the Ministry of Information in 1944, Our Country, John Eldridge’s tour around the wartime British Isles in the company of a sailor, is reassuring, even quietl... more >
Made for the Ministry of Information in 1944, Our Country, John Eldridge’s tour around the wartime British Isles in the company of a sailor, is reassuring, even quietly celebratory in tone. It’s a celebration of the ordinary sights of Britain, its cities, its varying landscapes and how they might appear to a sailor at home on shore leave after years away. The atmosphere is accentuated by William Alwyn’s stirring music and given voice by the words of Dylan Thomas that supply the narration. There is pure Thomas poetry here: ‘the moon-moved, man-indifferent, capsizing sea’, ‘the hills slag-black or grey as suntanned slates’, ‘the slow lanes drenched with quietness and leaves’. It’s hard to illustrate or even complement such verbal richness though, and at times the film seems composed of disparate parts rather than working as a harmonious whole. Overall, though there’s plenty of room for visual play as well as verbal and there is a lightness of touch in the filming that goes beyond the merely descriptive. We see field reclamation and brush clearance, land girls and sheaves stooked in fields, harvest suppers and country dances. At times, especially during the scenes of apple harvesting, the film almost resembles Soviet propaganda with its faces of happy harvesters and fruit heavy on the bough.
It is a very different film to that other major documentary of 1944, Diary For Timothy, with none of the atmosphere of weary resignation that characterises Humphrey Jennings’ film. This is made clear from the very beginning, when an American soldier announces that ‘it is a privilege to see Britain in wartime’. Throughout however, there are inspired edits and connections that could belong in a Jennings films - a kettle whistling to the sound of an air raid siren being just one. The films serve different purposes however. Diary For Timothy is more longsighted, its view tempered with the knowledge that anything that has happened once can happen again; Our Country has a more immediate aim, reclaiming a land, its people and the qualities that give it heart.
< less
Jennings’ penultimate film is a short piece in which four men – composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, naturalist Jamie Fisher, industrialist John Orston and cartoonist Osbe... more >
Jennings’ penultimate film is a short piece in which four men – composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, naturalist Jamie Fisher, industrialist John Orston and cartoonist Osbert Lancaster reflect on the roles of caricature, ‘wild nature’, industry and music in Britain’s national life and attempt to dispel the notion that the country is a ‘dim little island’. Jennings’ conception was to edit the four strands of visual and spoken narrative together to produce an interdependent portrait of a place in which nature, industry and culture hold equal importance in the life and new growth of the nation. This is familiar Jennings territory, and although there are some typically inspired and witty touches, such as matching words about a candle to a shot of a large industrial chimney, the oft-repeated charge, that after the war Jennings’ films lacked passion, is hard to deny. The narration talks of the ‘great upheaval of national consciousness and emotion’ that the nation had recently experienced and that Jennings’ films so eloquently expressed. For him to use the same techniques of stylisation and range of shots – a clip from Fires Were Started appears and there are shots of water that could have come from Diary for Timothy and wheat fields from Listen to Britain – but to address a post-war lack of confidence instead of a surge of wartime solidarity, means the film is not as convincing as it should be; its intended audience is rather vague. Maybe this is due to the tone of the narrative; the naturalist warns that we may have to ‘ration the fun’ we get out of nature, the industrialist warns that we need ‘more work from below and more drive from the top’. If we have that, he says, ‘we can still compete’. With so many warning notes in the narrative, it is unsurprising that our attention is drawn to the editing in the film - it seems to be trying to hold things together instead of reinforcing ties already present. < less
