Britain Projected
Paul Quinn on a celluloid journey from Canterbury to Notting Hill
From the Tate Gallery Art Magazine
The audience files into the Colpeper Institute, Chillingbourne, a magic
lantern show as time machine. Thomas Colpeper is a driven ascetic, played
in Powell and Pressburger's remarkable 1944 film,
A Canterbury Tale, by Eric Portman. His mission is to excite an audience
of soldiers, a GI and a land girl about the rich, rooted continuities of
Kentish life. His monkish profile is framed by the slideless projection
light beamed on to the wall like a full moon. The camera pans around the
squaddies' faces, each the trace of a medieval type. "Cook, clerk, doctor,
lawyer, merchant, they came to Canterbury to ask for a blessing or to do
penance ... follow the old road and as you walk think of them and of the
old England ..."
As it turns out, there is much going on outside the frame in a film that
transposes Why We Fight into Who We Are, What We Desire; Colpeper is also
the mysterious Glueman. By night he secretly and serially pours glue on
girls' hair. His motivation is revealed ultimately to be a mission to attract
soldiers to his lectures, to remove the distractions of local girls by a
curfew of fear: "I'm going to defend pouring knowledge into people's heads
by force if necessary ... knowledge of our country, love of its beauty."
Like all in the quiver of films the Archers (as Powell
and Pressburger collectively termed themselves) released in this period,
this one is both didactically targeted and tangentially bowed. In many ways
the scene, the entire film, is an echo of the many paeans to England threatened
or estranged by time or distance, from Rupert Brooke (and where does that
association end? With another Archer, and is there fragrance still for tea?)
to political co-options of similar sentiments such as Stanley Baldwin's
litany in On England ("the sounds of England, the tinkle of the hammer on
the anvil in the country smithy, the corncrake on a dewy morning, the sound
of the scythe against the whetstone and the sight of a ploughteam coming
over the brow of a hill ..."), through a round of warm beer epiphanies,
reaching last orders in John Major's dregs: bat on willow, spokes of the
spinster's bicycle.
A Canterbury Tale partakes of many of these national metonyms,
replete with wartime agricultural workers that seem to have stepped directly
front the pages of the Luttrell Psalter. But
given the atypical place of the Archers in British film culture, these imagined
communities are floated in a sea of considerable strangeness: to the conservatism
and pastoralism that marked their vision as profoundly as those less idiosyncratically
rooted in the traditions of British culture, is wedded an obsessional quality,
a voyeurism and scopophilia, more sinisterly cinematic, reaching its apex
in Powell's Peeping Tom, but already present here in fetishised form
- that glue pouring, like the film, is too overdetermined. Sublimation?
An allegory of the need to make Britain's fragments cohere, become adhesive?
Native misogyny? These and many, more explanations are left hanging, totally
overbalancing the film's other axis, its didactic drive.
In fact, in this sequence, we only get as far as slide one from Collpeper's
magic lantern, "the bend on the pilgrim's road"; but if we went further
down that road, on what slides might Colpeper draw with the image-bank of
his culture's cinematic as well as its literary heritage at his disposal?
Which films persuasively, convince us of a recognisable national identity?
And which act as aporias, anomalies, blindspots and multiple vanishing points
for a more fluid sense of identity than the nation's cinema traditionally
invokes?
Slide one: the pastoral
That bend on the pilgrim's road is as good a route as any through British
cinema. Everywhere you turn are rose-tinted visions of hedgerows and hills;
the army vehicles that tear up the terrain in A Canterbury Tale bring
home how precarious is this countryside, so that film itself becomes a vehicle
of conservation. The country becomes an enclosure for imperilled ways of
life: islanders beating off bureaucrats and business, from Whisky Galore
(aka, tellingly, Tight Little Island) to Local Hero.
In another Archers film, A Matter of Life and Death, an archetypal
arcadian vision - a goatherd resting on a sand dune regaling his herd with
panpipes - makes its protagonist believe he is in heaven until a low flying
spitfire
[Spitfire?? It was a Blenheim light bomber]
brings him to earth. Tensions simmer beneath the placid surface of the pastoral,
because while it signifies timelessness, exigencies of plot and progress
mean that structurally it cannot but be an interlude: war, developers, the
encroaching outside world are constant threats. A clump of trees might harbour
an endangered tawny pipit, or 39 steps across a Scottish moor may, lead
to a nesting German agent. What defines the British is always under siege,
so attempts to stay rooted are always tenuous. In Lindsay Anderson's
O Lucky Man, the Everyman hero stumbles across a bucolic picture
postcard image, a village church at harvest festival; in the midst of this
plenty the vicar's wife breastfeeds the exhausted Travis, before sending
him back into the big bad world. In this way, the maverick social-surrealist
Anderson mercilessly mocks the sunlit, infantalising sufficiencies of the
pastoral idyll.
Slide two: the urban
The pastoral and the urban are mutually dependent in British film imagery.
The urban hell is defined by the pastoral paradise. The world of work and
labour is usually one from which to escape. The vehicle of escape is, ironically,
the engine of industrialisation, the train. It is odd that two of the first
films ever made - the Lumi re Brothers' shots of workers leaving their Lyons
factory and a train arriving at a station - were to feature imagery subsequently
central to British film culture (the very idea of which one of Lumi re's
countrymen, Truffaut, thought oxymoronic): the factory and the train. The
factory gates open to a buoyant Gracie Fields in
Sing As We Go, admit the possibility of post-war Labour landslides
in Millions Like Us, entrap Albert Finney until Saturday Night
and Sunday Morning, harbour sinister commie seditionists in The Angry
Silence or comic ones in I'm All Right Jack.
To study the national sense of collectivity we have only to sit back and
watch competing ideologies clock in. The train is an enclosed world or an
escape from the workaday world; in films such as Bank Holiday,
Holiday Camp, or the opening of Brighton Rock, the urban poor
head for the seaside, a licensed transcendence of everyday life. This image
of escape reccurs in various guises and the desired transcendence is usually
defeated; it takes bathetic forms such as a yearned-for move to the suburbs
in Room at the Top, a missed train to the bright lights for Billy
Liar (would-be working class escapees in British films of the 1960s
hear a comic voice from 1930s cinema, Moore Marriot's in Oh, Mr Porter
echoing down the platform "Next train's gone!"). The soaring kestrel
in the prologue of A Canterbury Tale undergoes a cross-cut evolution
into a fighter plane; in Ken Loach's realist riposte, Kes, it's a
grimly inevitable flightpath to the trashcan.
Even Lynne Ramsay's recent Ratcatcher envisions utopia in pastoral
terms - a new estate outside the city opening on to wheat fields. The inner
city by contrast is something out of nineteenth- century demonisations of
"how the poor live", such as Henry Mayhey's with his account of rats attacking
men "with such fury that the people have escaped from them with difficulty".
In Ratcatcher, a strike by dustmen means rubbish heaps strew the
streets and rats prowl. Such a cityscape is an ultimate affront to the vision
of a Ruskin for whom "a good sewer" was "a far nobler and a far holier thing
... than the most admired madonna ever painted". Though appositional in
purpose, and born out of experience, a film such as Ratcatcher incorporates
traditional images of the proletariat as portrayed from above - a danger
being that rats function as the metaphoric poor, as well as metonyms of
poverty; a system-directed critique becomes a confirmation of ancient stereotypes,
a symbolic space where garbage, rats and the poor engage in a dance of substitutions,
while the bourgeoisie sit it out in the arthouse, at worst disgusted, at
best moved but, worryingly, unsurprised by, prejudicial representations
ground deep in the national psyche.
Slide three: surveillance
Colpeper watches and bids his audience watch. At the same time, lie is
spying on them, ready with his glue. The ambivalence of surveillance is
registered in many British films; appropriately, enough, it relates also
to the history of cinema itself.
Colpeper gives his history lesson by means of cinema's antecedent, a magic
lantern; this machinery again comes into play much later in British film,
in Bill Douglas's Comrades. But in the latter, we are given a very
different kind of history instead of continuities in an homogeneous island
story we have "a lanternists account" of the Tolpuddle Martyrs. Sliding
between both films and their divergent tableaux, see get a sense that the
apparatus of the gaze can both fire and freeze. In A Matter of Life and
Death, another of the Archers' benign authority figures, Dr Reeves,
watches village life roll by (there actually is a proto-Majorite vicar's
wife abroad on her bike) with a camera obscura; in his raised eyrie he peers
at the mirrored disc below him like a god crouched over a world. He is the
good doctor with power of life and death, but he is also that other British
obsession - the spy, the licensed voyeur.
Frequently in British films, the Benthamite, panopticon model of surveillance
infiltrates the pastoral one: to get to his arcadia, Anderson's Travis moves
between less idealised constants of the British countryside; it is a stopover
after a military intelligence base where he is tortured over tea by ministry
men, and before a research institute where geneticist forbears of the men
who made Dolly the Sheep (and Dolly surely is at once the apotheosis and
antidote of modern British pastoral) attempt to cross him with a pig. A
similar. warp in the woolly pastoral fabric occurs in the 1950s classic
Quatermass II, in which a village that ten years earlier would have
been populated by Ealing whimsy is surrounded by barbed wire and off-limits
to outsiders. The alien domes of the secret plant bespeak new truths of
the changing British countryside, and provoke new questions about watching
and being watched. A survey of Britain's obsession with the look, be it
secret, sinister or salacious (edited by Nicolas Roeg for best effect),
would move through Powell's Peeping Tom, spies seedy or suave, from
Palmer to Bond, Witchfinder General's period proof that the inquisitional
is ever ready to gallop out of a dappled glade, an appalled Michael Caine
watching a porn film featuring his dead brother's daughter in Get Carter
, Robin Askquith peering, leering, through a suburban upstairs window
in Confessions of a Window Cleaner, and Roeg's own Performance
, a play of Borgesian mirrors - perhaps the scene where hoodlum James
Fox threatens a lowlife projectionist: "You know, I don't think I'm gonna
let you stay in the film business." Made in the 1960s (though canned until
1970) when identity seemed at its most productively blurred, when we are
most unsure just what we are looking at.
Slide four: diplomacy, or wedding bells
British cinema has long been, perforce, a diplomatic medium. Adept at
explaining an island to itself, it must also look to overseas relations.
Thus, Colpeper's converts critically include an American GI who also learns
he has a stake in Britain's past. Reunited with his buddy in a Canterbury
teashop, he can recite the story of the pilgrim's road verbatim.
The war brought out the best in the British, coaxing them out from under
their understatement and revealing a renewed sense of history. The Archers'
first post-war film, A Matter of Life and Death, was conceived as
propaganda for the new peace; though characteristically baroque in its conception,
at its heart is a simple love story, culminating in the eternal love of
an RAF pilot for an American girl. This film, this union, can be said to
mark the salad days of a "special relationship" that has been abiding if
problematic. Subsequently Britain's most ambitious filmmakers depart for
Hollywood, America's falling stars land over here; Dana Andrews finds occult
traces in the English countryside of Night of the Demon, the very
American Brian Donlevy incarnates the quintessentially British boffin, professor
Quatermass. A bizarre unwritten edict emerges that every B-film should have
an American protagonist, while canny British actors find they can earn a
shilling or make a buck by repressing their RADA or Rank charm schooling
and approximating an American drawl: who can ever remember a trilby sporting,
pre-DJ Pete Murray as wise- cracking Biff in Escort for Hire? There
was never an unequivocal golden age, of course, when Britain made non-ambivalent
representations of itself. The ambivalences are in many ways what's most
interesting. Before and during the war Scotland's crofters and shipbuilders
are dutifully recorded in grainily poetic documentaries; afterwards, we
get whimsy galore - a kilted Bill Travis tossing the caber in Geordie
, or taking The Bridal Path; then, after the success of Hammer
aesthetics, its island fringes are returned to a threatening pagan past
in The Wicker Man there is the Hollywood rewrite: Mel Gibson, the
painted face that launched a thousand devolution votes. Welsh representation
undergoes a similar. trajectory: Paul Robeson bringing his commitment to
The Proud Valley, the Hollywood version of How Green Was My Valley
, its miners played by Oirish-Americans returning from the pit singing
in perfect harmony. Significantly, a recent Welsh based film like Human
Traffic eschews national stereotypes, but replaces them with the generic
ones of yoof Culture. This is anywhere Britain, the nation as Gap ad.
As for England, what remains? A sociology teacher realism for some, a
heritage franchise for others, a few attempts to convey a fractured, multi-cultural
reality constrained by televisual limitations, or diamond geezer gangster
movies, as infected as anything else by the dominant bathos like the Krays
trying to impress their mafia "betters". The most indicative recent image
is the marriage of Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts in Notting Hill.
If the union in A Matter of Life and Death was born of post-war idealism,
this is a marriage of convenience, an act of commercial diplomacy as blunt
as anything touted to Elizabeth I. Notting Hill best represents the
wedding of calculation and the global market, screened for the approval
of a docile press, unable to argue with success, and all too ready to provide
it with a five-star epithalamium. We have strayed far from the pilgrim's
road. If the Glueman's aim was to knit peoples, histories, nations together,
something has come unstuck along the way.
Notes :-
-
Powell and Pressburger
-
Michael Powell and
Emeric Pressburger,
makers of magic.
-
Columba Powell
-
Columba is the son of
Michael Powell
and memorably appeared in Peeping Tom.
-
Luttrell Psalter
-
Illuminated manuscript written about 1325. Classic medieval images
of everyday folk.
-
Gracie Fields
-
Northern English (Lancashire) singer & comedienne. Made a reputation
for singing "cheery" or "sentimental" songs during WWII. Made a
dame after the war.
[Roger (who is not quite old enough to remember) points out ...
Gracie Fields was most popular in the 1930s, rather than in WW2 ...
Because her husband, Monty Banks, was of Italian origin, he was threatened
with internment by the British authorities (like Anton in Blimp), and this
led Gracie and Monty to relocate to the USA for most of WW2, which caused
some bad feeling from the British public during the War.
See
The Gracie Fields site and
about Gracie's War years
]
