Humphrey Jennings, the Left and the Experience of Modernity in mid twentieth-century Britain

Jones, Benjamin; Searle, Rebecca

doi:10.1093/hwj/dbs036

Cited by 8 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…All that is Solid Melts into Air,. 46 Ben Jones and Rebecca Searle (2013) Ideas of 'the modern' were always categorised in relation to the permanent 'other', that of tradition. The above poem illustrates this nicely, with past experiences of youth being drawn upon to support an understanding of a distinctly modern experience of youth in 1960.…”

Section: Meanings Of Modernitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Youth Movements, Citizenship and the English Countryside

Edwards

2018

Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements

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Section: Meanings Of Modernitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Youth Movements, Citizenship and the English Countryside

Edwards

2018

Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements

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“…In so doing, it argues that the components in the 'Appassionata' passage are mutually interrogative, producing a self-consciously ambiguous and multivalent narrative. If scholars are more familiar with the ways in which Jennings' works use images to document and explore the complexity of twentieth-century Britain (Jones & Searle, 2013), the chapter reveals how the 'Appassionata' passage achieves this through a variety of sounds. This chapter therefore scrutinizes a passage of the film frequently cited but not yet extensively examined by critics.…”

Section: Part 3: Nationhood and Conflictmentioning

confidence: 99%

Soundings Documentary film and the listening experience

2018

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SOUNDINGSchirruping sparrows can transport me back, as if through some mysterious portal, to my childhood bedroom in East London where I fell asleep and awoke to those sounds.The room itself and the very feeling of being there, and listening, is evoked. Delia Derbyshire has described how the sound of air-raid sirens during Coventry's wartime Blitz in her childhood engendered her 'love for abstract sounds', as did the 'percussive sound' of millworkers' 'clogs on cobbles' going to work at six o'clock in the morning in her later childhood home of Preston (Cavanagh, 1998). Listening is an intense, inner experience that can have lifelong resonances since 'there is nothing to stop' sound's 'penetrating enveloping presence from overpowering' (Rangan, 2017, p. 284); it has no bounding frame like the image, containing, defining and controlling it, and so is freer to generate deep affects that we have little voluntary control over. It is such a freedom that lies at the heart of the writing in this collection and its concern with the enveloping presence of sound in the context of documentary film. The photograph can show us things, even bring emotive responses but as all of the authors here show, sound's affectiveness can be deployed to generate deeper meanings beyond those provided by the frame of moving pictures. This tendency of sound to break the frame makes it ambiguous and ephemeral.We talk of the 'soundscape', yet unlike its sister landscape, its content and especially its edges are far more blurred and ultimately, indefinable, even unknowable. Sound emanates from objects that in general, we can see, at least in one's mind's eye, but as Steven Connor suggests, the actual attachment of sound we make to those objects is dependent on whatever other thing is acting on them. There is in a sense, no sound of the object itself (2004, pp. 161 -2). Anyone who has ever tried to record the sound of the wind will know that it appears to have no clear character or even sound unless it is blowing through something, such as the wires of a telephone line. We may not even make any attachment of sound to object. As Delia Derbyshire explains of the air-raid sirens, she did not know the source or meaning of their sound as a young child. Their power was both abstracted and metaphorical, like music, and this explains how they had such a profound effect on Derbyshire's future career as a composer of electronic and concrete music. Further, citing Lucy Donaldson, Simon Connor writes in this collection that unlike vision, in such listening, sound also 'makes a vital contribution to the evocation of other senses, for example, the sound of wind rustling leaves invites the feel of air on our skin, or the sizzle of food cooking conjures taste' (Simon Connor, 2018, p. 91). Sound seems to almost 'touch' us and then explode a multitude of responses, its sensual effect at once beguiling and unsettling. Compared 'increased interest in perception, embodiment and the senses ' (2010, p. 6). They do so in a variety of ways: by interpreting their own liste...

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“…In so doing, it argues that the components in the 'Appassionata' passage are mutually interrogative, producing a self-consciously ambiguous and multivalent narrative. If scholars are more familiar with the ways in which Jennings' works use images to document and explore the complexity of twentieth-century Britain(Jones & Searle, 2013), the chapter reveals how the 'Appassionata' passage achieves this through a variety of sounds.This chapter therefore scrutinizes a passage of the film frequently cited but not yet extensively examined by critics. It argues that it is both more experimental and complicated than previously thought, countering Alessandra Marzola's interpretation of the scene as a moment of 'hypnotized listening'.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Soundings : documentary film and the listening experience

2018

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Chapter 10 A 'Symphony of Britain at War' or the 'Rhythm of Workaday Britain'? Len Lye's When the Pie Was Opened (1941) and the musicalisation of warfare Anita Jorge Chapter 11 Building a sonic image of a nation: Finnish documentary and propaganda films in the early decades of sound film Kaarina Kilpiö Chapter 12 Raúl Ruiz's Now We're Gonna Call You Brother and the problem of the people's sonic representation

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Humphrey Jennings, the Left and the Experience of Modernity in mid twentieth-century Britain

Cited by 8 publications

References 27 publications

Youth Movements, Citizenship and the English Countryside

Youth Movements, Citizenship and the English Countryside

Soundings Documentary film and the listening experience

Soundings : documentary film and the listening experience

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