Margy Kinmonth (2022)
The subtitle may sound like a weak pun but isn’t – at least, it’s a direct quote from Eric Ravilious (1903-42) who, as Margy Kinmonth makes clear, once wrote that ‘Artists are drawn to war …’ There are things wrong with this documentary portrait of Ravilious but Drawn to War’s strengths outweigh its defects.
In the debit column …
Kinmonth is pointlessly anxious to keep things ‘lively’: she seems to think her audience is liable to be impatient for action cinema. She bookends the film with a supposedly dramatic rendering of the plane crash in Iceland in which Ravilious died. She inserts repeated shots of a young boy, representing the budding artist, running about the South Downs. Even a reminder of Ravilious’s famous woodcut for the Wisden almanac cover has to be accompanied by the sound of cricket bat striking ball and crowd applause.
Freddie Fox and Tamsin Greig read letters exchanged by Ravilious and his wife Tirzah Garwood, along with diary entries, etc. Fox, who did a decent job of giving voice to John Curry’s letters in James Erskine’s The Ice King (2018), does a bad job here. As well as being too emphatic, he keeps attempting little bits of characterisation – acting Ravilious instead of reading his words as simply but expressively as he can. Tamsin Greig, though much better, shows something of the same tendency and her voice sounds a bit on the mature side. It’s true that Tirzah Garwood survived Ravilious by nearly ten years but she was five years younger than him (and only forty-two when she died, in 1951). Most of the material Greig reads was written by Garwood when Ravilious was alive.
Although she gives some coverage to Tirzah Garwood’s talents as an artist, Kinmonth tends rather to treat her as a victim. The film devotes a few minutes to Ravilious’s affairs with other women in the early years of the marriage whereas Garwood’s own extra-marital romances aren’t mentioned. Kinmonth is on firmer ground in highlighting Ravilious’s stubborn determination to continue working as a commissioned war artist despite his wife’s fears about the dangers involved and her own ill health (Tirzah was first diagnosed with cancer in 1941). To add insult to injury, she didn’t receive a widow’s pension for some time after September 1942: because Ravilious’s body was never recovered, the British government, for the best part of two years, regarded him as missing rather than dead. But Kinmonth’s narrative somehow manages to make this delay seems like Ravilious’s fault, too.
On the credit side …
Ravilious’s art! Margy Kinmonth doesn’t stint on examples; her references to the landscapes and other images that inspired the work are well chosen. I was especially pleased to hear one of her contributors – perhaps the writer Robert Macfarlane but I may have misremembered this – observe that it’s often a pathway that leads the eye into and through a Ravilious picture: where the path is heading is a matter of melancholy uncertainty. That sometimes strikes me when I look at the print of ‘Wet Afternoon’, Ravilious’s 1938 water colour, on our wall.
Eric and Tirzah married in 1930. Amazingly, Kinmonth is able to show us a video recording – made on a ‘cinematograph’ – of the wedding party in Kensington.
While the actors’ voices are a disappointment, most of the talking heads are well worth listening to. This is true of Anne Ullmann, the youngest of Eric and Tirzah’s three children; the artists Anne Desmet and David Hepher, whose family lived close to the Raviliouses in the 1930s; art world professionals, including Charles Saumarez Smith; and, as well as Robert Macfarlane, a few bigger-name celebrity Ravilious fans. Inviting contributions from Ai Weiwei, Alan Bennett and Grayson Perry might be another reflection of Kinmonth’s nervous need to widen her film’s appeal but it pays off. I must confess I wasn’t that impressed with what Ai Weiwei had to say but it’s refreshing to hear Grayson Perry talk freely as a practising artist rather than as the presenter of television with a preconceived line (entertaining though the TV programmes often are).
Alan Bennett is even better. He says that Ravilious is underrated partly because his art is easy to read. To illustrate the point, Bennett mentions the print of ‘Railway Landscape’ that hung on the classroom wall in the Leeds primary school he attended. It was placed alongside an image of Highland cattle; these were pictures, in other words, that children were expected to understand. The geriatric Alan Bennett talks enjoyably about ‘Railway Carriage’ (his only caveat: it’s not grimy enough for the third-class carriage it’s meant to be) – and even more perceptively about ‘Tea at Furlongs’ (1939). The table set for tea looks out on benign Sussex countryside but, with two empty chairs and a large grey umbrella in evidence, the composition is ominous. Bennett, having already said he thinks Ravilious’s art is decidedly English but never ‘cosy’, suggests that ‘Tea at Furlongs’ could as well be called ‘Munich’.
While Bennett has clearly always liked and admired Ravilious, I hadn’t realised he was forgotten for decades after his death. (This seems all the more surprising when, as Charles Saumarez Smith notes, there was an exhibition of his and other war artists’ work at the National Gallery even during Ravilious’s lifetime.) Anne Ullmann explains that she and her brothers discovered their father’s neglected work under Edward Bawden’s bed, following the latter’s death in 1989. This discovery started the process of rebuilding of Ravilious’s posthumous reputation. Margy Kinmonth’s film ends with text summarising his achievements and standing today; that’s standard practice in a screen biography, whether documentary or drama, but the simple assertion that Ravilious’s ‘legacy is unsurpassed’ is a vague, cliched overstatement. In contrast, the story of how that legacy has gained ever-increasing public recognition, merits more screen time than it gets in Eric Ravilious: Drawn to War.
28 January 2025
