Marcus Armitage, Alex Campbell, Ruth Grimberg, Catherine Harte, Michael Ho, Gareth Johnson, Amrou Al-Kadhi, Florence Kennard, Maia Krall Fry, Callum Rice, Hermione Russell, Theodore Tennant (2017)
This year marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of Humphrey Jennings and Stewart McAllister’s famous documentary short Listen to Britain, a collage of sights and sounds of British life during World War Two. To commemorate the anniversary, ‘BBC Four and BFI partnered to offer the next generation of filmmakers an exciting opportunity to capture the diversity of UK today’. Applications were considered by a ‘panel of industry experts’ representing the partners and the production company Wingspan, which managed the project. Each of the successful applicants received a grant of up to £5,000 to make a film no shorter than two minutes and no longer than ten. The result is Listen to Britain 2017, a collection of twelve shorts, premiered at BFI on 19 September and to be screened on BBC Four on 24 September.
The quotes above are from the BFI programme note, which also briefly summarised each of the twelve films. Unusually for me, I read the note beforehand and I felt apprehensive. In the event, the premiere was a very enjoyable occasion. All twelve filmmakers were there and took a bow at the end. I spotted in the audience several of the people who’d featured in the films although they were overshadowed by Eric, the canine title character of Florence Kennard’s piece, who followed in the tradition of The Artist‘s Uggie at the Oscars show by joining in the human curtain call. Each one of the shorts was of interest; several were admirable. That pre-screening apprehension wasn’t unjustified, though. I still have reservation about Listen to Britain 2017 as a whole.
The original Jennings and McAllister documentary runs only nineteen minutes. Its picture of Britain in 1942 doesn’t, of course, pretend to be panoramic. The war effort is embodied not just by men in uniform but also by the workforce on the home front. There’s a strong musical emphasis. Soldiers croon (and yodel) ‘Home on the Range’. Flanagan and Allen lead a works singalong. The pianist Myra Hess gives one of her lunchtime recitals at the National Gallery. The perorative images are accompanied by ‘Rule Britannia’. Listen to Britain is propaganda but politically partisan in only the broadest sense: the film describes a country whose various citizens are united in a common purpose. In 2017 the phrase ‘diversity of UK today’ has a more specific and political meaning than it did in 1942. Collectively, the ingredients of Listen to Britain 2017 (a small mercy that it’s not called ‘Listen to UK 2017’) strongly suggest the ‘panel of industry experts’ had a checklist of themes to be covered: immigrant and refugee experience, misogynist abuse online, perceived disability, post-industrial anomie, etc.
Brexit casts a long and dismal shadow over the new film: the June 2016 referendum and its aftermath have exposed a disunited kingdom, a place very different from the one that Jennings and McAllister presented. Yet there’s little sense of different, disputing voices among the contributors to Listen to Britain 2017. This makes it more palatable for its assumed audience (the likes of me, anyway) and perhaps there weren’t any reactionary applicants for BFI-BBC Four funding. The narrowness of the political viewpoints reflected in the film is nagging, nevertheless. This is a limited picture of what people in this country think today. (More careful listening to Britain might have avoided Brexit in the first place.) It’s becoming increasingly clear that loss of belief in old political certainties is conducive to the growth of identity politics – but Listen to Britain 2017 illustrates this only through examples of what the people behind it see as the right sort of identity politics. The prevailing spirit of the compendium is expressed in the words of one of the young people who appears in Amrou Al-Kadhi’s CLASH: ‘What’s great about Britain is that queerness and Muslims are really integrated and that’s what I feel part of’.
Notes on each of the twelve films, in the order in which they were screened:
Accents Speak Louder Than Words (Catherine Harte): A good title. Kasha came to Britain from Poland twenty-seven years ago. In recent years, she has suffered from ‘accent discrimination’. While proud of her Polish origins, she now feels compelled to disguise them and signs up for elocution classes. Her prospective voice coach is horrified by this and uncertain whether they should proceed but Kasha insists she wants to. It’s a dismaying story – one that needs a ‘before’ and ‘after’ structure in order to realise its theme more fully. You’d like to hear how Kasha sounds at the end of the elocution course and what she feels she’s lost in addition to her natural accent. Anti-Polish prejudice is very – and misleadingly – localised: according to Kasha, things were fine when she lived in London, then in Yorkshire: her problems started only when she moved to the Thanet area of Kent.
Listen to Bridgeton (Callum Rice): An even better title – echoing that of the original film, specifying the location of this one, hinting at the imaginative use of sound in Callum Rice’s piece. Bridgeton is an area of Glasgow that houses the city’s last remaining corporation bus garage – huge, crepuscular and nearly deserted. Rice shows the work of restoring old vehicles there. The voices of those involved in this are heard throughout; their faces are unseen or half-glimpsed. The locale is richly expressive: it hints at larger currents of industrial and technological change; the antique look of the buses gives them a nostalgic quality. The place is almost but not quite a ghost town in itself. The images here are real and specific rather than worked-up illustrations of the words on the soundtrack. That soundtrack is a dialogue of human and mechanical: each vehicle has its peculiar acoustic – in effect, its voice. In the climax to the film, the human voices refer to difficulties they’ve encountered in their own lives – with drug addiction, for example – and begun to overcome: the repair work on screen acquires a double meaning. The overall sense of something lost being worked on – patiently, nocturnally – and recovered is strong. The convergence of social and personal themes is finely judged by Callum Rice. Listen to Bridgeton is the outstanding film in this collection.
Maesteg (Theodore Tennant): Maesteg is a town in Glamorgan. Theodore Tennant’s film focuses on Stumpy, a local taxi driver, and on the death of coal-mining in the area. The leading man and his fares are entertaining company but the characterisation of the place as a waste land (a ‘shit hole’, according to Stumpy) now that the mine has closed is, by now, too familiar. There’s a lack of fresh insights into the struggle of coming to terms with the change and decay that places like Maesteg have undergone. The resonance between the themes of Listen to Bridgeton and Maesteg may explain their proximity in the sequence but this shows the latter to particular disadvantage.
Eric (Florence Kennard): a day in the life of a therapy dog. Eric, a border collie, does his rounds: a centre for people with learning disabilities; a youngish woman still in the early stages of recovery after a serious stroke; a care home for the elderly. The dog leaves everyone he meets feeling better for the experience: when he first arrives at the centre, he marches into a group who are working together on a jigsaw and stands on his hind legs as if to join in. Eric’s work is a beguiling mixture of altruism and self-gratification: people pat and fuss him, sometimes heavy-handedly, without his turning a hair; he also gets plenty of food treats. Florence Kennard shoots part of the film from a dog’s-eye point of view. Eric supplied further entertainment even before he finally joined Kennard and other filmmakers on the stage. There was audience applause at the end of each of the twelve films, usually accompanied by barking from the back of NFT1.
India Hope: Portrait of the Artist (Hermione Russell): The first of two family portraits (and of two shorter, five-minute elements). India Hope Russell, sister of the filmmaker, writes poetry, paints, sings. We see and hear examples of her work; and listen to this articulate young woman, who has Down syndrome, reflect on how people perceive her and how she sees herself. The piece is appealing and inspiring. Whether it reflects a broadly representative experience is more arguable.
That Yorkshire Sound (Marcus Armitage): The other shorter film, for understandable reasons. It’s an animated piece: Marcus Armitage’s pictures illustrate the accompanying soundtrack of Yorkshire life. Not all of the latter seems particular to a single part of the country but Armitage’s art work is excitingly inventive and dynamic.
Silent Roars (Maia Krall Fry): Four young women who use the internet to promote their respective areas of activism – and who are on the receiving end of online abuse and threats as a result. These ‘influencers’ aim to increase public awareness of climate change, bird life, sustainable clothing and … personal identity may be the simplest way to describe it. Three of the four are unproblematic in terms both of their area of interest and the personality they present on screen. The eco-activist and the ornithologist are personally engaging; Maia Krall Fry’s images of the former, a slight girl, standing among glaciers, are remarkable. The fourth subject is a transgender woman who posts images of herself online; one of her main intentions, she says, is to ‘reclaim my body’. Her cause is idiosyncratic and, unlike the other three, egocentric. It’s deplorable that she receives abuse. It’s worth noting that she describes the images she uses as ‘provocative’, without explaining what she’s looking to provoke.
Voices of Britain (Alex Campbell): Less focused and less imaginative than some of the other films but the former shortcoming is refreshing in this company. Alex Campbell puts together a variety of voices – people of different ages and accents – with images that sometimes feel vague and contrived, lacking a life of their own. The voices, though, are worth listening to, even if the message of the piece – ‘our similarities outweigh our differences’, according to the BFI programme note – seems an anxious assertion rather than an inference to be drawn from the material Campbell has put together. The reference in one of the voiceovers to the Manchester Arena terrorist attack brings home how very recently these films have been made.
Learning to Swim (Ruth Grimberg): In a green and pleasant part of Surrey, a middle-aged, middle-class woman, whose accent (!) suggests she’s originally Scandinavian, is one of a group of local residents offering accommodation to newly-arrived refugees. A young Syrian man is the woman’s current guest. Her teenage son is teaching him to swim in the family’s own pool – a nice illustration of how the other half lives. The aquatic metaphor is obvious but effective, not least in bringing soberingly to mind what’s happened to many refugees at sea off the European mainland. The two principals, especially the young refugee, are likeable. The piece appears to have been filmed shortly before, having got a job with an IT outfit, he moved away to London. Ruth Grimberg’s contribution, like Catherine Harte’s, leaves you wanting to know how the immigrant is faring now.
In Other Words (Gareth Johnson): The visual-audio marriage here is highly specific. Three young non-white Londoners recite – with passion – their poetry, words that illustrate their continuing struggles with mental ill health and other social challenges. Shots of a building suggest it’s the meeting place of a larger poets’ group. If so, it’s not clear if the ethnicity of the group overall is broader than the trio of featured poets suggests.
CLASH (Amrou Al-Kadhi): Watching Victoria and Abdul the previous day should have guaranteed strong sympathy with Amrou Al-Kadhi’s critique of ‘the national obsession with period dramas and … [their] failure to reflect modern diversity’ (BFI note again) – but didn’t. The racism and love of hierarchy implicit in the largely fake nostalgia that such dramas often indulge are indeed disturbing but CLASH is too predominantly a moan: Al-Kadhi would have done better to ask each of his interviewees how to deal with the problem – short of banning period dramas from British screens (ie censorship). Perhaps a solution is implied in a sequence that sees the BME and/or LGBT contributors run around in flouncy costumes – or perhaps this is the film is just having a larf. That’s what plenty of the BFI audience did at this point, as they did during the sarcastic plum-in-mouth opening voiceover (read by Tim McInnerny – the only well-known name involved in any of these twelve films?) The underlying, self-centred premise of CLASH – there’s no justification for film or television that ‘doesn’t speak to me’ – is dispiriting.
From HK to MK (Michael Ho): The second family portrait – this time of the filmmaker’s father – makes for a quietly incisive last chapter. Gabriel Ho came from Hong Kong to England as a student in the late 1960s. He married an English girl and they set up home in the (then brand new) new town of Milton Keynes, where Gabriel continued to work as a dentist until his recent retirement. Michael Ho’s voiceover narrative is affectionate and pedestrian – a curiously winning blend. His father makes the humorous and persuasive point that, in the early days of Milton Keynes, the place’s population as a whole was, to a greater or lesser extent, a band of outsiders. A visit a few years ago to relatives in Hong Kong awakened Gabriel’s awareness of his Chinese roots. He’s an interesting complement to Kasha, whose story opened Listen to Britain 2017. This is a man who’s enjoyed a professionally successful and personally fulfilling life in Britain – but who’s been surprised to discover, half a century on, that he’s also a little homesick.
19 September 2017
