(Various directors) (1964)

This BFI programme comprised three documentary shorts, all made in 1964:   Today in Britain (directed by Peter Hopkinson); Faces of Harlow (directed by Derrick Knight); Portrait of Queenie (directed by Michael Orrom).

Today in Britain:

This was sponsored by the Foreign Office, the Commonwealth Relations Office and Colonial Office ‘to present the nation to a global audience’.  The narration is by James Cameron:  his distinctive, relaxed but authoritative voice is perhaps a little intrusive but it brings out the quality of the language in the script he wrote with Peter Hopkinson – the alliteration and other linguistic curlicues now seem as much a piece of history as the images they accompany.  Even allowing for the film’s promotional purposes, the vision of Britain presented by Hopkinson and Cameron is strikingly complacent:  we have a unique history but we’re up for the future; the seamless transition from Empire to Commonwealth is without parallel; ditto the recent expansion of higher education.  The latter development at least allows the film-makers to feature one of the rare black faces in the film:  the only others I noticed were in a shot of the West Indies cricket team fielding (with John Edrich at the crease) and a bus conductor, who gets a friendly smile from one of his white passengers that seems meant to sum up multiracial harmony across the land.    It’s not clear when in 1964 the film was made or released:  there’s no suggestion that the Profumo affair and related events of the previous year caused any ripple of anxiety; the brisk tour of each country of the United Kingdom includes a remarkably brief glance at Northern Ireland without of course a whisper of the Troubles to come.  An early sequence focuses proudly on world-leading technological advances:  the army of white coats in gleaming laboratories makes this science fact look like science fiction and exudes an ominous whiff of we-know-what’s-good-for-you.  But the tone is confidently positive – Today in Britain may well have appeared between Harold Wilson’s ‘white heat of technology’ speech to the Labour conference in 1963 and the General Election of 1964 which brought him to 10 Downing Street.

Faces of Harlow:

Harlow was created in the wake of the New Towns Act of 1946.  Derrick Knight’s film, which he also wrote, was designed to boost local self-esteem as well as display the town’s amenities and activities to a wider public:  it was made for the Harlow Development Corporation.   Like all three films in this BFI programme, it’s too long – more overlong than the other two – although it’s interesting to see a community of this kind being promoted in the mid-1960s without any implication that the concept of a ‘planned community’ might be sinister (or any intended implication anyway:  I kept thinking of Pete Seeger singing ‘Little Boxes’).   Some of the artwork by Harlow schoolchildren is good but Knight’s attempts to suggest a vibrant local culture and indeed the whole sense of ‘community’ feel forced.   The BFI curator Alex Davidson, who introduced the evening, noted that pop music was conspicuous by its near-absence from the film, in spite of the fact that most of the biggest acts of the time played Harlow.  But Faces of Harlow, regardless of its shortcomings, evidently did what it was meant to do:  Davidson also explained that when it showed at the local cinema it got bigger audiences even than The Guns of Navarone.

Portrait of Queenie:

Michael Orrom’s camera spends an evening in and around the Ironbridge Tavern on the Isle of Dogs, run by Queenie Watts and her husband Slim.  Orrom and James Stevens, who co-wrote the script with him and contributed ‘special numbers’ to the programme of songs performed in the pub, seem more interested in presenting Queenie Watts as the symbol of a way of life than exploring her as an individual.  I don’t have much feel for East End culture, particularly its knees-up side, or for the jazz that Queenie sang but the piece is fascinating as an historical document.  Here too, you’re struck by the virtually all-white pub clientele, although a couple of the musicians are black, and friends of Queenie.  What’s also startling is how old she looks:  she was only in her late thirties when the film was made (only 53 when she died in 1980).  Queenie’s family were evacuated to Oxford during the war:  her mother and sisters stayed there – in a brief interlude we see them all performing ‘My Old Man’ together in an Oxford pub (the mother’s piano-playing isn’t too hot).   But Queenie is umbilically attached to the Isle of Dogs:  the shots of her walking round a landscape that’s still not recovered from the air raids of a quarter century earlier are strong.   Orrom begins and ends his film with two blonde-beehived girls arriving in the area for their visit to the Ironbridge Tavern and eventually heading tipsily home.  It’s a running joke that the pair order the same (and buy their own) drinks all evening – ‘Sweet martini, gin and bitter lemon’.   Just when the joke is wearing thin, Orrom rescues it:  their last orders are drowned out by the music onstage but we can read the girls’ lips.

30 December 2010