British Transport Films: 'An Artist looks at Churches'

     We are back in the world of British documentary films, a place that this blog has not visited for far too long a period - the sort of thing that was played in British cinemas before the main feature, and also, I can just remember, aired on BBC2 way back in the late Sixties and early Seventies. That was where I first saw 'Shellarama' and, I think, 'An Artist looks at Churches', which was written and narrated by the British Neo-Romantic artist John Piper. The latter was produced by 'British Transport Films', the former by the 'Shell Film Unit'. Thanks to the BFI both films are available on DVD. Piper was more than an artist - perhaps more of a Renaissance Man - the designer of tapestries and stained glass, graphic designer, writer, photographer, editor, theatre designer.

     'An Artist looks at Churches' forms part of six disc compilation of work by the BTF entitled 'Railways Forever!'. Another three compilations, at least, are available, but for me this and 'A Future on Rail' are the most interesting selections. All of these box sets, however, are very evocative, sometimes moving, and one cannot help but feel a wave of nostalgia. British Transport Films was established under the direction of Edgar Anstey (1907-1987) in 1949, a year after the nationalisation of the railways. Anstey, who was also a film critic at 'The Spectator', was stepped in the British Documentary tradition, having previously worked John Grierson at the Empire Marketing Board. I suppose the BTF's remit was not unlike that of Lord Reith's BBC: 'Inform, Educate, Entertain', as well, of course, as drum up custom for the railways. In addition they made films for other transport bodies such as London Transport. In all the product of that same class and culture that was chronicled by the novelist C P Snow. A somewhat better class of 'product' it has to be said. And one which seems to easily blend both the progressive and the conservative strands of post-war culture.

     Odd really, this nostalgia of mine, for it is for a time I did not know, for by the time I was born most of the best work by the BTF was past, as films made from the late Sixties onwards tend toward the utilitarian and the commonplace. Occasionally they succeed but too often the films lack a sort of heroic quality that can be found in works such as 'Ocean Terminus' and 'Snowdrift at Bleath Gill' - the 'Heroic Materialism' described by Kenneth Clarke in his landmark television series 'Civilization'. In some respects this tilt towards the banal is mirrored in other aspects of contemporary British film making and in the culture generally. Perhaps it reflects a crisis in Modernity, a loss of narrative. Certainly 'Heroic Materialism' failed to satisfy, failed to make up for the absent God. But it did for a while, at least, supply a common narrative structure. All that said the GPO Film Unit was still capable of producing a film like 'Picture to Post', directed by Sarah Erulkar, that could brilliantly combine the post-war ethic with the visual language of 'Swinging London'. Certainly the BTF didn't come to terms with the changes of the 1960s. Edgar Anstey retired in 1974, the BTF finally closing in 1982.

     Back, finally, to the film in question, and it is a classy production - atmospheric cinematography and a score by John Racine Fricker (1920-1990). We briefly see Mr Piper at the beginning of the film, strolling through an autumnal looking churchyard but otherwise he is an invisible presence. Just his very flat, rather mundane accented narration guiding us through a thousand years of English church history - one church, at least, for every hundred years. Not that architecture over predominates - space is given to the other arts, stained glass and sculpture for instance. Perhaps the choices are not the most obvious, but the film is none the worse for that. Though those choices are mainly from the south west, if memory serves me right. It is good, however to see the somewhat unknown St Philip's Cosham by Sir Ninian Comper included (and filmed so beautifully). The more well known churches, such as Lavenham or Ottery St Mary, appear in the two 'collages' that bookend the film. In common with a nearly all of these short documentary films of the early Post-war period there is a note of optimism - rather misplaced here at that. We have not entered into a new period of church building, or a golden age of church patronage of the arts. Far from it.

An Artist Looks at Churches                                                                                               1959

Producer                                Edgar Anstey
Director/Cinematographer   John Taylor 

'Last Things'

     I recently finished C P Snow's novel 'Last Things', the final instalment of his mammoth eleven novel sequence 'Strangers and Brothers'; the story of the narrator, Lewis Eliot, and his rise through the political and cultural strata of British society. It has been adapted for both television and the radio, with mixed success. And here I have to admit that I've started at the wrong end of the sequence, seduced - God damn it! - by the cover of the Penguin paperback, a lovely little pen and ink drawing by the English artist & graphic designer David Gentleman. Not only that, but I've been dipping, in a pretty haphazard manner, into BBC2 adaptation from the early eighties starring Shaughan Seymour, written by Julian Bond, and directed by Jeremy Summers and Ronald Wilson.

     C P Snow(1907-1980) was a scientist, writer, critic and all round public intellectual. He had a long career of public service, and also worked for a time in the private sector. Not the sort of person then that we see that often these days where the culture encourages specialisation to the detriment of character, or the ability to contextualise knowledge. C P is best remembered for the term 'The Two Cultures', the title of a 1959 lecture, in which he described what he saw as the dislocation of science and the humanities. He saw this as a harmful, if no outright destructive, tend in the culture. Although thinking in what may be thought of as a through going materialist and utilitarian manner - Snow argued, for instance, that the British education system, with its emphasis on the humanities, disadvantaged the economic wellbeing of the nation - there is an element of shared feeling with, say, a writer such as Aldous Huxley. Both realised that there was an increasing rift in the culture, an epistemic fracture perhaps, but argued from different perspectives. Both looked for a re-integration on both a societal and, at least for Huxley, personal level. Perhaps Snow, who is sometimes a derided figure these days, should be thought of as attempting the cultural synthesis one finds amongst the early members of the Royal Society such as Wren and Hooke, who were both scientists and architects. Although on feels he may have looked askance at the RS's putative origins in the 'Invisible College'. But I digress.

     Snow was a contemporary of the patrician Anthony Powell the author of another great novel sequence - 'A Dance to the Music of Time' - chronicling upper class British life in the middle years of the 20th century. Both novels are in part autobiographical, both are roman fleuves in the realist tradition of Nineteenth century novelists such as Dickens and Balzac and in particular both are heavily influenced by 'La recherche du Temps Perdu', Proust's gargantuan novel sequence with its patrician detachment and carefully qualified sentences. Of the two I would suggest that 'Strangers and Brothers' is perhaps more comprehensive of the two; the 'Dance' being more concentrated on the world of the English haut monde. To be honest I have to confess that I do find that air of detachment a little bit difficult at times in the work of both authors. I want that bit more 'bite', more sense of urgency (for want of a better word). Immediacy. 

     Still Eliot, successful in worldly terms but flawed and occasionally cruel in his private life, makes for an, at times, interesting narrator, coming to his retirement from public life and assessing his life and career, and facing the prospect of his own mortality. (That literary detachment, then, it could be argued, does well in reflecting the professional caution of a public servant.) Lewis looks askance at the cultural change of Sixties Britain - when there was a return to the irrational, the violent, the occult (in some way Huxley, at least temporarily, had won the argument) - a mere two chapters or so towards the end of the novel, and that perhaps a little too tangentially. Disengagement again. One feels, somehow, that is the work of a 'gross materialist', and that this detachment may reflect an attempt to apply the scientific method to the English Novel, but it does also mark a reluctance to explore anything beyond the material to the detriment of the novel. The effect is flat like stage scenery; characters seem to blend into one another. Conversation, even between members of the same family, are more like a public meeting or a college debating society. Did anyone in real life ever talk like that? Polite distrust permeates the novel. (The BBC2 adaptation is even worse, everybody seems caught up in a sort slow motion argument, but then one American critic did describe the whole adaptation as 'terrible'.) For a man who wrote a book on the nineteenth century novel, 'The Realists', Snow seems oddly reluctant to assimilate what those masters can teach us about writing. That isn't to say that isn't a novel without some merit; it is reflective and intelligent. Sometimes quietly moving. But its real importance, I suspect, lies beyond the literary in the historical, as it offers an insight into the mindset of a generation that helped form post-war Britain.