pottedstu

Made early in World War Two, this film offers inspiration to the people of Britain through a series of texts, mainly about the nature of Britain, drawn from great writers of the past and present. Laurence Olivier reads the poetry and prose in his customary powerful voice, and the words are accompanied by images of Britain which are often striking and poetic.

The film uses the writings of such classic English writers as Milton, Blake, Browning, and Kipling. From Kipling they choose the powerful but dark The Beginnings, which speaks of the time "when the English began to hate" and manages to be quite terrifying.

Also we hear Olivier reading from Churchill's speeches and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, making the film in part an appeal to Britain's American cousins to acknowledge their common culture and enter the war.

As propaganda it is effective: it's hard not to be moved by Britain's greatest actor reading Blake's Jerusalem. But at the same time, it's very vague in its message, more a reminder of British history than a manifesto of why we fought, and paradoxically it's only Lincoln's words that set out something of what the war was really about, the battle for liberty.

But visually, as you would expect from Jennings, there is much that is beautiful and arresting. A historical curio, but one still with plenty of interest.

Spare Time is a great little film that shows a lot of little details about life in Britain in the late 1930s.

The film is narrated by the distinguished writer Laurie Lee (best known for Cider With Rosie) but he is only there to reflect on the meaning of spare time in general terms, and the film doesn't tell us what all the different activities taking place are, it simply shows them in elegant film clips.

The activities range from those still common today, to some traditional working-class pursuits that are now dying out, to the highly esoteric. People go cycling and watch sports, but there's also a lot of music making - from the colliery band to the millworkers' kazoo jazz band. There are also scenes of very serious-looking men drinking in a bar, and a pigeon fancier and a greyhound owner. Some sections flash by very quickly while others get a little more detail, particularly the kazooists parading with a woman dressed as Britannia.

Jennings focuses on three industries: a coal mine, steelworks, and a textile mill. Because only the third employs women, there's inevitably a focus on male leisure pursuits, but some of the activities of the women of the mill are shown, and there are details of children playing. But for those interested in women's social history, the film doesn't show a great deal of women's lives.

The documentary movement of the 1930s and the Mass Observation program both seemed to involve a new interest in documenting the lives of ordinary people, considering even the smallest detail of people's lives to be important. Sometimes you might get the impression that highly-educated middle-class people analysing working class lives might be patronising or even a tool of social control (and the Mass Observation movement did influence early market research and opinion polling in Britain) but Jennings is genuinely concerned with rendering the small, everyday facts of peoples lives and turning them into something truly poetic.

In contrast to Jennings' wartime surveys of the nation, such as Listen to Britain, there is no propagandist or overly patriotic aspect to the film. It is simply a collection of images of a nation at play, and fascinating and valuable because of that, as much as for its artistry.

Compared to Ozu or Mizoguchi, Mikio Naruse's films are much lighter in tone, with more humour, and less of the overwhelming sense of pain and tragedy. Sometimes this works really well, offering stories that are emotionally involving but not morbidly extreme, but in this film I think it results in a film that's shapeless and drifts past the viewer without really going anywhere in particular.

The performances are excellent; of course Hideko Takamine is wonderful in the leading role running a hostess bar, but Reiko Dan is great fun as a young, flirty, ambitious hostess, and Tatsuya Nakadai as the loyal young bar manager is like a hero of the French New Wave, quiet, cool, and intense. Keiko's customers at the bar are to an extent caricatures, but are nicely drawn.

The film offers a full and fair-minded account of the world of hostess bars, with Naruse's usual interest in financial matters and the minutiae of life. But despite the occasional sad event, the cumulative impression is not of a woman in a desperately tragic situation, but more a case of just one damn thing after another. It lurches from moments of high drama to silliness to tragedy to the mundane, failing to achieve a consistent attitude or tone.

There are perhaps too many characters, so that while some relationships are clear and powerful, others pass by with little emotional effect. Unlike in Iwashigumo (Summer Clouds) the main character of this film isn't heroic, isn't keeping up any tradition, and doesn't have any particular claim on our affections. Her defence about needing a fancy lifestyle and expensive apartment for her job, and her attitude to her family, don't seem likely to endear her to the viewer either.

Overall, it feels like a set of great talents wandering around in an inadequate storyline. It's not enough to present the facts; a great film needs to use them to show you something more general about life. And something more profound than, "Well, every job has its problems."