A Film Canon

This short Mass-Observation documentary presents wartime Britain as a nocturnal world, and its war effort as a hushed orchestra. To this end, Jennings artfully prevents any person or utterance becoming too individuated, integrating everything back into a murmur that encompasses speech, singing, humming, whistling, and a variety of inanimate noises, with the result that the only 'voice' is in fact this orchestra's performance, figured predominantly in terms of BBC radio, whose omniscience is only rivalled by that of the camera's movement from candid close-ups to vastnesses of land, sea and air. More poetically, Jennings construes this murmur as analogous in elasticity, durability and beauty to recurrent motifs of English pastoral life - wind blowing through crops and leaves, the surface of the sea - as if to drive home the point that, beyond ideological imperatives, the war is an issue of land, and the right to enjoy it in the light of day; that is, the right to sight.