A Film Canon

 

 

The central statement of the Mass Observation documentary movement, Fires Were Started combines historical and reconstructed footage, scripting and improvisation, narrative and fact - that is, pragmatic and poetic imperatives - to evoke the experience, rather than the mere significance, of an independent fire-fighting squadron in the early days of the Blitz, the members of which are played by actual fire-fighters, as well as other non-professional actors. To an even greater extent than in Listen To Britain, Jennings conceives of individuation, or even characterisation, as a limit to be infinitesimally approached, rather than properly achieved, such that every death, and the pathos that accompanies it, inevitably speaks to a minor, if tangible, reconfiguration of the entire war effort. Conversely, that effort is suffused with an egalitarianism that ensures that each individual partakes of the calm, logistical tone into which militarism is subsumed; a human switchboard. That said, the fire around which the film revolves is viscerally shot, and crowded with the most ideologically-inflected machinery since the first wave of Soviet cinema, both of which culminate in Jennings' tendency to set hoses against stark, black backgrounds, as if to suggest that they are shooting light, flame, or some other ethereal substance. In the same way, the Thames is consistently explicated as a piece of weaponry, rather than a mere vehicle for it, most poetically in the subtle relocation of the critical battle to that between the roar of fire and the embalming wash of tempered English voices.