A Film Canon

 

 

A Diary For Timothy describes the first six months in the life of a child born on the fifth anniversary of Britain's entry into the war, baptising him in a font whose waters are variously described as those of the pronounced rainy season that struck England in the winter of 1944, the increasingly debarbed and demined coastline, and the pervasive, trickling notes of a lone piano player, which replace the orchestra of Listen To Britain, and are only partly offset by the predominance of Christmas carols in the second half of the film. As this might suggest, the propagandistic solidarity of Jennings' earlier works is replaced by a profound ambivalence that finds most immediate expression as a series of questions, or "things to think about", all of which culminate with the observation that "now that the danger's over for us, life is going to become more dangerous than before, oddly enough, because now we have the power to choose and the right to criticise, and even to grumble. A part of your bother, Tim, will be learning to grow up free." Concomitantly, the concluding remembrance of the aftermath of WWI produces a disorienting mixture of apprehension and melancholy ("Has all this really got to happen again") that finds its precedent in Hamlet's fixture on Yorick's skull, foregrounded in a local production, as well as, more generally, in Jennings' sensitivity to the surrealism, or strangeness, of technology - both military and non-military - most poetically encapsulated in his presentation of a rural family watching a grainy, amateur film of their farm as it stood at the beginning of the war.