Humphrey Jennings (1907–1950)

the quality varies massively because there are so many source extracts that vary in how they're written and what they say. some were a drag and hard to read (the early writing in particular is horrible because the language is archaic) some are really interesting documentary history. sometimes fragments could probably be interesting if given wider context. I'd have appreciated more editor interludes. personally i have trouble with descriptive writing so the significant amount which is pretty much just that was really hard for me. ultimately it's a really idiosyncratic book reflecting the editor's idiosyncratic views. if the concept sounds interesting you'll probably like at least parts of it but skipping boring stuff is probably a good idea

technically didn't finish this, but got half way and skipped around a bit. given it's a compilation of fragments i feel it's fair to review it/say i finished it without reading every word. maybe one day I'll come back to it… (més)

I'm not necessarily aware of other histories constructed like this; letters, journalism, speeches, poems, songs, etc of an era, delineating a social experience. Perhaps it would entail a tremendous amount of work for little profit–Jennings barely inserts himself into the texts, though I wonder if he'd lived to complete Pandaemonium, he wouldn't have trimmed some fat or editorialized to a greater extent.

Nevertheless, Jennings makes some really fascinating juxtapositions, such as picking out the thread between burgeoning material sciences and the treatment of workers as objects or people like Coleridge or Wordsworth mourning what they know is to be lost in the gain of a relative few.

Pandaemonium was sometimes a slog; I was more more interested in labor conditions than I was every other entry dealing with some guy's hot air balloon travel or another guy's monkeying around with test tubes. I was disappointed to find that there wasn't much firsthand account of the psychological effect and existential torment of enclosure but that's on me; it's not like those people were publishing. More than anything else, Jennings' work tells you nothing's really new; you might as well be reading a book compiling the exhortation of STEM boosters and all the different ways they can talk themselves into believing exploitation and alienation of others is actually progress.… (més)

The film opens with a title card outlining the story of Lidice.

It then moves on to an image of the stream running through the village of Cwmgiedd (half a mile from Ystradgynlais in west Wales), and an eight-minute opening sequence interspersed with images and sounds of everyday life in a community in the Upper Swansea Valley; men are shown working at the colliery, women engaged in domestic tasks in their homes and the inhabitants singing in the Methodist chapel. Most of the dialogue in this section is spoken in Welsh, with no subtitles. The section closes with another title card stating "such is life at Cwmgiedd...and such too was life in Lidice until the coming of Fascism".

The German occupation is heralded by the arrival in the village of a black car, blaring military music and political slogans from its loudhailer. Little is shown of the occupation itself, its violence being implied by a soundtrack of marching boots, gunfire and harshly amplified orders and directives, in the sound-as-narrative technique Jennings had previously developed in Listen to Britain. The identity of the community is eroded, with the Welsh language being suppressed and no longer permitted as the teaching medium in the school, and trade union activity being made illegal. The villagers resistance takes the form of covert activities including the publication of a Welsh news sheet. Eventually, even the singing of Welsh hymns in the chapel is outlawed.

The catalyst for the systematic obliteration of Cwmgiedd in a reprisal is intended to parallel the consequence of the actual murder of the leading Nazi Reinhard Heydrich the previous year. The children of the village are marched out of school and join the womenfolk as they are loaded onto trucks. The men, defiantly singing "Land of Our Fathers" as they go, are lined up against the wall of the village churchyard. (fonte:imdb)… (més)