Time was…
Tonight sees the opening of an exciting series of screenings and talks at BFI Southbank exploring the evolution of the television documentary in Britain. Visions of Change features a host of television treasures from the 1950s and ’60s – and early next month even features me introducing three significant early arts films. For the first programme this evening Ieuan Franklin introduces the work of ‘film poet’ Denis Mitchell, before the showing of three of Mitchell’s ground-breaking documentaries: Morning in the Streets, 1959, which he made with Roy Harris; A Wedding on Saturday, 1964, produced by Norman Swallow; and The Entertainers, also 1964, directed by John McGrath.
A striptease sequence in the latter, which was produced by Mitchell for Granada Television, led to the film being banned by the ITA and it took a year of negotiation before it eventually reached British screens in January 1965. I have written an article for Sight & Sound about the season and two complementary DVD collections forthcoming from BFI Publishing, but the piece is available online only to subscribers. (Equally frustrating is the fact that I can’t be at BFI Southbank tonight.) We’ll return to both the season and the DVDs, but below are some further resources about Mitchell’s work, and a first extract from my article.
Morning in the Streets is available from the BBC online in one of their slightly less than well-loved archive collections. Ieuan Franklin’s blog post about Mitchell is a very good place to begin exploring his work, as is the Radio 4 feature broadcast earlier this year, People Talking. Also available online, although not quite as legitimately, is Denis Mitchell’s 1960 documentary for the BBC, Chicago: First Impressions of a Great American City, of which this is the first part (the others can be easily found also):
from ‘The way we were’, Sight & Sound, November 2015
Fifty years ago, the distinguished documentary producer Norman Swallow speculated that, “It may well be that the television of our own time will not be remembered for its new dramatists, its rediscovery of satire, or its presentation of controversy”. Swallow was writing his book Factual Television in the early 1960s as he and we were watching Doctor Who, Z Cars, the first plays of Dennis Potter and That Was the Week That Was. Yet for this admittedly partisan observer, the small screen’s most memorable offerings were not these acknowledged classics but rather “the programmes of a small group of men who have used the television documentary as a means of expressing their own vision of our age”.
Among the hallowed names that Norman Swallow identified, all male and all white, were Denis Mitchell, Ken Russell, John Schlesinger, Philip Donnellan, Richard Marquand, Peter Morley, John Boorman and Peter Watkins. With a strong suggestion that he too should be included among their number, Swallow hailed as artists these authors of “the personal documentary”.
By which he meant “a programme, usually made on film, which is very much the individual work of its producer and/or director and which, through its imaginative handling of reality, expresses his own attitude not only to the programme’s immediate subject-matter but to the whole of the world in which he lives.” In such television documentaries of the 1950s and early 1960s, he suggested, British television “has enjoyed its finest creative moments.”
Few are the readers of Sight & Sound, I suspect, who would agree. Of the work of the best and the brightest highlighted by Swallow only Peter Watkins’ Culloden (1964) and The War Game (1965) made the cut in the magazine’s 2014 critics’ poll of the 50 Greatest Documentaries of All Time. Watkins, Russell, Schlesinger, Boorman and even Marquand (Return of the Jedi, 1983) are all celebrated, and occasionally castigated, for their later feature films, but with only a very few exceptions, such as Russell’s artist profiles, their television work from the 1960s remains all but unknown.
Few of the films in question (Russell once again excepted, and Watkins) have been accessible for screenings, for critical debate and for creative dialogues with later filmmakers. With the BFI Southbank season Visions of Change and the release of two BFI DVD box sets, many key films will once again be available and we will be far more able to judge the validity of Swallow’s claims.
One of the key films included in both the season and the box-set of BBC programmes is Denis Mitchell and Roy Harris’s 1959 Morning in the Streets. This artful slice of “social impressionism” assembles the sights and sounds of the terraces in an unnamed northern city. The anonymous voices of those who live, work and play there feature on the soundtrack along with a perhaps surprisingly structuring score. The method is associative and allusive, although there are aspects that more than fifty years on come across as heavy-handed, such as the juxtaposition of slum dwellings with street names like “Love Lane” and “Paradise”.
There are strong echoes of earlier British documentary traditions, both in the activist mode of Arthur Elton and E.H. Anstey’s Housing Problems (1935), with the accusatory testimony of a woman resident delivered to camera, and in the poetic portrait form of Humphrey Jennings’ Spare Time (1939). But at the same time Morning in the Streets feels very much of its cultural moment, close to the contemporary street photography of Nigel Henderson and Roger Mayne, engaged by the Free Cinema films of Lindsay Anderson and Karel Reisz, and clearly influenced by the radio features of Louis MacNeice and especially the “ballads” of Charles Parker.
I am delighted to find these notes about Norman Swallow. I joined the Beeb as his secretary in the late 50s, staying with him at the Talks and Documentary Department and later to the BBC Television Studios at Ealing.
He was a very special person, very much respected and liked. I was so lucky to spend those years with him and did later regret leaving. But at least I had that experience.