A DIARY FOR TIMOTHY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 405, 28 March 1947, Page 18

A DIARY FOR TIMOTHY

(Crown Film Unit)

HIS 40-minute production by Basil Wright and Humphrey Jennings, made in 1945 but only recently arrived in this cougtry (and so far as I

know available only in 16mm.) is one of the most interesting films of the past two years: interesting in its own right as a documentary record of the last six months of, the war, but particularly interesting as an experiment in an unusual style of screen narration. The script was wriiten by E. M. Forster and takes the form of a diary compiled for the future edification of Timothy, Jenkins, a newborn baby who has come into the world just about the time when the dark shadows of war (Arnhem, October, 1944) are beginning to disperse before the promise of victory and peace. A commentary spoken by Michael Redgrave frequently addresses the baby by name and describes what is happening in Britain and on the battlefronts; but the film seeks, and frequently finds, much more profound effects than can be achieved by the mere juxtaposition of voice and visual imagine. Brilliantly blending together photography, dialogue, commentary, music, and natural sound-but not always in orthodox relationship to one anotherA Diary for Timothy more than once produces, as in a chemical reaction, something very different from a mere\ combination of its various ingredients. It takes us, in fact, into the little-ex-plored realm of cinema aesthetics, and it is worth noting that the producer was Basil Wright, here reverting to the "symphonic" technique which he used in Song of Ceylon. a * * O explain simply the emotional quality and texture of A Diary for Timothy is not easy. An experiment in subjective impressionism, using the method of counterpoint and cross-cut-ting, it is concerned less with the events dealt with on the surface than with the inner significance of the events as they appealed to Director Humphrey Jennings himself; and it goes even deeper than that and concerns itself with the emotions which those events aroused in this one man in particular. Since no two persons feel exactly the same about afy* thing, this means that the film demands -considerable concentration if it is to be appreciated, and even then some of its intentions are obscure. To use the music of a piano recital by Myra Hess as the background for some of the everyday events of English life is an effective and readily enough understood device; and there is another thrilling and penetra--ting moment when, after the commentator has mentioned that by Christmas 1944 the situation was beginning to improve, a lovely scene of the frozen English landscape is matched on the sound-track by a child’s voice singing a carol, as clear and crisp as the snow on Christmas morn. But when scenes of rescue squads extricating bomb victims are cross-cut with glimpses of John Gielgud in the graveyard scene from Hamlet we are in much more difficult territory and one’s own interpretation of this sequence mey not necessarily coincide with what the director intended.

To say this, however, is perhaps to set too narrow limits to the film’s emotional field, for Jennings does, I think, succeed remafkably in transmitting many of his own feelings to the wider audience. Yet it nevertheless remains a peculiarly personal and specialised film, as well as a peculiarly evocative one; and I think it is quite safe to say that it will, in general, evoke a much deeper response in those people who were themselves living in Britain through the last six months of the war than in any others whose experience was at secondhand.