Humphrey Jennings's ‘Film Fables’: Democracy and Image in The Silent Village

Autor:	Masashi Hoshino
Rok vydání:	2020
Předmět:	Cultural Studies History Politics Literature and Literary Theory Sociology and Political Science Visual Arts and Performing Arts Aesthetics media_common.quotation_subject Modernism (music) Art Music Democracy media_common
Zdroj:	Modernist Cultures. 15:133-154
ISSN:	1753-8629 2041-1022
DOI:	10.3366/mod.2020.0286
Popis:	This essay explores modernism's aesthetic and political implications through examining the works of Humphrey Jennings. The essay takes as a starting point the tension inherent to the democratic aesthetic of Mass Observation between the individual observers and the editors who write up. This tension can be effectively examined in terms of what Jacques Rancière calls ‘film fables’: the Aristotelian ‘fable’ of dramatic action and cinema's ‘fable’ of egalitarian treatment of ‘passive’ images. The essay argues that the paradox between the two ‘fables’ can be observed in Jennings's works, especially in his essays on Thomas Gray, his ‘report’ poems, and The Silent Village (1943), a dystopian propaganda film set in a Welsh village invaded by Nazis Germany. By looking at these works, the essay illustrates how the utopian longing for ‘pure art’ in modernism is related to the impossible idea of ‘democracy’.
Databáze:	OpenAIRE
Externí odkaz:	https://explore.openaire.eu/search/publication?articleId=doi_________::a883f2fa9e2590a5bc19201a441fe791 https://doi.org/10.3366/mod.2020.0286 Zobrazit plný text záznamu