Timothy

From sundry hurrahs resounding about town I expected "Diary for Timothy" to be the last word in film entertainment and the first word in a "new chapter of film history"—a new method of film technique. It was neither, and consequently I came away feeling a little disappointed—feeling that is perhaps understandable psychologically, but not conducive to cool and impartial criticism. The film said what it had to say, and said it well.

It was a 16 mm. film produced by Basil Wright and Humphrey Jennings and made in 1945, when the events depicted and the problems mentioned were still recent and prominent enough in people's minds to be very real, and to the less apathetic, needing serious and sustained attention. E. M. Forster's script was excellent, and Michael Redgrave's narration was beyond reproach. Its turns of expression are familiar enough to be trite, but the simplicity and restraint have an artistry not often found in productions of this type. The slightest touch of the morbid sentimentalising and patriotic moralising that usually characterise U.S. war films would have ruined the effect the producers intended. "Diary for Timothy" is a documentary of everyday life in Britain and the effects of the war on the everyday people—particularly the long-distance effects that the war and peace will have on Timothy himself. The technique showing the chronology is excellent—Timothy has grown just a little every time we see him, the airman's convalescence is a little further advanced, the coalminer and the war news comes from the commentator himself as well as from radio sets in the homes of the people. The war was drawing to an end just as Timothy was starting life, and the parallel in time-progression is most effective. The technique to gain this effect is the most brilliant part about the whole production. Dialogue, background music, beautiful photography, and natural sound were all used almost in patchwork fashion. The important thing about patchwork is the pattern and this pattern in quite exciting in its newness. Scenes of the English landscape and the sound of a Christmas carol, the battle of Arnhem and a Myra Hess recital, a rescue squad at work after the bombing and Gielgud playing the graveyard scene from "Hamlet"—these are interwoven and crosscut to produce an intellectual and emotional effect that is subtle, and yet easily recognisable in analysis. At times, however, the smooth rhythm of this sequence somewhat jarred. For all that, the realist tradition of the documentary is certainly not submerged in the achievement of aesthetic and emotional effects. The problem of the peace is not answered, of course, but it is pointed out that it is Timothy and his contemporaries who will have to work out whatever solution is handed to them by the peace-makers.

Wright is one of the foremost writers on the history and theory of the documentary, and his avowed method of giving the audience the living action and the native scene gives us a dramatised film far above any manufactured from artificial settings and professional actors.