GROSS DISTRACTION - Brief Encounter - a land without cinema
The 1950s are driving me to distraction so let's rewind ten years and watch Brief Encounter again.
BRIEF ENCOUNTER, director DAVID LEAN, writer NOEL COWARD, cast CELIA JOHNSON, TREVOR HOWARD, production EAGLE-LION DISTRIBUTORS, 1946, 87 MINUTES.
As usual, I’m prevaricating. I’m avoiding getting on and writing about the next movie in this sequence, which is The Bridge on the River Kwai, from 1957. It’s the first of David Lean’s global cinemascope epics; an awkward, absurd, profoundly dishonest war story - but also a big-hearted adventure that took on iconic status, especially in Britain, in the decades after its release. Ten years before that, though, Lean made an even more important movie - a story of unrequited love in a time of austerity that somehow became lodged in the British national identity…
The Germans used to call Britain das land ohne musik (the land without music), “…the only cultured nation without its own music (except street music).” And it became a truism, accepted everywhere - and sometimes, with a backwards pride, here in Britain too. In Britain, in the big cities you'd find the most cultured audiences in all of Europe - Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Verdi (and later Schoenberg, Poulenc, Stravinsky…) all were welcomed and their work commissioned generously, but there was no native musical culture at all1.
I like the idea that this is something to do with the nation's ironic stance relative to its immediate neighbours. A major European power (once the greatest power on Earth) that isn't actually in Europe; that, in fact, has prospered to some degree because of its isolation from the continent and that had treated its European neighbours, across the centuries, as a literal buffer against conflict and domination. Britain has, for centuries, looked out over the fuss and bother of Europe with something between contempt and condescension.
So Britain has always been culturally isolated. Out on a limb. Europeans often put this down to a coarseness, to a deliberate rejection of the aesthetic. Or to something about Britain’s centuries-long history of mercantilism, war and domination that makes it impossible to acknowledge the finer sentiments. More generously, they put it down to practicality and pragmatism married with outrageous self-belief. And Europeans continually find confirmation for this perpective - from the implausible overreach of the British Empire to Churchill's beligerance, to the famous marauding army of football hooligans. And we enjoy this too, of course. We embrace it (no one likes us, we don’t care). But as time passes and the nation slips down the league tables by practically every measure, this island nation's self-image looks more and more ridiculous.
You can see this voluntary isolation in our native cinema. We enjoy the riches of the world’s film culture but don’t feel that we're really part of it (finally getting to my point here). After the second world war, an arc of devastated nations, from North Africa to Japan, urgently and deliberately built new cinema cultures. Cultures which went on to produce many of the most famous and important works of art in the form. And what unites (most) of these new production cultures was, perhaps inevitably, humanism - the vital, necessary humanism of peoples humbled and excoriated - even in victory - by war.
Directors, writers and cinematographers (many of whom had been active before the war, sometimes for decades; some of whom had fought in the war and were brand new to cinema) began to create simple narratives that centred ordinary people or the mass of people - often ordinary people set against the hostility and indifference of elites or institutions or states. From Kurosawa to Renoir to Rossellini.
But in Britain, this didn't happen. Cinema was thriving, of course. Audiences were huge. And there was a big, native production industry that had not been destroyed by conflict (it was open for business and began to pull in projects from Hollywood for exactly this reason). And what emerged was in many ways brilliant and beautiful and often humane. But it wasn't humanist. It didn’t belong to the same tradition as those other cultures. It was conservative, often backward, sometimes nakedly reactionary. A cinema emerged in Britain that produced dozens of the best-loved movies - the Ealing Comedies, all those splendid war movies and the many adaptations of Shakespeare and the other great dramatists. But in almost every instance, these movies set up individuals and communities as compliant agents of conformity and of the establishment - from Passport to Pimlico to Ice Cold in Alex, these movies don't offer any criticism of material conditions or any sense of the interests at work, the conflict that structures modern life.
Brief Encounter is an almost perfect case study for this profound gap in British cinema culture. One of the best-loved British movies (92% Metacritic, 93% Rotten Tomatoes); an exceptional, even beautiful, portrait of middle-class life in Britain, which is tenaciously intact after six catastrophic years; a snapshot of the country’s class stasis that’s rarely been bettered (plus that love story and that music…). But this movie is a long way from De Sica or Bresson or Ozu. I should be clear: I don’t want to idealise these creators or the film cultures they emerged from or even the forms they invented. But Lean’s film stands in profound contrast to those others. It is, in almost every respect, a refusal of the pattern that had emerged outside Hollywood and a restatement - a consolidation - of the social rigidity in which it originates. Brief Encounter is an almost despairing admission of the closing off of possibility and hope. It’s a realist film - but it’s the realism of defeat and this, perversely, is what we celebrate.
I did finally review The Bridge on the River Kwai.
Brief Encounter is on Amazon Prime.
1946’s top-grossing Hollywood movie was Disney’s ghastly Song of the South.
These reviews are all on Letterboxd.
I know this was never fully true.