Third Cinema

Narrative / Non-narrative

However, Listen to Britain is not a non-narrative film, it does not have a “non-narrative style” (Lovell and Hillier, 1972 pp89). It has a narrative of images and, to a much greater extent, sound that propel the viewer through the film. The audience are not necessarily pushed forwards in a linear sense, but against the conventional narrative parameters of cinematic time and space into an aural dimension, an aural depth. It also clearly demonstrates Winston’s “Chrono-Logic”; the film has an internal narrative – the time span that the events on screen are occurring within – but also an external narrative of the duration of the film within its screening. Jennings utilises time as a cyclical emblem, reinforcing his ideas around the unstoppable recycling of events. He starts and ends at the same time of the day, drawing us into the idea that this is happening every day. He is giving his films a level of ordinariness and denies the audience the concept of narrative resolution – there can be no resolution in a cycle of events. In this way, Jennings is further substantiating his position of ‘other’ to the ideologies and films of the First and Second Cinemas.

This is not to say that Humphrey Jennings eschewed narrative form, instead he was entirely aware of the constraints that it imposes on the way the film is viewed. He uses these constraints on the films as a way of recognising the problems that a tight narrative structure can impose on Third Cinema. When he uses conventional narrative, as he does in A Diary for Timothy, he does so on an ultra simplistic level. He is acknowledging the presence of a contrived external control on the film, by reducing it to one of the most recognisable forms of story – the diary or memoir. By placing a basic narrative framework around the film, he again escapes the need of the audience to follow the narrative, and instead allows the film to be a continuous interaction between viewer and the film screening.