Notes
HUMPHREY JENNINGS (1907 - 1950)
A FOREWORD BY MICHEL REMY
"This picture of yours hasn't got enough 1931ness", this comment attributed to Humphrey Jennings when, in Cambridge, he was asked to judge a painting by a friend, epitomizes his intransigent approach to the artistic process. It was this extremely sensitive awareness of the present in its relation to the past, which made him realize the relevance of surrealism almost spontaneously. In May 1936 he sat on the organizing committee of the International Surrealist Exhibition together with Herbert Read, Roland Penrose, David Gascoyne, Paul Nash, Hugh Sykes Davies and Henry Moore.
Jennings immediately adhered to the principles of the surrealist movement, publishing prose poems and translations from Péret and Eluard, and resoundingly criticizing Read's writings about surrealism for reducing the movement to a mere modernized version of Romanticism. He signed the various political declarations, and participated in most of the exhibitions, of the group, then led by the Belgian surrealist E.L.T.Mesens, the director of the London Gallery and editor of the London Bulletin. Jennings contributed to the Bulletin, exhibited at the Gallery in October 1938 (helped by his patron, Peggy Guggenheim), while getting involved in the activities of Mass Observation. Launched in January 1937, M.O. set out to document, through reports and surveys, the daily habits, manias and passions of the man in the street and map out the deep processes of the "social unconscious" of Britain. Bolton, re-christened Worktown, was the city chosen as a testing ground. Jennings, whose interest in the social applications of Freud's theories had increased after meeting Breton and Eluard, spent some time there, taking photographs of people, street scenes and interiors, which all reveal the fundamentally mythopoetic quality of an urban, industrial environment, and how reality interacts with man's subconscious. This preoccupation also underlies his patient gathering of texts which record the way the human imagination produced and faced the Industrial Revolution (posthumously published in 1985 under Jennings' title Pandemonium), and in 1938 he organized the exhibition "The Impact of the Machines" at the London Gallery, a celebration of the deep organic links between animals, humans and machines throughout history. "Machines are animals made by man", Jennings solemnly declared.
When the war broke out, Jennings increased his cinematographic activities, which he had started with in the early thirties when working with documentarist John Grierson at the G.P.O. Film Unit, then the Crown Film Unit. Joining in the war effort, but without ever falling into jingoistic propaganda, he made films which all convey a staunch faith in man's capacity to go beyond himself. Through a subtle, poetic editing of powerfully framed shots, he achieved the transfiguration of the ordinary, as in Fires Were Started (1943) and The Silent Village (1943). This collaboration with the government, however, and his acceptance of the O.B.E. for services rendered, led the anti-nationalistic Surrealist Group to "excommunicate" him from its ranks in 1947, a move which, undoubtedly, met with Jennings's own spirit of independence. In September 1950, he went to Greece to look at possible locations for a film, but fell from a rock on the island of Poros. He is buried in Athens.
A poet, a filmmaker, a painter and collagist, and a photographer, Humphrey Jennings illustrates surrealism's across-the-board investigation of the liminal space between the real and the imaginary in as many media as possible. Apart from the "reports" he wrote, brief visionary texts in which time and space are made to telescope, Jennings explored collage extensively, another way for him to refute simple dualisms. Starting with a banal photograph, he dis-locates it by perturbing it with, or juxtaposing, another photograph, regardless of any "rational" link. The more remote the two photos are from each other, the deeper and more poetically intense the rapport, one undercutting as well as enhancing the other. Given the photographs chosen, the resulting humour and irony are almost always devastatingly at the expense of bourgeois values.
This obsession with vectors of force underlying the existence of objects explains his many sketches, which have to be seen as traces of the unfinishable. Jennings ceaselessly tried to grasp the elusive elemental forces behind surfaces, as shown in the abundance of shadows in his photographs, in his fascination for horses and locomotives, ploughs and windmills, which crystallize the transhistoric creative interaction of nature and culture. In a poem celebrating Jethro Tull, Jennings wrote that "the plough is the English guitar".
In his post-war drawings and paintings, Vorticistic, post-Cubist or pre-abstract if one needs labels, the sometimes aggressive, sometimes tranquil, angularity and the interrupted rhythm of the lines, which may well echo the cinematic technique of montage, force the viewer to construct an interior image, constantly in the making. The lines, suspended in space, the minimalizing treatment of objects, reduced to their iconographic essence, and the primariness of colours create a kind of arrested dynamism, that of a vision of reality seen through a prism which fragments and diffracts the 'Being' of things, an attempt, derived from surrealism, to emblematize the actual process of creation In the most active and experimental sense, Humphrey Jennings is the poet of the deconstruction of visuality.
Michel Remy is the leading authority on British Surrealism, author of Surrealism in Britain published by Lund and Humphries and Professor of English Literature and Art History at the University of Nice.
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