Listen to Britain

Listen to Britain was made for a Canadian audience. Its purpose: to show those on the other side of the Atlantic how Britain was facing up not only to the Germans, but to its historic task in what had become a world war. This film, which contains no dialogue (apart from the prologue), carries to an extreme the semantic ambiguity for which the ‘poet of the Blitz’ is well-known, all in a staggering piece of audiovisual orchestration. The war becomes a sort of abstraction, spiritual and carnal, unifying all opposites: war and peace, town and country, Queen and people, music and mere noise… At no time does this unanimity require a single interpretation: the viewer is free to associate one image with another, as in the waking-dream state dear to the Surrealists. Declaration of love or man’s poetic genius, Listen to Britain invents a British style of realism: let us listen to this gritty realism, which expresses, with humour and modesty, brotherly feeling for the masses and an aristocratic sense of the individual. To be alive, to be free, to be cultured: that is what we are fighting for.

Laurent Roth

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