Feb 16th
A Colour Box**/Partie de Campagne**/Listen to Britain***National Film Theatre

A spare evening in London to return a video to a store in Camden, so I used it to see this triple bill of notable short films at the NFT. The first of them, A Colour Box, is a quirky but attractive looking little 3-minute handpainted animation of subliminal patterns set to some pleasant jazz music. Whether or not the G.P.O. intended Len Lye's film to advertise their parcel service in this way is doubtful; some brief messages appear on screen advertising cheaper parcel fares, adding a minor touch of nostalgia.

Jean Renoir's Partie de Campagne (aka A Day in the Country) is an adaptation of Guy de Maupassant's short story of a group of reasonably well-to-do Parisiens who go on a picnic in the country, with two of the ladies catching the eye of the local boatmen. The satire is fairly gentle, as with most French films of this period, and photographed with Renoir's characteristic eye for the human foibles of life. Renoir himself fled France because of the German occupation, and in his absence what was left of the film was edited together into this pleasant featurette.

Listen to Britain is, beyond doubt, a classic short by Humphrey Jennings, a visual overture of sights and sounds of the country going about its daily life during World War II, and in spite of a very clunky introduction (by the Office of Information), very much of its time, the succeeding images - of factories working, troop trains chugging, school children playing, and Myra Hess performing Mozart at the National Gallery - are a superbly evocative example of positive propaganda about what we were fighting for.