Came across this film on You Tube while looking around for more info on Robinson in Ruins, hoping to discover the truth of its availability in the states (no such luck as of yet). Instead I found a 50 min documentary looking at the social lives of working class teenagers in Lambeth. Posted in 5-ten minute segments below, ...Lambeth Boys is a curious production, on the one hand the silence that inhabits shots of place happening reminding me of the Cabrera Infante Brother's PM, but the spell is too often broken by the condescending voice over interpreting the actions of "the other".
#1
#2
#3
#4
#5
Other than just being interested in pysco-socio-geographical observation in general, the first thing that caught my attention, and led to my spending a whole weekend watching these five sections was the location of the film; Lambeth, the neighborhood where William Blake and his wife Catherine lived for 10 years, and where Blake produced some of the most important work of his life.
Source of Blake's London Map here
During Blake's time in Lambeth, the area underwent major urban industrialization. In this regard the depictions of the Sons and Daughter's of Lambeth in 1959 fated to lives of factory and mundane office employment and its connection to Blake is more than anecdotal. According to Peter Ackroyd's excellent Biography on Blake:
"....By the time they [Blake and his wife] left in 1800 it was already acquiring the characteristics of a peculiarly repellent urban slum with wretchedly built and undrained houses. Beth-el was in Hebrew the name for a sacred place, as Blake would have known from Genesis, but this place of the Lamb was soon degraded. And then there came Bethlem* itself, when the madhouse was moved to Lambeth from Moorfields in 1815.
Yet this area became the ground the ground or circumstance of some of Blake's greatest writing; it was the landscape in which his imagination continued to florish and, as a result, he refers to it more often than to any other London region..." (Ackroyd: pgs 128-129: 1995)
(blog note: Bethlem Royal Hospital: Bethlem Hospital, Lambeth, for lunatics; “is a huge but comely” edifice, and munificently endowed; it formerly stood in Moorfields, but now ornaments St. George’s; it is an immense structure, with an elegant frontage of 300 feet, and cost £100,000. The celebrated reclining statues of raging and melancholy madness, that were formerly exposed to the effects of our “moody climate,” after a restoration from Bacon’s skilful chisel, are now sheltered in the hall of the hospital. text source)
Begining at Jerusalems Inner Court, Lambeth ruin'd and given
to the detestable Gods of Priam, to Apollo: and at the Asylum
Given to Hercules, who Labour in Tirazahs Looms for bread
WB- From Milton:
"We can name these abodes of Blake's Lambeth: The Apollo Gardens, together with the Flora Tea Gardens and the Temple of Flora (Priam's Classical gods), were the decayed resorts of the neighborhood." (Ackroyd: pgs 128-129: 1995)
The Garden areas are suggestive of the social clubs the Lambeth kids meet at on the weekends to socialize and dance, but there is more here worth considering:
"So Apollo can be recognised among the 'Gods of Priam', but what is the 'Asylum Given to Hercules' where they labour at the looms? Around the corner from Hercules Buildings [where Blake and Catherine lived] was the Lambeth Asylum for Girls; it was designed to harbour two hundred of them, between the ages of seven and fourteen, largely to save them from prostitution (at that age they were known as 'chicken whores') and to train them for for the new manufactories or for domestic service." (Ackroyd: pgs 128-129: 1995)
But Blake was hardly some omniscient, paternal voice commenting on the depressing social situation of the masses he lived with, he was a tradesman and a member of that very class he walked among. Nothing was more abhorrent to Blake than being or seeing other people subjected to lives of servitude, this is the same poet who wrote:
I must Create a System or be enslav'd by another mans
I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create.
From Jerusalem
and held fircely to the belief that:
And Every Generated Body in its inward form,
Is a garden of delight & a building of magnificence
From Milton
Continuing where Ackroyd leaves off in Milton:
Who set Pleasure against Duty: who Create Olympic crowns
To make Learning a burden & the Work of the Holy Spirit: Strife.
T[o] Thor & Cruel Odin who first reard the Polar Caves
Lambeth mourns calling Jerusalem. she weeps & looks abroad
for the Lords coming, that Jerusalem may overspread all Nations
Crave not for the mortal & perishing delights, but leave them
To the weak, and pity the weak as your infant care; Break not
Forth in your wrath lest you also are vegetated by Tirzah
Wait til the Judgment is past, till the Creation is consumed
And then rush forward with me into glorious spiritual
Vegetation; the Supper of the Lamb & his Bride; and the
Awakening of Albion our friend and ancient companion
and because it's one of the greatest poems ever written (though I think Blake wrote it before he moved to Lambeth):
In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
the mind-forg'd manacles I hear
- From London
(all Blake quotes are taken from The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake; Edited by David V. Erdman, 1988)
....
At risk of being dismissed as nothing more then an anglophile, below are two other short film clips that caught my attention. For reasons I am still unsure about, this style of local observation seems to have a tradition in the UK, that as far as I am aware of isn't as established a practice in the U.S. I've heard it said in a few circles that this is due to the lack of romantic history in the U.S., I for one think that is a load of bollocks. Though ...Lambeth Boys does have a connection to an ancient past, said past is hardly the point of the film, indeed in part, this movie is compelling because it just as easily could have been filmed in the towns I lived in when I was the age of its subjects. Though Blake himself was student of history, he is not commenting on the rich layers of history he finds in the buildings of his neighborhood either. In the case of the last clip at the bottom titled The Sea in Their Blood, the focus on an industrial fishing/ summer resort community is particularly interesting given that I did in fact grow up in such a place. It also has the most interesting accompanying narrative of the bunch.
Snow (1963)
The Sea in Their Blood (1983)
"A dog fish in the sea is called salmon on the table"
No comments:
Post a Comment