{"id":57940,"date":"2013-05-22T00:00:59","date_gmt":"2013-05-22T00:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/?p=57940"},"modified":"2013-05-22T08:50:36","modified_gmt":"2013-05-22T08:50:36","slug":"youre-human-like-the-rest-of-them-the-films-of-b-s-johnson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/youre-human-like-the-rest-of-them-the-films-of-b-s-johnson\/","title":{"rendered":"You’re Human Like the Rest of Them<\/em>: The Films of B S Johnson"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Juliet Jacques.<\/p>\n

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You’re Human Like the Rest of Them: The Films of B S Johnson<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Compared to the fertile interactions between the literary and cinematic avant-gardes in Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union, British Modernism and film<\/a> was virtually a non-event. Wyndham Lewis and the Vorticists, the most militant movement, scorned the medium entirely; of the British Surrealists, only Humphrey Jennings<\/a> emulated French counterparts Robert Desnos and Jacques Pr \u00e9vert by working in cinema, and when he did, he adopted a naturalistic style, primarily influenced by the British documentary movement, rather than the Surrealist films of Luis Bu\u00c3\u00b1uel or Man Ray. Virginia Woolf wrote one brief text on cinema<\/a> after seeing The Cabinet of Dr Caligari<\/em>; Dorothy Richardson and US \u00e9migr \u00e9 H.D. contributed to Close-Up<\/em>, the internationally-minded journal that ran from 1927 to 1933, but otherwise, the inter-war Modernists displayed little interest in the newest art form.<\/p>\n

After the war, British critics reacted against Modernist literature’s restless experimentation and celebrated the formal conservatism and measured rage of the Angry Young Men. At the same time, in France, several high-profile authors were finding new directions for the \u2018innovative’ novel, and some \u2014 notably Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet \u2014 took their ideas into filmmaking. Disillusioned with the post-war cultural climate, B. S. Johnson<\/a> argued tirelessly for a continuation of Joyce and Beckett’s interrogations into the limits of language, striving with his friend Alan Burns to collate a circle of British neo-Modernist writers that would rival those in France.<\/p>\n

Few of the writers promoted by Johnson worked in film. Like Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute, Rayner Heppenstall<\/a> often explored the inner workings of a protagonist’s consciousness, in response to cinema assuming the 19th century novel’s exteriorised narrative function. Ann Quin<\/a> had no involvement; nor did Angela Carter. Of those praised for \u2018writing as though it mattered’ in Johnson’s Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs?<\/em>, only Stefan Themerson had made films, with his wife Franciszka, the last two of which were propaganda films after they relocated to Britain during the Second World War.<\/p>\n

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Johnson, however, sustained an interest in filmmaking, with most of his works included in the new BFI collection You’re Human Like the Rest of Them<\/em><\/a>, released to commemorate the 80th anniversary of his birth. Alongside Well Done God<\/em><\/a>, a collection of Johnson’s prose and drama, it forms part of an effort to understand Johnson as more than a \u2018novelist’, and appreciate his talent in its entirety. Featuring several short films, agitprop pieces, TV play Not Counting the Savages<\/em> and several television documentaries that he directed or presented, it is a fascinating package, not least because it shows how Johnson paid scant attention to currents in avant-garde filmmaking, and developed his own utterly distinct practice: like his novels, they are all very different, in subject and style.<\/p>\n

You’re Human Like the Rest of Them<\/em> (1967) was Johnson’s directorial debut \u2014 a short film about schoolteacher Haakon, played by William Hoyland, who is painfully aware of his own mortality, and distressed that those around him, particularly his pupils, do not collapse with this shared knowledge. It is often said that Johnson’s voice too closely resembled Samuel Beckett’s \u2014 see his contemporary Eva Figes<\/a>, writing in 2004 \u2014 and You’re Human<\/em> shares Beckett’s concerns with ageing and pointlessness, as well as a similarly stark, detached tone and bleak sense of humour. Little philosophy builds out of Haakon’s despair: a sense that everything is futile can put people, conversely, in a position of power \u2014 as it does in Johnson’s novel Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry<\/em><\/a> (1973), where Malry decided to avenge every \u2018debt’ he feels that society owes him \u2014 but here, all Haakon can do is \u201cmake myself \u2026 bloody awkward”, ending, like many of Johnson’s works, on a decidedly defeated note.<\/p>\n

Johnson wanted to cut on each word of You’re Human<\/em>, but settled for one at the end of every line of dialogue. This is not dialectical montage \u2014 the contrasting of opposing forces through cutting \u2014 but Eisenstein’s influence is apparent, as is, to a limited extent, that of the French New Wave. It is worlds away from the Structuralist approach of the London Filmmakers’ Co-op<\/a>, however, and nothing in Johnson’s published writing on film suggests that he even knew about the Co-op, who largely shared his aesthetic and political sympathies, and who might have provided vital theoretical and practical support.<\/p>\n

His next short, Paradigm<\/em> (1968) was even more Beckettian, its set stripped down to some coloured blocks against a cloudy background, with a discordant tone rumbling throughout. Its opening credits state that it is the \u2018international version’; then, a naked Hoyland presents a monologue in a nonsense tongue. Over its ten minutes, Hoyland interprets this invented language remarkably well, becoming slower and more melancholic as his character ages with each cut, but Paradigm<\/em> was disastrously received at Cannes in 1969: its producer disowned it after Walerien Borowczyk called it \u201cthe worst short film [I’ve] ever seen”. In the DVD’s accompanying notes, David Quantick<\/a> expresses his admiration for the film, and it’s nowhere near as bad as Borowczyk suggested, but You’re Human<\/em> far better makes Johnson’s point about the inevitability of ageing and sadness of having expressed everything possible, and similar linguistic experiments had been conducted more wittily by Kurt Schwitters, Raoul Hausmann and others fifty years earlier.<\/p>\n