The film also has a pedagogic point to make. Most documentaries of the time, including the ones we saw on British TV on the Czech rebellion, worked really hard to make their depictions seem realistic. In the process, they reproduce an ideological ‘reality’, for marxists. One way to show this ideological effect is to break the usual conventions, which is what Pravda does in a determined way. In the most-often quoted scene, some Czech workers appear on screen, speaking Czech. No subtitling or dubbing is provided for the viewer, unlike in the usual documentary – ‘Vladimir’ tells ‘Rosa’ ‘If you don’t speak Czech, you had better learn fast!’

The work scene is also disturbingly unusual (forward to 46min 30 seconds in this version). We see a young man tending a large rotary cutting machine in the Skoda factory (which made weapons as well as cars, the commentary reminds us). The machine cutters move slowly up and down the piece they are working on. We get extremely noisy natural sound. There are no edits or shifts in camera position, and no other sound for 5 or 6 minutes(a very long time in cinema). The worker tends the machine, lubricating it occasionally, but largely just watching it as it does its job. There are no ear defenders, no guard rails, and no other workers to talk to. After a couple of minutes, we are all longing for it to end.

My students often nominated this scene as the most annoying and challenging in the whole of a very unenjoyable film (but it did them good!). That was the whole point, of course. They found 5 minutes enough, so what of the poor guy who spent 8 hours a day doing that?

References

1. Monaco, J ( 1976) New Wave: Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette Oxford: Oxford University Press.

The Islanders (1939) dir Maurice Harvey. Permission of Royal Mail Film Archive.

In Exploring the Tomato: transformations of nature, economy and society (Mark Harvey, Steve Quilley and Huw Beynon, 2002), there is a chapter called ‘Broken Glass’, describing the extraordinary economic and social organisation of small growers (including part-time postmen), the Guernsey Tomato Marketing Board, and glasshouses made from the skeleton-frames of up-turned boats. It told of the system of English wholesale markets, and how the Guernsey ‘Potentate’ tomato (a powerful hybrid) had to endure a clunky two-week journey from grower to consumer, and of the standardisation and ‘process of qualification’ of tomatoes for mass consumer markets. This transitory world was shattered by the twin forces of competition from Dutch, North Sea Gas-warmed tomatoes and the growth of supermarket chains in the UK. The book was written nearly five years before I discovered the film – but could there have been some subliminal connection? A transmission of a kind of interest in the world?

The film transports us into a world as seen 65 years ago. One of many in a revolutionary genre of documentary films — Night Mail being the most famous —  The Islanders shows how the world was made rather than consumed. Social realist vision uncovers the work of world-making. So we see mostly men, mostly smoking, engaged in manual labour of producing, lifting and transporting tomatoes; the work of picking and grading; the work of making sales, of intermediating, and regulating. We are told only that restaurants demand regular, middle-sized, good-coloured tomatoes. The consumer as such is an absent figure. Further, this and many of the films from the GPO stable, unsurprisingly present a communications revolution, economies now made possible by radio and telephone, worlds connected, ships at sea rescued, letters delivered, telegrams sent, undersea cables laid. As today, the sense of a world being transformed by then revolutionary technologies of communication, wired social and economic organisation, is tangibly and visually exciting. The work of communication, of creating the infrastructures, occasionally at risk to working lives, is explored through stark and resolutely modernist imagery. The island dissolves into the planet, the planet into the universe, the film ends.

Orbiting the tomato: A door to a hidden-to-me dimension of my father. A refracting prism of past and present worlds. A society of proud production, now disappeared from visual representation (a genre documentary now dead) and buried by new forms of supermarket-dominated, consumer-oriented social and economic organisation. Work losing its core sociological reputation, and attempts to recover and re-visualise the tomato in the round, through its multiple presences. Such a simple fruit.

References

1. Harvey, M., Quilley, S. and Beynon, H. (2002) Exploring the Tomato: Transformations of Nature, Economy and Society Edward Elgar.