Intellectual humility

Apologies for a two-day hiatus - normal service will now be restored.

Earlier this year the Times Literary Supplement carried the  following advertisement:

____________________________________________

Intellectual Humility in Public Discourse

Request for Proposals and Fellowship Applications

With the generous support of the John Templeton Foundation, and subject to a final grant agreement, the University of Connecticut’s Humanities Institute announces a funding proposal competition of $2 million dollars to support interdisciplinary research projects on intellectual humility and its role in promoting meaningful public discourse. [...]

Topical areas of focus include both the barriers that prevent people from engaging in open-minded, intellectually humble dialogue over culturally divisive issues and scalable models or other interventions that may be effective or ineffective in promoting more reason-based, intellectually humble dialogue.

________________________________________________________

I'd never heard of the Templeton Foundation. The phrase that snagged my attention, and perhaps yours too, was 'intellectually humble dialogue'. What did this mean? I started to dig around and looked first at the  Foundation website, where I found what is, I suppose, a mission statement: Here it is:

The John Templeton Foundation serves as a philanthropic catalyst for discoveries relating to the Big Questions of human purpose and ultimate reality. We support research on subjects ranging from complexity, evolution, and infinity to creativity, forgiveness, love, and free will. We encourage civil, informed dialogue among scientists, philosophers, and theologians and between such experts and the public at large, for the purposes of dwfinitenal clarity and new insights.

Our vision is derived from the late Sir John Templeton's optimism about the possibility of acquiring “new spiritual information” and from his commitment to rigorous scientific research and related scholarship. The Foundation's motto, "How little we know, how eager to learn," exemplifies our support for open-minded inquiry and our hope for advancing human progress through breakthrough discoveries.

What are 'the Big Questions'? There's clearly a religious slant  to the Foundation's preferred lines of research - 'forgiveness, love and free will' are all Good Things, and I'm all for definitenal clarity.

The Foundation is very rich indeed, and reportedly hands out around $70 million each year in research grants and programs. in five core funding areas:

• Science and the big questions
• Character development
• Freedom and free enterprise
• Exceptional cognitive talent and genius
• Genetics

This is all fascinating, and you might like to ake a look at their funding priorities here, 

The Foundation also provides grants for several independently administered awards.,including the $100,000 Epiphany Prizes for ‘inspiring movies and TV’, Past winners include The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

As to its billionaire founder - ';a penny life will give you all the facts' as Auden said. These days it's Wikipedia.  He held British citizenship, lived in the Bahamas and was quite fantastically generous. The Wiki entry says that he "attributed much of his success to his ability to maintain an elevated mood, avoid anxiety and stay disciplined."

An example to us all, then. I don't suppose I'd ever be a recipient of the Foundation's munificence, although perhaps my sense of personal inadequacy is evidence of intellectual hunility?  I can be pretty good at elevated moods. , if that adds to my case. But I shan't hold my breath.

Finnegans Wake - the dust wrapper

Published on May 4th 1939 (a Thursday), this is one of 425 copies in a limited edition signed by the author (and you can expect to shell out £15-20,000 for a copy in this state, which is as near Fine as it gets).

What a lovely object this is. It has a dignified and monumental presence, like a 1930s power station. But - and it's troubled me for years - why is 'BY' thus capitalised? Why in the same size font? Why is it there at all? Wouldn't that nobly austere cover be even more noble, even more austere, without that unnecessary 'BY'?

Faber did the same thing many years later with Pincher Martin by William Golding, but quite reasonably, because the average punter might not know whether this was a book by Pincher Martin called William Golding or by William Golding called Pincher Martin.

On the back of their  dust wrappers for volumes of poetry Faber invariably employed that 'by', again for no reason I can fathom. A whim of Eliot's?

Speaking of which, I love the Faber poetry back list (which inexplicably no longer appears on the back of their poetry books. What a cohort - and what a prompt to further reading! With very few exceptions Faber poetry collections - and Faber books generally - no longer have such striking covers as they did in the past. The rot set in when that spindly 'ff' colophon emerged from (was it?) the modish designers Pentagram, and we lost the distinctive and very beautiful  Berthold Wolpe covers  that made mid-century Faber publications so desirable and collectible.

First edition Wakes tend to be in very good nick because they are (predictably) unread. Many modern first editions lack dust wrappers because (as you may not know) they were intended only to keep the book in a reasonably pristine state while on the bookshop shelves and usually discarded at the point of sale by the assistant, who would bin said item. As the dust wrappers of many first edition novels are especially attractive they tend to increase the value of the book, often to an eye-watering amount. Collectors will be wary of less than pristine books with fine wrappers as they are likely to be (as book dealers winningly term it) 'married' - not the original pairing. There's a whole publishing industry based on the production of facsimile wrappers which are, in the case of much genre fiction, the best thing about the novel. Have a look at some  here.

The London Nobody Knows

The London Nobody Knows is a very odd and  compelling documentary - you can probably find it on YouTube somewhere, and I hope you will. Look it up on the International Movie Database and in the section devoted to 'plot keywords' you'll find the following:

River Thames, chains, whip, pub, dancing, lavatory, haggling, catacombs and 'reference to Christopher Wren'.

The director/producer was Norman Cohen. This is his filmography:

1977 Confessions from a Holiday Camp

1977 Stand Up Virgin Soldiers

1976 Confessions of a Driving Instructor

1975 Confessions of a Pop Performer

1974 The Importance of Being Dublin   Director

1974 Confessions of a Window Cleaner   Producer

1973 Adolf Hitler - My Part in His Downfall  Director

1971 Dad's Army Director

1969 Till Death Us Do Part Director

1967 The London Nobody Knows

1966 Brendan Behan's Dublin Director/Producer

1966 The Blue Max Assembly Cutter

Cohen worked as a humble cutter on a 1966 movie called The Blue Max and became friends with one of the stars, Yorkshire-born James Mason. When, soon after,, he was contracted to make a 15-minute documentary about London Mason signed up and the project became more ambitious.

The title comes from a book by Geoffrey Fletcher published in 1962. For nearly thirty years - until 1990 - Fletcher wrote and illustrated a regular column for the Daily Telegraph. The London Nobody Knows was followed by a string of similar publications (London After Dark, Pearly Kingdom, The London Dickens Knew and (perhaps the best) Down Among the Meths Men. I'll come back to that. Long before modern topographical writers such as Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd, Geoffrey Fletcher developed an approach to telling human stories, of exploring communities that were fast disappearing thanks to massive re-development and gentrification of the 1960s and 70s. 

Fletcher was drawn to the undervalued, the ugly, the decrepit - he liked stuttering gas lamps, cast-iron lavatories and railway yards, the urban poetry of dereliction.  He was dismayed by the rise of office blocks and the gung-ho redevelopment which would stamp out, he correctly predicted, "the tawdry, extravagant and eccentric". The London he loved was disappearing fast - it was a Victorian city still, but one that had been blown to smithereens by the Luftwaffe during the Blitz. It was very much a post-war city, with bomb sites and widespread neglect and decay. It was shabby and beautiful and full of accumulated detail. The film picks up on this very sensitively.

Ian Nairn’s London and Geoffrey Fletcher’s The London Nobody Knows are the two best books written about the capital in the past half century - both were published in the first half of the 1960s and, in their different ways, have never been bettered. Having said which Fletcher's writing hasn't dated especially well and somebody suggested that a better title for his book would be “The London Nobody who reads the Daily Telegraph Knows.” 

From the introduction to The London Nobody Knows:

There are parts of London never penetrated, except by those who like myself, are driven on by the mania for exploration: Hoxton, Shoreditch, Stepney for instance, all of which are full of interest for the perceptive eye, the eye of the connoisseur of well-proportioned though seedy terraces, of enamel advertisements and cast-iron lavatories.

While Fletcher was billed as the film’s writer and his book informs the whole project, most of what we hear was scripted by Brian Comport, who was given a credit for “additional material”. He was later the screenwriter for the cult horror films Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly (1970), The Fiend (1972) and The Asphyx (1973). It was Brian's idea to have James Mason walk and talk directly to the camera, making the film a personal journey - an innovative format at that time, and an idea that really pays off. Mason's voice - Yorkshire via Cambridge, Dublin, Hollywood - is languid, sad, aristocratic even.

We first encounter Mason in the derelict Bedford Theatre in Camden Town, now long demolished (the site is a job centre). It fixes the tone for what follows, dilapidation and neglect. From there he wanders around the overgrown railway yards north of Euston and we're on our way. The first half is full of fascinating footage and is entertaining if unremarkable - there's some heavy-handed slapstick comedy and the film is speeded up a few times in a chortling Benny Hill style. But - and this is the reason for watching it again and again - almost exactly at the half way mark something happens.

We see a tap dancing busker (Norman Norris, who died aged 96 in 2007), then an escapologist, then the trendies of the King's Road, then - but I want to stay with the tap dancer for now. 

Norman Norris aka Lord Mustard - still tap-dancing until a few years ago in a red frock coat and top hat. In later years he became a well-known street entertainer in Oxford, often going by the names Captain Tap or Colonel Mustard. Born in Glasgow in 1911 as George Pirie, he took the name of Alastair MacDonald as his stage name and traveled  the country as an entertainer. He claimed to have worked with Norman Wisdom, and to have won the Bognor Regis Opportunity Knocks contest in 1981. He said in a newspaper interview I taught myself to tap dance as a boy and also do gurning [making strange faces]. Mostly I entertain to raise money for charity -- I was once a living legend in London."

Back to our film, and a montage of Londoners young and old wolfing down eel pie, mash and liquor in Manzi's, of Chapel Street, Islington, an old man's chomping jaws rhyme, visually, with the gnashing rear end of a council dust cart. Then we cut to an undertakers and Mason delivers with relish some bizarre lines:

When the eating is over and done with there's always the undertaker, at your service. At least we get a decent send-off. We get silk and satin, not the spoon and fork. We're embalmed in cherished memories, not jelly and vinegar.

The camera roams around the dilapidated Kensal Green Cemetery accompanied by the wonderful 1930s song by Leslie Saroney  Ain't it Grand to be Bloomin' Well Dead. The camera enters a derelict sarcophagus. Darkness. The end? No. Then the camera emerges from a Salvation Army band cornet and we're back in the deepest East End. What follows is a kind of hellish afterlife - breathtaking, harrowing and unforgettable.  We're in what Fletcher calls 'the suburbs of hell', a place of bomb sites, wet rags, old mattresses, waste paper and vegetable refuse that - Fletcher said - make the quarter so attractive.

Here we reach the lower depths - the homeless, the meths drinkers on the steps of the synagogue in Brick Lane, old men scavenging  in the gutter for  cabbages at the Market. 

When I got to the Synagogue, I found them on the steps, eight men and a woman.[…] a few young prostitutes, on the job, hung about in Brick Lane. Brick Lane is marvellous, a melting pot of all the nationalities that grew from the loins of Adam, greasy, feverish Brick Lane, the Bond St for the people of the abyss. 

There's that Telegraph perspective again. The same woman. I'm pretty sure, appears in this film, and is named Beth (from her native quarter of Bethnal Green). 

Beth showed signs of recognition, lifted up her weary red eye-lids and stretched out a hand for a fag. I distributed Woodbines. Meths women are heavy drinkers, and can get through three or four wine bottles full in a morning, but they tend to begin slowly and build up as the day wears on. Next to her was Liverpool Jack, an ex-merchant seaman whose nerves had gone West on the convoys, and a man called Pee. He had no other name, nor could any other have done him credit. He was the most abject of the meths men. He had made two or three attempts at suicide, and his last one nearly rang the bell. I thought, sometimes I overdo my relish for offbeat experiences.

The faces that we see are the faces of people who lived through the Blitz. Over eight months of bombing, mostly at night, more than one million London houses were destroyed or damaged and more than 40,000 civilians were killed, almost half of them in London. Much of what we see, I'd suggest, is what we would now describe as post-traumatic stress disorder. 

But life goes on, and vibrantly, elsewhere. We cut to Mason outside a former Yiddish theatre, now a bingo hall: "The enormous modern blocks are on the march, and already threatening each last little shop on the corner. Cut to the Marx family's bustling deli on Petticoat Lane, then to the bleak empty streets around Spitalfields, a vagrant scavenging among the cabbage stalks. Then Fournier Street (at around the time, I think, that the artists Gilbert and George moved in) and, inevitably, Jack the Ripper.

The end is heartbreaking. A cantor sings the Kaddish, a lament, not only for a community now dispersing, but for the very fabric of that community now being wiped out. by the wrecker's ball.

Mason is refreshingly unsentimental - most of Victorian London was squalid, he says, and the modern eyesores taking its place will in time come to be demolished. That's happening now, of course. But Cohen wants us to go out on a laugh and . well, watch it and see for yourself.

On St Trinian's

In the current TLS Libby Purves, reviews Terms and Conditions - Life in girls' boarding schools 1939--1979 by Ysenda Maxtone Graham. It's a terrific review of what sounds like a wonderful book. Contributions from many ex-boarders are rich and strange . . .

The louche prize, however, goes to Caroline (Lady) Cranbrook’s 1940s memories of a place called Wings: a grand house, and a drunken headmistress with a fag and crème de menthe ever at hand, encouraging the school sport of rugby (“Jump on me, girls, jump on me!”). She made them dance with her armless, First World War veteran father, whose stumps without prostheses they had to cling to. Biology in the old kitchen involved dissecting an aborted foal. So many teachers left that Cranbrook at fifteen taught two subjects herself and put the five-year-old boarders to bed. When inspectors came she was given make-up so that they would think she was a teacher. Eventually, with difficulty, she smuggled out a letter “betraying” the school. After Wings closed, rumours spread – one had the headmistress knocking out a girl’s tooth in assembly “because she didn’t like the way she was looking at her”.

Are the St Trinian's films much watched these days? These blissfully funny, endlessly re-watchable comic masterpieces catch something of the social upheavals of Britain in the 1950s as we negotiated the momentous social changes that came with peace time and the post-war Labour settlement. Before you read on, listen to Malcolm Arnold's  magnificent theme song (and credits with illustrations by Ronald Searle, who invented the whole St Trinian's myth in 1941). It will add to the experience.

Part of the appeal - to a section of the audience at least - was the dramatic and unnerving transformation that took place between the Fourth Form and the Sixth form, when the girls mutated
from pint-sized matt-haired gap-toothed she-devils (faithfully reproducing  Ronald Searle's original cartoons) into svelte glamorous debutantes, capricious and sexually potent incarnations of male desire,  and fear. Their essential moral depravity remained intact, but they acquired a veneer of class (and a veneer got you a long way in post-war Britain - vide Lady Docker).

The first three St Trinian's films are perfectly cast: Alastair Sim in drag as the trilling, cooing, unflappable headmistress Millicent Fritton; George Cole (in real life Sim's adopted son) as the cockney wide boy 'Flash' Harry (who appears to live in a shrubbery and sports the most hilarious coat in movie history - a shoulder-padded ankle-skimming camel hair creation, flapping unreliably in all directions, the ensemble topped with a dodgy pork pie hat); the sublime and very sexy Joyce Grenfell as the lovelorn policewoman Sgt Ruby Gates ('But I've had a bath specially!' she wails to her betrothed, shrewdly underplayed by Lloyd Lamble).

Cameos are by reliable stalwarts of mid-century British cinema: Richard Wattis, Eric Barker, Dennis Price and John le Mesurier all play Whitehall mandarins from the "Ministry of Schools". Then there's Raymond Huntley, Cecil Parker, Sid James, all turning in their best performances. Look out for Beryl Reid as the monocled lesbian chemistry teacher and - well, I could go on, and on. The St Trinian's staff room is populated with Britain's equivalent of The Addams Family. There's an illicit gin distillery on the premises, and a hotline to the the local bookmakers. It's heaven.

Best of all, for my money, is Terry-Thomas, the absolute non pareil of caddishness and a superb comic actor. In Blue Murder at St Trinian's (my favourite, I tend to think) he plays Captain Romney Carlton-Ricketts, sole owner and proprietor of the Dreadnought Motor Transport Co. He is employed by Miss Fritton to take the girls on a UNESCO-sponsored tour to the Continent (or 'Continong') with (as they say) hilarious results. He's the bounder's bounder, an unscrupulous and opportunist ladies' man out for all he can get. I've always loved the visual rhyme of the gap in his front teeth and the baffling hyphen in his name.

There are four films in the original series, and they should be watched in order:

The Belles of St Trinian's (1954)
Blue Murder at St Trinian's (1957)
The Pure Hell of St Trinian's (1960)
The Great St Trinian's Train Robbery (1966, the last and the least of them. Shot in colour, which doesn't help, and with Frankie Howerd drafted in, unhappily.)

There followed a succession of horribly crude and witless updates culminating in a 2009 travesty directed by Oliver Parker. Avoid this charmless horror and its lurid sequel at all costs.

In her TLS review Libby Purves adds an irresistible note (and this is what prompted my thoughts of St Trinian's).. In 1971 a sociologist collected nicknames used in girls. boarding schools and among theme were: Baggy, Bambam, Bouncy, Bubbles, Doodles, Farto, Flea, Kipper, Moo, Pawpaw, Pussy, Tick, Turnip and Wopsy. 

Lost worlds!

Otherwise mint

I don't write much poetry because I'm no good at it. But here's a little something I perpetrated which, I believe, offers to the world a minor innovation. Has anybody else used highlighter in a poem before?

Otherwise Mint 

Eliot's Selected for two quid
Picked up in Oxfam, Muswell Hill

With biro marginalia  

(Pages 3 to 11)

Crammed in tiny caps, some sideways

That took me back to school,

Wondering then, and now, how Faber miss the trick

Of making space enough for annotation

By learners on the brink of English Lit.

HE DIGRESSES HERE BECAUSE OF SMELL 

ADMITION OF NIGHTS IN CHEAPHOTELS

HISSTRUGGLE IS INSIGNIFICANT

'And should I then presume?'

'And how should I begin?'        

QUESTIONING HERE!!!

'A thing with claws'  [circled, with an arrow]

POSS. CRABS??? NOT EVEN IDETIFYING THE CREATURE

ARGUABLE CLIMAX OF POEM!

HISSTRUGGLE IS INSIGNIFICANT - NEVER A STRENGTH OF HOPE

         
          LAZARUS COME FROM DED BY JESUS

BUT IRONIC AS HE HAS NONE [Hope, that is]

EVEN IF HE HAD HIS YOUTH WD IT MAKE A DIF?

      HE COULD OF RISKED EVERTHING!!!

HEROSTATUS?

Then last of all there's one word:underlined

BLEAK.

Prufrock formulated, sprawling on a pen.

The other pages all unmarked,

Though not without some interest.

On pointless virtuosity

In his 2008 collection Song & Dance the poet John Fuller unveiled a new form: the autogram. This, he explained in a helpful note, was 'the imitation of a poet's work limited to using only the letters found in his or her name'. The following lines, for instance, use only the letters appearing in the name of . .  but can you guess?

Hail ami!

Wilt halt? Wilt wait?

What am I? An animal in a hat? Naw.

(Am I a Milan wit? A Taiwan tin-man? Naw!)

No prizes for that one. The others are trickier, and I'll admit to not 'getting' them all straight away, or in one case at all. But - how to say this politely? - I  really couldn't be bothered. An adroit pastiche is something to admire, to be sure, but a highly predetermined exercise such as Fuller's leaves me cold. What exactly is it that are we being invited to admire? The pastiche itself or the tight constraints within which it has been executed?

Fuller's autograms are certainly virtuosic but strike me as perfect examples of pointless virtuosity, making the location where the engagingly ludic becomes, well, merely ludicrous. Gilbert Adair once observed that 'clever-clever' does enot mean 'double clever' but 'half clever'.  I think he was referring to Tom Stoppard who, in Travesties, gave cleverness a bad name, soaring far beyond the ability of any audience to follow his giddy virtuosity (involving cut-up Dadaist limericks in French, I seem to recall)

The French, with their lightly-worn and culturally embedded stanbdards of intellectual  pretension are much better at this kind of thing, both as writers and readers. The Oulipian authors in particlar, worked gleefully within masochistically severe self-inflicted restraints to test both their own startling ingenuity, the outer limits of form and their readers' forebearance. You know the kind of thing - Perec's novel La Disparition (which excludes the letter 'e') or his 5,000 word palindrome; or la Vie mode d'emploi in which an apartment building is systematically and painstakingly explored and inventoried, room by room, using as a navigarting principle the Knight's move in chess. There's a place for all this of course, and a distinguished one, but it can all seem awfully remote from the pulse of life.

The poet Luke Kennard's latest collection, Cain, (published by Penned in the Margins) won this year's British Book Design and Production Award. It really is a beautiful piece of work, comparable in apperance to one of Alasdair Gray's exquisitely-wrought novels. It's beautifully printed in black and red and the acclaimed centrepiece is a series of thirty or so prose anagrams based on a passage from the Book of Genesis, the 'am I my brother's keeper' bit about Cain and Abel.

'Virtuoso' (from the Italian virtuoso) has the Latin stem, vir, implying manliness.. That masculinuty can best express itself through dazzling technical adroitness, facility and (by implication) commitment to an artistic practice is flattering for us blokes, but unsettling too..

I recall several 'virtuoso' performances in the past year or two. and as it happens they were all by men: One that springs to mind is Robert LePage at the 2015 Edinburgh Festival in a seamless (and often bloodless) epic  involving a model apartment building (shades of Perec) and an army of unseen assistants making it all happen. It will be re-staged at the Brbican next year. It had its moments, and many of them, but I was often reminded of the Charlie Parker recording Bird with Strings, in which the saxophonist performed in front of an orchestra, killing stone dead the very thing he was best at - wild improvisation unhampered by sheet music and orchestration. It was, I suppose, an ill-fated bid for artistic 'respectability' aimed at the posh, and quite horrible.

I suppose I prefer work that has a raggedy, unpolished feel, from Trout Mask Replica to . . . well, you know.

Autogram extract copyright John Fuller

Man with a Movie Camera

Another recycled TLS blog, this one about a favourite film.

Is Man with a Movie Camera, a sixty-seven-minute silent film directed by Dziga Vertov in 1929, really the greatest documentary ever made? Yes, at least according to a readers' poll in Sight & Sound magazine. This came as no surprise to cinephiles – the film has topped so many lists over the past eight decades that it may be time to declare it hors concours and give some other contenders a chance. It is to documentary film what Ulysses is to the modernist novel and (it could be argued) the two masterpieces share a common approach, a common aesthetic. They are both complex and minutely-detailed explorations of contemporary urban life and entirely, monumentally, momentously modernist.  . . . .

Man with a Movie Camera declares in its opening title card (itself a mini-manifesto) that the film was made without a script and contains no dialogue or inter-titles because it aims to offer an “international absolute language”. This is not just an aesthetic gesture, but an attempt to overcome the daunting communication problems of a country with a vast range of languages and cultures.

The result remains to this day a thrilling and audacious work of art, still fresh, energetic, provocative and wonderfully funny – remote from the much-derided "tractors and wheat fields" clichés of later Soviet propaganda. It is  an unalloyed pleasure to watch, and re-watch, and not only for film-buffs.

The BFI Blu-Ray reissue earlier this year features a fine musical accompaniment composed by Michael Nyman, while a big screen version, promoting this release, had a score by the wonderful Alloy Orchestra, derived from the director's notes to his original composer, and so perhaps closer to what Vertov had in mind.

The disc comes with many extras, including Vertov's little-known sound film Tri pesni o Lenine (Three Songs about Lenin) from 1934, a slice of Stalin-era propaganda that admittedly features plenty of tractors and wheat fields, but a lot more besides. It was commissioned by Stalin to commemorate the anniversary of Lenin's death and to persuade the Soviet people that he was Lenin's natural heir. It's not as immediately engaging as Man with a Movie Camera and is less likely to appeal to a modern audience, but it is certainly worth a look, not least for its intriguing literary connection.

(A declaration of interest: my chance discovery some years ago of W. H. Auden's long-lost renderings of Russian peasant songs, turned into sub-titles for the first London screening of Three Songs about Lenin, led to an invitation from the BFI to provide an essay for inclusion in the booklet accompanying this release.)

In May 2009, the TLS published my Commentary on the Auden material – a bundle of manuscripts, typescripts and shot lists that record a brief collaboration between the poet and the Film Society's Ivor Montagu, a rush job calling for technical know-how which may be seen as a dry run for Auden's rhythmic, metronome-timed commentary for the celebrated Night Mail (1936).

Three Songs about Lenin was last shown publicly in Britain in 2009, at a BFI screening  prompted by the rediscovery of the Auden verses. This one-off event was a partial re-creation of the original Film Society programme on October 27, 1935, a typically eclectic matinee that featured some German commercial shorts, a nature documentary about sea urchins, a dazzling abstract film by Len Lye and premieres of two films of lasting importance: Housing Problems, Arthur Elton's seminal study of the effects of poverty, followed by Coal Face (with its Auden madrigal and Benjamin Britten score). Some of these were screened before an expectant modern-day audience settled down to watch the main feature. I had seen it for the first time a few hours before at a trial screening and had been moved to see Auden's subtitles re-united with the original film. But that was in an empty theatre – this was in a crowded cinema.

In an early sequence in Three Songs about Lenin a Muslim woman removes her veil and joins a reading class in a village school. There were admiring murmurs in the audience and a ripple of applause as Auden's subtitles blazed on the screen:

My face in a dark prison lay 

And blind my life remained 

No learning mine nor light of day, 

A slave although unchained 

Till through my darkness shone a ray, 

And Lenin’s truth I gained.

"Dziga Vertov" was the pseudonym of David Abelevich Kaufman (1896-1954), invariably and inaccurately translated by film historians in the West as "spinning top". The term really means "gyroscope" – not a nursery toy but, far more resonantly, a piece of kinetic precision engineering, a modern device for the machine age.