A Diary for Timothy (1945) User Reviews

War-Time Commencement Speech?

[gavin6942 · 7/10 · 3 July 2013]

This brief documentary-style film presents the status of Great Britain near the end of the Second World War by means of a visual diary for a baby boy born in September, 1944. Narration explains to "Timothy" what his family, his neighbors, and his fellow citizens are going through as the war nears its end, and what problems may remain for new Englishmen like Timothy to solve.

What makes this brief documentary so interesting is how it focuses on Timothy James Jenkins, a real child in England. Thus, this is not just a time capsule, but a commencement speech of sorts -- but instead of following a graduation, it follows the birth of this child.

In a sense, the hopes of a nation are seen through one boy... and this, in turn, made the boy something of a cult figure. (On a very, very small scale, of course... but his biography is well-known to anyone who cares to search it out.)

A rather poetic film extolling the future and socialism.

[planktonrules · 6/10 · 29 September 2010]

This is a short film about the young life of Timothy--a child born in 1944 as well as European events of this and the following year (to almost the end of the war). No mention is made of the war in the Pacific--that is a bit odd.

Apparently, this short film has fallen into the public domain and I found a copy online. I would love to know more about the origins of the film--who financed it and what was the purpose for making the film. It seemed to me that the film was like an introduction to some socialist utopia the film makers envisioned for post-war Britain and the whole thing seemed to have a definite agenda. Scenes of school children singing in front of giant banners of the Soviet Union and lots of talk of Russian forces liberating Poland (though they didn't mention the slaughter of dissenters within Poland that also occurred in the process--a rather substantial omission) made me feel the film had a strong American involvement in socialist or Labor bent--very, very strong. No mention was made of assistance from the Free French and far less was said about American assistance than that of the Soviets. No mention is made of US or British assistance to the USSR (both countries fed and supplied the Russian people and military) and this does seem to show a strong bias. Perhaps the film was intended as a specific thank you and to be shown in Russia or perhaps the film makers wanted the UK to become a socialist or communist paradise as well.

Now despite the leftist leanings of the film, the quality of the short was exceptional. The narration was very lyrical in a way and was almost like a long poem to the future. And, the narration was exceptional. Obtaining E.M. Forster to write it and Michael Redgrave to narrate it is quite the pedigree. It is a lovely short film--very optimistic. It's just a shame that all the wonderful notions about this utopia never really came to be and it wasn't more balanced.

Directed by the great Humphrey Jennings

[malcolmgsw · 6/10 · 12 December 2019]

This is one of the last of the wartime documentaries from Humphrey Jennings.As usual he puts together a number of stories about men from various communities.I think that its aim is to show the resilience of the British people in coming through the war.

Fanfare for the wartime common man.

[shrbw · 3 February 2002]

'Diary for Timothy' is that most precious thing - a snapshot in time of ordinary people, their hopes and aspirations. It is considered by many to be Jennings's masterpiece.

The film is constructed around the first year of life for a baby, born in the closing stages of the war. There are two radical elements that distinguish this from his previous films. Firstly, the very literate narrative, written by E.M. Forster, no less! Secondly, the characters who appear are allowed to speak for themselves, almost in the form of soliloquy. Here are the voices of Britain, and one is reminded of Chesterton's poem in that they 'have not spoken yet'.

The mood of the film is very subtle. Although not strident, it and the characters in it argues the necessity for a better world and a fairer society (anticipating the Labour landslide).

What is really poignant is the realisation that many of these hopes have not been realised.

A very evocative film indeed - Emotional poetry

[ilpohirvonen · 9/10 · 27 July 2010]

In the history of cinema, the history of documentary is very interesting and when talking about the subject and the United Kingdom, people cannot leave two names alone; Basil Wright and Humphrey Jennings. Basil Wright directed The Song of Ceylon, which was a shocking description of UK's colonial possessions. Then Humphrey Jennings made many propaganda films during the WWII, the most well known of them are Words for Battle (1941), which was a poetic picture of England, read by Laurience Olivier. Listen to Britain (1942), which used sound as narrative it didn't use commentary tracks at all when describing one day in London, and many see it as one of the finest documentaries ever made. Then last but not least A Diary for Timothy (1945), which is a very evocative pacifistic propaganda film.

The production of Humphrey Jennings is fascinating, he never followed the same scheme. For instance in Words for Battle (1941) a famous actor read the poetic commentary for the film, in Listen to Britain (1942) he didn't used commentary at all only the sound and music. Then A Diary for Timothy achieves to bring something completely new once again. It's dedicated to a boy called Timothy who was born on 9.3.1944, the fifth anniversary day of WWII. The documentary shows the world around Timothy, what happens in it, in what kind of place young Timothy will grow up. The poetic commentary of the film is like an essay read an actor, an essay tied to emotional situation.

A Diary for Timothy is pure cinematic poetry, only few have reached, and if talking about the history of documentary, only Jean Vigo and Humphrey Jennings. It is an evocative documentary, which calls us to make a change. The film is existentialistic, it highlights the experience of an individual during the time which wasn't the time of existentialism, people believed in communality. But A Diary for Timothy managed to light a new spark of hope in the people.

This war propaganda is inventing MacLuhan's TV approach

[Dr_Coulardeau · 10/10 · 27 November 2007]

The film was recently presented at the Cinematheque in Paris for a debate on Jennings' work, with David Robinson and Elena von Kassel Siambani as debaters, and the participation of Stephen Frears. Stephen Frears' participation was disappointing because he did not say one single piece of his mind about Jennings. But the two other debaters totally missed the point by qualifying Jennings' war films as poetic. That satisfied the nostalgic audience but they completely missed the point. Too bad for our historians. They got lost and satisfied to be lost in the biographical elements and the historical events of the time, as if it were capital to know that Jennings was an aristocrat by birth. When we come across a film, or as for that any work of communication or art, any work produced by human beings, we have to look for the language in the message, the alphabets used to produce the message and the syntax of that message. At once we discover that this Diary for Timothy has little to do with a documentary, as little at least as Oliver Twist. At once we know this diary is not a documentary and that the films Jennings produced that were not connected with the war are different, be it only absolutely boring. The war enable Jennings to jump into a different style, syntax, language, message. A Diary for Timothy is pure fiction aiming at having a political effect on the captive audience of 1944-45 in England. This film is a masterpiece for his time because it invents something that will become the first and foremost medium in human history, television. The first language of the film is dictated by its framing-shooting-editing. Jennings centers his framing and shooting on characters, bodies, at times traveling from foot to head or vice versa, at times giving close-ups of one or two faces. This very close shooting, narrow framing is typical of what was to become television. It is thus aiming at empathy, especially since the characters do not speak: the discourse comes from a voice-over. The second technical element. The framing-shooting-editing of this film concentrates on absolutely common place everyday situations in 1944, so that you – the audience – can feel a high level of all-sensory empathy. Take for example the image of the bunk beds in the underground station: It focuses on one person in one bunk bed, in the dark, wrapped up in a blanket. You can at once smell the dampness and the soot, the stale air, the sweat and other body smells. You can feel the closed up environment in which human beings are packed, slightly claustrophobic and holding onto people who are invaders in a way, and you are feeling as if you were an invader too. You can also feel the fear, the danger, the night, etc. And of course you can hear the announcement for the last train and the train rumbling by, without seeing it. It is all-sensory except for the intellect and the mind. It is an immediate un-mediated reaction. It does not want to make you go out and do anything, not even think. It does not aim at making you engage in any action of any type. It just wants you to feel 100% convinced that what you are doing everyday in that war is the right thing. It is propaganda. And this very last element is fundamental. Jennings is inventing the ultimate manipulating medium, television, for which the medium is the message, the message is a massage and the massage is the ultimate message. TV is doing that all the time, especially in its fictional productions and it seems to deal with its news programs as if they were fiction with the stamp of TRUTH printed onto them. Now is this Diary for Timothy poetic? That is your choice to consider most of these pictures as poetic. The aim is not to produce poetry but effective propaganda and the new medium he is inventing is using the same techniques as poetry to reach its aim which is neither to make people – in 1944-45 – nostalgic or soft around the edges, or to make them wonder about the beauty of a scene or a vision. In one scene two people, one man and one woman are under a table covered with a tablecloth. But this scene is not funny and you will not smile or laugh at it, at least not in 1944-45 because of the direct edited surroundings of this short sequence. We know what this means and we admire the courage of these people very much. We think of other scenes of the same type (Mozart and his wife-to-be smooching under a table in Vienna as seen by Milos Forman) and the one here is serious and reveals the courage and strength of the two people, not their lust or freewheeling carelessness. Why on earth did the Cinematheque in Paris miss that point? Because they are entirely concentrated on the cinema and do not consider television, like for instance the Museum in Bradford (photography, cinema and television). And because in France it has been very trendy for decades to refuse to see Marshall McLuhan has a point on the question. But it is more surprising that the debaters went along with that mistake. As historians of the cinema they should always consider the cinema as one medium among many other media. Apparently they isolate the cinema from the rest of the mediatic world.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines

Timothy Who Will Be 76 in the Year 2020

[richardchatten · 9/10 · 30 August 2020]

A thoughtful record of the bleak final winter of World War II. My mother remembered hearing doodlebugs passing over Norfolk and I have a two year-old nephew currently oblivious of the present crisis; while what is now, as in wartime, known as the air raid siren ("I hope you'll never have to hear that sound, Tim") was ironically still a familiar sound to me as a child twenty years later as the maroon that summoned the fire brigade and lifeboats. So my own life spans the gap between both the events unfolded here and the current dark days we are living through three-quarters of a century later. Young Timothy was born on 1 September 1944, and there are still prominent figures in politics both here and in the United States (including the Democratic challenger in this autumn's elections) who were already born before he was.

(Modern viewers may criticise the lack of black faces, but Churchill remarkably is also absent from the film.)

Listen to Britain again

[Horst_In_Translation · 4/10 · 27 July 2016]

"A Diary for Timothy" is a short film from 1945 and the director is Humphrey Jennings, the man who made the Oscar-nominated "Listen to Britain" a few years earlier. The contents here are very different with the exception that history had progressed considerably in these 3 years. The Allies had won the war and this film tells audiences again about what life in Britain looked like around that time. It also tells about the upcoming challenges for post-war Britain and the world. For the framework here, Jennings used a little baby and explains this film by depicting the world he was born into as he did not exist yet in 1942 when he made his more known movie. This film here includes some very known British artists such as actors Michael Redgrave, John Gielgud and writer E.M. Forster. I still must say it was not really in interesting watch. I'd only recommend this to British people with a great interest in history, or even historians themselves. Thumbs down from me.

Lyrical, but too downbeat

[kmoh-1 · 9 July 2019]

A fascinating idea from Humphrey Jennings, to take a baby boy as representative of a nation soon to face massive decisions, is scuppered by the misguided choice of E.M. Forster as author of the narration.

Young Timothy proved to be incapable of holding the interest throughout a fairly long film, so other representatives were drafted in: a miner, a farmer, a train driver and a fighter pilot, to create an overwhelmingly masculine vision.

But not heroic. Forster's prose might have made a brilliant essay, but his Bloomsbury condescension and contempt for his fellow Britons, particularly the bourgeoisie and the working class, seems glaring in the democratic medium of film. He seems to regret that these very Britons being celebrated were on the verge of winning the war - consistent with his pessimistic statement in 'Two Cheers for Democracy' that "if fascism wins we are done for, and that we must become fascist to win."

The spectacularly downbeat section where the terrible defeat at Arnhem is juxtaposed with Myra Hess playing Beethoven's Appassionata sums up Forster's attitude. His internationalism may seem far-sighted and principled from a distance, but was this a message that needed to be drummed so unsubtly into his audience (many of whom would have been bereaved in battles such as this) at this particular time? "If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country", as he famously remarked in 'Two Cheers'. Well, if I was faced with such a difficult choice, I hope I would be less dogmatic about it than E.M.

The narration, contrary to the opinion of most of the other reviews, is terribly ill-judged. Declaimed in a gloomy monotone by Michael Redgrave, the viewer is left with the impression of moral equivalence between the allies and the Nazis. The hope represented by Timothy, that the form of the film forces Forster however reluctantly, to concede, is a slender thing indeed.