Geoffrey Jones: The Rhythm of Film

A DVD review, originally published in FILMWAVES in 2005.

*

The combined total of Geoffrey Jones’ cinematic output stretches to a mere 93 minutes. Jones, who died in June 2005, managed to cram an extraordinary variety into those minutes, making films for global corporations and national institutions (and for himself), documenting British industry and machinery, simple human pleasures and the activities of Britain’s wildlife in nine deftly crafted works, across which he developed a truly unique style.

Beginning in advertising, Jones attracted the attention of Sir Arthur Elton, who offered him the role of supervisory Director of Animation in Shell’s Film Unit. His first work, Shell Panorama (1959, not included here) was his only film with a commentary: this led to advertising commissions for Shell, one of which, Shell Spirit (1962) won the Golden Award from the Designers and Art Directors Association. It also interested Edgar Anstey of British Transport Films, whom (with Elton) had helped entrench the conventions of British documentary making with Housing Problems (1935).

Snow (1963), made almost by accident as Jones was shooting 16mm notes for Rail (1966), signalled Jones’ distinctive idiom, which deliberately reacted against the documentary style popularised during the Thirties. The film had no commentary, instead cutting shots of trains ploughing through snow and people shovelling to a score by guitarist Johnny Hawksworth. Skilfully combining images of mechanical power and human endeavour, Snow won numerous awards and gained an Oscar nomination in 1965.

Rail was Jones’ main project, commissioned by Anstey to celebrate BR design, which changed dramatically while Jones was filming in Trinidad. Jones decided to make Rail a celebration of Britain’s railways as they were, with three vibrant minutes on British Rail’s ‘new era’ closing the film. It is clear that Jones much preferred the aesthetic of the steam period, and much of Rail focuses on Victorian feats of station and locomotive construction, contrasting the pre-war rolling stock with the corporate blue electric trains of the Sixties.

It is Locomotion (1975), however, that represents the peak of Jones’ rhythmic juxtaposition of the industrial beauty of the railways and music. Commissioned to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Stockton-Darlington line, and set to music composed by Donald Fraser (and performed by Steeleye Span), Locomotion comprised archive drawings of mid-nineteenth century rail, fin-de-siècle photographs evoking the popularity of rail and the Tay Bridge disaster, silent film stock, shots of trains carrying soldiers to war and contemporary footage. Interspersed with images of the mechanics of locomotion, the music propels the film to an ever more frenzied pace as it progresses: combined with the dazzling array of images that detail the history of rail in fifteen minutes, the effect is mesmerising.

Trinidad and Tobago (1964) forms an alternative centre-point to the collection. Here, it is not the infrastructure of the Industrial Revolution that is celebrated, but a society distanced from Western narratives of ‘progress’. Trinidad and Tobago was a travelogue like none other of its time, playing brief shots of wildlife, people and surroundings against each other before exploding into the life of the carnival. Again without commentary, Jones minimises the intrusion of its sponsor (British Petroleum), once again structuring his film around music, this time a recording of indigenous compositions. The film is colourful without being gaudy, and the aesthetic coherence between the pictures and the music, and the impeccable rhythmic agreement between the two, retain the interest.

Also included are This is Shell (1970), an eight-minute evocation of every aspect of the oil company’s business, and the more personal Seasons Project (1980), which moved away from Jones’ aesthetic of machines to focus entirely on the British countryside, and its attendant wildlife. There are numerous shots of birds – one of a dove in mid-flight is particularly arresting – and the closing shot of a spider weaving its web is masterful.

Finally, there are A Chair-a-Plane Kwela (2004) and A Chair-a-Plane Flamenco (2004), two rhythmic shorts built from footage compiled in the Fifties. These are accompanied by a 31-minute interview with Jones, made shortly before his death, and a booklet explaining the background to Jones’ key films.

This release should allow historians to reconsider the place of Geoffrey Jones within the avant-garde film culture of the Sixties and Seventies. In so far as they were (often) commissioned and funded by major companies with the aim of extolling a corporate image, they can be situated within a tradition that stretches back to the GPO films of the Thirties. However, the distinctive style that Jones established across several pieces was a definite reaction against the ‘poetic realism’ of the period, but his works are also distanced from the London Co-op films that dominate studies of the time. Jones’ films are, of course, captivating regardless of their context, and the decision of the BFI to make them available should be as welcome to the casual viewer as it is to the film historian.