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A certain effect of Jennings’ mode of documentary filmmaking is evident in Spare Time. The film has minimal voice-over commentary spoken in quiet tones, a soundtrack in which sounds are often used contrapuntally to the images, and a narrative composed of individual vignettes which gives the appearance of a series of snapshots in which lives and experiences are captured at discrete, well-timed moments. As such, Spare Time stands apart from the realism of numerous films of the British documentary film movement. Not coincidentally, perhaps, traditionalists within the Griersonian documentary movement disliked Spare Time.1 The example says a great deal about Jennings’ filmmaking and its relationship to the tradition of British documentary.
The British documentary film movement under Grierson's stewardship emphasised a rhetoric of social persuasion grounded heavily in an expository mode in which images were aligned with, though frequently subservient to, a stentorian voice-over. Grierson argued that documentary was, from its inception, an ‘anti-aesthetic’ medium overtly intended as a tool of social ‘betterment’ and a purveyor of the ideological aim of advancing a particular form of social reformism.2 In promoting particular styles and aims for documentary film Grierson knowingly sought to separate documentary from the aesthetics and potential of nonfiction film undertaken by a sizeable segment of the international avant-garde.3 As the example of Spare Time suggests, Jennings’ films stand apart from the Griersonian agenda. Reinforcing this point Geoffrey Nowell-Smith notes that ‘[a]t no time did [Jennings] share the governing principles of the [British documentary] movement. Politically and ideologically he was not a meliorist or even a reformist. He was disparaging of realism, and of the practice that went with it’.4
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