A generation: Robert Vas’ Silver Spoon
John Wyver writes: My colleagues James Jordan and Eleni Liarou and I are a week or so away from finalising the programme for the symposium about the filmmaker Robert Vas to be held at Birkbeck, University of London, on Friday 27 March. We feel we have a rich programme already, but if anyone wishes to propose a further contribution, there is just one more week to put that forward.
In preparation, I have been watching the final film by Robert Vas that was screened during his lifetime, the 85-minute documentary Silver Spoon, broadcast on BBC2 on 2 January 1978, just over three months before his death on 10 April, at the age of 47. (Two other partially realised projects were completed by colleagues and broadcast after he died.) The film was spottily received by the critics, it was not repeated, and has hardly been seen since.
Silver Spoon is not one of Robert Vas’ greatest films, but it is immensely interesting, not least because as a study of young people in Britain nearly fifty years ago it has an alluring mix of familiarity and strangeness. It was made as a contribution to the Silver Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth, marking the twenty-five years of her reign since her accession on 6 February 1952.
(As such it would make an excellent double bill with Play for Today: The Spongers, the devastating film written by Jim Allen, directed by Roland Joffe and produced by Tony Garnett, which is set on a council estate during the Jubilee ‘celebrations’ and transmitted just three weeks after Silver Spoon on 24 January 1978.)
Vas begins Silver Spoon with a clip from Humphrey Jennings‘ 1945 Crown Film Unit documentary A Diary for Timothy (above). In particular, he uses a quotation from the narrator’s address to the baby Timothy, which looks forward with questioning but tentative hope to the post-war years:
Are you going to make the world a different place, you and the other babies?
Silver Spoon is Vas’ attempt to respond to that question, and although the film is strikingly ‘open’, refusing trite conclusions, the tone is down-beat, sombre, and in certain ways, grimly bleak.
Following the embrace of Jennings, an artist who Vas admired immensely and who he profiled in Heart of Britain (BBC, 1970), Silver Spoon has a bravura sequence intercutting the pageantry in the Technicolor feature film made about Coronation Day, A Queen is Crowned (1953, produced by Castleton Knight), with frank, visceral shots of the birth of a baby in hospital.
The film’s conceit then is to speak with young women and men who were born twenty-five years before on Coronation Day, 2 June 1953 — or thereabouts; it’s not made explicit that all of the subjects came into the world on exactly that day, but some of those that did were given silver sppons by their local authority. One of the subjects is training to be a barrister, another is a disillusioned musician, a third an aspiring actor. One works in engineering, another on a farm.
The informal, low-key interviews are illustrated with quotidian scenes of workplaces, cityscapes and housing, and (another nod to Jennings) of the English landscape. There is almost no narrration and very little (or perhaps no) non-diegetic music. 16mm film camerawork was by Ivan Strasburg and Derek Banks; Tom Scott Robson was the editor.
The film works as a kind of 25 Up, in the mould of the feted Up series from Granada directed by P{aul Almond and Michael Apted. Yet none of the contributors have quite the distinctiveness of most of those in that series. There is an aspiration to be a portrait of a generation, setting individual lives of ‘new Elizabethans’ against the broad issues of education and health; work, consumerism and moral standards; policing and the law; traces of empire and the persistence of the monarchy.
What comes through most strongly perhaps, at least when compared against an imaginary version made today, is the centrality of traditional ideas of class, and of the limits to social mobility. This is also a world, still but with an awareness of its imminent end, of machinery and manufacturing, with only glimmers of the digital times to come. Questions of identity, beyond that of the nation, are largely absent, with only a glancing engagement with race and no exploration of sexuality.
Towards its close, Silver Spoon broadens out, with shots of the Jubilee review of the fleet at Spithead, but with the implication that the pageantry and supposed military might means little in a world dominated by multinational capital. In the closing frames, Vas returns to Jennings and the words of the narrator to Timothy:
Are you going to have greed for money or power ousting decency from the world, as they have in the past? Or are you going to make the world a different place, you and the other babies?
Silver Spoon lacks the resonance of A Diary for Timothy, but it remains nonetheless a singular production from one of Britain’s greatest filmmakers, even if today Robert Vas is largely forgotten. Our symposium in late March is an attempt to begin to change that awareness, but recognition will only come when Silver Spoon and other twenty-plus films that he made, mostly for the BBC, can be dragged from the archive for engagement and appreciation – and for the kind of stimulus for a next generation of filmmakers that Robert Vas took from Humphrey Jennings .
All sounds fascinating! Documentaries for TV don’t yet seem to have received the equivalent treatment as the Land of Promise/Shadows of Progress film sets. And this is clearly a major oversight; I’ve been immersing myself in a few of the Man Alives on iPlayer, which are great.
The Spongers was, of course, first shown in the very same month as Silver Spoon: on 24 January 1978, reaching over 10 million people. In many ways, that particular month was the popular radical pinnacle of Play for Today – Licking Hitler, Red Shift, The Spongers, Destiny, a run bookended by Bleasdale and Churchill too.
Thanks Tom – and I’ve corrected the text with the date of the first showing of The Spongers (I had the repeat before).
Part of the challenge for repeats or physical media releases of many documentaries, and especially the work of Robert Vas, is the amount of film archive they contain, which was only cleared for limited use first time around, and which is expensive to clear again – even if it can be accurately identified.
But it’s definitely encouraging that the Archive section on iPlayer is increasingly including full-length films instead of, as used to be exclusively the case, only excerpts. I intend to showcase one or two of these in future posts.