You Should’ve Seen Us

In 2007, poet and writer Paul Mills used footage from the YFA collections as a stimulus for writing poems resulting in a small number of film poems written and married up with archive footage.  At the time there was no funding available to take the project further.  

In 2011, thanks to Arts Council funding from Creative North Yorkshire’s Extending Practice/Celebrating Place initiative, Paul Mills and the YFA were able to continue the work with archive film and poetry.  The aim of the collaboration was to combine the moving image with a spoken text to create a 50 minute presentation that could be shown at literary and film festivals across the region.

The selection of films for the project began in early 2011. Paul Mills describes the process:

“I began the long process of selecting film I could use for writing and again the triggers seemed to come from voices.  What was more, as I immersed myself in the period we were covering, particularly the early 50s, I started to recall – or even actually hear – the way my parents spoke.  I grew up in Cheshire and the films were all based in North Yorkshire, but the vocabulary came from a time more than a place.  It belonged to that period just after the war; my father, for example, saying, ‘Come on lad, shape!’ if I wasn’t doing something the way he thought I should.  My grandmother with too much to do in the house muttering to herself, ‘I’m just not shaping this morning’.  Just one example, yet I’d completely forgotten this strange usage until the films started to bring it all back.”

With the films selected covering the period from 1908 to 1958, the poems had to be written and rewritten before the sound rec

ordings could be made.  Using facilities at York St John University, the film maker and editor Ed Torsney recorded the spoken texts read by Paul, Vicki Dunn and Keith Watson, to be edited with the archive film later.  Paul Mills added:

“Voices helped in another way too. The films I was looking at had been made during the first half of the last century, the Second World War and the decade that followed. I was interested in how we respond now to what we see of life then.  As audiences, we allow ourselves certain privileges. Compared with the people in the films we think we have certain advantages. We see beyond their immediate present. We know how the war turned out. We imagine we have progressed. We also make the strange assumption that the people we see participating in this or that street festival or procession, this or that garden fete, all felt the same as each other about what was happening. The films generate a feeling of people all believing much the same things and enjoying themselves in more or less the same way:  English community life at its strongest.  The films therefore enhance a sense of conformity.  If we see a family on the beach in 1939 we assume they are somehow representative. They are doing what everybody else at the time was doing, dressing the same, behaving the same. For us, they become ‘the thirties’; their private moments represent the typical whether they actually were typical or not.  In my treatment of films from the archive, I wanted to question that way of seeing, and challenge, to an extent, that sense of everybody thinking, looking and being essentially like everybody else.”

‘Crowds On Holiday In Scarborough, 1953’:
Why do bandsmen always look like bandsmen?
They could be anything –
plumbers, union men, foundrymen,
but here they’re more like hairdressers –
so much brylcreem, how they move their hands.

The dialogue between Paul Mills and the YFA was on-going with the final selection of films a contrast of coast and country, in peace and war.  The editing stage took place at the YFA in October and November 2011, with the creative process of juxtaposing voice and film a collaboration between editor and writer.  The film extracts which feature in the final presentation include footage from:

The Egg Harvest – Cliff Climbing at Flamborough, 1908
Scenes at the Ripon Highland Sports, 1916
Harrogate Coronation Celebrations, 1937
Munitions Factory, 1940sSettle Wings for Victory Week, 1943
Holidays in England, 1953-1954
Church Fenton Village Events, 1958

Church Fenton, 1958
A new crop of children, the plumpest yet,
with bunches of chrysanths and gypsophila, and Mother’s dream
is a procession to Sunday School.  Left up to her
you’ll spend the rest of your life in your best clothes. 
Dad’s playing cricket and won’t save you.

 

Paul Mills described his inspiration for writing the poems:

“The voices I found – in the munitions factory, on the beach at Scarborough, the person addressed in the film about Harrogate in 1937, all women, do of course carry strong traces of conformity – they each belong to a certain culture group for example, but it is still the contrast between one voice and so many faces – in some cases hundreds – that made the journey of discovery so exciting, and the effect – when shown with the voice recorded – so surprising and strange.  Writing the poems was more like writing short monologues, little dramas, each an excursion into unknown territory … The process of writing helped me understand why, watching the films, I sometimes felt moved and elated, sometimes uncomfortable.  But the best discovery was that it’s possible to put together spoken words and films, a process of fine-tuning with much editing, in a way that makes art.”

‘You Should’ve Seen Us - A journey through North Yorkshire in poems and film’ is a fifty minute presentation designed for showing at literature and film festivals within the region and beyond. Viewing is in two parts, with an introduction, short interval, questions and discussion.
Overall time: approximately two hours.  

For more information and booking contact:
Email: youshouldveseenus@gmail.com
Telephone: 01765 603633 
www.paulmillswriting.co.uk

See one of the poems from the ‘You Should’ve Seen Us’ presentation here.