Henry Moore, London 1940-42

The Series of Shelter Drawings

This film features the explicitly figurative imagery of Moore's famous wartime bomb-shelter drawings, depicting the heads, torsos and limbs of the people of London taking refuge from air-raids in the tunnels of the city's subway system. The figures are likened, through the artist's distortions, to the pebbles, hillsides and valleys of an idyllic, peaceful Britain, which seems so far from urban, war-devastated London, yet with which they have some strange communion through their burrowing into the bowels of the earth. In his benign and essentially rural humanism, in the face of modern wars and the modern world they heralded, Moore is close to others of his generation working in other media: the poets Auden or Betjeman, and the composer Britten. He can be contrasted, though, with a slightly younger sculptor such as Chadwick (film 626), whose figures often seem angular, impersonal, and automated. There is no narration.

`... pictures of exceptional quality. Silently the film demonstrates that great art can easily dispense with commentary, and the value of the drawings is thus enhanced. The newsreel sequences at the beginning and the end contribute in producing an impressive atmosphere.' UNESCO

`... captures these drawings and their detail with great mastery ... the editing is outstanding. With the aid of music which is very impressive and, at the same time, discreet, the film has succeeded in reproducing the essential feature of these drawings, which is not dependent on the representation of terror itself, nor on any particular milieu or the like, but solely on the greatness and dignity of man, as preserved in these catacombs of terror.' German Center for Film Classification

`A revelation: a strength and force disclosed, a mastery made clear' Sunday Times, London

`It's uncanny, Anthony Roland, the master of the montage and dissolve ... The film melts moment by moment into a living and breathing homage to the people of London.' Michigan Education Journal

For more information see section 20 and section 32

© 1998-2008 The Roland Collection & Pira Intl.