Hope and Glory · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A bomb takes the school in the night. In the morning the boys arrive to find a smoking gap where their classroom stood, and a cheer goes up. Nobody mourns. That cheer is the whole film in a single sound, and it tells you that John Boorman has remembered something most war films are too tactful to admit: that for a nine-year-old, the Blitz was not a horror but the most thrilling thing that ever happened.

Boorman's invention is to refuse the adult vantage entirely. The war in Hope and Glory is never the foreground. It is weather, backdrop, the rise and fall of the siren that means school is cancelled and the streets have been restocked overnight with shrapnel to collect. Everything passes through Bill (Sebastian Rice-Edwards), and Bill mostly watches. He lingers on the gleam of a shell fragment, the geometry of a barrage balloon, a downed aircraft, the alien beauty of a bombed house with its rooms left open to the street like a dollhouse. The camera takes his scale and his curiosity.

This is what Deleuze called the seer (voyant) — a figure who can only look and listen because action is no longer available or required. In an ordinary war film the logic is sensory-motor: a situation presses, a character acts, the situation changes. The home front endures heroically; the soldier fights. Bill does neither. He cannot act on the war and, gloriously, he doesn't have to. The bombed house gives him nothing to do; it gives him something to see. Deleuze's word for such a moment is the opsign — a pure optical situation that has come loose from any act it might trigger. The exposed rooms are not a setting for a scene. They are an image held open for wonder. This is also why the rubble fields work as any-space-whatever: deserted, fragmented places that stop being locations in a plot and become charged fields of pure feeling. The children claim them as territory precisely because the adult grammar of use has been blown off them.

Then there is the light. Philippe Rousselot photographs ruin in warm, golden, saturated tones — the palette of memory, not of the grey documentary realism that Blitz cinema had made obligatory. This is the colour-image in Deleuze's sense: a colour that absorbs a scene and its emotion until the two can't be separated. The gold is not how the rubble looked. It is how it is remembered. And here the film makes its quiet break with a whole tradition of realism — the unwritten contract that the camera should not lie about suffering. Boorman lets it lie, and the lie is more honest to the child who lived it than any grey reconstruction would be. The title borrows Elgar's imperial anthem only to set its grandeur against the muddled, comic, ration-era truth of one suburban street.

Notice how little happens in the connective-tissue sense. Ian Crafford's editing builds the film as a loose chronicle — set-pieces and small domestic scenes accumulating, the comic next to the lyrical, with the audience trusted to find the feeling under the anecdote. Deleuze would recognize the voyage-balade form: the drift, the episode, the stretch that transforms nothing by the standards of plot. The move from the enclosed cul-de-sac to the luminous riverside idyll at the grandfather's house isn't a climax built by escalation. It's the shape memory actually has — vivid fragments, weakly linked, arriving in the order of intensity rather than cause. And because the whole film is the adult Boorman re-seeing his own boyhood, his vision and Bill's are fused into one: a free-indirect gaze in which we never quite know whether we are watching the child see or the man remember the child seeing.

The lineage is exact. Forbidden Games (1952) is the ancestor — wartime death filtered through a child's uncomprehending play — and Boorman borrows its premise wholesale: treat the Blitz as a child's arena of games. He takes the British home-front picture of Mrs. Miniver (1942) and strips out the patriotic uplift, keeping the suburban family and the shelter and the siren but replacing stoicism with comedy and wonder. He shares with The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) a faith in the silent, watching child's face as the place where meaning gathers. Released the same year as Empire of the Sun and Au Revoir les Enfants, his film helped consolidate a whole mode — the Second World War re-seen down a boy's sightline — and it sits beside Distant Voices, Still Lives in the memoir-episodic British autobiography that fuses remembered fragments to period sound.

What did it do to film? It proved that the most disconcerting truth about catastrophe — that for a child it can be indistinguishable from liberation — could be carried not by a thesis but by a form: golden light, episodic memory, and a boy who is permitted to do nothing but look. Watch it again and you may find yourself wondering whether you have ever told the truth about your own childhood, or only the dignified version. Bill never bothers with the dignified version. He just keeps watching, and the gold keeps falling on the ruins.