It is no more; it is no more / the tongueless bells no longer ring / only the smoking walls remain / and one stray dog who walks alone / searching in vain from stone to stone. […]
O church of the dead village, / there will be no more singing of psalms, no more reverences before the flowering altars, / no more bridesmaids, or chanted Passions, / no more Te Deums, or Misereres.
And thus you heard to the sound of a chisel / which carved “mene tekel” on the mine’s dark wall / the strings of dawn sing canticles of vengeance […] (Fischl, The Dead Village; p.3; 8).
- 1 Villagers were accused of harbouring and abetting them, and as an exemplary punishment, all men wer (...)
- 2 Many artists around the world wrote poems, novels, music, or made films on the topic – Kurt Weill, (...)
1This poem, written in 1942 by Viktor Fischl, a Czech refugee and poet working for the Foreign Minister in the exiled Czechoslovak government in London, served as a starting point for Humphrey Jennings’s film, The Silent Village. It is in fact Fischl himself who had suggested that a British film be made about the infamous massacre of the Czech village of Lidice1 – ordered on 9 June 1942 in retaliation for the assassination of SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich by Czechoslovak resistance fighters – by transposing the action to a region of Great Britain. The Lidice massacre triggered an international outcry2, and the making of The Silent Village was not the first British homage paid to the event. In September 1942, coal miners in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, founded the organisation “Lidice Shall Live” – named in defiance of Adolf Hitler’s claim that “Lidice Shall Die” – in order to raise funds for the rebuilding of the village after the war. After the massacre, Winston Churchill proposed destroying three German villages for every village destroyed by the Wehrmacht, but he was convinced otherwise, as it was feared that the campaign would waste resources and open the risk to similar reprisals against Britain.
- 3 The documentary film movement, which had previously worked under the aegis of the Empire Marketing (...)
2 Filmmaker Humphrey Jennings, a member of the Crown Film Unit3 celebrated for his poetic documentaries and semi-documentaries Spare Time (1939), London Can Take It! (1940), Words for Battle (1941) and Listen to Britain (1942), was approached by Fischl himself, who sent him a synopsis for the film. The synopsis began: “This is the small village of Lidice somewhere in Czechoslovakia, and this is the village of X somewhere in Wales. It is not so long since these two villages were exactly like one another” (“Radio Talk: The Silent Village” in Jackson 1993, p.67). Jennings then scouted for Lidice’s counterpart in Wales, with the help of president of the South Wales Miners’ Federation Arthur Horner and miners’ agent Dai Dan Evans, who recommended he should try the area of Ystradgynlais, in southwest Powys, which was less well-known, and “much more Welsh-speaking” (“Radio Talk: The Silent Village” in Jackson 1993, p.68) than the Rhondda valley. Jennings finally settled on the village of Cwmgiedd, which he had first glimpsed on a postcard, and lived in a collier’s house in the village for nearly three months, along with the whole film crew (a dozen people altogether).
- 4 As reported in a Listener article, Jennings had been given a description of Lidice by the Czech aut (...)
- 5 The very first Welsh language “talkie” (with the sound on separate discs) was a film entitled Y Chw (...)
- 6 The figure was likely to be ever lower in 1943.
3 Rather than build the film on a parallel between Lidice and Cwmgiedd, Jennings thought it would be more striking to make Cwmgiedd be Lidice. Consequently, the two villages not only needed to look like each other4 but also, potentially, to sound like each other. A substantial part of the film is in Welsh, untranslated and unsubtitled – quite an unusual fact, as very few films had been made in the Welsh language so far5. Altogether, there are more than twelve minutes and forty seconds of dialogue in Welsh, against only six minutes and seventeen seconds of dialogue in English (excluding the announcements made by the German invaders). Jennings knew that most of the audience would not understand the dialogue – according to a 1931 census (D. T. Williams 1953, p.332), only 36.8 per cent of the population of Wales spoke Welsh (which amounted to 2.38 per cent of the total UK population6) – but he wanted to keep them untranslated for two reasons: to lend the film authenticity and, more audaciously and perhaps in contradiction with the previous point, because it might suggest that it was Czech:
We were using Cwmgiedd and the country round it as a country under the “protection” of the greater German Reich, and this meant that we had to take the story and the incidents of the Nazis in Czechoslovakia and in Lidice and find the equivalents to them in Wales. For example, the Welsh language. Now much of the film has been recorded in Welsh – not that the audience is expected to understand it, but it is the sound made by the people who live in the country. To a certain extent, it may even suggest that it is Czech (Jennings, Transcribed from a Telephone Recording, The Silent Village, Wednesday, 26th May, 1943, 4.30pm, Misc, 1943, para. 2).
- 7 Its legal status was then regained in 1967 with the introduction of the Welsh Language Act.
4Although Welsh and Czech sound nothing like each other, the two languages had suffered similar fates. The Czech language (as well as Czech songs, literature, and culture) was banned under Nazi occupation (1939-1945) and speaking Czech was seen as an act of resistance, while the Welsh language had lost its legal status as early as 1536 and had been undermined by the policy of the “Welsh Not” put in place in the late 19th century7 – as will be tackled in the third part of this paper. Considering the two languages as linguistic foils to each other aligned the film with the manifestations of sympathy from British miners that had emerged in the wake of the Lidice massacre, all the more so as the film concludes on a tribute to the international community of miners’ position “at the forefront of the struggle”, in the final speech given by D.D. Evans himself:
No, comrades, the Nazis are wrong. The name of the community has not been obliterated. The name of the community has been immortalised. It lives in the hearts of miners the world over. The Nazis only want slave labour and the miners refuse to become slaves. That is why they murdered our comrades in Lidice. That is why we stand in the forefront of the struggle today, because we have the power and the knowledge, the understanding to hasten the coming of victory, to liberate oppressed humanity, to make certain that there shall be no more Lidices. Then the men of Lidice will not have died in vain.
5This call to international solidarity contrasted with the nationalist tone generally adopted in propaganda films of the period, and probably explains why the film puzzled more than one reviewer – although it also received many positive reviews. Welsh writer Noel Joseph, who wrote a novel based on the film’s script (The Silent Village: A Story of Wales and Lidice, Based on the Crown Film Unit Production), emphasised the universal resonance of this linguistic ambiguity:
The illusions in the film are in imaginative fact, not illusions at all. Welshmen become Czech, and Czech Welshmen. Indeed, the very terms cease to have significance. Here are only creatures of the family of men; physically powerless in the face of inexorable evil, but in spirit unbreakably strong, confident of a better day. (Joseph 1943, para. 5)
6However, considering the inhabitants of Cwmgiedd as mere “creatures of the family of men” or Welsh through the sole prism of its proximity with Czech would be missing part of the film’s message. In fact, the progressive annihilation of the Welsh language and the indigenous sounds associated with the community by the German invader, whose rule is gradually imposed on the village through blaring loudspeakers, is eminently political. It could first be read as manifesting the fear that small nations such as Wales (but more generally Great Britain) could be assimilated into the ever-expanding German Lebensraum, in the event of an invasion. But the fact that a minority language such as Welsh – whose status had been threatened on several occasions throughout the history of the British Isles – was chosen instead of English is in itself a political statement that transcends the mere context of the Second World War and the necessity to fight the enemy. The Silent Village can be read as containing myriad political messages expressed through the treatment of the Welsh language and the sounds associated with the community of Cwmgiedd: resistance to the German enemy, but also the struggle for linguistic and cultural diversity and against the policy of linguistic assimilation implemented by the British government.
7Several official documentary films of the Second World War – commissioned, produced, or sponsored by the Ministry of Information – focus on Wales and its contribution to the war effort. Among these films, Wales – Green Mountain, Black Mountain (1942, dir. John Eldridge) and Cymru-Wales (1943) contain extradiegetic Welsh songs and unsynchronised dialogue in Welsh. But The Silent Village was the first film in which the entire soundscape of a Welsh village had pride of place. Humphrey Jennings is a filmmaker famed for his innovative use of sound – he developed an aesthetic of sound/image asynchronicity in his film Listen to Britain (1942), for instance. Common to all of his previous films made for the Crown Film Unit was the desire to praise the diversity and richness of the soundscapes of Great Britain so that all British citizens would feel targeted and be encouraged to participate in the war effort. This echoes historian of Wales Martin Johnes’s assertion that, during the Second World War, the British government was cautious not to erase the Welsh and Scottish identities behind an all-encompassing definition of Britishness:
The government […] made efforts to ensure Welsh nationality was recognized. This extended beyond how it treated Welsh soldiers to passing legislation giving people the right to speak Welsh in court, to reminding the BBC to not say England when it meant Britain, and to pushing for propaganda that displayed the plurality of Britain, even if the results could actually annoy Welsh listeners who felt a narrow and overly traditional image of Wales was being portrayed (Johnes 2015, p.82).
- 8 Jennings made it a point of honour to stand out from Hollywood productions representing Welsh miner (...)
8In order to avoid conveying a hackneyed image of Wales8, precisely, Jennings made sure that the villagers were actively involved in the making of the film. With the help of D. D. Evans and the Committee of the Ystradgynlais Miners’ Welfare Hall, he formed a local film committee, with which he met twice a week: “It was worked on a thoroughly democratic basis”, Jennings explained. “And if I wanted something – corrections or ideas – help on the script – I could go to the appropriate member of the local film committee. […] [W]e didn’t want the film to be an inch out – to the village, to Wales, to the miners, to Lidice itself and so on” (“Did You Hear That? The Silent Village”1943, para. 3).
- 9 Nichols defines the observational mode as “emphasiz[ing] a direct engagement with the everyday life (...)
9The character of Cwmgiedd is conveyed throughout the first part of the film – the first eight minutes, more precisely – that clearly stands out, in that it is shot and edited in a strictly observational9 documentary mode, to use Bill Nichols’s terminology. The camera is unobtrusive and there is no voiceover or presence of a narrator. The remainder of the film – starting from the arrival of the Nazi invader – is, in fact, a “semi-documentary”, a form emblematic of Crown Film Unit productions from 1941 onwards characterised by a mixture of elements associated with the fictional form (pre-written scripts and/or dialogues, succession of dramatic events) and elements specific to the documentary genre (location shooting, use of non-professional actors sometimes playing themselves and realistic recreation of real events or situations). The opening sequence is constituted of scenes of the villagers’ everyday lives: children attending a lesson at school, men going down the pit, singing and showering after work, women doing household chores, the village grocer talking to his customers, the congregation singing at the religious service, a crowd attending a screening of Donald Duck’s adventures, a meeting of the miners’ representatives, etc. All of these scenes are accompanied by synchronised sounds – conversations in Welsh, birds chirping, dogs barking, the rustle of tree leaves, the clank of machinery, the whistle of steam engines and the rolling of wagons in the mine, and the churning of the stream running through the village – a sound that recurs throughout the film and that is the sonic mirror to the village, whose name signifies “valley of the noisy water” (cwm meaning “valley” and giedd, derived from gwy-eidden, meaning “noisy water”).
- 10 The term “acousmatic” was coined by French musique concrete inventor Pierre Schaeffer. It comes fro (...)
- 11 During the Second World War, certain works from German composers, considered to have fascist, total (...)
10There are also two types of acousmatic10 sounds. First, the extradiegetic music, composed by Christopher à Becket Williams (a little-known composer who was a friend of John Ireland). The music prominently features the harp, a popular instrument in traditional Welsh music, and is built on the confrontation between two main motifs. The first one is a three-note theme based on “Siegfried’s Funeral March” (from Wagner’s opera Götterdämmerung11), a piece that is taken up in its original full orchestral version and played on the radio when Heydrich dies in the film. The fact that the three notes are distinctly heard in the opening sequence over images of the village, and notably the river Giedd, foreshadows the fatal end of the village and its inhabitants. The second theme is constituted of the first seven notes of the traditional Welsh song “Bugeilio’r Gwenith Gwyn” (“Watching the White Wheat”). The substitution of the “Siegfried” theme by the “Gwenith Gwyn” theme (with a subtle shift from C major to D major) announces the film’s topic: the resistance of a Welsh village to the German invasion.
- 12 De-acousmatization is the process whereby the source of a voice, until then unseen, is revealed.
- 13 In all recently released versions of the film (BFI Player and DVD format), the hymn is erroneously (...)
11The second type of acousmatic sounds is the unaccompanied male choirs, singing traditional Welsh songs – performed by the Morriston United Male Choir. These contrast with the religious hymns, which are de-acousmatized12, to borrow Michel Chion’s term. For instance, the first religious hymn – the text of “Catrin: I Set my Face unto the Lord” sung to the tune “Blaenwern”13 – is heard on the soundtrack over a close up on the river Giedd flowing. After an extreme long shot and a long shot of the local church, the camera enters the church where the congregation is singing. The same de-acousmatization process is at work for another hymn, “Bryn Calfaria” (“Calvary Hill”) heard at 16:45 over shots of a dying man being watched over, followed by a long shot of the church and again, a medium shot of the congregation singing. The film features several songs performed by a male choir (the famous “Men of Harlech” but also “Ar Hyd y Nos” (“All Through the Night”) [19:44-22:22], a traditional Welsh song, and “Rhyfelgyrch Cadpen Morgan” (“Captain Morgan’s March”) [7:00-8:11], about the 1294 rising of Rhys ap Morgan in Glamorganshire), which are, on the other hand, never de-acousmatized. This results in conveying the impression that the song emanates from the whole community, as opposed to one specific group. According to Michel Chion, de-acousmatization is often associated with a loss of power. He writes:
[T]he de-acousmatization of a character generally goes hand in hand with his descent into a human, ordinary, and vulnerable fate. As long as we can’t see him we attribute all-seeing power to the voice; but once inscribed in the visual field he loses his aura. De-acousmatization can also be called embodiment: a sort of enclosing of the voice in the circumscribed limits of a body—which tames the voice and drains it of its power. (Chion 1994, p.131)
- 14 I am grateful to Dr. Gavin Williams for having kindly provided me with his conference paper.
12In The Silent Village then, symbolically, the men singing hymns in Welsh never lose their power. Unaccompanied male choirs are inherent to a South Walian tradition linked to industrial work, and the resilience of colliers. As Gavin Williams explains14, during the Great Depression, choral singing came to be associated with out-of-work miners, who then possessed nothing but their singing voices (G. Williams 2015, p.12). More generally, choral singing is systematically and traditionally associated with Wales, where choral societies, among which miners’ (or former miners’) choirs abound. In his novel based on the script of the film, Noel Joseph wrote that singing was an innate identity marker of the Welsh people:
When the younger people do go to chapel of their own accord, they go because they like singing, and the singing is very good indeed. […] They turned heavy frowns indeed on musical instruments in God’s House. But singing was different. They loved it, and most of them had from nature the fine voices of hill folk; fine soaring vibrant voices (Joseph and Masaryk 1943, pp.6–10)
13As for the dialogue in Welsh, it is treated, as Jennings phrased it, as “the sound made by the people who live in the country” and as such, it is initially placed on a par with the natural sounds of Cwmgiedd. As Gavin Williams remarks, most of them are scarcely audible, and some cut off awkwardly mid-flow, which shows that the Welsh language is mainly used to signify the fact of speech, not to convey meaning (G. Williams 2015, p.5). The idea that the human voice could, in some cases, be treated as an ordinary sound rather than a signifier was also articulated by Jennings in a discussion with Jack Holmes, transcribed by Ian Dalrymple, probably at a conference of the Association of Cine Technicians:
[I]f you take down dialogue scenes in which the dialogue is really successful, it will look pretty rubbishy; that is because it has been conceived as Dialogue, with a capital D, not the dialogue which you see “With extra dialogue by –”, but dialogue which is conceived as the sound that humans make in a particular set of circumstances. It will be easiest if I discuss sound first. All sound from our point of view is conceived as sound, and not as perfectly intelligible speech here and set of effects there. Speech and effects may overlap, and very often during a rehearsal or even after a take, the sound recordist will say: “A couple of words were completely covered by a small noise” – possibly even extraneous noises. The director has to make up his mind, has to ask: is he going to silence the children outside, or say that is the sound which was in fact outside. It is not only a question of being realistic – he has got to watch each particular case (Jennings, The Documentary Film, Humphrey Jennings and J.B. Holmes (Discussion Followed the Presidential Address and Was Arranged and Compiled by Ian Dalrymple) n.d., para 3)
14In The Silent Village, untranslated dialogue in Welsh is therefore conceived as “the sound that humans make in a particular set of circumstances”, in this case the language of a people free to express themselves as they wish, without fear of repression. As in his previous films, notably Listen to Britain, Jennings sought to praise the beauty and diversity of the nation’s soundscape. The effect is all the more striking as the natural sounds of Cwmgiedd are constantly pitted against the mechanical sounds of the German invader.
- 15 Jennings mentioned the fact that they had received the help of anti-Nazi refugees “who [knew] the m (...)
- 16 Furthermore, German military marches were then played in concentration camps, often by the prisoner (...)
15The transition between the introductory sequence and the second part is materialised by an intertitle that reads “Such is life at Cwmgiedd in the western valleys of Wales – and such too was life in Lidice until the coming of Fascism”. The second sequence then opens on an extreme close-up on the river accompanied by its rumble, which fills the entire soundscape. As soon as a German car topped with a loudspeaker (filmed in a long shot) enters the frame, the sound of the river is muffled. When the car crosses the bridge, a military march is played through the loudspeaker. The march, known as “Prussia’s Glory”15, was written after Prussia’s victory in the Franco-Prussian War, which led to the unification of the German Empire. When the Nazi Party rose to power in 1933, the march became a nationalist symbol that fitted in with the party’s ideal of restoring the nation’s former glory. The fact that one of the most characteristic sounds of the village is virtually “ousted” by a march that harks back to the territorial expansion of the German Empire is therefore very ominous16. The march is followed by an announcement informing the villagers that South and West Wales now stand under the protection of the Greater German Reich. “Prussia’s Glory” then resumes under the puzzled eyes of the inhabitants, who go on with their customary business. The car finally stops in front of the village school and the announcement continues through the loudspeaker, which fills most of the frame and is filmed in a low-angle close up. It proclaims a state of emergency, ordered by the Deputy Reich Protector, Heydrich, under which the courts martial are allowed to confiscate property, to hand over dissidents to the secret state police, and to issue a death sentence. The voice finally fades out when the car recedes.
16The Germans are in fact virtually never seen in the whole film – we only ever catch glimpses of them, for instance in a long shot in the shooting scene, or in the scene is which a soldier embodying Heydrich, seen from the back, gets shot by the villagers. The idea came from Jennings, who explained: “Next point, is that we proposed not to show any Germans. Now you may think this is very, very difficult: to make a picture about an occupied country without showing any Germans, but not entirely, because the whole film was to be an imaginative picture and not exactly a realistic picture” (“Radio Talk: The Silent Village” in Jackson 1993, p.72). Their presence is therefore mostly manifested by their voices barking orders through the loudspeaker or through wireless sets in private homes, or the playing of the military march “Prussia’s Glory” preceding or following the notices or of “Siegfried’s Funeral March” (from Wagner’s opera Götterdämmerung) to announce the death of Heydrich. The confrontation between the rich and organic soundscape of Cwmgiedd and the uniform and mechanical sounds of the oppressor materialises a deep antagonism between, on the one hand, democracy and liberty, associated with the historical struggle of the Welsh to maintain their language and traditions, and on the other, the cult of machinery and brutality typical of National Socialism, which is exactly what Jennings explains:
- 17 The reference to King Arthur who, according to some sources, was of Welsh origin and who defended t (...)
I’ve said that we didn’t actually show any Germans – we show one or two tin hats, a swastika, a loud speaker, – things of that kind. But the main feeling of oppression, the existence of the invisible Germans, is carried in the film by the voice of a German speaker – sometimes he’s speaking on a loudspeaker – sometimes from radio sets and so on – one voice. [...] In this picture you see not only the reconstruction of the Lidice story, but also the clash of two types of culture – the ancient Welsh liberty-loving culture which has been going on in these valleys, way, way back into the days of King Arthur17 and beyond, and which is still alive in the Welsh language and in the traditions of the valleys – the clash of that with this new-fangled loudspeaker-blaring culture invented by Dr Goebbels and his satellites. And it’s through the clash of these two cultures that the mechanism of the film, so to speak, is presented and not simply as a blood-and-thunder story of some people marching into a village (1943, para. 3).
- 18 The scene was filmed at Carreg Cennen castle in the Black Mountains.
17The “clash of the two cultures” takes the form of a sonic invasion of Wales, which could be seen as the metaphorical “confiscation of property” announced by the Germans upon their arrival in the village: it is what makes the village special that is targeted by the occupiers, namely its natural sounds, among which the language and songs of its inhabitants. For a while, when acts of resistance and sabotage are perpetrated by the villagers, the soundscape and Welsh language manage to hold out: we can still hear the tumult of the river, the rustle of leaves, birds chirping, dogs barking, conversations in Welsh, and nondiegetic male choirs (notably “Ar Hyd y Nos”, heard while a meeting is held in a ruined castle18, the sabotage of the mine, and the murder of a soldier, which stands for the murder of Heydrich). But progressively the orders and statements, which hitherto only came through the loudspeaker, infiltrate private homes through wireless sets, many of which are filmed successively in close-ups as if to signify the inevitability of the invasion. Even when wireless sets are not shown, the voices of the Nazis are heard offscreen over images of the villagers’ reactions, which makes them even more pervasive. Quite tellingly, “Morfa Rhuddlan”, the wistful melody that accompanies the scene in which all the villagers report, as required, to the local state police headquarters, is hummed and not sung, as if to signify the loss of both the voice of the people and their language. More will be said about the significance of the song in the last part of this essay.
18The gradual replacement of the Welsh soundscape by the mechanical, disembodied soundscape of the invaders culminates in the announcement of Heydrich’s assassination: the voice and music (“Siegfried’s Funeral March”) travel from radio to radio and from home to home, intruding on previously untouched domestic spaces. When the voice later broadcasts the list of people condemned to death, we see a woman turning off the radio, but the image immediately cuts to the outside where the loudspeaker continues to blare out announcements, as if the disembodied voice had become irreducible: the villagers are accused of having collectively conspired to assassinate Heydrich (“This morning, at 10:32, a murderous attempt was made on the life of the Deputy Reich Protector SS Obergruppenführer Heydrich”) and are ordered to hand the culprits over to the police before midnight. From then on, the once so vivid soundscape, including the songs and conversations in Welsh, is silenced: the grocer’s lips move, but no sound comes out, the tumultuous torrent is now almost dry and makes no sound, the rustling leaves of the tree fall silent, the inhabitants are motionless and the only sound to be heard is that of a threatening clock. In a harrowing sequence, the ticking fades and is replaced by men’s voices singing the national anthem of Wales, “Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau” (“Land of My Fathers”). The sounds of soldiers marching and shouting orders in German only heighten their intensity, as the men sing on while they line up calmly along the cemetery wall, only to be silenced by a volley of gunfire.
19The adjective “silent”, contained in the film’s title, is not to be understood as an inherent characteristic of the village of Cwmgiedd, but as the ultimate goal of the Nazi invaders, who come up against a resistant and organic collective voice that they can only silence by mechanically destroying it. “The Fascists cannot stop this singing. All they can do is to track down the singers and destroy their homes and goods”, Noel Joseph concludes (1943, p.42).
20 Even though the Welsh language is progressively obliterated like the rest of the soundscape, it would be reductive to consider it merely as any other sound. As Jennings remarked, in the film, Welsh is forbidden by the enemy just as Czech culture was annihilated under German occupation, and this makes it the language of resistance. Speaking Welsh becomes an act of rebellion and a duty, something the village teacher is quick to remind her pupils of:
Children, I’ve just had a letter to inform me that there is no more Welsh to be spoken in this school. All our hymns, our beautiful songs, our poems are to be heard no more. But children, I want you to promise me one thing, do not forget your Welsh. Speak Welsh at home, on the roadside, at your play, everywhere. Will you promise me not to forget your Welsh language?
21In a BBC interview reproduced in The Listener, Humphrey Jennings spoke of his desire to represent the linguistic issues linked to invasion and occupation through the resilience of the Welsh language in the film:
Now the teaching of Welsh in schools is a matter of great consequence to the Welsh people; and just as, in Czechoslovakia, one of the first things that was done under Heidrich was the suppression of Czech culture, so in the picture we have shown the suppression of Welsh teaching in schools, but we’ve also shown that Welsh is the language of the underground movement in this film. The children speak Welsh when playing in the street, even though they are not allowed to do so in school.
- 19 “All the male adults of the village have been shot. The women have been sent to a concentration cam (...)
22Comparatively, what little dialogue there is in German is immediately followed by a translation into and switch to English (for instance, “Achtung, Achtung! An die Bevölkerung von Cwmgiedd. Attention, attention! To the population of Cwmgiedd”, or the full translation of the original proclamation of the Lidice massacre that appeared in the press19). This might have been done simply for clarity’s sake, but the Welsh dialogue goes untranslated without it being perceived as a hindrance. What this could therefore imply is that the Germans are denied territorial foothold. Wendy Webster also contends that the Germans are characterised more by the brutality of the sounds they make than by their language: “if the film involved translation, it also presented a repertoire of brutal and oppressive sound, so tainted that it has no English or Welsh equivalent; so foreign that it is, in effect, untranslatable” (Webster 2011, p.269).
23Yet the fact that, throughout the whole film, English intercedes as German’s linguistic equivalent (even though it is spoken with a German accent) possibly reveals another layer of meaning: even though the film was a piece of propaganda whose goal was in no way to undermine the wartime national consensus, it contains subtle references to the policies of linguistic assimilation carried out by Great Britain in Wales throughout history. More particularly, the aural invasion that progressively takes place in the village is, to some extent, reminiscent of the language policy pursued by the British government from the end of the 19th century, following the 1847 Reports of the Commissioners of Enquiry into the State of Education in Wales, collectively known as the “Treachery of the Blue Books”. According to these reports, Welsh schools were inadequate, as English textbooks could not be used in areas where children spoke only Welsh. They concluded that “the Welsh language [was] a vast drawback to Wales, and a manifold barrier to the moral progress and commercial prosperity of the people” and that it “[was] not easy to over-estimate its evil effects” (Reports of the Commissioners of Enquiry into the State of Education in Wales 1847, p.309). This led to the emergence of a relatively widespread practice in Wales, the “Welsh Not”, which consisted of tying a piece of wood around the neck of Welsh-speaking schoolchildren, who in turn had to pass it on to their classmates caught speaking the language. The last pupil of the day to carry the piece of wood was punished. In the film, the prohibition on speaking Welsh, announced in English by the schoolmistress to her pupils, is a thinly veiled reference to this practice, which audiences in the 1940s would easily have identified: as she speaks, a placard with the 1870 Elementary Education Act – which made teaching in English compulsory – can clearly be seen in the background. In a later sequence, after a sudden cut from a shot showing the explosion of the mine, the schoolmistress teaches her pupils a class on the conquest of Wales. “Morfa Rhuddlan”, the hummed melody heard in the background during the registration scene, is also a subtle reference to the conquest of Wales, as the lyrics of the song relate the eponymous battle, fought against the Saxons in 796 in which the Welsh, under their King Carradog, were defeated and slaughtered.
24Again, the fact that the German invaders speak English is of course no accident. Furthermore, as John Hartley astutely remarked (2007, p.154), the Nazis’ vehicle is an SS Jaguar, whose name is reminiscent of the German Schutzstaffel (SS), but which was first and foremost a famous British sports car. The ruined castle, a symbol of the British conquest of Wales, is now used as headquarters by the Welsh rebels.
- 20 The sabotage of the mines by the village workers is also evocative of industrial sabotage and the m (...)
25More generally, English is always the language of power or decision-making: every time the villagers spontaneously speak English, they discuss serious matters such as silicosis (a lung disease caused by the inhalation of coal dust), or political motions such as striking or lending their support to their comrades in Lidice, whereas Welsh is the language of the everyday spoken by a people with no desire to conquer or subjugate other nations. But what this last instance points to is perhaps the fact that, beyond praising the resistance of Wales as a nation, what the film does is pay tribute to the resistance and international solidarity of the miners, and more generally, of the proletariat. That the men in the film speak English, not Welsh, and call each other “comrade” every time they discuss matters related to the coal mine, lends complexity to the confrontation of Wales and Germany by adding to the national identity another type of collective identity based on class20. Jennings, who wrote to his wife Cicely about the “honest Christian and Communist principles” of the Welsh being “daily acted on” (“Letter to Cicely Jennings”, 10 September 1942, reproduced in Kevin Jackson, 62) certainly did not want to downplay the importance of class and international solidarity with the proletariat of the world in the war effort. This is precisely what Evans does in his final speech in the film, in which he pledges his support for the Lidice miners and asserts that the proletariat will “hasten the coming of victory” and “liberate oppressed humanity”.
26Interestingly, the potentially subversive subtext of the film (its evocation of the conquest of Wales) was not picked up on by the production offices of the Ministry of Information. Rather, it was the revolutionary aspects of the film that alarmed them. The Ministry recommended not separating the miners from the rest of the working class as they believed it would encourage insubordination and be detrimental to the message of unity of the population put forward in propaganda discourses, as producer Ian Dalrymple pointed out in a letter to Jennings dated 29 October 1942:
1. We must be careful about the political aspect. The way the miners are picked out at the moment has revolutionary and barricade implications which we must avoid. 2. I don’t like picking the miners out of the rest of the workers as the vanguard. 3. I do think the miners must be picked out, for reasons of the film and of increased output: but through the coal and so to the miners [...]” (Dalrymple 1942, para. 1).
- 21 Quite interestingly, as Martin Johnes notes, the Germans had unavailingly tried to exploit the sens (...)
27And indeed what Jennings chose to represent in The Silent Village was not only the resistance of the British people to Nazism, but also the preservation of Britain’s multiculturalism and multilingualism, opposed in every way to the uniformising and alienating ideology of National Socialism, which condemned the expression of plural identities21. Extolling the linguistic and cultural pluralism of Great Britain was therefore also a way of warning the government against immoderate use of the rhetoric of a People’s War, which tended to downplay the diverse and rich national and regional identities that composed the nation.
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