| Description | Soldiers being demobilised, going home, theatre exterior, officer handing out bananas.
Prefabricated houses being transported and constructed; rows of prefabs still standing in the 1970s: woman inhabitant interviewed. Commentary suggests their continuing existence is an indictment of post-war building policy. Film of families moving as squatters into empty army camps; the short-lived, September, 1941, occupation of empty luxury flats in Kensington. The "Britain Can Make It" exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum: house interiors, clothes, portable radios, garden furniture, etc. Commentary talks about the "unique and daring experiment" of the introduction of the Third Programme, intended to bring culture into the home via radio, but which "contributed to a further polarisation of culture" because of its "upper-class tone". Children in new school buildings. Commentary asks if more education "would help bridge the gap between the artist and his public" but quotes from Cecil Collins’s Vision of the Fool, "We are all being educated to believe in the extrovert, useful person. Why? Because the extrovert, useful person is the most exploitable type… The Fool is interested in life, not in power, nor the passing of examinations…" Head of a Fool (1949) and another painting by Collins. Market traders explaining what their views on "art". Erecting statues. Commentary wonders if Socialist-Realism would be effective in Britain. Unveiling (1948) William Reid Dick’s statue of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Grosvenor Square: "if this isn’t art, it does imply an attitude to art". Film of Dick working on the statue. Film of the difficulties unveiling (1949) Dick’s statue of Lady Godiva in Coventry. |
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