London can take it!

London life in the blitz is presented as ‘a series of contrasts between the ordinary and the extraordinary, the casual and the tense, beauty and destruction, stillness and action, silence and noise, light and dark’. This is surrealism based not on symbolic representation of the subconscious but on images of everyday, images transformed by exceptional circumstances of war. These images are public not private. Their power is entirely cultural and social. The commentary by American correspondent Quentin Reynolds interacts in quite a complex way with the images. Primarily intended for North American audiences, a shorter five minute adaptation called Britain Can Take It was screened very successfully in British cinemas and was something of a breakthrough for British documentary.