Terminus

Well it's a very brave beekeeper who opens this documentary about an hectic twenty-four hours at London's Waterloo station, to the south of the Thames. These bees, however, are quite symbolic of what we see for the next half hour as the station manager checks in at the start of the morning rush hour. What's curious to note here is just how diverse those travelling passengers are. From the successful businessman buying his buttonhole upon arrival to those coming from further afield or destined for outward journeys - including the boat train to connect with the Queen Elizabeth in Southampton. There's even a few detained during Her Majesty's Pleasure! It's buzzing. Constant movement, chatter, a fellow with a seriously annoying laugh, rushing about - the general sense of all kinds of humanity in one place is well captured in this engaging fly-on-various-walls presentation. The logistics of keeping these steam trains running, of the manual signal operations, a constantly busy enquiry and lost property office and the meticulous planning of a staff who can keep trains moving to a schedule that would be nigh-on impossible to re-set should the momentum is lost is also well featured in this narration-free real life drama. Hats! Maybe it's a generational thing, but almost everyone wears an hat. If only onboard catering was this good nowadays, and I wonder if there is still a train to Clapham Junction every four minutes! Anyone need a brolly?

Great incidental music. Kind of soulful jazz. Random shots from a day in the life of a London train terminal around 1960.

I definitely spotted Leo Mckern at a ticket window. From the ticket vendor's view.

Leo Mckern didn't feature in the credits and Terminus doesn't feature in his imdb entry. But he's definitely there. Maybe just travelling?

This fly on the wall-style documentary from 1961 won an Oscar for best documentary. It is about an average day in the life of a busy train station. By todays standards it looks dated but the camera work and pace of the film are quite ahead of their time. It doesn't go on and on like most boring docu's, but just shows us the facts, how they are (a family saying goodbye to a relative leaving on a train, a little boy who gets lost) and nothing more. We make up our own minds. It is easy to see where a lot of modern film-makers might have stolen their ideas from. Not a great film, but not a bad one either.

British Transport Films was an organisation set up in 1949 to make documentary films on the general subject of British transport, in the same way as the GPO Film Unit had been set up in the 1930s to make films about the work of the Post Office. "Terminus" is one of their productions and takes a look at an ordinary day at Waterloo station in London. It was the first film to be directed by John Schlesinger, who later became one of Britain's best-known directors of feature films.

British documentaries were normally made with the express purpose of educating the public about some topic of general interest, or at least about some topic which the film-makers perceived as being of general interest, and in order to do so normally presented the viewers with a didactic voice-over by an unseen narrator, sometimes backed up by "talking head" interviews. There is none of that in "Terminus". Schlesinger dispenses with narration altogether; the only dialogue we hear consists of conversations between the people we see. This was a style of documentary which became known as "fly-on-the-wall", showing but not telling.

We see a wide cross-section of passengers- male and female, old and young, white and black. (There are numerous black faces featured, a reminder that the late fifties and early sixties were a period of increasing immigration into Britain). We also meet a number of those who work at the station or on the railways- the stationmaster, guards, porters, a signalman (who keeps a cat in his signal box), ticket-sellers, lost-property workers- although, surprisingly, no engine-drivers.

The film was nominated for a BAFTA for Best Documentary and also for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, although it was disqualified from this latter category because it had been released before the eligibility period. (Also, it seems rather too short to qualify as a "feature"). It was evidently well-regarded when it first came out in 1961, possibly because this style of film-making was something of a novelty at the time, and it certainly has some features which still catch the eye fifty-odd years on. Chief among these is Schlesinger's striking camera-work; he seems particularly fond of alternating "fly-on-the-wall" close-ups with "bird's-eye view" long-shots looking down on the station from a height.

Unlike the more traditional style of documentary, however, this one does not tell us much about British transport, even British transport as it existed in the early sixties, except that steam was still the main source of power at the time (and we probably knew that anyway). It didn't come as a great surprise to learn that the film is not as "documentary" as it makes out, as some of the shots were staged using actors. The scenes of the young boy Matthew Perry who is supposedly lost by, and then reunited with, his mother struck me as an obvious fake even while watching the film, but this was not the only sequence in which actors were used. (This "Matthew Perry" is not the future "Friends" actor, who was not born until 1969).

The whole idea behind British Transport Films seems to have been to inform the public about British transport. In "Terminus" Schlesinger has given us some visually arresting images, but I cannot say that he has fulfilled his remit of enlightening us.

I must admit I'm a sucker for all these 'archive footage' videos. Give me ten minutes of anonymous faces wandering in Parisian streets in 1927 and I will watch it with the fascinated scrutiny of a little boy over an anthill. Or New York, or Beijing, in fact I enjoyed Chaplin's "Kids Auto Races in Venice" less for Chaplin's constant interfering than for the time capsule it represented. A few years later, I started watching clips of Moroccan cities in the 50s, 60s, I was surprised by a talkie from the 30s where the language was similar to the one I grew up with and I just enjoyed the sight of modernity dating as far back as 1968... There's just something about the passing of time that totally sublimates banality.

And so on that simple basic level, I enjoyed John Schlesinger's documentary "Terminus" (quite a name for a career-starter!) The film is a 24-hour on the life going into the Waterloo station, the living and the mechanical. From the early arrivant to the late-comers, from those commuting between towns to join their workplaces to simple passer-bys, in half and hour, the film covers a wide range of travellers and shuttlers and workers, typical Englishmen with their bowler hats and umbrellas who seem to directly come out of a Magritte picture, women taking forever to kiss themselves goodbye, challenging the patience of the controller, and so many closeups on the marvels of the Industrial age, reminding us of the masterstroke of engineering the London Railroad or Underground were. One of the film's standout moments is a boy checking out the complex mechanisms underneath the train, captivated by the intermittent bursts of smokes, his curiosity echoes ours while watching the film.

1961 indeed, seems like yesterday, Queen Elizabeth was 35, John Cleese was 22 and Princess Diana was just born... 1961, but it was 61 years ago, which means that the document is as close to the year 1900 as it is to today. No need to imagine the changes, they're tremendous, and I looked at the film like a historical document, the way Britain used to be... I am not British but for thirty minutes the film made me feel part of that urban life where the stressful necessities of scheduling met the British legendary phlegm. Schlesinger as if he was visionary enough to understand the film didn't need any 'drama' doesn't go for the scoop or the sensation, so the closest we get to 'something' special is the annoying laugh of a young man and a little boy who lost his mother. The camera sticks a little too long on his face, perhaps the only time Schlesinger yielded to a voyeuristic pulsion, from the big picture to the little fellow.

But it is a documentary after all, and a good one at that. Schlesinger he didn't just let the camera roll, the angles were deliberate, so were the ellipses, the travellings shots, the close-ups and ultimately the elaborate editing. Some choices of background musics are fitting, one can question the use of "Jamaica" when a group of Black people is showed, but nevertheless, there's not one moment where our attention isn't caught by the things that have changed, whether the way people dressed or the way they behaved or the way they spent time when cellphones didn't exist. Still, witnessing the things that haven't changed is equally heartwarming. We still feel a load in our hearts when paying goodbye to close ones and losing a child is still a parent's nightmare...

The film ends on a strange 'noirish' tone, during the night, showing a whole other reality and foreshadowing the sleazy nocturnal universes depicted in Schlesinger's "Darling", "Billy Liar" or "Midnight Cowboy". It's a misinterpretation to regard Schlesinger as a documentary-style director, despite him figuring among the 'British New Wave' pioneers like Karel Reisz and Lindsay Anderson. While his attention to mundane details is integral to the realism of kitchen sink dramas, there are some elements of quirkiness, humor and transgression that regularly pop up in "Terminus" and that are so subtle they might either be missed or be the figment of my over-analysis. But I doubt Schlesinger made a documentary for the sake of realism.

Documentary isn't an "unnatural" way to film normality, and coming from a director who made a normality out of things deemed unnatural, it's quite a delightful irony .