Tag: shell shock

The History of Sound

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 23 January 2026
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Director – Oliver Hermanus – 2025 – UK, US – Cert. 15 – 128m

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A Kentucky man falls for a music professor in Boston and accompanies him on a field trip recording folk songs – out in UK cinemas on Friday, January 23rd

In 1917, having grown up on a farmstead in rural Kentucky and his remarkable singing voice being noticed by a local schoolteacher, Lionel Worthing (Paul Mescal from Hamnet, Chloé Zhao, 2025; Gladiator II, Ridley Scott, 2024; All of Us Strangers, Andrew Haigh, 2023) gets a student scholarship to Boston’s New England Conservatory of Music. One Saturday evening in a Boston pub with friends, he makes the acquaintance of David White (Josh O’Connor from La Chimera, Alice Rohrwacher, 2023; Mothering Sunday, Eva Husson, 2021; The Crown, TV series, 2019-20; God’s Own Country, Francis Lee, 2017) who is playing folk songs on the piano and, it turns out, is a tenured academic with an obsessive hobby: travelling around the country collecting, recording and cataloguing folk songs. David has what Lionel describes as the sound equivalent of a photographic memory: he can remember word for word and note for note, any song sung in his presence.… Read the rest

Tags 1910s, 1920s, 1980s, abusive relationship, academic holidays, army, assistant, bereavement, Boston, Briana Middleton, call up, catalog, catalogue, choir, Chris Cooper, church choir, collect, college, community, coughing, countryside, death of mother, Dion Graham, drafted, Emma Canning, England, ethnic, ethnomusicologist, eviction from the land, family farm, farm, field trip, fireman, folk songs, Frist World War, gay relationship, Hadley Robinson, hobby, indigenous, indigenous folk songs, Italy, Josh O’Connor, Kentucky, Lake District, letter, LGBTQ, LGBTQI, mail, Maine, Malaga Island, Michael Schantz, military draft, mixed black and white ethnic, Molly Price, mothers and sons, music, musicologist, negro spiritual, New England Conservatory of Music, obsession, Oliver Hermanus, Oxford University, paper candle, parents and children, Paul Mescal, performing, photographic memory: Silver Dagger, pianist, piano, police, policemen, poor people, porch, post-WW1, promote a book, pub, record, recording, relationships, Rome, rural, rural and urban, scholarship, sex, shell shock, socialite, song, song gathering, spiritual, stately mansion, student, suitcase, sweet-talking, tent, tenured academic, the happiest time of your life, The History of Sound, travelling, truncheon, tuberculosis, TV appearance, UK, US, war, wax cylinders, wax phonograph cylinders, widow, working the fields, World War 1, World War I, World War One, WW1

Features Live Action Movies

Benediction

Director – Terence Davies – 2021 – UK – Cert. 12a – 137m

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The life of First World War poet Siegfried Sassoon, his homosexual lifestyle and his heterosexual marriage – out in cinemas on Friday, May 20th

It’s been five years since Davies’ previous film A Quiet Passion (2016) and the curious thing is, both these films have been about poets and poetry. The earlier film was about Emily Dickinson, with its discussion about religion and Christianity very much to the fore; the new film is about Siegfried Sassoon and while the Catholicism he embraced in later years is in the mix, alongside that element Davies’ research revealed others of far greater interest to the writer-director, notably that Sassoon was gay. As you might expect, the first half hour or so concentrates on the First World War, but more time is spent in the middle of the film exploring some of Sassoon’s gay relationships with a small section towards the end skimming over his later years and heterosexual married life.

Siegfried Sassoon (Jack Lowden) saw action in the First World War and had the utmost respect for the men under his command – and they for him. He was appalled by the conditions under which they found themselves serving.… Read the rest

Tags active service, Anton Lesser, Ben Daniels, Catholicism, chief medical officer, conflict, conversion, court-martial, Craiglockhart, Craiglockhart War Hospital, dance, Edinburgh, Emily Dickinson, fathers and sons, First World War, fit for active service, gay, gay illegal, gay relationships, gay sex, Gemma Jones, George Sassoon, Hester Gatty, heterosexual marriage, high command, homosexual illegal, hospital, illegal, Ivor Novello, Jack Lowden, Jeremy Irvine, Julian Sands, Kate Phillips, law, literary, marital breakdown, marriage, Matthew Tennyson, military command, narcissist, offspring, Peter Capaldi, poet, poetry, relationships, Richard Goulding, Robbie Ross, separation, sex, sexual preference, shell shock, Siegfried Sassoon, Simon Russell-Beale, Terence Davies, theatre, top brass, war, Wilfred Owen, World War 1, World War I, World War One, WW1

Features Live Action Movies

Benediction

Glum heroes

Benediction
Directed by Terence Davies
Certificate 12a, 137 minutes
Released 20 May

Films about poets are few; however, the director Terence Davies has now made two in a row as different as their historical subjects. The earlier A Quiet Passion (Reform, April 2017) concerns the introverted, isolated, American spinster Emily Dickinson while the current Benediction is about First World War poet Siegfried Sassoon (Jack Lowden) – a homosexual man when this sexual preference was illegal, before the word ‘gay’ was used to describe such things.

His Military Cross earned for bravery as a First World War officer drops into a stream then sinks, an image expressing Sassoon’s dissatisfaction with the way the war is being run, and the hardships endured by the troops. He writes in protest to the top brass, but instead of the court-martial and platform to speak he expects, he is diagnosed with ‘shell shock’, partly thanks to literary mentor Robbie Ross (Simon Russell-Beale). Sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh… [Read more…]

Full review published in Reform magazine.