The Principality of Sealand

Sealand Official Site

Vija Celmins

Arcosanti

Paolo Soleri's Arcosanti: A Desert Oasis (Sony DSC-RX10) from Dan Carter on Vimeo.

John Smith, The Girl Chewing Gum (1976)

John Latham

Coastal Erosion in Norfolk

Spiral Exhalations

From Edgar Allan Poe, "MS. Found in a Bottle" (1833):

We got under way with a mere breath of wind, and for many days stood along the eastern coast of Java, without any other incident to beguile the monotony of our course than the occasional meeting with some of the small grabs of the Archipelago to which we were bound. One evening, leaning over the taffrail, I observed a very singular, isolated cloud, to the N. W. It was remarkable, as well for its color, as from its being the first we had seen since our departure from Batavia. I watched it attentively until sunset, when it spread all at once to the eastward and westward, girting in the horizon with a narrow strip of vapor, and looking like a long line of low beach. My notice was soon afterwards attracted by the duskyred appearance of the moon, and the peculiar character of the sea. The latter was undergoing a rapid change, and the water seemed more than usually transparent. Although I could distinctly see the bottom, yet, heaving the lead, I found the ship in fifteen fathoms. The air now became intolerably hot, and was loaded with spiral exhalations similar to those arising from heated iron. As night came on, every breath of wind died away, and a more entire calm it is impossible to conceive. The flame of a candle burned upon the poop without the least perceptible motion, and a long hair, held between the finger and thumb, hung without the possibility of detecting a vibration. However, as the captain said he could perceive no indication of danger, and as we were drifting in bodily to shore, he ordered the sails to be furled, and the anchor let go. No watch was set, and the crew, consisting principally of Malays, stretched themselves deliberately upon deck. I went below — not without a full presentiment of evil. Indeed every appearance warranted me in apprehending a Simoom. I told the captain my fears — but he paid no attention to what I said, and left me without deigning to give a reply. My uneasiness, however, prevented me from sleeping, and about midnight I went upon deck. As I placed my foot upon the upper step of the companion-ladder, I was startled with a loud, humming noise, like that occasioned by the rapid revolution of a mill-wheel, and before I could ascertain its meaning, I found the ship quivering to its centre. In the next instant, a wilderness of foam hurled us upon our beam-ends, and, rushing over us fore and aft, swept the entire decks from stem to stern.

Partially Buried

Preparing for his stay at Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau paid a visit to an Irish railroad worker, James Collins, with a view to buying Collins’s shanty for boards. “It was of small dimensions,” Thoreau comments, but not much could be seen of it since dirt was “raised five feet all around as if it were a compost heap” (29). Striking a bargain with Collins, Thoreau unearths the cabin the next morning, dismantles it and removes the materials to the pondside.

Robert Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed was created at Kent State University in Ohio during an arts festival in January 1970. The shed, part of an abandoned farm owned by the university and used as a storage space for dirt, gravel and firewood, had twenty loads of earth from a construction site piled on top of it until the central beam snapped from the pressure. The outmoded farm building and the forms of social and economic organisation it invokes are almost but not entirely obliterated by the overturning of earth by modern machinery. The shed becomes an instant ruin, a memorial to the Jeffersonian conviction that the small-scale, self-sustaining agrarian community might be the foundation of American national virtue. Sitting in his own shed in 1845, Thoreau had an idea that such a notion was already history. The once sacred art of husbandry, he complains, is now “pursued with irreverent haste and heedlessness by us, our object being to have large farms and large crops merely [...]. By avarice and selfishness, a grovelling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber” (103).

“It’s a Mud Mud Mud World” read the headline of a dismissive article in the local press following the completion of Partially Buried Woodshed (RS, 307). Mud had preoccupied Smithson since at least 1968, though it was too cold at Kent State for mud to flow and earth had to be used instead. In an essay for Artforum, “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects” (1968), Smithson envisions a disintegration of the “earth’s surface and the figments of the mind,” with “[v]arious agents, both fictional and real, somehow trad[ing] places with each other –– one cannot avoid muddy thinking when it comes to earth projects, or what I will call ‘abstract geology’” (RS, 100). “Muddy thinking” for Smithson does not mean confused thinking. Instead, mud works as a solvent that collapses the distinction between mental and physical processes to produce a kind of materialist negative capability, with thought a form of entropic power that acts upon secure knowledge and wears it down: "One’s mind and the earth are in a constant state of erosion, mental rivers wear away abstract banks, brain waves undermine cliffs of thought, ideas decompose into stones of unknowing, and conceptual crystallizations break apart into deposits of gritty reason .[...] This movement seems motionless, yet it crushes the landscape of logic under glacial reveries" (RS, 100).

References

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden, or Life in the Woods (Radford, VA: Wilder, 2008).
Flam, Jack, ed. Robert Smithson: Collected Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

Impact Event

The resurrection of a credible theory of catastrophism among scientists during the 1980s to explain the extinction of the dinosaurs was in part, as Doug Davis has argued, made possible by Cold War technology. Davis posits a complex interrelationship between military-scientific work in impact-explosion craters caused by nuclear detonations and impact-extinction theory in geology and palaeontology. The study of bomb craters, for example, enabled the verification of the effects of impact explosions for palaeontologists, while the dinosaur apocalypse reconstructed from the geological record draws its vocabulary of destruction from Cold War rhetoric—“target properties”, “projectiles”, “fallout”, “bombardment”, and so on—as well as providing a plausible scenario of a post-nuclear world. Deep time produces evidence of the future anterior, the will-have-been: “The same regime of signs”, claims Davis, “is at work after a nuclear holocaust in the 1980s as after a catastrophic impact 65 million years ago” (497). Impact-extinction scientists were not funded by the military, yet their findings were inseparable from the work of Cold War science; as such, Davis concludes, the “state of conflict itself enabled the theory’s development” (506; original emphasis).

Reference

Davis, Doug. '“A Hundred Million Hydrogen Bombs”: Total War in the Fossil Record,' Configurations 9.3 (2001): 461-508.

Planet of the Apes

'Nature will surely come to her own again. Nothing human is of long duration. Men and their deeds are obliterated, the race itself fades; but Nature goes calmly on with her projects' -- John C. Van Dyke, The Desert: Further Studies in Natural Appearances (London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1901), p. 62.

'Enfranchisement was an historical event' -- Jean Baudrillard, America, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso.1988), p. 112.

Vanishing Point

In Modern Arms and Free Men (1949), Cold War technocrat Vannevar Bush describes approvingly how U.S. car and ham radio subcultures meant that “[e]very corner garage, every radio club, was a sort of center of training, training that could be easily transformed in a short time, when the test came, into the ability to operate the complex implements of war” (20). This description, while referring to the pre-World War II generation, is even more pertinent post-war, especially with regards to the matrix of interrelated subcultures that flourished along the west coast during the 1950s and 1960s: the technological avant-garde vernacular of hot rod and biker groups “chopping” factory-produced vehicles into individualized mutations of lurid self-realization, independent radio DJs providing slang-encoded communications and self-reflexive commentary (Davis 1998: 65-6; Hickey 1997: 61; Miller 1999: 33).

As with Bush’s observation of an earlier era, this street-level expertise, put to the service of adapting fordist methods of production to an aesthetic of individual display, is easily converted back into the operation of the machinery of war, the exploitation of the masses’ “aptitude for movement as a social solution” as Virilio calls it (1986: 28). Such a view is, by the early 1970s, vividly interrogated in a number of elegiac New Hollywood productions, especially in George Lucas’ American Graffiti (1973). Lucas makes sure the interrelationship between California car culture and war is not missed by ending his film with information about what happened to his protagonists: one dies in a car crash, another is missing in action, another is a writer living in Canada, clearly one of the thousands who crossed the border to escape the draft (Miller 1999: 87-89). Vanishing Point doesn’t traffic in Lucas’s nostalgia for innocent times – the theatrical trailer for American Graffiti asks “Where were you in ‘62?” and a palpable sense of loss saturates that film – but there is a similar scrutiny of the destructive temporal accident seen to be somehow at the core of the American automobile.

References

• Bush, V. 1949. Modern Arms and Free Men: A Discussion of the Role of Science in Preserving Democracy. New York: Simon & Schuster.
• Davis, M. 1998. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. London: Pimlico.
• Hickey, D. 1997. Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy. Los Angeles: Art Issues Press.
• Miller, S.P. 1999. The Seventies Now: Culture as Surveillance. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
• Virilio, P. 1986. Speed and Politics, trans. by Mark Polizzotti. New York: Semiotext(e).

This is a modified extract from John Beck, ‘Resistance Becomes Ballistic: Vanishing Point and the End of the Road,’ Cultural Politics 3.1 (2007): 35 -50.

Jeremy Deller, The Battle of Orgreave

Trevor Paglen

Chris Petit

Zabriskie Point

Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point (1970) is remembered largely for its famous closing sequence of slow-motion explosions, as his female protagonist Daria imagines the destruction of the Carefree development-resort in the Arizona desert and all it stands for. To the accompaniment of Pink Floyd's 'Come In Number 51, Your Time Is Up,' Antonioni presents the annihilation of buildings, furniture, clothes, food, television, and books with an exquisite eye for the aesthetic properties of things coming apart.

The Carefree resort is clearly modelled on the houses Frank Lloyd Wright built in the desert around the outskirts of Phoenix, and which became the fantasy homes for aspirational post-war Angelenos. (Most of the land, incidentally, to the south and east of Phoenix is comprised of Indian reservations). Daria's allegiance to native cultures-- the hippie paraphernalia of Sioux and Navajo jewellery, the long, uncut hair, the meaningfully empathic look exchanged with the Mexican or Indian maid -- clearly informs her discomfort at being in this place, and reveals her awareness of the subjugation and displacement of the region's indigenous inhabitants. Daria works for the Sunny Dunes Corporation, which is behind the desert development, and has arranged to spend time with her boss at Carefree. This tryst provides the pretext for her trip from LA to Phoenix, a drive of some three hundred miles, which temporally, however, takes Daria through millions of years, from the geological ground zero of Zabriskie Point to suburban wish fulfilment.

While Antonioni's film is generally not much admired, its stunning visual language is rightly celebrated. Zabriskie Point is fascinating precisely because it puts such a high premium on chromatic splendor and pictorial composition at the expense of plot, narrative, and characterization. It is a film that is supremely concerned with surfaces and quality of light; with looking. It is in particular concerned with looking at and visually representing landscape, as Dave Hickey writes, ‘by picturing the noncultural wilderness within a frame'(1).

As a specific cultural product of the Enlightenment, this 'viewing' of the non-human world from a privileged vantage point prefers a nature scrubbed of the tracklines of history -- of everyday life, of dramatic event -- in order to offer up the world as empty page upon which the prospector can scrawl his signature. The modernist formal dismantling of the sovereign perspective, according to Hickey, did not effectively challenge the authority of the gaze, but simply realigned its taste away from romantic luxuriance to pared down austerity. So, especially in its American modernist form, the landscape tradition favors the arid West, with its absence of 'atmospheric incident and decorative vegetation' that allows the view 'to mimic the reductive, formalist territories of European Modernism, upon which the works of industrial humans appear as decrepit blemishes on an equally abject (but essentially pure) armature of primal design’ (2). For Hickey, '[c]reatures of the eye' read but do not caress the world, and, as a consequence, 'the glass wall that the camera deploys between the body and the world, through which only the eye can pass, lends itself perfectly to our disembodied romance with the evacuated landscape that presents itself to us as a container of the spirit’ (3).

This is a not unfamiliar critique of the cold, cold heart of the Enlightenment: the Cartesian propensity for division and domination, the construction and enlistment of aesthetic categories -- beautiful, picturesque, sublime -- to service the interests of nation and empire building and private enterprise. As Hickey suggests, the American West is one of the nodal sites for the resourcing of expansionist, capitalist, and aestheticist projects.

The vision of the fruits of these projects erupting, fragmenting, atomizing at the end of Zabriskie Point is a willed return to the granular existence of geological history. It is a vision that destroys the notion of history as progress, that produces a catastrophic counterreading of 'nature' that rejects the organic modernism of the high-tech dwelling nestled comfortably in the supporting landscape and the prospect it supplies. The violence of civil disorder and industrial overlay that frame the film are, subsequently, revealed to be a mere prelude to the violence inflicted by the desert, to which the trappings of human existence are seen to return. The liberating potential written onto the vacant desert space by Daria and her confused drop-out protester friend Mark, whose death at the hands of the police prompts her vengeful vision, is at the same time endangered by the encroachment of a bourgeois leisure elite with visions of Edenic reclamation. Daria's redemptive romantic nature (an ersatz hippie primitivism) and nature as professional-managerial resource (utopian modernism in its postwar, postfordist manifestation as high-end trophy-home) are both exploded in the final scenes of the film. The dispersal of the signs of US culture into shimmering patterns of light and colour might be seen as a kind of radical formalist recoil from the commodification of modernism, as the geometric abstraction of nature at its most crystalline absorbs the sedimental garbage of conspicuous consumption back into part of its own elemental grandeur.

Frank Lloyd Wright's utopian interest in the possibilities of organic form in architecture was confirmed by the flora of the desert, where he finds in the Saguaro cactus the 'perfect example of reinforced building construction. Its interior vertical rods hold it rigidly upright maintaining its great fluted columnar mass for centuries’ (4). The inner ribs of the Saguaro were, indeed, used as structural elements in Papago and Pima shelters, and Wright senses a kind of natural duration in the.cactus which resists the vicissitudes of history. The Saguaro, incidentally, like the one sitting in the corner of the Sunny Dunes executive's LA office, bears in its scientific form the name Carnegiea gigantea, after steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, whose foundation established the Desert Laboratory in Tucson in 1903 for the study of desert ecology.

The Desert, published in 1901, the most celebrated of the over forty books published by John C. Van Dyke, is dedicated to one A.M.C., which, although not enlarged upon by Van Dyke, turns out to be Andrew Michael Carnegie. Van Dyke was the first professor of art history at Rutgers College, a well known art critic, friends with Sargent, Whistler and Mark Twain, author of a number of books of art appreciation, and a regular contributor to upmarket magazines (5). He was a prominent Rembrandt scholar, remembered almost exclusively in the obituaries of 1932 for challenging of the attribution of nearly a thousand Rembrandts around the world (6). In 1897, respiratory problems prompted Van Dyke to to visit his brother in southern California, and The Desert recounts his experiences during three years spent around what is now called the Colorado Plateau ¬¬-- which includes the Mojave, Colorado, and Sonoran Deserts -- between 1898 and 1901, equipped with a pony, a few pounds of supplies, and only a fox terrier for company. The book broke from the conventional distrustful view of the desert as barren, hostile, and unpleasant and, as 'the first work to praise the desert for its beauty,' claims Van Dyke expert Peter Wild, The Desert 'led the way in a major shift of the culture's outlook on the arid portion of its natural heritage' (7).

Van Dyke moved comfortably in the circles of preeminent industrialists and art collectors like Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and Frank Thomson. According to Van Dyke, it was he who guided Carnegie's first investment of six thousand dollars in American art and who continued to acquire art for him during his later life (8). Like his friend Bernard Berenson, Van Dyke was a connoisseur of Renaissance art, and like Berenson, this skill was put to work in stocking the collections of wealthy industrialists and, subsequently, in shaping the taste of America's upper class (9). Van Dyke had, it appears, a standing invitation at Frick's house, and was well enough trusted to edit Carnegie's autobiography. Indeed, it has been suggested that Van Dyke's trip to the desert was, in fact, precipitated by Carnegie, who wanted someone to deliver conscience money to a former employee sacked, persecuted, and ruined after the Homestead Strike and who had taken refuge from the law in northern Mexico. Needless to say, nothing of this story makes its way into The Desert, which is solely concerned with disinterested acts of acute perception (10).

References

1. Dave Hickey, 'Shooting the Land,' in Peter E. Pool, ed. The Altered Landscape (Reno and Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press, 1999), 22-32, p. 25.
2. Ibid., pp. 26-7.
3. Ibid, p. 28.
4. Frank Lloyd Wright quoted in Peter Reyner Banham, Scenes in America Deserta (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), p. 73.
5. David W. Teague, The Southwest in American Literature and Art: The Rise of a Desert Aesthetic (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997), p. 128; Peter Wild, ed., The Desert Reader: Descriptions of America's Arid Regions (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1991), p. 111; Patricia Nelson Limerick, Desert Passages: Encounters with the American Deserts (Alburquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1985), p. 96.
6. Teague, p. 130. See also Alessandra Ponte, 'The House of Light and Entropy: Inhabiting the American Desert,' Assemblage 30 (1996):12-31, p. 19.
7. Peter Wild quoted in Ponte, p. 129. John C. Van Dyke, The Desert: Further Studies in Natural Appearances (London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1901).
8. Ibid, p.138.
9. Ponte, 'The House of Light and Entropy,' p. 19. 'Berenson's oeuvre must be placed within the milieu of the theories of visual perception developed in the aesthetics of Konrad Fiedler, Adolf von Hildebrand, Alois Riegel, and Heinrich Wolfflin'; that is, an aesthetics of 'pure visibility'. Ponte, pp. 19-20.
10. Van Dyke liked to present himself as the ideal composite of cultivated, urbane aesthete and Rooseveltian outdoorsman, as much at home in the Painted Desert as the galleries of Europe. To a large extent he was, yet the picture of self-sufficient nomad is somewhat compromised by the fact that many of his desert visits were made by train, he often stayed on his brother's ranch or in good hotels, and his knowledge of desert fauna was hardly sufficient to survive for long periods alone in harsh conditions. 'In 1901 [Van Dyke] sent the tearsheets for his book Old English Masters, Engraved by Timothy Cole back to the Century company not from a desert water hole but from the Hotel Almada, in Guayamas, Mexico, which its stationary proclaimed to be a "Hotel Moderno de Primera Clase."' He would not have lasted for long, observes Teague, 'under the delusions that rattlesnakes are in fact sluggish and that Gila monsters are harmless.' Teague, p. 130.

I offer a more extended discussion of Van Dyke and his relevance to British architecture critic Reyner Banham's reading of Western American space in John Beck, ‘An Over-illuminated World: Reyner Banham and Art History in the Wilderness.’ Everything 3 (2000): 26-33. Zabriskie Point has recently (finally) been released on DVD in the UK.

Camilo Vergara

Edward Burtynsky

North Bay, Canada

German Fortifications: The Atlantic Wall

Let's Face It in Colour

Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male (1939)

Chris Burden, Shoot

Richard Serra, Surprise Attack

Excerpt here

Robert Smithson, Asphalt Rundown

David Maisel, The Library of Dust

Gordon Matta-Clark, Conical Intersect

Thank Christ for the Bomb

Two albums made at the beginning of the 1970s explicitly dealing with the reverberations of world war in the present. One by an English band, the other by a German group. Both draw on potentially controversial iconography and speak to particular constructions of national history and its legacies.

Miroslaw Balka: How It Is

Tate Modern 13 October 2009 – 5 April 2010.

For the second time in the same afternoon I am about to enter a dark Polish chamber. This time it is the vast grey steel shipping container erected in the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall by Polish artist Miroslaw Balka entitled, after Samuel Beckett’s 1964 novel, How It Is. The huge box (30m long x 13m high) is on 2m stilts, which means that you can walk under it, though the feeling that the thing is going to collapse on top of you is quite strong. At the back end is a ramp which leads inside the structure but the darkness within is so profound that visitors soon completely disappear from view as they walk in. Although not quite as literal as Kusmirowski’s Wagon, a life size reproduction of the type of train carriages used to transport prisoners to Auschwitz exhibited at the 4th Berlin Biennale in 2006, allusions to recent Polish history in Balka’s work are clear. The size of the structure is such, though, that the echoes of forced transportation, imprisonment, and obliteration are both outstripped and amplified by the box’s overpowering presence.

Robert Kusmirowski: Bunker

The Curve, Barbican Art Gallery, London. 30.09.09-10.01.10

The Polish artist Robert Kusmirowski has bunkered The Curve -- the gallery has been converted into a series of rooms and corridors full of broken-down electronic equipment, discoloured documents, old clothes, and piles of old canisters. A draisine runs along a track that seems to go nowhere. Stair-rails are knobbled with rust and everything is covered in a heavy layer of dust. A ventilation system or electricity generator drone fills the space without ever becoming ominous, and some grilled lightbulbs provide just enough illumination to get from room to room.

The gallery attendant briefs me before I enter the bunker. It's quite dark in there, she says, so tread carefully. Don't touch anything. No photography. It is dark in there, in the way cinemas are dark when you go in during the day, or in the manner of a fairground attraction or waxwork exhibit where the creepy theatricality abruptly shuts out natural light and puffs its illusions into the atmosphere. It may just be a seasonal influence, but there is also a whiff of the grotto about the blank entrance to a subterranean world of fantasy. The disorienting effect is sudden in Bunker, and although the fact of the environment’s artifice never completely goes away, the Barbican complex within which the installation is ensconced seems immediately remote and irrelevant. More accurately, the experience is a bit like exiting a shopping mall into the stairwell of a multistory car park or mistakenly getting out of a lift on the maintenance floor. At moments like this, common enough in contemporary urban life, the glare and noise of heavily managed spectacular environments are temporarily cut out and we find ourselves amid the dirt, damp, and acoustic atonalities of the concrete boxes and sheet metal containers that are passed off as public space. This moment, on the threshold of entering Bunker, of anticipation and misrecognition is fleeting but key to the affective power of the kind of immersive environments constructed by Kusmirowski. It is the moment when the security of the art centre is imaginatively breached by the uncanny effect of finding oneself on the other side. Although it is the iconography of World War II and Cold War bunkers -- mid-twentieth century analogue technology, plenty of nuts and bolts, rust, concrete, and grey paint -- that Kusmirowski is drawing on to anchor the piece, the military dimension is downplayed enough for the space to feel like a more generic non-place, a forgotten or irrelevant corner of a large modern urban structure no longer even used by service staff. Walking around the outside of the Barbican in the dying light of a winter afternoon, the feeing is not that different.

The simultaneous proximity and distance of the bunker space to its enfolding environment -- its near- and farness -- is one aspect of the installations capacity to unsettle. Another is its ability to appear utterly authentic and completely phony at the same time. With so many World War II and Cold War bunkers renovated and reconstructed as tourist attractions, part of the strangeness of Bunker is the way it apes real bunkers that now perform as simulations of themselves. Wandering through Kusmirowski’s bunker feels a bit like discovering the remains of a real bunker but also like viewing a staged reconstruction inside a real but decommissioned bunker. The thing that distances Bunker from the tourist bunkers, though, is the dust; the dust and the absence of instructional labels. While the tourist bunker has somehow to create a narrative of redemption out of the remains of a previous site of threat and conflict -- this was a dangerous place, the real bunker must acknowledge, but is now safe and can be consumed as history -- Kusmirowski’s bunker, created within a development built out of the craters of the Blitz, instead concentrates on generating an affectively authentic space out of a collection of unprepossessing and unrelated bits of junk. The tourist bunker is always on the verge of, if not already and necessarily deeply invested in, fetishizing the paraphernalia of the military-industrial institutions it preserves and displays. Bunker gets close to this in the sense that the ghost train dimension of the thing gives it a gothic aura that might be a bit too much. On the other hand, the banality of the stuff strewn around the place -- old bunks and bits of machinery probably pulled out of skips or dragged back from salvage yards -- refuses to offer much to the diligent Jane’s Defence Weekly reader.

• BBC News, Friday, 9 October 2009 Artist installs replica bunker

Take It then Face It

London Can Take It (1940), one of the most successful propaganda films produced in the UK during World War II, presents the chilling scenario of a city as target during total war. Directors Harry Watt and Humphrey Jennings used the American journalist Quentin Reynolds to write and narrate the voiceover, which to modern ears has the effect of making the opening of the film seem a bit like an episode of the Twilight Zone, where Rod Sterling introduces in earnest tones a drama of dreadful yet often plausible horror. This admittedly superficial resemblance to popular science fiction is not so far out, perhaps, since part of the purpose of Reynolds' narration is to provide critical transatlantic distance -- to speak to an American audience that is observing from far away, as if from another world -- and at the same time to carry the sense that what happens in London makes a difference in the United States. The film toured the US in a slightly modified form as Britain Can Take It, and President Roosevelt attended a private screening. The Blitz-torn London depicted here is a disturbing world that is all too familiar and yet morbidly strange; it is both reassuring and saturated with dread.