This is a brief documentary about the life of Cambridge University. Two things caused me some surprise. The first was that it makes no mention of Oxford, Cambridge's traditional rivals, and the second was the fact that although it was made in 1945 there is no discussion of the war which must have caused many changes to our universities, just as it did to every other aspect of British life.
The film is structured around the typical student's day. The running assumption is that the typical student is male- the proportion of women in Cambridge in 1945 was much lower than it is today- although the presence of female students is acknowledged and a few of them are shown. The typical student spends his morning in lectures, the afternoon in tutorials (or "supervisions" to use the Cambridge term) or in private study and the evening in extra-curricular activities like the University Music Society. We also see two of the lecturers in action, the physicist Sir Lawrence Bragg and the historian G M Trevelyan.
The film presents the University as a blend of ancient and modern, combining ancient ceremonies and traditions with shots of scientific equipment which was doubtless very state-of-the-art in 1945. I myself was a student at Cambridge, in the eighties rather than the forties, although things do not appear to have changed much in the intervening forty years. Apart from one shot of a group of handsome half-timbered houses, possibly since demolished, I recognised every exterior scene shown here, and a few of the interior ones. Some of the traditions appear to have changed between the forties and the eighties, such as the one whereby arts students were required to wear academic gowns to lectures but science students were not. (In my day we did not wear gowns to lectures, but were expected to do so for supervisions). Others, however, such as the degree ceremony and the formal dinners in the College Hall, were instantly recognisable.
I recently caught this film on the specialist movie channel Talking Pictures TV, which occasionally shows documentary shorts like this one as well as its normal diets of classic feature films. The point of reviving them is presumably to give modern audiences a nostalgic glimpse of British life in the mid twentieth century. Nostalgia normally involves a feeling of "Haven't things changed!", but when your subject is an institution like Cambridge, where some things change very slowly indeed, that feeling is more likely to be "Haven't things stayed the same!"
The film is structured around the typical student's day. The running assumption is that the typical student is male- the proportion of women in Cambridge in 1945 was much lower than it is today- although the presence of female students is acknowledged and a few of them are shown. The typical student spends his morning in lectures, the afternoon in tutorials (or "supervisions" to use the Cambridge term) or in private study and the evening in extra-curricular activities like the University Music Society. We also see two of the lecturers in action, the physicist Sir Lawrence Bragg and the historian G M Trevelyan.
The film presents the University as a blend of ancient and modern, combining ancient ceremonies and traditions with shots of scientific equipment which was doubtless very state-of-the-art in 1945. I myself was a student at Cambridge, in the eighties rather than the forties, although things do not appear to have changed much in the intervening forty years. Apart from one shot of a group of handsome half-timbered houses, possibly since demolished, I recognised every exterior scene shown here, and a few of the interior ones. Some of the traditions appear to have changed between the forties and the eighties, such as the one whereby arts students were required to wear academic gowns to lectures but science students were not. (In my day we did not wear gowns to lectures, but were expected to do so for supervisions). Others, however, such as the degree ceremony and the formal dinners in the College Hall, were instantly recognisable.
I recently caught this film on the specialist movie channel Talking Pictures TV, which occasionally shows documentary shorts like this one as well as its normal diets of classic feature films. The point of reviving them is presumably to give modern audiences a nostalgic glimpse of British life in the mid twentieth century. Nostalgia normally involves a feeling of "Haven't things changed!", but when your subject is an institution like Cambridge, where some things change very slowly indeed, that feeling is more likely to be "Haven't things stayed the same!"
