Coventry Cathedral: Exploring Reflexivity in a Collage Film

Employing an extensive and diverse range of archival material, Coventry Cathedral: Building for a New Britain chronicles the planning and construction in the 1950s and early 1960s of a modernist replacement for the medieval cathedral almost entirely destroyed in 1940. Drawing on a breadth of archival elements from a wide range of sources, the production team sought to develop a reflexive screen language that acknowledged the materialities of these elements, highlighted the production processes that created them, and located them in a screen language of spatial montage and distinctive graphics. Centred on a close reading of the opening sequence, the article explores the ways in which the film worked to develop William Wees’ conception of collage ‘to invest found footage with new meanings’. Those meanings in this case included the idea of the construction of the film as an allegory of the construction of the cathedral and the reconstruction of post-war Britain.