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- guardian.co.uk, Thursday 15 April 2010 22.50 BST
A soujourn into our recent past ... The Little Ones, made in London in 1965
LP Hartley once said: "The past is another country – they do things differently there." When I sat down and watched Jim O'Connolly's moving 1965 feature film The Little Ones, accompanied by Lionel Ngakane's 1966 short Jemima + Johnny, I realised how true that is. In these rather beguiling films about the innocence of children and their capacity for binding communities, I not only saw a London that I failed to recognise, but came face to face with my own past. Or at least that of my father.
Jemima + Johnny was shot in part on the street where my father had lived since arriving from Grenada three years previously: Moorhouse Road, London W2. It was a few years before I born, but to see the streets and the houses as they looked back then, and to have such a personal connection to it, was at first a little freaky but then ever so exciting. Like every other person of my generation, I have heard stories of the those dilapidated houses rented to immigrants at great profit to the slum landlords, but I didn't realise they were that grimy, that the environment was that poor. Actually to see a London still so bleak, so far from the gentrified city I have become used to, introduced me to a foreign land.
Jemima + Johnnie – a beautiful, almost dialogue-free film – makes me wonder I have not heard more about Lionel Ngakane and why I was not aware of such narratives being made in the mid-60s. For although it deals with race in a seemingly traditional way – two children, one black and one white, bringing a splintered community together – there is not an ounce of didactism to be found. It takes race as a subject but tries to create art out of it. And by and large it succeeds.
However, the real discovery for me was The Little Ones. O'Connolly creates a story that surprisingly isn't dependent on ethnicity at all, but on the need of one black and one white boy for love and friendship, which they believe they will find if they can get to Jamaica, where love can be picked from the trees.
Although the film follows the boys' adventures as they travel from London to Liverpool to try to board a ship, the real story for me lies in the faces of the people and dirtiness of London. By today's standards the children in the film look almost malnourished, as grey and unkempt as the bricks and mortar. As I sat through this sojourn into our recent past, I began to understand again the power of this medium, the power that goes beyond its primary function of simply storytelling, but the power of holding history for us. And how the unearthing of such films show us how progressive we were, even when Britain was grappling with its fear of immigration and the resulting xenophobia.
I so enjoyed seeing these two movies back to back, but I came away a little sad. Sad that both these films were made and released about the same time as the iconic American TV series I Spy, starring Robert Culp and Bill Cosby. I Spy was also a narrative that featured black and white leading characters, but did not deal with the issue of race. In the US, its very existence has been celebrated as a breakthrough, while we – in somewhat stereotypically British fashion – seem to have forgotten about our achievement.
If the screening of Jemima + Johnny and The Little Ones at the BFI Southbank in London next week achieves anything, it will be to remind us that, 45 years ago, film-makers were already going beyond race in the narratives they were creating. Let's hope we fare as well 45 years from now.
The Little Ones and Jemima + Johnny are screened at BFI Southbank on April 29; www.bfi.org.uk