WIND THE BOBBIN UP - A Cinematic View of the Industrial Revolution

When you have a young child you find yourself learning a large number of nursery rhymes. Initially you don't question the lyrics as you simply want to please and placate your child. But after an extended period of repeatedly singing them you begin to question what they're all about. The subject matters can be nonsense but the ones that seem to last, aside from having a catchy simple tune, tend to have a significant historical story. For example most people are agreed that "Ring a Ring o' Roses" is about the Great Plague in England in the mid 17th Century.

For our child, and many others it seems, the song of choice is "Wind the Bobbin Up" the lyrics of which are reproduced below.

Wind the bobbin up,

Wind the bobbin up,

Pull, pull, clap, clap, clap.

Wind it back again,

Wind it back again,

Pull, pull, clap, clap, clap,

Point to the ceiling,

Point to the floor,

Point to the window,

Point to the door,

Clap your hands together, 1, 2, 3,

Put your hands upon your knees 

The lyrics hint that the song may have originated from some kind of textile work and a quick search on the internet seems to confirm this, with Iona and Peter Opie tracing its origins back to 1890's in Yorkshire. However the rhyme speaks to me of something different, something beyond its original intention.

The industrial revolution not only produced inventions such as the sewing machines, the looms and the steam engine which created a whole new way of working in the world. Its impact was also felt beyond the landscape of the factory to produce new technologies such as the camera which allowed people to look at the world anew. For me visions of the industrial landscape that inspired the song are fixed in my mind from my experiences of those spaces captured by this new technology of the time.

The industrial revolution is synonymous with the spinning wheel, this was the motion which powered industry of that time. The symbolism of this motion is not lost on the subject of my research who begins his very first film with that very image.  By no coincidence this circular motion, which is both the title and the first two lines of the rhyme, is also the mechanism for how the camera records information on the reel. So for me, embedded in a world of research on cinematic space, the bobbin is the cinematic reel which is showing the world anew.

This is not however where the cinematic metaphors end, in the second verse the child is prompted to point at various features of the space surrounding them (which we also do in the hope that the child will learn through mirroring our actions). Possibly this is just a learning exercise for the child, but for me approaching it again from the point of view of my research this seems like a string of filmic shots, a montage of views that allow us to grasp (via the mechanism of the pointing finger as opposed to the camera) the space surrounding us.

Furthermore for me the views that you are prompted to take of the space are not arbitrary, including mention of window and door which also have significant meaning in cinema, and force you to engage with your surrounding space in an unusual way. When otherwise would you focus you attention on the ceiling, the floor or the window rather than the space beyond it. This unusual engagement with space is one of the features of early avant-garde cinema, where filmmakers were asking how this new technology can help us to engage with the world in a different way.

For me an unusual viewpoint of this short, and what would seem at first insignificant rhyme, has lead me to re-evaluate the world in which it was constructed, the space surrounding me and also my own approach to my work.