Original at
Glasgow University
John Seaborne
The little there is written about John Seaborne is all found in memoirs
of Michael Powell. He first charted the course of their friendship in 1938,
in the book Four Hundred Thousand Feet On Foula,
[It was only "200,000 Feet on Foula"]
an account of the
quest to make the film The Edge of the World (1938) in the Hebrides.
His work with Powell before that and with the Archers after is covered in
the first volume of Powell's autobiography.
'Seaborne' was an assumed name he had taken after deserting one regiment
in the Second World War and joining another, to get nearer the action. Being
listed as a deserter under his real name he continued with John Seaborne
for the rest of his life. He entered the film business as a stagehand but
soon moved up the ranks to become a director-editor of the weekly Gaumont
Film Magazine, which went world-wide and accompanied feature films as a
short. He met Powell at a small film studio, Nettleford, by the Thames were
Seaborne was already an editor and Where Powell arrived to shoot his first
feature film, Two Crowded Hours in 1931. From then on Seaborne cut
all of Powell's films up to and including I Know Where I'm Going,
with a two film break for illnness at the time of 49th Parallel (1940)
and One of Our Aircraft is Missing (1941), when he was replaced
by David Lean.
Not only did Seaborne cut the films but he was frequently on set, being
a construction expert and on a number of occasions second-unit director.
Having cut Powell and Pressburger's first collaboration The Spy in Black
(1939) and their follow-up Contraband (1940), missed the next
two, Seaborne found himself in the bosom of the Archers for their first
Technicolor film The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1942). Powell
explained the method of working the company had formulated, "We always encouraged
the editor to keep up with the shooting, and it was rare that John Seaborne
was more than three or four days behind us with his first assembly of the
film. I needed to know what he thought of the scenes and whether he needed
retakes or extra shots to complete sequences, while the sets were still
standing in the studio."
"The editing and cutting of a film, the selection of the best performances
by the actors from what the director and cameramen often think are the worst
takes, the relationship with the director, the intercutting of close-ups
and long shots, the use of dialogue and the use of sound - these are all
in the hands of the editor as he sits in his cutting room looking at the
images on the miniature screen before him, and trying to reconcile them
with the words of the script, which lies open on his desk, and the scenes
which the director has brought to the screen more in the breach than in
the observence". Powell testifies that Seaborne was "all this and much more
. . . His contribution to our films was immense but varied."
