Humphrey Jennings and British Documentary Film

Humphrey Jennings has been described as a poet, a propagandist, an artist, an interpreter of the human condition, and, of course, a documentary film-maker. In many ways, his films encapsulate the imagined experience of the Second World War in Britain: stoic resilience, the eternal values of civilisation and culture, endurance against the odds, and good humour. Jennings, along with Bill Brandt and Herbert Mason, created the visual memory of the conflict: from the defiance of London Can Take It, which he made with Harry Watt in 1940, to the poetic reconstruction of Words For Battle; from the sights and sounds—the rhythmic patterns—of a nation at war in Listen to Britain, to the hope and aspirations of a new generation in Diary For Timothy. Moreover, his personal journey, a young man at Cambridge seeking to understand modernity and its discontents, his involvement in Mass Observation, with its aim to construct an ‘anthropology of ourselves’, and his life as a surrealist artist, he has come to represent the ‘cultured classes’ of the 1920s and 1930s. Understandably, then, he has been the subject of much historical interest and has attracted more attention than other documentarists of the period—with the exception perhaps of John Grierson, whose GPO Film Unit employed Jennings in 1934 and then again from mid-1938

Ancient history · Art · Art history · Battle · Civilization · Literature · Modernity · Movie theater · Performance art · Poetry · Subject (documents · Cinema and Media Studies · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Philosophy · Photography and Visual Culture