Humphrey Jennings and British Documentary Film

Humphrey Jennings is an attractive figure for historians of inter-war Britain and the Second World War. Mass Observer, Surrealist, patriot, historian, and maker of exquisitely observed documentary films, he appears (perhaps too neatly) to channel the complex artistic, cultural, and political sensibilities of the 1930s generation. The everyday sinew and contradictions of life in modern Britain, which Orwell pinpointed in prose, Jennings captured on celluloid. Philip C. Logan's Humphrey Jennings and British Documentary Film: A Re-Assessment is built upon the premise that the magpie nature of Jennings' various activities needs to be considered cumulatively; that his multi-media dabblings coalesce into an aesthetically coherent and culturally important whole. Although the bulk of the book is concerned with the period 1938–50, Logan tries to avoid focusing disproportionately on the trio of films (Listen to Britain (1941), Fires Were Started (1943) and A Diary for Timothy (1945)) that have been the main locus of scholarly interest. To this end the book's sixteen chronologically arranged chapters are all of the same length, and in the Introduction he takes pains to differentiate his approach from that of a straighter historical-biographical take. The distinction he makes is not especially convincing and possibly represents an attempt to distance the book from Kevin Jackson's Humphrey Jennings (2004). Even less convincing is the description of Jennings as a previously ‘shadowy’ figure, as this book not only follows hot-ish on the heels of Jackson's biography, but Logan himself (who has seemingly sought out everything ever written on Jennings and more) cites an enormous volume of pre-existing literature

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