PICTURING A NATION IN WARTIME: THE FILMS OF HUMPHREY JENNINGS

A towering figure in the history of documentary filmmaking and British cinema, Humphrey Jennings’s body of work was small but enormously influential. Associated with John Grierson, the “father of documentary” (literally, insofar as he coined the term), whose GPO Film Unit gave him his start, Jennings is best known for LISTEN TO BRITAIN (part of Anthology’s Essential Cinema repertory collection). But this is only one of many seminal films he made during and after WWII. Combining elements of impressionistic city-symphony experimentation, documentary observation and propaganda, these unique films stand at the center of one of film history’s epochal movements. We will be screening all of the major short films, as well as the sole feature, FIRES WERE STARTED, of a filmmaker whom Lindsay Anderson once suggested was perhaps “the only real poet the British cinema has yet produced.”

Special thanks to Kevin Macdonald, Fran Robertson (Figmont TV), Carol Hunter (MovieMail) and Kitty Cleary (MoMA).

PROGRAM 1:

SPARE TIME

1939, 18 minutes, 16mm.

Made for the New York World’s Fair of 1939, SPARE TIME is an incredible portrait of the prewar working class and an early illustration of Humphrey Jennings’s genius.

LONDON CAN TAKE IT

1940, 10 minutes, 35mm. Co-directed by Harry Watt.

The first real evocation of Britain coping with the war.

WORDS FOR BATTLE

1941, 8 minutes, 35mm. Commentary spoken by Laurence Olivier.

In WORDS FOR BATTLE images of wartime Britain are imaginatively counter-pointed on the soundtrack by passages from Milton, Blake, Browning, Kipling and others.

LISTEN TO BRITAIN

1942, 20 minutes, 35mm. Co-directed by Stewart McAllister.

“[In LISTEN TO BRITAIN] the subject is simply the sights and sounds of wartime Britain over a period of some twenty-four hours. To people who have not seen the film it is difficult to describe its fascination… The picture is a stylistic triumph, a succession of marvelously evocative images freely linked by contrasting and complementary sounds; and yet it is not for its quality of form that one remembers it most warmly, but for the continuous sensitivity of its human regard.” –Lindsay Anderson, HUMPHREY JENNINGS: FILM-MAKER, PAINTER, POET

THE SILENT VILLAGE

1943, 36 minutes, 16mm.

Jennings’s somber re-creation of the destruction by the Nazis of the Czech village of Lidice.

Total running time: ca. 95 minutes.