“There is nothing so exhilarating as seeing even a few ideas one has long had really coming into being on the screen.” This reflection was shared by the English documentary filmmaker Humphrey Jennings with his wife in a letter written from London in the summer of 1942. At the time, Mrs. Jennings was living in the United States with their two young daughters, and her husband was nearing completion of his only feature, made under the auspices of Britain’s Ministry of Information.
Ultimately known by a pair of titles, “I Was a Fireman” and “Fires Were Started,” the movie was a modestly fictionalized distillation of 24 hours among members of an auxiliary firefighting unit in a dockside London neighborhood. With a full moon expected for their next shift, the unit can expect to be tested during the night ahead. And so it is, by incendiary bombs that ignite a warehouse adjacent to a munitions ship.
The cast consisted of non-pros more or less duplicating their wartime roles in civil defense agencies. It was one of more than a dozen films completed by Jennings and his crews during World War II. Most were one- or two-reel shorts whose titles still evoke the patriotic urgency of the period: “The First Days,” “Spring Offensive,” “London Can Take It!” “Heart of Britain,” “Words for Battle,” “Listen to Britain.”
A characteristic Jennings anthology was assembled several years ago for the 16 mm distribution company Blackhawk Films. Acquired for DVD by Image Entertainment, this collection is available for purchase at Amazon .com. It’s an unlikely vintage item for the documentary shelves in most retail outlets.
The Jennings centennial is just a few days away — he was born in a rural Suffolk village on Aug. 19, 1907 — so it’s appropriate to recall the nature of his work, which once enjoyed an almost reverential prestige among admirers. His life ended prematurely in 1950: He fell to his death while on a location-scouting trip to the Greek island of Poros. It was a prospective site for a documentary about public health sponsored by the European Economic Commission.
The anthology derives its title, “Listen to Britain,” from a famous Jennings documentary of 1940 in which he contrives to liberate images of wartime compatriots from a conventional spoken narration. Instead, he blends evocative imagery with evocative natural sound. Sometimes it matches the camera subjects: couples gliding around an enormous dance hall to the tune of “Roll Out the Barrel,” or Canadian soldiers serenading themselves to “Home on the Range” on a troop train. In other sequences, natural sounds are deftly orchestrated for rhythmic effects that replace straightforward musical accompaniment. For example, one transition experiments with the hum of factory machines as “underscoring,” distantly echoing the martial mood set by Royal Air Force musicians at the National Gallery during free luncheon concerts.
Jennings discovered a congenial and exalted mission as a national unifier during the war. In some respects, he was using cinematic rhetoric to echo the inspirational oratory that distinguished Winston Churchill as prime minister; both celebrated the determination and resourcefulness of a population under attack. As a matter of fact, Mr. Churchill’s verbal defiance becomes a part of the soundtrack in a Jennings film of 1941, “Words for Battle,” which adroitly replaces narration with historical quotation.
Entrusted to Laurence Olivier, these quotations confront the crisis with national eloquence over the centuries. A brilliant concluding flourish even evokes an American deity, Abraham Lincoln, blending passages from the Gettysburg Address with footage taken near the Lincoln statue in Parliament Square as military traffic and people in uniform seem to surge through London. Handel’s “Water Music,” invoked in early sequences, returns for an emotional crescendo. The cumulative impact bodes well for the entire war effort and dignifies every audio-visual motif in the film itself.
Jennings’ father was an architect. His mother was a painter and gallery owner. Educated at boarding schools in Cambridge from the age of 10 or so, Jennings graduated from Pembroke College at Cambridge University but left a graduate dissertation on Thomas Gray unfinished. He appeared to be preparing for careers in painting, theater design or still photography until hired by the documentary unit of the General Post Office in 1934. The “Listen to Britain” anthology would seem more authoritative with examples of his work from the 1930s — say, the first, “Post Haste,” a 10-minute study of betting pools; and the last, “Spare Time,” an 18-minute study of city dwellers in their leisure time.
Jennings’ last cinematic testament, “Family Portrait” of 1950, is part of the anthology. It interweaves a half-hour summary of English history with hopeful prospects for the future. Meant to commemorate the Festival of Britain a year later, the film suggests several directions that the Jennings flair for educational, historical and inspirational content might have taken in subsequent decades.
TITLE: “Listen to Britain and Other Films by Humphrey Jennings”
RATING: No MPAA rating (Adult subject matter — a compilation of documentary films made in England from 1940 to 1950; occasional images of wartime peril and destruction)
CONTENT: Seven films directed by Humphrey Jennings for film units of the British government
RUNNING TIME: About three hours
DVD EDITION: Image Entertainment
WEB SITE: www.image-entertainment.com
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