Humphrey Jennings (1907-1950)

[DB7]

Cinema: Humphrey Jennings by Kevin Jackson

REVIEWED BY CHRISTOPHER BRAY



HUMPHREY JENNINGS

by Kevin Jackson

http://www.timesonline.co.uk

Picador £30 pp448



Humphrey Jennings. The name is so anonymous-sounding it might have been that of a carpenter or manufacturer of preserves. Yet it belonged to the most singular of the talents that clustered around John Grierson’s British documentary movement during the 1930s and 1940s. While the bulk of their work is now only of sociohistoric interest, Jennings’s films still speak to us as films.



Grierson and his acolytes were utilitarians. They believed their documentaries could make people into better members of society. Not so Jennings, who thought aesthetics more important than agitprop. Although he shared the Grierson gang’s instinctive leftism, he was never quite trusted by them. As Grierson once joked to a colleague: “Let’s go down and see Humphrey being nice to the common people.� Nice to them he was, though as Kevin Jackson points out in this scrupulously weighted biography, Jennings also “had a surprisingly old-fashioned pride in employing servants�.



It came with the territory. Jennings was born in 1907, the son of an artist mother and an amateur architect father. Their Walberswick home in Suffolk was a place of paintings, poetry and politics. In bed with flu, the 11-year-old Humphrey pronounced himself bored, whereupon he was handed a copy of Plato’s Republic and told to get on with it. By the time he left the Perse School in 1926, Jennings had proved himself a first-rate athlete, orator, actor, set designer, poet, linguist, classicist and historian. One’s envy increases when he fetches up at Pembroke College, Cambridge, to read English. Jennings was lucky enough to be an undergraduate just as the subject as we know it today was being invented. One of his tutors was I A Richards who was working on what would become Practical Criticism. Among his fellow students were William “Seven Types of Ambiguity� Empson and Jacob “The Ascent of Man� Bronowski. That guy over there was John Maynard Keynes, and those two bickering blokes were Bertie Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein. To Jennings, already burning with learning, Cambridge offered less a baptism of fire than a warm welcome. He felt instantly at home. Three years later he took a starred First.



Multitalented, Jennings had no idea what he wanted to do when he graduated. Or rather, he had lots of ideas. He was going to do postgraduate research. He was going to be a painter (though heavily derivative, the horse’s head Jackson reproduces crackles with energy). He was going to be a poet. Unable to make up his mind, Jennings did what so many brilliant young men in his position were doing: he went to Paris.



He came back a surrealist bricoleur, working on collages of such mysterious juxtapositions (a swiss roll and a mountain?) that the bigger mystery is how he got tugged into the documentary swirl. In fact, Jackson argues convincingly, there was no mystery because those ostensibly realist tracts are everywhere tainted with what André Breton called “psychic automatism�. A Diary for Timothy (1946), for instance, seems at first glance like a piece of author-free reportage about the state of post-war Britain. Nonetheless, its often startling movements from image to image make for a work of mood-swinging self-awareness.



Jennings was always at pains to remind his audience of the constructed nature of his pictures. He was a realist about realism. Far from believing that the camera couldn’t lie, he believed it had to lie if it were to stand any chance of telling the truth. Fires Were Started (1943) uses collage technique, blending the iconography of documentary (it “stars� real East End firemen working during the Blitz) with the dictates of fiction (from that observed reality the picture traces a near conventionally structured narrative arc) to conjure up a work of compacted poetic truth. As Jackson says, the film takes you on a “journey from the everyday to the timeless and back again�.



Jennings’s own journey from the everyday to the timeless was over all too soon. He was 43 when, scouting locations on the Greek island of Poros, he lost a handhold climbing, and plunged to his death. How different post-war British film might have looked had he lived. In this wondrously adoring book he does just that.

[Paul E]

"The only true poet of the English cinema"

Just bought this. I really can't agree with (the usually sound) Michael Powell when he describes documentary makers as 'frustrated feature makers' (or words to that effect). If Britain made a major contribution to cinema in the 30s it was surely through documentary film - not just Jennings but Cavalcanti, Len Lye, Norman MacLaren and others. Very likely in the 30s the ordinary British persons first encounter with surrealism (if not through a London Transport or Shell Oil poster) would be through a five minute short made for the GPO! Check out Len Lye's N or NW (about such a prosaic matter as using the post code properly) if proof is needed.....

[Steve Crook]

Paul E:

"The only true poet of the English cinema"

Just bought this. I really can't agree with (the usually sound) Michael Powell when he describes documentary makers as 'frustrated feature makers' (or words to that effect). If Britain made a major contribution to cinema in the 30s it was surely through documentary film - not just Jennings but Cavalcanti, Len Lye, Norman MacLaren and others. Very likely in the 30s the ordinary British persons first encounter with surrealism (if not through a London Transport or Shell Oil poster) would be through a five minute short made for the GPO! Check out Len Lye's N or NW (about such a prosaic matter as using the post code properly) if proof is needed.....

Powell just had a bee in his bonnet about documentaries because he knew that all documentaries have an element of fiction and selective editing. Flaherty's Man of Arran (1934) was heavily staged, he got the islanders to use some fishing techniques that they abandoned many years before. But it was also (or mainly) the way that the critics seemed to be in love with documentaries and considered them to be the only original British films.



Pressburger's grandson, Kevin Macdonald, did a very good documentary for Channel 4 about Humphrey Jennings in 2000.



Steve

[Paul E]

Worth a read although I think too much of Jackson's focus falls on Jennings' rather indifferent poetry and painting rather than on his legacy as a filmaker. Although written with obvious affection the result is a Jennings portrayed as something of a dilettante. Also, Jackson digresses lengthily on the backgrounds of some of Jennings' associates but at the same time is guilty of crucial lapses of research (for instance, Jackson appears to be unaware of the significant essay Jennings wrote on his involvement as producer of Birth of the Robot (Len Lye's colour film for Shell). The greatest weakness of the book though is its failure to place clearly Jennings' role within British modernism, especially in its commercial manifestations.

[Clinton Morgan]

He should have a DVD release. A box of three or four discs consisting of all of his films, including the Kevin McDonald ("Come out and git yer boy!") documentary and with commentaries by Christopher Frayling, Jeffrey Richards and Mike Leigh.



I love 'Spare Time'. There was a time when Channel 4 would show the Jennings/Grierson/Calvacanti documentaries in the afternoons. Ah well, at least they're showing St Trinians films.

[DB7]

Humphrey Jennings: true poet of cinema



Last Updated: 12:01am BST 17/08/2007

As the BFI presents a season of Humphrey Jennings's documentaries, Sukhdev Sandhu celebrates the lyrical work of a man enthralled by Englishness



There was a time when documentaries were seen as poor and rather earnest relatives of the feature film.



For sure, a critical cap would be doffed to the likes of Leni Riefenstahl or to Claude Lanzmann, but, for the most part, documentaries were regarded as lowly art, souped-up versions of home movies or newsreel footage that were driven by issues rather than by aesthetics, and that recorded rather than created or transformed reality.



While that perception has changed over the past couple of decades, on account of the success of films such as Hoop Dreams (1994) and Michael Moore's Roger and Me (1989) (both of which fashion the kind of urgent and enthralling narratives at which Hollywood used to excel), it's still the case that some of the best and most pioneering documentarians are not as known as they ought to be.



Of few filmmakers is this more true than Humphrey Jennings. Directors such as Mike Leigh, Kevin Macdonald and Lindsay Anderson, the last of whom called him "the only true poet of the English cinema", have all sung his praises.



Images from his films, especially those of rubble-strewn east London during the Blitz, are often used to pad out history programmes about the Second World War, but these days his bold and endlessly resonant documentaries, among them Listen to Britain (1942) and Fires Were Started (1943), are more often invoked than seen.

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Born in 1907, Jennings was one of the first English directors to understand that documentaries could be more than mirrors to the world.



He was trained by John Grierson, a Scottish Calvinist who coined the term "documentary" in the 1920s and who managed to secure government funding for the creation of a film unit that, he planned, would produce educational material for the good of society.



Grierson's philosophy, best encapsulated in his statement "I look on cinema as a pulpit, and use it as a propagandist", was reflected in films such as Arthur Elton and Edgar Anstey's Housing Problems (1935), in which slum-dwellers speak to camera about their shoddy living quarters in stilted rhythms and contextualised by paternalistic voiceovers.



Jennings, however, was a fiercely and loquaciously intelligent Cambridge graduate whose work had attracted the attention of T S Eliot. He was a bibliophile, a set designer, a writer of verse, a painter who in 1936 helped to stage the first Surrealist exhibition in Britain.



There was no way that he was going to dedicate his life to churning out pedagogic bulletins for the masses; he sought, rather, to create what in his penultimate film Family Portrait (1950) he called "a new kind of poetry and a new kind of prose", a celluloid forerunner of what is nowadays termed "creative non-fiction".



This radical approach, one that sought to dig below the surface of daily life in order to divine the almost intangible structures and patterns that united the people of this country, was not so dissimilar from the Mass Observation project that he had helped to establish in 1937, and whose manifesto encouraged volunteers to study the "behaviour of people at war memorials; shouts and gestures of motorists; the aspidistra cult; beards, armpits, eyebrows".



No surprise then that Basil Wright, director of Song of Ceylon (1934), dismissed Jennings's Spare Time (1939) on account of its "patronising, sometimes almost sneering attitude towards the efforts of the lower-income groups to entertain themselves".



Seen today, however, the grace and gentle wit with which it links together the pigeon-fancying, darts-playing and country-cycling pastimes of its subjects, and its ability to home in on a single woman bending down to do up her shoes amid a sea of ballroom dancers, appear anything but patronising.



Its democratic vision of English culture recalls George Orwell's evocation in The Lion and the Unicorn (1941) of "the clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill towns, the rattle of pin-tables in the Soho pubs, the old maids hiking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning".



It also anticipates those key works of post-war cultural anthropology: Charles Parker's collection of Radio Ballads (1958-1964) and Iona and Peter Opie's playground study, The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959).



Jennings, no less than Wilfred Owen or Keith Douglas, was a war poet. The threat of German invasion not only stimulated him to produce his most urgent and simultaneously timeless work, but it encouraged him to apply his free-ranging intelligence to the question of England, what it was and what it represented.



He was a socialist more indebted to the nonconformism of William Cobbett than to the doctrines of Karl Marx, and his films are largely free of ancient statuary, glorious processions, patriotic cheerleading.



Instead, they are composed of vivid, beautifully photographed images of cornfields and wave-lashed shores, of factories and coal-smeared miners, and, in Listen to Britain, of both Dame Myra Hess and Flanagan and Allen.



Rural and industrial, ancient and modern, highbrow and vernacular: Jennings believed in a deep Albion, multi-layered and reverberating with ghost songs, that drew its strength from local variation and diversity. Indeed, in Family Portrait, he argued that Britain was a crucial link between Europe and America, a hybrid place whose distinction lay in its traditions of tolerance, courage, faith, freedom, and a commitment to social difference.



Especially innovative was Jennings's attention to sound; many of his films can be enjoyed with closed eyes. He understood, to a startlingly modern extent, that all places, and certainly nations, have sonic identities.



Listen to Britain creates a generously polyphonic sound-portrait of the country, so that the chimes of Big Ben, the roar of a fighter plane taking off, children's feet dancing in a schoolyard, the clip-clop of horses' hooves and the beery banter of working men are all heard alongside each other, equally important elements of a spectrum that is as moral as it is auditory.



Throughout the war, and before his premature death in 1950, Jennings's films were screened at WI halls, guilds, small local theatres. They were even screened on mobile projectors in factories during lunch breaks.

[Rob Compton]

"A Diary for Timothy" is such a beautiful piece of film poetry. I think it's the peak of Jennings' work

[julian_craster]

To read this Life of the Day complete with a picture of the subject,

visit http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/lotw/2010-09-24







(Frank) Humphrey Sinkler Jennings (1907-1950), film-maker, painter, and writer, was born at The Gazebo, Walberswick, Suffolk, on 19 August 1907, the elder of two sons of Frank Jennings (1877-c.1950), an architect, and of his wife, Mildred Jessie Hall (1881-c.1950), a painter and shopkeeper. In 1916 he went to the Perse School, Cambridge, at that time a progressive institution where the classicist Dr W. H. D. Rouse was headmaster and Caldwell Cook, author of The Play Way, was an inspiring teacher of English and drama. Jennings soon excelled both at work and at games and showed promise as an actor, set designer, and poet. In 1926 he won a scholarship from Pembroke College, Cambridge, to read for the English tripos, which was still in its early days. His undergraduate years were busy and set the pattern for a varied working life. He painted a great deal, designed sets for many theatrical productions, including the first British performances of Stravinsky's The Soldier's Tale and Honneger's King David, and, with his fellow undergraduates Jacob Bronowski and William Empson, founded and wrote for Experiment, a student magazine of unusual distinction. Despite these and many other distractions he studied assiduously, particularly in sixteenth-century literature and art, and managed to take a first in part one of the tripos (1928) and a first with distinction in part two (1929).



On 19 October 1929, after a brief courtship, Jennings married Cicely Cooper (b. 1908), the daughter of Richard Synge Cooper, a civil engineer; their first daughter, Mary-Lou, was born in September 1933 and their second, Charlotte, in August 1935. Under the direction of I. A. Richards, then an influential English don, Jennings began work on a doctoral thesis about the poetry of Thomas Gray, a former student of Pembroke. This was never completed though Richards thought his research 'a very remarkable combination of elaborate erudition with speculative daring' (private information) and T. S. Eliot offered to publish a shortened version of one chapter in the Criterion. The only tangible evidence of Jennings's postgraduate labours was his edition of the 1593 quarto of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, published in a small edition by the Experiment Press in 1930. Chronically short of money Jennings was often forced to interrupt his studies to take short-term employment and worked as a schoolteacher in Salisbury, as a textile designer in Paris, and as a set designer at the Festival Theatre in Cambridge. Finally, in 1934, he joined the General Post Office film unit (later renamed the Crown Film Unit), which gave him his first training as an editor and director.



For the next five years Jennings earned his living making short documentaries, both for the Post Office and for independent production companies, where he was able to experiment with the new colour processes Gasparcolor and Dufaycolor. The greater part of his always restless energies, however, was given to his usual extra-curricular activities of painting, writing (including an angry essay on theatre for The Arts Today, edited by Geoffrey Grigson), and various forms of private research. For a short period he became a leading figure of the British surrealist movement, and, with Roland Penrose, Herbert Read, and others, organized the famous International Surrealist Exhibition of June 1936, at which his collage Minotaur, an unflattering portrait of Lord Kitchener, proved to be one of the most notorious exhibits. With David Gascoyne he translated a collection of poems by the French surrealist Benjamin Peret, Remove your Hat (1936). Though brief Jennings's spell as a surrealist had lasting consequences. His many years of work on Pandaemonium, an epic anthology of texts illuminating the industrial revolution as seen by contemporary witnesses, began with a short article for the surrealist journal London Bulletin in 1938, while his contributions to Mass-Observation, the pioneering project in domestic anthropology which he founded early in 1937 with Tom Harrisson and Charles Madge, also showed marked surrealist tendencies. His principal publication while involved in the movement was May the Twelfth: Mass-Observation Day Surveys 1937, a collage account of George VI's coronation, co-edited with Madge for Faber and Faber.



Jennings's first distinctive film, Spare Time (1939), has sometimes been mistakenly identified as a product of Mass-Observation. In fact it marked Jennings's full-time return to the General Post Office film unit, where he remained until after the war, but the misattribution is understandable since the film-a rapid series of vignettes, cut to the music of brass bands, kazoos, and other amateur performances, and almost wordless, save for a terse commentary by Laurie Lee-depicted the leisure activities of working-class men, women, and children in much the same spirit as a Mass-Observation day report: deadpan, inquisitive, alert to idiosyncrasy and humour. Some of Jennings's colleagues found it condescending though it now appears far less so than many documentaries of the period and can stand comparison with certain essays of George Orwell as a remarkably sympathetic enquiry into popular culture. Like Orwell, too, Jennings was an unconventional member of the non-communist left and once defined his politics as 'those of William Cobbett' (Jackson, 232).



In collaboration with his gifted if cantankerous editor Stewart McAllister, whose contribution tended to be unjustly overlooked before Dai Vaughan's biography of McAllister, Portrait of an Invisible Man (1983), redressed the balance, Jennings developed the techniques of Spare Time in the films he made during the Second World War. In these documentaries Jennings drew on his several vocations as painter, poet, historian, and sociologist and brought each skill to a new pitch of refinement and passion. Though their fascination as a record of the home front and their efficacy as propaganda can hardly be overstated (they were among the films which helped bring the United States into the war), they are also works of outstanding eloquence, complexity, and emotional force; in brief, works of art. At least three of them-Listen to Britain (1942), Fires were Started (1943), and A Diary for Timothy (1945)-are now agreed to be masterpieces. Several contributors to Sight and Sound's international poll of directors and critics in 1992 nominated one of these titles in their list of the ten best films ever made.



Critics have been less kind to the four films Jennings made after the war-A Defeated People (1945), The Cumberland Story (1947), The Dim Little Island (1949), and Family Portrait (1950)-finding them at best unimaginative, at worst complacent, and animated by a sentimental patriotism that is almost a caricature of the ardent love of his native country which fired Jennings's greatest efforts. Such at least was the limiting judgement of the film director Lindsay Anderson, whose otherwise admiring essay of 1954, 'Only connect', did much to keep Jennings's reputation alive through periods of neglect. Anderson called Jennings 'the only real poet the British cinema has yet produced' and few have seriously challenged the verdict (Jennings, 53). Yet there is little biographical evidence to support the view that Jennings was a spent force. He continued to work tirelessly at accumulating texts on science and industry for Pandaemonium (some of which bore fruit in Family Portrait), he completed dozens of paintings, and he wrote erudite, searching articles for the Times Literary Supplement and other publications. He seems to have been particularly stimulated by a visit in 1947 to Burma, where he went to look into the possibilities of a feature based on a novel by H. E. Bates, The Purple Plain (1947). Neither this nor any of the other features he prepared for his main post-war employer, Wessex Films, ever went into production. It is possible, as some sceptics have suggested, that he would never have thrived in the world of features although certain sequences in his dramatized documentaries The Silent Village (1943) and Fires were Started show that he was quite as comfortable with the prose of fictional narrative as with the more associative poetry of his personal form of documentary. The critic David Thomson, one of Jennings's most articulate advocates, suggests that Jennings had it in him to grow into Britain's Bunuel.



Though he is still not widely known outside specialist circles Jennings's reputation has grown with the years and his work has been brought back to a broader public on several occasions, notably by Robert Vas's Omnibus documentary for BBC television in 1970, by a well-received exhibition of paintings and films at London's Riverside Studios in 1982, and by the publication in 1985 of an abbreviated version of Pandaemonium, edited by Mary-Lou Jennings and Charles Madge, which was greeted by surprised and enthusiastic reviews on both sides of the Atlantic. His wartime films are regularly screened and discovered by new generations, at the National Film Theatre.



Jennings was appointed OBE, in 1946, for his contributions to sustaining morale at home and for publicizing the British cause abroad; he was promptly 'excommunicated' by one of the surviving surrealist factions. He died, on 24 September 1950, on the Greek island of Poros, after falling from a cliff while scouting locations for a film about health services in Europe. He was buried in the protestant cemetery in Athens.



Kevin Jackson



Sources M.-L. Jennings, ed., Humphrey Jennings: film-maker, painter, poet (1983) + A. W. Hodgkinson and R. E. Sheratsky, Humphrey Jennings: more than a maker of films (1982) + K. Jackson, ed., The Humphrey Jennings film reader (1993) + D. Vaughan, Portrait of an invisible man: the working life of Stewart McAllister, film editor (1983) + M.-L. Jennings and C. Madge, eds., Pandaemonium, 1660-1886: the coming of the machine as seen by contemporary observers (1985) + D. Thomson, A biographical dictionary of film, 3rd edn (1994) + H. Jennings, ed., Venus and Adonis: the quarto of 1593 (1930); repr. with new introduction (1993) + b. cert. + b. cert. [Cicely Cooper] + m. cert. + private information (2004) [M.-L. Legg]

Archives BFI, papers + priv. coll., MSS FILM BFI NFTVA, 'Humphrey Jennings-the man who listened to Britain', Channel 4, 23 Dec 2000 + BFI NFTVA, performance footage SOUND BL NSA, performance recording

Likenesses L. Miller, photograph, 1942, NPG [see illus.] · L. Miller, photographs, c.1944, Vogue archives · Beiney, photograph, c.1946, repro. in Jackson, ed., Humphrey Jennings film reader, back cover

[HUGHJAMPTON]

And to compliment JC's article, in 6 parts starting here.

[DB7]

Kevin Macdonald on Humphrey Jennings
The director of The Last King of Scotland and new film Life in a Day which collates video footage of one day from people all over the world, explains why Humphrey Jennings deserves the title Poet of British Cinema.

People think that the Italians invented neorealism, but actually Humphrey Jennings did. He was revolutionary in using non-professional actors in his films, and he got extraordinary performances out of them.

His name may not be that well-known, but in filmmaking circles he’s regarded as one of the great British filmmakers. Mike Leigh has spoken highly of Jennings, and you can see the influence Jennings had on Leigh – he was one of the first to use that combination of script and improvisation.

His films have totally shaped our current view of the war and life in Britain in the Thirties and Forties. Almost every documentary that you see about the Second World War uses unattributed clips from his films.

When he got involved in documentaries, it was really just a way of making money. He was an artist, an academic and was involved in lots of creative things like the first Surrealist exhibition in London and the Mass Observation Movement [a project where people’s diaries were collated into records]. Then the war broke out and he started making documentaries where he had to spend time with ordinary people, working-class people in particular, and he was transformed.

Lindsay Anderson, the film critic and director, said Humphrey Jennings was “the only real poet that British cinema has produced” and it’s a very good description of him.

Listen to Britain is his filmic version of the Mass Observation Movement. It goes from place to place, from a dance hall to a factory worker singing, and it paints this tremendously moving portrait of Britain. I’m not a patriot, but it makes you very proud to be British.