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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