Happy Birthday, Humphrey Jennings! Born today in 1907 as Frank Humphrey Sinkler Jennings, this English painter, set designer, editor, actor, writer, and director is perhaps most famously known for his ground-breaking World War II propaganda documentary films.
Jennings was educated at the Perse School and later read English at Pembroke College, Cambridge. When not studying, he painted and created advanced stage designs. He was later the founder-editor of the magazine Experiment.
After graduating with a starred First-Class degree in English, Jennings undertook post-graduate research on the English poet, letter-writer, classical scholar, and professor at Pembroke College, Cambridge Thomas Gray.
After abandoning what looked like being a successful academic career, Jennings undertook a number of jobs, including photographer, painter and theatre designer.
Jennings later joined the GPO Film Unit. This was a subdivision and social research organization of United Kingdom General Post Office. Established in 1933, it took on responsibilities of the Empire Marketing Board Film Unit.
Headed by pioneering Scottish documentary maker John Grierson (often considered the father of British and Canadian documentary film) in 1934, the organization was set up to produce sponsored documentary films mainly related to the activities of the GPO.
Largely, it is thought that Jennings joined because he needed the income after the birth of his first daughter, rather than from a strong interest in filmmaking.
In the early 1940s, Jennings wrote and directed the film of which he is best known. This was the 1943 British black and white documentary/war film 'Fires Were Started' (also known as 'I Was a Fireman'). This was his also his first and only feature-length film.
Filmed in documentary style, 'Fires Were Started' shows the lives of firefighters through the Blitz during the WWII.
The film uses actual firemen (including British wartime firefighter and author Cyril Demarne) rather than professional actors.
This World War II propaganda docudrama celebrated the heroic bravery of Britain's fire fighters at a time when German bombers were causing endless conflagrations.
The uncredited actors are real firemen from a working London fire house, but Jennings and his crew organize the footage into a fictionalized story about a new man joining the crew and meeting his fellow firefighters (both male and female) before embarking on his first assignment.
Exterior shots were filmed on location, while the interior scenes were shot at English film and television studio Pinewood Studios.
Although Jennings's first cut of the film was titled 'I Was a Fireman' and ran for seventy-four minutes, this was cut down to sixty-five minutes and was released as 'Fires Were Started'.
Film critics mostly praised the film for its realism and documentary value, despite its reconstructions. English film critic Dilys Powell, of the British newspaper The Sunday Times declared its authenticity to be "moving and terrifying".
On BFI's Top 100 British Films list, 'Fires Were Started' ranked in at #89.
Jennings passed in Poros, Greece on September 24, 1950. This was due to a fall on the cliffs of the Greek island while scouting locations for a film on post-war healthcare in Europe. Jennings was 43. He was later buried in the First Cemetery of Athens.
In 1954, Jennings was later described by British feature-film, theatre and documentary director, film critic Lindsay Anderson ('if....') as: "the only real poet that British cinema has yet produced."
Jennings is best known for brilliantly observing the effects of the Blitz on London. They were passionate, patriotic films that offered penetrating, and yet somehow poetic insights into the British people as they coped with the disastrous bombing.
Though often dealing with violence, he imbued the haunting images with a sense of weird beauty.
One of the greatest figures in the celebrated British documentary film movement, Jennings is most remembered for the way his work reflects the concerns and conditions of World War II-time in the United Kingdom.
Today, he is undoubtedly of great historical importance, but the ultimate justification for the present gathering of work is that Jennings was a wonderful filmmaker who made uniquely beautiful films.
Contained within this one man was a seemingly impossible array of artistic abilities. Indeed, Jennings had a poet's command of the cinematic language.
These included a painter's eye for evocative imagery and composition, a musician's ear for rhythm and tone and counterpoint, a Soviet's sense of juxtaposition, a journalist's nose for the concrete and the factual, and a compassionate man's love for the people he portrayed.
It may seem paradoxical that an artist of such positively romantic parts should have labored almost exclusively in the documentary realm, with all that it implies of subordination to subject and sponsor.
However, Jennings' particular talents emerged at a time of very particular need, and that seeming subordination to a cause is in fact the key to the continuing resonance of his work.
In the incongruous coupling of the Cambridge aesthete and the British propaganda machine, both parties turned out to be anxious to compromise for the sake of the union.
In his pictures, Jennings' impressive aesthetic arsenal helped to expand the scope and the vocabulary of documentary.
In turn, the documentary idea, especially in time of war, served to focus and direct his aesthetic impulses to public ends. The result was a short, shining, and perfect marriage.
Jennings had been active from 1934–1950.
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