Everything about Humphrey Jennings totally explained
Humphrey Jennings (
August 19 1907 –
September 24 1950), was an
English filmmaker and one of the founders of the
Mass Observation organization. Jennings was described by film maker
Lindsay Anderson as: "the only real
poet that
British cinema has yet produced."
Biography
Early life
Born in
Walberswick, Suffolk, Jennings was the son of an
architect father, and a painter mother and attended The
Perse School, Cambridge. Later he read English at
Pembroke College,
Cambridge, where when not studying, he created advanced stage designs and was the founder-editor of
Experiment in collaboration with
William Empson and
Jacob Bronowski.
Early career
After graduating with a starred First Class degree in
English from
Pembroke College, Cambridge, Jennings did a number of jobs - including photographer, painter and theatre designer. In 1929, he married Cicely Cooper. He eventually found his niche in
John Grierson's
GPO Film Unit in 1934.
In 1936 Jennings helped with the organisation of the
1936 Surrealist Exhibition in London, in association with
Herbert Read and
André Breton. It was at about this time that Jennings became involved in the start-up stages of
Mass Observation, and was to make the film
May the Twelfth as a montage of the 1937 coronation of King
George VI and Queen Elizabeth for Mass Observation.
The War years
With the outbreak of
World War II, the GPO Film Unit became the
Crown Film Unit, a movie-making
propaganda arm of the
Ministry of Information, and Jennings joined the new organisation.
Jennings made only one feature length film, the 70-minute
Fires Were Started (1943), also known as
I Was A Fireman, a wartime propaganda movie detailing the work of the
Auxiliary Fire Service, which blurred the lines between fiction and
documentary. This film, which uses techniques such as
montage is considered one of the classics of the
genre.
He made a number of notable short films, inclusively patriotic in sentiment and very English in their sensibility, such as:
Spare Time;
Our Country,
The Dim Little Island,
A Diary for Timothy (with the narration written by
E.M. Forster),
Words for Battle,
London Can Take It!, and
Family Portrait (his last film, which tells of the
Festival of Britain). Co-directed with Stewart McAllister, Jennings' best remembered short film, made 1942, is
Listen to Britain. Excerpts are often seen in other in documentaries, especially portions of one of the concerts given by
Dame Myra Hess in the
National Gallery while its collection was evacuated for safe-keeping.
He died in
Poros, Greece in a fall on the cliffs of the
Greek island while scouting locations for a future film on post-war healthcare in Europe. He is buried near
T.H. White at the Protestant Cemetery in
Athens.
Reputation
Humphrey Jennings' reputation always remained very high among film makers, but had faded among others. His films appear strikingly different from the 'social critique' approach which typified the documentaries of Grierson and his "school" of the 1930s and the feature films of the 1960s and 70s such as
Lindsay Anderson's
This Sporting Life (1962) or
Karel Reisz's
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960).
After 2001 this situation was partly rectified: firstly by the feature-length documentary by
Oscar-winning documentary-maker
Kevin Macdonald,
Humphrey Jennings: The Man Who Listened to Britain (made by Figment Films in 2002 for
British television's
Channel 4); and secondly by Kevin Jackson's monumental 450-page biography
Humphrey Jennings (Picador, 2004). In 2003 two of his films,
Listen to Britain and
Spare Time, were included in the
Tate Britain retrospective,
A Century of Artists' Film in Britain which featured the work of over one hundred filmmakers. As of 2005, nearly all the films of Humphrey Jennings are available on
DVDs.
Filmography
As director
As producer/creative contributor
The Birth of the Robot (dir. Len Lye 1936)
(dir. Alberto Cavalcanti 1934)Further Information
Get more info on 'Humphrey Jennings'.
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