Frank Humphrey Sinkler
Jennings (19 August 1907, Walberswick, Suffolk
– 24 September 1950, Poros, Greece
) was an English
documentary
filmmaker and one of the founders of the
Mass Observation
organization. Jennings was described by film critic and
director
Lindsay Anderson in 1954
as: "the only real
poet that
British cinema has yet produced."
Early life and career
Humphrey Jennings was the son of
Guild
Socialists, an
architect father and a
painter mother.
He was educated at The Perse
School
and later read English at Pembroke College, Cambridge
. When not studying, he painted and created
advanced stage designs and was the founder-editor of
Experiment in collaboration with
William Empson and
Jacob Bronowski.
After graduating with a starred First Class degree in
English, Jennings undertook post graduate
research in the poet
Thomas Gray, under
the supervision of a predominantly absent
I. A. Richards, who was teaching abroad. After
abandoning what looked like being a successful academic career,
Jennings undertook a number of jobs including photographer, painter
and theatre designer. He joined
GPO Film
Unit, then under
John Grierson, in
1934, largely it is thought because Jennings needed the income
after the birth of his first daughter, rather than from a strong
interest in film. Relations with his colleagues were difficult,
they saw him as something of a
dilletante, but he did form
a friendship with
Alberto
Cavalcanti.
In 1936, Jennings helped with the organisation of the
1936 Surrealist
Exhibition in London, in association with
André Breton,
Roland Penrose and
Herbert Read. It was at about this time that
Jennings, along with
Charles Madge and
Tom Harrisson helped found
Mass Observation and co-edited with Madge
the text
May the Twelfth, a montage of extracts from
observer reports of the 1937 coronation of King
George VI and
Queen Elizabeth for Mass Observation. A
fiftieth anniversary edition of this text was published in 1987 by
Faber.
The War years
The GPO Film Unit became the
Crown Film
Unit in 1940, a movie-making
propaganda arm of the
Ministry of
Information, and Jennings joined the new organisation.
Jennings only feature length film, the 70-minute
Fires Were Started (1943), also
known as
I Was A Fireman, details the work of the
Auxiliary Fire Service in London. It
blurs the lines between fiction and
documentary because the scenes are
re-enactments. This film, which uses techniques such as
montage, is considered one
of the classics of the
genre.
His films are otherwise shorts, inclusively patriotic in sentiment
and very English in their sensibility, such as:
Spare Time
(1939),
London Can Take It! (1940),
Words for
Battle (1941),
A Diary for Timothy (with a narration
written by
E.M. Forster, 1945),
The Dim Little Island
(1948) and
Family Portrait (his last completed film, which
tells of the
Festival of
Britain, 1950). Co-directed with Stewart McAllister, Jennings'
best remembered short film is
Listen to Britain (1942).
Excerpts
are often seen in other 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 film on post-war healthcare in
Europe. Jennings married Cicely Cooper in 1929; the couple
had two daughters.
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 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. The Macdonald documentarty is included in the
Region 2 DVD of
I Was a Fireman (
Fires Were
Started) released by Film First in 2008.
Filmography
As director
As producer/creative contributor
See also
References
Further reading
- Aitken, Ian ed. Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film.
Routledge (2005)
- Jackson, Kevin (Ed.). The Humphrey Jennings Film
Reader (Carcanet, 1993)
- Jackson, Kevin. Humphrey Jennings (Picador,
2004).
- Winston, Brian. Fires Were Started- (BFI, 1999)
External links
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