Favorite Forgotten Films

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Curtis Clark, ASC

In 1942, during Britain's darkest days of World War II, a British filmmaker named Humphrey Jennings made a 20-minute short film that stands as one of the crowning achievements of the British documentary film movement initiated by John Greirson's 1929 milestone film, Drifters. Arguably the greatest filmmaker to emerge within the British documentary film movement, Humphrey Jennings crafted an extraordinary poetic portrait of the daily rhythms of life on the British homefront as it faced the Nazi threat. Called Listen To Britain, the film consists of a remarkably fluid montage of carefully connected B&W images juxtaposed with natural sounds. Each visual and sound image functions as a vital component in a hypnotic relay which grows immeasurably greater than the sum of its scenes. Jennings and his key collaborators, including cinematographer Chick Fowle and editor Stewart McAllister (with whom he generously shared a co-director credit) never missed a moment or a beat that would advance this tightly wound and intensely moving experience.

Humphrey Jennings made 25 films, mostly shorts, between 1934 and 1950. The majority of these were financed either by the Crown Film Unit or the Greirson led GPO Film Unit -- both of which were British government sponsored. Some of his most notable films include: Spare Time, 1939; Words for Battle, 1941; Listen to Britain, 1942; Fires Were Started, 1943; The True Story of Lili Marlene, 1944; V1, 1944; A Diary For Timothy, 1944-45 and The Cumberland Story, 1947. In Jennings' films, understanding the art of juxtaposing visual images with natural sound reached a new benchmark, not just for non-journalistic documentary, but for all cinematic art.

It is somewhat ironic that while Humphrey Jennings was making films for the British government, his more widely recognized contemporary, Leni Riefenstahl, was making films for the Nazi Reich which would also define new levels of artistic achievement in documentary filmmaking. Olympiad, her epic film of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, remains unsurpassed in its innovative visual treatment of athletic competition. Although some of her subject matter was abhorrent, e.g., Triumph of the Will, which depicted the 1934 Nuremberg Nazi rally, the creative vision and commanding cinematic skills she brought to the emerging documentary medium equally stand as quintessential to our understanding of its poetic power.