Crown Film Unit

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The Crown Film Unit was a British state production unit that existed from 1940 to 1952, with which a wealth of mostly short, but occasionally full-length documentaries, often with propaganda content, was produced, especially during the Second World War .

Company history

The Crown Film Unit emerged in 1940 from the GPO Film Unit , a subdivision of the British General Post Office (GPO), which was founded in 1933 for the production of information and advertising films . After the beginning of World War II , the GPO was subordinated to the British Ministry of Information and henceforth operated as the Crown Film Unit. The purpose was the cinematic information of the local population by the government, but also the dissemination of British convictions to the international community. The main objective in Germany was to strengthen the will of the population to resist the German war machine. This threatened to be weakened primarily during the so-called “London Blitz”, the attempt by Nazi Germany to quickly subjugate Great Britain as part of a “ Blitzkrieg ” (1940/41). With its productions, the Crown Film Unit was intended to emphasize the necessity of joint action against Hitler's Germany vis-à-vis other countries (and above all the later war allied USA). The Americans, in turn, should be strengthened in their will to go to war with the argument that their "fighting cousins" in the British Isles should not be left alone in the fight against the fascists on the continent.

It was the task of the Crown Film Unit to create a climate of confidence with its films with documentary content, for example about the British war effort. Under the direction of the producer Ian Dalrymple , some very high-quality information films were created that skillfully concealed their propaganda content, such as in Listen to Britain . With director Humphrey Jennings , the film unit had a director who tried to paint a sober and sometimes grim picture of the mood in the British population at the time of the bombing by the German Air Force with his Crown Film Unit work. These films were also made for the American audience to promote and promote an Anglo-American brotherhood in arms. Every now and then, well-known British actors ( Laurence Olivier , Michael Redgrave , John Gielgud Bernard Miles , Marius Goring ) or actors who had fled Hitler's Germany ( Lucie Mannheim ) made themselves available to the Crown Film Unit - be it as actors or singers or as a speaker.

Shortly after the occupation of Germany by Allied troops in 1945, the Crown Film Unit sent a team to the war-torn, defeated country to take stock of the realities on the ground under Jennings. The 18-minute film was called A Defeated People and was first presented to the public on March 17, 1946. In the same month, the government closed the Department of Information as a former war facility and replaced it with the Central Office of Information, which also continued to run the Crown Film Unit. Although this film unit now lost more and more importance, it was even able to win an Oscar in the following year with the documentary Daybreak in Udi, published in 1949 . The documentary Royal Scotland (1952) was also nominated for an Oscar in the category Best Documentary . Nevertheless, the Crown Film Unit was dissolved in the same year 1952 by the Tories then ruling in London . This decision was preceded by controversy with the Labor Party .

Productions (selection)

Web links