Humphrey Jennings

Humphrey Jennings (born August 19, 1907 in Walberswick , Suffolk ; † September 24, 1950 in Poros , Greece ) was a British filmmaker, painter and poet who was best known for his documentaries during the Second World War .

biography

Humphrey Jennings was born into a family of artists. His father was an architect, his mother a painter, and both were active in the Arts and Crafts movement . Jennings studied English literature at Pembroke College in Cambridge from 1926 to 1929 . During his studies he directed the first English performances of Stravinski's Histoire du soldat and Arthur Honegger's Le Roi David . In 1928, Humphrey Jennings co-founded the literary magazine Experiment . Jennings developed into an important promoter of modernism in Great Britain in the following years , he was one of the organizers of the first British exhibition of surrealists in London in 1936. Jennings also emerged as a poet and painter himself, some of his drawings are exhibited in the Tate Gallery . His most important literary work, Pandaemonium , a collection of essays on the history of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain, was not published until posthumously in 1985.

Jennings found his most important role in 1934 when he joined the GPO Film Unit . Under the direction of John Grierson , a documentary film school developed from which emerged talents as diverse as Basil Wright , Alberto Cavalcanti and Jennings. Jennings' first works were very different from the other publications of the GPO, his films were more experimental and were closer to the avant-garde than the realism of Grierson. In 1935 he assisted the experimental filmmaker Len Lye in his animated film The Birth of the Robot . In 1936 he was involved in organizing the International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries in London .

In 1937 Jennings founded together with the anthropologist Tom Harrison and the sociologist Charles Madge the organization Mass Observation , which documented " public opinion " on social and political issues using scientific methods . Jennings was only involved in one Mass Observation film project , the May 12th film for the coronation of George VI. in 1937.

Jenning's most important documentary in the 1930s was the short film Spare Time , which he shot for the 1939 World's Fair in New York City . Spare Time shaped Jennings' style of later films; instead of a coherent narrative, he presented short scenes that he assembled in an unusual way and put together with music and noises to form a collage. Unlike the other films from the GPO Film Unit, Spare Time did not deal with the working conditions of the lower class , but showed them during their leisure time activities. Jennings thereby avoided the stereotypical representation of this layer, but came into conflict with Grierson.

With the outbreak of World War II, the film department of the GPO came under the Ministry of Information and began to produce propaganda films. Jennings initially worked on compilation films such as London Can Take It! with, but from 1941 he continued to work on his own to perfect his assembly style. The Heart of Britain showed the effect of the Blitzkrieg on northern England, musically accompanied by classical music by Beethoven and Handel . Words for Battle shows images from everyday British warfare, while Laurence Olivier recites poems and famous speeches. The best known film from this series of short films is Listen to Britain , in which Jennings edited scenes from everyday life from the war. Above all, Listen to Britain shows how intensively Jennings dealt with noises and their influence on the effect of the image. An indispensable help with these films was film editor Stewart McAllister , with whom Jennings worked until his death.

In 1943 Humphrey Jennings completed his only feature-length film, the documentary Fires Were Started . In a staged framework he described the work of firefighters in London during the German air raids in the winter of 1940/41 for one day. Also in 1943 Jennings directed The Silent Village, a short film about the Lidice massacre . Other short films about the German attacks on England followed. The end of the world war was documented by Jennings in A Diary for Timothy , in which he contrasted the events of the war with the first year of life of a newborn. The text accompanying this “diary” was written by EM Forster . Even though Jennings made other short films up until 1950 that dealt with the post-war era, A Diary for Timothy is now considered his last masterpiece.

Humphrey Jennings died on September 24, 1950 when he fell off a cliff while preparing to film in Greece.

Aftermath

Jenning's films have long been very controversial. Contemporary documentary filmmakers criticized the way he worked, with Basil Wright seeing Jennings' first major film, Spare Time, as condescending and almost mocking the working class . The Oscar-nominated film Listen to Britain also met with opposition. In contrast, the film critic and later filmmaker Lindsay Anderson defended Jennings as probably the only poet that British film had ever produced. Consequently, at the end of the 1950s, Anderson, Karel Reisz , Tony Richardson and other representatives of Free Cinema Jennings took themselves as models for their own films. The Marxist German documentary filmmaker Hartmut Bitomsky made two television films about him for West German Radio in the 1970s .

Similar to the entire British documentary film movement of the 1930s, Humphrey Jennings was almost forgotten in the 1970s and 1980s, and the realism of this movement was suddenly no longer in demand. It was not until the success of the social dramas by directors like Ken Loach or Mike Leigh in the late 1980s that GPO films became more popular again. Humphrey Jennings became the focus of attention by Kevin Macdonald's documentation Humphrey Jennings: The Man Who Listened to Britain in 2000 and by the retrospective A Century of Artists' film in Britain the Tate Britain in of 2003.

Filmography (selection)

• 1934: The Story of the Wheel
• 1934: Locomotives
• 1938: Design for Spring
• 1939: Spare Time
• 1939: The First Days
• 1940: London Can Take It!
• 1941: Words for Battle
• 1941: This Is England
• 1941: The Heart of Britain
• 1942: Listen to Britain
• 1943: Fires Were Started
• 1943: The Silent Village
• 1944: The Eighty Days
• 1945: A Diary for Timothy
• 1946: A Defeated People
• 1950: Family Portrait

literature

• Kevin Jackson: Humphrey Jennings . Picador, London, 2004, ISBN 0-3303-5438-8 . (English)
• Kevin Jackson (Ed.): The Humphrey Jennings Film Reader . Picador, London, 1993, ISBN 1-8575-4045-X . (English)
• Mary-Lou Jennings: Humphrey Jennings: Film-maker, Painter, Poet , British Film Institute, London, 1982, ISBN 0-8517-0118-3 . (English)
• James Chapman: The British at War: Cinema, State and Propaganda, 1939-45 , IB Tauris & Co Ltd, London, 1998, ISBN 1-8606-4158-X . (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ George Novell Smith: Humphrey Jennings: Surrealist observer , in All Our Yesterdays , British Film Institute, London, 1986.
2. ^ Ian Aitken: Film and Reform: John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement , Routledge, London, 1990.
3. ^ Quoted from Screenonline , Spare Time , accessed on August 18, 2007.
4. ↑ Elizabeth Sussex: The Rise and Fall of British Documentary , University of California Press, Berkeley, 1975.
5. ^ Lindsay Anderson: Only Connect: Some Aspects of the Work of Humphrey Jennings , in Sight & Sound , Vol.23, No.4, 1954.
6. ^ John Hill: Sex, Class and Realism: British Cinema, 1956–1963 , British Film Institute, London, 1986.
7. ^ Geoff Brown: Paradise Found and Lost: The Course of British Realism , in The British Cinema Book , British Film Institute, London, 2001.

Web links

• Humphrey Jennings in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Screenonline : Biography of Humphrey Jennings