Fires Were Started –
About this book
Humphrey Jennings (1907-50) was perhaps the most gifted film-maker of the British documentary movement. Involved in the Mass Observation project of the 1930s, Jennings' talent lay in picturing ordinary life in ways that were inventive yet authentic. " Fires Were Started –" (1943) is his major achievement. A film about a day's work for a unit of mainly auxiliary volunteer firemen at the height of the blitz, it blends observation with reconstruction to achieve a particularly poignant kind of propaganda. Lindsay Anderson expressed the opinion of many commentators and viewers when he wrote in Sight and Sound (in a 1954 article reprinted as an appendix to this volume) that Jennings was 'the only real poet the British cinema has yet produced'. But how could a documentarist also be a 'poet'? This is one of the questions addressed by Brian Winston in his study of " Fires Were Started – ", a question which is particularly relevant today in the wake of the massive public controversies surrounding 'faked' documentaries. For Winston documentary film-making is always 'creatively treated actuality' and must be taken as such if it's to be properly valued and understood.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1. A Fresh and Loving Eye'
- 2. An Intellectual Artist'
- 3. 'The Simplest of Pictures'
- 4. 'The Idea of Connection'
- 5. 'Films of Britain at War'
- 6. 'This Is What We Were Like - The Best of Us'
- 7. 'The Past with the Present'
- 8. 'Jennings' Films Are All Documentaries'
- 9. 'The Murky and Undecided Realities of Today'
- Appendix: 'Only Connect: Some Aspects of the Work of Humphrey Jennings' by Lindsay Anderson
- Notes
- Credits
- Bibliography