Fires Were Started –

Front Cover
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019 M07 25 - 96 pages
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.
 

Contents

A Fresh and Loving Eye
An Intellectual Artist
The Simplest of Pictures
The Idea of Connection
The Past with the Present

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About the author (2019)

Brian Winston is Head of the School of Communications at the University of Westminster, UK. He has a US Emmy for documentary scriptwriting and has written a history of the documentary tradition, Claiming the Real (BFI, 1995).

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