Fires Were Started –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
An Intellectual Artist | |
The Simplest of Pictures | |
The Idea of Connection | |
The Past with the Present | |
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14 Local Control Abbotsden achievement actually artist audience authentic Barrett Bells Go BFI Publishing Blitz bomb British cinema British Documentary camera cast Cicely classic documentary Cockney contemporary conventional crew Denis Forman despite dialogue Diary for Timothy Documentary Film Documentary Film Movement Documentary Movement Dykes Ealing editing effect English example factual shooting feature film fiction film Film Classics film-maker film's Fire Brigade fire-fighting Fires Were Started firewomen Fred Griffiths G.P.O. Film Unit Grierson Harrisson Harry Watt Home Front human Humphrey Jennings Ian Dalrymple intellectual Jacko Johnny Lindsay Anderson Listen to Britain London Mary-Lou Mass Observation McAllister's mobile canteen munitions ship Nanook narrative National Fire Service Officer past picture poetic principal photography production Pronay propaganda message raid re-enactments reality Rotha Rumbold scenes screen script sequence shots singing Stedman Jones stereotypes Stewart McAllister story Stuart Legg style Substation suggested surrealism synch thing treatment Trinder truth Vaughan war-time