Humphrey Jennings

Introduction

In this article and the next I will be using the key wartime films of Humphrey Jennings to look at the lack of substantial debate around his work. I will be considering the affects of what I see as a dire absence of rounded in-depth analysis. I will be looking at the current frameworks in which he is viewed, and considering if they are the right frameworks for looking at such a complex artist as Humphrey Jennings. In the second article I will argue that it is more valuable to look at Jennings as an early proponent of the radical cinema movement of the Third Cinema. Conceived in the late 60’s by the Argentine filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino with the manifesto “towards a third cinema”, the movement aims to create a cinema of debate and opposition. I will be looking at how this applies to the wartime propagandist and patriot Jennings. In particular, I will be looking at how his wartime work was oppositional, in form and content, to the First Cinema of Solanas and Getino’s manifesto.

Humphrey Jennings (1907-1950) was a poet, a painter, an intellectual and an anthropologist. He was also one of the pivotal filmmakers in the British wartime documentary movement. His films have become recognised as some of the key works that Britain has ever produced, not only in Jennings time, but in the history of cinema. Jennings was a middle-class, educated man with a double-first from Cambridge. He was involved, with friends Eluard and Breton in staging the first Surrealist exhibition in Britain, in which he also exhibited his own surrealist paintings and photos. He was also one of the founding members, along with Tom Harrison and Charles Madge, of the anthropological movement Mass Observation. The movement’s aims have been described as “investigating public opinion qualitatively and quantatively by the direct observation of behaviour in public places and above all by listening to people’s conversations … a form of loosely organised visual and aural eavesdropping” (Lovell & Hillier, 1972. pp64). The movement collated reports from observers across the country on such things as the number of people in beards, and the different types of hat worn going to the theatre, attempting to paint a (albeit surreal) picture of Britain. Jennings was also fascinated by the Industrial Revolution, and was through most of his adult life compiling essays on the causes and sociological impact of it in a book, Pandaemonium (Jennings, 1985), since published posthumously. It is important to consider all these aspects when looking at Jennings, as he drew from all of them for his film work, often very directly.