Humphrey Jennings

Current Critical Evaluation

Jennings critical reputation has made the transition from almost being ignored as a filmmaker, to establishment as one of Britain’s greatest artists. “Jennings is not only the greatest documentarist but also … the greatest filmmaker this country has produced” (Millar, 1969 pp102). Indeed this reflection is fifteen years on from Lindsay Anderson’s claim for Jennings as “The only true poet of British cinema” (Anderson, 1954 pp1), an earlier call for recognition of Jennings’ work. Yet it is only over the last decade that these individual claims of greatness have become a more collective call by both critics and the British filmmakers clearly influenced by him (Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, Terrence Davies), to recognise the value of Jennings’ work. Jennings is now more readily recognised as both an important director of his time, and an important director in the hundred-year spectre of British cinema history. Yet true critical discussion of Jennings is rather inadequate; instead there seems to be a desire to redress the lack of recognition bestowed upon him over the forty years since his last key work. This has meant that the current critical approaches to Jennings are almost entirely positive in their viewpoint, as if the need to correct the imbalance of past critical evaluation is more important than constructing serious debate about the deficits in his work. There is a strong sense of the need to establish Jennings as one of the all-time key British directors, to the extent that it overpowers the need for a climate of debate around his work. That is not to say that the positive approaches are entirely inadequate in their readings, or even that they are insufficient pieces in themselves, instead it is my opinion that an almost complete lack of counter criticism devalues the excellent positive work on Jennings. By largely ignoring the negative, the positive becomes weaker, and less credible.

This cultural appreciation runs from the beautifully crafted prose of Anderson “[Jennings work will] speak to us for posterity, saying, ‘This is what it was like. This is what we were like – the best of us'” (Anderson, 1954 pp6) to the almost ridiculous claim of Paul Wells that “Jennings effectively poeticised ‘actuality’ … elevating the human worth of ordinary people as they stoically endured the hardships of war” (Wells, 2000 pp221). A more patronising statement would be hard to find, simultaneously missing Jennings whole ethos and relegating the lives of ‘ordinary people’ to subjects in need of cinematic justification. As if, without Jennings camera, the firemen in Fires Were Started wouldn’t be doing much of ‘human worth’. Indeed, this statement demonstrates the danger of the current critical standing of Jennings – instead of elevating his work, the lack of grounded argument actually denigrates it.