Abstract
In most histories of British cinema the Second World War is regarded as a ‘golden age’ when the social practice of cinema-going was at its height (annual cinema admissions reached their peak at 1,632 million in 1945) and when British films, long dismissed as pale imitations of Hollywood, enjoyed a hitherto unprecedented level of both critical and popular acclaim.2 The war also marked a high watermark for the British documentary movement, whose skills and experience were now much in demand for the provision of ‘propaganda for democracy’. It was during the Second World War that documentary films reached their widest audiences and that documentary entered into the mainstream of British film culture. Documentary films such as Britain Can Take It!, Target for Tonight and Fires Were Started became synonymous with the ideological project of British wartime cinema to represent the ‘people’s war’, while critics at the time and since have identified a ‘wartime wedding’ between documentary and the fiction film in which the style and ethos of the former infused the latter.3
The documentary movement represents a special expertness in the use of films for propaganda and informational purposes. For eleven years its members have been working to a thesis of public enlightenment which now fits closely to official needs; so much so that many things which documentarists have urged long and vainly now look like being created as a result of the war urgency.
Documentary News Letterl 1
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Notes
See, for example, Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards, Britain Can Take It: The British Cinema in the Second World War (Oxford, 1986);
Robert Murphy, Realism and Tinsel: Cinema and Society in Britain 1939–48 (London, 1989);
Neil Rattigan, This Is England: British Film and the People’s War, 1939–1945 (London, 2001):
and Philip M. Taylor (ed.), Britain and the Cinema in the Second World War (London, 1988).
The first use of the term I have identified is by the documentarist John Shearman in his article ‘Wartime Wedding’, Documentary News Letter, 6: 54 (1946), p.53.
Frances Thorpe and Nicholas Pronay, with Clive Coultass, British Official Films in the Second World War: A Descriptive Catalogue (Oxford, 1980), p.ix.
The history of the MOI is documented in Ian McLaine, Ministry of Morale: Home Front Morale and the Ministry of Information in World War II (London, 1979).
The role of the MOI Films Division is discussed in James Chapman, The British at War: Cinema, State and Propaganda, 1939–1945 (London, 1998), pp.13–57.
Paul Rotha, Rotha on the Film (London, 1958), p.234.
Jo Fox, ‘John Grierson, his “Documentary Boys” and the British Ministry of Information, 1939–1942’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 25: 3 (2005), pp.345–69.
Harry Watt, Don’t Look at the Camera (London, 1978), p.128.
Kenneth Clark, The Other Half: A Self-Portrait (London, 1986), p.10.
Jeffrey Richards and Dorothy Sheridan (eds), Mass-Observation at the Movies (London, 1987), p.457.
Paul Swann, The British Documentary Film Movement, 1926–1946 (Cambridge, 1989), p.169.
Helen Forman, ‘The Non-Theatrical Distribution of Films by the Ministry of Information’, in Nicholas Pronay and D. W. Spring (eds), Propaganda, Politics and Film, 1918–45 (London, 1982), p.224.
Paul Marris (ed.), BFI Dossier Number 16: Paul Rotha (London, 1982), p.25.
Elizabeth Sussex, ‘Cavalcanti in England’, Sight and Sound, 44: 4 (1975), p.208.
The critical literature on Jennings is extensive. On his wartime films see in particular: Aldgate and Richards, Britain Can Take It, pp.218–45; Philip C. Logan, Humphrey Jennings and British Documentary Film: A Re-Assessment (Farnham, 2011), pp.121–282;
Malcolm Smith, ‘Narrative and Ideology in Listen to Britain’, in Jeremy Hawthorn (ed.), Narrative: From Malory to Motion Pictures (London, 1985), pp.145–57;
Jeffrey Richards, ‘Humphrey Jennings: The Poet as Propagandist’, in Mark Connelly and David Welch (eds), War and the Media: Reportage and Propaganda, 1900–2003 (London, 2005), pp.127–38;
and Wendy Webster, ‘The Silent Village: The GPO Film Unit Goes to War’, in Scott Anthony and James G. Mansell (eds), The Projection of Britain: A History of the GPO Film Unit (London, 2011), pp.263–71.
Basil Wright, The Long View: A Personal Perspective on World Cinema (London, 1974), p.200.
Quoted in Mary-Lou Jennings (ed.), Humphrey Jennings: Film-Maker, Painter, Poet (London, 1982), p.33.
Roger Manvell, Films and the Second World War (London, 1974), p.149.
Roy Armes, A Critical History of British Cinema (London, 1978), p.154.
K. R. M. Short, ‘RAF Bomber Command’s Target for Tonight’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 17: 2 (1997), pp.181–218.
Eric Rhode, A History of the Cinema from its Origins to 1970 (London, 1978), p.372.
Dai Vaughan, Portrait of an Invisible Man: The Working Life of Stewart McAllister, Film Editor (London, 1983), p.78.
Jeffrey Richards, ‘Wartime Cinema Audiences and the Class System: The case of Ships With Wings (1941)’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 7: 2 (1987), pp.129–41.
J. R. Williams, ‘Status of British Documentary’, Documentary News Letter, 5: 6 (1944), p.66.
Aldgate and Richards, Britain Can Take It, pp.238–40. Pat Jackson’s account of the film is in his autiobiography, A Retake Please! ‘Night Mail’ to ‘Western Approaches’ (Liverpool, 1999), pp.178–256.
Ian Grant, Cameramen at War (Cambridge, 1980), p.191.
Tony Aldgate, ‘Mr Capra Goes to War: Frank Capra, the British Army Film Unit, and Anglo-American Travails in the Production of Tunisian Victory’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 11: 1 (1991), pp.21–39.
James Chapman, ‘“The Yanks are Shown to Such Advantage”: Anglo-American Rivalry in the Production of The True Glory (1945)’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 16: 4 (1996), pp.533–54.
Ian Jarvie, ‘The Burma Campaign on Film: Objective Burma (1945), The Stillwell Road (1945) and Burma Victory (1945)’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 8: 1 (1988), pp.55–73.
J. B. Priestley, Postscripts (London, 1940), pp.35–6.
Paul Addison, The Road to 1945: British Politics and the Second World War (London, 1975), p.17.
Nicholas Pronay, ‘“The Land of Promise”: The Projection of Peace Aims on Britain’, in K. R. M. Short (ed.), Film and Radio Propaganda in World War II (London, 1983), p.55.
George Orwell, ‘Poetry and the Microphone’ [1943] in Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (eds), The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell Volume 2: My Country Right or Left, 1940–1943 (Harmondsworth, 1970), p.381.
John Ellis, ‘Victory of the Voice?’, Screen, 22: 2 (1981), p.72.
Alan Burton, The British Consumer Co-operative Movement and film, 1890s-1960s (Manchester, 2005), p.157.
Toby Haggith, ‘Post-War Reconstruction as Depicted in Official British Films of the Second World War’, Imperial War Museum Review, 7 (1992), p.44.
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© 2015 James Chapman
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Chapman, J. (2015). Documentary at War. In: A New History of British Documentary. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230392878_4
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