(Humphrey Jennings, 1944-51, BFI, E)
Jennings was killed filming in Greece in 1950 aged 43, bringing to a premature end the career of one of the major figures in British cultural life of the 1930s and 40s. Poet, painter, designer, surrealist, Blakean social visionary, he brought all his gifts together as a documentary film-maker. He was, according to Lindsay Anderson, "the only real poet the British cinema has yet produced".
The crucial second volume of his collected works included his wartime masterpieces, Listen to Britain (1942) and Fires Were Started (1943). Volume three rounds out the war with The True Story of Lili Marlene (1944), his odd recounting of how the German soldiers' favourite ballad was taken up by the British squaddies, and A Diary for Timothy (1945), a film about the last year of the war and the prospects for the future, its delicate script written by EM Forster and beautifully read by Michael Redgrave. Timothy has now survived the damaging 1961 send-up of second world war movies by the Beyond the Fringe quartet.
The rest of the disc takes in the postwar movies that see Jennings struggling to continue the moral certainties of the wartime propaganda pictures. The Jennings scholars who've contributed thoughtful essays to an accompanying booklet write rather cautiously about them, but I think Family Portrait, his contribution to the 1951 Festival of Britain celebrations, ranks among his best work. "Family" for him meant Britain, as it did for Orwell. Jennings's posthumously published book on the history of the Industrial Revolution, Pandæmonium, is a key text that inspired Frank Cottrell Boyce and Danny Boyle's 2012 Olympic Games opening ceremony.