Profile of Humphrey Jennings on Famous Like Me

Humphrey Jennings, (August 19, 1907 Walberswick, Suffolk - September 24, 1950 Greece), was a British film-maker and one of the founders of the Mass Observation organisation. Jennings was described by film maker Lindsay Anderson as: "the only real poet that British cinema has yet produced."

He was the son of an architect father, and a painter mother. He studied at Cambridge where, when not studying, he created advanged stage designs and was the founder-editor of Experiment in collaboration with William Empson and Jacob Bronowski. After graduating with a starred First Class degree in English from Pembroke College, Cambridge, Jennings did a number of jobs - including photographer, painter and theatre designer. In 1929, he married Cicely Cooper. He evenually found his niche in John Grierson's GPO Film Unit in 1934.

In 1936 Jennings helped with the organisation of the 1936 Surrealist Exhibition in London, in association with Herbert Read and André Breton. It was at about this time that Jennings became involved in the start-up stages of Mass Observation, and was to make the film May the Twelfth as a montage of the 1937 coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth for Mass Observation.

With the outbreak of World War II, the GPO Film Unit became the Crown Film Unit, a movie-making propaganda arm of the Ministry of Information, and Jennings joined the new organisation.

Jennings made only one feature length film, the 70-minute Fires Were Started (1943), also known as I Was A Fireman, a wartime propaganda movie detailing the work of the Auxiliary Fire Service, which blurred the lines between fiction and documentary. This film, which uses techniques such as montage is considered one of the classics of the genre.

He made a number of notable short films, inclusively patriotic in sentiment and deeply interested in Englishness, such as: "Spare Time"; "Our Country", "The Dim Little Island", "A Diary for Timothy" (written by E.M. Forster), "Words for Battle", "London Can Take It!", and "Family Portrait" (his last film, of the Festival of Britain). His films were often criticised for being 'too poetic' by those who preferred the straight 'grim social critique' approach that became the norm in the 1960s and 70s.

He died on the cliffs of the Greek island of Poros, while scouting locations for a future film on post-war healthcare in Europe. He is buried near T.H. White in the Protestant Cemetery at Athens.

His reputation always remained very high among film makers, but had faded among many others. From 2001 this situation was partly rectified: firstly by the feature-length documentary by Oscar-winning documentary-maker Kevin Macdonald, Humphrey Jennings: The Man Who Listened to Britain (Figment Films, 2002); and secondly by Kevin Jackson's monumental 450-page biography Humphrey Jennings (Picador, 2004). In 2003 his work was included in the Tate Britain retrospective A Century of Artists' Film in Britain. As of 2005, nearly all the films of Humphrey Jennings are available on DVDs.

Further reading

• Jackson, Kevin (Ed.). The Humphrey Jennings Film Reader (Carcanet, 1993)
• Jackson, Kevin. Humphrey Jennings (Picador, 2004).

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