Humphrey Jennings
(United Kingdom)

Humphrey Jennings was born in 1907 in Suffolk. After getting a First at Cambridge he drifted through a number of arty jobs. He was involved, with his friends poets Paul Eluard and André 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.
He joined GPO Film Unit, then under John Grierson, in 1934. The GPO Film Unit became the Crown Film Unit in 1940, a movie-making propaganda arm of the Ministry of Information. His films are inclusively patriotic in sentiment and very English in their sensibility, such as: London Can Take It! (1940), Fires Were Started (1943), A Diary for Timothy (1945), or Family Portrait (his last completed film, 1950). Probably Jennings' best remembered short film is Listen to Britain (1942). Excerpts from it are often seen in other documentaries about wartime.
Throughout his life Jennings also worked on his great anthology on the Industrial Revolution and the human imagination. "Pandaemonium" a monumental achievement, was finally published in 1985.
Jennings died in 1950 in Greece from a cliff fall while researching his next film.

Films
Filmography
V. 1
UK, 1944
The Heart of Britain
UK, 1941
This Is England
UK, 1941
Welfare of the Workers
UK, 1940
Cargoes
UK, 1939
S.S. Ionian
UK, 1939
The Farm
UK, 1938
Speaking from America
UK, 1938
Penny Journey
UK, 1938
The Story of the Wheel
UK, 1934
Post-haste
UK, 1934
Myra Hess
9´, UK, 1945
London Can Take It!
9´, UK, 1940
English Harvest
9´, UK, 1938
Farewell Topsails
9´, UK, 1937
Words for Battle
8´, UK, 1941
Fires Were Started
80´, UK, 1943
Making Fashion
7´, UK, 1938
A Diary for Timothy
40´, UK, 1945
The Cumberland Story
37´, UK, 1947
The Silent Village
36´, UK, 1943
The True Story of Lilli Marlene
29´, UK, 1944
Family Portrait
25´, UK, 1950
The First Days
23´, UK, 1939
Listen to Britain
20´, UK, 1942
Spring Offensive
20´, UK, 1940
A Defeated People
18´, UK, 1946
Spare Time
15´, UK, 1939
Design for Spring
15´, UK, 1938
The Changing Face of Europe
116´, UK, 1951
The Dim Little Island
10´, UK, 1949
Locomotives
10´, UK, 1934

DAFilms.com is powered by Doc Alliance, a creative partnership of 7 key European documentary film festivals. Our aim is to advance the documentary genre, support its diversity and promote quality creative documentary films.

Doc Alliance Members

Sign up to receive regular updates on our film program:

By signing up for the newsletter, I hereby consent to receiving commercial communications by electronic means and to all relevant personal data processing required for the purpose of sending the Doc-Air Distribution s.r.o. newsletter. I hereby confirm that I have read and familiarized myself with the Principles of Personal Data Processing and that I consent to the text therein. I also hereby acknowledge the rights specified herein, including, without limitation, the right to submit objections against direct marketing techniques.

Poslat svému Junioru

Zavřít