The Crown Film Unit

The Crown Film Unit, under the direction of Humphrey Jennings, produced a number of propaganda films supporting the British war effort between 1940 and 1945. Jennings’ two most famous films are A Diary for Timothy and Fires were Started. Jennings’ films are calm and lyrical; he had a poet’s eye for landscape and dramatic chiaroscuro. His characteristic emotional diction and tone is evident in the first of these short documentaries, London can take it, a ten minute picture about the Battle of Britain. Jennings’ films were made to refute German propaganda proclaiming that the civilians in London were close to hysteria and demoralized by night-time bombing raids. London can take it is serene and never shrill; the film’s emblematic image shows an old man and woman with their angelic grandchild nestled between them sleeping throughout an air raid. The dispassionate and objective-sounding narrator notes that Hitler has said that the British in London are close to the breaking point – the camera carefully observes the faces of crowds of Londoners for any trace of fear or dismay and, of course, registers only a cheerful, if earnest, fortitude. Another short film praises Britain’s green and pleasant land in the words of its great poets, ending with images of a statute of Abraham Lincoln on a busy street – suggesting, of course, that the Americans, as well as the rest of England’s former, and present, colonies were roused to action and would join the crusade to defeat German aggression. Fire were Started (also known as I was a Fireman) traces the events of a single night during the Blitz, focusing on a company of firefighters. Bombs set waterfront warehouses ablaze and the firefighters battle the blaze which threatens war ships being built at a nearby wharf. The film seems staged but is scrupulously realistic – we see the dispatchers, support personnel, the crews of men directing luminous columns of spray into the huge fire, and, at dawn, the exhausted firefighters collapsing at the station. Everything is understated and calm. There is no sense of anger or fear – men do their duty, perky women serve coffee from mobile canteens, the dispatchers speak with serene deliberation. In the morning, we see the street beside the ruined warehouse, thronged with Londoners going to work, people in suits and business dress picking their way through the rubble, a woman pushing a baby in a perambulator with a happy dog trotting alongside. All of this is intercut with parallel montage showing the battleship, saved from the flames, and surging through the grey seas to fight the Germans. The fire is depicted through shots sculpted by light, intensely pictorial, huge frieze-like reliefs of men and hoses struggling against the blaze – in some scenes, great cascades of fire fall on the men and the firefighters leap into the inferno in luminous, swirling clouds of smoke; water from a hose runs down a wall lit by the flames and viscous, it seems, as blood. One of the firefighters dies in the blaze and the movie ends with his funeral – images of the fierce-looking, stoic widow intercut with shots of the battleship plowing through stormy seas. A Diary for Timothy is another curious hybrid of documentary imagery and staged narrative: the film, written by E. M. Forster, purports to be diary written by a woman whose husband is fighting in Germany for her newborn son, Timothy. Like the other films, the picture is undemonstrative, stoic and understated. The movie employs parallel montage to intercut shots of the growing infant with his mother, the hospitalization and physical rehabilitation of a wounded RAF pilot, a coal miner laboring underground, and a train engineer driving his massive locomotive through rain and sleet and fog. The purpose for the film to demonstrate the calm fortitude of the British Home Front. The film is extremely complex, features poetic stiff-upper lip narration, and has musical sequences often shot in a proto-MTV style featuring lyrical nature photography – Dame Myra Hess performs Beethoven’s Appassionata piano sonata to an enthusiastic crowd while the narrator broods that it is “German music.” The movie shows schoolchildren performing under an enormous hammer-and-sickle banner and the sound track crackles with radio accounts of the destruction of German armies by the Soviets. In one scene, an out-of-work laborer stand in a deserted field and the movie muses as to whether the war has accomplished anything – if high unemployment continues, the narrator tells us and, if there social injustice persists, more war is inevitable. In many interesting ways, the film resembles Rossellini’s Paisan, although far more abstract and daring in the manner in which it crosscuts between it’s various narrative strands – the infant’s growth, the progress of the seasons (Britain looks very cold and dank), the pilot’s rehab, the miner who is ultimately badly injured in a mine disaster, and the great throbbing locomotive. Like Rossellini’s films, the movie ends with the assertion that unless Timothy grows up to be a new, and better, kind of humana being, the war, and its sacrifices, will have been in vain. Jennings died in 1950; he fell from a cliff in Greece while scouting locations for a new documentary.