Fires Were Started -.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Winston, Brian.

Series:

BFI Film Classics

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Auxiliary Fire Service (Great Britain)--In motion pictures.

Auxiliary Fire Service (Great Britain).

Fires were started (Motion picture).

London (England)--History--Bombardment, 1940-1941--In motion pictures.

London (England).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (90 pages)

Place of Publication:

London : BFI Publishing, 1999.

Summary:

Humphrey Jennings (1907-50) was perhaps the most gifted filmmaker of the British documentary movement. Involved in the Mass Observation project of the 1930s, Jennings' talent lay in picturing ordinary life in ways that were inventive yet authentic.Fires Were Started(1943) is his major achievement. A film about a day's work for a unit of the National Fire Service at the height of the blitz, it blends observation with fictional reconstruction to achieve a particularly poignant kind of propaganda. Lindsay Anderson expressed the opinion of many commentators and viewers when he wrote inSight and Sound(in a 1954 article reprinted as an appendix to this volume) that Jennings was "the only real poet the British cinema has yet produced." But how could a documentarist also be a poet? This is one of the questions addressed by Brian Winston in his highly engaging study ofFires Were Started--a question that is particularly relevant today in the wake of the massive public controversies surrounding "faked" documentaries. For Winston documentary filmmaking is always "creatively treated actuality" and must be taken as such if it's to be properly valued and understood.

Contents:

Cover Page

Title Page

Contents

Acknowledgments

1 'A fresh and loving eye'

2 'An intellectual artist'

3 'The simplest of pictures'

4 'The idea of connection'

5 'Films of britain at war'

6 'This is what we were like - the best of us'

7 'The past with the present'

8 'Jennings' films are all documentaries'

9 'The murky and undecided realities of today'

Appendix: 'Only Connect: Some Aspects of the Work of Humphrey Jennings' by Lindsay Anderson

Notes

Credits

Bibliography

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eCopyright.

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

978-1-83871-252-5

1-83871-582-7

OCLC:

1182878916