DOCUMENTARY - BRITAIN THROUGH A LENS - TIMELINE.

We had a screening about the history of documentaries called 'Britain through a lens'  this blog will discuss the timeline of what I extracted from the video then I will go on to discuss the style and why I thought it was interesting to watch because not only is it important to discuss the format itself but it is important to understand why documentaries started in the first place as it has become one of the biggest Genres's shown on our screens today.


Director: Durlacher, Chris

Summery
The unlikely story of how, between 1929 and 1945, a group of tweed-wearing radicals and pin-striped bureaucrats created the most influential movement in the history of British film. They were the British Documentary Movement and they gave Britons a taste for watching films about real life.

They were an odd bunch, as one with among them later admitted. "A documentary director must be a gentleman... and a socialist." They were inspired by a big idea - that films about real life would change the world. That, if people of all backgrounds saw each other on screen - as they really were - they would get to know and respect each other more. As John Grierson, the former street preacher who founded the Movement said: "Documentary outlines the patterns of interdependence".

The Documentary Film Mob assembles a collection of captivating film portraits of Britain, during the economic crisis of the 1930s and the Second World War. Featuring classic documentaries about slums and coal mines, about potters and posties, about the bombers and the Blitz, the programme reveals the fascinating story of what was also going on behind the camera. Of how the documentary was born and became part of British culture.

Broadcast time/date
21:00 19.07.11

Channel
BBC4

Duration.
60 min.

Cast
The narrator, Steven Mackintosh.

Subject terms.
British documentary movement;
Documentary films --Great Britain -- History and criticism;

Genre
Documentary

Language
English

Format
Videorecording


In the 1930s and '40s, a small group of young British artist and filmmaker were inspired by a vision,
they felt that they could change the country by making films about 'real life'. To fund there venture they turned to the government.

It was said that a British documentary maker must be a gentleman, a socialist, have a university education, a private income, his own car, a nasal voice and have made some sort of film, a well developed nasal voice has been known to excuse the other requirements, except being a gentleman and a socialist.

During the WWII the filmmakers kept there focus on the lives of ordinary people but their films also carried a message, they lifted hearts it was an art that had taken them years to learn for the war was the end of a journey of filmmaking that began almost 20 years earlier.


Below is the timeline of the Documentary movement.

• 1927 - Young Scottish political activist and street preacher John Grierson approached the government seeking funds for one of his films, the Empire Marketing Board (EMB, set up by the Tories) asked Grierson to make a film about the great British Empire. 

                                                     Headquarters of the EMB

                                                                  

                                                                    John Grierson

• 1928 - Money was assigned to Grierson to make a documentary about the Herrin industry.

• 1929 - Grierson delivered a full-length silent documentary film about the Herrin fishing business.

(IMAGE OF OR CLIP OF VIDEO)

• 1930 - John Grierson became a civil servant when the EMB was given a new sub-department NO:45, it was called the EMB film unit, he put in an advert for filmmakers.

• 1931 - The department was full of filmmakers they consisted of the following filmmakers; 

Basil Wright - he had made a couple of self-financed shorts but wanted to work on a larger canvas.

Edgar Anstey - A scientist looking for a creative outlet

Arther Elton - An heir to a Baronet who had his own butler.

Sister  Ruby - Grierson's school teacher.

• 1931 - Industrial Britain was made. It was a PR film, to promote the industrial industries and the importance of them during the Great Depression, the images were set to stirring music and was the first time it had a voice-over commentary, it turned ordinary working men into working-class heroes. It was given a nationwide release.
• 1931 - Harry watt joined the EMB.
• 1931 - 1933 Over 100 documentary films were made.
• 1933 September - Government cut funding for the filmmaker unit and it was closed down

Sir Kingsley Wood was in charge of the General post office unit also known as the GPO he snapped up the documentary filmmakers unit, he wanted them to make films about what was going on in his department like encouraging people to buy telephones or to promote a new stamp that was coming out.

The GPO film unit was given a new location NO:21 Soho, Grierson reminded his disciples about the fundamental purpose of the documentaries they where making even though they were now making films for the Post Office.

• 1934 - Humphrey Jennings a photographer and painter, played a part in a GPO film but was set to be a historical figure within the movement.
• 1935 - a film was made about the slums in Britain this was to be a great deal for the oil industry a film was released call Housing Problems it was a bit like a corporate video. But this brought about a new form of documentary, this was when the interview was introduced. Grierson's sister Ruby was the one that pioneered the interview she was the assistant producer on Housing Problems and she wrote to her brother saying "I'm going to put up a camera and a microphone and I'm going to ask them questions, I'm going to tell them the camera is yours and the microphone is yours" she took a lighting and a crew into the slums. she said to the interviewees " Here is the camera and here is the microphone, now it's your chance to tell the bastards what it's really like to live in the slums" it was a chance for the people at the bottom of society to have a chance to speak.
• 1936 - Nightmail was released, this film was to show the hard-working mailmen delivering post by railway. A unique voiceover was created in a way of a song/peom (I think this was the first ever example of what we call MC'ing in today's time), this was the works of WH Auden and Benjamin Britain. It was directed by Harry Watt. It was the first time that real people had been researched and a script was created by the dialogue they would actually say and was re-created on the day of the shoot, it was also the first time that a set was built in a studio in South London to replicate the inside of the train, this was so they could be accurate, it was also the first time that a documentary was not only seen but heard.

Here are the lyrics that were narrated by Grierson himself.

This is the night mail crossing the Border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,

Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner, the girl next door.

Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:
The gradient's against her, but she's on time.

Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder
Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,

Snorting noisily as she passes
Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.

Birds turn their heads as she approaches,
Stare from bushes at her blank-faced coaches.

Sheep-dogs cannot turn her course;
They slumber on with paws across.

In the farm she passes no one wakes,
But a jug in a bedroom gently shakes.


Dawn freshens, Her climb is done.
Down towards Glasgow she descends,
Towards the steam tugs yelping down a glade of cranes
Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces
Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.
All Scotland waits for her:
In dark glens, beside pale-green lochs
Men long for news.


Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from girl and boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or to visit relations,
And applications for situations,
And timid lovers' declarations,
And gossip, gossip from all the nations,
News circumstantial, news financial,
Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,
Letters with faces scrawled on the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, the adoring,
The cold and official and the heart's outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.

Thousands are still asleep,
Dreaming of terrifying monsters
Or of friendly tea beside the band in Cranston's or Crawford's:

Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh,
Asleep in granite Aberdeen,
They continue their dreams,
But shall wake soon and hope for letters,
And none will hear the postman's knock
Without a quickening of the heart, 

For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

                                            A video from youtube from the film Nightmail

It came to the attention of the GPO that Grierson was moonlighting and working outside of the unit for other industries, this was not a great thing for himself the future of the Documentary unit, he regarding non-GPO documentaries as further opportunities to spread the message of the movement. because in  1935 - Coalface was released, this was a promotional film for the British coal industry, it revealed how British comforts relied on the back-breaking work of the minors so Grierson was called into a meeting for working beyond the GPO's remits, Grierson argued that his filmmakers were just making an extra income for the GPO, but he was politely informed that it was taboo for the government to hire itself out as a private company.

• 1937 - Grierson was moved away from being the head of the GPO film unit, he resigned from the civil servant service, many of the documentary movement left and were scattered across Soho, they sold their services to many private companies, the Orion shipping company, engineering giant Vickers Armstrong, BP and Shell.
• 1939 - Sparetime was released, it was directed by Humphry Jennings, it was commissioned by the government who wanted something lighthearted to show about the fun normal British people had during there days off, it was criticised, one critic accused it of 'Laughing at the plebs".
• 1939 - First Days, was released, without funding the documentary movement took it upon themselves to create there own documentary about what was happening during the war, it was a snapshot of Britain and a vivid record of how Britain coped and to have an optimistic outlook. 
• 1940 - the GPO was moved out of that department and moved to the Ministry Of Information, it was known as the Crown film unit.
• 1940 - London Can Take It was released, It was about how Britain was bearing up during the German bombing raids, the authentic life of Britain during the blitz.
• 1941 - Target for tonight was released, created by Harry Watt, he had convinced the government to fund this film about how the RAF was hitting back against the Germans. This film becomes the most successful documentary of the history of the movement. The way it was constructed was the same as in the film Nightmail, it was researched first then scripted word for word, then the real people would recreate what they had said before, many of the people featured in the film lost their lives whilst fighting in the war.
• 1942 - Listen to Britain was acknowledged as an early masterpiece of the British documentary industry, without voice overs it was seen as the authentic truth. But listen to Britain was a government propaganda film, it's intention was for the country to stick together through the fight.
• 1945 - Diary For Timothy - was directed again by Humprey Jennings and was a storytelling device about a soldier writing home to his baby it was the first time that archives and actors where used for a documentary, the truth is the compelling emotions of a soldier.

In 1950  Jennings died by falling off a cliff whilst scouting locations.
Sister Ruby died whilst filming on a boat and was torpedoed by a German submarine, John Grierson stayed abroad most of his life, founding documentary industries in Canada and Australia. Harry Watt quit documentaries and began doing commercial movies and the others didn't last it to the age of television.

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All the above was taken from references that I had taken note of during the screening off BB4's Britain through a lens.

What I have observed through watching this documentary and the way it was made is that it used archive footage but reconstructed the original  by focusing on one landmark in colour than taking it back to black and white, the filmmaker demonstrated that the old versus the new hasn't changed that much and he also used a narrative structure in which we intend to do on our project.

Britain had become more and more about documenting real life and I feel like all that was created between the 1930s-40s was a big part of how we document our lives today.

if we look at programmes life, benefit street we are still focusing on what society would be called as 'Slums' we do not frown upon the people that are less fortunate but we do start appreciating what we have by watching these types of programmes.

How is this going to influence my documentary - I decide that as a presenter and narrator for our documentary I want to keep it relevant for the audience we are making it for, unlike Grierson, who wanted to give a message to Britain he didn't have a broadcasting channel for the type of people he wanted it to go out tom, therefore, I think he had more of a challenge because it had to hit home to everyone, however in our brief that we were given it was to appeal to people of 16 - 25, as if it was going to be commissioned by BBC THREE which is now based online and our guideline to focus on was about online .... hang on I see a pattern here? 

I want to use archive footage and it would be good to do similar transitions as this documentarie does.