The Humphrey Jennings film reader

Humphrey Jennings (1907-1950) has long been recognised as one of Britain's greatest film directors. His studies of national life, and particularly his three wartime films "Listen to Britain", "Fires Were Started" and "A Diary for Timothy", invaluable documents of their times, remain among the highest achievements of world cinema - humane, innovative and poetic. Jennings's films are rich due to the drama of subject matter and the range of passions and skills he brought to his work. He was a gifted painter, a key member of the Surrealist movement; a poet and literary critic; a founder of the domestic anthropological movement Mass Observation; and a historian, who assembled an anthology about the Machine Age, "Pandcemonium". The "Humphrey Jennings Film Reader" tells the story of his brief, varied life in his own words, using many previously unpublished letters, treatments and screen-plays. It reprints all of his published critical writings on literature, painting and other subjects (most of them unavailable in book form since the 1930s), the texts of his radio broadcasts for the BBC and a selection of his poems.