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5 unusual facts about Humphrey Jennings


Film Producers Guild

Peter Morley got his first job in the industry working as a projectionist at the Guild's screening room and met people like Humphrey Jennings, John Grierson, Jill Craigie and Paul Rotha.

Fires Were Started

Fires Were Started (1943) is a British film written and directed by Humphrey Jennings, filmed in documentary style showing the lives of firefighters through the Blitz in World War II.

Humphrey Jennings

Jennings only feature length film, the 70-minute Fires Were Started (1943), also known as I Was A Fireman, details the work of the Auxiliary Fire Service in London.

His films appear strikingly different from the 'social critique' approach which typified the documentaries of Grierson and his "school" of the 1930s and the feature films of the 1960s and '70s such as Lindsay Anderson's This Sporting Life (1962) or Karel Reisz's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960).

O Dreamland

Listen to Britain - a 1942 short co-directed by Humphrey Jennings, another of Anderson's heroes, made in an impressionistic style.


Marius Goring

After attending the Perse School in Cambridge, where he became a friend of an older boy, the future documentary film maker Humphrey Jennings, he studied at the universities of Cambridge, Frankfurt, Munich, Vienna and Paris.


see also

Stewart McAllister

Following the death of Humphrey Jennings in 1950, McAllister began working for the British Transport Films unit, under Edgar Anstey.