Movies: Humphrey Jennings

The true story of the massacre of a small Czech village by the Nazis is retold as if it happened in Wales....

A narrator recounts the state of Great Britain near the end of WWII via a visual diary for the titular baby boy born in September 1944....

Poetry by Rudyard Kipling, John Milton, and William Blake, and excerpts from speeches by Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill, all read by Laurence Olivier, illuminate documentary footage of England during its defense against the Nazi blitz in World...

Documentary about Humphrey Jennings, an English documentary filmmaker from the 1930s to 1950....

1935 documentary about the hard working life of Welsh coal miners....

A depiction of life in wartime Britain during the Second World War. Director Humphrey Jennings visits many aspects of civilian life and of the turmoil and privation caused by the war, all without narration....

A tribute to the courage and resiliency of Britons during the darkest days of the London Blitz....

British film written and directed by Humphrey Jennings, filmed in documentary style showing the lives of firefighters through the Blitz in World War II....

In preparation for the celebration of the 1951 Festival of Britain, this short film was released to assure British citizens of their nation's place in the world and of their own places within that nation. Illustrative scenes of farming, science, poli...

Rubber rooftops and bomber-size fly paper suspended in the sky? Gad Sir, bring on the Blitz! David Low’s success as a cartoonist in the 1930s is perhaps best demonstrated by the fact that Goebbels complained that he was souring British-German relatio...

Londoners prepare for war....

An impressionistic portrait of the BBC....

The Eighth Army famously adopted a German song in the Western Desert. The Crown Film Unit traces the journey of Lili Marlene from its composition in post-WW1 Hamburg, via Radio Belgrade and the Afrika Korps, through victory in Tunisia and Sicily, to ...

Documentary short by Humphrey Jennings...

The film, made to advertise domestic telephone sets, is based around two very different families. The Petts are conventional, happy and have children; the Potts are unconventional and unhappy, without children....

This experiment was a “prestige advertisement” for Shell Motor Oil. As conventional animation became dominated by Walt Disney, many European filmmakers turned to puppets as an alternative, and Lye enlisted the help of avant-garde friends such as Hum...

Osbert Lancaster, James Fisher, John Ormston and Ralph Vaughn Williams meditate on the history and culture of England....

A Defeated People is a 1946 British documentary short film made by the Crown Film Unit, directed by Humphrey Jennings and narrated by William Hartnell. The film depicts the shattered state of Germany, both physically and as a society, in the immediat...

Edward R. Murrow narrates Humphrey Jennings' short documentary about life in England during wartime....

Documentary short by Humphrey Jennings. The GPO Film Unit was a subdivision of the UK General Post Office. The unit was established in 1933, taking on responsibilities of the Empire Marketing Board Film Unit. Headed by John Grierson, it was set up to...