The post office film unit established by Sir Stephen Tallents in 1933 will be
forever associated with John Grierson and his idea of documentary cinema. During
his spell in charge (1933-1937), Grierson oversaw the creation of a film school
that he attempted to direct towards a socially useful purpose. J. B. Priestley
remembered, "if you wanted to see what camera and sound could really do, you had
to see some little film sponsored by the post office or the Gas, Light &
Coke company."
This early strand of the GPO Unit's filmmaking is best represented by its
'masterpiece', Night Mail (1936), which borrowed from the aesthetics of Soviet
cinema to turn an explanation of the work of the travelling post office into a
hymn to collective labour. To quote Priestley again, "Grierson and his young
men, with their contempt for easy big prizes and soft living, their taut social
conscience, their rather Marxist sense of the contemporary scene always seemed
to me at least a generation ahead of the dramatic film people."
However, the significance of Grierson's project at the GPO Film Unit would be
more apparent in its eventual influence than its immediate impact. What is
perhaps more important to stress is that this idealistic strand was not the only
or, perhaps, even the most important part of its work.
The GPO Film Unit had been established as part of the post office's new
public relations department. It was a typically experimental move. For much of
the interwar period, the GPO was the largest employer in Britain: it had around
a quarter of a million employees and was at the cutting edge of business
organisation and technological research. Thus, for example, massive government
investment in the telephone network saw the production of instructional films
such as Telephone Workers (1933), an early attempt to help train a large staff
that was spread over several geographically distinct sites.
As well as creating a national communications infrastructure, the GPO was
attempting to introduce commercial ideas of customer service into what was then
a government department. Thus one job of the GPO Film Unit was to find ways to
bridge the gap between the stern norms of communication in the Civil Service and
popular understanding. The serious impulse behind entertaining musical fantasies
like The Fairy of the Phone (1936) was an attempt to find new ways to
communicate with the public. This was an essential requirement if you believed,
as Stephen Tallents, the GPO's Head of Public Relations did, that popular
expectations of government were evolving. As he put it, the idea of government
as being negative was being superseded by the idea that government should be
positive, moving from "the preventing of the bad to the encouraging of the
good".
The work of experimental artists and filmmakers such as Lotte Reiniger,
Norman McLaren and Len Lye can, then, be understood as part of a wider GPO
project, exemplified by Giles Gilbert Scott's Jubilee Telephone Kiosk and the
development of services such as the Speaking Clock and '999', to move government
into closer and more harmonious contact with the British people.
First and foremost, the Film Unit was responsible for promoting the
reputation of the GPO, emphasising the scale and success of its technological
ambitions. This task informed the bombast of films like the comparatively big
budget BBC - The Voice of Britain (1935), as well as the internationalist
idealism of We Live in Two Worlds (1937), which envisaged how new communications
technology would herald the coming of a global civilisation. This thematic
technophilia was also reflected in the Unit's method, especially in the sound
experiments organised by the Brazilian émigré Alberto Cavalcanti. Among the
GPO's sonic achievements was the first use of recorded speech (6.30 Collection,
1934), modernist experiments in sound montage (Song of Ceylon, 1934) and the
employ of now feted composers such as Benjamin Britten, Maurice Jaubert and
Darius Milhaud.
This characteristic of the Unit's work became more evident after Grierson was
replaced by Cavalcanti and a theoretical approach to 'realism' became less
important than developing a variety of inventive and colloquial idioms. At the
most obvious level, the Unit pursued celebrity endorsements - persuading
cricketer Len Hutton and family to appear in What's On Today (1938), for example
- but this approach also began to prompt interesting experiments in film
form.
Harry Watt's The Saving of Bill Blewitt (1936) is often referred to as the
first 'story documentary'. The film combined real locales and non-professional
actors with a narrative based script. Let off the leash by Cavalcanti, Watt
began consciously to blend the aesthetic and social commitment of the early
Grierson documentaries with narrative devices borrowed from Hollywood. This
resulted in the GPO's most theatrically successful production, North Sea (1938),
which wore its 'educational' brief more lightly and made an overt attempt to
entertain. According to Denis Foreman's memoir, such fusions later fascinated
the Italian Neo-Realists.
Cavalcanti's reign also saw the production of Humphrey Jennings' masterful
Spare Time (1939), an imaginatively edited catalogue of working-class Britain at
play. Playful and humane, Jennings' delightfully undidactic film was exhibited
at the New York International Exhibition of 1939 as an example of an emerging
'new Britain.'
On the outbreak of the Second World War, the GPO Film Unit became the Crown
Film Unit, and its morale-boosting mode was effectively nationalised, a move
which resulted in the production of patriotic wartime classics such as London
Can Take It (1940), Target for Tonight (1941) and Listen to Britain (1942). Now
led by the sensitive producer, Ian Dalrymple, this was perhaps the Unit's most
triumphant phase, ironic considering the amount of governmental opposition that
Tallents and the Film Unit had faced in peacetime.
Although the GPO Film Unit was eventually subsumed by the newly created
Central Office of Information in 1946, and many of the filmmakers from its
golden age migrated into commercial film production and television, the post
office continued to make films. Early GPO efforts like Cable Ship (1933) and
Under the City (1934) had found their audience among children and in the
provincial village halls of various voluntary organisations; later post office
films concentrated on these more narrowly defined educational purposes. Indeed,
later children's programmes such as Postman Pat were arguably the long-term
result of the public affection for the post office which the GPO Film Unit had
been established to embed some 50 years earlier.
Scott Anthony
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