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The Coming of the Dial had the job of promoting the
automation of telephony that the GPO was undertaking in the early 1930s by
introducing dial telephones and exchanges employing banks of electromagnetic
relays in place of human operators. With such a brief, it could have been like
any of the more routine films made by the GPO Film Unit in the period from its
metamorphosis from the Empire Marketing Board Film Unit in 1933 to the outbreak of war. In
the event, however, director Stuart Legg made a film that used impressively confident editing
techniques to produce an eloquent marriage of lyrical filmmaking and Modernistic
technological propaganda.
Once the somewhat incongruous strains of trumpet voluntary that accompany the
titles have faded, the film moves into a powerfully modernist 30-second
juxtaposition of shots of one of the light display sculptures created by the
former director of the Bauhaus, László Moholy-Nagy. This is accompanied by a
commentary that, under the rubric of 'building the future in the laboratory',
compares the GPO's applied research into electromagnetic switches with applied
chemistry, physics and biology in steel manufacture, signal lenses and
grass-breeding.
The film is conspicuously well made, with carefully angled and lit shots,
montage, use of superimposition and, on the soundtrack, the sound of
electromechanical switches in place of music.
Timothy Boon *This film is included in the BFI DVD compilation 'Addressing The Nation: The GPO Film Unit Collection Volume 1'.
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1. The dial (3:37)
