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Humphrey Jennings ranks amongst the greatest film makers of twentieth century Britain. Although a relatively unknown figure to the wider public, his war-time documentaries are regarded by many (including Lord Puttnam, Lindsay Anderson and Mike Leigh) as amongst the finest films of their time. Groundbreaking both in terms of their technique and their interest in, and respect for, the everyday experiences of ordinary people, these films are much more than mere government propaganda. Instead, Jennings work offers an unparalleled window into the British home-front, and the hopes, fears and expectations of a nation fighting for its survival. Yet until now, Jennings has remained a shadowy figure; with his life and work lacking the sustained scholarly investigation and reassessment they deserve. As such film and social historians will welcome this new book which provides an up-to-date and thorough exploration of the relationships between Jennings life, ideas and films. Arguing that Jennings's film output can be viewed as part of a coherent intellectual exercise rather than just one aspect of the artistic interests of a wide ranging intellectual, Philip Logan, paints a much fuller and more convincing picture of the man than has previously been possible. He shows for the first time exactly how Jennings's artistic expression was influenced by the fundamental intellectual, social and cultural changes that shook British society during the first decades of the twentieth century. Combining biography, social history and international artistic thought, the book offers a fascinating insight into Jennings, his work, the wider British documentary film movement and the interaction between art and propaganda. Bringing together assessments of his tragically short life and his films this book is essential reading for anyone with an interest in British cinema or the social history of Britain in the 1930s and 40s.
Humphrey Jennings was one of Britain's greatest documentary film-makers, described by Lindsay Anderson in 1954 as 'the only real poet the British cinema has yet produced'. A member of the GPO Film Unit and director of wartime canonical classics such as Listen to Britain (1942) and A Diary for Timothy (1945), he was also an acclaimed writer, painter, photographer and poet. This seminal collection of critical essays, first published in 1982 and here reissued with a new introduction, traces Jennings's fascinating career in all its aspects with the aid of documents from the Jennings family archive. Situating Jennings's work in the world of his contemporaries, and illuminating the qualities by which his films are now recognised, Humphrey Jennings: Film-Maker, Painter, Poet explores the many insights and cultural contributions of this truly remarkable artist.
This book presents a chronology of thirty definitions attributed to the word, term, phrase, and concept of “documentary” between the years 1895 and 1959. The book dedicates one chapter to each of the thirty definitions, scrutinizing their idiosyncratic language games from close range while focusing on their historical roots and concealed philosophical sources of inspiration. Dan Geva's principal argument is twofold: first, that each definition is an original ethical premise of documentary; and second, that only the structured assemblage of the entire set of definitions successfully depicts the true ethical nature of documentary insofar as we agree to consider its philosophical history as a reflective object of thought in a perpetual state of being-self-defined: an ethics sui generis.
Times of the Technoculture explores the social and cultural impact of new technologies, tracing the origins of the information society from the coming of the machine with the industrial revolution to the development of mass production techniques in the early twentieth century. The authors look at how the military has controlled the development of the information society, and consider the centrality of education in government attempts to create a knowledge society. Engaging in contemporary debates surrounding the internet, Robins and Webster question whether it can really offer us a new world of virtual communities, and suggest more radical alternatives to the corporate agenda of contemporary technologies.
The image of Coventry in flames was one of the most haunting of the Second World War. Yet the excitement and optimism of the 1950s and 1960s were succeeded by a quarter century of urban blight and economic slump. The collapse of manufacturing industry - machine tools, aeroplanes, cars - left a proud community adrift and demoralised. Today a revitalised twenty-first century city, Coventry has embraced the new millennium and evolved from bleak post-industrial desert to vibrant cultural oasis, in the process rediscovering a sense of purpose and a vision for the future. "The City of Coventry" tells the story of an experiment in social democracy carried out by a Labour-controlled council which envisaged the bomb shattered city as a model of urban regeneration and imaginative planning. Post-war reconstruction could be a striking success, as in the pedestrian-friendly Precinct and the bold new cathedral, or a notable failure as in the ever more intrusive ring roads and grim high-rise flats. In offering a fresh perspective on the city, this innovative volume of essays rediscovers Coventry as an inspiration for poets and painters such as Philip Larkin and Terry Frost, musicians as varied as Benjamin Britten and The Specials, and film-makers such as Humphrey Jennings, whose "Heart of Britain" was shot in the immediate aftermath of the Blitz. Adrian Smith skilfully mixes memoir, family history and meticulous scholarship to paint a complete and incisive portrait of Coventry. Drawing on new research into topics as diverse as the place of Surrealism in West Midlands culture and the shadowy presence of rugby league in a union bastion, Smith brings a unique insight into the recent history of his native city. Attractively presented, highly readable and with broad appeal, "The City of Coventry" is a lively re-examination of an iconic city of the twentieth century illuminating the profound changes that engulfed industrial England during and after the Second World War.
Humphrey Jennings (1907-50) was perhaps the most gifted film-maker of the British documentary movement. Involved in the Mass Observation project of the 1930s, Jennings' talent lay in picturing ordinary life in ways that were inventive yet authentic. "Fires Were Started –" (1943) is his major achievement. A film about a day's work for a unit of mainly auxiliary volunteer firemen at the height of the blitz, it blends observation with reconstruction to achieve a particularly poignant kind of propaganda. Lindsay Anderson expressed the opinion of many commentators and viewers when he wrote in Sight and Sound (in a 1954 article reprinted as an appendix to this volume) that Jennings was 'the only real poet the British cinema has yet produced'. But how could a documentarist also be a 'poet'? This is one of the questions addressed by Brian Winston in his study of "Fires Were Started –", a question which is particularly relevant today in the wake of the massive public controversies surrounding 'faked' documentaries. For Winston documentary film-making is always 'creatively treated actuality' and must be taken as such if it's to be properly valued and understood.
Humphrey Jennings has been described as the only real poet that British cinema has produced. His documentary films are remarkable records of Britain at peace and war, and his range of representational approaches transcended accepted notions of wartime propaganda and revised the strict codes of British documentary film of the 1930s and 1940s. Poet, propagandist, surrealist and documentary filmmaker – Jennings' work embodies an outstanding mix of startling apprehension, personal expression and representational innovation. This book carefully examines and expertly explains the central components of Jennings' most significant films, and considers the relevance of his filmmaking to British cinema and contemporary experience. Films analysed include Spare Time, Words for Battle, Listen to Britain, Fires Were Started, The Silent Village, A Diary for Timothy and Family Portrait.
Rough Draft: The Modernist Diaries of Emily Holmes Coleman, 1929-1937 is an edited selection, published here for the first time, of the diaries kept by American poet and novelist Coleman during her years as an expatriate in the modernist hubs of France and England. During her time abroad, Coleman developed as a surrealist writer, publishing a novel, The Shutter of Snow, and poems in little magazines like transition. She also began her life’s work, her diary, which was sustained for over four decades. This portion of the diary is set against the cultural, social, and political milieu of the early twentieth century in the throes of industrialization, commercialization, and modernization. It showcases Coleman’s often larger-than-life, intense personality as she interacted with a multitude of literary, artistic, and intellectual figures of the period like Djuna Barnes, Peggy Guggenheim, Antonia White, John Holms, George Barker, Edwin Muir, Cyril Connolly, Arthur Waley, Humphrey Jennings, Dylan Thomas, and T.S. Eliot. The book offers Coleman’s lively, raw, and often iconoclastic account of her complex social network. The personal and professional encouragements, jealousies, and ambitions of her friends unfolded within a world of limitless sexual longing, supplies of alcohol, and aesthetic discussions. The diary documents the disparate ways Coleman celebrated, just as she consistently struggled to reconcile, her multiple identities as an artistic, intellectual, maternal, sexual, and spiritual woman. “Rough Draft” contributes to the growing modernist canon of life writings of both female and male participants whose autobiographies, memoirs, and diaries offer diverse accounts of the period, like Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company, and Robert McAlmon and Kay Boyle’s Being Geniuses Together.