Humphrey Jennings’ eminence in British films is long-established. Lindsay Anderson, writing in 1954, declared him the only true poet British cinema had produced, and that claim is still valid fifty years on. Yet outside of Britain, knowledge and appreciation of his work is patchy; and even inside Britain, Jennings’ fame is nowhere near as widespread as it should be. One reason for this, no doubt, is the kind of films Jennings made during his relatively short life (he died in 1950, aged 43, after falling off a cliff in Greece while scouting for locations). In outward form they were documentary and propaganda films, chiefly made through the GPO Film Unit and its wartime successor the Crown Film Unit: they told of British life and courage under German attack during the Second World War, the period of Jennings’ highest achievement. But their inner content – intensely personal and lyrical, both realistic and surreal – had nothing of bland officialdom about it.

Jennings arrived in films in 1934 with formidably wide interests and gifts. He came from an artistic family, and was regarded as the star intellectual of his time at Cambridge University. His interests were manifold: literary and historical scholarship, painting, photography, theatre design. He knew and championed the French Surrealists, and his own art works developed a collage style very much under their influence. He soaked himself in British history and the ways in which the 19th century’s Industrial Revolution had changed the country’s life, culture, and imagination. In 1937 he joined poets, anthropologists, Freudians, Surrealists and other explorers in establishing a newly-formed movement, Mass-Observation, dedicated to the documenting of ordinary people’s lives, thoughts, and dreams. Jennings’ 1939 film Spare Time showed the movement’s influence clearly.

But it took the heat of the Second World War for all his gifts and interests to come into focus, and to be further enlivened by something new: a growing, non-patronising sympathy for working people, and an ability to present them on the screen with an ease new in British cinema. On one level Jennings’ war films – the focus of our selection – present an invaluable and humane record of how Britain looked and felt at different stages of the 1939-45 war. Along the way, we can trace Jennings’ startling stylistic growth as a film-maker. Surrealist art and his own instincts taught him to appreciate surprising juxtapositions in images; the chaos of war, caught on the spot, gave him ideal material. Jennings and his crew scoured London and the provinces for images and people with stories to tell; but the films were essentially formed in the cutting-room, where images were mixed and matched in ways dazzling, surprising and moving, matched to soundtracks of equal complexity. Some of the tricks developed in Jennings’ films, like sound bleeding in from the next shot before the current shot is finished, have since become commonplace: but there is nothing ordinary or tired about their use here. Stewart McAllister was his cutting-room wizard, and he played a major part in shaping Jennings’ films. Working without each other, neither achieved the same level of success.

After the war, Jennings seemed adrift from the times – still making films, but lacking any burning incentive in a country facing the different challenges of reconstruction, repairing industry, and manufacturing a peacetime identity. It’s hard to see how he could have developed in Britain’s cinema of the 1950s: cinema documentaries were dying, and the feature industry didn’t want poets. But Jennings has not vanished; he’s here among us at this festival. And in a world that grows nastier by the day his films offer a transfiguring experience, finding beauty, even hope, in war’s horrors, telling us about the good hearts of men and women, and the wonder of life.