Humphrey Jennings Movies

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...

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

A behind-the-scenes GPO Film Unit documentary (directed by Stuart Legg) that races from studio rehearsals and newsrooms to control rooms and...

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

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...

A Defeated People is a 1946 British documentary short film made by the Crown Film Unit, directed by Humphrey Jennings and narrated by William...

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

Short documentary on the use of the V-1 Flying Bomb during the German bombings of London.

The film, made to advertise domestic telephone sets, is based around two very different families. The Petts are conventional, happy and have...

A depiction of life in wartime Britain during the Second World War. Director Humphrey Jennings visits many aspects of civilian life and of the...

This experiment was a “prestige advertisement” for Shell Motor Oil. As conventional animation became dominated by Walt Disney, many...

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

How long-distance telephone calls are made, from the UK to the USA. We see operators, miles of wires, and the amplification of voice transmitted...

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

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...

Documentary short by Humphrey Jennings

Shot in mid-1939 as S.S. Ionian (also shown as Her Last Trip), Humphrey Jennings’s GPO short follows the Royal Mail steamer on a last peacetime...

A story of sacrifice, in which organised labour voluntarily relinquishes hard-won workplace rights after being asked "to give up by choice what...

Humphrey Jennings’s wartime short rallies Britain’s countryside, showing fields ploughed up from fallow, seed sown, and crops raised on...