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.