Brian Winston

Fires Were Started - (eBook, PDF)

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

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.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Bloomsbury UK eBooks
• Seitenzahl: 96
• Erscheinungstermin: 25. Juli 2019
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781838715830
• Artikelnr.: 59854845

Autorenporträt

Brian Winston was a leading figure in British media studies. He was Professor of Communications and Lincoln Chair at the University of Lincoln, UK. He held senior academic posts at UK National Film and Television School, New York University, Pennsylvania State University, the University of Wales (Cardiff), and Westminster University. He authored and edited over 20 books, including Claiming the Real: The Documentary Film Revisited (British Film Institute, 1995), Technologies of Seeing: Photography, Cinema and Television (British Film Institute, 1996), Fires Were Started- (BFI Film Classics, 1999), and A Right to Offend (Bloomsbury Academic, 2012).