NIGHT MAIL (1936)

One text that really inspired me and that I used as stimulus for the direction I am taking is Night Mail Night Mail by Harry Watt & Basil Wright (1936). The film was overseen by John Grierson who is widely acknowledged with coining the term "documentary film" and godfather of British documentary. As head of the GPO film unit he created many genre defining documentaries and the Night Mail is an archetypal film from the British Documentary Film Movement John. It was a pioneering documentary of a postal train travelling from London to Scotland.

The film was a huge collaborative effort drawing on a variety of styles and talents fusing poetry from W.H. Auden a score by Benjamin Britten and a mix of real life, purpose built sets and re-enactments to fascinating effect. It combines elements of many documentary modes Watt’s ethnographic observatory approach showing the human side of the workers sharing jokes and sipping beer. Wright brought the poetic elements through it’s use of expressionistic camera and lighting techniques borrowed from experimental European cinema, the interesting score and of course W.H. Audens poetry. Finally the expository approach and exposition through Griersons’ own narration. This groundbreaking cinematic approach to documentary created a performance from the language of film manipulating it and the using subjectivity to create an emotive reading of the film. these are all areas that greatly interest me.

Grierson believed in the social responsibility of the filmmaker and the potential of film in helping society achieve its democratic ideals and in the case of Night Mail uses aesthetic to help create this “good propaganda” and Grierson’s position on the function of documentary film is descibed as “representing the inter-dependence and evolution of social relations in a dramatic and symbolic way”. These are ideas and sentiments I wish to explore further in my own work.