'Not just recording reality, but reconstructing reality'

I first came across Fires Were Started by accident. I was a television journalist making a film about JB Priestly, a great writer of the period. This was in 1984, when Priestly had just died; it was about two o'clock in the morning in the cutting room and we were listening to his radio broadcasts during the Blitz. He's got that common-sense, gravelly voice of England that was key to our identity and our liberty. We needed some pictures to illustrate it, so I'd asked the BBC library to send us some documentary film, and Fires Were Started came in. I sat there and watched it all the way through - in the middle of the night.

Still from Fires Were Started. View this clip. You'll need the Real plug-in, download it here.

What Humphrey Jennings was doing was not just recording reality, but reconstructing reality. The great breakthrough he made was that he was the first person who didn't view ordinary people like animals in a wildlife film. Ordinary people had been filmed before, but he was doing more than that - he wanted their voices to come through.

The extraordinary thing about Fires Were Started was that it was a recreated experience, reconstructed in the docks where these fires had taken place. Jennings was crazy. He nearly got himself burnt alive. He needed to experience what fire was like.

His films are highly wrought - they owe a lot to poetry. They are films of images as opposed to films of narrative. The narratives come through the images. They are a much more rhetorical sort of film than the ones that get made today.

These are films that are very unabashed at pulling at emotional strings. They are films that could only have come out of Britain at war. And I think that what now would be seen as slightly grandiose, at that time clearly caught a mood. On the one hand, you get music used in a very romantic way, and at the same time natural sound and the sound effects of everyday life in a very realistic way. The interplay of the two makes it feel both immediate and at the same time from a completely different age.

	'One man went to Mow' from Fires Were Started. View this clip. You'll need the Real plug-in, download it here.

In some ways Fires Were Started is hopelessly contrived, and some of the lines sound like something out of a hammy film. On the other hand, there is both an innocence and a genuineness. If you think of that strange sequence when they all start singing 'One man went to mow', that has clearly been set up, but it obviously comes out of their willingness to do it. No doubt the firemen believed it was a true evocation of their lives.

I suppose the odd thing about Fires Were Started is that you remember particular still shots from it. Wide shots of the great buildings burning and the tiny firemen on the end of the ladders, and of close-ups of that particular white, working-class face of the time. The paleness of the East End face was probably based on bad nutrition, not much sunlight and a polluted environment. But it was the face of a generation. There are close-ups of firemen's faces fighting the flames on the roof - almost like a Rembrandt painting. Also, I love those shots of a completely vanished world at the end, with the ships unloading and going out to sea.

Jennings is the filmic equivalent of George Orwell. There is that constant appeal to decency and common sense. Unlike John Grierson, Jennings was much less preachy, much less hierarchical. He made films that mixed propaganda with a passionate social conviction. At the heart of them was his belief in the essential generosity of spirit of everyday human beings. He was the first person who trusted people to speak for themselves. He directed them but in the end it is the voice of the people that comes through. His films are democratic and optimistic. There's a Jennings quote which summarises everything that matters in my job:

'He can't tell the community who they are unless he talks about the things the community knows about, things that they are interested in, and unless he also looks at the community's past, at the figures, the monuments, the achievements, the defeats or whatever they may be, that have made the community what it is.'

Although Jennings was talking about poets, it applies equally to the film-makers. It sums up what matters in factual programming: that sense of being absolutely engaged with what audiences want to watch.

Tim Gardam is Director of Programmes, Channel 4.

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