'Much more than just a maker of films'

The Channel 4 documentary tries to explain why it is that, half a century after Humphrey Jennings's death in 1950, so many of his fellow film-makers still regard him as one of the greatest directors British cinema has ever produced. But Jennings was much more than just a maker of films.

In the course of a tragically short life - he was just 43 when he died - Jennings somehow managed to achieve a good deal more than most artists who live to a ripe old age. First and foremost, he was a painter who worked steadily at developing his skills from the time he was an undergraduate to his final years, and even crammed in a little drawing and painting on the side while the Luftwaffe's bombs rained down on London.

It was in his capacity as a painter, photographer and collage-maker that he helped organise the 1936 Surrealist Exhibition in London, the show that boasted Salvador Dali lecturing from within a deep-sea diving suit, a woman with a head made of roses wandering around holding an artificial limb and a pork chop, and the poet Dylan Thomas brewing cups full of boiled string.

	Still from Spare Time, made for the Mass Observation movement & the GPO. View this clip. You'll need the Real plug-in, download it here.

In the wake of the surrealist adventure, Jennings helped to co-found a remarkable movement called Mass Observation, a domestic anthropology project which involved middle-class intellectuals from the rich south venturing into the working-class cities of the north in the same spirit of adventurous enquiry with which explorers set off for 'darkest Africa'. The observers snooped on people's drinking habits, sexual antics, and on what they were saying about politics, antisemitism, dogs and facial hair. Jennings did not stay with Mass Observation for long, but he did help produce one of its most substantial literary monuments: May the Twelfth, a colourful montage-portrait of the 1937 Coronation.

As well as being a film-maker, painter, photographer and editor, Jennings was also a poet, theatre critic, art critic, a brilliant scholar of English literary history, a BBC radio broadcaster, a translator (of the French poet Benjamin Peret) and, in his adolescence, an amateur playwright. He was also a professional set designer for both stage and film, and even dabbled a bit in acting.

Finally, there is his great literary work, Pandaemonium: the Coming of the Machine in the Industrial Revolution, which was not published until 35 years after his death but which many of his admirers consider to be a masterpiece to rival any of his films. It is a chronological gathering of eye-witness accounts, from the 17th to the 19th centuries, of the coming of the 'machine age'. What makes it compelling and thought-provoking is its ability to uncover hidden connections between apparently different things: from newspaper reports of men struck dead by lightning to the beginnings of the factory system; from discoveries of dinosaur bones to the growth of the railways.

Pandaemonium mixes Jennings's interests in surreal connections, ordinary people's lives and documentary records. It is an epic vision, which he compared to a sort of vast, unfolding film of the growth of modern Britain, the world's first industrial nation, home to the first industrial working class, whose descendants became the heroes and heroines of Jennings's films.

Pandaemonium is also an intimate portrait, wrinkles, scars and all, of the country whose best qualities Jennings (a complex patriot) cherished and wanted to celebrate in his wartime films.

One of the most notorious innovations of modern industry was the division of labour, which turned multi-skilled humans into single-task automata. Jennings saw the horrors of that process, and the sheer range and variety of his creative work can be seen as a living rebuke to the inhumanity of the division of labour and specialisation. Some critics say that he spread himself too thinly, tackled too much. But it would be closer to the truth to say that it is precisely Jennings's mastery of so many arts, his refusal to be a Jack of only one trade, that helps make his work so rich and so enduring.

Kevin Jackson is a writer, producer and broadcaster. He edited The Humphrey Jennings Film Reader and is writing a biography of Humphrey Jennings.

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