Humphrey Jennings filming © Lee Miller Archive

The British documentary film owes its origins not only to political commitment, but also to Scottish Calvinism. John Grierson was the man who pioneered this film movement and who first used the word 'documentary'. The key to understanding him and his work is his Scottish Calvinistic upbringing.

Born in 1898, the son of a village-school headmaster, Grierson grew up on Clydeside, and was influenced by both the Marxists of the militant shipyard trade unions and by Calvinism. This puritanical religious belief was dominated by the idea that an individual's mission in life would demonstrate that they had been chosen by God. It often gave people a powerful work ethic, which Grierson certainly had.

Calvinism was also deeply suspicious of idle entertainment and play-acting, which were seen as a waste of time and, worse, an untruthful way of behaving.

Fact versus fiction

The first film Grierson saw, when he was six years old, was part of a Lumière programme and showed a boy eating an apple. He remembers that the Calvinist elders felt that, because it dealt with reality rather than fiction, it was less sinful than theatre. Grierson later saw the purpose of film as educational and political. 'I look on cinema as a pulpit, and use it as a propagandist,' he said.

Grierson combined strong theoretical convictions about the social purpose of recording reality with practical know-how about making films and a passionate determination to get things done. After much persuasion, he received government backing in 1928 for a film unit based at the Empire Marketing Board. There he made Drifters, a silent film about North Sea herring fishermen, which laid the foundations of documentary in Britain. Then, from 1933, he made films at the General Post Office (GPO).

Before this, Grierson had been a student of philosophy at Glasgow University. Graduating in 1923, he then spent three years on a research fellowship in the United States, writing on the problems of education and public information. He studied the psychology of propaganda.

Film school

In the 1930s, at the GPO Film Unit, Grierson gathered a group of young, very enthusiastic, but completely inexperienced film-makers, whom he trained into a movement. Their lack of experience was an advantage because it meant they had no rigid ideas about the right or wrong way of doing things. Humphrey Jennings was one of this group.

Classic documentaries produced by Grierson's unit include The Voice of Britain (1935) and Night Mail (1936). The GPO Film Unit's other films deal with the world of work, housing conditions, pollution, unemployment and undernourishment.

But although he prided himself on 'putting the working classes on the screen', his films tend to view them as types rather than as people - and they are rarely allowed to speak for themselves. Also, Grierson didn't always film spontaneous reality: he often used actors, scripts and special sets.

Moving force

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

During the Second World War, Grierson found himself in Canada, where he became head of its National Film Board, and amassed a team of more than 800 film-makers. After the war, he worked for UNESCO in Paris, and then became Controller of Films at the Central Office of Communications in London. In 1957 he turned to television and worked in Scotland. He died in 1972.

Today, the British documentary movement of the 1930s still exerts an influence that is inspiring but, because it sometimes favoured dull if worthy films, is sometimes limiting. At its best, though, in films such as Jennings's Fires Were Started and A Diary for Timothy, the British documentary mixes loveable idiosyncrasy with a real feeling for the lives of ordinary people. As such it combines Jennings's two other enthusiasms, Surrealism and Mass Observation.

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