This film about British Industry in the 1930s portrays the industrial worker as a heroic figure, championing the craftsmanship of the individual behind the dehumanizing façade of the industrial landscape.
Crown Copyright
John Grierson/Robert Flaherty
John Grierson/Edgar Anstey
Arthur Elton, John Grierson
COMMENTAdditional camera credits: Robert Flaherty, Basil Wright
Four years after the national strike, John Grierson was commissioned by The Empire Marketing Board to make a film about British industry. Typically Grierson goes for a film about characters. Industrial Britain is a series of gritty portraits set against heroic backdrops of roaring furnaces, glassworks and fuming chimneys.
The result - in the light of the divisive strike - is a queasily romantic view of working life that freely extrapolates from these individual stories to a broader picture of an assumed industrial excellence. The commentary, written by Grierson, is poetic text rather than information. It is abstract, anthropological, and heart warming. At the time it was made, this film and others like it did much to bolster Britain's self-image as a nation of craftsmen workers whose quality was reflected in the perfection of the products they made for export to the rest of the world. It is a view that became so strongly embedded in the nation's national psyche that when, after the war, Britain's manufacturing was quickly overtaken by the rest of Europe, it took years of industrial strife - and searching investigative TV documentaries - to correct.
Film supplied by Film Images (London) www.film-images.com
