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Humphrey Jennings
Humphrey Jennings, born in 1907, was a writer, set designer, painter, editor and, perhaps most famously, a director of ground-breaking documentary films. Throughout his life, Jennings also worked on his great anthology on the Industrial Revolution and the human imagination, Pandaemonium. Jennings died while making a film in Greece in 1950; Pandaemonium, a monumental achievement, was finally published in 1985. Kevin Jackson's biography of this gifted and influential man is an indispensable guide to Jenning's life and work, and the turbulent times through which he lived.
Hardcover
First published August 1, 2000
8 people want to read
About the author
Kevin Jackson
106 books17 followersThere is more than one author with this name in the Goodreads database.
Kevin Jackson's childhood ambition was to be a vampire but instead he became the last living polymath. His colossal expertise ranged from Seneca to Sugababes, with a special interest in the occult, Ruskin, take-away food, Dante's Inferno and the moose. He was the author of numerous books on numerous subjects, including Fast: Feasting on the Streets of London (Portobello 2006), and reviewed regularly for the Sunday Times.
From: http://portobellobooks.com/3014/Kevin...
Kevin Jackson was an English writer, broadcaster and filmmaker.
He was educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge. After teaching in the English Department of Vanderbilt University, Nashville, he joined the BBC, first as a producer in radio and then as a director of short documentaries for television. In 1987 he was recruited to the Arts pages of The Independent. He was a freelance writer from the early 1990s and was a regular contributor to BBC radio discussion programmes.
Jackson often collaborated on projects in various media: with, among others, the film-maker Kevin Macdonald, with the cartoonist Hunt Emerson, with the musician and composer Colin Minchin (with whom he wrote lyrics for the rock opera Bite); and with the songwriter Peter Blegvad.
Jackson appears, under his own name, as a semi-fictional character in Iain Sinclair's account of a pedestrian journey around the M25, London Orbital.
Adapted from Wikipedia
Kevin Jackson's childhood ambition was to be a vampire but instead he became the last living polymath. His colossal expertise ranged from Seneca to Sugababes, with a special interest in the occult, Ruskin, take-away food, Dante's Inferno and the moose. He was the author of numerous books on numerous subjects, including Fast: Feasting on the Streets of London (Portobello 2006), and reviewed regularly for the Sunday Times.
From: http://portobellobooks.com/3014/Kevin...
Kevin Jackson was an English writer, broadcaster and filmmaker.
He was educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge. After teaching in the English Department of Vanderbilt University, Nashville, he joined the BBC, first as a producer in radio and then as a director of short documentaries for television. In 1987 he was recruited to the Arts pages of The Independent. He was a freelance writer from the early 1990s and was a regular contributor to BBC radio discussion programmes.
Jackson often collaborated on projects in various media: with, among others, the film-maker Kevin Macdonald, with the cartoonist Hunt Emerson, with the musician and composer Colin Minchin (with whom he wrote lyrics for the rock opera Bite); and with the songwriter Peter Blegvad.
Jackson appears, under his own name, as a semi-fictional character in Iain Sinclair's account of a pedestrian journey around the M25, London Orbital.
Adapted from Wikipedia
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
March 3, 2019
This is the first – and so far only – full biography of Britain’s great wartime poet-propagandist, who gave us the country at its best in works of deceptive artistry and vision like Listen to Britain, Fires Were Started and A Diary for Timothy. (A mention too for a couple of personal favourites: intensely moving films of very different kinds, Spare Time and The Silent Village.)
In his 43 frenetic years, Jennings also co-founded the Mass-Observation movement, helped popularise surrealism in Britain, and fashioned an epic, posthumously-published ‘collage’ of Industrial Britain that inspired the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics, all while pursuing a parallel career as a (largely unheralded) poet and painter.
Jackson’s book is a little lopsided, relying slightly too much on lengthy extracts from letters and later on extensive descriptions of the films, but it’s also illuminating, neatly written – if occasionally overly spiky – and based on a decent spread of interviews and archive documents that seem about as complete as a Jennings biographer could find. Some of the latter are simply extraordinary, including a terribly affecting, rousing letter from a left-wing Welsh miner who had helped with The Silent Village, imploring Jennings not to quit the Crown Film Unit, and drawing parallels between the two men’s situations, both of them hostage to capitalism. Jennings’ own surrealist ode to the capital in wartime, ‘I See London’ is barely less astounding. For his part, Jackson is clearly well-versed in cinema and European literature, and only occasionally lets that learned nature show at the expense of accessibility. (I must assume, though, that Jackson went to Cambridge, as he seems to think that everybody else cares about Cambridge as much as he does, sending us on a colourful but excessive diversion around the university in the 1920s.)
Whether he quite gets under the skin of the man is debatable, but since Jennings was someone who defined himself by his work and his artistic passions, then perhaps that is mostly what there was. And he’s here in part: flawed, obsessive, in love with the sound of his voice, but also brilliant and beloved: a Cambridge-educated aristocrat who through his wartime experiences grew to love the working class communities whom he had previously idealised or been fascinated by, but never truly understood.
Since it seems unlikely that we’ll get another Jennings biography – surely any effort would just be a re-ordering of the self same sources – then this engrossing, impassioned if imperfect book seems required reading for any fan of this most brilliant of British directors.
In his 43 frenetic years, Jennings also co-founded the Mass-Observation movement, helped popularise surrealism in Britain, and fashioned an epic, posthumously-published ‘collage’ of Industrial Britain that inspired the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics, all while pursuing a parallel career as a (largely unheralded) poet and painter.
Jackson’s book is a little lopsided, relying slightly too much on lengthy extracts from letters and later on extensive descriptions of the films, but it’s also illuminating, neatly written – if occasionally overly spiky – and based on a decent spread of interviews and archive documents that seem about as complete as a Jennings biographer could find. Some of the latter are simply extraordinary, including a terribly affecting, rousing letter from a left-wing Welsh miner who had helped with The Silent Village, imploring Jennings not to quit the Crown Film Unit, and drawing parallels between the two men’s situations, both of them hostage to capitalism. Jennings’ own surrealist ode to the capital in wartime, ‘I See London’ is barely less astounding. For his part, Jackson is clearly well-versed in cinema and European literature, and only occasionally lets that learned nature show at the expense of accessibility. (I must assume, though, that Jackson went to Cambridge, as he seems to think that everybody else cares about Cambridge as much as he does, sending us on a colourful but excessive diversion around the university in the 1920s.)
Whether he quite gets under the skin of the man is debatable, but since Jennings was someone who defined himself by his work and his artistic passions, then perhaps that is mostly what there was. And he’s here in part: flawed, obsessive, in love with the sound of his voice, but also brilliant and beloved: a Cambridge-educated aristocrat who through his wartime experiences grew to love the working class communities whom he had previously idealised or been fascinated by, but never truly understood.
Since it seems unlikely that we’ll get another Jennings biography – surely any effort would just be a re-ordering of the self same sources – then this engrossing, impassioned if imperfect book seems required reading for any fan of this most brilliant of British directors.
Displaying 1 of 1 review