A recommendation

British cinema is renowned largely for its spirit of documentary realism. Think Ken Loach, think Mike Leigh, or – more recently – think Shane Meadows. The four-disc, forty-film box set ‘Land of Promise: The British Documentary Film Movement, 1930-1950’ (recently released by the British Film Institute, and available here) represents the primordial soup from which this tradition was birthed.

This is not to say that the films within it are primitive. Far from it. They are poetic, lyrical and – in their own quiet way – revolutionary. This is especially true of those documentaries made by the leading lights of the movement – John Grierson, Paul Rotha and Humphrey Jennings – which are strongly featured here. Rotha’s Shipyard (1935), for instance, is a strangely moving account of the construction of an ocean liner. And Jennings’ Listen to Britain (1942) – a free-associative flight through the sights and sounds of WW2-era Britain – is proof enough for why Lindsay Anderson described him as “the only true poet of the English cinema”.