Boom Britain
November sees the launch of one of the BFI National Archive's most ambitious projects in years. Boom Britain is the collective title for a series of publications and events designed not merely to celebrate non-fiction filmmaking in the postwar era, but also to rewrite British film history. Or, in some cases, to write it more or less from scratch.
Until now, the 1950s to the 1970s has been barely explored by documentary historians. The conventional wisdom is that aside from a few isolated pockets of activity, such as the Free Cinema movement of the late 1950s (which launched the careers of Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson), or the much-loved Technicolor travelogues and train films of British Transport Films, little was produced of any especial interest. We are endlessly told that the great period of the British documentary movement spanned the 1930s and 1940s, that its giants were Humphrey Jennings, Pat Jackson, Harry Watt and Basil Wright, who spun the form into pure cinematic poetry.
However, while their work remains as outstanding as ever, the fact is that plenty of creatively outstanding and sociologically fascinating films continued to be produced and screened after their heyday - the problem was that they were increasingly ignored by critics. The postwar documentary had its own major figures, such as Guy Brenton, Paul Dickson, Sarah Erulkar, Derrick Knight, John Krish, Eric Marquis, Michael Orrom, Anthony Simmons, Derek Williams and many others, whose reputation has suffered more from the lack of availability of their work than for any other reason. You have only to watch Krish's touching portraits of refugees (Return to Life, 1960) or the elderly (I Think They Call Him John, 1964) or Dickson's post-modern treatment of industrial relations (The Film That Never Was, 1967) or Simmons' cheerful music-hall inspired portraits of his fellow East Enders (Sunday by the Sea, 1953; Bow Bells, 1954) to realise that these are also hugely important films, not just cinematically but also historically and culturally, and that their rehabilitation has been long overdue.
Boom Britain comprises several strands. A retrospective at BFI Southbank in November and December offers rare opportunities to see these films on the big screen (often for the first time in decades), in some cases with the filmmakers themselves in attendance. A four-disc DVD set containing 32 complete films and a 430-page book, both titled Shadows of Progress, offer a comprehensive overview of the period. Screenonline and the Mediatheque will be launching similar collections, and four of John Krish's most outstanding films will be going on a national tour. Many of the films have been restored by the BFI National Archive and preserved in 35mm and on high-definition digital masters, ensuring that the neglect that many of them have suffered over the last half-century will never happen again.
