Boom Britain: The Reception
Boom Britain, the BFI National Archive's massive survey of the hitherto largely unexplored landscape of postwar documentary filmmaking, launched late last year to an ecstatic reception.
The touring programme A Day in the Life: Four Portraits of Postwar Britain by John Krish garnered rave reviews, especially from Anthony Quinn in The Independent and Tim Robey in the Daily Telegraph, and was recently announced as a nominee in the Evening Standard British Film Awards, in the Best Documentary category. The four films making up the programme, plus two more Krish documentaries from the same era, are being released on Dual Format DVD and Blu-ray on 21 March.
The four-disc DVD set Shadows of Progress, the BFI's most extensive documentary release since its 1930s/40s survey Land of Promise (to which in many respects it is the sequel) was greeted similarly enthusiastically. In the Sunday Telegraph, Simon Heffer called it "an excellent collection", while The Digital Fix's Anthony Nield concluded a lengthy review by calling it "a joy to sit through. Seaside symphonies rub shoulders with talking heads, pure cinema precedes a party political broadcast, the future is predicted and the past is remembered. All told, a superb achievement." Not to be outdone, Scott Jordan Harris in Popmatters said that it was "so substantial, and so thorough, that it becomes not so much a DVD collection as a small, single-subject library of film."
BFI Palgrave Macmillan's book Shadows of Progress, edited by Patrick Russell and James Piers Taylor, was described by veteran arts documentary producer John Wyver as "an essential volume for anyone interested in factual filmmaking. More than anything else, it feels like a first map of a terra pretty much incognita, since the world of post-war sponsored and independent documentaries has to date lacked even the most basic documentation. On opening the volume, you sense a world from only yesterday that is largely unknown, even to those concerned with the history of the British documentary.".
But perhaps the most valuable legacy of the project was the way that it allowed the Archive to preserve the reminiscences of surviving filmmakers, many of whom were in their eighties and nineties, and whose input was all the more vital for the way it filled gaps in badly under-explored territory. Some of them appeared onstage at BFI Southbank for interviews that were subsequently published online via BFI Live. These included filmmakers Peter Bradford, Sarah Erulkar, Derrick Knight, John Krish, Anthony Simmons, Derek Williams and former employees of World Wide Pictures, as well as panel discussions devoted to Lindsay Anderson and the Boom Britain project as a whole.
Links
Anthony Quinn (The Independent) on A Day in the Life.
Tim Robey (Daily Telegraph) on A Day in the Life
List of Evening Standard British Film Awards nominees.
Simon Heffer (Sunday Telegraph) on Shadows of Progress (DVD);
Scott Jordan Harris (Popmatters) on Shadows of Progress (DVD).
Anthony Nield (The Digital Fix) on Shadows of Progress (DVD and book).
