Humphrey Jennings in the East End: Fires Were Started and Local Geographies

Abstract

The East End of London's radical changes in topography and population have made it a rich resource for writers and filmmakers. What did it offer documentary film and wartime propaganda? How do depictions of local life help to construct national community? And how do moving images of the East End in the 1940s preserve places and patterns of behaviour that survived the Blitz but have since disappeared? This article addresses these questions by looking at the film Fires Were Started (1943), shot on location in the East End, but until now, not studied for the local geographies it depicts. Director Humphrey Jennings draws on T. S. Eliot's ‘The Waste Land’ as well as his own poetry to present the story of a city ravaged by the Blitz.