Only Context: Canonising Humphrey Jennings/Conceptualising British Documentary Film History

Abstract

This article assesses the predominant ways in which critics and historians have traditionally understood the career of Humphrey Jennings, long considered the British documentary movement's leading film-maker. The terms in which we have previously understood Jennings’ career form part and parcel of how we have hitherto narrated British documentary film history, as a ‘rise and fall’ story that ends around the time of his death. The assumptions underlying this story are now up for debate. This article is therefore an exercise in positive historical revisionism. It is not an attempt to diminish Jennings’ reputation. The canonisation of film-makers and other cultural figures is a historical process as much as it is a recognition of inherent aesthetic value. This article makes visible some of the historical and institutional contexts framing the emergence of three different versions of ‘Jennings’. These can broadly be summarised as: the quality film-maker; the poet; the modernist. Underpinning the latter two versions, ever since the publication of Lindsay Anderson's classic article ‘Only Connect’ in 1954, are three assumptions: a relatively conventional Romantic conception of Jennings as an individual artist, the people's war as a central point of reference, and the ‘rise and fall’ story of British documentary history. This article concludes that dislodging these assumptions can fruitfully lead to valid new perspectives on both Jennings and the longer history of British documentary.