Shadows of Progress: Documentary Film in Post-War Britain * Shadows of Progress: Documentary Film in Post-War Britain 1951-1977

Abstract

The British documentary movement of the 1930s and 1940s casts a long shadow. The British Film Institute's Shadows of Progress project is a sustained attempt to shed light on over twenty-five years of postwar documentary filmmaking that has been obscured by this shadow. The material collected under this title comprises an edited collection of new essays on postwar British documentary filmmakers, with extensive contextual material by editors Patrick Russell, Senior Curator (Non-Fiction), BFI National Film Archive, and James Piers Taylor, independent curator/film historian, plus a DVD box set containing thirty-two films produced between 1951 and 1977.1 The focus is exclusively upon documentary film rather than television, on which a future project is promised. Shadows of Progress makes a persuasive, extensively researched case for substantially revising the latter part of the standard ‘rise and fall’ narrative of British documentary film history, in which Drifters (John Grierson, 1929) marks its beginning,...