The Future's in the Air: Imperial Airways and the British Documentary Film Movement

Abstract

Tim Boon argued recently that the importance of the British documentary film movement lies in its advocacy of new technologies, or more precisely in the construction of a very particular understanding of the artistic, intellectual and political impact of these new technologies. 1 However, most studies of the movement have tended to take either a biographical or formal approach. The biographical approach invariably centres on John Grierson and attributes (or blames) ‘Griersonians’ for the trajectory of documentary film in Britain. By contrast, film theorists tend to place the British documentary movement in an avant-garde lineage that stretches from the films of Sergei Eisenstein to Italian neo-realism. This essay attempts to synthesise these approaches. My interest is in how British documentary film-makers understood and attempted to communicate their understanding of the contemporary world. The focus of the article is a high-profile sequence of documentary films (Air Outpost, African Skyways and The Future’s in the Air )w hich were produced by Paul Rotha for Imperial Airways in 1937. Aviation in the 1930s presented an exceptionally rich subject matter for Rotha’s film-makers. It was a new technology driven by nationalistic and territorial anxiety and yet the intrinsic internationalism of the technology also required the working out of considerable common legal, technical and organisational ground (Cooper 1946). Additionally, aviation posed an existential threat to an island that had built an empire through naval supremacy. From apocalyptic fears