The 1936 short film Night Mail was influential in the emergence of a documentary cinema movement in the United Kingdom. The highly acclaimed piece, which featured WH Auden’s famous poem, experimented with cinematography, narrative, sound and editing in a way few British films previously had, while taking plenty of inspiration from the cutting-edge foreign cinema movement of the time.
The seminal 35-minute film charts the journey of the Travelling Post Office, an overnight train service from London Euston to Aberdeen that had its own sorting office on board.
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Featuring a narrative structure focused on the themes of national, regional and community integration, it has a narration track, musical numbers and wonderful poetry from WH Auden that matched the quickening cadence of the train as it rattled across the tracks.
At this point you may be surprised to hear the GPO Film Unit, which produced the film, was part of the General Post Office BT’s forebear.
John Grierson and films with a social conscience
The GPO ran a groundbreaking film unit between 1933 and 1940 and, while some of these PR films were public service announcements designed to explain the general functions and workings of the GPO, many enabled a broader range of artistic impression.
Night Mail, directed by Henry Watt and Basil Wright, written by John Grierson and featuring music from Benjamin Britten, is the most renowned of those films.
BFI historian Ian Aitken salutes the ambition of what was essentially a promotional film: “By 1936, film output at the GPO Film Unit was divided between the production of relatively routine films promoting Post Office services, and more ambitious ones experimenting with the use of sound, visual style, narrative and editing technique. Night Mail is firmly in the latter category.”
Established by Steven Tallents (the GPO’s first Controller of Public Relations) in 1933, the unit’s aim was to promote the work of the GPO to the public, while also to raise the morale of its workers (at the time, Britain’s largest employer). During the eight-year life, the studio produced dozens of films pertaining to GPO activity and beyond.
However, under the stewardship of Grierson, the studio would become a veritable film school for the brightest and most expressive young minds in British cinema. Given significant financial freedom and artistic impression these filmmakers were central to the emergence of documentary cinema in the UK.
British novelist and playwright JB Priestley once observed: "Grierson and his young men, with their contempt for easy big prizes and soft living, their taut social conscience, their rather Marxist sense of the contemporary scene always seemed to me at least a generation ahead of the dramatic film people."
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Filming tea, submarine cables and war
Song of Ceylon (1934) was a GPO Film Unit production for the Ceylon Tea Propaganda Bureau and the Empire Tea Marketing Board. It won the award for best film at the International Film Festival in Brussels the following year. Renowned for the ambitious and experimental sound design from Alberto Cavalcanti (another major figure and influencer who went on to direct wartime classic Went The Day Well?), the film chronicled the life and customs of the Sinhalese and the effects of industrialism.
Prior to Night Mail, a 1936 film called The Saving of Bill Blewitt was described by the Bafta-nominated British documentary filmmaker Paul Rotha (who collaborated with Grierson) as the first ‘story’ documentary.
Meanwhile, earlier entries like Cable Ship (1933), which explained how submarine telephone cables were repaired at sea, and Under The City (1934) were popular among children: think of them as early prototypes of Postman Pat!
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As World War II loomed large, the unit turned its attention to wartime propaganda and public information campaigns. Britain At Bay (1940) was made to raise morale after the French surrender, while London Can Take It! chronicled how people in the capital were holding up during the Blitz.
1940 was the final year of production before the Ministry of Information commandeered the unit.
Legacy of the GPO film unit
However, the narrative styles, innovative production techniques and ambitious artistic choices made during those years would go onto inform a new generation of documentary film makers.
The DVD collection GPO Film Unit Collection: Volume 1 - Addressing The Nation is the result of collaboration between BT, Royal Mail, the Post Office Museum and the British Film Institute. The triple-disc set features restored versions of the early short films, while subsequent volumes showcase the latter releases. Meanwhile, many others, including Night Mail, can be viewed on the web at BFI Screenonline.
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