Humphrey Jennings Trailers
Humphrey Jennings: The Man Who Listened to Britain TrailerBBC: The Voice of Britain TrailerThe Glorious Sixth of June Trailer
Frank Humphrey Sinkler Jennings (19 August 1907 – 24 September 1950) was an English documentary filmmaker, celebrated for his poetic and visually striking portrayals of British life during World War II. A co-founder of the Mass Observation social research organization, Jennings blended avant-garde techniques with a deep sense of national identity, creating films that captured the resilience and spirit of the British people. His most acclaimed works, including Listen to Britain (1942), Fires Were Started (1943), and A Diary for Timothy (1945), showcase his unique ability to fuse documentary realism with lyrical storytelling. Film critic and director Lindsay Anderson described him as "the only real poet that British cinema has yet produced."
Most Popular Humphrey Jennings Trailers
Total trailers found: 39
03 June 1935
1935 documentary about the hard working life of Welsh coal miners.
01 January 1941
Edward R. Murrow narrates Humphrey Jennings' short documentary about life in England during wartime.
01 December 1937
One of the last voyages of a commercial sailing ship on a trip from Cornwall.
01 September 1938
Life during a season on a pre-war British farm.
04 August 1934
How news of a general reduction in GPO charges was finally brought to parliament and the people, despite attempts by the country's enemies to prevent the announcement.
18 February 1934
Humphrey Jennings' first film as a director, a brief overview of the British postal service.
16 April 1934
The film, made to advertise domestic telephone sets, is based around two very different families. The Petts are conventional, happy and have children; the Potts are unconventional and unhappy, without children.
01 January 1938
Documentary short by Humphrey Jennings
01 January 1939
Londoners prepare for war.
02 January 1949
Osbert Lancaster, James Fisher, John Ormston and Ralph Vaughn Williams meditate on the history and culture of England.
02 January 1944
The Eighth Army famously adopted a German song in the Western Desert. The Crown Film Unit traces the journey of Lili Marlene from its composition in post-WW1 Hamburg, via Radio Belgrade and the Afrika Korps, through victory in Tunisia and Sicily, to an imagined post-war East End, full of light, music and bananas for sale.
01 January 1939
Documentary short by Humphrey Jennings
16 February 1948
A documentary by Humphrey Jennings about the modernization of coal mines in Cumberland.
28 July 1935
A behind-the-scenes GPO Film Unit documentary (directed by Stuart Legg) that races from studio rehearsals and newsrooms to control rooms and transmitters, weaving speeches, music, and outside broadcasts—featuring voices like H.
02 January 1944
Humphrey Jennings’s Crown Film Unit short on the summer 1944 V-1 “doodlebug” campaign, tracking a salvo from the coast toward London as it runs Britain’s layered defenses—coastal AA guns, RAF fighters, and barrage balloons—capturing both interception and impact in a stark report of terror and resilience.
10 June 1936
Rubber rooftops and bomber-size fly paper suspended in the sky? Gad Sir, bring on the Blitz! David Low’s success as a cartoonist in the 1930s is perhaps best demonstrated by the fact that Goebbels complained that he was souring British-German relations.
01 June 1940
Humphrey Jennings’s wartime short rallies Britain’s countryside, showing fields ploughed up from fallow, seed sown, and crops raised on once-idle land as part of the national push to feed the home front—an urgent, lyrical call to turn soil into sustenance.
01 December 1944
Short documentary on the use of the V-1 Flying Bomb during the German bombings of London.
12 April 1943
British film written and directed by Humphrey Jennings, filmed in documentary style showing the lives of firefighters through the Blitz in World War II.
01 November 1945
A narrator recounts the state of Great Britain near the end of WWII via a visual diary for the titular baby boy born in September 1944.
17 June 1943
The true story of the massacre of a small Czech village by the Nazis is retold as if it happened in Wales.
01 January 1934
The history of wheels, roads and vehicles from cavemen to the coming of steam.
06 April 2025
Documentary about Humphrey Jennings, an English documentary filmmaker from the 1930s to 1950.
01 February 1942
A depiction of life in wartime Britain during the Second World War. Director Humphrey Jennings visits many aspects of civilian life and of the turmoil and privation caused by the war, all without narration.
01 January 1934
A concise museum short that traces the evolution of the steam locomotive, using the Science Museum (London)’s model railway collection to chart design leaps from early pioneers to mainline express engines.
02 January 1938
How long-distance telephone calls are made, from the UK to the USA. We see operators, miles of wires, and the amplification of voice transmitted across the waters.
02 January 1939
Shot in mid-1939 as S.S. Ionian (also shown as Her Last Trip), Humphrey Jennings’s GPO short follows the Royal Mail steamer on a last peacetime run through the Mediterranean—Gibraltar, Malta, Alexandria, Haifa—under the gaze of the Mediterranean Fleet (HMS Barham, Malaya, Warspite).
01 October 1940
A tribute to the courage and resiliency of Britons during the darkest days of the London Blitz.
24 January 1941
Poetry by Rudyard Kipling, John Milton, and William Blake, and excerpts from speeches by Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill, all read by Laurence Olivier, illuminate documentary footage of England during its defense against the Nazi blitz in World War II.
03 February 1938
The harvest of a pre-war British farm.
01 October 1936
This experiment was a “prestige advertisement” for Shell Motor Oil. As conventional animation became dominated by Walt Disney, many European filmmakers turned to puppets as an alternative, and Lye enlisted the help of avant-garde friends such as Humphrey Jennings and John Banting to make the amusing puppets.
01 January 1938
As the subtitle of the film suggests - The Story of a Post Card from Manchester to Graffham - this journey is very much focused on the process of sorting, transporting and delivering the postcard in question.
01 January 1940
A story of sacrifice, in which organised labour voluntarily relinquishes hard-won workplace rights after being asked "to give up by choice what Hitler takes by force.
01 February 1941
The Heart of Britain (1941) depicts wartime life in the North and Midlands, contrasting tranquil countryside with the grit of industry.
17 March 1946
A Defeated People is a 1946 British documentary short film made by the Crown Film Unit, directed by Humphrey Jennings and narrated by William Hartnell.
01 January 1939
Spare Time is a 1939 British film directed by Humphrey Jennings for the GPO Film Unit, and made for the 1939 New York World's Fair.
02 January 1945
A concert short spotlighting Dame Myra Hess performing the first movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No.
01 December 1950
In preparation for the celebration of the 1951 Festival of Britain, this short film was released to assure British citizens of their nation's place in the world and of their own places within that nation.
01 January 1951
Industrial and social progress in post-war Europe.
