Overview

The documentary film movement of the '30s and '40s is deemed to lie at the heart of the modern British film culture. This anthology of the period includes extracts from the writings of directors and producers, including John Grierson, Paul Rotha, Humphrey Jennings, Alberto Cavalcanti and Basil Wright. Each section is accompanied by short commentaries and a photograph of each figure. An introduction describes the movement's history from 1927 to 1950, and the types of films it made, relating it to other British film genres and contemporary debates on national cinema.

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9780748609482

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A useful collection of material The texts collected here gives a vivid sense of the intellectual orientations, motivations, relationships between, and achievements of, the featured individuals. British documentary scholars will have encountered most of his material before ... Aitken's anthology ... is the first recent publication to pisition itself as an authoriitative collection of source material on the movement as a whole. A useful collection of material The texts collected here gives a vivid sense of the intellectual orientations, motivations, relationships between, and achievements of, the featured individuals. British documentary scholars will have encountered most of his material before ... Aitken's anthology ... is the first recent publication to pisition itself as an authoriitative collection of source material on the movement as a whole.

Author Information

Ian Aitken is Professor, Department of Cinema and TV, Hong Kong Baptist University. He is the author of Film and Reform: John Grierson and the British Documentary Film Movement (Routledge, 1990, 1992), The Documentary Film Movement: An Anthology (Edinburgh University Press, 1998) and The Cinema of Alberto Cavalcanti: Realism, Surrealism and National Cinemas (Flicks Books, 2000).

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