Royal Mail Film Classics
Founded in 1933 as successor to the Empire Marketing Board Film Unit and headed by John Grierson in the role of Film Officer, the GPO Film Unit produced one of the finest British collections of documentary, public information, animation and industrial film ever to come from a single UK source, spanning much of the 20th Century.
The GPO Film Unit provided a temporary home to many of the best-known names in the British documentary movement, including Alberto Cavalcanti, Humphrey Jennings, Basil Wright, Harry Watt, Edgar Anstey, Arthur Elton and John Taylor, alongside innovators and experimentalists such as Len Lye and Norman McLaren. The Unit remained in existence throughout the 1930s and survived into the early years of the Second World War, when it became the Crown Film Unit.
The collection includes classics such as Nightmail (1936), which perhaps best exemplifies how British industry supported leading artists in the pre-television age, drawing as it does on the combined talents of Basil Wright and Harry Watt, alongside WH Auden, Benjamin Britten, John Grierson and Stuart Legg.
Despite the fact that the GPO Film Unit was set up to produce fully-funded sponsored films, the film-makers found space to develop and experiment within these constraints. Films such as Housing Problems, Workers and Jobs and Coal Face focus on some of the social issues facing a rapidly changing Britain in the 1930s, while Len Lye's Colour Box is unashamedly experimental and only very nominally an advertisement for the GPO's parcel post.
The collection covers subjects ranging across transport and communications in Britain and abroad; the home front during the Second World War, British industries, from fishing to mining, the nation's health - and developments in the Post Office service itself.
Watch an introduction from the British Film Institute to the work of the GPO Film Unit, presented by Derek Jacobi:Written and compiled by the British Universities Film & Video Council © BUFVC 2005
