The Eighty Days

The Dim Little Island

Osbert Lancaster, James Fisher, John Ormston and Ralph Vaughn Williams meditate on the history and culture of England.

Making Fashion

Documentary short by Humphrey Jennings

The True Story of Lili Marlene

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.

The Birth of the Robot

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. Exploring the still-complex color process, which involved the combination of three separate images, Lye creates such a vivid storm scene that reviewers hailed it as “proof that the color film has entered a new stage.” The music is Holst’s The Planets. - Harvard Film Archive

Cargoes

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). After the Ionian was sunk by a German mine on 29 November 1939 en route from Crete to Hull, the film was recut and released as Cargoes.

A Diary for Timothy

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.

The Silent Village

The true story of the massacre of a small Czech village by the Nazis is retold as if it happened in Wales.

English Harvest

The harvest of a pre-war British farm.

London Can Take It!

A tribute to the courage and resiliency of Britons during the darkest days of the London Blitz.

Spring Offensive

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.

Words for Battle

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. This short film serves as both propaganda and as a rallying cry to the British people.

Farewell Topsails

One of the last voyages of a commercial sailing ship on a trip from Cornwall.

V.1.

Short documentary on the use of the V-1 Flying Bomb during the German bombings of London.

Penny Journey

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.

A Defeated People

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. The film depicts the shattered state of Germany, both physically and as a society, in the immediate aftermath of World War II. The narration explains what is being done – and what needs to be done – both by the occupying Allied forces and the German people themselves to build a better Germany from the ruins.

The Story of the Wheel

The history of wheels, roads and vehicles from cavemen to the coming of steam.