UK Release Date: 22-09-2008
Price: £24.99
UK Certificate: PG
Director: Grierson, Legge, Cavalcanti et al, GB 2008
Country: UK
Distributor: BFI

It’s one of those bizarre accidents of British film history that our tradition of experimental film-making should have arisen not through the emergence of an artistic movement on European lines – Expressionism in Germany, Surrealism in France – but as an adjunct of the General Post Office. Created in 1933 with a brief to both enlighten the public about new technological developments and to inform them about GPO services – telephones, stamps, Post Office Savings accounts – the GPO film unit was born out of the same public service ethos as the BBC and acted as an unlikely laboratory for new ideas about film’s technique and role in modern life that have had a profound influence on British society ever since.

The results of the first three years of the unit’s work (under John Grierson) are collected in this new set from the British Film Institute, and make for fascinating viewing. Grierson is usually credited with inventing ‘documentary’ as we have come to know it, but one of the most striking aspects of the films on offer here is just how wide a remit this offered to his film makers: from Soviet-style experiments with editing and rhythm in modest titles such as The Coming of the Dial (yes, it’s about the introduction of the dial telephone) to the colourful and total abstraction of Len Lye’s A Colour Box or the grittily poetic evocations of Caval­canti’s Coal Face, marrying WH Auden’s verse with music by Britten and a non-naturalistic treatment of sound and image. Even more surprising are films like The Glorious Sixth of June, a mock-epic and distinctly Pythonesque celebration of reduced postal charges that looks forward 60 years to the kinds of ‘ironic’ strategies employed by modern TV advertisements. Stranger still is Pett and Pott, probably one of the oddest films ever made in this country; it’s a surreal (indeed, barking mad) cautionary tale on how not having a telephone can lead to moral ruination and a film that shares a fascination with the anomie of suburban life with Hitchcock’s near contemporary Rich and Strange.

Best of all, and worth the price of admission alone is Basil Wright’s haunting and visionary Song of Ceylon, in which the timeless rhythms of Buddhist life are contrasted with the intruding sights and sounds of modern commerce; a million miles from the patronising tone of most travelogues, this intensely beautiful film manages to subtly satirise the imperialist project that it is supposed to serve.

This is an exemplary release, beautifully packaged with a comprehensive 78-page book – I can hardly wait for volumes 2 and 3.