Night Mail

From 1933, the GPO (General Post Office) Film Unit produced many documentaries, inspired by the likes of Nanook of the North, to promote their service. The films had many talented British film-makers working for them, including the likes of Basil Wright and Alberto Cavalcanti (both on the production team here), and have recently been released in three DVD collector's editions by the British Film Institute. As well as producing some damn fine films, they are key works in understanding the mentality and living conditions of a Britain long gone, when we took pride in our work. They are both uplifting in their detail and wholly depressing given the state of Britain today. I'm only 27 and feel this way, so God knows what the old folk must think.

Night Mail follows the midnight postal train from London to Scotland, looking at various things such as the sorting room, the loading of the train, and the inspired way of collecting mail from various places by catching the bags at high speeds in a retracting net. The last ten minutes features a now famous poem by W.H. Auden, read to the music of Benjamin Britten, that is read rhythmically to the sounds of the train. Starting slow, it gradually picks up pace as the train gets faster, and ends at a breathless pace.

Finishing at around the 30 minute mark, it leaves a great impression regardless of its slight running time. As mentioned before, it manages to capture the spirit of old Britain, and of a time when our public services were actually efficient. Now, the Post Office seems to lose more mail than it delivers, and if you're lucky to catch a train that arrives on time, you have the pleasure in sitting near some gormless scumbag listening to his s**t dance music out loud, or some lazy fat single mother who won't deal with their screaming baby. But anyway, the quality of the film-making is often overwhelming for a documentary short, using interesting camera angles, lovely cinematography, and informative narration. I was surprised to see that the average user rating for this on IMDb is 6.8, considering this is one of the best, and most important documentaries to come out Britain. Ever.

www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com

This is a British documentary short about the mail being delivered by the train. It follows the mail from being received and snatched up by the trains. It shows the system as an efficient method manned by hard working people. I don't think that I've ever actually seen someone hangs the mail bags which gets snatched by the train. It's interesting to see these trains close up. It is expertly filmed. The workers are probably not actors which limits any performance. It is still a fascinating time capsule especially for any train lovers.

"Night Mail" is still a famous film 75 years after it was made in 1936. It is not, however, a feature film but a documentary, only 25 minutes long, about an everyday subject, the journey of the mail train from London to Scotland. It is perhaps the best-remembered of a series of films produced by the GPO Film Unit publicising the work of the British General Post Office.

Part of the reason for its fame is the collaboration between two giants of the English cultural scene, the poet W. H. Auden and his friend the composer Benjamin Britten. Auden's poem written for the film, the one starting "This is the Night Mail crossing the border, Bringing the cheque and the postal order" has been much anthologised; I was introduced to it at primary school, and some of its evocative lines, such as "But a jug in the bedroom gently shakes" and "Letters with faces scrawled in the margin" have remained with me ever since. In the film itself the poem is read out in the closing few minutes, beginning slowly but picking up speed in order to imitate the rhythm of the train's wheels, and then slowing down again as the train approaches its final destination in Aberdeen. It is accompanied by Britten's music which also evokes the sounds and rhythms of a moving train.

The film is, however, also notable for its purely visual qualities, with some striking black-and-white photography of the train and the landscapes, both rural and industrial, through which it passes. There are films where virtually every shot reminds us of a painting; here every shot reminds us of a documentary photograph, perhaps something from "National Geographic". The film also serves as a piece of social history, even if the obviously scripted dialogue between the men in the on-board sorting office owes more to upper-class preconceptions about how working-class Britons spoke than to reality. (These scenes were not shot on board the train itself but in a studio). We may today regard the steam locomotive as a quaint and cosy part of the nostalgia industry, and that system of nets used for loading and unloading mailbags while the train is in motion certainly has, to our eyes, a Heath-Robinson air about it. Nevertheless, in 1936 the Royal Mail had a well-deserved reputation for efficiency, and the film helps us to understand how it achieved this reputation with the aid of what would have been the state-of-the-art technology of the period.

I haven't awarded the film a score out of ten, as it seems pointless trying to compare it with the full-length dramas which I normally review. A recent viewing on the "Sky Arts" channel, however, has enabled me to appreciate a much talked-about film which for me had for a long time just been a memory from a school poetry lesson.

The acknowledged leaders of documentary films for more than twenty years beginning in the 1930s were the British. The brilliant foundation English filmmakers' laid down in the 1930s carried over to the 1940s documenting their country's ordeal in World War Two. The famous 'British Documentary Film Movement' was led by one of its more popular early contributions, February 1936's "Night Mail." Scotsman John Grierson was instrumental in the formation of United Kingdom's documentaries. As a film critic for the New York Sun, Grierson was the first to use the term "documentary" in his paper's review on Robert J. Flaherty's film 1926 "Moana." Later, he was named an assistant to the Empire Marketing Board (EMB) film production department.

At EMB Grierson produced his first documentary, the influential 1929 "Drifters," detailing the daily life of herring fishermen. When EMB closed its film unit in 1933 because of the Depression, Grierson and several colleagues relocated to the General Post Office (GPO), an improbable government agency where England's imprint in documentaries really took off.

England's General Post office was the largest employer in the country, numbering over 250,000. Its public relations office, with an adjunct film unit, spent more money than any other governmental agency informing the country about the operations of the GPO. "Night Mail" was produced to illustrate how the evening express mail train from London to Scotland was the lifeblood to innumerable communities along its route, delivering daily newspapers, important legal paperwork and simple 'feel-good' letters to its customers.

Explains film reviewer J. Watts, "'Night Mail' is one of the best known British documentaries of the 1930s and is often considered to be one of the best documentaries and best short films ever made." The 24-minute film was under the direction of Harry Watt, who relied on Basil Wright's research and script following the progress of heaps of mail originating from London's Euston Station and other points on their nightly journey to the London, Midland and Scottish Railway terminus. A dramatic highlight shows the train's collection of mail bags along the way without slowing down by snaring them on hanging poles. Conversely, when a hamlet's mail needed to be dropped off, the coordination between the train and the people on the ground was performed with split-second precision.

Meanwhile as the train raced throughout the countryside, mail was sorted onboard. The bucking of the train made it virtually impossible to get a steady shot, so a reproduction of the coach was built in the GPO studio. At first the set was shakened to simulate the train's movement, but Watt noticed the structure "just rattled like a sideboard in a junction town." The solution was to show a string hanging down and swinging. The postal worker 'actors' were told to sway at the same time as the string to fool its audiences.

Once the rough cut of "Night Mail" was seen, Grierson acknowledged the film captured the machinery of the overnight delivery system, but questioned "What about the people who write them and the people who get them?" A poem was inserted to be read in the film's coda. Famed poet W. H. Auden was hired to compose the concluding passage set to a Sergei Eisenstein-style of montage shots. "It's the final scenes of the film that turn 'Night Mail' into a little masterpiece," pointed out reviewer Watts. The poem made "Night Mail" a work of art and departs from the many other documentaries produced by GPO.

"Night Mail" proved to be a huge hit with the British public. Its popularity is so enduring that in 1987 an update on the documentary was produced, 'Night Mail II." The documentary format was so prominent in the United Kingdom that once the war was over, British dramatic feature films inserted an inordinate amount of documentary-style footage that gave its cinema a sense of realism that other countries eventually duplicated.

This film was made by the General Post Office (GPO) an organisation that has seen many manifestations and name changes since 1936. It depicts a near-utopian world populated by chirpy proletarians working through the night to sort and deliver the mail. The technology is ancient, steam trains, hand trolleys, manual sorting. Bags of unsorted letters are hung on the side of the railway line and caught by a mechanical grab as the train passes. Bags of sorted letters are similarly hung out of the train and caught in a net as it flashes by. The impression was given of extreme efficiency but I was struck by the lack of controls. If a bag missed the net, probably no-one ever noticed until it was found months later half-eaten in a field full of sheep along the railway line. The photography was excellent with lots of silhouettes against the night sky. The sound quality in the print I saw was poor but the dialogue given to the plucky workers was clunky anyway and largely not worth hearing. The voice giving the commentary had to be heard to be believed. My favourite character was the manager in a suit who wandered amiably down the train dispensing dubious advice. Some things never change. Night Mail is largely remembered today because of Benjamin Britten's and WH Auden's collaboration on the film but their contribution is limited to a brief section at the end.