Noticias

(John Krish, 1959-77; BFI, 15)

John Krish entered the cinema as a teenager early in the second world war, working for the Crown Film Unit (on Harry Watt's Target for Tonight and Humphrey Jennings's Listen to Britain) and the Army Film Unit (as an editor on Carol Reed and Garson Kanin's The True Glory), before joining British Transport Films. It was with the latter group that he made his classic The Elephant Will Never Forget (1953), a beautiful movie about London's last tram journey. It was shown in a much acclaimed quartet of his pictures that travelled the country in 2010, and was included, along with his infinitely moving I Think They Call Him John (1964), in Shadows of Progress, the BFI's four-disc survey of postwar British documentary.

Now, in Krish's 90th year, the BFI help clinch his reputation as one of Britain's most distinctive and distinguished documentarians with a compilation of his work,...

These monochrome slices of 50s and 60s life make for a fascinating, if faintly necrophiliac, experience, says Peter Bradshaw

The British Film Institute has re-released this quartet of short films from the 50s and early 60s about British public life by the documentarist John Krish. They are heartstopping social-realist monochrome visions of the way we lived then, and immersing yourself in these beautifully photographed and sparely narrated films is a fascinating, if faintly necrophiliac experience. Britain looked pinched, starved, a little depressed — more than ready for the Beatles' first LP. The Elephant Will Never Forget (1953) is an elegiac farewell to the London trams; They Took Us to the Sea (1961) is a record of an Nspcc-sponsored day out to the seaside at Weston-Super-Mare for deprived Birmingham kids, labelled on the train like wartime evacuees. Our School (1962) showed the gloriously robust classroom style of teachers at a Hertfordshire secondary modern: a subject...