Night Mail

If you've ever studied film or Media in England you would have certainly come across the GPO Film Unit during your studies. A unit formed by John Grierson after being influenced by Robert Flaherty of 'Nanook of the North' fame!

This documentary shows how the people of 1930's United Kingdom got there mail from a to b!

Directed Basil Wright with commentary by John Grierson & Stuart Legg and superb and now famous poem finale by the now great W.H. Auden this is a good documentary.

8/10

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 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.

"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.

Unlike the WAR COMES TO America (1945) entry in the WHY WE FIGHT documentary series, this famed British effort in a comparable – if longer-running and, decidedly, less enthusing – cycle of "Transport" films has not stood well the test of time. I was even tempted to shave off another half-a-star to its rating, but I guess – much like a normal movie – one needs to assess such items within the context of the time in which they were made. In its case, too, one has to consider what it was attempting to do – both narratively (a depiction of the train service, often dependent on split-second timing, run at night by the Post Office throughout the United Kingdom) and technically (still, though much has been said of its adherence to the celebrated montage – generally frantic and frequently symbolic – typified by classic Soviet cinema, this is only intermittently evident here!). However, the justifiably lauded finale – edited to the rhythm of a W.H. Auden poem – remains exhilarating to watch.

For what it is worth, a certain amount of nostalgia played into this viewing – not only because we are basically watching a way-of-life that is fast approaching extinction (in the face of the technological wonders of our age), but due to the fact that my father used to work as a postman and, as a kid, I spent a good many Summer's day both at his office and on the road, observing and even helping out in the daily distribution of the local and international mail!