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He was the son of an Architect father, and a painter mother. He studied at Cambridge where, when not studying, he created advanged stage designs and was the founder-editor of ''Experiment'' in collaboration with William Empson and Jacob Bronowski . After graduating with a starred First Class degree in English from Pembroke College, Cambridge , Jennings did a number of jobs - including photographer, painter and theatre designer. In 1929 , he married Cicely Cooper. He evenually found his niche in John Grierson 's GPO Film Unit in 1934 . In 1936 Jennings helped with the organisation of the 1936 Surrealist Exhibition In London , in association with Herbert Read and André Breton . It was at about this time that Jennings became involved in the start-up stages of Mass Observation , and was to make the film '' May The Twelfth '' as a montage of the 1937 coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth for Mass Observation. With the outbreak of World War II , the GPO Film Unit became the Crown Film Unit , a movie-making Propaganda arm of the Ministry Of Information , and Jennings joined the new organisation. Jennings made only one feature length film, the 70-minute '' Fires Were Started '' ( 1943 ), also known as ''I Was A Fireman'', a wartime propaganda movie detailing the work of the Auxiliary Fire Service , which blurred the lines between fiction and Documentary . This film, which uses techniques such as '' Montage '' is considered one of the classics of the Genre . He made a number of notable short films, inclusively patriotic in sentiment and very English in their sensibility, such as: ''Spare Time''; ''Our Country'', ''The Dim Little Island'', ''A Diary for Timothy'' (written by E.M. Forster ), ''Words for Battle'', ''London Can Take It!'', and ''Family Portrait'' (his last film, which tells of the Festival Of Britain ). Co-directed with Stewart McAllister, Jennings' best remembered short film, made 1942, is '' Listen To Britain ''. Excerpts are often seen in other in documentaries, especially portions of one of the concerts given by Dame Myra Hess in the National Gallery while its collection was evacuated for safe-keeping. He died on the cliffs of the Greek island of Poros , while scouting locations for a future film on post-war healthcare in Europe. He is buried near T.H. White in the Protestant Cemetery at Athens . Humphrey Jennings' reputation always remained very high among film makers, but had faded among others. His films appear strikingly different from the 'social critique' approach which typified the documentaries of Grierson and his "school" of the 1930s and the feature films of the 1960s and 70s such as Lindsay Anderson 's'' This Sporting Life '' (1962) or Karel Reisz 's '' Saturday Night And Sunday Morning '' (1960). After 's Channel 4 ); and secondly by Kevin Jackson 's monumental 450-page biography ''Humphrey Jennings'' (Picador, 2004). In 2003 two of his films, ''Listen to Britain'' and ''Spare Time'', were included in the Tate Britain retrospective, ''A Century of Artists' Film in Britain'' which featured the work of over one hundred filmmakers. As of 2005, nearly all the films of Humphrey Jennings are available on DVD s. FURTHER READING
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