The Complete Humphrey Jennings, Volume Three: A Diary for Timothy

In her recent book The Love-charm of Bombs, Lara Feigel explains how World War Two, and the Blitz in particular, elicited from Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green, Grahame Greene, Rose Macaulay, and Austrian émigré Hilde Spiel their fiercest passions and their finest novels.

The war had the same effect on the visionary British documentarist Humphrey Jennings, who in the five years left to him after Germany’s defeat never reached the heights he’d scaled with Listen to Britain (1942), Fires Were Started (1943), and The Silent Village (1943).

The concluding volume of the BFI’s exemplary trio of DVDs/Blu-rays collecting Jennings’s work comprises 10 shorts and is subtitled after his last major film – and his least consoling. A Diary for Timothy (1946, 39 minutes) is a month-by-month record of the early life of a middle-class boy (born on 3 September, 1944), which Jennings contrasts with the fortunes of a miner, an engine driver, a farmer, and a fighter pilot recovering from injuries in hospital.

Though victory in Europe is inevitable, reverses in the Allies' campaign cast a pall over Tim’s first Christmas. "Darkness, fog, and death” suffuse the film, and a stage shot of John Gielgud’s Hamlet addressing Yorick’s skull intensify the mood of foreboding. It's what will happen during the peace that troubles Jennings. Having survived a pit accident, Goronwy the miner recalls “the unemployed, broken homes, scattered families” of the post-Great War period and asks, “Has all this really got to happen again?”

Rhetorically questioning Tim, Jennings (pictured left) subtly argues, through narrator Michael Redgrave, for an alternative to a future dependence on capitalism and imperialism: “Are you going to have greed for money and power, ousting decency from the world, as they have in the past, or are you going to make the world a different place, you and the other babies?” It's a mercy, perhaps, that Jennings didn't survive into the 1980s.

Plummily narrated by Marius Goring, The True Story of Lili Marlene (1944, 30 minutes) features atmospheric historical recreations but awkward acting as it tells the allegorical tale of how the German love song migrated from Nazi radio to become a universally adored wartime favorite, ending up as the symbolic property of Monty's Desert Rats. For the internationalist Jennings, the piece is uncommonly jingoistic.

A better (and more metaphysical) propaganda film is The Eighty Days (1944, 14 minutes, pictured below), which reveals the dazzling contribution made by Stewart McAllister in orchestrating Jennings's footage of stoical Brits facing uo to Hitler’s V-1 flying bomb attacks. Myra Hess (1945, 10 minutes) pays tribute to the illustrious pianist – shown playing Beethoven’s Appassionata sonata – whose organization of 1,700 wartime concerts at the National Gallery spearheaded the revival of the classics in a time of musical privation.

Shot mostly in the ruins of Hamburg, Düsseldorf and Essen in the autumn of 1945, A Defeated People (1946, 19 minutes) depicts how the British aided German reconstruction. Notes of self-righteousness creep in. Maybe the Germans should be left to starve, a disembodied male voice of the British public opines. They don't deserve coal for their fires, the narrator William Hartnell intimates. Such sentiments were understandable given the recent liberation of the concentration camps and the fear of Nazism recurring. Jennings favors a stern hand but humane solutions.

The Cumberland Story (1947, 45 minutes) describes how cooperation between a manager, a shop steward, mining engineers and coalface workers, along with mechanisation and the introduction of day wages, enabled Workington collieries to extract coal from a seaward band plagued by faults. Though disparaged by Jennings scholars, it is a well-crafted film that offers a balanced insight into industrial relations on the eve of coal's 1946 nationalisation. The most potent images show the strain, endurance, determination and dignity of men working under the constant threat of death.

Jennings's last two films, The Dim Little Island (1948, 11 mins) and Family Portrait (1950, 24 minutes), revealed a slackening. State-of-the-nation propaganda pieces – the latter made for 1951’s Festival of Britain – they are earnest meditations on different aspects of Britishness.

They can be regarded as blips in a formidable career. The fugue-like The Dim Little Island, both celebratory and melancholy, presses a naturalist, an industrialist, a cartoonist, and the composer Vaughan Williams into a refutation of national mediocrity. Tumbling with ideas to the point of incoherence, Family Portrait almost parodies Jennings’s fabled lyricism and is riddled with visual clichés. It emerges as a paean to cultural conservatism that honors a mace as a symbol of authoritarianism. This Scepter’d Isle, anyone?

Two films are designated as extras: V1, which Jennings didn’t sign, is an alternative cut of The Eighty Days; The Good Life (1951), which was unfinished at the time of Jennings's death at 43 from a climbing fall in Poros, Greece in 1950, was completed by Graham Wallace. Lost until 2000, it is about improvements in European healthcare. Would that it had improved enough to have saved the life of cinema's heir to Blake and Milton.