Love Letters and Live Wires: Highlights from the GPO Film Unit

A BFI FILM PROGRAM ► Founded in 1933, the GPO Film Unit — the film production unit of the General Post Office — was one of the most remarkable creative institutions that Britain has produced and an internationally renowned centre for innovative, exciting films. A hotbed of energy and talent, it provided a springboard for many of the best-known and most acclaimed artists of British cinema: leading figures in the British Documentary Movement such as John Grierson (future founder of the National Film Board of Canada), Alberto Cavalcanti, Basil Wright and Harry Watt, and pioneering animators/experimentalists such as Len Lye, Lotte Reiniger and Norman McLaren (himself to become one of Canada’s greatest filmmakers).  Recalled the writer J. B. Priestley, “If you wanted to see what camera and sound could really do, you had to see some little film sponsored by the Post Office.”

This selection of some of the GPO’s greatest short films, newly restored by the British Film Institute’s National Archive, showcases the Unit’s sheer range: from quintessential documentary (Night Mail) to avant-garde animation (Trade Tattoo) and even musical comedy (The Fairy of the Phone). While dispensing clear and entertaining instructions on the use of such new-fangled devices as the post code, the telephone or the air mail service, the films bring alive a revolution in mass communications as epoch-changing then as the internet is now. Great Britain 1936-39. All prints 35mm. Total running time: 81 mins.

Acknowledgments: This touring program is presented by the British Film Institute in partnership with Royal Mail, The British Postal Museum and Archive and BT Heritage.

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N or NW · The first live-action work by famed animator Len Lye (who pioneered painting directly onto film) is the stylish tale of a quarrel between young lovers.  Despite being an ad for the Post Office, it was admired by the Surrealists. Len Lye/1937. 10 mins.

Love on the Wing · The great Norman McLaren’s first entirely animated film was likened by one reviewer to “ballet broken loose from the laws of gravity". The   Postmaster General rejected it for being “too Freudian”. Norman McLaren/1938. 4 mins.

The Fairy of the Phone · This eccentric musical revue, featuring popular stage star Charlotte Leigh and a chorus line of telephone operators, was designed to promote the use of the telephone in British homes. William Coldstream/1936. 10 mins.

The Horsey Mail — Gale winds and abnormally high tides flooded the area around Horsey, a village in Norfolk, in 1938, leaving local lands salted and unsuitable for farming and costing many people their livelihoods. Patrick Jackson/1938. 10 mins.

Trade Tattoo · Len Lye’s use of stencilled patterns, animated words, and complex printing and colour processes transforms black-and-white found footage into a startling, rhythmic, multilayered celebration of everyday work. The music is by The Lecuona Band, a Cuban swing group. Len Lye/1937. 5 mins.

A Midsummer Day’s Work · Made months before the outbreak of WWII, Alberto Cavalcanti’s lovely, lyrical rural portrait chronicles the laying of an 18-mile telephone cable from Amersham to Aylesbury. Travelogue-like details include the cottage where Milton wrote Paradise Lost. Alberto Cavalcanti/1939. 13 mins.

The Tocher · Berlin-born Lotte Reiniger, the pre-eminent practitioner of silhouette animation, moved in 1935 to Britain, where she made this subtle, delicate “film ballet” drawing on myth and fable. “Tocher” is Scottish dialect for “dowry.” Lotte Reiniger/1938. 5 mins.

Night Mail · A landmark of British documentary, Watt and Wright’s renowned film poem sets the romance of the railway to the pulsating rhythms of W. H. Auden’s poetry and Benjamin Britten’s music. The depiction of workers on the night mail train from London to Glasgow includes some recreated scenes; the relationship between realism, authenticity and documentary has never been straightforward. Harry Watt, Basil Wright/1936. 24 mins.