Period & History

Breathing new life into history, this collection contains all of the drama, passion, and delightful costumes that one would come to expect with premium British period cinema.

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  • Listen to Britain

    Documentary, public information film, morale booster; propaganda film. All descriptions that apply to Humphrey Jennings and Stewart McAllister's extraordinary war-time film. Using his customary combination of poetry and propaganda, Jennings constructs a collage of the various people and classes ...

  • London Can Take It!

    Humphrey Jennings and Harry Watt's famous film, produced at the GPO film unit, is an enduring example of British self-mythology and rousing evidence of the artistic potential of supposed propaganda. A hymn to our capital city's resilience during the Blitz, structured as a day-in-the-life of stiff...

  • The Silent Village

    The villagers of Cwmgiedd, southwest Wales, are the stars of Humphrey Jennings' unforgettably inventive drama-doc. At Lidice, Czechoslovakia, a mining community's entire male population was executed by the Nazis in 1942. Jennings (often said to be Britain's greatest documentary filmmaker) ingenio...

  • Spare Time

    Humphrey Jennings epitomises the artist-filmmaker and this poetic evocation of ordinary people enjoying well-earned time away from the mill, mine, or foundry is a forerunner to Jennings' later wartime greats such as Listen to Britain. Joyous shots of people either pigeon fancying, ballroom danci...

  • Scott of the Antarctic

    This tale of adventure and daring was one of Ealing Studio’s most ambitious features, with the crew hauling a huge Technicolor camera on location to Norway and Switzerland. The choice to shoot in colour was interesting given the bleak, white landscape and cinematographer Jack Cardiff based shots ...

  • Farewell my Concubine

    Spanning 50 years and a lifelong relationship amidst the violence and upheaval of national civil unrest, this unflinching epic balances intimate romance and devastating scale to heartbreaking effect. Adapted from the novel by Lilian Lee (author of Rouge), the tale of Dieyi and Xiaolou carries us ...