Mail on the Rails: Night Mail and the Golden Age of British Documentary

Directed in 1936 by Harry Watt and Basil Wright, Night Mail is undoubtedly the most famous documentary made by the GPO Film Unit (a government department established to explain the workings of the British postal system).

In one respect, the film can be seen as propaganda, blending poetry and realism to assert an unashamedly positive view of working life and a hymn to Industrial Britain. On another level, perhaps more than any other film of the period (or since) Night Mail encapsulates everything about The Locomotive Age that continues to attract such fervent admiration in so many people.

It was John Grierson (head of the GPO Film Unit at the time) who had coined the term “documentary” and outlined in an essay a set of principles for the documentary film. Grierson’s interest in film had developed in America, after studying the ways in which the tabloid press manipulated public opinion. Could cinema, the new visual art form, produce the same effect? After watching the films of Robert Flaherty, Grierson was convinced cinema could be used as an educational tool, to show an audience a visual record of peoples’ lives.

Robert Flaherty’s films were predominantly set in remote locations, featuring real people. His first film, Nanook of the North (1922) detailing the lives of the Inuit people had been very popular. Audiences would certainly have seen nothing like it before and the film was also feature-length – exceedingly rare for the period. The film was shot in real locations and purported to be real life, although it was later discovered Flaherty had staged certain sequences for dramatic effect.

Grierson viewed Hollywood cinema as an opiate for the masses (he once compared cinema magnates to dope pedlars) and his ideas about what should constitute good film-making can be viewed as the antithesis of everything the emerging Hollywood Studio System stood for. Grierson first defined documentary film as the “creative treatment of actuality.” Films should not feature stars but ordinary people. Real locations should replace staged sets.

This raises some interesting questions about Grierson’s attitudes towards the public. Did he think an audience became susceptible to the fantasy adventures manufactured by the studios by choice or had they been manipulated? Did Grierson think audiences of the day believed these fantasies were real in part or were they just seeking escapist entertainment – a universal dumbing-down in the collective unconscious?

Historical studies of audience reactions to films have often focused on the hysteria produced by them. In 1895, after watching L’arrive’e d’un train en gare de la Ciotat (Arrival of a Train at Ciotat), [directed and produced by Auguste and Louis Lumiere], audiences reportedly ran screaming from cinemas. Even from the birth of cinema, the locomotive, with its emphasis on motion and movement has fascinated film audiences.

A similar reaction is attributed to Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903). The final image of the film shows a close-up of a man firing a gun straight at the viewer. As cinema became more popular it would be false to assume, however that audiences behaved like startled rabbits each time they were subjected to a new cinematic technique.

As the history of cinema progressed viewers began to engage more effectively with films. This is an area of film studies that has been comparatively neglected. The increasing sophistication of films and audiences was complementary. The cinema was not a passive experience, designed to zombify audiences. Viewers demanded packaged escapist entertainment with familiar elements included but also elaborate cinematic spectacle and innovation. Successful film-makers and studio bosses understood both the need for a formula and to give audiences something they had never seen before. Without the latter, the cinema would not have developed technologically at such a rapid pace.

This somewhat tarnishes the reputation of Grierson with the whiff of the patronising reformer – someone who believed they were better qualified to decide what the public needed than the public themselves. Liberal and socialist intellectuals are often seen in these terms but whatever Grierson’s views about the public he wished to educate, we should not allow this to detract from his subsequent achievements. He arguably had an enormous influence on generations of documentary film-makers. Grierson is instrumental in the history of British cinema and documentary cinema in general.

After his time in America, Grierson viewed film as a means of propaganda, of education and social reform. He had a lofty ambition for films to attain a higher truth, to represent reality rather than fiction. Perhaps films could highlight injustices, righting wrongs, redressing balances. Providing information and knowledge to audiences was one of the guiding principles but Grierson’s ideology was not solely about bombarding the audience with facts, sledgehammer-style. Entertainment was the other side of the equation. For, Grierson, in his own way, wanted to entertain people as well as inform them.

Grierson defined documentary as the "creative treatment of actuality.” By implication, every frame of film involves a set of creative decisions. Who is the subject of the camera and why? How are they lit? How close is the subject? At what angle was the camera shot taken? Then there is the editing of successive frames to examine. Another set of complex creative decisions must be made. What has been cut from the final film and why? What has been included and in what manner have successful shots been edited?

The documentary film form is therefore not a representation of reality but a set of creative decisions made by the film-maker to represent their version of reality. Essentially documentaries are no different from the fictional narrative – both are highly subjective. In the digital age of reality television, “reality” is a misnomer, since these same decisions are taken on a directorial and editorial basis. Multiple camera set-ups are staged and rehearsed. The only difference between the classic documentary and reality television is that the latter employs more sophisticated techniques, attempting to work on many more levels to convince viewers that what they are seeing and hearing is real.

Night Mail centres on the overnight journey of a train from London to Scotland.  But while the nation sleeps, work continues. On board the train, mail is gathered and loaded, dropped-off and sorted as the journey progresses. There is a sense throughout the film, of constant motion. The film begins with the sound of a trumpet fanfare - a clear indication that this will be a celebration of the communications system and the employees who make it work.

The films of the GPO Film Unit commonly increased public awareness of how this work was done (and therefore had a political purpose, nurturing public support for the services shown.) The same films also helped boost the morale of the workers, convincing them they were doing an important job and doing it well. Falling short of 25 minutes, Night Mail condenses the narrative period, ensuring the film does not overstay its welcome.

The film commences as a rather dry record of facts and figures, detailing when the train is due, how much mail is carried on board, how it is sorted etc. In 6.30 Collection (1934, also directed by Harry Watt) there are almost identical sequences of men at work, sealing and tying mail bags in a West London sorting office. In both films, the performance of everyday work is depicted realistically and not glamorised in any way.

This ordinariness is punctuated by more lyrical and fluent shots of the train itself. Along the lines, along telegraph wires, we follow its relentless journey. There are the overhead shots accompanied by the omniscient narrator, who with Received Pronunciation, in the style of the newsreel announcer, looks down on the scene, tracking the progress of the train.

Alberto Cavalcanti’s pioneering use of sound techniques, perfectly captures the rhythm of the train rattling over the tracks, at the same time the line approaches or retreats on the screen. The synthesis of sound and image encourages the viewer to feel an active participant in the journey.

Because these sequences are so effective, the train becomes the focus of the narrative, although perhaps the real purpose of the film is to show the cogs in the machine, the human elements that keep it working efficiently. There are the workers maintaining the track, who stand back to let the train pass, admiring it in the process. Drivers, sorters, platform crews are all depicted. Each has an equally important part to play in the delivery.

Night Mail can be compared to the Soviet montage films of the silent era.There is the same lyrical depiction of the nobility of work by utilising close-ups, the same harmony between man and machine. As an idealised vision of a working organisation, Night Mail uses sound to convey an enhanced sense of reality.

There is camaraderie and humour between colleagues. Everything, everyone is in their right place in the working hierarchy. There is no room for class conflict or debate, for complaints from the workers, even though on the evidence of the film the supervisor and manager do not appear to work, other than checking everything is in order and drinking tea.

Similarly, there is no opposition between an industrialised landscape and a traditional agricultural one. The railway is like a thread running through the fabric of the countryside, improving communication, providing continuity. Witness the farmer who has a newspaper dropped as the train passes, then waves to an invisible neighbour that the train is on its way.

As the train heads towards its destination (and the film towards its conclusion) there is the celebrated sequence for which the film is chiefly remembered, the collaboration between the poet W H Auden and the composer Benjamin Britten. It begins with the famous line “This is the Night Mail crossing the border.”

The train has been shown passing the industrial heartlands of the Midlands and the North but it is interesting to note that it is only when the train has entered Scotland that the pace and tension accelerates. The romanticism of the landscape is the perfect point to usher in Auden’s lyrical verse. The poem is read, faster and faster to the rhythm of the music and the rhythm of the train. Dogs and rabbits run to the same rhythm as the train labours geographically uphill until the work is done and the driver has had chance to wipe his brow.

The train comes to its rest at the station to receive some tender loving care. The film’s sense of eager anticipation is satiated by the final lines of Auden’s poem.

“And none will hear the postman’s knock

Without a quickening of the heart,

For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?”

There is no danger of the film being forgotten, either. Though mail is no longer transported by rail (the last train was withdrawn by Royal Mail in 2003) the film survives as a poignant reminder of a bygone age. Night Mail endures as a poetic celebration of an industry in its heyday.

Thank-you for reading. Any comments will be gratefully received.

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