Documentary at War

In most histories of British cinema the Second World War is regarded as a ‘golden age’ when the social practice of cinema-going was at its height (annual cinema admissions reached their peak at 1,632 million in 1945) and when British films, long dismissed as pale imitations of Hollywood, enjoyed a hitherto unprecedented level of both critical and popular acclaim.2 The war also marked a high watermark for the British documentary movement, whose skills and experience were now much in demand for the provision of ‘propaganda for democracy’. It was during the Second World War that documentary films reached their widest audiences and that documentary entered into the mainstream of British film culture. Documentary films such as Britain Can Take It!, Target for Tonight and Fires Were Started became synonymous with the ideological project of British wartime cinema to represent the ‘people’s war’, while critics at the time and since have identified a ‘wartime wedding’ between documentary and the fiction film in which the style and ethos of the former infused the latter.3