b. 1907 d. 1950

Jennings found his first rush of fame as part of the Documentary Film Movement, under John Grierson's GPO Film Unit, and his second, posthumous rush of fame as a major inspiration for Lindsay Anderson and the Free Cinema movement. Yet he was criticised by his realist contemporaries for the lyrical, avant-garde nature of his work. Also an artist and writer, at the forefront of Surrealism in the UK, his best-known films, such as Listen to Britain and A Diary for Timothy, were made through the Ministry of Information as propaganda during the Second World War. His work is known for its multi-layered depictions of 'ordinary' British life and its exploration of the notion of Britishness (a preoccupation for Jennings; seen in his involvement with Mass Observation, an anthropological project instigated in 1937).

He uses associative editing to evoke an emotional landscape from sound and image, such as the famous sequence in Listen to Britain, where a recital at the National Gallery by concert pianist Myra Hess segues into a performance by popular singers Flanagan and Allen, with a cut on a shared note, uniting a class-bound Britain in one war effort.