The NHS film unit

摘要

When I heard that the British Film Institute has a mediatheque on tour showing old films about coal, I felt a rush of nostalgia. I grew up in a Scottish mining village where "NCB," the logo of the National Coal Board, had a much higher profile than the NHS. The local cinema didn't do social realism, however, and until recently I had never heard of the NCB Film Unit.Its spiritual forerunner, the GPO (General Post Office) Film Unit, is better known because of its 1936 classic Night Mail, a documentary about the London to Glasgow postal train, with music by Benjamin Britten and verse by W H Auden. The GPO Film Unit was influenced by Soviet cinema, and its first director, John Grierson, was a socially conscious Scotsman in the tradition of Lord Reith, founder of the BBC.