Paul Rotha

Filmmakers' reputations rise, fall, and reach different audiences due to a range of interrelated factors, which include interpersonal reputational networks that form during their lifetime, and may or may not expand after their death. The decline in Paul Rotha's reputation, from widespread acknowledgment of his role as a leading British documentary filmmaker during the 1940s to an overlooked figure now, apart from some limited academic interest, is a case in point. This essay traces the multiple factors-social, cultural, and individual-that need to be considered to fully assess the rise and fall of filmmakers' reputation.

This article explores the discursive theme of documentary's crisis and renewal through internationalism as it evolved at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, established in 1947. During its first decade Edinburgh was the most significant forum for discussion on the future of documentary as an international genre, a debate to which all the key figures of the prewar generation contributed, as critics, panelists, advisors, speakers and film-makers. Amid a sense of crisis for British documentary, marked by the perceived dominance of instructional film-making of limited social and aesthetic ambition, these figures urged film-makers to look to the developing world, where the old themes of documentary could inspire new work to match the canonical works of the past. Presented at Edinburgh in 1953 World Without End, an aesthetically ambitious film made in Siam and Mexico, sponsored by the international agency UNESCO and co-directed by two of the British documentary movement's most celebrated film-makers Basil Wright and Paul Rotha, was widely praised as renewing the prewar traditions of the sponsored documentary. The article argues that the well-intentioned critical discourse of renewal through thematic engagement with international development, evident in the reception of World Without End, evades the contemporary politics of the British state's relationship to its empire, the movements of national liberation that actively sought to end it and the new forms of despotism nurtured by the geopolitics of the Cold War.

George Orwell in his essay “A Nice Cup of Tea”, published in the London Evening Standard in January 1946, described tea as “one of the main stays of civilization in this country”, and this belief was confirmed by the British documentary filmmakers who produced many short films during the 1930s and 1940 depicting the act of tea drinking as a significant part of British culture. In the wartime films of Humphrey Jennings, for example, the cup of tea symbolizes the mythology of the ‘spirit of the Blitz’ by strengthening the concept of citizenship and bringing the community closer together during a time of chaos and uncertainty. Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards, in their 2007 book Britain Can Take It: British Cinema in the Second World War, recall a scene from Jennings’ 1943 masterpiece Fires Were Started when, after the team of firemen finish putting out a raging fire at the London docks, which has seen one of their colleagues tragically killed, “A mobile canteen arrives with the ‘nice cup of tea’, that distinctively British symbol of normality”. This particular scene signifies the importance of the ‘cup of tea’ in times of crisis (both personal and national) and emphasises the fact that tea consumption has always been a central part of daily life in Britain. Consequently, tea culture has become synonymous with British national identity.
This chapter will provide a contextual analysis of the depiction of tea culture within the British documentary film from a socio-historical and cultural perspective establishing how tea drinking crossed boundaries of class and gender; taking ‘afternoon tea’ was no longer a leisure activity strictly reserved for the upper classes but a necessity for the working classes for whom the much need ‘tea break’ provided an opportunity for relaxation from the everyday toil of the factory, farm, coal mine and steel mill. Tea also played a vital role during the war, comforting families whose homes had been destroyed by enemy bombs and weary citizens emerging from long nights in inner-city air-raid shelters. Films such as Ruby Grierson’s Today We Live (1937) and They Also Serve (1940), Harry Watt’s North Sea (1938), Jack Lee and J B Holmes’ Ordinary People (1941) and Humphrey Jennings’ Spare Time (1939), Heart of Britain (1941), Fires Were Started (1943) and The Silent Village (1943) all comment on the cultural significance of tea as part of the British national experience while reinforcing the concept of British wartime community spirit. As the 20th century philosopher Bernard-Paul Heroux once claimed, “There is no trouble so great or grave that cannot be much diminished by a nice cup of tea”.