Oddly-fascinating documentary that finds poetry, music and laughter in the story of the London to Glasgow "Postal Special" – the GPO Film Unit's biggest commercial success. This film elevates watching people work to a new art form and so possesses a number of intellectual pretensions, not least of which is the music of Benjamin Britten and the poetry of W H Auden – a remarkable fusion of music & sound, verse & voice.
This film shows why documentary is such a Cinderella medium since few non fiction works possess its sense of montage as a storytelling device nor its evocative camerawork. They usually merely indulge in the boring relation of facts without the sense of poetry necessary to make them above average or even great. Unfortunately, this tendency afflicts the documentary films that accompany Night Mail on this collection.
Copyright © 2009 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.
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