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A quick round-up of recent reviews:

Lynsey Hanley (The Guardian).
Juliet Gardiner (History Today).
David Parkinson (Oxford Times) - scroll down to near the bottom.

Beaver

I was anticipating 6-hours of gray, depressed and bleak post-war Britain - perhaps traits strongly evident in a UK coal pit. What I thought would be a marathon of depressing propaganda shorts, turned out to be anything but. To be sure, there are several vignettes that fit my preconceived mold, but the vast majority of the films presented here celebrate the absurd and the offbeat. Included here are fantastic cartoons, hilarious (oftentimes unintentionally) safety films, and fascinating individual portraits of the miners and their lives outside of the mines. Yet, more than just this, we get an invaluable historical document...

And yes, those are freshly-severed fingers in the final framegrab!

Zazou dans le Metro wrote:

MichaelB wrote: I'm not privy to long-term future plans (and in any case I wouldn't be able to go public now even if I did know), but I can certainly confirm that the BFI has no intention of slackening its documentary output.

And there I was, hoping you were going to let slip news of an impending 'The Complete Works of Humphrey Jennings' on Blu-Ray !

Browsing the latest Moviemail push on Panamint titles with the smattering / scattering of Jennings across them prompts an enquiry whether we might see a mouth watering collection from bfi in the not too distant future.
You can leave the answer in a brown paper parcel with the school porter Michael rather than break confidence with your paymasters.

And there was I thinking that someone had something new to say about Portrait of a Miner...

As a general rule, can purely speculative questions like this be restricted to the main BFI thread? Jennings has nothing to do with this collection. Also, I know I've banged on about this before, but can we consign the horrible typographical affectation 'bfi' to the distant (pre-2006) past where it belongs?

Anyway, to answer your question: I have absolutely no idea, but given that the BFI is working flat out on new documentary releases at the moment (two new COI volumes, the next industrial heritage release, above all the postwar sequel to Land of Promise, all of which are hugely demanding in terms of time and resources), I'd be very surprised.

NABOB OF NOWHERE wrote:Browsing the latest Moviemail push on Panamint titles with the smattering / scattering of Jennings across them prompts an enquiry whether we might see a mouth watering collection from bfi in the not too distant future.

Although it's worth remembering that the BFI have already issued about 50% of Jennings' output over the various GPO volumes and the 'Land of Promise' set.

MichaelB wrote:And there was I thinking that someone had something new to say about Portrait of a Miner...

As a general rule, can purely speculative questions like this be restricted to the main BFI thread? Jennings has nothing to do with this collection. Also, I know I've banged on about this before, but can we consign the horrible typographical affectation 'bfi' to the distant (pre-2006) past where it belongs?

Anyway, to answer your question: I have absolutely no idea, but given that the BFI is working flat out on new documentary releases at the moment (two new COI volumes, the next industrial heritage release, above all the postwar sequel to Land of Promise, all of which are hugely demanding in terms of time and resources), I'd be very surprised.

Despite my reprimand thanks for the prompt answer . My mealy mouthed defence is that I put Humphrey Jennings in search and this thread seemed to be the most abundant reference.
Cue dedicated Jennings thread.
Sorry about the typography... Jennings being pre-2006 is a pretty lame excuse too?

antnield wrote:

NABOB OF NOWHERE wrote:Browsing the latest Moviemail push on Panamint titles with the smattering / scattering of Jennings across them prompts an enquiry whether we might see a mouth watering collection from bfi in the not too distant future.

Although it's worth remembering that the BFI have already issued about 50% of Jennings' output over the various GPO volumes and the 'Land of Promise' set.

To paraphrase Wilson Pickett 50% won't do..gotta be a 100

If you're based in the UK and have access to a Screenonline-equipped public library (which in practice should mean any UK library with a sound-enabled PC, as their IP address should be automatically logged), BFI Screenonline offers a huge amount of Jennings, including titles unavailable on DVD.

I've made my way through the BFI BTF, GPO and COI sets in their entirety (and also know more about shipbuilding, morris dancing and veneral diseases than I ever expected to), but even I never suspected that a film like The Shovel could exist. It takes its subject so seriously that it's practically surreal: avant-avant-garde comedy with nerves of steel.

I'm not even halfway through the set yet and it's really good. Like a lot of the British industrial films from the era, they're beautifully shot and (generally) beautifully edited. You can tell that the filmmakers were real craftsmen, even when they were probably dealing with subject matter they'd never have chosen for themselves.

I LOVE The Shovel - and of course as an instructional film it does its job beautifully, even though it seems almost obsessively anal to people like us who've probably never devoted a millisecond's thought to the sheer range of shovels out there and their different purposes.

But just you wait till you come across Man Failure, which I believe is the reason for the set's 15 certificate. There were dropped jaws all round in the screening room when that one came up, followed by instant agreement (as with The Shovel) that it was a dead cert for the set.

Incidentally, I don't know what's happening with volume 2 - I'd certainly started working on it before I left the BFI a year ago, so it had definitely been greenlit (sales of volume 1 were in four figures, which isn't bad at all for an ultra-specialist release like this), but I haven't heard anything since.

Films like The Shovel are why these sets are always worth picking up. There are often beautifully poetic documentaries scattered among the time-capsule gems, but true oddities like this are even more precious and rare.

As you say, it's so darn thorough that it becomes hypnotic. I feel sort of embarrassed now that in the past I've always just gone out and bought a shovel, with no thought whatsoever as to the niceties of its design. And I wish I'd been able to study its slow-motion shovelling masterclass segment before I had to move around dozens of cubic metres of soil and stones last year!

One for UK folk:

When Coal Was King, a new Timeshift documentary, airs tonight on BBC4 at 9pm and makes ample use of the National Coal Board's film output.