Night Mail

Basil Wright (1907 - 1987)

The 1936 classic 'Night Mail' has been released on Video via licence in several guises. Here it was packaged together with, Job in a Million, Granton Trawler, and Story of an Air Communique.

The limited edition DVD is nostalgically packaged in the style of a 1930s GPO parcel and features an exclusive set of 4 postcards, showing images of TPO ephemera.

Night Mail is a 1936 documentary film about a London, Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS) mail train from London to Scotland, produced by the GPO Film Unit. A poem by English poet W. H. Auden was specially written for it, as was music by Benjamin Britten. (The pair also collaborated on a rail-documentary on the line from London to Portsmouth, The Way to the Sea, also in 1936.) The film was directed by Harry Watt and Basil Wright, and narrated by John Grierson and Stuart Legg. The Brazilian filmmaker Alberto Cavalcanti was the sound director.

DATOS CURIOSOS:

The shots of the interior of the carriage where the mail is sorted were filmed in a studio. An impression of movement was given by gently swinging the string that was hanging down from the top of the sorting boxes before each shot was filmed and telling the postal workers to walk with a rolling gait.

The sound recordists equipment was unable to record a realistic sound of the mail train clattering over the joints in the track during the "two bridges and 45 beats" trackside mailbag collection sequence. Eventually they resorted to recording the sound of a model train being pushed back and forth over joints in a model railway track in time to the film of the man on the train counting the beats.

En realidad creo que no me gustó la película. Estaba revisando el blog y creo que se nota a simple vista que documentales me han gustado más. Bueno este no es uno de esos, y entre que no me motiva escribir sobre él y que casi no hay información en la red, pues sólo quedaría repetir lo que se dijo en clase, sobre la concepción del trabajo de los protestantes y de los católicos, pero ¿cuál es el caso de repetir algo que ya se ha dicho? además, sé tan sólo lo que dice Weber en su libro, así que creo que sería más fácil simplemente remitir directamente a que se lea este y a que cada quien forme su propia opinión sobre el mismo y sobre su relación con el documental.

FUENTES:

• You Tube. Night Mail - (1936) - Part 3. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=902G8widi00
• Night Mail. http://www.lightstraw.co.uk/gpo/nightmail1.html
• IMDB. Night Mail. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0028030/trivia