WWII Britain Revisited in 120 Short Films, Now Free on the Web

How do you fight pro­pa­gan­da? With pro­pa­gan­da, or so held the British wartime school of thought. “Over 120 films were pro­duced as ‘cul­tur­al pro­pa­gan­da’ to coun­ter­act any­thing the Nazis might throw out and to refute the idea that ours was a coun­try stuck in the past. These films were designed to show­case Britain to the rest of the world, at a time when Britain itself was under attack.” These words come from the about page of the British Coun­cil Film Col­lec­tion, a new­ly opened inter­net archive of over 120 such pieces of cul­tur­al pro­pa­gan­da, free for the view­ing. Above, you’ll find 1941’s City Bound, as direct an illus­tra­tion of the leg­endary stiff upper lip as you’ll find in this dig­i­tal vault. The reel trum­pets, in its sober man­ner, the unblink­ing effi­cien­cy of Lon­don Trans­port as it fer­ries work­ers into the city cen­ter each morn­ing and dis­gorges them back into the sub­urbs each night, even amid the falling bombs of the Blitz. And if you find these stern­ly proud shots of com­muter trains and bus­es rolling bang on time from their sta­tions a bit arti­fi­cial, remem­ber that the Coun­cil still had to pro­duce the film itself under the very real threat from above.

These pro­duc­tions “pro­vide us with a unique insight,” says the Coun­cil today, “not nec­es­sar­i­ly into how Britain actu­al­ly was, but more into how Britain once want­ed to be per­ceived by the rest of the world.” Any­one inter­est­ed in nation­al brand­ing, vin­tage boos­t­er­ism, and sub­jec­tive his­to­ry can have a field day indulging their fas­ci­na­tions in these meta-qual­i­ties, but many of these short doc­u­men­taries offer legit­i­mate­ly worth­while first-order infor­ma­tion as well. Con­sid­er the above, Archi­tects of Eng­land. Yes, it came into being to show­case the splen­did inge­nu­ity of Eng­lish build­ing from Stone­henge mon­u­men­tal to indus­tri­al mod­ernist, but for a spir­it­ed twelve-minute ground­ing in British archi­tec­tur­al tra­di­tions, you could do worse. If you remain uncon­vinced of the val­ue of any of this, bear in mind that you can eas­i­ly down­load any­thing in the British Coun­cil Film Col­lec­tion. If you need the mak­ings of, say, an iron­ic music video, look no fur­ther.

Relat­ed con­tent:

‘Keep Calm and Car­ry On’: The Sto­ry of the Icon­ic World War II Poster

Great Movie Direc­tors Dur­ing Wartime: Hitch­cock, Capra, Hus­ton & Their WWII Films

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.